Posted on 07/21/2006 5:53:01 AM PDT by SJackson
Since the outbreak of the Hezbollah-Israeli conflict, Pat Buchanan and other paleoconservatives have made themselves true exponents of populism: the Jew-baiting, conspiracy-driven demagoguery of 1890s agrarians.
In two columns, posted at WorldNetDaily this week, Buchanan accused President Bush of being a puppet of nefarious Jewish warmongers. Outlets of the Hate America Right – especially Paul Craig Roberts and LewRockwell.com – have joined him, and then some.
Nothing sets Buchanan’s imagination racing like a Bush-backed Israeli war. On Tuesday, Pat asked, “Who is whispering in his ear?” His answer: bloodthirsty Hebrews.
That Tel Aviv is maneuvering us to fight its wars is understandable. That Americans are ignorant of, or complicit in this, is deplorable.
This occurred after “Israel instructed the United States to terminate all aid to the Palestinian Authority,” and “Our Crawford cowboy meekly complied.” In an overtly ethnic reference, he added, “Bush sounded less like the leader of the Free World than some bellicose city councilman from Brooklyn Heights.”
In Thursday’s column, entitled “No, This is Not ‘Our War,’” Buchanan writes America is “impotent” because “we have allowed Israel to dictate to whom we may and may not talk.”
Worse, blood-drenched Jews are using America equipment to commit war crimes. “Israeli airstrikes [are] an outlawed form of collective punishment, that has left [Hezbollah supporters] with no sanitation, rotting food, impure water and days without light or electricity in the horrible heat of July.” (Days without light in July?)
He sagely concludes: “And we wonder why they hate us.”
So effusive was his most recent offering that Pat felt a need to add halfway down the article, “None of this is written in defense of Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran.”
No, but it’s all designed to smear the Jews and paint the terrorists as the victims rather than the aggressors and sole instigators of this war. He accomplishes this by highlighting only Muslim suffering – which Israel has taken extraordinary lengths to avoid – while ignoring the daily panic that fills the heart of an average Israeli boarding a bus, attending a wedding, or lunching at a corner deli.
He does this by overlooking the fact that Hezbollah and other Muslim terrorist groups hide in residential neighborhoods to maximize the number of innocent civilians killed by IDF retaliation in the hopes the world media will highlight Israeli “brutality” – as Pat has so willingly obliged.
Buchanan keeps mum that Hezbollah terrorist are blocking Lebanese civilians from evacuating southern Lebanon, making members of this largely Christian nation human shields. Islamist terrorists targeted fellow Arabs and Muslims in Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia – why would this surprise Pat?
Pat makes genocidal lunatics the moral superiors of Binyamin Netanyahu by claiming, for instance, that “there is no solid proof Iran is in violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it has signed, but Israel refuses to sign.”
All of this is perpetrated with the single aim of making Israel an international pariah, his pastime for decades – one other paleocons share, few more than LewRockwell.com.
That paleocon paradise has become a hub of the Hate Israel, Hate America Right. On Wednesday, Butler Schaffer, a – what else? – professor at the Southwestern University School of Law, wrote, “Wars are intentionally put together by two or more states to enhance their power interests.” “the United States was a clear wrongdoer” in Vietnam and bewailed “the terrorism practiced upon the same people by the United States to reduce the Iraqi people to obedience.”
LR.com columnist Jim Lobe gave this deadly conspiracy a Jewish face, writing, “[T]he neo-cons have succeeded in aligning U.S. policy with the right-wing government in Israel, a key goal going back to the first Likud government of the late Menahim Begin.”
When Israel – finally – responded to years of terrorist provocations, LR columnist and professor Christopher Westley discovered the problem is the existence of Israel itself. “[T]he existence of a state overrides whatever mutually beneficial arrangements that might otherwise promote civilization” between Jews and Islamist murderers. He quickly notes, “To argue this has nothing to do with love or hate for Israel,” because “you can love Israel without equating it with the Israeli state.” Still, Israel “must know that governments cannot kill and dismember the innocent without creating blowback later. It also applies to the U.S., which funds Israel’s military.”
Chris Floyd, a columnist for the Moscow Times, posted a mock “Imperial Edict” allowing “our most steadfast and faithful satrap, Ehud Agrippa” to “continue his destruction of the Arab rabble.”
William S. Lind seems positively disposed to Hezbollah’s “brilliantly conducted raid” because, as a terrorist gang, its popularity is “pushing the Arab and larger Islamic worlds further away from the state.” And “One can only imagine how [shelling Israel] resonated world-wide with people who are often bombed but can never bomb back.”
Eric Margolis assessed the conflict as Israeli “revenge,” because Hezbollah was “the only Arab military force to ever defeat Israel.” More importantly, terrorist kidnappings were merely “a gesture to help the embattled Palestinians.”
