[font=verdana, geneva, arial, sans serif][size=+1]Lindbergh lives
[/size][/font][font=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif][size=-2]Mar 13th 2003 | RICHMOND, VIRGINIA AND WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition
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[font=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif][size=-1]Whispers blaming the war on a Jewish cabal have got a little louder[/size][/font]
[font=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif][size=-1]JIM MORAN, a Democratic congressman from Virginia, has a reputation for leading with his mouth. His latest bon mot, however, could cost him his seat. On March 3rd, the pugilistic Irish Catholic suggested that the looming war with Iraq was the handiwork of the American Jews. If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, he argued, we would not be doing this.[/size][/font]
[font=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif][size=-1]It has taken time for Mr Moran's comments to work their way into mainstream Washington politics, and he has already issued several apologies. But he is now drawing fierce criticism from both Republicans and Democrats of all religions. The reaction, which already includes calls by local rabbis for his resignation, rebukes by the White House and lectures from the congressional leadership, recalls the Trent Lott affair three months ago, when the Mississippi senator was forced to quit as Republican majority leader after indirectly praising segregation.[/size][/font]
[font=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif][size=-1]Mr Moran says that he has no intention of resigning. But his position is weakened by his somewhat spotty record. In 2001 he was rude about Ariel Sharon to the American Muslim Council. Mr Moran has also been criticised for taking political contributionslater returnedfrom Muslim organisations that federal authorities at one time suspected of having ties to terrorist groups.[/size][/font]
[font=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif][size=-1]Whatever his faults, Mr Moran is not alone in raising suspicions about the fact that so many hawks in the Bush administration, including the deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz and the head of the Pentagon's defence-policy board, Richard Perle, happen to be Jewish. Gradually people from the left and right are beginning to allege in public what some moderates whisper privately: that war against Iraq has been promoted by a cabal of Jewish hardliners who are more concerned with protecting Israel than they are with advancing America's national interest. [/size][/font]
[font=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif][size=-1]Shirley Williams, a left-of-centre British politician who is married to one of America's most prominent intellectuals, Richard Neustadt, and is currently a visiting professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, told the House of Lords that the Bush administration's policy is propelled to some extent by what I can only describe as a fundamentalist Christian and fundamentalist Jewish drive that is almost as powerful as fundamentalist Islam itself. Michael Lerner, a rabbi and editor of the leftist Jewish magazine Tikkun, was blackballed from speaking at an anti-war rally in San Francisco because some of the sponsors apparently refused to have a pro-Israel speaker. [/size][/font]
[font=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif][size=-1]On the left, no discussion of the war is complete without somebody claiming that a group of neo-conservatives with close ties to Israel has been planning the whole thing for years. Back in 1996, they point out, several prominent American Jews who now occupy influential positions in the Bush administration, including Mr Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, helped to write a report for a hardline Israeli think-tank with close ties to Binyamin Netanyahu. It called for Saddam Hussein's removal from power. Prominent Jewish hawks also banged the anti-Saddam drum in the pages of the Weekly Standard and in reports for another think-tank, Project for the New American Century.[/size][/font]
[font=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif][size=-1]On the right, one of the most prominent critics of the war, Pat Buchanan, is also an outspoken critic of the role of the Jewish lobby in American politics. Back in 1990 Mr Buchanan argued that the first Gulf war was being touted by the Israeli Defence Ministry and its amen corner in the United States. Last year, Mr Buchanan founded a magazine, American Conservative, with the express aim of recapturing the conservative movement from the (largely Jewish) neo-conservatives who, he thinks, have hijacked it. [/size][/font]
[font=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif][size=-1]In the 1930s, when anti-Semitism was both pervasive and respectable in America, Charles Lindbergh and his America-Firsters blamed Jewish interests for trying to drag America into a pointless war with Germany. Today, country clubs and universities in America have abandoned their restrictions and quotas. Yet some people continue to see sinister Jewish forces trying to drag America into unnecessary foreign entanglements. Mr Moran, rather like Mr Lott, is an unsettling reminder of a dark part of America's past.
