“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?
