MSNBC Fires MSNBC’s Foreign Policy Amen Corner

In August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, threatening the world’s supply of oil.  International sanctions immediately followed.  As the world was readying for war, Pat Buchanan went on American television to opine that:

There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in The Middle East – the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.

Also that:

The civilized world must win this fight,’ the editors thunder. But, if it comes to war, it will not be the ‘civilized world’ humping up that bloody road to Baghdad; it will be American kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown.

Blacks, Hispanics, Pat Buchanan has your back — at least when it comes to Jews.

I’m not sure why any of it should had come as a surprise.  In the ’80s and early ’90s Buchanan wrote a total of 9 columns defending John Demjanjuk — and that’s not counting other Nazi war criminals.  These columns included everything from accusing the Holocaust victims of mass hysteria to Holocaust revisionism.  In 2009 Buchanan outdid himself in a  Human Events column (reprinted by Ron Paul’s buddy Lew Rockwell, among other people) that compared Demjanjuk to Jesus.  Not a surprise either, considering that by then the distinguished paleocon was hosting Holocaust deniers at his website and wrote a book about the, you know, peaceful Hitler.

But I digress.  In 1991 William F. Buckley castigated Buchanan, and although the commentator amassed 3 million votes in his 1992 Presidential run, he fell out of favor thereafter.  During the events leading up to Golf War 2 Buchanan became the “conservative” amen corner of the liberal media.  Back then my gentile co-workers gushed over his “anti-war” editorial for the New York Times as my pacifist Jewish co-workers gulped.  Ten years ago conservatives didn’t consider Buchanan one of our own.  (In any event, why is this isolationist and protectionist a conservative?)

MSNBC hired Buchanan in 2002 because they agreed with him on the Iraq war, which was back then the most pressing issue of the day.  Buchanan’s racist anti-Semitic history was already well-known, and was not an issue.  He came on board because he was not a foreign policy conservative.  Moreover, as Alana Goodman eloquently put:

It always seemed odd that MSNBC, the far-left network, employed one of the most fringey, controversial, anti-Semitic figures on the right. But then again, there was probably a good reason for it. The left still wishes all conservatives were as easy to demonize as Pat Buchanan.

Now that our military is gutted out and foreign policy issues do not animate broadcasters, the liberal network has no use for poor Pat.

As a conservative with a libertarian bend I have no problem with a decision by a private news network to sever ties with a contributor.  I have to disagree with Profrssor Jacobson.  If MSNBC doesn’t want to hire conservatives, it’s their prerogative.  If they use Media Matters’ guidelines to select their lineup, that’s also entirely up to them.

Buchanan’s complains that he’s being “blacklisted” are laughable, particularly considering that he’s a defender of Joe McCarthy.  In any event, here is his statement:

The modus operandi of these thought police at Color of Change and ADL is to brand as racists and anti-Semites any writer who dares to venture outside the narrow corral in which they seek to confine debate. All the while prattling about their love of dissent and devotion to the First Amendment, they seek systematically to silence and censor dissent.

Nothing says “the narrow corral” like Holocaust revisionism.

I find Buchanan’s complaint that the ADL gets to to tell us who is an anti-Semite particularly noxious.  The definition of anti-Semitism should not be left to Buchanans and Mearsheimers of the world.  It’s the ADL’s job not merely to explain what anti-Semitism is, but to make racism and anti-Semitism socially unacceptable.  As a conservative with a libertarian bend I am entirely comfortable with private groups defining our moral standards.  And while the ADL loses credibility when it glides over or ignores anti-Semitism on the left, it’s correct about Buchanan.  Shame on conservative commentators like Sean Hannity for having Buchanan on his show as a regular guest.

Without a hearing, they smear and stigmatize as racist, homophobic, or anti-Semitic any who contradict what George Orwell once called their “smelly little orthodoxies.” They then demand that the heretic recant, grovel, apologize, and pledge to go forth and sin no more.

Is the Holocaust now a “smelly little orthodox[y]”, I wonder?  It’s irrelevant, though, because as I said, if MSNBC had a problem with Buchanan’s anti-Semitism, he would have never be hired in a first place.

Defy them, and they will go after the network where you work, the newspapers that carry your column, the conventions that invite you to speak. If all else fails, they go after the advertisers.

Nice try.  Color of Change did go after advertizes on Beck’s show, but what does it have to do with Pat Buchanan?  He insinuated that his former employer was threatened with a boycott.  In light of him failing to produce the evidence of such threat, I am going to assume that it’s paranoia speaking.

I know these blacklisters. They operate behind closed doors, with phone calls, mailed threats, and off-the-record meetings. They work in the dark because, as Al Smith said, nothing un-American can live in the sunlight.

What kind of conservative demands “a hearing” for being fired?  His bosses made a decision behind closed doors, alright, but Pat Buchanan has no constitutionally guaranteed right to a job with MSNBC.  Traditional stoic masculinity dictates that Mr. Buchanan deals; instead he issued a hyperbolic statement.

The drama queen knows what he’s doing.  With so many decades in the public eye behind him, Buchanan must had noticed that punditry is a high turnover business.  One day you are in, and the next day you are paling around with the Institute for Historical Review.  Seriously, we are dealing with middle brow entertainment here.  Buchanan is trying to generate some sort of controversy by championing his own victimhood.  Cry me a river.

