In search of anti-semitism: what Christians provoke what Jews? Why? By doing what? - And vice versa

The evidence that the Jewish factor was engrossing Buchanan mounted. And then whatever coincidence might in desperation have been pleaded for this aggregation of all-Jewish anti-Hussein activists, its usefulness expired when Pat Buchanan went on to write that if we went to war, the fighting would be done by kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown." There is no way to read that sentence without concluding that Pat Buchanan was suggesting that American Jews manage to avoid personal military exposure even while advancing military policies they (uniquely?) engender.

I see no other explanation for it. Perhaps it was done impulsively. The iconoclastic daemon having a night out on the town? In that case it is a pity that, after Abe Rosenthal exploded and the quarrel between them became a national engagement, Buchanan told a reporter from Time magazine, "I don't retract a single word."

Rosenthal Strikes Back

WHAT HAPPENED three weeks later-and the three-week interval became something of a side-issue, having to do with the organization of the Jewish lobby-was the column by A. M. Rosenthal. It was extreme in its conclusions, and the moment is appropriate in this essay to look at what I wrote about the controversy on September 17, 1990, three days after the Rosenthal column appeared. I will repeat here that much of the column as is relevant to this narrative:

The hot talk . . . is of Abe Rosenthal's column in the New York Times (September 14) in which he, well, reads Pat Buchanan out of civilized society. What he says, flatly, is that Buchanan's statements about the U.S. intervention in Saudi Arabia, combined with other positions he has taken dating back to his defense of President Reagan's visit to Bitburg, are the work of an anti-Semitic mind. He goes so far as to suggest that the kind of thing Mr. Buchanan says can lead to Auschwitz, and that he, Rosenthal, isn't going to let him get away with it, because he is guided by a famous moral injunction, delivered by Jesus on the Cross, on which Mr. Rosenthal improvises exactly to reverse its meaning, which becomes now, "Forgive them not, Father, for they know what they did."

.. I write as a friend of both, though I have experienced A. M. Rosenthal, as it happens, ten times as frequently as Pat Buchanan, notwithstanding that Mr. Buchanan and I have occupied the same ideological foxhole since he became old enough to bear arms. I need to say this about the two gentlemen. About Mr. Rosenthal, that he has always walked about in rooms in which customized trip-wires wait confidently to ignite his footloose emotional gyrations: and when he comes upon them, the resulting explosion knows no conventional limits. I deem his attack on Pat Buchanan to be an example of-. Rosenthal, gone ballistic.

And I deem Pat Buchanan to be insensitive to those fine lines that tend publicly to define racially or ethnically offensive analysis or rhetoric. This is best described by illustration. If Scholar A, spending a lifetime in psychometric anthropology, concludes that black Americans weigh in 15 points behind white Americans in conventional IQ tests, he runs a certain risk in publicizing his findings, though only the Know Nothings will denounce him as a racist for [doing sol. If, however, having done so he accepts an invitation to speak at a rally advocating an end to forced busing on the grounds that he is impelled by his findings to oppose the dilution of educational quality, sensitive moral calibrators are likely to suspect, even if they cannot successfully reason to that conclusion, that Scholar A is actively engaged in advocating invidious racial policies.