Pissed Off Democrats

Neoconservatism and the Jews

When you think Jews, you think liberalism, but that is more a remnant of the past than it is a reflection of Jewish politics today.

Many Jews during the early part of the last century were liberals and disproportionately socialist or fellow travelers. When I was recruited to work at the White House in the 50s I had to sign a loyalty oath and my background, including all my friends and relatives checked by the FBI to insure I had no subversive alliances. I can't imagine a presidential candidate with associations Obama has who does not have a complete background check. I can imagine how quickly Obama would be disqualified.

After reading Michael Harrington's classic, The Other America, my politics shifted to the far left where I stayed for many years. Then "mugged by reality" I rejected the subversive anti-Americanism of the left and increasingly pro-Israel, pro-American, strong defense position of neoconservatism sounded much better to me all the time.

I don't deny the views on the left were seemingly seductive and appealing to a young formidable mind. The liberal left sounds egalitarian and appears to seek justice but it isn't justice the left wants.

I have the responsibility for standing up for what is right and for what is ours in a very unfair world where most people want to kill us. What America has done has not always been right, but I'm for America and for Israel first. The America firsters are also pro-Israel.

I think the emergence of neocon thinking is very significant. In essence, I think neocons combine the best of the two dominant strains of US foreign policy thinking: idealism and -- realpolitik. They have Wilson's devotion to promoting democracy while at the same time recognizing "as Wilson did not - that this often requires force.

After 911 the position of the U.S. government had to change. That was the kind of change we could believe in. 911 was an open declaration of war against the United States. It has been referred to as a World War. Democrats prefer to call it a tactic. But it was not the first time it happened, though the worst and terrorism has been the means since the Cold War.

It is not idealism which drives the neoconservatives to oppose Islamism. It is the reality that they have been attacking us and this was not the first time on our soil. As Norman Podhoretz pointed out in his book World War IV, "neither Keiser Wilhelm nor Adolf Hitler nor Joseph Stalin ever managed to pull off..." attacking us at home.

Pissed Off Democrats

Metapedia says, "Neoconservatism is a political ideology with origins in the Marxist Trotskyite movement that has played a critical role in formulating American foreign policy, especially after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001."

That is one interpretation which is widely accepted, although neoconservatives have been around for a lot longer than September 11th, and ironically, most of the Bush administration were not neoconservatives; although they were certainly mostly traditional conservatives. Neither were they mostly Jewish although "neocon" has become a code word for Jew.

Pat Buchanan is a paleoconservative. He is critical of the neoconservatives and has often been criticized of being antisemitic. He is very critical of Israel and "Neocon", as it is for most paleoconservatives, an epithet for the "Jews" and while it appears frequently on the far right, it is also more often used by the left.

"When a member of the enlightened classes, or Pat Buchanan, makes reference to a "neocon," what he's saying is "yid." That's right, "neoconservative," particularly in its shortened form, when employed by a nonconservative (or by Buchananites) and therefore meant derogatorily, is the modern, albeit more specific, word for "kike" that the left can say--and it has been doing so liberally (no pun intended) ever since American conservatism became yet something else that Jews have managed to benefit from--the conquered, final frontier of that famous Jewish manipulation. (Julia Gorin, Sept 23, 2004, Opinion Journal - Ms. Gorin is a contributing editor at Jewish World Review.

It has been claimed that the essence of neoconservative thought has been a rationale for preemptive and unilateral military action against those who we perceive as a threat - who if left to their own devices will either continue their plans to strike at America or our allies or provide weapons and logistical support to terrorists who will as their proxies.

Anything hawkish is laid in the lap of neoconservatism and blamed on the Jews. Those who do claim the neocons are responsible for the Bush Doctrine have been very vocal about it. In Vanity Fair, Art Dudley drew parallels between Richard Perle and the Minister of Propaganda for the Nazis, Dr. Joseph Goebbels. That was typical of the level of slanderous attacks on the neocons. Here is what Metapedia contains vis-a-vis the neoconservative roots in Marx:

"The intellectual founders of neoconservatism, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, and most prominently Irving Kristol, were all alumni of City College of New York, known then as the "Harvard of the proletariat" due to its highly selective admissions criteria and free education. They emerged from the (largely Trotskyite) Old Left and retained these origins in the factional New York intellectual debates of the 1930s. The Great Depression radicalized the student body, mostly children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants sometimes on the edge of poverty, who were introduced to the new and revolutionary ideas of socialism and communism." (Metapedia)

Neoconservatives, writes Metapedia were ..."generally liberals or socialists who strongly supported the Second World War. Multiple strands contributed to their ideas, including the Depression-era ideas of former Trotskyites, New Dealers, and trade unionists. The influence of the Trotskyites perhaps left them with strong anti-Soviet tendencies, especially considering the Great Purges targeting alleged Trotskyites in Soviet Russia."

