One of the best lines in Jacob Heilbrunn’s book on the neocons, They Knew They Were Right, is that having been excluded by the old WASP establishment, young Jewish rightwing intellectuals of the 50s-70s burned with outsider resentment. And in the end, when they gained influence (in the administrations of Reagan, Clinton and GWBush) they created a "parallel establishment" in Washington.
Heilbrunn never fleshes this idea out; but it is in essence an idea about money. Scott McConnell, the editor of The American Conservative, has said that "Neoconservatism is a career." The neocons created a wealth of jobs and opportunities for intellectuals in Washington, chiefly at thinktanks–the thinktanks that thunk up the Iraq war.
I bring this up because lately I took a look at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a little-known thinktank in Washington that is a pillar of that parallel establishment. The whole foundation is dedicated to fighting radical Islam and fostering democracy in the Middle East. Its website says that it is defending democracies "under assault by terrorism and militant Islamism." There is very little on the website about Israel, and yet it is plain when you look into the group that support for Israel is at the heart of the group’s creation. In this sense, FDD is like Freedom’s Watch, the Ari Fleischer pro-Iraq war group I have written about. Freedom’s Watch purports to be all about America’s interests, and yet it is plain, even to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which did the first story on the outfit last summer, that its board and staff are chiefly Jewish and that promoting a U.S. foreign policy that joins the U.S. at the hip with Israel in the fight against terrorism, starting with the Palestinians, is the group’s main objective.
I have criticized Freedom’s Watch for not being upfront about this aim. The same charge can be leveled at FDD. Go to the website and the group says it was started after 9/11 by "visionary philanthropists," then gives as its board of directors just three names, Jack Kemp, Steve Forbes and the late Jeane Kirkpatrick. Three gentiles. But if you go to the organization’s latest 990 form, which it filed with the federal government because it is a 501c3 (forms collected by the great guidestar.org) there are more than 20 directors listed, and most of them have a strong Jewish interest.
Among the board members listed for 2005 are Michael Steinhardt, the co-owner of the New Republic who started birthright, the program to send Jewish kids to Israel for free; Roland Arnall, the ambassador to the Netherlands who co-founded the Simon Wiesenthal Center; Charles Bronfman, who started birthright with Steinhardt; Cheryl Halpern, who has been associated with the Republican Jewish Committee and WINEP, the pro Israel military thinktank; Tony Gelbart, who started Nefesh B’nefesh, an organization that urges American Jews to move to Israel; Larry Mizel, who started a Jewish museum in Denver; Leonard Abramson, founder of U.S. Healthcare and founder of a Jewish museum; and Lindsay Rosenwald, who is identified online as a member of the Republican Jewish Committee.
These are some of those "visionary philanthropists." Of course, there is nothing wrong with these folks taking a part in the political process. What is unkosher is the website’s failure to identify them. Indeed, I see an effort throughout FDD’s online publications to hide the salami. Charles Jacobs, a member of the board of advisers, is listed as the head of the American Anti-Slavery Group, a Darfur organization. There is no mention of the fact that Jacobs started the rightwing David Project, an Israel lobby group on campus, or that he was (according to Wikipedia) associated with CAMERA, another Israel lobbyist. Why doesn’t FDD share this info?
I.e., if the U.S. and Israel really do share interests, and Americans widely support the unwavering alliance (even as apartheid conditions prevail in the West Bank), why don’t the people who care about Israel put it right on the menu when they’re selling foreign policy? Because they fear, as Bill Kristol, an adviser to FDD, said at Yivo, that Americans may abandon Israel post-9/11 and -Iraq.
Now let’s talk about money. The salaries listed in the Form 990 on Guidestar.org are pretty shocking. The writer Claudia Rossett gets $110,000 a year. Walid Phares, anti-Islamist, get $118,000. Joel Mowbray, a columnist based in New York, gets $127,000 a year. Wow. I can tell you, that’s big money for writers. Eleana Gordon, the group’s senior v.p. who does occasional events on women’s rights in Iraq, got $197,500–3 years ago. I bet she’s gotten a raise since then.
Then there’s the group’s vice chairman: Tucker Carlson’s father Richard W. Carlson, a former ambassador. In the 2005 report Carlson made $138,255 as vice chairman and then his company, Tulip Hill Enterprises, got another $385,000 for "radio show and documentary production." Huh. I wonder what they produced.
This is the character of the "parallel establishment." Conservative gentiles working intimately with conservative Jews to fight radical Islam; and I bet most of the money is Jewish, as most of the money behind Freedom’s Watch is Jewish. The sense I got about the visionary philanthropists is that they are self-made entrepreneurs who made it in the great Jewish leap forward of the meritocracy and service economy. Megarich, like Arnall, who started Ameriquest, a subprime lender, or Bernard Marcus, of Home Depot. A couple others are in biotech.
That leap forward is something I participated in and celebrate. We knocked down the doors that made my parents’ generation justly resentful. But you have to wonder whether Jewish entrepreneurs have not become the leading engines of the American economy. Surely the thinktank economy. I would never single out their Jewishness were it not for the role that wealth is playing in the political process.
