Joe Klein: Why I write what I write about Jewish neocons
Joe Klein talks with the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg about his running feud with the "Commentary crowd" over his assertions that Jewish neocons are pushing a pro-Israel agenda at the expense of U.S. interests (recap: Round I, Round II, Round III).
His bottom line:
Listen, people can vote whichever way they want, for whatever reason they want. I just don't want to see policy makers who make decisions on the basis of whether American policy will benefit Israel or not. In some cases, you want to provide protection for Israel certainly, but you don't want to go to war with Iran. When Jennifer Rubin or Abe Foxman calls me antisemitic, they're wrong. I am anti-neoconservative. I think these people are following very perversely extremist policies and I really did believe that it was time for mainstream Jews to stand up and say, "They don't represent us, they don't represent Israel."
As the interview progresses, Klein, the author of "Primary Colors" and a columnist for Time, makes clear he doesn't actually think that Jewish neocons are purposely trying to hurt the U.S. – it's just that in their zeal for protecting Israel they are making dangerous miscalculations:
I'm not saying that they don't think it's also in America's best interest. But Israel's best interests are in their mind and they're doing things, they're encouraging policies that are violent and potentially disastrous for the American people. There's this great book coming out called "In a Time of War," about the West Point class of 2002, and you know, you read something like this and you want throttle Doug Feith, you just want to whoop him upside the head.
It turns out Klein even agrees with the notion that Israel's survival is a legitimate consideration for U.S. policymakers – he just doesn't share the doomsday view of Iran:
JG: If you believed that Iran posed an existential threat to Israel, would you consider that an American national security problem?JK: Yes.
JG: Because of the lessons of the Holocaust, as McCain says?
JK: Not just because of the Holocaust, but because of the possibility that you're going to have a Holocaust. I mean, I don't want to see religious extremists launching on a democracy anywhere. I don't want to see hundreds of thousands of Jews and Palestinians killed because of some nutcase.
JG: But you don't believe that that's going to happen.
JK: No! No! I think that that is a really distorted and kind of crazily extremist position.
And, whatever you do, don't lump Klein in with Mearsheimer and Walt: "I am not a Walt-Mearsheimer guy. I think Jews have a perfect right to have a lobby. I do believe that there is a group of people who got involved and had a disproportionate influence on U.S. foreign policy."
Klein accuses his critics of wanting to "stifle opinions that are different from theirs." In this case, he adds, they're picking on the wrong pundit: "I'm certainly not going to back down."
John Podhoretz, a neocon prince and the editor of Commentary, responds on his publication's blog:
He says he's not anti-Semitic but rather, anti-neoconservative. To say it is a badge of honor to stand in opposition to a person as manifestly intellectually unstable as Joe Klein has become is to understate the case. As for his use of classic anti-Semitic canards, I am happy to report that the Jewish people will long survive Joe Klein.The question is, will Time Magazine?
UPDATE: Klein also weighed in yesterday on his own blog:
I don't think a war with Iran is coming, thank God, but this time I am not going to pull any punches. My voice isn't very important in the grand scheme of things, but I'm going to do my job–and that means letting you know exactly where I stand and what I believe. I believe there are a small group of Jewish neoconservatives who are pushing for war with Iran because they believe it is in America's long-term interests and because they believe Israel's existence is at stake. They are wrong and recent history tells us they are dangerous. They are also bullies and I'm not going to be intimidated by them.
Klein may not be intimidated, but he seems to be taking a bit more care in making his point - (i.e. "they believe it is in America's long-term interests"). But what's still unclear (at least to me) is why he insists on using "Jewish" to modify the term neoconservative. Is John Bolton more or less of a threat than other neocons because he's not Jewish? What about Pastor John Hagee? Would he be more deserving of attention if he were a rabbi?
UPDATED UPDATE: Peter Wehner (National Review crowd) jumps in with a lengthy critique of Klein's interview with Goldberg.
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Klein may be a writer for Time - but he is also an arrogant idiot - bloviating and posturing and backtracking to the point where his words are fluffy and meaningless.
He should’ve become a TV writer.
Jacob Heilbrunn is the author of the newly released, They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons, and a senior editor at the National Interest. Jacob Heilbrunn asserts that neoconservatives have so far gotten away “scot-free” with planning the greatest foreign-policy disaster since Vietnam. And so his book will call them to account. Not quite.
