Damian Penny has an entry on the neocon=Jewish cabal line and its popularity:
Call it antisemitism
Simon Jenkins, an anti-war columnist for The Times, criticized Fahrenheit 9/11. But not for the usual reasons. He says Mikey spent too much blaming the Saudis and Big Oil for Bush's post-9/11 policies, when the real culprit is the damned Joooooooos...er, "neo-conservatives".
Quoth Melanie Phillips:
This pernicious theory is, of course, demonstrably ludicrous. The power of this tiny group of 'neocons' has been exaggerated out of all proportion. The idea that such a fragment of the US administration could somehow have reprogrammed the minds of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and all the rest belongs to the wilder shores of paranoid fantasyland. The idea that, almost overnight, these neocons vanquished the vast interests of big oil and that lobby's myriad connections with the US administration is jaw-droppingly asinine. The idea that they could have persuaded Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al to act in the interests of Israel and against the interests of America is simply bizarre.
It also ignores various contrary facts. Like the fact that Israel actually regarded the Iraq war as a diversion from what it sees as the number one threat, Iran. Or like the fact that Rumsfeld and Cheney themselves believed straight after 9/11 that Iraq had been involved in those attacks, and that whether they were right or wrong this and this alone is why Iraq was in their sights. No other explanation is necesary, certainly not a demented conspiracy theory which would do credit to the ravings of Saudi Arabia about the Zionist hand behind terrorism in that country.
But alas, actual facts are irrelevant here. For what we are seeing is a vicious prejudice which is simply impervious to reason. It is the resurrection of the vile and disgusting belief -- which we can now see has never gone away, however we in Britain and America may have deluded ourselves about our 'civilised' society -- that the Jews possess extraordinary and sinister power which they exercise in a covert way to advance their own interests and harm the rest of mankind. Thus, as in the passage above, the Jews have 'seized' Washington, are 'traitors' to the conservative tradition (hello, neocons have their roots in the liberal tradition) and by implication to America itself, 'disdain' law and diplomacy because they are crazed by power-lust and the desire to kill people, and so 'deftly' provided a new threat to terrify the world after communism -- a threat which doubtless is a figment of their war-crazed imagination and nothing whatever to do with the fact that an Islamist death-cult, financed, trained and supported by a network of rogue states and which has now fanned out across the globe, has declared war on the west and is busy pursuing that murderous objective.
Note also the sneer by Jenkins at the idea that there is antisemitism at work here. What else are we supposed to call an attitude which irrationally singles out a tiny group of Jews for exercising superhuman powers they patently do not possess, to influence people with real power who did not need to be influenced, to support a country which did not seek this kind of support but thought it might be a distraction from more urgent considerations, and in a way that makes them deeply disloyal and traitorous to their own country because they actually display a higher loyalty to another?
You must pay to read the article on the internet, but I read it on my PDA using AvantGo, and it's every bit as bad as Phillips says. People like Jenkins may not say what they're really thinking, having learned that it's not yet again acceptable to publicly damn Jews (hence the weasel words like "Zionist" and "neocon"), but there's no reason we shouldn't call things as we see them.
Often, there's plenty of room for honest debate about whether something is really antisemitic. But garbage like this, which could have come straight from Hezbollah if the perpeatrators weren't clever enough to substitute "neoconservative" or "Zionist" for the J-word, is antisemitic. Period.
damianpenny.com |
