Do We Still Need a Special Envoy on Anti-Semitism?
Ben Cohen 2013-06-07Reading the remarks of Ira Forman, the State Department’s newly-appointed special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, to a Washington D.C. gathering of the American Jewish Committee, I was seized by one heretical thought that was quickly followed by another. Are there any real benefits to be gained from the existence of this position? And does the special envoy help to clarify or obscure the reasons behind the persistence of anti-Semitism in our own time?
The position was created by the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act that was signed into law by President Bush in 2004. The act was authored by the late Democratic congressman Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor whose horror at the global upsurge in anti-Semitic beliefs and violence that accompanied the outbreak, in 2000, of the second Palestinian intifada led him to campaign for a dedicated State Department official to stay on top of the problem.
Bush was receptive because he regarded the fight against anti-Semitism as an essential component of promoting the values of liberty around the world. Announcing the act’s passage, Bush declared that “extending freedom also means confronting the evil of anti-Semitism.”
The first special envoy, Gregg Rickman, did an admirable job of setting the tone, particularly in explaining the intimate connections between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. That cannot have been an easy task, especially as Rickman’s main interlocutors were European diplomats, most of whom shudder at the idea that distaste for Israel can be motivated by distaste for Jews. When Rickman left government following President Obama’s election in 2008, the post remained vacant for more than a year before Hannah Rosenthal, a former Clinton administration official, was appointed.
With Rosenthal’s arrival, there was a notable shift in emphasis: whereas the Bush administration framed the fight against anti-Semitism as integral to the broader struggle for political liberty, under Obama it was repositioned as one of several components of a tolerance agenda. The excessive attention Rosenthal gave to prejudice against Muslims provoked her predecessor, Rickman, into advocating that she be rebranded as the “special envoy to monitor Islamophobia,” in order that “someone else who cares more about the fate and welfare of Jews” be appointed in her stead.
It’s too early to predict whether Forman will attract the same controversy that Rosenthal did. Given his previous role as CEO of the National Jewish Democratic Council, expectations that he will stick his neck out on an issue that adds an unwelcome layer of complexity to the administration’s Middle East policies will be low to begin with. Nonetheless, several clues to his approach can be found in his Washington speech.
In broad terms, Forman made the right noises. His account of recent anti-Semitic outrages from Hungary to Iran was certainly accurate, if pedestrian. But what was absent was any understanding of what makes anti-Semitism unique.
Charles Maurras, a notorious French anti-Semite of the 19th century, once observed that the great strength of Jew-hatred is that it “enables everything to be arranged, smoothed over, and simplified.” This, in turn, helps explain why anti-Semitism finds fertile ground in such culturally diverse locations as Venezuela and Egypt, as well as why it wins adherents on both left and right. Burying this distinctiveness in the name of a multi-ethnic coalition that regards all prejudices as equally toxic, as Rosenthal surely did during her time as special envoy, necessarily blunts an effective response.
A related criticism is that too much of the Special Envoy’s time is spent on commemorating past atrocities against Jews, at the expense of current problems.
In his speech to the AJC, Forman urged his audience “not to think that the picture is all bleak. There has been good news as well as bad.” However, the “good” news he related was exclusively concerned with Holocaust commemoration in Europe and the United States. What that ignores, of course, is the painful truth that it is much easier for a country like Belgium to commit itself to educating school kids about the Holocaust than it is to clamp down on the various Islamist groups agitating against Jews within its own borders.
A related passage of Forman’s speech was even more striking. He described a recent visit to Auschwitz with an unnamed “Palestinian imam” who left the extermination camp carrying the following conclusion:
Because the people here in Europe, with what they have faced in the past, they have overcome the discrimination, all the terrible things. And now they live with peace…with safety. This means we can, in the Holy Land, do the same thing. We can overcome our conflict, our wars, our people who were killed, and we can talk together to reach a peace.”
There is nothing wrong with talking about peace. But is gushing over the invocation of the Holocaust in a Palestinian appeal for peace in the “Holy Land” what a special envoy on anti-Semitism should be doing? Wouldn’t it be preferable to highlight the manner in which the hardwired anti-Semitism of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood both confounds the peace process and contributes to the insecurity of Diaspora Jewish communities? And if we are going to educate about the Holocaust, shouldn’t the stress be on how the mass genocide of the Jews was the culmination of centuries of anti-Semitism, rather than an abstract illustration of the inhumanity which human beings are capable of? Finally, isn’t the Holocaust the best illustration of just how exposed and vulnerable Jews are when they don’t have their own state?
