Straight Talk From A Neocon
Why I am a Jewish Conservative
[Editor’s note: The following is the text of an address given by AT political director Richard Baehr to Congregation Rodfei Zedek in the Hyde Park district of Chicago, and a group of visiting students from Harding University, a Christian college in Searcy, Arkansas.]
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I am a Jewish conservative and I will try to explain what that means, and why that perspective or orientation makes sense to me, and why I think it should to others. There are many kinds of conservatives. There are small government conservatives, who believe that an economy works better when more of it is in the hands of private rather than public enterprise. I consider myself a small government conservative. Small government conservatives believe that lower tax rates on employment and capital spur an economy and promote work and entrepreneurship. The alternative is the nanny state-where government seeks to control and provide more services, and tax rates are far higher to support this. In Europe, the fastest growing economies are all the low tax model countries, many of them in Eastern Europe, countries which have had their fill of collectivism, and state control. The slow growing economies, with high unemployment and little new job creation, are in Western Europe, following the high tax, social welfare model. The new leaders in Germany and France are finding out how difficult it is to combat an entrenched culture and laws developed over 50 years that penalize work and job creation even though this model has produced sustained high unemployment levels and slow growth for decades.
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Finally, I am a conservative because of foreign policy—in particular American national security and support for Israel. For me this issue trumps all the others. In fact, I am not just a conservative, but a neoconservative. Which means that I personally was the one who brought you the Iraq war. Funny, right? Actually, not. For Israel’s enemies in the United States, on the right, and even more so on the left, make precisely that charge: that supporters of Israel in America led us to war against Iraq in service to Israel’s Likud Party. And capitalizing on that charge at a time when the Iraq war is unpopular, these critics are now arguing that America risks being led into another war, taking action against Iran’s nuclear program at the behest of these same pro-Israel advocates. Some of those who make these charges claim that they are the real conservatives, and that the neocons are inauthentic conservatives (hence neo), since many were once on the left. One wonders howthis brand of conservatives hope to win a governing majority when they reject those who switch to their side on most other arguments. These Israel critics on the right are known by some as paleoconservatives. In their ranks are folks like Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak. But the fiercest attacks on the neocons have come from the left.
The very term neoconservative has become to a certain extent a slander, when uttered by a cable TV talk show host such as Chris Mathews or a writer like Michael Lind. For many left wing critics of the Iraq war, the term is used as virtually synonymous with Jews, and in particular, with the group of Jews who they believe encouraged or supported the Bush Administration in going to war in Iraq. Among the names often associated with the necoons are: Charles Krauthammer, Joshua Muravchik, Bill Kristol and his father Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and his son John Podhoretz, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, and Richard Perle. These individuals I just named are all Jewish.
There are non-Jewish neocons: Jeanne Kirkpatrick, John Bolton, and William Bennett, among them. Those who blame the neocons for the Iraq war generally exclude the non-Jewish members since a core part of their argument is that the American neocons were all doing Israel’s bidding, and it is more convenient to blame Jews for this. The charge I think is preposterous. The idea that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Don Rusmfeld, Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell are shrinking violets who needed a push from a group of neocons, some in government, some political writers outside of government, to decide to go to war, strains credulity. And of course none of the Administration figures have ever suggested that they needed any push from anybody else to take action in Iraq.
What is disturbing I think is that so many American Jews have been completely oblivious to the rank anti-Semitic undercurrent in the charge and the danger to American support for Israel that is tied to the effort to associate the neocons, meaning the Jews and Israel, with the Iraq war. The effort by anti-Iraq war critics on the left to tag Israel and its supposed agents (the neocons) with causing the war, has picked up steam recently with the publication of a new book by Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt called The Israel Lobby. It was also seen in the vicious attacks on Senator Joe Lieberman last year when he ran for re-election and was rejected by his own party in the Democratic primary.
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Read the whole thing.
For those weak-minded individuals who can’t think for themselves and need an authority figure to tell them what’s going on, here it is.
This is a Jew addressing other Jews, discussing the neocon smear by the lefties.
