Tribune Viewpoint Column is Anti-Semite Rant

This past Tuesday, the Marquette Tribune printed a viewpoint column attacking George Bush’s “neoconservative” (read: “Jewish”) policy advisors. One William Gartland (identified as a resident of Rio, Wisconsin) attacked the notion that Paul Wolfowitz is a “failure” in foreign policy:

Wolfowitz was a smashing success. He and his neo-conservative brethren — Douglas Feith, Richard Perle et al. — succeeded in engineering a war that removed one of Israel’s principal enemies and neutralized Syria and Iran, without Israel being obliged to spend one shekel nor shed the blood of one of her soldiers. After all, that was the geo-political purpose behind neo-con thinking in promoting the Iraq war.

Wolfowitz and his cronies are “graduates” of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs aka JINSA. (Note the fraudulent use of Jewish in the title when “Israeli” would be the honest and correct adjective.)

Wolfowitz has been most successful in getting some 1,500 young Americans to die on behalf of Israeli security — not to mention the 10,000 maimed and wounded on Israel’s behalf.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with charging the Jews, or any other group for that matter, with having biases. We think they have a deplorable liberal/left bias in their voting habits.

It’s even acceptable to say that the Jews have a special concern for Israel — although we have trouble seeing how this is worse than the concern the Irish have for Ulster or black members of Congress for Haiti.

But when someone starts charging Jews with betraying the United States, we are moving into anti-Semite country. And when someone posits a cabal of Jews selling out the interests of the U.S. for the benefit of Israel, we think of guys goose-stepping in jackboots.

The most interesting thing about these folks is that they give the Jews a huge backhanded compliment. The Jews are supposedly so smart that they can manipulate, willy nilly, people like George Bush, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld — not to speak of left-leaning politicians like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Tony Blair. While all the dumb Gentiles thought that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the very intelligent but very malevolent Jews knew better.

Does this guy Gartland have a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for bedtime reading?

The truth is that the neoconservatives are motivated by a worldview that goes far beyond concern for Israel. As Max Boot explained in the January/February 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs:

The charge that neocons are concerned above all with the welfare of Israel is patently false. In the 1980s, they were the leading proponents of democratization in places as disparate as Nicaragua, Poland, and South Korea. In the 1990s, they were the most ardent champions of interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo-missions designed to rescue Muslims, not Jews. Today neocons agitate for democracy in China (even as Israel has sold arms to Beijing!) and against the abuse of Christians in Sudan. Their advocacy of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan is entirely consistent with this long track record. If neocons were agents of Likud, they would have advocated an invasion not of Iraq or Afghanistan but of Iran, which Israel considers to be the biggest threat to its own security.

History may eventually decide that the neoconservatives were wrong — although in the wake of the Iraqi election, they are looking pretty good. But if they are wrong, they are wrong because their ideas don’t work, not because many of them are Jews.