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As
if to confirm what some opponents of this war have been saying
but not too loudly about this being a war for Israel,
the Bush administration is now "weighing
an Israeli proposal for a joint operation in Iraq's western
desert to disarm Iraqi missiles before they could be launched
against Israel."
That
this war has always been about Israel is a matter of
simple geography. For all the President's palavering about
the "threat to Americans" posed by Iraq, those "weapons
of mass destruction" Saddam supposedly has couldn't even
reach Europe, let alone the U.S. But Tel Aviv is well within
range. Indeed, the prospect of Iraqi missiles raining down
on Israel has been one of the chief deterrents against a move
by Israel's far-right Likud government to ethnically cleanse
Palestine of Arabs a plan that is increasingly popular among
Israelis – and/or move the IDF back into Lebanon. The
U.S. occupation of Iraq will eliminate that deterrent and
set up Israel to deal with Hizbollah and Syria in the regional
conflagration to follow.
The
oddly showy attempts by U.S. government officials to downplay
the extent of U.S.-Israeli collaboration have never been too
convincing if they were, you see, the Israeli lobby in the
U.S. would be outraged, and that would be the end of that.
But who's kidding whom? The coming war in the Middle East
will be a joint operation between Washington and Tel Aviv
in every sense, not only militarily but also on the political
and diplomatic fronts. In the blockbuster
second issue of The American Conservative, Paul
W. Schroeder, professor emeritus of history at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, disdained the Oedipal explanation
for the origins of the President's war plans, writing:
"Much
more plausible is the suggestion that this plan is being promoted
in the interests of Israel. Certainly it is being pushed very
hard by a number of influential supporters of Israel of the
hawkish neoconservative stripe in and outside the administration
(Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, and others)
and one could easily make the case that a successful preventive
war on Iraq would promote particular Israeli security interests
more than general American ones."
Too
easily, which is why the War Party is making a preemptive
strike and declaring that the antiwar movement is "anti-Semitic."
For to state the geographical and political reality of this
war that it is a war for Israel's sake, and for the sake
of its powerful Christian evangelical "amen corner"
in the Republican party is to now be guilty of a "hate
crime," according
to Andrew Sullivan, pontificating in the London Times.
Citing a New York Sun piece charging a recent "Not
in Our Name" rally in New York City's Central Park with
being a virtual Nuremberg rally, Sullivan smears the antiwar
movement in America as a nascent American edition of the National
Socialist German Workers Party:
"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 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 Middle East. It's the acrid glue that unites Saddam,
Arafat, Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Iran and the Saudis. And if you
campaign against a war against that axis, you're bound to
attract people who share these prejudices."
This,
of course, is what the War Party is counting on. It doesn't
matter that a few nut-balls on the edge of the crowd can hardly
be said to fairly represent anyone's views but their own.
The whole sleazy methodology of propagandists like Sullivan
is to sling as much mud at the antiwar movement as possible,
without regard for credibility, common sense, or even common
decency in the hope that a general impression will be created,
nonetheless, like the residue of dogshit on a sidewalk.
If
you read
the original New York Sun piece, which Sullivan
merely retails for general distribution, the patent unfairness
of this particular smear technique is on full display:
"The
anti-war demonstration in Central Park yesterday, one of several
across the country over the weekend, was riddled with anti-Israel
and anti-American sentiment, and in some cases classical anti-Semitism,
as thousand of protesters assembled for what was ostensibly
a show of harmless political dissent."
The
idea is to mix in perfectly reasonable sounding critiques
from the lips of antiwar protestors attesting to the centrality
of Israel in this war "America's support of Israel
is unconscionable. [I don't] want my tax dollars spent going
towards Israel's disenfranchisement of the Palestinians"
with a comment by one alleged participant who cited the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Throw in the names
of Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Michael Lerner, and the sponsoring
organization, and you have successfully smeared everyone in
Central Park that day as a neo-Nazi stormtrooper. It works
every time.
It
worked during World War II, when smear-artists like John
Roy Carlson the Andrew Sullivan of his time wrote
screeds "exposing" leading America First antiwar
organizers as "secret" Nazi collaborators. His technique
was to masquerade as a sympathizer, and "interview"
obscure anti-Semites, who, glad for the attention, happily
babbled on about how "Roosevelt and the Jews" were
dragging us into the war and he soon had them quoting copiously
from the Protocols a transparent forgery that anti-Semites
and their accusers have gotten quite a lot of mileage
out of since it was created by the Russian secret police in
the 1800s.
However,
it won't work this time: as our oddly childish chief executive
said (or
tried to say) the other day: "Fool me once, shame
on you: fool me twice, shame on me." Saddam Hussein is
not Hitler, but a tinpot despot, Iraq is not the Third Reich,
only a broken-down half-starved cripple of a nation, and
Susan Sarandon is not Elizabeth
Dilling, no matter how hard you squint your eyes.
Sullivan's
talents as a smear artist leave much to be desired. To begin
with, citing the Sun, he quotes one demonstrator at
the Central Park shindig as saying "If Bush goes with
them and is too critical, he might lose [their] support
the
international financiers have their hooks in everything."
Sullivan then goes on to hiss: "Ah, those international
financiers. Remember them?"
Ellipses
alert! This is one of the favorite tactics of a lazy,
and pretty careless, smear artist: the promiscuous use of
ellipses to tie in unrelated subjects, and thus imply all
sorts of things about your opponents. In the smear trade,
they call this the old "word-twister." The problem
is that it is always possible to go back to the source and
check. In this case, the Sun also includes tell-tale
ellipses at that crucial point in the sentence so it's impossible
to know what the poor guy, identified in the story
as Amir
Forghany of Queens, New York, meant to say. Oh well, he's
a dirty filthy Arab, isn't he aren't they all anti-Semites,
anyway? Sullivan's rhetoric is designed to appeal to another
sort of anti-Semitism because, you know, Arabs are Semites,
too.
