Neo-Con Rage
A very good summary of how hard-line neo-conservatives see the world — and especially Israel’s place in it — can be found in an interview at the National Review Online’s (NRO’s) website by Kathryn Jean Lopez of Caroline Glick, the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post who also serves as the Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy (CSP). What comes through the interview is how hard-liners like Glick see the relationship between the U.S. and Israel (“the war against Israel and the war against the U.S. are one and the same”); the Manichean nature of the world (“freedom” versus “the forces of slavery and jihad,” “good” versus “evil”); how they conflate different threats (“al Qaeda and Iran” as a single “enemy” whose “ultimate aim …is global domination and the destruction of the U.S.”); their contempt for Europe (its “refusal to accept the true lessons of the Holocaust”); their Islamophobia (“genocidal anti-Semitism …has taken over the Islamic world”); and their need for an “enemy” to give order to their world (Obama “refuses to acknowledge that there is such a thing as an ‘enemy’ in international affairs. And as a consequence, he is unable to understand what an ally is.”) Glick is also furious with Condoleezza Rice and the State Department for their presumed influence over Bush and efforts to force Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians. The title of the interview is “Shackled Warrior: Israel in Bondage.”
It’s worth repeating: Glick is the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at CSP, an organization whose board of advisers have included over the years, among many other senior Bush foreign-policy officials, the current deputy national security adviser charged with Middle East policy, Elliott Abrams. Now I don’t think Abrams is quite as radical as Glick or Gaffney, but the association is not one he’s ever renounced or distance himself from). Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy and protege of Richard Perle (another member of CSP’s board of advisers), has rejoined the board, and John Lehman, an adviser to John McCain, has long served on it. (Gaffney, Abrams, Feith, Perle and Lehman all worked in the office of former Washington State Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson” at one time or another during the 1970s.)
There is one other document that I have cited before which I think summarizes the hard-line neo-con worldview particularly succinctly. It’s by Dennis Prager, a California talk-show host who has stood by John Hagee despite McCain’s repudiation, and it can be found here.
En Español
The Latest
From IPS News
- Biodiversity Meet Suggests New Guidelines on Synthetic Biology Amid Persisting Questions
- International Diplomat Erik Solheim on Politics, Climate Change, Much-Needed UN Reform and Trump
- Billions will Vote this Year – LGBTIQ+ People Must not be Excluded
- Rising Temperatures Drive Human-Wildlife Conflict in Zimbabwe
- Women Organize to Fight Coastal Erosion in Southeastern Brazil
- More Diversified Trade Can Make Middle East & Central Asia More Resilient
- Afghan Women Struggle with Soaring Mental Health Issues
- Solomon Islands: A Change More in Style than Substance
- The US a Direct Partner in the Israeli War
- US Senators Threaten Criminal Court & Advise Israel to Nuke Gaza
- Online fundraising for IPS Inter Press Service at Razoo