"The original "neoconservative" theorists, such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz were often associated with Commentary magazine and their intellectual evolution is quite evident in that magazine over the course of these years. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s the early neoconservatives were anti-Communist socialists strongly supportive of the civil rights movement, racial integration, and Martin Luther King. However, they grew disillusioned with the Johnson administration's (1963-1969) Great Society. They also came to despise the counter-culture of the 1960s and what they felt was a growing "anti-Americanism" among many baby boomers, in the movement against the Vietnam War and in the emerging New Left." (ibid)

"According to Irving Kristol (1920-), former managing editor of Commentary magazine and now a Senior Fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington and the publisher of the hawkish magazine The National Interest, a neoconservative is a "liberal mugged by reality." Broadly sympathetic to Woodrow Wilson's idealistic goals to spread American ideals of government, economics, and culture abroad, they grew to reject his reliance on international organizations and treaties to accomplish these objectives following decolonization and the entry of many African and Asian states into the United Nations, which tilted the body toward recognizing Third World interests. As the radicalization of the New Left pushed these intellectuals further to the right in response, they moved toward a more aggressive militarism. Admiration of the "big stick" interventionist foreign policy of Teddy Roosevelt remains a common theme in neoconservative tracts as well. Now staunch anti-Communists, a vast array of sympathetic conservatives attracted to their strong defense of a "rolling-back" of Communism (an idea touted under the Eisenhower administration by traditional conservative John Foster Dulles) began to become associated with these neoconservative leaders. Influential periodicals such as Commentary, The New Republic, The Public Interest, and The American Spectator, and lately The Weekly Standard have been established by prominent neoconservatives or regularly host the writings of neoconservative writers." (ibid)

"As a new staple of mainstream American vocabulary, "neoconservative" warrants a reminder of the term's beginnings, before it became chic newspeak. It originally referred to a movement of largely Jewish liberals who gave leftism an honest and protracted effort, who dutifully reviled every Republican president through Eisenhower, who did their time in inner cities, and who gave peace and social engineering a chance, until the real-world consequences of their good will forced them to acknowledge that what they were doing wasn't working but in fact backfiring. At which point, these men (e.g., Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol) underwent a midlife epiphany and became conservative after the 1960s. (Julia Gorin, Sept 23, 2004, Opinion Journal)

The Neoconservatives were Democrats who rebelled against the Democratic Party. What is happening today is somewhat reminiscent of the rebellion then which pushed former leftists to the right; strong on defense in the 70s -- especially after the nomination of Senator George McGovern in 72, and today strong on defense against radical Islam of which some suspect Obama of being and feeling betrayed by the lack of democracy in the party and hijacking of the DNC by the Obama campaign. In the 70s they rallied around Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democrat - and in 2008 they rallied around Senator Hillary Clinton, a Democrat. But just as those Henry Jackson Democrats were swing voters for Reagan, many of today's Hillary supporters have declared themselves for John McCain and Sarah Palin, who will be strong on defense - whereas they feel, as I do, that Obama may destroy America from within.

The neconservatives of the 70s, led by Norman Podhoretz, who was at the time the editor of Commentary Magazine, was critical of various administrations "appeasement" policies just as Obama's announced policy of negotiating with terrorism is appeasement to the Islamist enemy and compared to Chamberlain at Munich. The necons challenged this false notion of "Detente" with an enemy whose only goal was to destroy American values.

Neocons have generally been very supportive of taking the battles to the enemy so we don't have to fight them at home - although we need to do both. Eliot A. Cohen called our current wars against Islamism World War IV and the Cold War was actually a continuation of WWII and should more correctly be called WWIII. Norman Podhoretz wrote a book called World War IV, The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism.

The attack on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon were just one part of this war which has been going on since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Islamic attacks have been frequent and have occurred continuously. There was the first World Towers attack and there have been terrorist attacks against the regimes of Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Indonesia, Spam, Israel, Britain, and elsewhere.

Weapons of mass destruction bring this ongoing conflict to a much higher and more dangerous level and aggressive actions; including those taken by the Bush administration are warranted against terrorists and state sponsors of terrorism.

Obama has not in any way provided any indication or expression of confidence that he would be aggressive enough or be equal to the job of providing the protection for America which in spite of our many vulnerabilities has kept us free of a major terrorist action since 9/11.

The problem won't disappear by ignoring it. Islamic radical militants have only one goal and we can't even know for sure if Obama has what it takes to confront the enemy? How sympathetic is he to Islam or his friends on the left? He says he isn't, but his background is questionable. Should we believe him when he denies he was ever a Muslim when the facts dispute his claim? Anyone who thinks otherwise must ignore his personal history, that much of it we know and give him an incredible benefit of doubt for that which we do not know. Would we make assumptions we might not make for anyone else? We could be wrong about the obvious not being so obvious - but it is a stretch to do so.

Islamofascism is a serious threat. They are willing to die for their religious radical cause. Very few Americans are even willing to risk the exposure their threats. Only a few shoulder that responsibility. They are the real heros.

Here is what Bernard Lewis, the leading contemporary expert on the Middle East says about the culture of Islam:

"We know already that they do not give a damn about killing their own people in great numbers. We have seen it again and again."

And Youssef Ibrahmim in the New York Sun when describing the war between Iran and Iraq between 1980 and 1988:

"Iran lost nearly one million of its citizens without blinking."

From Norman Podhoretz (World War IV) quoting someone else:

"A substantial proportion of these losses were incurred when Iran sent massive numbers of older men, children, and sometimes women as human `waves' against Iraq's better-equipped forces. Although thousands upon thousands of these poorly armed forces were slaughtered with each assault, the Iranian government continued to send them to the front."

Do we have the resolve to fight them? Does Obama?

Hank Roth