From left to right, anti-Semitic claims abound in U.S. press

Friday, March 28, 2003 | by

BRET STEPHENS AND MELISSA RADLER

As U.S. troops march on Baghdad, Jews are increasingly being blamed for driving Bush administration policy.

Worse yet, the allegations are coming from higher levels and from both ends of the partisan spectrum. Here is a sample of recent quotes:

*Democratic Rep. Jim Moran: "If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this."

*New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd: "Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol [are]...the clique of conservative intellectuals pushing the war."

*Conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan: "For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam? Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud."

*"Hardball" host Chris Matthews: War is being driven by "conservative people out there, some of them Jewish, who…believe we should fight the Arabs and take them down. They believe that if we don't fight Iraq, Israel will be in danger."

*"Meet the Press" host Tim Russert, to Richard Perle: "Can you assure American viewers…that we're in this situation against Saddam Hussein and his removal for American security interests. And what would be the link to Israel?"

*University of Chicago Professor Fred Donner in The Chicago Tribune: "The Bush administration paints a rosy scenario for the upcoming war against Iraq. It is a vision deriving from Likud-oriented members of the president's team—particularly Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith."

*Washington Times columnist Georgie Anne Geyer: "The 'Get Iraq' campaign…emerged first and particularly from pro-Israeli hard-liners in the Pentagon such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and adviser Richard Perle…"

*Former (and prospective) Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart: We "must not let our role in the world be dictated by Americans who too often find it hard to distinguish their loyalties to their original homelands from their loyalties to America and its national interests."

This is by no means an exhaustive list. It is a representative one.

As political bedfellows go, Dowd and Buchanan, or Geyer and Hart, are the oddest couplings imaginable: Dowd has called Buchanan a "bully," and there can hardly be two publications further apart editorially than The Washington Times and The Nation. Yet on this topic their views come into eerie proximity. Are they anti-Israel, anti-Semitic or both? If so, are they wittingly anti-Israel and anti-Semitic? And what does it portend for America and American Jews?

"The idea that this war is about Israel is persistent and more widely held than you may think," writes Bill Keller in an essay in The New York Times. Just how widely held Keller doesn't say, nor is there current polling data to give any sense of its scope.

The nearest proxies—American attitudes toward Israel and toward a prospective war against Iraq—suggest it's a minority position: Americans consistently hold a "favorable" view of Israel by 2-to-1 margins, and support for war now runs over 60 percent.

At the same time, a poll last year by the Anti-Defamation League found that 20 percent of Americans agree with the view that "Jews hold too much power in the U.S. today." It is here the idea that the war is being conducted at Israel's behest most likely takes root.

The idea takes two general forms. The first is that the war is the work of the American-Jewish community generally acting out of concern for Israel. This, says the Anti-Defamation League's Abe Foxman, is "the classic anti-Semitic canard that Jews are responsible for everything." Implicit in it, too, is the notion of dual loyalty.

The second is that it is the handiwork of a select group of neo-conservative thinkers—"some of them Jewish," as "Hardball" host Matthews puts it—in the service of Ariel Sharon and his cohorts. This plays to another traditional anti-Semitic trope: the "court Jew" manipulating a government he pretends to serve in order to fulfill some ulterior personal or political objective.

In the current crisis, the court Jew par excellence is Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, a staunch advocate of military action against Iraq. Last October, Dowd wrote a column in which Perle played the part of a sinister, if slightly ridiculous tutor to "boy emperor" George Bush. In the current issue of The New Yorker, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh alleges that a venture capital firm in which Perle is managing partner "may gain from the war." (Perle disputes the allegation and plans to sue Hersh.)

In his article, Hersh describes the Defense Policy Board as a secretive group of about 30 advisers, none of whom are actually members of the government, with "access to classified information and to senior policymakers, [giving] advice not only on strategic policy but also on such matters as weapons procurement."

This is formally accurate. At the same time, it plays into the classic "Elders of Zion" canard that Jews use shadowy groups to shape policy. In other words, not just one court Jew, but a cabal of like-minded Jews, acting in unison to advance their agenda.

Buchanan, in The American Conservative, charges "a cabal of polemicists and public officials…[with] colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords."

Yet if the anti-Semitic pedigree of these remarks is plain, it remains a question whether Moran, Dowd and Buchanan speak or write with anti-Semitic intent. "One of the peculiar features of contemporary anti-Semitism," says neo-conservative writer Norman Podhoretz, "is that it almost never admits to being what it is."

Thus Moran, in rebutting the charge of anti-Semitism, notes that his daughter is marrying a Jew and that she and her son intend to convert. And Buchanan, near the conclusion of his lengthy article, writes "The Israeli people are America's friends and have a right to peace and secure borders."

In saying this, Buchanan plainly means to inoculate himself against the charge of being anti-Israel. He is not against Israel per se, but—like many Jews and Israelis—he is against the policies of the Sharon government.

He does not object to Perle or Wolfowitz or Kristol as Jews, but as American citizens who put their allegiance to their ethnic homeland ahead of the interests of the United States. As for charges of anti-Semitism, these, he writes, are "designed to nullify public discourse by smearing and intimidating foes and blacklisting them and any who would publish them."

In the case of Russert, he was simply asking a provocative question; Dowd seems guilty of little more than flippancy. The fact that so many of the most prominent and articulate advocates of the war are Jews, with open and established ties to Likud Party figures, acquits Donner and Matthews of outright fabrication.

What it does not acquit them of, however, is a suspicious selectivity. When President Bush named his cabinet, it was widely commented that, unlike the Clinton administration, it included no Jews. As deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz is the most prominent Jewish member of the government, yet never before has so much influence been ascribed to someone in a deputy position.

What about National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld? To assume that Wolfowitz and Perle have steered the United States to war must assume, first, that Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, Tenet and Bush would have no better reason to go to war than to do Perle's or Sharon's bidding.

If the administration seems to have done anyone's bidding in recent weeks, it's Tony Blair's.

Finally, according to polls, American Jews support the war in equivalent proportions to the American public as a whole; among Jews in Congress, proportionally fewer voted for last October's war resolution than the body as a whole.

The suggestion that American Jews—whether as a class or as a cabal—are behind this war is so illogical, so unhinged from fact, and so peculiarly targeted that it's difficult not to describe those who make it as anti-Semites. This is not to say that those who suggest as much consider themselves as such. Nor is it to say they wrote or spoke with anti-Semitic intent. But it is the case that the words they authored amounted to anti-Semitic innuendo.