Points of Friction

Free Speech (Slightly Abridged)

If there is one fact about Hollywood that is beyond dispute, it's that the film industry is largely “owned by Jews,” as Marlon Brando put it in an interview with (Jewish) Larry King [April 5, 1996]. You know the rest: Brando immediately learned that even so obvious a truth is unmentionable and apologized in tears. The apology made his point better than his first statement had, and the attacks continued even after he'd groveled. Some of his accusers implied that there are no Jews to speak of in Hollywood. Temperate discussion of the argument he'd been trying to make was simply impossible.

At about the same time, another Jewish firestorm stopped publication of a new biography of Joseph Goebbels by the controversial historian David Irving, an outspoken skeptic about the received version of World War II and the Holocaust.

The uproar, which included death threats, caused St. Martin's Press to break its contract with Irving and to denounce his book as “repellent” – a judgment that had somehow never occurred to St. Martin's until pressure was applied. The London Times [April 5, 1996] ascribed the cancellation to “Jewish pressure,” a plain assertion nowhere to be found in the American press. Time magazine [April 15, 1996] piously called the book “offensive to believers of all stripes,” as if Seventh Day Adventists, Hindus, and Buddhists had also taken umbrage. “Offensive” books should not be published, it seems. It's edifying to find this doctrine promoted by TimeWarner, a sewer of cultural ordure.

What is unsettling about this episode is that it offers more evidence of the tightening noose on public opinion. I used to enjoy the feeling that a variety of viewpoints was always available in this country, that one could pick and choose among them. But this is no longer the case. We seem to be enmeshed in a series of one-sided controversies where Jewish interests are concerned. When the Jewish establishment takes a position on a subject, it's heatedly asserted in all the major media, and little may be said on the other side.

You are left to wonder why there is another side. The denunciations of Irving's book were well-nigh unanimous, leaving you curious as to whether he or anyone else could write a long book using primary sources without having anything at all worth reading and taking into account. The study of history is a complicated process and always involves a lot of sifting. Nobody ever has the whole truth about the past; everybody has a greater or lesser share. Any errors in Irving's book could presumably have been corrected in the usual way, by the criticism of other historians. But people who hadn't read the book were determined not to let it get to that point. The public must not be allowed to see it at all.

Joseph Sobran

True, Irving's book can still be taken up by other publishers – the further from New York, the more safely. But Jewish pressure and power have become a troubling and menacing factor in American public discussion. In several other Western countries it is now actually illegal to question whether the Nazi regime tried to exterminate the Jews, and Irving himself has been singled out for prosecution under the Holocaust laws. The Israeli writer Amos Elon has remarked on how strange it is, even in Israel, that a historical fact should be treated as religious dogma, and its denial as blasphemy. It's become problematic for anyone to say the Holocaust did happen, since denial or even doubt invites legal and extralegal penalties.

The Holocaust laws are only the extreme and explicit cases of a more general climate of implicit thought control. Not only principled criticism of Israel, but the mere statement of certain scandalous but indisputable facts about it is kept out of the mainstream media.

It isn't that Israel lags a little behind Western standards of justice; it doesn't even aspire to those standards. Equality for non-Jews would mean the virtual abolition of Israel.

But Jewish propagandists insist that Israel is “an integral part of the West,” an ally, asset, and beleaguered sister democracy of the United States – even though it denies, in principle and in practice, that all men are created equal.

In other countries Zionist Jews claim for themselves the equal rights they refuse to extend to others in the Jewish state. Their famous “liberalism” is merely a tactic for use where Jews are a minority a way of disarming gentile nationalism while preserving their own.

One index of a group's power is its ability to impose a double standard in its own favor. By this measure, the Jewish establishment is very powerful indeed. We've come to accept its routine censorship of discussion in America. Nobody dares say that something is amiss when a publisher is intimidated into canceling publication of a book. In fact, I didn't notice a single expression of alarm about the threats of death.

Double Standard

The Weekly Standard, the new voice of Respectable Conservatism, keeps showing its true colors. A recent book review by one Frederic Raphael flays T. S. Eliot for anti-Semitism and winds up making a wider and equally bitter attack on Christendom itself. I've often wondered just what “anti-Semitism” means nowadays. I should have known the answer. It means Christianity.

