Rare News Desk
I’ll leave it to our Jewish readers to decide whether Breitbart’s recent hatchet job against Bill Kristol—headlined “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew”—is blatantly anti-Semitic. Clumsy, witless, and wholly unsubstantiated by the article, certainly. But the author, David Horowitz, is himself Jewish, and I’d be hard-pressed to call the accusation of “renegade Catholicism” a slur (though the historical baggage between the two terms is obviously incongruent).
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What interests me more is the substance of Horowitz’s charge against Kristol, which is premised on the latter’s refusal to vote for Donald Trump and attempt to organize a third-party challenge. I’m sure Kristol is having a good laugh at the accusation that he’s a “renegade” for not backing a Republican nominee in a presidential election, since Jewish voters regularly support Democrats by massive margins. This may be the first time the Weekly Standard editor finds himself in Judaism’s political mainstream.
Horowitz’s critique is a weird brew of valid apologetics for Trump’s foreign policy, unsettling forgiveness for the sins of Mike Tyson, and a demented defense of the Rafael Cruz ghosts in the National Enquirer’s attic (how often do those things go together?). But why the invocation of Kristol’s Judaism? Horowitz tries to explain in a follow-up piece, published at Breitbart yesterday:
In mounting a third-party run which would split the Republican vote and elect Hillary, Bill Kristol seems to be forgetting that the Iranians and their Jew-hating allies are openly preparing a second Holocaust in the Middle East (and then for the rest of us). Obama, Hillary, Huma Abedin, and the Democrats are the chief enablers of this already planned Holocaust.
Splitting the Republican vote and electing Hillary is a betrayal of the Jews in an hour in which their backs are to the wall. Hence the designation renegade for those who are planning a third-party run, and for which I make no apologies.
Where to begin? First, it’s doubtful that Kristol is “forgetting” about Iranian hostility to Israel, given that he constantly writes jeremiads about the subject accompanied by cadaverous reanimations of Winston Churchill.
Second, it’s bizarre to claim that “electing Hillary is a betrayal of the Jews,” given that Mrs. Clinton is generally regarded as tougher on Iran and its allies in Bashar al-Assad’s government than Trump. Even on the nuclear deal, which Hillary supports, Trump’s positions have at best been muddled, and include an assurance made several years ago that he would negotiate with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Trump has also said he would take a neutral position between Israel and the Palestinians. If you’re looking for a candidate who will be more bellicose on Israel’s behalf, Trump-Clinton is at best a wash.
And while the logic of rooting for Trump to forestall a second Holocaust is invalid, the premise itself is psychotic. I thought we finally laid to bed the notion that Iran is about to annihilate Israel when Bernard Lewis’s prediction of a 2006 apocalypse came and went. Since that fever pitch, the CIA has repeatedly concluded that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program long ago, and the Iranians have complied with President Obama’s arms agreement by relinquishing 98 percent of their nuclear fuel, dismantling more than 12,000 centrifuges, and filling their reactor at Arak with cement. Meanwhile, Hezbollah has grown relatively quiet since its disastrous 2006 war with Israel (kept in check by occasional Israeli airstrikes in Syria) and the Iron Dome air defense system has proven incredibly effective.
If Israel’s foes are trying to engineer a nuclear attack, they’ve got a lot of work to do.
Republican hawks and Donald Trump have diverged in recent months over the Republican nominee’s embrace of a realist foreign policy. But the two are still connected at the tail by a penchant for the apocalyptic. For Trump, “our country is disintegrating” thanks to boneheaded trade deals; for hawks, our country risks disintegration from a drumbeat of menaces out the Middle East that threaten to take Israel down first and us shortly thereafter. The difference is one of agency, not outcome. Horowitz has pulled off the knight’s move of servicing the latter in support of the former.
The best conservatism is one that’s optimistic but realistic, eschews eschatology, reforms rather than rages, follows the Constitution, maximizes liberty where applicable, minimizes concentrations of power, operates in the realm of the possible rather than via some shimmering ideological fantasyland, and learns from the mistakes of the past. If that’s what you seek, then Trump, Horowitz, and Kristol all fall short.
