Anti-Semitism and a Presidential Candidacy

...For there was no mistaking Buchanan's meaning here: The Jews were proposing to send non-Jewish American kids to die for the sake of Israel in a war that nobody else wanted...

...Not so long ago the price of giving open expression to anti-Semitic ideas or sentiments was relegation to the margins of American political life...

...Certainly in the first three decades or so after World War II, no person who had said the things about Jews that Buchanan has said would have been considered fit for respectable political society, let alone qualified to run for high political office...

...If such fumes cannot kill, then a good part of what has generally been accepted as having happened to the Jews at the hands of the Nazis cannot have happened...

...Finally, there was his obsessive railing against what he called "all this wallowing in the atrocities of a dead regime," by which he meant the hunting down and prosecution of accused Nazi war criminals like Klaus Barbie, Karl Linnas, Arthur Rudolph, and especially John Demjanjuk...

...In short, Buchanan used the Demjanjuk case as a way of lending plausibility to the main contention of the blatantly anti-Semitic Holocaust revisionists- that the number of Jews slaughtered by the Nazis had been vastly exaggerated...

...At the same time, he was playing on the classically anti-Semitic canard of "dual loyalty"-in this instance, the idea that American Jews were subordinating the interests of the United States to those of Israel...

...The American Jewish community was neither alone nor especially prominent in advocating that Saddam Hussein be prevented from seizing control of the Persian Gulf...

...In 1996, he has been more cautious, and if his political fortunes keep improving he will probably become more cautious still: He may even stop pointing to identifiably Jewish names like Goldman Sachs, Greenspan, and Rubin whenever he attacks the Mexican bailout...

...Buchanan's ideas about the economy and foreign policy are wrong and indeed dangerous, and even if he were not an anti-Semite, they would provide sufficient grounds for working against him...

...But if so, why are they reluctant to admit it...

...Yet Buchanan has emerged as a serious contender for the Republican nomination for President of the United States...

...The story begins with a number of statements Buchanan made first on television and then in his syndicated column during the period leading up to the Gulf War...

...All were clearly and identifiably Jewish (Rosenthal, Perle, Kissinger, and Krauthammer), but as he wrote in the second piece, it was "kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown" who would actually do the fighting...

...For me, this alone would have settled the issue of Buchanan's anti-Semitism...

...On the contrary, falsely alleging that he was the victim of a "preplanned orchestrated smear campaign" by the Anti-Defamation League, he demanded that "the Jews" apologize to him...

...In ignoring all this while singling out Israel and its "amen corner" in America, Buchanan was trying to discredit Desert Storm as a "Jewish war" (which was exactly one of the tactics used by his political forebears of the 1930s in their campaign to keep the United States out of World War II...

...Having devoted an enormous amount of energy to apologizing for or defending or pooh-poohing the gravity of the crimes committed by these men under the Nazis, Buchanan claimed vindication when an Israeli court finally ruled that Demjanjuk was not in fact the guard known at the Treblinka death camp as "Ivan the Terrible...

...Buchanan was fierce in his opposition to all other "national liberation" movements that were influenced by Marxist ideas and armed by the Soviet Union, but for some strange reason he made an exception for the PLO...

...But he is an anti-Semite, which means that for conservatives to remain silent about it while opposing him only because he is a protectionist and an isolationist is inescapably to suggest that anti-Semitism is of no great importance as compared with these other issues...

...We are told to treat Buchanan's supporters with respect, and it is precisely because I do respect them and share their concern over the moral condition of this country that I believe many of them would consider him morally unworthy of their respect if they became aware of his anti-Semitic record...

...A majority of the Arab states (including even Syria, one of Israel's most intransigent enemies) joined the coalition, as did practically every West European nation...

...Nevertheless it is important, if only for the sake of political hygiene (not to mention the simple truth), to go over the evidence yet again before it is willfully forgotten or sanitized or buried under an avalanche of tactical electoral considerations that threaten to besmirch the honor of the conservative movement...

...A few of the people who offer us this counsel privately believe that Buchanan is an anti-Semite, but they think that saying so will at best do no good and at worst will drive his supporters out of the Republican coalition and make Bill Clinton's reelection even more probable than it already is...

...Now, if Buchanan's efforts on behalf of Demjanjuk had been confined to the assertion that this was a case of mistaken identity, he would have been justified in claiming to have been right all along...

...Thus, whereas with respect to South Africa he ridiculed the view that "White rule of a Black majority is inherently wrong" and insisted that "the Founding Fathers did not believe this," he actually went so far as to enlist the Founding Fathers on the side of the PLO, comparing its war against Israel with the struggle of the American colonists against the British in the 1770s...

...But then came the day when Buchanan declared on a television talk show that "only two groups" were "beating the drums . . . for war in the Middle East-the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States...

...Norman Podhoretz, a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute, retired last year after 35 years as editor in chif of Commentary magazine...

...In other words, we are to cease and desist from bringing up Buchanan's record of hostility toward Jews, and not only are we to stop denouncing him as an anti-Semite, we are even to avoid such euphemisms as "extremist" in describing that record...