It may be that articulating these arguments would push the special envoy into politically and diplomatically difficult terrain. If that’s the case, then arguably we’d better off if his position didn’t exist in the first place.
Choose your plan and pay nothing for six Weeks!
For a very limited time, we are extending a six-week free trial on both our subscription plans. Put your intellectual life in order while you can. This offer is also valid for existing subscribers wishing to purchase a gift subscription. Click here for more details.
Do We Still Need a Special Envoy on Anti-Semitism?
Must-Reads from Magazine
The GOP Is Already Beaten
A bunker mentality without the siege.
Noah Rothman 2018-08-06
If the “blue wave” that Democrats see building ahead of November does not arrive with the ferocity they envision, the political left can still take solace in some of the victories they’ve already won. In that event, the Republican Party would have narrowly escaped losing a national referendum, but that doesn’t mean that Republicans have escaped defeat. Even today, the GOP is a broken husk of its former self.
Over the weekend, progressives and liberal populists gathered at the annual Netroots Nation conference to revel in their ascendancy, but their confidence is not unjustified. One after the other, Democratic presidential hopefuls flattered the crowd of activists and, more important, professed their shared policy preferences. A single-payer health care system estimated to cost $32 trillion over a decade, expanded social security, tuition-free college, the forgiveness of student-loan debt, a $15-per-hour national minimum wage, a federal employment guarantee, a dramatic paring back of the nation’s immigration-enforcement agencies; these and more formerly radical ideas are gaining real purchase. Even the centrist Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan swore requisite fealty to the progressive agenda.
Anyone with a sense of modesty and frugality will find this reckless profligacy appalling. Even the immodest possessed of a passing familiarity with unintended consequences must concede, for example, that a massive minimum-wage hike amid a wave of automatization might not be so compassionate after all. But the point of these ideas is not that they are especially feasible—they’re not. The point is just that they deserve to be called ideas. Democrats who dismiss the innumeracy and toxic racial obsession exhibited by their party’s left flank as passionate fringe elements are making a big mistake. The fringe is where the energy is. It’s where the canvassers and the small-dollar donors are. And it’s where the coalition’s ideas are conceived. As such, the fringe doesn’t stay fringe for long.
Republicans know that all too well. At the dawn of this political moment—one that would culminate in the kind of Republican domination of state and federal government unseen in nearly a century—the GOP, too, had its wacky fringe. But the margins weren’t merely sources of embarrassment. They were fonts of enthusiasm and intellectual vitality. The libertarian-tinged conservatives who spent the Obama years organizing, strategizing, and pitching sweeping legislative reforms at CPAC may not have overtaken the GOP, but no one could convincingly argue that they did not have a serious influence on the Republican Party.
Today, that vibrancy is gone. The conservative movement in and out of Congress is not dedicated to the advancement of its ideas but to preventing the other guy’s ideas from coming to fruition.
From the confirmation of judges, whose chief qualification is their opposition to bizarre new readings of the Constitution that justify sweeping liberal policy objectives, to the non-enforcement of onerous regulations by the executive, the stuff that energizes the Republican Party’s activists and intellectuals is utterly unambitious. Gone are the days when conservatives promised to overhaul the nation’s health-care system, devolve federal powers back to the states, scale back the IRS, and render the nation’s ballooning entitlement programs sustainable. Gone is the CPAC that served as an arena of competing ideas. The desire to out-compete the left has been replaced by the fleeting satisfaction of triggering liberals’ gag reflexes on Twitter.
According to Cory Bliss, chief strategist for a PAC dedicated to preserving the GOP’s House majority, the messages that really jazz Republican voters are entirely negative. “If the choice is, ‘Do you want to raise middle-class taxes? Do you want to abolish ICE? Do you want Nancy Pelosi as speaker?’ That’s a debate we’ll win,” he told the New York Times recently. A Republican voter in Ohio’s 12th congressional district summed up the GOP agenda more succinctly: “We’ve got to protect President Trump.” But for what? Republicans asked the public for prohibitive political power and got it, but now that power is dedicated solely to its own preservation.
There’s a lot to be said for running block. William F. Buckley distilled the conservative ethos in National Review’s mission statement as “someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop,” and the bulwarks that Republicans have erected in the effort to impede the advance of cultural and economic liberalism are impressive. But there is a concession in all this negative partisanship, and it’s a sad one from the conservative perspective. It is that the legislative phase of this period of unique Republican dominance is over. The ball is not going to advance. The GOP is already on defense.
This strange bunker mentality is entirely unjustified. The appeal of a persecution complex notwithstanding, Republicans are still the masters of their destiny. There are no observable conditions that have forced them into a position of servility. With 92 days to go before the midterms, this docility on the part of the party in power is as inexplicable as it is inexcusable.
Choose your plan and pay nothing for six Weeks!
For a very limited time, we are extending a six-week free trial on both our subscription plans. Put your intellectual life in order while you can. This offer is also valid for existing subscribers wishing to purchase a gift subscription. Click here for more details.
Podcast: The Jeong March Through Institutions
Podcast: Russia-gate and the Sarah Jeong controversy.
Noah Rothman 2018-08-06The first of the week’s COMMENTARY podcast explores the controversy around the newest member of the New York Times editorial board, Sarah Jeong, who spent years inveighing against “white people” on Twitter. Will that have any political impact, or is it only a preoccupation of the political class? Also, Donald Trump confesses the Trump tower meeting wasn’t just about adoptions after all…
Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes.
Choose your plan and pay nothing for six Weeks!
For a very limited time, we are extending a six-week free trial on both our subscription plans. Put your intellectual life in order while you can. This offer is also valid for existing subscribers wishing to purchase a gift subscription. Click here for more details.
#NeverTrump Conservatives Should Not Become Democrats
Lovely, dark, and deep.
Noah Rothman 2018-08-02
Politico contributing editor Bill Scher isn’t the first to claim that the only responsible way for Trump-skeptical conservative to oppose the president is to register as Democrats, but his is one of the most charitable and honest of those appeals. It deserves a comprehensive response. Toward that end, I’d contend that Scher has conservative thought leaders confused with legislators and political organizers. He has mistaken those who adhere to inviolable conservative principle with influence-seekers who are bound to a constituency, not ideas. Finally, he has adopted a narrow view of the current political moment that has blinded him both to what the Democratic Party truly is and the incentives to which conservatives in political exile respond.
Scher began by noting that a few influential Trump critics in the conservative movement have left the Republican Party in the Trump era, and a few are even rooting for a Democratic takeover of one or both chambers of Congress in November. This is, in his estimation, a half-measure unequal to the gravity of the moment and generally not in this group’s interests. There is no country for a homeless pundit. They will need a tribe if they are to be effective and, ultimately, protected.
Outside the tent, Scher claims, the Democratic Party will continue to move left and become even more unappealing to those on the right. The party can serve as a haven for conservative refugees, he insists, if they’d only just throw off their partisan blinders. Ideologically diverse, accommodating, and conciliatory, Scher insists that Democrats maintain the last true big tent. “[I]f you are primarily horrified at how Trump is undermining the existing international political and economic order—hugging Russia, lauding strongmen, sparking protectionist trade wars—then becoming a Democrat is your best option,” he wrote.
This isn’t just a terrible misunderstanding of what animates Trump’s conservative critics; it is a misguided and ultimately deceptive misrepresentation of the modern Democratic Party.
Scher makes the point repeatedly that the Trump-skeptical conservative movement has utterly lost the debate and the GOP with it. In 2016, most of the party’s voters rejected the doctrinal conservatism to which they cling. What else is new? The Republican Party has not always been a conservative party. Conservatives waged a 20-year struggle to displace the progressive ethos that typified the GOP from T.R. to Eisenhower. Preserving the GOP’s ideological predisposition toward conservatism is a constant struggle, but it is one that conservative opinion makers relish.
Trump’s critics in the conservative movement abandoned him not just because of his temperamental defects, but because of his progressive impulses. The president’s skepticism toward free trade, his conciliatory posture toward hostile regimes abroad, his Keynesian instincts, his apathy toward budget deficits, and his general amenability toward heedless populism are traits that traditionally appeal to and are exhibited by Democrats. Why would conservatives join that which they are rebelling against?
Scher’s contention that the Trump-skeptics in conservative ranks would have more influence over the Democratic Party than the GOP is bizarre. The anti-Trump right is far too small a contingent to have any impact on the evolutionary trajectory of the Democratic Party, even if they were to abandon the principles that led them into the wilderness in the first place. They do, however, enjoy influence over American politics wildly disproportionate relative to their numerical strength.