Reviewing a new study of Eliot by a British Jew named Anthony Julius, Raphael observes that the whole history of Jewish-Christian relations is “a long story of one-sided malevolence,” beginning with “the Fathers of the Church,” infecting all of Western European culture, and culminating in the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism, according to Raphael, informs “the whole language of Western thought.” (If so, why single out Eliot?)

Raphael doesn't state the practical conclusion, but it's obvious enough: Christianity must be destroyed. If its whole tendency is to produce mass murder, if it reached it's only natural fulfillment at Auschwitz, what other inference is possible?

This is a widely held view among Jews, who have rarely condemned the Communist persecution of Christianity in the tones they reserve for the Nazi persecution of Jews; but it is generally felt imprudent to say it openly to a Christian majority. The old European phrase “Jewish Bolshevism” indicated keen popular awareness of the animus behind the Soviet regime's mass murders of priests, who were hardly “capitalists”; and equating Jewry with Communism was no more unfair than equating Christendom with Nazism.

Jewish hatred of Christianity still surfaces now and then; a few years ago another neoconservative magazine, Commentary, ran long diatribes blaming the Holocaust on Christianity – one by the fanatical Hyam Maccoby, who wrote a book to the same effect. Many Jewish readers wrote in to express their fervent agreement and their delighted surprise that someone would put their thoughts in print. “Messianic” Jews – Jewish Christians – are the object of special loathing in the Jewish community and forfeit the normal right of Jews to Israeli citizenship.

The hatred of Christianity is enshrined in the tax-supported National Holocaust Museum in Washington. Museum tours begin with a short film on the origins of anti-Semitism, which it traces to the Gospels – a frequent theme in intramural Jewish writing. When some Christians objected to the film three years ago, Alan Keyes, the recent presidential candidate, wrote a piece in the Washington Times defending the charge as essentially true.

The truth is that the Gospels show the Jewish leaders and the Jewish mob as seeking Christ's death, but hardly the Jews as a whole; the Gospels were largely written by Jews, and many if not most of the first Christians were Greek-speaking Jews. Does anyone deny that the Jewish establishment was hostile to Christianity? That hostility forms the background of the Acts of the Apostles, where the early Christians are constantly shown as seeking secrecy “for fear of the Jews.” No matter how fiercely the accuracy of the New Testament is attacked, it is hard to explain why all this would have been invented if the Jews had been generally tolerant of the Christian community.

The “long story of one-sided malevolence” is further complicated by the obscene fables of Christ in the Talmud and later Jewish literature. Yet Jews have generally migrated to Christian lands and found tolerance in them. It's hardly credible that they would have chosen to live in countries where they were singled out for hatred.

Christians have sometimes treated Jews shamefully; but they are ashamed of this precisely because it is un-Christian. If hating Jews were compatible with Christianity, Jewish charges of anti-Semitism would carry no sting. In point of fact, Jews have become skillful at “working” the Christian conscience and instilling a guilt they seldom feel about their own treatment of Christians where Jews have had the upper hand, as in Israel today. How many Jews have called on their Israeli brethren to treat Christians as equals?

It is not “malevolence” that is one-sided, but guilt. Christians are judged by Christian standards, and are condemned; Jews are judged by Jewish standards, and are excused. This double standard is implicit in nearly all contemporary Jewish-Christian “dialogue,” and forms the unspoken ground rules of the outwardly cordial relations between Christian conservatives and Jewish neoconservatives.

The ancient Jewish hostility is also happily diluted by humanity. It would be unfair and unrealistic to suggest that most Jews hate Christians in America. They have too many Christian friends and even, with the increase of intermarriage, relatives; in fact, half of American Jews now marry gentiles. Ordinary decency, kindness, and practical need have a pleasant way of qualifying abstract principles. Sometimes love does conquer all.

But there is little in the roots of Jewish tradition to encourage respect for Christianity as such, and a great deal to discourage it. Even the most well-meaning Jews are noticeably reserved about saying anything in direct praise of Christianity, just as the most malevolent are inhibited by their minority status from expressing their hatred. The Jew who speaks well of Christianity earns contempt within his own community; the Jew who dares to speak ill of it earns admiration for his courage.