And
Sullivan's admirers have the
nerve to compare him to Orwell? His mindlessly
predictable propaganda is more like Winston Smith's screeds
for the Ministry
of Truth.
In
explaining why we ought to all be head over heels in love
with Israel, Sullivan announces that "an openly gay man
just won election to the Knesset." What more do we need
to know? During the Vietnam war, super-hawk Norman Podhoretz
once declared that the antiwar movment was motivated by homosexual
passion to save all those delectable young men from a certain
death. But this sentiment, the homoerotic equivalent of the
fabled "Vietnam Syndrome," has since been overcome
by the new power-queen ethos of the post-Stonewall generation.
Who cares how many of those cute little Palestinian teenagers
are gunned down by Ariel Sharon's helicopter gunships: power
trumps aesthetics for Sullivan every time. And get this:
"Compared
with China, a ruthless dictatorship brutally occupying Tibet,
Israel is a model of democratic governance. And unlike China's
occupation of Tibet, Israel's annexation was a defensive action
against an Arab military attack."
But
of course the Chinese would explain their actions in the same
"defensive" terms: they are "forced,"
they would aver, to occupy Tibet because of plots by Western
powers. As for the Han
Chinese "settlers" brought in by Beijing to
"integrate" Tibet into the People's Republic, how
are they different from the "settlers" from Brooklyn
brought in by the Israelis to occupy olive groves that have
been Palestinian for a thousand years? We are supposed to
ensure and enforce a double-standard on behalf of Israel,
or else be denounced as "anti-Semites." What balderdash.
Yet like any deluded ideologue, particularly one as un-self-critical
as Sullivan, he fails to see that this blatant hypocrisy just
will not do. Instead he elevates his own premises to the status
of "self-evident" axioms:
"To
single [Israel] out for attack is so self-evidently bizarre
that it prompts an obvious question: what are these anti-Israel
fanatics really obsessed about?"
The
"obsession," unfortunately, is all on the other
side. For some reason, a cadre of American pundits, from George
Will to Sullivan to Bill Bennett, etc. ad nauseam,
is obsessed with promoting Israel's national interests above
our own. At least, I guess Sullivan is an American.
Though this ex-Brit (or dual citizen?) smearing some of his
fellow Americans as proto-Nazis in a British newspaper seems,
at best, in poor taste, and at worst a subtle appeal to European
anti-Americanism, i.e. you know how those ignorant
Yanks are, they hate everyone – Jews, fags, you-name-it.
What
is "self-evidently bizarre," however, is that Sullivan
seems to be publicly losing his mind. It
happens to a lot of people
with AIDS. Dementia sets in, eventually, and, no matter
how many drug cocktails they take, in the end virtually all
succumb to mania and mental deterioration. The rabid, frothy-mouthed
tone of Sullivan's recent writings, combined with a telltale
literary sloppiness, is really kind of sad. Thus, we see the
progression in Sullivan's piece, from the first mention of
the Protocols, cited by a single demonstrator,
to the end of the article, in which the war-maddened Sullivan
fantasizes a mass distribution of the infamous forgery: "No
wonder they are selling the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion in Central Park"! he screeches. The poor boy
is hallucinating.
It's
time for Sullivan to throw in the towel before he does any
more damage to what is left of his reputation. I remain an
admirer of his book, Virtually
Normal, which dared to debunk gay victimology and
even called into question oppressive "anti-discrimination"
laws favoring gays, but his writings on the war his entire
post-9/11 output bring to mind the ravings
of the syphilitic
Nietzsche.
Sullivan
and his "warblogger"
friends want the antiwar movement to be "puny and struggling."
But it
wasn't the War Party that lit up the congressional switchboards
during the debate of the war resolution. The calls were overwhelmingly
anti-war, and on Main Street, America, antiwar sentiment is
growing.
That's why Sullivan and the New York Sun a newspaper
set
up explicitly on account of dissatisfaction over the alleged
"anti-Semitism" of the New York Times (!)
have launched this libel early on, hauling out this old
canard and running it up the flagpole. Hardly anyone is saluting,
however. How many times can they drag out the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion, fer chrissake, and employ the same
victimological illogic that not even Jesse Jackson and Al
Sharpton get away with anymore? The state of Israel and its
American amen corner no more represent Jews worldwide than
Al Sharpton and Robert Mugabe represent all People of Color,
and it's high time somebody said so.
The
calculation of the War Party is that, by smearing anyone who
dares to identify the real politics of this war, they can
equate antiwar sentiment with anti-Semitic agitation. As if
the interests of Israel and of all Jews everywhere are identical
and as if this war really does serve Israel's interests,
which it doesn't, as Professor Schroeder is good enough to
point out:
"A
preemptive war on Iraq would be as counterproductive in the
long run as the Israeli occupation of Lebanon engineered by
Ariel Sharon or the current Sharon/Likud efforts to destroy
Palestinian resistance and terrorism and abort any independent
Palestinian state by sheer military force. There are better
ways for America to ensure Israel's survival
."
While
I would venture that Israel is well-equipped to look after
its own survival, thanks to the involuntary generosity of
American taxpayers, Professor Schroeder's remark about the
historical significance of the coming war is worth repeating
and remembering:
"It
would represent something to my knowledge unique in history.
It is common for great powers to try to fight wars by proxy,
getting smaller powers to fight for their interests. This
would be the first instance I know where a great power (in
fact, a superpower) would do the fighting as the proxy of
a small client state."
As
one particularly
self-important bore with
a literary tick
of major
proportions and delusions of
grandeur habitually
puts it:
"Indeed."
–
Justin Raimondo
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