Good Lord, what an article. Such infighting. Wow! Grab the popcorn, indeed.

Thanks for linking it.

One thing I like about Stephen Schwartz: The man does not mince words.

This is all so . . . arcane. . . .

Trotskycon? Or Donkey Kong?

It's a relief to see someone classifying "neocons" not as Jews as so many not-son-in-the-closet-but-in-denial anti-Semites have been doing lately...

Thanks for the link but Blogspot permalinks not working (what a surprise)

Until I move to MT best to link to the main page
*HARRY'S PLACE*

It's the venue that startles me so: heck, I read NRO, and I never noticed until you pointed it out. Thanks!

Below is an impression I would love to share,
particularly with Jewish members on this list. It is a
most disturbing impression that can only be
ameliorated through collegial discourse, in my view.
So I offer it to this list in hope of promoting
discussion instead of slander. Reason can change my
views as they are fraught with alarm that would
appreciation pacification.

The "Big Red Scare" days of the Cold War were heady
days, especially for the once Leninist neocons turned
anti-Red propagandists publishing in CIA sponsored
media directed at the Left. But those days are gone
and many rich careers made in the Conservative
Movement fighting the "Red Menace" came to a crashing
end. Trade names for think-tanks, publications,
publishing houses and other assets could be bought for
a nickle on the dollar as the Corporate Establishment
and CIA ceased funding of the "Red Scare" propaganda
machine and the well payed "experts" had to scramble
in search of real jobs.

Many proved to be as good at scholarship and writing
as at their past trade of scare propaganda and they
found a niche for themselves in academia. But for the
neocons it proved business as usual, for they were
able to move from the "Big Red Scare" to the "Big
Green Scare." Green is the color of Islam and the
neocons managed to parley venture capital from
right-wing Zionist extremist entrepreneurs into a "War
on Terror" fighting the new Islam scare. Indeed,
deeming the Cold War "World War III," they declared
"World War IV" on Islam:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/podhoretz.htm

To be sure, the internationally waged Zionist campaign
to label all Islamists "Jihadists" is not new. In its
desperate effort to impede global recognition of the
Palestinians as a people with national aspirations,
the Israeli Government funded lavishly with American
aid-funds all sorts of front organizations that
depicted every act of terror a tactical battle in the
GLOBAL Islamist War on the West. Recently, Israeli
operative Bernard Lewis was honored on his 90th
birthday as the first to warn of a new war of the
worlds-- to the death-- between Islam and Christianity
which they say he dubbed, a Clash of Civilizations,
not Huntington, the author of a book by the same name.
Nowhere was his past personal history as agent of an
interested party ever mentioned, after all, a basic
tenet of this operation is the "Don't show, don't
tell" inability on the part of us "dumb goyim"
Christians to recognize the bias behind his
"scholarship."

To be sure, the neocons would be quick to point out,
9/11 has more than signaled the existence of such a
"clash of civilizations."-- but with ALL of Islam?
Here again, as in their past Cold War propaganda, the
neocons relied on their true and tried tactic of
"don't show, don't tell," for we are deemed "dumb
goyim" who will not look behind the blaring slogans.
The fact is that we, the Christian World, came to
Islam to conquer it after it had collapsed as a power,
not the other way around. And, armed by Stalin,
European Jews created out of nothing the state of
Israel. Instead of making the Germans pay for the
Holocaust, we, in fact, made the Arabs pay and pay
dearly; the most helpless Palestinians, according to
Benny Morris, the Zionist historian, suffered a cruel
invasion that caused some more idealistic Israelis to
name it "Zionazi" for its exterminationist tactics of
ethnic cleansing. That 1948 event is, right or wrong,
at the root
of 9/11, as well as our imperial protection of our
"cheap oil" through corrupt regimes we back and
protect against their own subjects.

Through parthenogenesis (eg. self-replication) a
plethora of organization was created by a hand full of
neocons, much as they did as one time Leninists, to
give the impression of a heterogeneous "united front"
of view points. For them, 9/11 was not as much of a
God-sent as was the coalition they managed to make
with the Fundamentalist Christians who believe that
the Day of Rapture will only come AFTER Israel comes
to dominate the Middle East. Coalition with these
"Christian Zionists" (though for reasons that can be
considered nothing more than an extension of their
anti-Semitic position) proved to be like a Stalinist
Coup per the 1936 Dimitrov designed "united front"
that, "neutralizes our enemies and brings them to the
service of our cause."

Using the Cold War Era and the opportunist Senator
Jackson of Washington State, who really thought the
neocons would bring him to the presidency, (his hopes
were dashed by a massive and fatal coronary) they
campaigned for bigger is better strategic weapons and
thus in an influence peddling scheme linked the
massive American military-industrial complex-- that
Eisenhower was so weary of-- with that of Israel.
There was plenty of money to be made and, to date,
none of the neocons nor their progeny suffers from
poverty. But, the end of the Cold War seemed to put
all that in jeopardy; that is, until 9/11 brought an
end to the unachievable sure-fire ABM System and gave
cause for a "transformation" of the US military into a
global Christian Expeditionary Force chasing Jihadists
all over the globe and promoting-- they hoped--
Israeli domination of the Middle East:

But note, no sooner did we reach achievement of one
such venture in our war on terror that we abandoned it
unaccomplished for yet another. Hence, the masters of
9/11/2001 are still alive and free, today mid-2006,
still directing alQaeda in its terrorizing of the
world. After all, there's little to be gained from
ending the source of the scare!

In the meantime, the "Big Green Scare" propaganda is
in full swing. For example, the same neocon Hudson
Institute that championed more-is-better nuclear
armaments for the war against the Big Red Scare is now
promoting "expert and great scholar" on Islam Bat
Yo'er, an Israeli who lives in Switzerland (like many
neocons living in "anti-Semite" Europe instead of the
"safe homeland" Israel), from where she propagates the
concept of "EURABIA," which means that Europe has
already been taken by Islam because of its inherent
weaknesses: (1) anti-Jewish nature and (2) loss of
Christian zeal to destroy Islam. Now if that doesn't
sound like an obvious attempt to kill two birds with
one stone, I don't know what does. As Anne Norton
notes in her book, " Leo Strauss and the Politics of
American Empire," Yale university Press, there is an
ongoing a full-court-press anti-Semitic campaign
against Arabs and Islam in general, run by the
neocons, which I would dub the "Big Green Scare."

This campaign has yet another motive: fear that as
more and more Islamics settle and succeed in America,
they will acquire the economic wherewithal to match
the "Israel Lobby" that Mearsheimer and Walt wrote
about in their study-- but this AIPAC with "I" for
"Islam" instead of "Israel"-- one seeking to sway
Congress, not on Israel's behalf as does AIPAC, but on
behalf of Islam. Such "dumb goyim" are deemed the
Christian Americans in Congress, that the neocons fear
that, once the Arabs acquire a foothold in American
politics, they will draw Congress away from Israel.

It is most instructive to read how the Neocon
Establishment responded to the Mearsheimer and Walt
analysis of the Israel Lobby and what is fomented by
these neocons-- or through their "friends"-- about
Islam in order to feed the Big Green Scare; it is
utter ANTI-SEMITISM!!!

Here is one sample of the way the case is made:
part 1
http://www.reportingwar.com/esman032006.shtml
part 2
http://www.reportingwar.com/esman041006.shtml

and below is the URL for the Mearsheimer and Walt
article that caused such a stir:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html
which was so vitriolically denounced by ADL as
follows:
http://www.adl.org/Israel/mearsheimer_walt.asp

So, it would seem, Ye'or on "Eurabia" is O.K. but
Mearsheimer and Walt on AIPAC is "anti-Semitic." I
leave you all to contemplate and further research
what's behind the BIG GREEN SCARE.

Daniel E. Teodoru

"So I offer it to this list in hope of promoting discussion instead of slander...."

..says the man, who then proceeds to offer nothing but slander.

The Soviet archives were opened. The scholarship is in. The threat was there, and its characterization as an "evil empire" utterly beyond dispute. Recommend you read some of it.

Likewise, your Jewish conspiracy theory" lens for seeing the world is not going to be addressed in rational debate. If you are actually interested in investigating this rationally, I recommend spending time listening to what the Jihadists themselves have to say.

As long as your fixation in this matter is with the Jews, and not the situation itself, your "impressions" can never amount to anything other than Judenhasse.

Daniel E. Teodoru, I'm going to tell you something I wouldn't say in H-WAR, because if someone has to speak I'll wait and let it be more learned gentlemen than me: shorter please, more focused, and less conspiracy-minded.

It's already a problem there, where a lot of the people you are talking to are military history professors, who just take looking at long, dense chunks of text as part of their fate. Here, you're talking more to just plain folks, though many of these plain folk are really, really bright and well up on what's happening militarily and politically in the United States of America. If you insist on saying "hello" with conspiracy-sodden, long, dense messages - yes I know this is not long for you, and I know I'm going on here too - then it's your choice not to get much of a friendly reaction.

