Ulhas 'sez certain sectors of the Left can't forget. Neo-cons can't
remember. I just skimmed through the latest issue of Commentary. Our Jeet
Heer has a letter replying to a piece by neo-con Muravchik. The latter in
his replies to Jeet and others 'sez that neo-cons did NOT support the anti-
semitic Argentine junta of the 80's! Huh!?! Jeanne Kirkpatrick did. I
remember seeing Irving Kristol debate Jacobo Timmerman on the PBS MacNeil-
Lehrer News Hour back then. Kristol lied about Timmerman (saying he had
been a supporter of the junta), who as he was being tortured in Argentina
was subjected to wild rants about Einstein, Marx and, "Judeo-Bolshevism, "
derived from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Kristol minimized the
hatred of and violence against Jews by the regime, as he also apologized
for the Christian Zionist Right.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/letters.htm#N
> ...Neocons December 2003
To the Editor:
By his compressed joining of some of the writers for the Public Interest on domestic policy and Commentary on foreign policy, Joshua Muravchik gives a somewhat misleading account of the origins in the 1970’s of the term "neoconservative" ["The Neoconservative Cabal," September].
I was the co-founder and co-editor (unnamed by Mr. Muravchik) with Irving Kristol of the Public Interest. In a joint statement in our first issue, we stated that we were "anti-ideological," and discarded prefabricated views of reality. Norman Podhoretz, when he became the editor of Commentary, rejected that point of view. As he wrote in Making It (1967):
Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol proposed to shape my thinking in accordance with what Bell called "the ladder of practicality." Bell and Kristol were to found a new magazine of their own, the Public Interest, in line with this principle. Thanks to Kristol’s great editorial talents and Bell’s insatiable curiosity, it was to be much better than a company suggestion box, but it would still operate, like the art of politics itself, strictly within the limits of the immediately possible. Quite apart from my theoretical objection to their notion that "ideology" was dead [and the] belief that the system under which we were living in America was the best a fallible human nature was likely to build . . . I did not believe that intellectual discourse . . . need limit itself so masochistically in order to be "relevant" or influential.
Almost all the economic articles in our first five years were written by Robert M. Solow, Thomas Schelling, Robert Heilbroner, and Edwin Kuh. These men were social democrats, as was I (and as was Mr. Muravchik’s father Emmanuel, former director of the Jewish Labor Committee). In 1972, Irving Kristol decided to declare publicly for Richard Nixon. I thought that continuing as co-editor would be difficult, and I resigned, telling Irving that friendship was more important than ideology, a view that Podhoretz contests in Ex-Friends (1999).
In his first years as editor of Commentary, Podhoretz had gone Left and featured such writers as Paul Goodman and Staughton Lynd, a militant labor activist. By the late 1960’s and early 1970’s he had begun moving Right. At the end of the 70’s he published an essay by Jeane Kirkpatrick (then a Democrat) to the effect that authoritarian regimes could evolve politically, peacefully, while totalitarian regimes could not—a view brought to the attention of Ronald Reagan that led to her appointment as U.S. ambassador to the UN.
On another matter, Mr. Muravchik disputes the argument that Leon Trotsky and the "theory of permanent revolution" were relevant sources of neoconservatism. On that he is right, but I should add that the theory was not coined by Trotsky.
Its author was a Russian revolutionary who used the name Parvus (his real name was Helphand). By the turn of the century, Parvus had written brilliant Marxist articles that impressed August Bebel, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxembourg, and Lenin, and he had become Trotsky’s mentor. In the 1905 revolution, Parvus and Trotsky sought to establish a workers’ soviet, which failed. Parvus prophesied that the industrial states would come to a world war, and that this would be the opportunity for revolutionists to telescope events in order to seize power. This would be an ongoing world process—a permanent revolution.
DANIEL BELL Cambridge, Massachusetts
To the Editor:
In "The Neoconservative Cabal," where I am described as "looking as Jewish as [my] name sounds," Joshua Muravchik asks whether neoconservatives are mostly Jews. The answer is yes, at least according to their hagiographer, Mark Gerson, author of The Neoconservative Vision. In that respect, neoconservatism is quite distinct from other U.S. political tendencies or movements, with the exception of various Trotskyist and other leftist sectarians. But unlike the latter, neoconservatives are highly visible and, especially under the Bush administration, have enjoyed unprecedented influence.
