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.

Jim Lobe

Jim Lobe served for some 30 years as the Washington DC bureau chief for Inter Press Service and is best known for his coverage of U.S. foreign policy and the influence of the neoconservative movement.

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4 Comments

  1. Mr Lobe, I’ve been an avid reader of your posts on AW.com for three years now or more. It’s a delight to finally add your OWN blog to my bookmarks.

    Your insight and detail you provide are of great value to any like me who rely on you and others to fill us in an what the MSM won’t tell us.

    Thanks so much, keep it coming.

    Your writings and analyses are greatly valued.

  2. The first article I ever read by Glick convinced me she is a paranoid psychopath.
    It worries me that people like her are even in this country.
    She needs to be on the terrier watch list.
    She’s the kind I can imagine cooperating in some false flag event designed to bring about a war of the worlds.

  3. Glick wants U.S. forces and U.S. taxpayers to make the Mideast safe for the Israeli settler movement and its expansionist projects. Let’s hope the American people see through her game and refuse to play along with it.

  4. I live in Washington state and I’m floored by the statement that all those folks worked in Jackson’s political life. I’m dismayed and need to know more. Please tell me more …

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