Also, it would help if you didn't talk about neoconservatives, Jews and so on as if they were aliens. Remember, you're talking to some (of each kind), and when you say something odd, you compel an immediate reality check.

Example: "For them, 9/11 was not as much of a God-sent as was the coalition ..."

Well, no. And people who were immensely shocked and horrified by the 11 September, 2001 attacks, and who know that their friends, also neoconservatives or Jews, were equally shocked, baffled and horrified, can't not know that this stuff about a God-send is nonsense. They don't have to speculate about whether neocons were dry-eyed stunned or weeping along with everybody else: they remember that they were.

Again, neocons: when?

You said "Using the Cold War Era and the opportunist Senator Jackson of Washington State, who really thought the neocons would bring him to the presidency, (his hopes were dashed by a massive and fatal coronary) they campaigned for bigger is better strategic weapons and thus in an influence peddling scheme linked" ... (Etcetera.)

You have these stereotypical sinister conspiracies interacting outside history, outside events, being manipulative and not moulded by what has happened to us all and the need to find ideas (not just evil schemes and scams) to deal with it.

A lot of people who would own up to the neoconservative label, as I have, came to that point because of 11 September 2001 and related events. They can't not know how history hammered their preconceptions flat and made them start a re-thinking process. They can't not know what doctrine was ready to hand when they went outside their former usual sources of information and opinion in looking for answers, and that often answers were not to be had at all because everybody else was also taken so badly off guard.

Again, the "dumb goyim" stuff won't fly. People know that's not so. You're talking to people who in some cases know about as well as anybody on the planet that this is a load of old rope.

USS Clueless was written by a gentile but really not "clueless" - and if you don't know USS Clueless or its relevance to establishing "received opinion" in blogsphere neocon circles pity help you.

If you want the views of a "textbook neocon", that is a social liberal with a Democrat background who has shifted to a more "muscular and militant" approach to military and foreign policy because he thinks that pacifism and the "America is evil!" lobby just won't get the job done for his country, you can read Armed Liberal. It's crazy that you give this mass of tangled conspiracy-thinking, and you don't have a clue on what he's on about. He's about as clear as a man can be as to the ideas that he is struggling with, and where he's gotten to and how far he hasn't gone in his thinking.

You want to know what Jews think? It's a lot like what the goyim think: nobody cares about whether you are circumcised when the building is coming down. The main thing Jews seem specially aware of is just how painfully isolated and out of the loop they are with their fellow Jews, who remain for the most part solidly liberal.

You want to know what a hard core conservative Christian thinks this is about? You can read Donald Sensing, who's about as respected as anybody in the right-wing blogsphere. The rev. is a forthright guy, he doesn't leave you in doubt as to what's on his mind. (And anybody less like a fanatical, unworldly and easily manipulated "dumb goy" would be hard to imagine.)

You want to know what a bunch of foreigners think? You should. Because the Internet and the genuinely international basis of the threats we face and the affronts we've suffered has effectively dissolved some national barriers, especially for English speakers. There are Australians, Brits, Canadians and others who - because of events like the Bali bombing - are in every functional way part of a movement that can't be defined only in terms of America's political history and traditions any more. The pass-keys are English, a modem and a sense of solidarity. By the way: Hebrew is not a functioning substitute for English. (Nor is Church Latin.)

You want to know what the big boys and hard core old conservatives think (no "neo" about it)? Just read things like the transcript of Donald Rumsfeld taking to, effectively his own people - Hugh Hewitt - and then getting ripped for being old fashioned in his thinking and work methods. You know, people have to talk to each other sometime, and the neocons and their allies do so in very public ways on the Internet, and it's really not hard to get a hold of because there is no secret lodge, and you can Google what people said.

If you want stuff in book form, you can read Bob Woodward's Bush at war and Plan of attack. Again, it's really not a problem, because you're looking at people whose temperament is to tell you right up front that they went for this Saddam feller and they got him too. And they want credit for that.

But if you discount all the documentation, which in this case is incredibly great, complete, timely and personal documentation - then how are you doing history?

What you're weaving is not real military history, even in spirit. You've lost the thread of how people act. Your conspiracies don't correspond to people's demonstrated and clearly articulated concerns, and these conspiracies don't act like people, even evil ones.

If you read a lot, but you only see phantoms, spaghetti-tangles of conspiracies of people who act like aliens, then you've drifted loose from the concreteness of history and war.

No offence intended. But: WRONG WAY! GO BACK!

Back on topic...

