Media service asked to drop Buchanan

Jewish Democrats launched a petition calling on a columnist syndicate to drop Pat Buchanan.

The National Jewish Democratic Council said a recent column by the three-time presidential candidate questioning President Barack Obama’s pick of Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court was intolerant because it made an issue of her Jewish faith.

“If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats,” Buchanan wrote in a May 14 column titled “Are liberals anti-WASP?” an outdated formulation for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

The NJDC launched a petition May 17 asking the Creators Syndicate to drop Buchanan.

“Last week, you allowed him yet again to continue his fixation with Jews,” the NJDC petition said, referring to Buchanan’s oft-stated charge that U.S. Jews have outsized influence.

Buchanan, a former official of the Nixon and Reagan administrations, ran in the Republican Party primaries in 1992 and 1996 and as a Reform Party candidate in 2000.

The Anti-Defamation League, responding to the column, called Buchanan “a recidivist anti-Semite who doesn’t miss an opportunity to show his fangs.”

Kagan, 50, is Obama’s choice to replace John Paul Stevens,  who is retiring at 90. — jta