By Melanie Phillips, JNS
Israel’s war with Iran has given an ancient blood libel a new lease of life.
Earlier this week, an out-and-out antisemite was revealed to be holding a senior position in the Pentagon.
In an exclusive story on JNS, Washington correspondent Andrew Bernard revealed that Col. Nathan McCormack, the Levant and Egypt branch chief at the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s J5 planning directorate, had referred publicly to Israel as a “death cult.”
In April, he suggested that the United States “might be Israel’s proxy and not realized it yet.”
In May, he wrote: “Netanyahu and his Judeo-supremacist cronies are determined to prolong the conflict for their own goals: either to remain in power or to annex the land.”
Within hours of the story appearing, McCormack was moved to another position while the Pentagon investigated. Questions may well be asked about how such an individual could be appointed to a senior defense post.
However, the main thrust of his noxious assertions has long been a widespread view in Western establishment circles and has even been legitimized in public debate. This is the belief that the Jews manipulate governments and drag them into foreign wars that serve Jewish interests at the expense of others losing their lives.
This is, of course, a classic blood libel that stretches back into antiquity. Today, it’s found on both the left and right.
“The U.S. must make it clear that we will not be dragged into another Netanyahu war,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), echoed by members of the progressive “Squad” in the U.S. House of Representatives. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said: “We cannot let [Israel’s prime minister] drag our country into a war with Iran.”
For his part, McCormack referenced the 2007 book by authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which accused the pro-Israel lobby in America of shaping its foreign policy to support Israel in ways that harmed the United States.
Although the Anti-Defamation League called the book “a classical conspiratorial antisemitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control,” the authors continued to be treated with respect in academic circles as “realists.”
The isolationism that gives rise to such views has a long lineage in America. It was in dismaying evidence during the 1930s and 1940s, when Nazism was plunging Europe into darkness.
Most notoriously, the celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh announced at an America First rally in 1941 that the Jews were “pressing this country toward war” and trying to “force a free and independent people into war against its will.”
Like other forms of Judeocidal rhetoric, these tropes went underground after the Holocaust—only to come roaring back during the deeply controversial Iraq War that began in 2003.
Those who were against the U.S. invasion of Iraq tendentiously blamed it on “the neocons.” This was code for “the Jews,” because a number of influential “neocon” analysts who supported the war happened to be Jewish.
The false claim that Israel had taken America to war in Iraq became a common meme on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2004, Thomas Friedman wrote that Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s prime minister, had President George W. Bush “under house arrest in the Oval Office.”
In London, a British colonel told me that “Ariel Sharon has his hand up Bush’s back”—and was astonished when I replied that Israel had told the United States it was Iran, not Iraq, that posed the greatest danger.
The disastrous course of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which were generally viewed as a lethal quagmire, turned the West in general against getting involved in any future wars, particularly those in the Middle East.
Opponents of the war against Iran are now re-running the Iraq war memes, with the charge that now-mythical “neocons” are driving President Donald Trump into yet another “forever war” with American “boots on the ground” as U.S. forces die for a cause “in a faraway country.”
This cry has gone up among MAGA isolationists such as the social-media personality Tucker Carlson and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who said in August last year that a “cabal of neocon elitist war-mongers” was calling the shots in the Biden administration.
Yet none of their claims is remotely true. No one has ever talked about an invasion of Iran, or a protracted war, or the likelihood of American soldiers dying.
It’s the Israelis who have taken all the risks by destroying Iran’s air defenses and killing its top military brass, with the result that if the United States now gets involved in the Israeli attack, its forces will be substantially protected.
The question is why, given all these differences, such strong anti-war feeling exists on both sides of the Atlantic.
The main reason is that these objectors don’t see themselves as under attack by Iran.
Yet Iran has been at war with America and the West since the Islamic revolutionary regime came to power in 1979. It has mounted countless attacks against Western interests, has had its fingerprints all over every major terrorist incident and has killed countless numbers of people. It’s been building intercontinental ballistic missiles to hit America and Europe, and repeatedly declares its intention to destroy the West.
So why is the West so blind to all this? Why doesn’t it understand that it needs to defend itself against this clear and present danger?
The answer, astounding as this may seem, is that people on both the left and right have concluded that the Islamic world’s aggression against the West is all the fault of the Jews.
For the left, the Islamic world is the historic victim of Western colonialism and imperialism. As such, it can’t be held responsible for any violence against the West, which must be viewed instead as legitimate resistance.
Accordingly, Muslims—whether in the form of the Palestinian Arabs or the Iranian regime—can’t possibly be guilty of genocidal aggression against Israel. Their violence can only be seen as resistance, and so the story has to be concocted that Israel is guilty of colonialism and oppression.
Those purported Israeli crimes are held to have enraged the entire Islamic world against Israel and its Western backers. So, for the left, it’s the oppressive and aggressive Jews who are the reason that the world is lurching into war.
On the other side of the political divide, some on the right seek alternative explanations for what seems to them inexplicable and terrifying. These people subscribe to the Western delusion that everyone in the world is governed by rationality and self-interest.
Accordingly, they find it impossible to grasp the nature of religious fanaticism. They can’t understand that Islamic terrorists blow themselves up on the streets of Western cities not out of despair but from an ecstatic belief that they are doing the will of God. They can’t grasp that Iran’s Supreme Leader believes that providing an apocalypse will bring the Shia messiah down to earth.
Ever since 9/11, these people on the right have asked themselves why Muslims hate the West so much, since the West has had nothing to do with the Islamic world. They have concluded that it could therefore only be because of resentment at the existence of the Jewish State of Israel.
So war against the West by the Muslim world is the fault of the Jews for being there at all. And so these ignorant Westerners go straight down the rabbit hole of Jewish conspiracy theory, which tells them that the only explanation for America supporting Israel is that the Jews possess some kind of demonic, magical powers to control events.
How can the Jewish people cope with this fearsome, unprecedented lunacy that has consumed so much of the West?
By standing up for the truth wherever possible, keeping themselves as safe as they can—and by having faith that magnificent, courageous and steadfast Israel will now show the West just what it takes to defeat the real forces of evil.
