Can We Talk?

[newyorican]

C.L. Sulzberger would not have liked this war. Back in 1937, New York Times Washington bureau chief Arthur Krock was hoping to be named editorial page editor. As Gay Talese tells it in The Kingdom and the Power, Sulzberger would not even discuss it. He explained to Krock, "It's a Jewish paper and we have a number of Jewish reporters working for us. But in all the years I've been here, we have never put a Jew in the showcase."

This war has put Jews in the showcase as never before. Its primary intellectual architects--Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith--are all Jewish neoconservatives. So, too, are many of its prominent media cheerleaders, including William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and Marty Peretz. Joe Lieberman, the nation's most conspicuous Jewish politician, has been an avid booster, going so far as to rebuke his former partner Al Gore and much of his own party.

Then there's the "Jews control the media" problem. It's probably not particularly relevant that the families who own the Times and the Washington Post are Jewish, but let's not pretend this is so in the case of the Jewish owner-editors of, say, U.S. News & World Report and The New Republic. Mortimer Zuckerman is head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and Peretz is unofficial chair of the American Arab Defamation Committee. Neither is shy about filling his magazine with news Jews can use.

To make matters worse, many of these Jewish hard-liners--"Likudniks" in the current parlance--appear, at least from a distance, to be behaving in accordance with traditional anti-Jewish stereotypes. Much to the delight of genuine anti-Semites of the left and right, the idea of a new war to remove Saddam was partially conceived at the behest of Likud politician Benjamin Netanyahu in a document written expressly for him by Perle, Feith and others in 1996. Some, like Perle, apparently see the influence they wield as an opportunity to get rich. What's more, many of these same Jews joined Rumsfeld and Cheney in underselling the difficulty of the war, in what may have been a ruse designed to embroil America in a broad military conflagration that would help smite Israel's enemies. Did Perle, for instance, genuinely believe "support for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder"? Is Wolfowitz really so ignorant of history as to believe the Iraqis would welcome us as "their hoped-for liberators"?

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[LdyGuique]

1. Wow! A thoughtful article on a serious issue

It's become so taboo to utter nearly anything that might be anti- the neocon bias or the nearly blind support the government backs Israel with that I'm surprised to see someone willing to take the heat.

[simcha_6]

6. Your comment is ill-advised

It wreaks of paranoia- people do it all the time. As for the article above- I'm reading "Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion" in the edition printed by the Kurdish Reform Society in 1970. The tone is about the same in that and the above post you so praise. Not to the same extent, of course, but this article seems pretty inflammatory. Would one call this "Jew-baiting?"

[pelsar]

2. the "rise of the jew"

well on a more satirical aspect I do believe that my shares in the "taking over the world" corp will finally start rising, they've been terribly dormat for a very long time.

on a more realistic aspect it would probably be quite easy to show a disproportionate amount of members of the jewish faith involved in the "far left" anti war activities as well.

Hence the only realistic conclusion is that the "jews" as a cultural/religious group are simply more active in their communiites/nations then other groups. But this has been known for a long long time, as seen by their numbers in nobel prizes, inventions, as advisors to kings and presidents and prime ministers in years past The only recent addition to the very long list of activities is that the "jew" has shown an ability to fight as well....that is a new one.

other than that..the article is simply another angle at "jew baiting" though more sophisticated than the usual ones. (but in line with the protocols of zion)

[Lithos]

3. This has nothing to do with religion

It has to do with obtaining individual power and wealth and not with promoting religion. Wolfowitz, Perle and Feith are hiding behind and using religion in much the same way Bush and the Religious right. And just like the Religious Right, they are neither - the values they adhere to are more closely allied with self-serving Ayn Rand style secular objectivism than with any real religious morality.

I am disappointed with Eric Alterman, he looked like he almost got this, but I think failed in the end.

L-

[bemildred]

4. Not his best effort, no.

If he'd taken a "their Jewishness has nothing to do with it, they
are power-mad swine" sort of line, he would have done better.

I'd never thought of the Straussians as "Objectivists", but it's not
a bad fit.

[Coastie for Truth]

5. My recollection of the "Birth of the Neocons"

was that it was in the turbulent late 1960's -- and was initially a rather stupid and infantile response (by people who didn't get tenure - or who didn't get into their first choice graduate program) to the equally stupid and infantile "rearrange the deck chairs" response of the higher education bureaucracy to the civil rights movement. Geopolitics came much later - with Bibi Netanyahu's ties to some of the early neocons.