Does refusal to put conservatives on its payroll tell us that MSNBC is kind of lame?  It does, but not so much because they hired Buchanan as much as because said paleocon was their token conservative.  They will go down in history as a news channel that employed a noted anti-Semite for a decade.  I dare them to put a respectable Goldwater/Reagan conservative on the air.

UPDATE: Link fixed.

Some Watchdogs

Both the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the ADL recently released statements on anti-Semitism in the Occupy movement.  Mathew Knee at Legal Insurrection comments:

There are two major organizations in the Jewish community tasked with certifying people, things, and movements as anti-Semitic or not: The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center/Museum(s) of Tolerance.  Sometimes, they differ, owing largely to the fact that the ADL’s leaders vote Democrat while the Wiesenthal Center’s leaders, primarily being Orthodox Rabbis, are generally thought to lean Republican.

Now that the Democratic leadership is embracing OWS, and it does look like ADL Director Abraham Foxman dares not to challenge Occupiers:

We are seeing some individuals holding anti-Semitic signs at the “Occupy Wall Street” rallies, and some videos posted on YouTube from the rallies have shown individuals expressing classic anti-Semitic beliefs such as “Jews control the banks” and “Jews control Wall Street.”  While we believe that these expressions are not representative of the larger views of the OWS movement, it is still critical for organizers, participants and supporters of these rallies to condemn such bigoted statements clearly and forcefully.

There is no evidence that these anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are representative of the larger movement or that they are gaining traction with other participants.  However, history demonstrates time and again how economic downturns can embolden anti-Semites to spread malicious conspiracy theories and promote stereotypes about Jews and money. As a consequence, these statements must not be left unchallenged.

Simon Wiesenthal’s statement has a bit more teeth:

…Unfortunately, the hateful fringe of the Occupy Wall Street Movement is now also coast-to-coast, though you might not know it from the mainstream media. Today’s hate propaganda from the New York protests has gone viral. This includes placards identifying “Wall Street Jews” as “Hitler’s Bankers,” and angry shouts of “Kill/Screw Google Jews.” According to anecdotal evidence, the conspiracy banter that the 9/11 attacks were a U.S. government and/or Israeli plot is also popular among some protestors.

From Wall Street to LA’s City Hall now comes a copycat wave of street posters including one with the headline “End the Fed Spigot” under which are pictures of missiles and Stars of David bombarding innocent victims. Another pseudo-learned poster tells us: “Humanity has been colonized by a Satanic cult called the ILLUMINATI . . . Masonic and Jewish bankers who . . . control the purse strings [and] are conspiring against us. They have orchestrated TWO WORLD WARS and are planning a THIRD.” We are told that it’s “Humanity VS. The Rothschilds”. Protester Patricia McAllister, who says she works for LA Unified Schools exercised her First Amendment Right thus: “I think that the Zionist Jews, who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve, . . . need to be run out of this country.”

For almost 200 years, blaming the world’s economic woes on the Rothschilds or Wall Street or Jewish bankers has been “the socialism of fools”—and mother’s milk of every demagogue from Hitler to Henry Ford to the Internet bloggers who still insist that Goldman Sachs’s secret Zionist high-command cunningly engineered the 2008 global financial collapse. Of course, toxic hate is not the motivator of most protestors, many of whom are suffering from or sincerely concerned about real economic hardship. Yet history shows the danger of lunatic fringe ideas spreading from the periphery to the center of a tumultuous movement…

Rabbi Cooper who issued this statement goes on to allege racism among the Tea Party, as they saw in birthers, which they felt was disavowed by political leaders that came out of the movement.  Cooper called on OWS to similarly reject the anti-Semitic fringe.

I take an issue with characterization of Occupy anti-Semitism as a fringe phenomena.  First, the Occupy movement is so small and incoherent it’s fringe only.  To be sure the guy with bad teeth and “Hitler’s Bankers” banner is no commie.  But there are plenty more examples, and the far left parents who bring their kids to Zuccotti Park don’t mind them photographed in front of that sign, and friendly photographers go out of the way to snap that shot, and Huffington Post approvingly features the picture on its pages.  I wrote about that one before.

The Occupy movement is not so much a political force as counterculture ritual.  People join this movement to express themselves: take off their bras, beat on drums or forgo washing for weeks.  Evidently they are accepting of wackier forms of self-expression, including anti-Semitsm and racism.

Both Cooper and Foxman need to pick up the phone and call the Canadian Jewish Congress because that organization can explain that anti-Semites are at the root of the Occupy movement.  Occupy is the brainchild of a Canadian publication called Adbusters that apparently thinks that anti-Semitism is hip and fresh and all.

Adbusters recently ran a picture of Israeli Prime Minister meant to look subtly evil (pallid skin, eyelids same color as lips, too much flash on his forehead) with the words “Can you trust this man with nuclear weapons?”

Why, yes!

In 2004 the publication ran a story “Why Won’t Anybody Say They Are Jewish?”  They printed a list of prominent “neocons” with asterisks next to Jewish names.  Some commentators noted that at least they didn’t use yellow stars.  But it’s the 2010 comparison of Gaza Strip to Warsaw Ghetto that earned them the condemnation of the Canadian Jewish Congress and got them banned in some bookstores.

The ADL and Simon Wiesenthal Center need to do better research.

UPDATE: Occupy LA organizers refuse to denounce rabid anti-Semitism, via Legal Insurrection: