Further thoughts on Sailer on Breindel

My discussion of Steve Sailer’s article on the late Eric Breindel ended with a comment that went beyond Sailer’s arguments and characterized Sailer himself. This understandably bothered some readers. I agree that such personal comments can be off-putting and are not the most effective way to make an argument. So let’s take a second look at Sailer’s article, this time describing the article and Sailer’s attitudes as expressed in the article, but not Sailer as a person.

Reading it again, I am struck less by any specific factual misstatements made by Sailer (though there are such statements) than by the tone of crude malice, and the low, mischievous way he puts it all together. It starts with the bolded first line:

Tamar Jacoby’s late ex-husband / heroin junkie / neocon extraordinaire

linking Breindel’s arrest at age 27 for heroin possession with his career as a prominent editor which began some years later. The juxtaposition of those phrases creates the immediate impression on the mind that Breindel was a junkie while he was a leading neoconservative. Would anyone not motivated by malice make such a linkage?

Then there is the simultaneous description of Breindel as the “late ex-husband” of Tamar Jacoby. Since Jacoby is the most aggressive and dishonest advocate for open borders in America today and deservedly a despised figure on the right, Sailer obviously is seeking to tar Breindel by associating Breindel with her. But as the Times article explains, their marriage took place in the late 1980s and was extremely brief. By the time Jacoby became a leading open borders advocate in the early 2000s, her marriage with Breindel had been over for more than a decade and Breindel himself was several years dead.

So the triple linkage,

Tamar Jacoby’s late ex-husband / heroin junkie / neocon extraordinaire

designed to trigger an overwhelmingly negative impression of Breindel’s character on the reader’s mind, does so by suggesting several things that are not true.

Then Sailer calls Breindel:

… an extremely important figure in the development of the neocon stranglehold on public debate in America…

Stranglehold on debate? The New York Post under Breindel was an island of conservative outspokenness in a sea of New York leftism. One of its featured columnists was Patrick Buchanan, in his hey-day in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when he was the best conservative voice in America, and NOT a neoconservative.

Does Sailer present any facts to back up his claim that Breindel helped construct a “strangehold” on debate? No. What he really means is, the neocons in general have created a strangehold on debate on the right (which with qualifications is arguably true but pertains mainly to the post 9/11 era and Bush’s policy of Muslim democratization); and Breindel, because he was a neocon, was part of it. But Sailer points to no facts showing that Breindel had anything to do with suppressing debate or building a politically correct regime. It’s pure smear, based on the syllogism: neocons are evil controllers of America; Breindel was a neocon; therefore Breindel was an evil controller of America.

And then this:

A general lesson for our era is that cyberspace is far overrated as a way to influence events compared to personal contacts and behind the scenes machinations.

It’s those sneaky Jews again, pulling the strings of the world! You would think that Breindel did not actually edit the editorial page of a major U.S. newspaper and write lots of highly intelligent editorials and serve as an intellectual leader in the New York and America of his time. No, what he was about, and what he owes his prominence to, is “behind the scenes machinations.”

There’s much more that I could say, but these three examples demonstrate Sailer’s bigotry. By which I mean that Sailer, without regard for truth, balance, or decency, portrays in grotesquely false and negative colors a deceased person who belonged to a group Sailer hates (Jewish neoconservatives), in order to make that person an object of dislike, disgust, and suspicion—and, moreover, disgust and suspicion of a specifically anti-Semitic type. I don’t call Sailer anti-Semitic, because I don’t know that he is. But I do say that he talks about Jewish neoconservatives in the same way that an anti-Semite talks about Jews.

- end of initial entry -

Spencer Warren writes:

On your new Sailer post, I don’t think there was anything wrong in what you wrote yesterday. For him to write such a thing about a deceased person, which has no relevance whatever to current debate, is a strong indication of Sailer’s anti-Semitism, I think. Plus all the details in his article that you note. What he wrote is totally “out of left field.”

LA replies:

Well, I didn’t retract what I said yesterday, I just acknowledged that it does offend some people and may distract from what I have to say. My sharp comment about him as a person becomes the focus, rather than what he said. So I think it was valuable to go through the article again looking more carefully at what he actually said.

As indicated by the below exchange, which starts with a correspondent warmly praising me for my “restraint about going one millimeter beyond what you know for a certainty,” and which ends with the same correspondent calling me a “coward” and “blind as a bat” for not agreeing with him, inter alia, that admiration for Franco makes one an anti-Semite, I get it from all sides.

The correspondent wrote:

I wish you to know whatever our differences I have great respect for your ethical scrupulousness—as revealed in this posting and on many other occasions. Your restraint about going one millimeter beyond what you know for a certainty is admirable.

I must ask you a question, however. Do you think that “neo-con” has become, at least in some circles, code language for Jews? I ask because on many occasions when the group is targeted (no, I can’t cite chapter and verse because I haven’t done a systematic study) it’s always the Jewish names that are trotted out. (It’s also possible my sensitivities make them stand out for me; I’m willing to accept that possibility, and I do recognize that Jewish intellectuals have been and are prominent in that camp.) But I rarely see that of Dick Cheney or many others one might name.

LA replies:

> Do you think that neo-con has become, at least in some circles, code language for Jews?

If you mean that the word in some circles always means Jews, then I would not agree, unless we’re talking about some crude anti-Semitic circles.

If you mean that the word sometimes is used as code language for Jews, of course I agree.

At the same time, “neoconservative” continues as an ordinary term of political description, used by the neocons themselves. So the attempt made by some people to ban the word “neoconservative” is very wrong. You have to deal with each situation in which the word is used, not make a blanket characterization.

Are you aware that a respected neoconservative editor, Thomas Lifson of the American Thinker, accused me using “neoconservative” as a code word for Jews, and when I demanded that he back that up, and I showed how prominent neoconservatives call themselves neoconservatives, he refused to explain or retract the accusation, then proceeded to cut me off? Here’s the article where I explain what happened, from August 2005.

Correspondent replied:

Thanks for your thoughts on this. I’d disagree that the code word is confined to “crude anti-Semitic circles.” But perhaps the nub or our disagreement is how we define “crude.” That adjective takes in a great deal of territory and people would define it differently. I’d call Buchanan a “crude anti-Semite.” (There’s plenty of evidence for that.) I suspect you’d disagree.

Of course there’s no question that “neoconservative” is a term that simply denotes a certain set of more or less coherent views on domestic and foreign policy. It carries no automatic negatives or positives. We can agree on that one, at least.

As for Thomas Lifson—he’s an ass—and I’m sorry you were on the receiving end of this intemperate, stupid attack.

LA replied:

> I’d disagree that the code word is confined to “crude anti-Semitic circles.”

I did not say that the code word is confined to crude anti-Semitic circles. I said:

If you mean that the word in some circles always means Jews, then I would not agree, unless we’re talking about some crude anti-Semitic circles.

If you mean that the word sometimes is used as code language for Jews, of course I agree.

> I’d call Buchanan a “crude anti-Semite.” (There’s plenty of evidence for that.) I suspect you’d disagree.

I understand where you’re coming from. I see the things that you see, which you describe as crude anti-Semitism. I would not describe them the same way. I think it is fairly likely that Buchanan has anti-Semitism inside him in some form and that it is at least part of the motivation for his crude agenda against Israel. But I don’t see how someone can be called an anti-Semite who has never in his life attacked Jews as Jews.

Correspondent replied:

But Buchanan has. One famous observation of his, quoted in an article on Buchanan written by Ken Stern of the American Jewish Committee some years ago—I’m sure you could contact them and get a copy—was that while visiting a military cemetery he remarked on how few Jewish names he found. That doesn’t strike you as anti-Semitic? You honestly think the purpose of that statement was merely descriptive? (Should I add that Jews served in WWII and Korea in numbers far beyond their percentage of the population—and if you add the Jewish soldiers that fought in the Red Army against the Nazis they would have been among the highest percentage group under arms in the greatest war of modern times. There is a record of statements of this kind. His insensitivity to the Holocaust, his defense of accused Nazi war criminals, his veneration of Franco, his condemnations of Vatican II that finally dropped the principal theological basis of Christian anti-Semitism—none of these things strike you as anti-Semitic? Larry, please forgive me, but I think you are working very hard NOT to connect the dots.

LA replied:

I don’t want to revisit all these old issues, which I’ve discussed many times. As someone who has written major articles condemning Buchanan in the strongest terms for his bigotry against Israel, I simply and fundamentally diagree with the big campaign in the early ’90s, which you are dredging up, that called Buchanan an anti-Semite. The evidence was not there. I think the U.S. Jewish community discredited itself with those attacks. The two famous lists of names, of neocons, and of U.S. soldiers, were in two unrelated articles which Norman Podhoretz and others dishonestly conflated and treated as though they were in one column and Buchanan was comparing them.

Your position and that of the Jewish community is basically that any statement that puts Jews in a critical light is anti-Semitic. This Boy-Who-Cried-Wolfism has had very negative effects in our society, as seen in the rise of real, serious anti-Semitism that has become common and accepted, and which I have to deal with all the time, and which the terminally stupid Jewish community has barely noticed because they were so obsessed with crying Wolf at Paddy Buchanan back in 1993 that they’ve barely noticed the far worse things that have been happening all around them ever since then.

You list, among your “proofs” of his anti-Semitsm, “his veneration of Franco.” So according to you anyone who supported or admired Franco in the Spanish Civil War—Franco who saved Spain from Communism and who by the way refused to cooperate with Hitler which led to Hitler’s defeat in North Africa—is an anti-Semite. When you say things like this you show an inability to make distinctions between utterly distinct things.

Correspondent replied:

You’re right. Let’s just let it lie. Your attribution of sources for the critique of Buchanan are in some cases wrong, but that’s the least of it. If you wish to wear blinkers—go ahead. Your ability to deny the self-evident is remarkable. The “Jewish community” didn’t discredit itself in anyone’s eyes—except for those Jews that are ashamed of being Jews and feel they have to genuflect in the direction of conservatives that despise them. Buchanan discredits himself. As do conservatives too cowardly to call spades spades. If you can’t see the man’s an anti-Semite you are simply blind. Blind as a bat. Let’s return to our Hudna .

LA replies:

Thank you.

Alan Levine writes:

I thought your characterization of Buchanan on target. He is on the edge of anti-Semitism, but not quite over the line.

I must say that suspect that I would long ago have decided that he was simply an anti-Semite but for the fact that Paul Gottfried and his daughter know him well (the daughter once worked for him) and attest that he is not. Paul’s explanation for his behavior is that Buchanan does not dislike Jews in general, but dislikes American Jews for their liberalism, and his bias against Israel is really the Israelis serving as surrogates for American Jews. Which, of course, is unreasonable and quite bad enough. But there is a childish streak in the man, which he showed well enough in his absurd defenses of pre-WWII isolationism. Whatever he might believe about that issue—and his beliefs are idiotic enough—you would expect that a man deep in the contemporary political game would know enough to shut up about a matter that was not of contemporary importance and would immediately brand him, even if unjustifiably, as a crank. You can also see this childish, spiteful streak in his defenses of Nixon and of the Second Indochina War. I have seen him maintain, in all seriousness, apparently, that the current war has done more damage than the Indochina War to the United States, though this again seems to be linked to his craze against the neocons. Somehow I think that a look at the comparative casualty figures would render that unconvincing…

LA replies:

First, the idea that we can conclude that party A is not an anti-Semite because Party B, who is a Jew, knows Party A socially and attests he is not an anti-Semite is unpersuasive. And it’s even more so when the Jew in question is a right-winger with pronounced anti-Israel or Judeo-critical positions such as Robert Novak (Jewish by birth, Christian by conversion, and an inveterate enemy of Israel who has constantly testified that his friend Buchanan is not an anti-Semite) or Paul Gottfried (a paleocon who is very critical of most American Jews). To determine a person’s beliefs, you need to look at the total picture, not just take the word of a friend and ideological comrade of his.

Second, if Gottfried’s explanation is correct that Buchanan dislikes American Jews for their liberalism and that he projects that dislike onto Israel as surrogates for American Jews, then that is anti-Semitism. I have said many times that paleocons who have an animus against neocons for their universalism and express that animus by being enemies of Israel are anti-Semites. The Israelis haven’t pushed universalism on America, the Israelis haven’t pushed the “Proposition Nation” idea on America; the Israelis haven’t pushed open borders on America. The Israelis are innocent of all that. So the Israelis are being attacked purely for the fact that they are Jewish. That’s anti-Semitism.

It’s also another example of the tribalism which I say is a feature of paleoconservatism. For the paleocons, truth and falsity, good and bad, are determined by what group a person belongs to. I have many times heard paleocons openly justify their demonization of the state of the Israel on the basis of their dislike of American neoconservatives.

Justin writes:

You’re completely right about Sailer; he’s motivated by malice.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 22, 2007 12:34 AM | Send