Richard Perle’s Outrageous Lies

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I’ve just finished listening to an enlightening 2-hour radio interview with hosts Mark Glenn and James Morris and guest Kevin MacDonald, and including an interesting call-in appearance from Stephen Sniegoski. The general topic was Jewish power, but one point in particular stood out: Recently, a premier architect and promoter of the neocon war against Iraq, “Prince of Darkness” Richard Perle, has been escalating his campaign to deny the neocon role in American politics. Let me explain.

Back in 1996, a group of Americans writing for an Israeli think tank published a paper for Israeli Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” In addition to calling for Saddam Hussein’s replacement, it also advised an overthrow or destabilization of the governments of Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Iran, thus leading to something akin to a “Greater US-Israel Co-Prosperity Sphere.”  

One year later came the formation of The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a neocon think tank based in Washington. William Kristol and Robert Kagan co-founded it as a non-profit educational organization, but many have accused it of playing a primary role in the Bush Administration’s decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003. Later, the Pentagon hosted a unit called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), where Paul Wolfowitz joined Douglas Feith in propagating what many have claimed were false allegations about Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.In the American media there were legions of neocon writers who repeated the party line about the need for a preemptive war against Hussein. Anyone following the efforts and words of the neocons likely recognized a sense of schizophrenia about describing who, exactly, these neocons were. Last year I wrote about this phenomenon of naming neocons (see also here), noting how such comfortable homes to neoconservatism as The Public Interest, The National Interest, and Commentary (published by The American Jewish Committee) began to ignore any connection between Jews and neoconservatism. For example, the Winter 2004 issue of The Public Interest had an essay titled “Conservatives and Neoconservatives.” Yet author Adam Wolfson offered not even an oblique reference to Jews. Never mind that journal co-founder Irving Kristol is considered by many to be the father of neoconservatism, or that the other three editors over the forty-year life of the magazine have also been Jews.          

Over at its more foreign-policy oriented sister publication, The National Interest, Francis Fukuyama, in “The Neoconservative Moment” (Summer 2004) also failed to mention this connection. And in the October 2005 issue of Commentary, Joshua Muravchik did likewise in his article “Iraq and the Conservatives.” (Notice that Muravchik doesn’t even call them neoconservatives.)

The schizophrenic aspect of naming or not naming neocons as Jews was obvious at the New York Times beginning at the end of 2008. In mid-December, America’s “paper of record” featured a review of a book about neocon hawk Richard Perle written by Alan Weisman, “a world-traveled journalist and the son of Ukrainian Jews.” In the review were found familiar neocon names such as Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, and David Frum. The reader, however, heard not a word about their Jewish identity.  

One month later, however, the very same Times Book Review addressed Jacob Heilbrunn’s They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons—yet another book on neocons written by a Jewish author. But this time the reviewer, Timothy Noah, could not have been more blunt about the Jewish nature of the movement: “There’s no point denying it: neocons tend to be Jewish.” Heilbrunn confirmed this in an interview, when he bequeathed to us this verbal gift: “It is anything but an anti-Semitic canard to label neoconservatism a largely Jewish phenomenon.” In an article in The American Conservative, Philip Weiss delivered the same verdict: “Heilbrunn achieves one important chore: a forthright social narrative of the neocons as a Jewish movement.”

All of this brings us full circle back to 2004, when Kevin MacDonald wrote that “neoconservatism is indeed a Jewish intellectual and political movement.” “The current situation in the United States is really an awesome display of Jewish power and influence.”  MacDonald goes over the entire history of the movement back to the 1960s and shows that the principal players were Jews with a strong Jewish identity and a strong sense of pursuing Jewish interests — first and foremost the interests of Israel, but also advocating the use of US foreign policy to combat anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. He shows that neocons hold traditional Jewish liberal attitudes on every other issue, including immigration policy, but that they managed to elbow out traditional conservatives in the Republican Party to the point that paleocons like Pat Buchanan have been relegated to the sidelines.

Of course anyone following the antics of the neocons always knew about a certain Jewish character to the movement. After all, didn’t Pat Buchanan famously write in his seminal cover story in The American Conservative in early 2003 that a “neoconservative clique” was responsible for a pre-planned attack on Iraq following 9/11? Continuing, he thundered, “We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars.”

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Connelly-OutrageousLies.html#Perle

2009-02-25