This is the admiration Raphael is bidding for. The notable fact is that his attack on a Christian cultural icon, and the entire Christian tradition, has found a welcome in The Weekly Standard, which it striving to be the new voice of American conservatism, and not just the “neo” kind. Apparently the goyish readership isn't expected to take offense, or even to notice. Far from fearing anti-Semitism, the neoconservatives take for granted that Christian enmity toward Jews is too far gone to be rekindled – that any malevolence is indeed one-sided, and no longer has anything to fear.

While neoconservatives seek to make alliances with the pro-Israel Christian Right, and even defend people like Pat Robertson against charges of anti-Semitism leveled by other Jews, you will search their writing in vain for a good word about Christianity itself, which has apparently made no positive contribution to Western culture that might redeem it from its genocidal essence. Temporary alliances with Christians in no way imply respect for the Christian religion.

The few neoconservatives who credit Christianity with any virtues ascribe them solely to its Jewish roots. In their view, Jesus Christ added nothing worthwhile to the world. In Israel, where Jews may speak less guardedly, Christians are called “idolators.” A few years ago the first performance of Handel's Messiah in Israel was fiercely protested: the work consists mostly of Old Testament verses prophesying Jesus.

All this may come as a shock to those Christians who, cooing about the “Judaeo-Christian tradition,” assume that their neocon friends reciprocate their warm sentiments and share their basic attitudes on morality. Most neocons are indifferent or faintly derisive toward “social issues” and voice few objections to legal abortion. Their passion is for foreign policy and American global hegemony, directed always to the welfare of Israel.

For the time being, the deep and abiding Jewish hostility to Christianity is complicated by the immediate Islamic threat to Israel. This requires the solicitation of Christian support for the Jewish state, which, however, never goes so far as to allow concessions to Christians in Israel, where non-Jews can never be full citizens. One of the most remarkable successes of Zionist propaganda has been its ability to distract attention from the direct opposition of Israeli principles to American and Christian principles of law and justice. In fact, almost nobody in the conservative movement has pointed out that American Jewry supports in Israel the very racial inequalities it denounces in America.

At the same time, the neocons are alarmed by the more open hostility to Christian culture of Jews in Hollywood and the New York-Washington media. They see no reason to antagonize the goyim while Israel's fate is at stake.

The most notable feature of the neocon attack on Pat Buchanan this winter was that Israel was barely mentioned, except in coded allusions to “isolationism” – though Israel was uppermost, as always, in the minds of the powerful and vocal Jews who wanted to destroy him. Buchanan was above all an outspoken advocate of a Christian America, which would put its own interests first and concentrate on repairing its badly damaged moral and social fabric.

The neocons are “neo” in their attachment to post-New Deal America rather than to the America of the Founders. Though they deplore some liberal excesses, they have no desire to restore the old constitutional and federal system, America's ancien regime, in which “isolationism” was the application of limited government to foreign policy.

From the neocon point of view, Buchanan's Christian patriot agenda would have been disastrous – notwithstanding the many “issues” on which the neocons profess agreement with Buchanan's positions. If you differ with them on Israel, areas of ostensible agreement, however numerous, count for nothing. That alone would justify the diabolization of Buchanan, but he went far beyond mere disagreement about Israel. He appeared to them as the arch-goy, the uppity Catholic, a new Father Coughlin (to whom he was often compared).

Yet the neocons' real agenda has to be largely concealed, so they roared about secondary matters like free trade and immigration. Again, in America they support liberal immigration policies they would absolutely oppose in Israel, where ethnic purity is the sovereign principle – and American aid will soon help build the sort of barrier to unwanted immigrants the neocons have blasted Buchanan for advocating along the Mexican border.

Printing the Raphael review was a momentary indiscretion for The Weekly Standard. But the very fact that it was deemed printable at all shows its congruence with the neocons' inmost attitudes, which are usually kept under wraps. For the time being, Christianity must be tolerated – for Israel's sake.