The American Spectator

“I am not a bigot but we have to face facts. Working on my readers’ behalf I have come up with a carefully researched list of the four most influential foreign policy advisers to President Bush. What they share in common is the belief the U.S. has the right to protect itself from its enemies. And half of them are black…”

Now, no matter where a writer goes from there, unless it is some sort of lame observation about how President Bush has embraced diversity, he is going to look like a wanker. Why? Because, whatever a writer has to say about President Bush’s foreign policy, the skin color of Bush’s advisers is irrelevant.

Things have not been looking too bright for the anti-war, anti-Bush left these days. The outrage that has greeted the absence of WMDs has been muted. Saddam Hussein is captured. Iraq is, by fits and starts, being remade into a place where democracy might stand a chance. Al Qaeda has cleverly revised its strategy and is now blowing up Muslims. Libya is fessing up to its nuclear programs and Pakistan is admitting that some of its nuclear scientists were running a “freelance” build your own bomb school.

Yoiks! The neocons might have been right. Which, if you are on the bitter left, just isn’t possible. What to do? Simple solutions find simple minds and, as hundreds of years of European history tell us, if in doubt, blame the Jews.

British Columbia’s Adbusters Magazine does a pretty good line in anti-consumption proselytizing. Claiming a circulation of 120,000 (two-thirds of its readers are in the U.S.), Adbusters launched “Buy Nothing Day” and “TV Turn-off Week” in the early 1990s.

However, adapting groovy graphics to an anti-consumption message had been getting old. Lately, the magazine has been transforming itself into a strange sort of bitter left redoubt. Publishing witty little pieces like “Is America Becoming Fascist?” is some distance from promoting no-swoosh runners.

But it wasn’t enough. Publisher Kalle Lasn needed the hard stuff, soooo: Jewbusters! In the most recent issue, the editors, under the titular question “Why won’t anyone say they are Jewish?”, explained

Here at Adbusters, we decided to tackle the issue head on and came up with a carefully researched list of who appear to be the 50 most influential neocons in the U.S.… Deciding exactly who is a neocon is difficult since some neocons reject the term while others embrace it. Some shape policy from within the White House, while others are more peripheral, exacting influence indirectly as journalists, academics and think tank policy wonks. What they all share is the view that the U.S. is a benevolent hyper power that must protect itself by reshaping the rest of the world into its morally superior image. And half of the them are Jewish.

Lasn wraps his anti-Semitism in a lefty package of neocon bashing; but it’s still anti-Semitism. The test is simple — is Lasn attacking the position or the religion? His jaunty asterisks beside half of the names on his leading neocon list are straightforward. It’s not about policy: these are Jews. He could not have been clearer if he had Photoshopped in a few groovy yellow Stars of David to identify the Jewish policy intellectuals, journalists and statesmen on his list. (And, hey, why not some of those cute little swastikas for the gentiles, after all, Bush = Hitler.)

The subtext of the Adbuster list is not about policy, it is about the assumption that a Jew, Black, Muslim or Caucasian is incapable of writing and thinking about a particular issue without his religion or ethnicity getting in the way. One might have just as much fun looking at the masthead of the Nation.

With this, Lasn has transformed himself into a neo-McCarthyite. He, literally, “has a list.” This aging icon of the bitter left, impotent in the face of the realism of the neocons, has fallen back on race baiting.

It’s a move as desperate as it is despicable. It reveals that the wellspring of malice which lies at the heart of the anti-war, anti-globalization, anti-Bush left has pushed it into territory usually occupied by the conspiracy theorists, militias, and the tinfoil hat crowd. Zionist Occupied Government anyone?