All this appeared at the website that prominently featured of Lyndons Larouche associate Karen Kwiatkowski, published the columns of Cindy Sheehan, and rallied with leftists. (Pat Buchanan’s rag, The American Conservative, also published Kwiatkowski; not Sheehan, though.)
LewRockwell.com is also the home of former assistant secretary of the treasury and right-wing nutcase Paul Craig Roberts. In March, LR posted a piece by PCR insinuating a “’black opts’ [sic.] group will orchestrate [an] attack” on America “in order to gain a pretext for attacking Iran.” As recently as last month, he reaffirmed America had a secret plan to nuke Iran.
In response to Israeli defense, Roberts noted some neocons, “mostly Jew,” had been accused of “dual loyalties.” In fact, the kidnapping of the IDF soldiers was all a Jewish conspiracy. Shrewd Jews knew removing Saddam from power “would open the door for Israel to provoke attacks from Hizbollah.” Besides, “what is decried as ‘Arab terrorism against Israel’ is, in fact, the only tactic Muslims have for calling the world’s attention to the plight of the Palestinians.”
David Duke liked that article, just as he defended Cindy Sheehan. Holocaust deniers also linked to articles by Roberts (and Buchanan).
What more eloquent testimony can one hope for than seeing anti-Semites recognize their own?
Since the onset of the war, Roberts and LewRockwell.com have lashed out at “the crazed David Horowitz.” Thomas DiLorenzo reveals the original sin of the “(supposedly) former Commie”: he likes Abraham Lincoln.
The real sin David Horowitz commits is that he recognizes a moral distinction between terrorists who cross international borders to kidnap soldiers – in order to secure the release of convicted Muslim terrorists, including a child murderer – and a long-overdue response by a freedom-loving state aimed at ending the endless cycle of victimization negotiating with terrorists inevitably inspires.
Some of Lew Rockwell’s cohorts didn’t comprehend this during the Cold War, some did, including Buchanan and Roberts. None of them comprehend it when the principle is applied to the Jewish State, implying something else is clouding their reasoning.
> Pat's not an anti-Semite. He just plays one on TV (and in print).
He is a good actor. He had me fooled.
Might make for an interesting BBQ. You won't be invited.
How do you mean? By airing his commercials??
It's particularly troubling because not only is Brooklyn Heights' city councilman, Dave Yassky, Jewish - but he's currently dealing with anti-Semitic and anti-white taunts and insults from fellow Democrats in his primary race.
Yes, there have been a couple threads about that.
Your "?" is stuckkkkkkkkkkk
I haven't seen that, you'd have to point me to the articles.
Double diddly dog ditto! (Ned Flanders is wearing off on me.)
What's most galling to me is that the more Buchanan loses it, the more insane and anti-semetic he gets, the more people like Chris Mathiews and Don Imus cozy up to him.
That's because the media still portrays him as a typical denizen of the "right", a mainstream Republican thinker. Republicans hate religious and racial minorities you know.
You nailed it. The extremist zealot kooks on the left and on the right are merely flip sides of the same coin. bttt
Here's Jerry Pournelle [!]
comparing the Middle East
to Los Angeles:
--------------------------------------------------
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Suppose a coalition of Crips and Bloods kidnaps two Beverly Hills policemen, claims credit, and carries them off to South Los Angeles, to the politically independent city of, say, Bell Gardens.
Beverly Hills then bombs the freeways to cut off all imports of weapons and cut off the chance of transporting their hostages to Mexico. The Los Angeles Police Department and the Hawthorne Police Department send in patrol cares to evacuate LA and Hawthorne citizens. Beverly Hills bombards the community center and bus stations. A hundred people are killed. When the citizens protest they are told that since 40% of their people are gang bangers, it's time to do something about it to protect Beverly Hills. Crips and Bloods from Los Angeles throw firebombs at homes in Beverly Hills, but they don't do a lot of damage. In retaliation, BHPD patrol cars drive through Bell Gardens firing at public housing projects they are pretty certain are centers of Crip and Blood and other anti-BeverlyHillistic citizens.
Defenders of Beverly Hills Police Department point out that no one has been able to control the Crips and the Bloods and the Columbian gangs, and BHPD has no choice but to end this nonsense once and for all. There will be collateral damage, and we're all sorry. Meanwhile, BHPD is asking for Federal Funds to buy F-15's to complete the job, because they need to cut all the roads and other ways in and out of Bell Gardens to prevent Columbian gangs from reinforcing the Crips and Bloods. And anyone driving in a car is subject to attack by BHPD helicopters.
We firebombed Japan. We need national determination to end the reign of terror of the Crips and Bloods. Do what is necessary.