...But none of them was ranged against a Jewish enemy, and that by itself was evidently enough to override even the anti-Communist passions that one might have thought would always be trumps in Buchanan's political soul...

...Nor was Israel the only nation interested in stopping Saddam Hussein...

...In the course of those efforts, however, Buchanan went way beyond any such limited objective as protesting against a miscarriage of justice...

...And if the testimony of survivors is inherently unreliable because of a "syndrome" that manifests itself in "fantasies," then much that we think we know may not be true...

...Not content with that, he followed it up with two columns compounding the offense...

...This identification with the America First movement casts a harsh light on his bizarre solicitude for Nazi war criminals...

...To be sure, intimations of an animus against Jews could be detected in Buchanan even earlier...

...It was Margaret Thatcher and George Bush (no great friend of Israel, incidentally) who were "beating the drums" most loudly and forcefully, and non-Jewish notables too numerous to list who were responding...

...But Buchanan himself deserves no such treatment from conservatives...

...To say it again: The voters attracted to Buchanan deserve to be taken seriously, and the worries about our society that are driving them into his arms deserve to be addressed...

...Yet I for one, as an ideological ally of his during the Cold War and a friendly acquaintance, had been very reluctant to make too much of these intimations...

...There are, however, others who, while sharing this fear of alienating Buchanan's constituency, at the same time flatly deny that he is an anti-Semite, or declare themselves unconvinced...

...My own impolite opinion is that deep down (or maybe not so deep) many of these conservative deniers and putative skeptics know very well that Buchanan is an anti-Semite...

...Anti-Semitism and a Presidential Candidacy By Norman Podhoretz Aconsensus seems to be developing among conservatives opposed to Patrick J. Buchanan that the best way to express their opposition is to avoid "name-calling" and "ad hominem attacks," to treat him with "respect," to acknowledge the validity of the issues through which he seems to have struck a responsive chord, and to provide better solutions than his to the problems he has succeeded in placing at the very center of this presidential campaign...

...Rosenthal in the New York Times) who had either been similarly reluctant to charge Buchanan with anti-Semitism or who had never before noticed anything amiss...

...And only last week, when the Jewish Action Alliance challenged him to disavow his past anti-Semitic statements, he responded by accusing it of anti-Catholic bias...

...One reason, I would guess, is that they like his stand on abortion or some other issue and do not wish to see those stands tarnished by association with anti-Semitism...

...Four years ago, the charge of anti-Semitism against Buchanan was so thoroughly documented in articles by Joshua Muravchik, Jacob Weisberg, William F Buckley, Jr., and others that no one who remained, or chose to remain, unpersuaded then is likely to be persuaded now...

...The implications were spelled out by Joshua Muravchik in an article in Commentary: Diesel exhaust fumes were used not only at Treblinka but also at Chelmno, Sobibor, and Belzec, and were moreover employed extensively by the Nazi killing squads . . . inside the USSR...

...And in one of his columns, he endorsed the vile concept of a "Holocaust Survivors Syndrome" involving "group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics...

...But even if I am mistaken about this, avoiding the issue will still exact a heavy price from the conservative movement...

...Never, not once, did Buchanan retreat from or apologize for any of these anti-Semitic outbursts...

...For example, he pushed the crackpot theory that the exhaust from the diesel engines used in the Treblinka gas chambers did not "emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody...

...In 1992, when he was merely a protest candidate with little to lose, he defiantly adopted the slogan "America First," in full knowledge that the purpose of the original America First movement, founded in 1940, was in the short run to oppose American aid to the nations of Europe threatened by Nazi Germany and in the longer run to keep the United States from going to war against Hitler...

...This was, of course, an egregious lie...

...That did it for many of us (led by A.M...

...Another reason is that some of them may even be preparing to support him in the no longer inconceivable event that he becomes the Republican candidate for president in 1996-something they would be unable to bring themselves to do if they admitted, even or perhaps especially to themselves, that he is an anti-Semite...

...But there was more...

...It will, then, be up to others to make sure the voters know that this man appealing for their support in a bid for the presidency is an unrepentant anti-Semite...

...In the first, he named four of the Americans who were trying to drag us into war...

...What he deserves-and what the honor of the conservative movement demands-is that his anti-Semitism be taken seriously and that he be disqualified as a candidate because of it and because of it alone...

...Among his writings on anti-Semitism are the articles "J'Accuse" (1982, about Israel and the war in Lebanon) and "The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name" (1986, about Gore Vidal...

...And so I held my tongue...

...Chances are that most of the voters now supporting Buchanan are unaware of his anti-Semitism...

...There was, to begin with, his otherwise inexplicable sympathy for the Palestine Liberation Organization...

...Conversely, conservatives who ignore or deny or forgive Buchanan's anti-Semitism because they favor the positions he takes on abortion or immigration bring disgrace upon those very causes by accepting such a man as their leading spokesman...

...It was inconceivable that Buchanan would be so tender toward any of the PLO's sister movements- whether the FSLN in Nicaragua or the FMLN in El Salvador-or about any other terrorist organization backed by the Soviet Union...