March 12, 2003

This Washington Post leader zeroes

This Washington Post leader zeroes in on the Jim Moran situation:

Mr. Moran's comment will be used to concentrate the poison of anti-Semitism in many parts of the world where it remains virulent and dangerous.

Jews in fact are far from unified in their opinion of President Bush's Iraq policy. Nonetheless many people argue, often in more sophisticated ways than Mr. Moran, that the Bush policy is being engineered by and on behalf of Jews or Israel. At its most conspiratorial, the theory goes like this: A small group of Jews (sometimes referred to, in a kind of code, as "neoconservatives" or "neocons") decided years ago that Saddam Hussein should be overthrown to improve Israeli security. Evidence is contained in a memo that some of them wrote in 1996 for Israeli politician Binyamin Netanyahu. These "neocons" then insinuated themselves into the Bush administration and seized on 9/11 as the pretext to put their plan into motion. Mr. Bush and his top foreign-policy team -- Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and CIA Director George J. Tenet -- are presumably too weak and gullible to evade the manipulations of these Jews.


Here's Pat Buchanan's defense of the conspiracy theory; here's David Duke's (via Taranto.) Moran's comments differ in their vagueness, and in that he has attempted to "soften" them by inserting multiculti buzzwords like "community," but they're in the same vein, part of the same distressingly longstanding tradition.

I agree with Bill Quick, that hounding Moran from office isn't the solution; depose the messenger and the message remains. Rather: criticize the message. Tease out the implications. Map out its ideological antecedents, place it in a historical context, identify its contemporary champions, etc. (If that process causes his constituents and his party to seek a better class of politico to represent them, so much the better.)

A correspondent or two has taken issue with my previous post that places Moran's statement in the Jewish Conspiracy Theory category. I think it does belong there, but I'll concede that Moran, universally acknowledged to be something of a nitwit, may not have really known what he was saying. But he ought to have known.

Posted by Dr. Frank at March 12, 2003 10:20 AM | TrackBack