I never wanted to believe it, but I think that Pat Buchanan has a real problem with Isreal.
Tom Roeser's blog nailed it, not me. He's a local Chicago commentator, but worth a read if you're not familiar with him.
About Tom
Thomas F. Roeser, president of his own corporate relations firm, and Op Ed contributor to the Chicago Tribune, is radio talk show host, writer, lecturer, teacher, and former vice president of The Quaker Oats Company of Chicago, whose newspaper columns have appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times and the Wall Street Journal. A former John F. Kennedy Fellow, Harvard, and Woodrow Wilson International Fellow, Princeton, New Jersey, he has served as Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at Roosevelt University, Chicago. He is a Senior Fellow of The Heartland Institute, the Chicago-based free market research center. He is the author of the book, Father Mac: The Life and Times of Ignatius D. McDermott, Co-Founder of Chicago’s Famed Haymarket Center (McDermott Foundation, 2002), and Chicago correspondent of The Wanderer, the nation’s oldest Catholic newspaper. He writes daily for his own blog, www.tomroeser.com.
Roeser is a former assistant to the Secretary of Commerce who formed the nation's first program to assist minority entrepreneurs (now the Minority Business Development Agency) and later served as Director-Public Affairs for the Peace Corps. For 27 years he formed and operated the government relations department for The Quaker Oats Company--serving for many of them as Vice President. He has been Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at the Wharton School of Finance, University of Pennsylvania; the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University; Loyola University of Chicago; DePaul University, the University of Illinois-Chicago, and St. Johns College, Oxford.
He was born in Evanston, Illinois and attended elementary and secondary schools in Chicago, graduating from St. John's University at Collegeville, Minnesota. After an extensive experience covering politics in Minnesota, he became a research-publicist to the Minnesota Republican Party; then an aide to two U.S. congressmen and a governor. He returned to Chicago to launch The Quaker Oats Company's government relations department in 1964 and continued his education with post-graduate studies at DePaul and Loyola Universities.
He took a leave of absence from Quaker in 1969 to form the nation's first unit of government dedicated to fostering minority enterprise. Roeser gave President Richard Nixon a strategy that coordinated the 116 government programs which could be utilized for minority entrepreneurs. He then recommended the abolition of his own federal agency. This controversial challenge to the permanent bureaucracy led to Roeser's reassignment as Director-Public Affairs for the Peace Corps.
He returned to Quaker in 1971 and served as vice president until retirement in 1991, and since that time has been representing a variety of clients on public policy issues.
As the first corporate government relations executive to become a Kennedy Fellow at Harvard, he designed the course "Influencing the System" which shows how nine constituencies intersect to produce public policy. He later received a Woodrow Wilson International Fellowship at Princeton, NJ, and in addition to his work at Quaker took the course to many private colleges across the nation.
On radio, Roeser (a member of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, AFL-CIO) hosts his own program of talk which airs on WLS-AM (ABC) Sunday. He has been a senior correspondent and talk show host for Catholic Family Radio, a network with outlets in Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver, Minneapolis, and Milwaukee. He is an occasional commentator on "Chicago Tonight" which is seen on WTTW-TV, Chicagoland public television.
Long active in Chicago civic organizations, he was a founder of Project LEAP (Legal Elections in All Precincts), Chicago's anti-vote fraud organization, and is chairman of the City Club of Chicago, one of the city's oldest civic reform organizations. He is a director of the Better Government Association, and the United Republican Fund of Illinois, serves on the Chicago Committee of the Council on Foreign Relations, and is a Board member of Haymarket Center of Chicago. He has been program chairman for Rotary One, the founding chapter of Rotary International, the first service club in the world. In addition, he is a director of The Rockford Institute and serves as member of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars. He serves as program chairman of the Chicago Legatus chapter (an organization of Chicago area Catholic CEOs and senior business executives). He is married to the former Lillian Prescott, the father of four grown children and grandfather of thirteen.
In 1988, he and Mrs. Roeser were named by John Paul II as Knight and Lady of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem.
The Vatican, which has an unsavory record in regard to the periodic slaughters of the Jews has thrown its moral weight (such as it is these days) onto the scales against the Jews.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/blog/index.asp
Such an uncharacteristically sloppy misrepresentation of the Pope's position seems deliberately malicious to me.
The fact that a Pope is worried about the Catholic Maronites of Lebanon (many of whom fought and died as Israel's allies during the Lebanon operation) hardly means that he has taken sides against the Jews or Israel.
I don't see why it's helpful for Horowitz to say stuff that seems designed to offend conservative American Catholics - a group that represents millions of staunch GOP defenders of Israel.
Thanks for the link. I hadn't heard of him before (that I know of).
Buchanan has fallen down and can't get up.
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