BUCHANAN, ANTI-SEMITISM, AND LIKUDISM

Pat Buchanan's at it again. In his new book Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency, he describes Richard Perle's account of Perle's first encounter with George W. Bush:

Perle's depiction of his delight at first meeting the future president reads like Fagin relating his initial encounter with the young Oliver Twist.

I think Timothy Noah is right, that this comparison is blatantly and shockingly anti-Semitic. Buchanan has defended the passage as merely a "literary allusion." Um, sure, Pat, an allusion to...literature's most infamous corrupting, manipulative Jew.

The gist of Pat's argument, if you haven't guessed, is that neoconservatives are too close to Israel, and have seized control of Bush's foreign policy to enact programs which would benefit the Jewish State. As I've written before, I reject imputations of dual loyalties, but I admit being uncomfortable with the close ties that many neoconservatives have with the hardline Israeli Likud, both because Likud's policies have been entirely disastrous both for Israel's security and Palestinian human rights (to say nothing of the regional reputation of Israel's sugar daddy, the United States), and because I have never seen a reasonable explanation of why or how the U.S.'s enormous support for Israel since 1967 has been either a strategic or a moral good for the U.S. This is an issue that is too little discussed, and it's not helped by Buchanan dragging his baggage into it.

Related, here's Naomi Klein with an interesting piece on what she calls The Likudization of the World, the disaster that could occur if the world adapts Likud's approach to defining and fighting terrorism:

There has indeed been a dramatic and dangerous rise in religious fundamentalism in the Muslim world. The problem is that under the Likud Doctrine, there is no space to ask why this is happening. We are not allowed to point out that fundamentalism breeds in failed states, where warfare has systematically targeted civilian infrastructure, allowing the mosques start taking responsibility for everything from education to garbage collection. It has happened in Gaza, in Grozny, in Sadr City. Mr. Sharon says terrorism is an epidemic that “has no borders, no fences” but this is not the case. Everywhere in the world, terrorism thrives within the illegitimate borders of occupation and dictatorship; it festers behind “security walls” put up by imperial powers; it crosses those borders and climbs over those fences to explode inside the countries responsible for, or complicit in, occupation and domination.

Likudism is characterized by the total belief that "we" are objectively, perhaps even transcendently, good and "they" are objectively bad, by the rejection of any examination of root causes, and by the complete refusal to even entertain the idea that one's own policies may have in fact created, and still may be creating, the conditions for terrorism or to consider any solution other than military violence, more checkpoints, and thicker walls. Sound a lot like the GOP's plan for fighting terrorism to you? Unfortunately, you're right.