Stephen Schwartz: "Well, I consider Beichman's intent more sinister: to exclude Hitchens and myself from consideration as reliable allies in the struggle against Islamist extremism, because we have yet to apologize for something I, for one, will never consider worthy of apology. There is clearly a group of heresy-hunters among the original neoconservatives who resent having to give way to certain newer faces, with our own history and culture. These older neoconservatives cannot take yes for an answer, and they especially loathe Hitchens."

OK, there's a need for knockers. I'll answer the call.

I'm not a big Christopher Hitchens fan. I suspect him of being an atheist, an imbiber of alcoholic drinks, and a journalist. I suspect him of having a capacity for tactlessness. I'll stop there on this occasion.

I'm not a fan of Stephen Schwartz either. In this case my objections go a long way further. I think he spins. I don't think he deals with things straight on to the best of his ability, or even that he makes his case with just with normal human lapses (of temper, or tiredness, or overconfidence in making a claim or whatever).

He lost me when he showed that Wahhabi Saudi Arabia was his chosen enemy, and he damned Hizbolla as Wahhabi-influenced - as though it wasn't Shi'ite, and as though there was no Muslim terror if it wasn't Wahhabi. That's just not right.

When Stephen Schwartz expounded on Muslim doctrine on apostasy and the death penalty, he was deceptive. Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch caught him cheating. Since Stephen Schwartz can't be trusted, his expert knowledge may be intimidating, but it's useless for guidance.

Stephen Schwartz: "To my last breath I will defend the Trotsky who alone, and pursued from country to country, and finally laid low in his own blood in a hideously hot little house in Mexico City, said no to Soviet coddling of Hitlerism, to the Moscow purges, and to the betrayal of the Spanish Republic, and who had the capacity to admit he had been wrong about the imposition of a single-party state, as well as about the fate of the Jewish people. To my last breath, and without apology. Let the neofascists, and Stalinists in their second childhood, make of it what they will."

To his last breath then, let him be damned as an unrepentant Trotskyite.

I didn't know he was an unrepentant Trotskyite, but now he's said it, it doesn't surprise me much. And that's a bad thing to say about anyone.

It's in line with the highly political, combative and deceptive approach Stephen Schwartz has taken to talking about Islam. Within Communism or within Islam, he's a factionalist hater, a propagandist, not straight.

Unless you would have thought during the Cold War that every Communist was to be trusted except for Joseph Stalin's faction, I don't see a good reason why you should trust Stephen Schwartz then or now, when he seems to be pushing a roughly analogous line: all that is Muslim is good unless it's Wahhabi.

This is not somebody to trust. I hope he won't be referred to again in a Winds of Change post as if he was a reliable authority.

PS:

#1 from Michael J. Totten: "One thing I like about Stephen Schwartz: The man does not mince words."

Yes he does! And that's my point.

George Galloway has often gotten credit in a similar way, but he's crooked. Brutality and bluster are not proper tests of honesty. Blasting pseudo-forthrightness at somebody else's expense does not mean you aren't being devious and slippery, and that's also "mincing words".

I don't care that Stephen Schwartz might be on one side of an issue, and George Galloway on the other.

Honesty is a quieter, harder, humbler thing.

Trotskyism was an insistence of perpetuating "world revolution," hence internationalism. This, therefore, could never have anything in common with Zionism. And it was a very atheistic insistence on religion as an illicit drug of the lumpen proletariat. In fact, Trotskyism can be said to have been Lenin on steroids. And the steroids is the important part.

East European Jews are East Euros plus. But once the confines of the mental schetle are breached, an East Euro Jew was alone and in unfriendly waters. Yet, let me point out that East Euros are prone to inconsistency. For example, WE severely stereotype but never let our stereotypes get in the way of mano-mano encounter. So you will tend to find East Euros who can go to extremes of ideological anti-Semitism while in personal encounter they feel deep, deep affection for some specific Jews that they have shared a whole life with or just met. The same is true in reverse, as can be seen in Israel, Brooklyn and LA. I recall Germans measuring the "racial inferiority" of East Euros on the basis of their abstract rage to the group contradicted by personal romance for individuals. This should be kept in mind, for the world of refugees from Stalinism is replete with Jewish-Christian unity between individuals who curse the group-roots of each other.

