It’s ‘Respectable’ Buchanan Who Tars the Republicans : Anti-Semitism: A David Duke is easy to isolate and discredit. But what of a candidate with the same ideas and Establishment credentials?
The most dangerous politician in the United States is not David Duke. Overt Nazis, members of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists are easy to isolate and discredit. In contrast, Patrick Buchanan, who also is challenging George Bush for the Republican presidential nomination, is a far more formidable threat.
Like Duke, Buchanan appeals to the fears and prejudices of white American middle-class voters whose livelihood and security are threatened by the sluggish economy, and who are receptive to diatribes blaming others--blacks, Jews, foreigners--for their troubles. Like Duke, he is an isolationist. According to Buchanan, President Bush “is a globalist, and we are nationalists. He believes in some pax universalis; we believe in the old Republic. He would put America’s wealth and power at the service of some new world order; we will put America first.”
While Duke is widely shunned, Buchanan is expected to receive at least 25% of the Republican vote in the New Hampshire primary. Unlike Duke, Buchanan is a popular member of the Washington Establishment. As a speech writer for Richard Nixon and as Ronald Reagan’s director of communications, he established solid credentials as a Republican Party activist. Through his syndicated columns and regular television appearances, his opinions have reached millions.
Even the American Jewish Establishment considers Buchanan more benign than Duke. The executive director of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations has acknowledged that while “I cannot see the circumstance under which we would host Duke,” the conference probably would meet with Buchanan.
As the son of two survivors of the Holocaust, I am terrified by Buchanan’s respectability. The difference between him and Duke is one of aesthetics and packaging rather than substance. True, Buchanan is not a would-be storm trooper, but that hardly makes him more palatable.
It is often forgotten that by the time he became chancellor of Germany in 1933, Adolf Hitler had distanced himself from the thugs who roamed Germany beating up Jews, Communists and social democrats. He made a successful effort to reassure the German Establishment by letting them know that he was really one of them--that he, too, liked children and dogs.
Buchanan’s true personality came to the fore last year, just before the Gulf War, when he updated the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the 1930s and ‘40s. In 1941, Charles Lindbergh, one of the most prominent of the pro-Fascist America-Firsters of that era, charged that “the three most important groups who have been pressing this country to war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration.” After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Buchanan said on national television, “There are only two groups that are beating the drums right now for war in the Middle East, and that is the Israeli defense ministry and its amen corner in the United States.”
Shortly thereafter, Buchanan, who has referred to Capitol Hill as “Israeli-occupied” territory, singled out former New York Times Executive Editor A.M. Rosenthal, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, columnist Charles Krauthammer and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger--all Jews with decidedly Jewish names--as promoters of a U.S.-Iraq war. He also wrote in one of his columns that the Americans who would die in such a war were “kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzalez and Leroy Brown.”
Buchanan has championed the cause of a succession of Nazi war criminals, and on one occasion argued that it would have been impossible for Jews to perish in the gas chambers of the Treblinka death camp.
Buchanan has even expressed admiration for Hitler himself. In 1977, he wrote: “Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an individual of great courage, a soldier’s soldier . . . a political organizer of the first rank, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him.”
Most leaders of the Republican Party have never publicly condemned Buchanan’s poison-mongering. They do not seem to realize that the evil he epitomizes befouls them by association.
Recently, President Bush unambiguously repudiated David Duke. Regardless of political cost, he should now disavow Pat Buchanan and all he represents in equally categorical terms. And the rest of us, Democrats and Republicans alike, must follow suit. We must confront the Buchanans among us and make clear to them that we as a nation will not tolerate anti-Semitism or racism of any sort.
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