Mr. Muravchik also asks whether Israeli interests have been a priority in the neoconservative outlook. One can find a wide range of foreign-policy opinions among neoconservatives, but a fervent commitment to Israel’s security is among the few universally shared fundamental principles. For more than 30 years, neoconservatives have called for a strategic alliance between Israel and the U.S.—even at the expense of other U.S. allies—based on the presumed commonality of their interests. "America’s fate and Israel’s fate are one and the same," William J. Bennett said recently. Is it "pander[ing] to anti-Semitism" (as Mr. Muravchik puts it) to note that this view distinguishes neoconservatives from other national-security hawks?
Mr. Muravchik’s assessment of a 1996 paper prepared by a group of neoconservatives for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which argued that Iraq was the key to tipping the balance of power in the Middle East in Israel’s favor, is disingenuous. The seven people he cites as mere "attendees" at a conference were actually members of a "Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000" chaired by Richard Perle and sponsored by a private, Israel-based institute that credits him with authorship.
Mr. Muravchik suggests that this task force, in calling for Israel’s support for ousting Saddam Hussein, may have been "trying to influence Israeli policy on behalf of American interests." But he fails to mention that the paper, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," was a guide for how Netanyahu could not only destroy the Oslo peace process but also persuade Washington to abandon the "land-for-peace" formula on which U.S. policy in the region has been based since 1967.
Finally, Mr. Muravchik is probably right that the BBC described me as a "longstanding opponent of anti-Semitism" to protect itself against predictable charges of anti-Semitism. That said, what has long most distressed me about neoconservatives is precisely their eagerness to denounce criticism from the Left of themselves and of Likud-led Israeli governments as anti-Semitism while at the same time defending, if not actively supporting, their own anti-Semitic allies on the Right—be they the murderous neo-Nazi military junta in Argentina, Afghan "freedom fighters," or leaders of the Christian Right whose devotion to Israel, in the eyes of neoconservatives, invariably trumps their abiding and deep-seated distrust of Jews. Writing in support of Jerry Falwell and the "moral majority" in these pages almost twenty years ago, Irving Kristol noted, "It is their theology, but it is our Israel."
If anything empowers anti-Semitism, it is that kind of devil’s bargain. If Mr. Muravchik wonders about an "ulterior motive" for my concern about neoconservatism, he need look no further.
JIM LOBE Takoma Park, Maryland
To the Editor:
Joshua Muravchik is unhappy with various writers (myself included) who have tried to show the influence of Straussians and former Trotskyists on neoconservatism. He thinks we are guilty of "ancestor hunting," finding obscure intellectual sources to explain contemporary ideas.
Mr. Muravchik should take up his complaint not with me but with Irving Kristol. In his indispensable 1995 collection, Neoconservatism: Autobiography of an Idea, Kristol pays lavish attention to the formative impact of his youthful days as a Trotskyist and to his slightly more mature encounters with Strauss. Here is Kristol on the "frequent debates" among Trotskyists he often attended: "I have never since seen or heard their equal, and, as a learning experience for college students, they were beyond comparison." Aside from Kristol, there were many other future neoconservatives who received their political education at the school of Trotsky: Gertrude Himmelfarb, Seymour Martin Lipset, Martin Diamond, Albert Wohlstetter, and (in a younger generation) Stephen Schwartz, among others.
As for Strauss, Kristol writes: "Encountering Strauss’s work produced the kind of intellectual shock that is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. He turned one’s intellectual universe upside down." Again, a long list can be made of other neoconservative writers influenced by Strauss. Riffling through back issues of Commentary and the Public Interest, I came across articles by Walter Berns, Werner Dann hauser, Allan Bloom, Robert Goldwin, Harvey Mansfield, Thomas Pangle, Clifford Orwin, and Leon Kass, each of whom was either a student of Strauss or strongly influenced by his teaching.
On a more personal note, I must point out that Mr. Muravchik gives a very distorted interpretation of my Boston Globe article on Strauss. He states that I portray Strauss as an "authoritarian," and he has "the impression" that I learned what I know of Strauss "from a polemical book by one Shadia Drury." (Drury has written two books on Strauss, not one, as Mr. Muravchik seems to think. The second is indeed polemical, but I have talked to some Straussians who admire the first.)
Strauss’s followers describe him as a friend of liberal democracy, although not quite a liberal democrat. Strauss’s critics, however, think there is something profoundly anti-democratic in his thought. Pace Mr. Muravchik, Shadia Drury is not the most prominent critic of Strauss on these grounds. Long ago, Hannah Arendt accused Strauss of being an enemy of liberal democracy, and more recently the political theorist Stephen Holmes has taken up the same line.
My article attempted to provide a balanced assessment by presenting the arguments of both Strauss’s admirers and his critics. In researching it, I not only read deeply into Strauss’s writing but also interviewed several Straussians—Stanley Rosen, Clifford Orwin, and Robert Goldwin—and my piece gave the friends of Strauss a fair hearing.
Readers can get a sense of the balance I tried to strike by looking at my conclusion: "But just how ‘sinister’ was Leo Strauss himself?" I asked.
The answer depends on how a reader approaches his books. If you read Strauss with a well-disposed spirit, he can be interpreted as a genuine friend of American liberal democracy. He worked to create an elite that was strong, sober, and sufficiently free of illusions about the goodness of man to fight the totalitarian enemies of liberal democracy—be they fascists, Communists, or Islamicist fundamentalists.
But if you read Strauss with a skeptical mind, the way he himself read the great philosophers, a more disturbing picture takes shape. Strauss, by this view, emerges as a disguised Machiavelli, a cynical teacher who encouraged his followers to believe that their intellectual superiority entitles them to rule over the bulk of humanity by means of duplicity. The worst thing you can do to Leo Strauss, perhaps, is to read his books with Straussian eyes.
Mr. Muravchik gives a truncated quotation from the last paragraph, creating the false impression that my article was a hatchet-job on Strauss. With his weak reading skills, if Mr. Muravchik took a class on Strauss’s ideas, he would earn a C minus.
Finally, Mr. Muravchik raises the ugly specter of anti-Semitism in an uncharacteristically murky way. Could he explain exactly who, among the writers he mentions, is an anti-Semite? And what evidence does Mr. Muravchik have to support this grave accusation?
JEET HEER Toronto, Canada
To the Editor:
Joshua Muravchik offers a valuable antidote to the conspiracy theories that have proliferated about neoconservatives over the past year. But in debunking the more fanciful claims about neoconservative motives, he goes astray in dismissing the influence of Leon Trotsky and Leo Strauss on the movement.
Mr. Muravchik is quite right to pooh-pooh any direct connection between Trotsky and figures like Douglas Feith, R. James Woolsey, and Richard Perle. But Trotsky was an important intellectual figure for the founding fathers of the neoconservative movement like Elliot E. Cohen (the first editor of Commentary) and Sidney Hook. For a host of New York intellectuals, Trotsky provided what seemed at the time like a sophisticated alternative to Stalin. In this regard, Trotskyism can be seen as a pit-stop on the way to the all-out rejection of Communism championed by Hook, Cohen, Irving Kristol, and others after World War II. The fact that the Trotskyist past has been wielded as a cudgel against neoconservatives—beginning, I think, not with John B. Judis (as Mr. Muravchik suggests) but rather with Sidney Blumenthal in The Rise of the Counter-Establishment—should not prompt them to disown it.
Something similar might be said about Leo Strauss. Mr. Muravchik correctly observes that Strauss was anything but a politico. But his unworldliness did not mean that he was oblivious to the threat posed by totalitarianism to the West. Strauss, whose hero was Winston Churchill, did provide a kind of "political counsel." Much of Strauss’s writing—On Tyranny in particular—was a warning, implicit and explicit, about the flaccidity of liberal democracy in the face of fascism and Communism, something he witnessed first-hand when Weimar Germany collapsed. No less a neoconservative than Daniel Patrick Moynihan was influenced by Strauss in the 1970’s as ambassador to the United Nations at a moment when the third world had become virulently anti-Israel and anti-American.
Nor is it quite right to assert, as Mr. Muravchik does, that Strauss did not believe in an elite. He declared that he was training "princes" who could make a special contribution to liberal democracy, but who would not enjoy unique privileges. In a 1959 speech, for instance, he observed that "Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society."
