"The Real Anti-Semitism"
MAN: Do you know about the connections between the Republican Party and the neo-Nazis which were revealed a few months ago-and could you talk a bit about what might be the significance of that in this context?
That was sort of an interesting phenomenon; it's hard to know exactly how seriously to take it, but it's certainly very real. I don't know how many of you followed what happened with the Nazis in the Bush campaign around last August-do you know about that stuff?
There's this part of the Bush campaign called the "Ethnic Outreach Committee," which tries to organize ethnic minorities; obviously that doesn't mean blacks or Hispanics, it means Ukrainians, Poles, that sort of business. And it turned out that it was being run by a bunch of East European Nazis, Ukrainian Nazis, hysterical anti-Semites, Romanians who came out of the Iron Guard, and so on. Well, finally this got exposed; some of the people were reshuffled, some were put into other positions in the Republican Party-but it all just passed over very quietly. The Democrats never even raised the issue during the election campaign.
You might ask, why? How come the Democrats never even raised the issue? Well, I think there was a very good reason for that: I think the Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League basically called them off. The point is, these organizations don't ultimately care about anti-Semitism, what they care about is opposition to the policies of Israel-in fact, opposition to their own hawkish version of the policies of Israel. They're Israeli government lobbies, essentially, and they understood that these Nazis in the Bush campaign were quite pro-Israel, so what do they care? The New Republic, which is sort of an organ for these groups, had a very interesting editorial on it. It was about anti-Semitism, and it referred to the fact that this committee was being run by anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, Nazis and so on, and then it said: yes, that's all true, but this is just "antique and anemic" anti-Semitism. Nazism is just "antique and anemic" anti-Semitism, not terribly important, we shouldn't get too upset about it. And then it said: the real anti-Semitism that we ought to be worried about is in the Democratic Party, which is filled with "Jew-haters"-that was the phrase they used. And part of the proof is, the Democrats were actually willing to debate a resolution calling for Palestinian self-determination at their National Convention, so therefore they're "Jew-haters" and that's the "real" antiSemitism in America. (That was in fact the title of a book by the Director of the A.D.L., Nathan Perlmutter.)38 Well, the Democrats got the message that they weren't going to win any points with this, so they never raised a peep about it.
Incidentally, this is only one of the things that happened at that time there's another story which got even less publicity, and is even more revealing. The Department of Education has a program of grants that it dispenses to fund projects initiated by local school systems, and for the last four or five years the school board in Brookline, Massachusetts, has been trying to get funding for a project on the Holocaust which always gets very favorably reviewed, but is always turned down. Again in 1988-also right before the election-the federal reviewing committee had to deal with their proposal. As usual it got very favorable reviews, but instead of just turning it down, Chapter Two 53 this time the government simply eliminated the entire program category under which it was being submitted. Well, at that point some information began to surface as to why the project kept getting turned down-and it turned out that it was being refused every year because of letters the Department was getting from people like Phyllis Schlafly [a right-wing activist] attacking it for being unfair because it didn't give adequate space to Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members. Besides, they said, it's kind of brainwashing children, and turning them against things like the Holocaust, it's just more of this neo-liberal tampering with people's thoughts. Parts of these letters actually got published in the Washington Post and the Boston Globe.
Well, you'd have thought there'd be an uproar. A program on the Holocaust gets turned down by the government, by the Reagan administration, because it doesn't give enough space to Nazis and Klan members? Not a peep, not a peep. And the point is, Phyllis Schlafly and that whole gang are adequately pro-Israel-and therefore it doesn't matter what they think. They can be in favor of the Klan, they can be in favor of the Nazis, they can say you shouldn't be allowed to teach the Holocaust, it doesn't matter, as long as they remain sufficiently supportive of hawkish Israeli policies. As long as they meet that qualification, it's fine, they can say whatever they want.
