A Matter Of Protocol

I have looked into the weird "lizard masters" comment left on a previous post, and it seems that this is a way by which the members of a certain subculture accuse anyone who disagrees with them of being anti-Semitic. Guess which subculture.

It doesn't matter to them that most American Jews did not vote for the War Party, insofar as they had any option not to, at either the last Presidential or the last Congressional Election. Nor that large numbers of Israeli Jews make a point of voting against the War Party at every opportunity. No, the levelling of this ridiculous charge, apparently even against anyone who so much as uses the term "well-funded", is one of, shall we say, their Protocols (do your worst!).

Look at the list of signatories to the Project for the New American Century, just for a start. If Francis Fukuyama (a partially lapsed but now returning neocon), Dick Cheney, Steve Forbes, Dan Quayle or Zalmay Khalizad is Jewish, then I for one will be extremely surprised. Never mind Jeb Bush.

Even people whose names look as if they might be - George Weigel, Donald Rumsfeld, Gary Bauer - are not, Weigel being in fact a German-descended Catholic (and biographer of John Paul II, to whom he should have paid more attention), Rumsfeld a German-descended Protestant-if-anything, and Bauer one of America's leading Evangelical Protestants (and also, obviously, of German descent).

The Elders of Zion never existed at all. The World Masonic Conspiracy has never existed, whatever the Lodge might have acted as an organising tool for in individual countries or cities. Neither the Catholic Church generally nor the Society of Jesus specifically has ever been at the centre of any sort of political network, whatever individual Catholics or Jesuits might have done; the same is true of Opus Dei (although what if it weren't?). There is no "global terror network" called "al-Qaeda"; there is simply Islam doing what Islam does, because it is Islam. And so forth.

But there really is the neoconservative network as set out above. It exists. It functions. British MPs are among those under its daily direction, and the consequences are clear in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and as we prepare to detain people for months without even charging them with anything. None of this is any sort of secret, as a "conspiracy" must be: it is loudly proclaimed with pride. To say this is not anti-Semitic: few of the Euston Manifesto Group, and even fewer of the Henry Jackson Society, are Jewish. It is simply anti-neoconservative.

And that, of course, is the problem. Hence the smears, however ill-executed and laughable.

Frit.