Obviously, Strauss does not provide a blueprint for neoconservatism. But it seems fair to say that while not all neoconservatives are Straussians, almost all Straussians are neoconservatives. All of which suggests that neoconservativism may be more complicated than some of its adversaries care to admit.
JACOB HEILBRUNN Washington, D.C.
To the Editor:
A certain defensiveness tinges Joshua Muravchik’s efforts to repel the genteel anti-Semitic suggestions that the war against terror is a Zionist concoction.A0These claims are so disconnected from reality that one wonders why they must engage one’s time at all.
Jews in public life should not feel a necessity to defend themselves from personal feelings of attachment to Israel—quite aside from the fact of its strong support of the United States and Western values and its undertaking of military action only under demonstrable threat to its existence—any more than anyone in this country of immigrants should feel dissuaded from attachment to his or her ethnic or national roots. It serves Jews ill, and even endangers them, to strike too defensive a stance.
FREDERIC WILE New York City
To the Editor:
I am surprised that Josh ua Muravchik’s otherwise excellent piece fails to mention America’s leading anti-Semitic columnist—Patrick Buchanan and his rag the American Conservative. It was he, I believe, who gave the term "neoconservative" a dark and sinister meaning and made it into a new codeword for "yid."
I used to believe that Buchanan hated Jews because so many were liberals and he (rightly) blamed liberals for many of society’s problems. When some Jews woke up and abandoned liberalism, one might have thought that Buchanan would have welcomed them with open arms. Instead, he hates them for their impurity—sort of like the New Chris tians in medieval Spain.
In Buchanan’s warped mind, these neoconservatives are lurking in the State and Defense Departments and are manipulating Bush into fighting wars that are only in the interest of Israel—never mind what happened on September 11, 2001. At any moment I expect to see a revised edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with a new introduction by Buchanan and a distorted picture of Paul Wolfowitz on its cover.
PETER A. SCHNEIDER Harrington Park, New Jersey
JOSHUA MURAVCHIK writes:
My apologies to Daniel Bell for omitting his part as a founder of the Public Interest. The omission, however, is immaterial to the story of the neoconservatives since Mr. Bell was not and is not one—as his brief recapitulation of his differences with Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz seems designed to underscore.
Readers will appreciate Mr. Bell’s disquisition on Parvus/Helphand (also known sometimes as Gel fand and, on account of his girth, as "Dr. Elephant" to Kautsky’s children). Parvus and Trotsky did indeed collaborate closely in 1905 and for a time afterward, though by 1917 Parvus would play a very different role, persuading the German general staff to insinuate Lenin back into Russia to derail the February Revolution.
While Parvus apparently led in the formulation of the theory of permanent revolution, it was Trotsky’s name that became attached to it. This has been taken as grist by the conspiracy-theorists who claim that neoconservatism is a form of Trotskyism. Regardless of authorship, what was distinct about the theory was not its internationalism, a notion inherent in all Marxism, but the idea that different historical stages could somehow occur simultaneously. What all of this has to do with neoconservatives is of course precisely nothing.
In any event, by rescuing Parvus from obscurity, Mr. Bell may have paved the way for yet a new set of revelations, tracing the origins of neoconservatism to the Jew Parvus and alleging, perhaps, that neocons are trying to subvert the Arab world for the benefit of Israel just as Parvus helped to subvert Russia for the benefit of Germany.
Pace Jim Lobe, I did not ask whether most neoconservatives were Jews. I asserted that many were and others were not. Neither I nor Mr. Lobe nor any source he wishes to invoke can say what the proportion is because there is no agreed roster of neoconservatives or any agreed criteria for inclusion on it.
But Mr. Lobe is dead wrong in claiming that the high proportion of Jews distinguishes neoconservatism from other political currents. The Communist and Socialist parties, the 1960’s New Left, reform Democrats, the civil- rights movement, the ACLU—in short, almost every left-of-center political formation in America of recent memory—has counted substantial "disproportions" of Jews in its ranks. I do not know the reasons for this, but similar patterns have appeared outside the U.S., such as in the Russian revolutionary movements or the South African anti-apartheid camp. Right- wing extremists and anti-Semites, including notoriously the Nazis, have seized on these demographic facts to paint the Communists, socialists, liberals, race-mixers, or whatever as at bottom Jewish conspiracies aimed at serving Jewish interests—much as Mr. Lobe now tries to paint neoconservatism.
