Tonight I was driving home from a friend’s in Dutchess County, near Bruce Kovner’s vast country estate, when a black cat ran across Route 82 right in front of me. I hit the brakes, missed the cat. Still, I wondered about my luck.
I was thinking about Dan Levy’s acknowledgement on Huffpo today that some mainstream Jewish organizations granted asylum to the neoconservatives over the years, notwithstanding their Israel-centered ideas about spreading democracy at the point of a gun, and now Jews have got to come to terms with this. Levy says it’s just a few crazy neocons. But I don’t think it’s that simple. I think the line between neoconservative thought and mainstream Jewish life has been really blurred over the last few years. A few examples:
–Lordly Kovner is no wingnut. He’s chairman of Juilliard and also chairman of the American Enterprise Institute, yet he has provided a haven for Likudnik crazies like Dore Gold, Richard Perle, and David Wurmser.
–The New Republic is considered liberal, mainstream, a fount of young journalistic talent. Yet its editor, Marty Peretz, is described as a neocon in Jacob Heilbrunn’s book, They Knew They Were Right. And the magazine is lousy with neoconservative thinking. Lawrence Kaplan of TNR hooked up with neocon Bill Kristol, now ensconced at the NYTimes, to write a book pushing for the Iraq War. Peter Beinart of TNR, author of another book pushing wars he wasn’t going to be fighting, shopped himself to AIPAC all spring to give private talks on Israel’s interests. And TNR’s John Judis has said that Jewish organizations have made dual loyalty, to Israel, an “inescapable part” of American Jewish life. He should know.
–Thomas Friedman of the New York Times supported the American invasion of Iraq in part because Saddam had paid for suicide bombers in Israel. Paul Berman, late of the Village Voice and Dissent, offered a similar rationale in his book Terror and Liberalism. Liberals? Neocons? Hey–Doug Feith comes from a Democratic family too.
–Jeffrey Goldberg lately mused that it was a good idea to wage the Iraq war to set off a “benign domino theory” that would spread democracy to all Israel’s enemies. When he was writing for the New Yorker, he published a piece in the runup to the Iraq war full of shadowy intelligence suggesting that Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda. Judy Miller ran similar malarkey in the pages of the New York Times. Were these great liberal publications captured by neoconservative fever-dreams? What is Bill Kristol doing at the Times now?
–Joe Lieberman.
I’m just saying, it’s not a clear line. Neoconservatism, or that large chapter of neoconservative thought that said you bring war and suffering to Arab societies in order to produce peace in Jerusalem, gained adherents throughout the Israel-loving American Jewish community, enraged by suicide bombers. Levy, who worked for an Israeli prime minister, seems to think the dissociation will be cut and dried. No: it involves an examination of what Zionism has done to Jewish political culture here, and the degree to which Israeli/Palestinian brutality has brutalized a once-dovish American community.
Related posts:
- The Klein Effect: Huffpo Accuses Mainstream Jewish Groups of Feting the Bloody Neocons
- At Last, Jewish Paper Calls on Jewish Community to Repudiate Neocons, Not ‘Cover Up’ for Them
- Associated Press Gets Rather Bold in Detailing Neocons’ Disastrous Back Pages
- Neocons will be talking up the greatness of the Iraq war forever, huddled in caves
- 30 Years Ago, Neocons Were More Candid About Their Israel-Centered Views
{ 7 comments }
Dual loyalty? It's a FIRST loyalty issue. Far too many zionists (mostly jewish but christo-fascist also) are loyal to Israel first. You should run a list of the Bush-appointed US gov't officials that carry Israeli passports. It will make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.
So we stay away for a while and the sog tries to smear Todd. Bad idea, Todd is too solid for you sog, you are colliding with unelastic no-nonsense there. Please spare us the embarrasment of seing you crawl out of a brawl again. Remember Alex. Keep quiet.
As for this Joe Klein performance I say talk is cheap. Before I see the PAZ-Jew himself apologizing for neocon excesses and calling for aipac to be registered as a foreign lobby I consider it to be no more than a PR manoeuvre.
"I think the line between neoconservative thought and mainstream Jewish life has been really blurred over the last few years."
If you'd just leave out "over the last few years" you would be right. The view of Arabs as natives deserving to be brutally colonised – the same view of arabs that the French pieds noirs or the Afrikaaners had about the native Algerians and South Africans – has been around for decades and more.
Phil is right when he says..
" I think the line between neoconservative thought and mainstream Jewish life has been really blurred over the last few years"
And therein lies the problem. Without going into how the Jews came to believe they were entitled to be "exceptions" to all the rules about democracies and nations right to expect undivided loyalty from their citizens..let's just say…it is a problem for the jews because it is causing a problem for the non jewish majority.
This is the crux of the issue regarding US Jews and Israel and US policy. Without this exceptionalism Jews feel and support for themselves the neo zionist wouldn't have been able to surface in our government.
It's a hot subject that will scare many Jews but there is no denying it exist and is an underlying if unintended factor in the rise of the militant zios.
Best to deal with it in an open way. Eventually, as I said long ago, the US American and Jewish Israeli interest will diverge …as they are doing now over Iran.
The US war on terriers that Israel thought would be so good for them may be the worst thing that could have happen for them…it has exposed a whole can of worms that now has to be dealt with by Jews and Americans.
"I was thinking about Dan Levy's acknowledgement on Huffpo today that some mainstream Jewish organizations granted asylum to the neoconservatives over the years…and now Jews have got to come to terms with this. Levy says it's just a few crazy neocons…Levy, who worked for an Israeli prime minister, seems to think the dissociation will be cut and dried."
It really doesn't matter whether practitioners are "Left" or "Right" in their diaspora identity. Jewish Zionism is Jewish Zionism, a far-right, nationalist ideology in and of itself. The Jewish Zionist Neocons are actually far more intellectually honest than Jewish Zionist left-liberals like Levy, because they don't completely switch their political ideologies depending on which hat they are wearing. There is far more continuity between elitist Neoconservatism and Zionism than there is between multi-cultural liberalism and Zionism.
Of course, both are liars in the claim that they are loyal Americans, but the "liberal" Zionists are additionally hypocritical in the claim that they are dedicated ideological multi-culturalists as well, whereas the Neocons don’t claim to be ideological multi-culturalists, they just want massive US immigration to drive down the wages for labor, ie The Wall Street Journal’s open-borders positions.
Levy appears to be attempting to triangulate the issue, as in: okay, okay, us Jews will admit we were too tolerant of the wacky Neocons, but it was just an aberration. It won’t happen again. You have our word on it. Case closed.
The case will never be closed so long as Israel-firsters like Levy and his coven are running amok in America, tearing at the political, social, and economic fabric of the country with their sickening chutzpah and hypocrisy. And who is harboring them? The left-liberal mainstream.
If jews cannot control the military by the leash they go for the tailhook.
Jane Harman performing the trick:
Military Sex Abuse
People will remember V-lover jewish Admiral Boorda booting Admiral Stan Arthur at the behest of jewish senator Durenberger.
The left-liberal mainstream is left, for sure, but when it comes to
Israel, it is hard-core right as any oldtime Junker family.
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