Heilbrunn achieves one important chore: a forthright social narrative of the neocons as a Jewish movement. Tracing ideological currents in the Jewish community from the 1940s to the 1970s, Heilbrunn, a journalist who himself flirted with neoconservatism, describes how the neocons were propelled by resentments against WASP elites—the men who had ignored the Holocaust, they felt, and “frozen out” Jews from the establishment. It would be hard to overemphasize Heilbrunn’s accomplishment. There has been endless prevarication about the fact that neoconservatism is an element of the Jewish experience, even from liberal Jews. Yet Heilbrunn will have none of it. He says that neoconservatism is “intimately linked with the memory of the Holocaust and the allies’ failure to save the Jews during the war” and notes that a “peculiar amalgam of intellectual rigor and ethnic resentment … lies at the heart of the neoconservative outlook.”
And here’s the topper: a “lifelong antipathy toward the patrician class among the neocons … prompted them to create their own parallel establishment.”
An Ha’aretz Editorial and Book Review supported the conclusions.
Heilbrunn’s book is pretty good (and the book begins in the 1930’s, not the 40’s). John Bolton is one of those cases where you could call him a neocon, or you could call him an traditional American nationalist. So he’s not really representative, I don’t think.
Heilbrunn is right that the beginnings of the movement are clearly in the old New York Jewish communities of the 30’s. (Lots of figures came out of that community--Hannah Arendt, for instance.)
PBS did a documentary on the beginnings of it a while back: http://www.pbs.org/arguing/
neocons like podhoretz minor (see above) seem incapable of rational debate. for them everything is an ad hominem and wildly exaggerated if not an outright lie. to disagree slightly is to be branded an anti-semite or pro-terrorist (ultimately making a joke of what should be a serious charge).
How could a man so dishonest edit a once-respected journal? john podhoretz’s intellectual forebearers seem to be Josef Goebbels and Julius Streicher—bigots and propagators of the Big Lie theory.
Quote: And, whatever you do, don’t lump Klein in with Mearsheimer and Walt: “I am not a Walt-Mearsheimer guy. I think Jews have a perfect right to have a lobby. I do believe that there is a group of people who got involved and had a disproportionate influence on U.S. foreign policy.” End-Quote.
Mearsheimer and Walt state in their book that pro-Israeli folks have every right to lobby - they never say otherwise. In fact they say its as American as apple pie. They do assert that the pro-Israeli lobby’s effect may be detrimental to both Israel and the US.
Why are they so frequently mis-quoted?
Joe Klein is so full of crap, his eyes are brown. He says the Iranian threat to Israel is exaggerated. He cited the fact that Achminejad is not really calling the shots, but that the Supreme Ruler Ayatollah Khamenei is and he hasn’t called for destroying Israel.... (until this week).
“It is totally wrong and baseless to think that any retreat from our righteous positions [pursuit of nuclear weapons] would change the policies of the arrogant powers,” Khamenei said on Iranian national TV.
Case closed: Klein’s analysis stinks.
To most of the posters here: I am proud to be Jewish and I agree with the US’s invasion of Iraq. In almost all of the grumbling about this foreign policy decision, no one mentions that the Hussein dictatorship is gone. The great value of that accomplishment is hard to over-estimate and will be paying dividends for decades, if not centuries.
I haven’t read Heilbrunn’s book so I don’t know how much time and effort he put into documenting the Jewish connection to neoconservatism. My response is ‘so what’. It may be sociologically or historically interesting, but it says nothing about Jews and nothing, really, about neoconservatism. Neoconservatives adhere to a set of policy principles which, among other things, believes in an interventionist foreign policy and the use of military power in the pursuit of US interests. What is wrong with Jews believing in those two policies? (Nothing).
People like Klein really don’t know what they are talking about when they say ‘Jewish neocons dragged the US into Iraq against the best interests of the US people and for the benefit of Israel’. First of all, as I recall, Ariel Sharon never advocated for the US invasion. Many other foreign leaders did, including Tony Blair, but I do not believe Sharon ever said he wanted the US to invade Iraq. Israel had no reason to expect benefits from the US invasion and none have been forthcoming. To put it bluntly, the Iraq invasion was not, and is not now beneficial to Israel. Sure, a bunch of Islamic terrorists have been killed and that is all to the good. But it does not follow that taking the fight to the jihadies benefits Israel in particular over, say, everybody else in the free world. If Ariel Sharon never believed the Iraq war would help Israel, why would Wolfowitz and Feith? Most Jews in the US opposed the invasion. The true fact of the matter is, the Christian Bush administration believed that removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq was a good idea and easily justified. I’m Jewish and I do to. So did the Jewish neocons in Washington. Big deal. Klein and others have no case if the classical antisemitic canards are stripped away from their argument.
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Bob Armstrong
07/30/08 10:02 AM
A lot of people pushed our buttons and lied to us about Iraq including the neocons. I hope we learn from the experience.
I agree with Joe that neocons seem to believe that it is America’s job to rid the world of Israel’s enemies.
I think we are seeing a backlash by the voters who are starting to feel like suckers. The tyranny of the minority may be coming to a close. I hope so.
--cheers