Trump-skeptical conservatives are ubiquitous features on cable news. Their magazines and websites are enjoying a renaissance. They haunt their comrades who have made their peace with Trumpism. Most critically, they represent the strain of conservatism to which the majority of the Republican Party’s congressmen and women are loyal because it was that brand of conservatism that led them into politics in the first place. The worst-kept secret of the Trump era is that this president receives his highest marks when he’s doing conventionally conservative things. When the president behaves as he promised to on the campaign trail, Republicans rebel and often rein in his worst impulses. It’s not much, but it is a sign that a partial restoration of the status quo ante is not unthinkable.
Scher frequently cites exceptions within the Democratic firmament as though they do not illustrate the rule. He claims that the Democratic Party is not “a rotten cauldron of crass identity politics, recreational abortion, and government run amok.” As evidence, he cites the fact that a handful of pro-life Democrats have managed to resist the party’s purge of that formerly-common view, but that is an admission of heterodoxy. The Democratic Party’s fealty to divisive identity politics is hardly a figment of conservative imaginations. From Salon.com to the New York Times opinion page, many on the left, too, have soured on the party’s attachment to racial and demographic hierarchies. And as for the party’s reputation for profligacy, Democrats can renounce the works of the 111th Congress—the last time the party had total control of Washington—whenever they muster up the gumption.
Scher believes it is inconsistent for conservatives to support a Democratic takeover of one or more legislative chambers and not support the Democratic agenda, but there is nothing inconsistent about it. Conservatives who think the GOP-led Congress has proven an insufficient check on the GOP-led executive are placing a vote of confidence in the Constitution, not the progressive agenda. If the cohort formerly dubbed #NeverTrump conservatives believe Democrats would be a better governing party than the GOP, they should certainly register Democratic at the nearest opportunity. If they believe that, though, they’re not #NeverTrump conservatives at all. They’re just #NeverTrump.
Conservatives are no strangers to being torn between their principle and their influence. Conservative opinion makers have been compelled to choose between proximity to power and their core values before. Those who chose temporary isolation in order to shield conservative beliefs from being disfigured by those who do not cherish them might not enjoy the gratitude they’ve earned. But they left behind a markedly more conservative country than the one they were born into.
The lessons of recent history are clear: Those who are content to sacrifice their principles for access and influence preserve neither in the long run.
Choose your plan and pay nothing for six Weeks!
For a very limited time, we are extending a six-week free trial on both our subscription plans. Put your intellectual life in order while you can. This offer is also valid for existing subscribers wishing to purchase a gift subscription. Click here for more details.
PODCAST: Is There An American Center Any Longer?
Podcast: Who are centrists, and should we cater to them?
John Podhoretz 2018-08-02Polls say a majority of Americans believe both Republican and Democratic politicians are out of the mainstream. So where is the mainstream? Who represents the mainstream? Are there centrist politicians any longer? Or are “centrists” just soft liberals in disguise and therefore represent very little? It’s a podcast from 30,000 feet. Give a listen.
Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes.
Choose your plan and pay nothing for six Weeks!
For a very limited time, we are extending a six-week free trial on both our subscription plans. Put your intellectual life in order while you can. This offer is also valid for existing subscribers wishing to purchase a gift subscription. Click here for more details.
Depravity and Theatrics on Donald Trump’s Stage
In on the act.
Noah Rothman 2018-08-01
The behavior of many attendees of Donald Trump’s campaign-style rally in Florida on Tuesday night was barbaric. There’s no other way to put it. The footage of rally-goers’ menacing and shouting profanity at reporters in slavish observance of the president’s goading was unbecoming of the citizens of a republic that values a free and independent press. The normalization of the radical anonymous conspiracy theorist “Q,” who is conspicuously obsessed with the idea that child sex trafficking is a popular liberal pastime, is disgraceful. A target of last night’s frenzied crowd, CNN’s Jim Acosta claimed that the “the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt.” Indeed, this was a hostile assembly, and such crowds are capable of astonishing violence. But, as he later learned and revealed, Acosta was probably not in that kind of danger.
When Acosta descended from the podium on which he broadcasts, he calmly approached his abusers and invited them to speak—most of them happily accepted. This isn’t the first time that Acosta has served as the object of a mob’s derision, only for their ire to transform into celebrity-worship when the cameras go off. No one should minimize the potential for savagery here; it would not be the first time that the president has incited his followers to acts of violence, and the media figures and outlets Trump singles out endure harassment and credible threats from the president’s most unhinged fans. But there is a performative aspect to the Two Minutes Hate directed toward Acosta. He serves as their foil, the heel who absorbs the crowd’s fury in the ring only to sign autographs for his hecklers backstage. And there’s some evidence that Acosta relishes that role.