In pushing this accusation, Mr. Lobe claims that a commitment to Israel’s security "is among the few universally shared fundamental principles" of neoconservatives. This weaves a small truth into a big lie. To be sure, there is a strong commitment to Israel’s security. But the points of agreement among neocons are hardly few; the only reason we have the word "neocon" is that a rather small group of people came to share a broad outlook.
What defined the neoconservatives ab initio was their hawkish approach to the cold war, support for defense spending, skepticism toward dE9tente and arms pacts with Communist states, advocacy of the Reagan doctrine, and the like. In the post-Soviet era, neocons have continued to be "hard-liners" vis-E0-vis imminent or potential threats from China, North Korea, Islamism, Serbian expansionism, and international terrorism, and they have taken a highly internationalist view of America’s security interests.
Any fair-minded reading would see the neocons’ defense of Israel as part of this broader worldview. As a Jew, I would never deny that Israel holds a special place in my heart, but this scarcely distinguishes me from Jewish liberals who are foreign-policy doves. What does distinguish me—what makes me a "neocon" and binds me to others of the same ilk—is that I am no less adamant about the security of, say, Taiwan or Poland.
With regard to the 1996 paper, it is not I but Mr. Lobe who is being disingenuous. The so-called "stud y group" was a one-meeting affair. The BBC, guided by Mr. Lobe, claimed that Richard Perle and others "wrote" the document. But the document itself makes clear that the function of those named was much more tenuous. It says: "The main substantive ideas in this paper emerged from a discussion in which prominent opinion makers, including Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loew enberg, David Wurm ser, and Meyrav Wurm ser participated." Furthermore, although Mr. Lobe gives the impression that the paper was something done at Netanyahu’s request, in truth it was an uninvited effort to lobby Netanyahu, and there is no evidence that he ever read it or heard of it.
Worse still, Mr. Lobe’s assertion—which lies at the heart of the conspiracy theory—that the paper "argued that Iraq was the key to tipping the balance of power in the Middle East in Israel’s favor" is made up out of whole cloth. The paper puts first emphasis on Israel’s relations with Turkey, Jordan, the Palestinians, and the United States. After many paragraphs on these subjects, it turns to Syria and Lebanon, then Saudi Arabia. Two- thirds of the way through, a single one of the paper’s 29 paragraphs discusses Iraq. It reads, in its entirety:
Since Iraq’s future could affect the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly, it would be understandable that Israel has an interest in supporting the Hashemites in their efforts to redefine Iraq, including such measures as: visiting Jordan as the first official state visit, even before a visit to the United States, of the new Netanyahu government; supporting King Hussein by providing him with some tangible security measures to protect his regime against Syrian subversion; encouraging—through influence in the U.S. business community—investment in Jordan to structurally shift Jordan’s economy away from dependence on Iraq; and diverting Syria’s attention by using Lebanese opposition elements to destabilize Syrian control of Leba n on.
Mr. Lobe’s concluding point is of a piece with his dishonest method throughout. He claims that neocons hurl false charges of anti-Semitism, but he offers not a single example. He claims they were "allies" of the Argentine junta, which is a sheer concoction. Apparently he means to suggest by this that neocons are so faithful to the Right that they will overlook anti-Semitism within it. But when so stalwart an anti-Communist as Patrick J. Buchanan took after the Jews, the ones who called him on it most sharply were neocons like A. M. Rosenthal, Norman Podhoretz, and myself. In a similar spirit, and again without offering a shred of evidence, Mr. Lobe tars the entire Christian Right with an "abiding and deep-seated distrust of Jews."
Contrary to Mr. Lobe’s smear, the neocons have a record of remarkable consistency in their foreign-policy views regardless of "Jewish interests," and in their opposition to anti-Semitism regardless of ideological interests. Ironically, Mr. Lobe reveals himself to be quite the opposite: a man who will play fast and loose with anti-Semitism according to the dictates of his ideological position. At one moment he lays broad-brush charges of anti-Semitism and at the next he shamelessly encourages anti- Semitism: whatever it takes to strike a blow against those to his Right.
