Press Self-Censorship about Jews

Secret of Neocon Malevolence: They're Canadian!

 

On Dec. 23, 2007, the NJ Sunday Star-Ledger published Paul Mulshine's op-ed Blame Canada for David Frum - NJ.com (see below). At first I thought it was a joke, but Mulshine really seems to believe his thesis and even tells readers, "The Canadians are part of the British Empire..." in order to prove the insidiousness of Canadians.

 

Dear Paul,

 

I never truly believed that NJ was hostile to intelligent life until I read your Sunday column.

 

Let me give you a hint. Frum is a Yiddish word that means pious. Toronto hosts one of the most viciously racist Jewish communities in North America. It gave Harvard the second rate Yiddish Professor and loopy Zionist Ruth Wisse,* whose husband Leonard is Chairman of the Board of Directors of CAMERA and whose professorship was funded by arch-Zionist Martin Peretz.

 

Pick up a copy of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by Mearsheimer and Walt. It has some problems, but you have to start somewhere.

 

Get a clue!

Joachim Martillo

Boston, MA

ThorsProvoni@aol.com

 

* For more information, check out The Fanaticism of Ruth Wisse and Jews and Power versus The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

 

 

Blame Canada for David Frum

Sunday, December 23, 2007

I realize domestic production in the United States is lagging in certain areas. But has it gotten so bad that we have to import conservative commentators?

I don't think so. There are plenty of us here already. We are perfectly capable of criticizing the Beltway boobs who want to extend indefinitely the reach and power of the federal government.

People like David Frum, in other words. Frum, who hails from Canada, claims to be conservative. But he is not really a conservative in the traditional American sense. He is instead perhaps the leading proponent of what has come to be known as "neoconservatism." This is the idea that it is the proper role of the government of the United States to bring about "An End to Evil."

That is insane, of course, but it is the actual title of a book Frum wrote back when the neocons had the ear of the impressionable George W. Bush.

Frum was a speechwriter for Bush in the run-up to the disastrous Iraq War, and he claims responsibility for lumping together Iran, Iraq and North Korea into that "Axis of Evil" that needed to be straightened out at the expense of the American taxpayer. The Frum plan called for quickly bumping off Saddam Hussein and setting up a democracy in Iraq. Then it was off to Iran, Syria and anywhere else in the Mideast that could benefit from Beltway guidance.

At the time Frum was having these deep thoughts, the Republican Party seemed to be on the verge of consolidating a grip on power that could last a generation. But thanks largely to the Iraq debacle, the Democrats soon took hold of both houses of Congress. So now the GOP needs a "Comeback."

That is the title of Frum's latest book. It's subtitled "Conservatism That Can Win Again."

Conservatism can indeed win again, but if it does it will triumph over the neoconservatism of Frum and his fellow Canadians, Charles Krauthammer and Mark Steyn. Until I read this book I hadn't really thought about how much American neoconservatism owes to these deep thinkers from Canada. And what it owes is a legacy of absolute disaster. These guys got everything wrong, a fact that can be documented by just one headline from an April 2003 Steyn column: "Just as I said, the war in Iraq will prove to be a cakewalk."

The central error in the neocon -- or should I say "neo-Can" -- fallacy is a naive belief that democracy necessarily leads to good government. Frum remains confused on this point. Early in his new book, he asserts that much of the Muslim world is consumed by hatred of America.

"Surveys conducted by Zogby International in early 2002 -- a year before the Iraq War -- found that only 13 percent of Egyptians and 12 percent of Saudis expressed favorable opinions of the United States," he writes.

But later in the book, he writes, "Yet it remains true, the more democratic the world is, the safer America is."

That's the neocon fallacy in a nutshell. It wasn't until I finished this book that I realized that fallacy may be rooted in the political soil of the Great White North. Democracy does indeed seem to work relatively well in northern climes. Like the Swedes and the Norwegians, the Canadians manage to govern themselves to their own satisfac tion under their electoral systems.

But as the polling data cited by Frum show, a freely elected Saudi or Egyptian government would be even more anti-American than the current dictatorships. As for Iran, it's already perhaps the most democratic country in the Mideast if one's definition of democracy is simply rule by the majority. The Iranians freely chose their current madman leader over a much more sensible character in 2005. And there is no reason to believe that, given their druthers, the Iranian voters would pass up the chance to have nuclear weapons, just like we American voters do.

After 9/11, Bush could have fought what would have been a relatively small and simple war against al Qaeda. Instead, Frum et al. managed to convince the poor man that he needed to refight World War II. Lacking a Tojo or Hitler, the neocons cobbled together whatever miscreants they could into an "axis," to use Frum's time-warp terminology.

Again I detect the cold hand of Canada in all this. The Canadians are part of the British empire, the same empire we Americans so violently rejected. It no doubt perfectly natural for a Canadian to think that the United States should pick up where the British left off, bearing the white man's burden and all that nonsense. The neocons can even quote Kipling without bursting out laughing.

But the British were both more intelligent and more ruthless about the business of empire than we are.

Comeback? No. Go back, Mr. Frum. There must be some evil up north that needs to be ended. You could start with the hockey fights.

Paul Mulshine may be reached at pmulshine@starledger.com. To comment on his column, go to NJVoi ces.com.

 

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