From David Frum’s column in Thursday’s New York Sun yesterday but forgot there were a few things in it I wanted to highlight:
You may know the names of these antiwar conservatives. Some are famous: Patrick Buchanan and Robert Novak. Others are not: Llewellyn Rockwell, Justin Raimondo, Joe Sobran, Charley Reese, Jude Wanniski, Eric Margolis, and Taki Theodoracopulos….The Web sites of the antiwar conservatives approvingly cite and link to the writings of John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Noam Chomsky, Ted Rall, Gore Vidal, Alexander Cockburn, and other anti-Americans of the far left….Justin Raimondo, an Internet journalist who delivered Mr. Buchanan’s nominating speech at the Reform party convention in 2000, alleged in December 2001 that Israel was implicated in the terror attacks of September 11: “That the Israelis had some significant foreknowledge and involvement in the events preceding 9/11 seems beyond dispute.” …The writers I quote call themselves “paleoconservatives,” implying that they are somehow the inheritors of an older, purer conservatism than that upheld by their impostor rivals. But even Robert Taft and Charles Lindbergh ceased accommodating Axis aggression after Pearl Harbor….The accusations culminated in a March 2003 article by Mr. Buchanan in The American Conservative that fixed responsibility for the entire Iraq war on a “cabal” of neoconservative office-holders and writers: “We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people’s right to a homeland of their own.” [New York Sun, 3/27/03]Buchanan’s statement by itself is enough to show how these conservatives are in favor of oppression. There is no such thing as a “right to a homeland”–no group has a right to its own government by virtue of its religion or ethnic group: not the Palestinians, and not the Jews either, for that matter. The only kind of state that has a right to exist is a free one. By that standard, Israel has a right to exist; a Palestinian state doesn’t.