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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (53705)	10/21/2002 3:03:01 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Andrew Sullivan on how the anti-war left is being hijacked both by anti-semitism and the weird embrace of the far right: America's anti-war movement, still puny and struggling, is showing signs of being hijacked by one of the oldest and darkest prejudices there is. Perhaps it was inevitable. The conflict against Islamo-fascism obviously circles back and back to the question of Israel. Fanatical anti-Semitism, as bad or even worse than Hitler's, is now a cultural norm across much of the Arab Middle East and beyond. It's the acrid glue that unites Saddam, Arafat, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Iran and the Saudis. They all hate the Jews and want to see them destroyed. And if you're campaigning against a war against that axis, you're bound to attract some people who share these prejudices. That is not to say that the large majority of anti-war campaigners are anti-Semitic. Of course they're not. But it is to say that this strain of anti-Semitism, hovering around the edges of that movement, is a worrying and dangerous sign. In American history, it's also not new. One of the major strains in anti-war sentiment in the 1930s in America was anti-Semitism. The America Firsters saw war as something that would only enrich the "international financiers" who controlled the banks and arms industry. European Jews - and their American counterparts - were trying to snare the U.S. into a European conflict it would do best to avoid. No surprise then that, alongside the far left, the far right in America is also now a part of the anti-war movement. Patrick Buchanan's new magazine, The American Conservative, is full of such anti-war bromides. Buchanan has long flirted with anti-Semitism, and it must surely somewhat embarrass the "progressives" fighting a war against Iraq that he is now, as his forefathers were in the 1930s, their ally. andrewsullivan.com