You can't understand American politics and culture nowadays without grasping
the enormous power and influence of the Jews. The Jewish angle is complicated;
it's not all to the bad; but from a Christian standpoint, it deserves criticism,
because the interest of Jews and Christians naturally diverge. It is sentimental
nonsense to pretend otherwise.
But since sentimental nonsense is obligatory in the American media, anyone
who tries to talk frankly on the subject is "out of the mainstream,"
"extremist." The Israeli press is remarkably blunt about Jewish
power in this country; but its coverage, though written from a Jewish perspective,
would violate settled taboos in America. A Hebrew-language newspaper, Ma'ariv
(the Israeli equivalent of the Washington Post), recently [Sept.
2, 1994] ran a long, detailed article on Jews in the Clinton Administration:
"The Jews Who Run Clinton's Court"! The idea that there may be
a Christian perspective on the subject is unthinkable.
The notion that two profoundly different cultures can easily mix, under
shibboleths of "pluralism" and "multi-culturalism,"
is naive. You might as well expect a character from Homer to walk into a
Thackeray novel. A culture is almost by definition a set of things that
can't mix, because they have their own full meaning only in relation
to each other and lose their meaning in any alien context.
Unfortunately, the Jews - the organized Jews, the ones who, for our purposes,
really count (leaving out unaffiliated Jews, mavericks, eccentrics, Mrs.
Goldberg down the street, so to speak - are quick to damn any criticism
as "anti-semitism," "Jew-hating," and, when that criticism
comes from independent Jews, "self-hate." (The idea of "self-hate"
is so tortured you wonder how on earth it arose. You get the impression
that the only people Jew ever hate are themselves.)
The word "anti-Semitic" can usually be translated "Semitically
Incorrect." Jews in America don't have to worry about persecution.
The organized Jewish power is actually enforcing an ideological orthodoxy,
and its habitual resort to personal abuse and intimidation is itself part
of what deserves criticism. Such charges wouldn't be daunting to potential
critics if "the Jews" weren't powerful. Like such ugly
neologisms as "racism," "sexism," and "homophobia,"
"anti-semitism" doesn't belong to the classic English language,
as it has been used from Shakespeare to Dr. Johnson to Dickens to Hemingway.
It's a term of vilification. Its function is not to define and distinguish
but to conflate. (Nobody speaks of "anti-gentilism.") So many
people and places have been damned as anti-Semitic countries.
Nevertheless, certain things must be said. And to be said they must be sayable.
The Jewish question is part of my beat. Part of the reason for this newsletter
is to utter a Christian viewpoint and to defend Christian
interests at a time when public discourse is choked with fear of the Jews,
in large part because of Jewish control of the major media - by ownership,
pressure, false delicacy, and the constant threat of calumny.
Why is this urgent? Well, because, for instance, Israel can get a lot of
Americans killed. In his book The Samson Option (Random House, 1991),
Seymour Hersh described in detail how Israel's secret nuclear arsenal implicated,
and even endangered, the United States. Maybe Hersh was wrong. But, he is
a distinguished reporter, and he was making an assertion of considerable
gravity. His thesis deserved, you might think, some discussion. The book
was an attempt to alert us to an unsuspected danger and a vindication, by
the way, of the foreign policy of America's founders. But The Samson
Option died a quick death.
I began to understand the problem in 1982, when I ceased to be an automatic
defender of Israel (which I had been since the Six-Day War in 1967). The
savage war on Lebanon opened my eyes. I saw, first, that the American alliance
with Israel was making us enemies throughout the Muslim world. That was
good for Israel and also good for the Soviet Union; but very bad for the
United States. Moreover, I had a personal stake: my two sons were approaching
draft age at a time when it looked as if the draft might be restored, and
I saw no reason why they should be sent to fight in the middle East. The
thought of it made my blood run cold. For that matter, I didn't want any
American boy to die for a foreign country.
I also came to realize how treacherously Israel was dealing with the United
States. I'd tried to ignore evidence of this, starting with the attack on
the Liberty in 1967. When Menachem Begin lied to Ronald Reagan about
his intentions in Lebanon, the pattern was too clear to ignore. I learned
a good deal about Israel espionage against the United States even before
the Pollard spy case broke in 1985.
Along the way I perceived an unmentionable fact: that many Jews in the media
were committed, sometimes fanatical Zionists, who justified everything Israel
did, would never admit any deep divergence between American and Israeli
interests - and would shed not tear if my sons died for Israel. They included
most of the neoconservatives I'd previously thought of as my allies and,
in some cases, friends. But even the Pollard case didn't seem to shake their
primary loyalty to Israel.
I also couldn't help noticing the hypocrisy of organized Jewry, which pushed
one set of principles in America - racial equality, secularism, and so forth
- and their polar opposites in Israel, whose reason for being is to confer
privileged status on Jews and Judaism. Jews won't let American Christians
pray in their own public schools, but they are willing to tax them to subsidize
and protect Israel. That, too, is both obvious and unmentionable. It cries
out for discussion.