That doesn’t excuse any of this behavior. Indeed, it makes it worse. In his conduct as America’s chief executive, Donald Trump has inflamed and aggravated tensions to serve his own narrow ends. That objective is so transparent, though, that most who participate in this performance must do so knowing it is a farce. In willingly suffocating their better angels with a pillow, Trump and his allies may be radicalizing the truly unhinged who cannot see through the act. Perhaps more depressing, the Trumpified Republican Party is acclimating itself to behaviors and policies that would have been considered unspeakably callous not all that long ago.
In that speech before a group of veterans last week, Trump implied that media reports of businesses or individuals hurt by his trade war were pure fabrications. “Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news,” Trump said to cheers. “What you are seeing and what you are reading is not happening.” That goes for polling data, too. At least, polling that the president doesn’t like. “Polls are fake, just like everything else,” Trump insisted this week before citing his own standing among Republicans as determined by—what else?—polls.
The only way to avoid feeling insulted by this naked contempt for the audience’s intelligence is to convince yourself that this is all a game. Maybe rally goers think that blind displays of fealty to the president frustrate all the right people. Maybe they love being swept up in the performance art of it all, and Jim Acosta might as well be the Iron Sheik to Trump’s Hulk Hogan. The bottom line is that the audience believes they’re part of the act.
But Trump’s acolytes are endorsing or excusing shameful behavior that no one should tolerate from public servants or the government of which they are a part.
Donald Trump is fond of reciting portions of civil-rights activist Oscar Brown Jr.’s 1963 poem, “The Snake,” from behind the lectern to impugn foreign refugees fleeing war and poverty abroad as sleeper agents who seek only to do Americans harm. This isn’t just agitation; it’s policy. The United States took in just 33,000 refugees last year, the lowest intake in over a decade and well below the quota. This year, administration officials led by immigration antagonist Stephen Miller hope to resettle only 15,000 refugees, a decline that experts contend is designed to allow the private charities and public mechanisms that facilitate resettlement to atrophy permanently.
At first, Trump was happy to defend his “zero tolerance” policy, which became a euphemism for breaking up families at the border to deter future border crossers. He incoherently blamed “Democrat-supported loopholes” for the policy while simultaneously insisting that a secure nation cannot have a “politically correct” immigration policy, all to the sound of applause. Only when the backlash became so great did he back off this draconian policy, and his fans cheered him for that, too.
The public outcry that erupted following the termination of “zero tolerance” has abated, but the horrors have not. In testimony before Congress on Tuesday, a Health and Human Services official confessed that they knew the “separation of children from their parents entails significant risk of harm to children.” The psychological abuse associated with this policy has occasionally led to outbursts among incarcerated children, leading U.S. government officials to administer regular doses of psychotropic medication to their charges without the consent of a parent or guardian—a practice that a district judge halted in a sweeping ruling on Monday.
The president’s rallies exemplify the post-truth moment, in which his supporters adopt Trump’s penchant for moral and intellectual malleability as though it was a virtue. As Jonah Goldberg observed, the president’s vanguard has seamlessly transitioned from claiming that there was no evidence that the president welcomed the interference of Kremlin operatives in the 2016 election to contending that welcoming such interference would not violate any statutes to insisting that cooperation with hostile foreign powers for political gain is just best practice. Likewise, when Trump’s crowds chant “lock her up” nearly two years into the Trump administration, they know that’s not going to happen. It’s the kind of banana republicanism that owns the libs, and that’s all that matters.
For Trump’s fan base and his phalanx of enablers in the conservative press, this is all a big gimmick, and they think they’re in on it. It’s all just talk, and so the stakes must be low. Anyone who over analyzes the impact of a presidential pronouncement just doesn’t get him—not like his infinitely forgiving admirers do. But this is not a game. The behavior of the most powerful man on earth matters. Pretending it does not only to posture as self-righteous is no nobler than the hysterics to which Trump’s perspectiveless critics are prone. They are players occupying two different roles on the same stage, both taking their direction from the president.
Choose your plan and pay nothing for six Weeks!
For a very limited time, we are extending a six-week free trial on both our subscription plans. Put your intellectual life in order while you can. This offer is also valid for existing subscribers wishing to purchase a gift subscription. Click here for more details.