http://www.frontpagemag.com/GoPostal/commentdetail.asp?ID=22313&commentID=707793
For example, anthropologists under the leadership of Boas viewed their crusade against the concept of race as, in turn, combating anti-Semitism. They also saw their theories as promoting the ideology of cultural pluralism, which served perceived Jewish interests because the U.S. would be seen as consisting of many co-equal cultures rather than as a European Christian society.
Similarly, psychoanalysts commonly used their theories to portray anti-Jewish attitudes as symptoms of psychiatric disorder.
Conversely, the earlier generation of American Jewish Trotskyites ignored the horrors of the Soviet Union until the emergence there of state-sponsored anti-Semitism.
Neoconservatives have certainly appealed to American patriotic platitudes in advocating war throughout the Middle Eastgushing about spreading American democracy and freedom to the area, while leaving unmentioned their own strong ethnic ties and family links to Israel.
Michael Lind has called attention to the neoconservatives odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for democracy odd because these calls for democracy and freedom throughout the Middle East are also coupled with support for the Likud Party and other like-minded groups in Israel that are driven by a vision of an ethnocentric, expansionist Israel that, to outside observers at least, bears an unmistakable (albeit unmentionable) resemblance to apartheid South Africa.
These inconsistencies of the neoconservatives are not odd or surprising. The Straussian idea is to achieve the aims of the elite ingroup by using language designed for mass appeal. War for democracy and freedom sells much better than a war explicitly aimed at achieving the foreign policy goals of Israel.
Neoconservatives have responded to charges that their foreign policy has a Jewish agenda by labeling any such analysis as anti-Semitic. Similar charges have been echoed by powerful activist Jewish organizations like the ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
But at the very least, Jewish neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, who were deeply involved in pushing for the war in Iraq, should frankly discuss how their close family and personal ties to Israel have affected their attitudes on US foreign policy in the Middle East.
Wolfowitz, however, has refused to discuss this issue beyond terming such suggestions disgraceful.
A common argument is that neoconservatism is not Jewish because of the presence of various non-Jews amongst their ranks.
But in fact, the ability to recruit prominent non-Jews, while nevertheless maintaining a Jewish core and a commitment to Jewish interests, has been a hallmarkperhaps the key hallmarkof influential Jewish intellectual and political movements throughout the 20th century. Freud commented famously on the need for a non-Jew to represent psychoanalysis, a role played by Ernest Jones and C. G. Jung. Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict were the public face of Boasian anthropology. And, although Jews represented over half the membership of both the Socialist Party and the Communist Party USA at various times, neither party ever had Jews as presidential candidates and no Jew held the top position in the Communist Party USA after 1929.
In all the Jewish intellectual and political movements I reviewed, non-Jews have been accepted and given highly-visible roles. Today, those roles are played most prominently by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld whose ties with neoconservatives go back many years. It makes excellent psychological sense to have the spokespeople for any movement resemble the people they are trying to convince.
In fact, neoconservatism is rather unusual in the degree to which policy formulation as opposed to implementation is so predominantly Jewish. Perhaps this reflects U.S. conditions in the late 20th century.
All the Jewish intellectual and political movements I studied were typified by a deep sense of orthodoxya sense of us versus them. Dissenters are expelled, usually amid character assassination and other recriminations.