And I became aware that most Christians in the media, including friends
of mine, were afraid to say what, deep down, they knew. They were afraid
of being smeared by the same neoconservatives they professed to regard as
friends. They didn't dare to draw the obvious inference from the Pollard
case, even when it transpired that the documents Pollard stole had probably
been passed to the Soviets by the Israelis. They were in the same position
as liberals in the 1940s and 1950s who had been afraid to admit that their
ranks had been infiltrated by Soviet sympathizers and agents. (The cry of
"anti-Semitism" was a bullying diversion from the real issue,
as the cry of "McCarthyism" had been.)
Even knowing all this, I was shocked at the violence of the personal attacks
against me when I began writing against the U.S.-Israeli alliance.The neoconservatives,
whom I'd naively expected to respect my right to disagree, were the most
vicious. I was even more shocked when some of my Christian friends betrayed
me - though one of my great consolations was that I found stalwart and honorable
friends among non-Zionist Jews. (When the chips were down, some of my best
friends were Jews.)
Pat Buchanan got the same treatment a few years later, when he observed
that Israel's "Amen Corner" was leading the cry for war with Iraq
- just as I expected it would. He, too, was attacked with special venom
by neoconservatives some of whom he'd befriended, as well as by some Christian
conservatives who saw their chance to win favor with the people they feared
and toadied to. (Among those who were brave and decent enough to defend
him was Michael Kinsley, his liberal Jewish antagonist on Crossfire.)
You can agree with the neocons on nine out of ten issues -but if the tenth
is Israel, the other nine count for nothing. You may want to keep their
friendship, but it's not up to you; they treat you as their mortal enemy
(which is why I define anti-Semite as a man who is hated by Jews). There
is no clearer proof of the absolute priority of Israel for them. But the
gentiles in the conservative movement, who still talk in their sleep about
Alger Hiss,have put up little resistance to Zionist infiltration.
And it's one of the constants of journalism that the Amen Corner eggs this
country to fight with any country it sees as a threat to Israel: Iraq, Iran,
Syria, Libya, even North Korea. Moreover, it favors military intervention
abroad in general, though it's less unanimous when Israel isn't menaced;
some oppose intervention in Bosnia or Haiti, because the loss of American
lives would lead to "isolationism" - their word for making American
interests paramount.
Why does Zionism rely so heavily on deceit, camouflage, insinuation, betrayal,
propaganda, and calumny? At bottom it may be less a matter of mendacity
than of a cultural gulf. Most Zionists, even those who are otherwise honest
people, resist open debate because they correctly sense that their cause
- Jewish chauvinism - is indefensible in terms of both American interests
and Christian culture. They need gentile support but can't afford to say
what they really think of gentiles; though what they think can be gathered
from the way Israeli law treats gentiles. Where gentiles are the
majority, the Jewish power calls for equality, secularism, and "pluralism";l
but Israel, where the phrase "Judeo-Christian" is used sparingly,
is exempt from those other wise universal standards. (Hence the tortured
Israeli debate over whether to annex the occupied territories: what if the
Arabs become the national majority!) The occasional gentile who catches
on must be silenced and ostracized. Find, if you can, an American Zionist
who demands equality for Israeli Christians. Such a Zionist is nearly as
rare as an American Christian who sticks up for his fellow Christians in
Israel.
Israel is no worse than many other countries. But it is worse than any other
ally, except Britain - another country that likes its American friends to
do the fighting. The analogies are interesting. At home, Churchill spoke
of "the British Empire"; but for American consumption, he sang
of "the great democracies" and "the English speaking peoples."
Nor has Mrs. Thatcher been shy about telling us where to send our boys.
The Zionists have a long way to go before they will match British mischief;
but Britain is an exhausted power, and Zionism poses the chief dangers to
America at the moment.
There are other aspects of organized Jewry that deserve our critical attention
too, its virtues as well as its proclivities. Up to a point, its tribalism
is healthy and deserves emulation by a society whose weakening bonds of
kinship are plunging us into crime and general decadence. But its liberalism,
self-absorption, and deep hostility to Christianity are both excessive and
self-destructive. The intellectual brilliance of Jews is one of the wonders
or the world; but it also has its dark side, a facile skepticism, an insensitivity
to the dumb virtues of tradition (even, at times, Jewish tradition), a reckless
radicalism.
The reason the current Jewish taboos should be broken is so that the whole
truth can be told, and not just those things that are discreditable to the
Jews. Actually, the Jews are nowhere near as bad as some of their defenders
make them sound. They sometimes take advantage of our gullibility; which
is not to say we gentiles were all innocent before they arrived. They do
us harm; but not because they really want to harm us. As I say, cultures
are more than just different flavors of ice cream. They are more like different
cosmologies. The most important fact about any man, as G.K. Chesterton pointed
out, is what kind of universe he thinks he's living in.
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[The preceding article was reprinted with permission from the May edition
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