Though I come from a world of deep hate for "Jews," my tutors in my growing up as a refugee in the Westward trek-- imposed on me by my parents who believed America the "Paradise of Freedom"-- were Jewish friends of my parents who survived double Holocaust: Hitler's and Stalin's. They taught me to look for the common bond of affection between con-specifics (ie. homo sapiens). In contrast, in West Europe through America and Asia, I always found non-individualized traits both generalized in prejudices and personalized in segregation. For example, the empathy showed me by Jesuits all through my West European education was marred by their denial of religious council or sacraments; all these thing, my American children-- who were all baptized Eastern Orthodox-- had lavished on them generously by the post-1960s Catholic Church. In contrast, I had been elected three times president of SYO chapters even though I am not even circumcised. I was even given awards for bringing Jewish religion and culture back into the youth activities of these synagogues. But once it occurred to anyone to ask me if I am Jewish, the question of SYO bylaws came up because it is the law that one has to be Jewish. Yet, besides my fellow youths who voted me in, so very iconoclastic anyway, I noted with amazement how adult leaders of all three synagogues tendered their resignations if I was to be "discriminated" against, having to relinquish my elected post. This happened in both reform and orthodox synagogues, so that's not the issue.

So, comparing the sectarianism of Christians with the ecunemicalism of Jews (whether in my parents' friends or the synagogue officials I encountered) the difference was incredible. I would say that Jews were far more prone to follow the admonition of fellow Jew, Jesus Christ-- "do onto others as you would have them do onto you," than most Christians I have known. This is important because the Jewish religious observance, intellectual rigor and welcoming kindness is not something one was likely to feel in the presence of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and their conspiratorial ilk. In fact, I would say, the distinction between Jews and Communists born of a Jewish mother is like night and day: Jews have this strange openness and warmth, Communists are consumed by hate and rage. The Jewish maternity of any Communists rarely seemed to matter.

"Neconservatives" are people with a certain non-self identification. For the term "neoconservative" was a pejorative appellation invented by Michael Harrington to indicate that a group of so called "leftists" were not leftist at all but only wanton opportunists. They were deemed not of the right by Herrington but infuriating self-serving frauds. That they had Jewish mothers is besides the point. For even Communists are by definition ATHEISTS and thus by definition could never be JEWS, whatever their mothers were.

I have known many Communists in my lifetime and therefore found myself weeping over their suffering when their world dream of historical determinism ground to powder, despite the suffering they imposed on me. Many were thoughtful people and heroic fighters for a hopeless cause, having spent their entire lives at great jeopardy in minority, optimistically maintaining the discipline of center to periphery.

But the left was a heterogeneous stew. A noteworthy element was the obsession with personal manliness on the part of some of these "intellectual" nurd revolutionaries, per the memoirs of many women in the "movement." And when manliness through revolutionary perseverance is violated by opportunistic fraud, skulduggery and larceny, then manliness is indeed an irresolvable problem for those who engage in such shiftiness.

What I'm trying to say is that the post-1967 "Jewishness" of neocons aside, these were people with a tremendous uncertainty as to their status as "mensch." That is a title one obtains from others one looks up to, and these people so opportunistically violated the groups they swore manly allegiance to, that surely they were left with a residual doubt about how "mensch" they really are. No, they are not Jews, not commies, nor left or right wingers, not anything; just aging "putzes" seeking some sort of social affirmation for themselves as "mensh" through their brazen call for "World War IV."

I bring that up because I want to emphasize that Jews-- the people that characteristically debate as many points of view in a group as the number of debaters + one, can never be deemed prone to conspiracy, nor to closed minded brute maleness. They are born of KINDNESS and optimism. Yes, that's the trait common to all the double-Holocaust survivors I trekked across Europe with as my teachers in life (replacement aunties and uncles for the family I lost to Stalinism) for over a decade. And, all the neocons I came to know over two decades after, in no way could measure up to these REAL Jews...as real Jews as Jesus!

It is unfortunate that Zionism became prey to these manliness seeking neocons. For they sought to be seen as "mensch" by the real Israeli mensch who want nothing more than a return to a nation of the kind of Jews that were looked up to for over two thousand years of being a "lost" people. The hate filled Zionism from afar of the hateful neocons is neither Jewish, nor Zionist. For the neocons, Zionism is not an end but a means. Calling for "World War IV" in the Middle East, allegedly for Israel's sake, is not due to fervent Zionism, nor to the Jabotinskyite "revisionist Zionism" of "super-Jews" copying Hitler as Zionazis since the 1930s. It is synthetic hate by people with no reason for hate, sitting in comfy New York, London and/or Paris apartments or in villas on the French Riviera bought ill gotten gains as influence peddlers for the strategic aerospace weapons industry. By infecting America with their hate for Islam, they attain-- in their own eyes-- the "mensch" status before they die that they could never attain while opportunistic drifters from extreme left to extreme right, always faithful to the violent and totalitarian ways of Lenin, if not to his goals. That's not Jews, that's not commies, that's not Bushits...that's neocons, a small cabal of self-centered literati.

Daniel E. Teodoru