by Jonas Alexis
When it was announced that former Republican senator from Nebraska Chuck Hagel was considered as a candidate for Secretary of Defense, neoconservative luminary Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard was on the run to oust him.
The Wall Street Journal, Jonathan S. Tobin and Alana Goodman of Commentary, Nathaniel Botwinick of National Review, and an editorial in the Washington Post were doing almost the same thing.
A swell of neocon apologists for Israel such as Senator Lindsey Graham and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell went on CNN and NBC respectively denouncing Hagel.
Senior analyst for Fox News Brit Hume did the same thing. The Republican Jewish Coalition called Hagel’s nomination “a slap in the face for every American who is concerned about the safety of Israel.” The Israel’s Project president and CEO Josh Block had done his best to spread the gospel that Hagel’s nomination must be rejected. AIPAC had done the same thing.
A panel of neoconservative propagandists for Commentary began to denounce Hagel. The neoconservative troops went on TV denouncing Hagel at every opportunity. The legendary Alan Dershowitz declared that Hagel’s nomination is “a policy mistake,” and he would be more than welcome to testify against Hagel. Joseph Klein of neocon Front Page Magazine wrote an article entitled, “The Anti-War/Anti-Semitic Defense Chief.” Jonah Goldberg of the National Review and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) denounced Hagel’s nomination as “a petty pick.”
Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University agreed. Danielle Pletka of the AEI said she doesn’t know whether Hagel is an anti-Semite or not, but she agreed with people who have called Hagel an anti-Semite. Speaking of Hagel, Jewish journalist Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post declared, “Old soldiers don’t make for good Pentagon chiefs.”
Why this madness against Hagel?
He has said some damning things about the Israel Lobby. Hagel is a Vietnam veteran champion who got wounded twice in battle. He supported Reagan and was even named deputy administration of the Veterans Administration during Reagan. Not only that, Hagel is a champion of conservative ideas “with a voting record of 84 percent by the American Conservative Union.”
But Hagel’s unpardonable sin is that he believes the Iraq invasion was probably the most egregious mistake the United States every made. Hagel does not support the American foreign policy which puts us all of in trouble. Hagel is a supporter of Israel, but he does view the Jewish Lobby as the anti-thesis of what the Founding Fathers envisioned. “The Jewish Lobby intimidates a lot of people,” declared Hagel in 2008, “Most of the time members play it safe and adopt an ‘I’ll support Israel’ attitude.
AIPAC comes knocking with a pro-Israel letter, and ‘then you’ll get 80 to 90 senators on it. I don’t think I’ve ever signed one of the letters…I’m a United States senator. I’m not an Israeli senator.” Moreover, Hagel does not see a war with Iran as idealistic. “A military strike against Iran,” he said some years ago, “is not a viable, feasible, responsible option.”
To Bill Kristol, those statements classified Hagel as an “anti-Israel, pro-appeasement of Iran bona fides” who has “a record of consistent hostility to Israel over the last decades.” When Hagel was getting positive reviews across the political landscape, Kristol reiterated his views saying that Hagel’s views on Iran is “dangerous” and he has an unbinding “distaste for Israel and the Jews,” which he had carried with him over the years.
Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal, after declaring that there is an anti-Jewish “odor” in Hagel’s statement, declared that the “Jewish Lobby doesn’t exist.” Daniel Halper of the Weekly Standard quoted an alleged Republican declaring in an email, “Send us Hagel and we will make sure every American knows he is an anti-Semite.” As Robert Wright of the Atlantic pointed out, we have no way of knowing whether Halper is telling the truth or not, since he did not tell us who that Republican was.
But let us suppose that he was telling the truth. What does that actually mean? It means that this is the way the neoconservatives are going to treat a decent patriot like Hagel. If you don’t align with the neoconservative dream, then you are in big trouble.
Once again what we are seeing here is that the neoconservative continues to be a fifth column in the United States, progressively bringing down the foundations of what the Founding Fathers had already set for us.
Stephens went on to misrepresent Mearsheimer and Walt in citing them saying that the Jewish Lobby is “inaccurate,” while Stephens does not tell his readers that Mearsheimer and Walt went on to say almost the same thing that Hagel was saying, that the Lobby exerts an enormously powerful influence on foreign policy in the Middle East.
Then Stephens indirectly proves what we are saying all along in quoting Hagel himself: “I’m a United States Senator. I support Israel. But my first interest is I take an oath of office to the Constitution of the United States. Not to a president. Not a party. Not to Israel. If I go run for Senate in Israel, I’ll do that.” Yet Kristol declared right before President Obama picked Hagel that the president “will be doing himself and the nation a disservice.”
The Constitution of the United States comes first, and Hagel is right in line with historical thought and with the Founding Fathers, who themselves made it very clear that the United States should never indulge herself in allying with a foreign entity. Once again, here is a man who stands for the Constitution, pledges allegiance to the United States’ interest, and now he is being lambasted as a “disservice to the nation”!
Moreover, for Kristol, Hagel and his cohorts are “just silly people” who “have a contempt for ‘Israel and its supporters.’” After his nomination, Hagel has of course toned down his language and somewhat pledged allegiance to Israel. Yet even after Hagel declared that he gives “unequivocal, total support for Israel,” Kristol was still not satisfied and called it “total nonsense.”
Here again we see that Kristol and the neoconservative and Zionist machine—with all their hawkish magazines such as Weekly Standard, Commentary, Jewish World Review, National Review, etc.—are a fifth column in the United States and they stand in opposition to what the Founding Fathers have fought and died for.
Alan Dershowitz for example denounced former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as “the worst Secretary of Defense in modern history,” partly because, says Dershowitz, he is “responsible for why Iran continues to pursue its nuclear program, because he has been softer on Iran than anybody.” David Horowitz of Front Page Magazine called Ron Paul “a vicious anti-Semite” because Ron Paul wanted to reduce foreign aid to foreign countries, including Israel.
In other words, Israel should come first, and the United States should be an afterthought. Both the first and second president Bush found that out the hard way. Weekly Standard writer Elliott Abrams, “who pleaded guilty in the Iran-contra scandal of withholding information from Congress,” once again proves this point when he appealed to “Nebraska Jews” not only to prove that Hagel is an anti-Semite but to show that Hagel should not have been chosen for the role.
Abrams, who is the son-in-law of former editor of Commentary Norman Podhoretz and whose wife is an activist for the fifth column base Emergency Committee for Israel, never got dismissed from his position for his illegal activity. Interestingly enough, he got so powerful afterwards that he recently ended up publishing a book for Cambridge University.
Surprisingly, both Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic and Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times defended Hagel, saying that Hagel is not an anti-Semite. Yet for Goldberg, Mearsheimer and Walt, who say the same thing that Hagel is saying, are like Louis Farrakhan and therefore are ipso facto anti-Semites!
The U.S. certainly has got to break down the neoconservative stronghold, which has produced massive death in the Middle East and massive debt in the U.S. The war in Iraq alone is going to cost the taxpayers at least $3 trillion. The U.S. economy has suffered enough.
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Jonas E. Alexis studied mathematics and philosophy as an undergraduate and has a master’s degree in education. His interest at present includes the history of Christianity and the history of science. He is the author of the new book Christianity & Rabbinic Judaism: A History of Conflict Between Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism from the first Century to the Twenty-first Century. Citations for his articles are available upon request. He can be reached at [email protected]
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Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.
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