Jeet Heer quotes Irving Kristol on the heuristic value of the Trotskyist debates to which he was party some 60 years ago. Kristol, as I wrote, was the one major neocon figure who had a significant dalliance with Trotskyism. Mr. Heer throws up several other names of people he says "received their political education at the school of Trotsky." But even granting the debatable premise that these people all deserve to be called neocons (it is doubtful that Diamond, Lipset, or Wohlstetter ever accepted such a label), Mr. Heer’s characterization of their relation to Trotskyism is a gross exaggeration (except perhaps in the case of Schwartz).
Diamond was an expert on American constitutional theory with a special interest in the electoral college. Did his knowledge and insight concerning this subject come from studying how Trotsky apportioned the Petrograd soviet? Wohlstetter was a master of nuclear-weapons strategy. Was this owing to the lessons learned from Trotsky’s tactics as commander of the Red Army?
In short, Mr. Heer is throwing up a smokescreen. The point of his article was to link the war in Iraq to the influence of Trotskyism. Its headline read: "Trotsky’s Ghost Wandering the White House: Influence of Bush Aides: Bolshevik’s Writings Supported the Idea of Pre-emptive War." But none of the people Heer now adduces as students of Trotsky was active in the debate over the war, much less involved with formulating U.S. policy.
It is not I who has distorted the import of Mr. Heer’s article on Leo Strauss, but rather Mr. Heer himself. He quotes two paragraphs from it that give alternative interpretations of Strauss’s legacy. The canons of daily journalism may require such "balance," but readers can easily see that the balance is spurious—i.e., that a benign assessment of Strauss requires reading him with "well-disposed" (which is to say, credulous) eyes, whereas a skeptical reading (of a kind recommended, says Mr. Heer, by Strauss himself) leads to a far darker impression.
If this does not make it abundantly clear which side of the argument Mr. Heer wants his readers to understand is the accurate one, he spelled it out flatly in another paragraph of his article that he does not bother to quote here:
While some Straussians dispute the idea that the master was a godless cynic, it does seem that Strauss wanted a regime where the elite lived by a code of stoic fortitude while governing over a population that subscribes to superstitious religious beliefs.
The fact that Trotskyism was being wielded as a cudgel against me, as Jacob Heilbrunn puts it, would not lead me to disown my Trotskyist past—if I had a Trotskyist past. Although I have been one of the neocons singled out in this respect by John Judis and Michael Lind, among others, that is merely emblematic of the larger fallaciousness of this issue. In truth, very few neocons had a Trotskyist past, and, as I have already indicated, none of them was an active participant in the debate over Iraq. It may be true, as Mr. Heilbrunn says, that some of the intellectual predecessors of neoconservatism went through Trotskyist episodes, but that is stretching things pretty thin.
Mr. Heilbrunn is right that, for these people, Trotskyism served as a kind of way-station on the road from Communism. But that is all it was, leaving no lasting imprint on their thought. I would be curious to see anyone able to specify what exactly in the ideas of Elliot E. Cohen or Sidney Hook reflected a lingering kernel of Trotskyism. Indeed, I would say the same for Kristol, notwithstanding the florid quotation Jeet Heer has given us about the peerless learning experience Kristol felt he had had as a young Trot.
Kristol’s point was not that any tenet of Trotskyism retained validity in his eyes, but rather that the intense theoretical give-and-take was a fine form of mental calisthenics. Kristol even went so far as to assess the exercise as "beyond comparison," although I suspect that his forebears and mine got much the same workout (and of a nobler kind) debating the arguments of the rabbis of the Talmud.
Contrary to Mr. Heilbrunn, nowhere did I assert that Strauss did not believe in an elite within a democracy. I rebutted some, like Jeet Heer, who have made Strauss out to be an advocate of some kind of elite-run, nondemocratic system. As for Mr. Heilbrunn’s interesting claim that almost all Straussians are neoconservatives, I wonder how he knows.
To Frederic Wile’s point that imputations of a Zionist conspiracy behind the war against terrorism are so "disconnected from reality" as to be better left unanswered, I can only say that accusations against Jews far more "disconnected" than this have caused grievous harm.
Thanks to Peter Schneider for a kind word. His observation that it was Buchanan who gave "neoconservative" its current spin is new to me but may be accurate. In the current discourse I believe that Bu chanan has marginalized himself, but I have treated his anti-Semitism elsewhere (see my "Patrick J. Bu cha n an and the Jews," Commentary, January 1991).