Maureen Dowd’s Rosh Hashanah Message to American Jews: Stop Being “Puppet Masters” of the Republicans
So what does one make of her case? First, as Ira Stoll has pointed out, Dan Senor is hardly a neoconservative. During the early days of the Iraq war, he was a spokesman for Paul Bremer, who as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, advocated policies fiercely opposed by neoconservatives. Bremer presided over the disbanding of the Iraqi army and de-Ba’athification, while the neoconservatives favored setting up a government headed by an Iraqi leader they believed was friendly to democracy and the West, particularly Ahmed Chalabi.
As Stoll points out, “depictions of Jews as snakes or puppeteers are classical anti-Semitic images.” Moreover, he notes, when Glenn Beck charged that the leftist billionaire George Soros was “puppet master” of the entire left — he who is openly an opponent of Israel — the left all charged Beck with indulging in anti-Semitism.
Dowd also singled out Paul Wolfowitz in her column, ignoring the key makers of policy in the Bush administration — Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld — none of whom are Jewish.
Even Jeffrey Goldberg, no supporter of Romney, responded to Dowd’s column by writing:
This sinister stereotype became a major theme in the discussion of the Iraq war, when critics charged that Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, among other Jewish neoconservatives, were actually in charge of Bush Administration foreign policy. This charge relegated George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Stephen Hadley, and the other Christians who actually set policy to the status of puppets.
And, he points out, in saying that Israel has a right to make what decisions it will take to protect its people, Romney “wasn’t actually veering wildly at all from the bipartisan consensus on this question.”
As to setting red lines for Iran, Goldberg also notes that it is “hardly outrageous” for Israel’s prime minister to try to get an assessment of what the administration thinks these are, and when it would be willing to act against Iran if need be. (Goldberg also argues in another column that an Obama administration would be more likely to sanction a military strike against Iran than a Romney one.)
Did the Times’ editors to have any embarrassment for not asking Dowd to reconsider her column before posting it? The answer quickly came from editor Andrew Rosenthal, who responded to Politico’s Byers: “No fair-minded reading of Maureen Dowd’s column supports the allegations you and others are making. She makes no reference, direct or implied, to anyone’s religion.”
Rosenthal misses the point. The very terms “puppet masters” and “snakes” are anti-Semitic images, used to discredit and inflame people against Jews, without openly calling them wrong because they are Jewish. One can use these terms while avoiding openly condemning Jews as responsible for evil policies and events, while knowing readers who always fear Jewish influence behind the scenes get the point and have their prejudices confirmed. Writing at Commentary’s “Contentions,” Jonathan S. Tobin thinks that Dowd’s column amounts to a “tipping point that should alarm even the most stalwart liberal Jewish supporters of the president.”
This report shocks even me, and I thought I was beyond shock. I did mention the regnant antisemitism in my Rosh Hashanah blog http://clarespark.com/2012/09/16/thought-crimes/. I need not feel guilty over the emphasis I put on that still powerful animus, that goes unrecognized by the majority of non-Jews and even Jews themselves. Good job, Ron, but oh that it was even necessary is a shanda.
You’re shocked at blatant anti-Semitism and I don’t even see it. That’s a pretty wide gulf. It’s the hysterical code and dog-whistle nonsense liberals indulge in and which requires mind-reading, a skill I do not have.
Clare, color this blogger incapable of shock!
In fact, I have been sounding the alarm bells on this very issue, and many are finally waking up – most especially blinded Jews!
As such, the reaction to the following has stirred a hornet’s nest, but that is a good thing – http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/08/08/leftism-lethal-to-jews-their-overall-health-others-too-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/
And, since NYC was my stomping grounds for years, surely I recognized the seepage of anti-semitism into party politics, as well as within its NY Times halls of slime, cheered on by leftist profs/props – http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/06/27/anti-semitism-anti-zionism-takes-center-stage-in-nyc-democratic-primary-race-heres-the-results-commentary-by-adina-kutnickii-2/
Nevertheless, Dowd and her fellow travelers should understand the following – leftist Jews within her purview are not in the same league as Zionist Jews in Israel. Strong Jews are the majority in Israel, as opposed to the small percent of leftists, however vocal they are. Therefore, whether her head flies off or not, our enemies will get clobbered, and she will have nothing to say about from her venemous perch to change our course – http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/07/20/non-quenchable-jew-hatred-jewish-justice-necessitates-revenge-the-more-punishing-the-better-nothing-less-will-suffice-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki-152/
To hell with all our haters!
Clare, color this blogger incapable of shock!
In fact, I have been sounding the alarm bells on this very issue, and many are finally waking up – most especially blinded Jews!
As such, the reaction to the following has stirred a hornet’s nest, but that is a good thing – /2012/08/08/leftism-lethal-to-jews-their-overall-health-others-too-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/
And, since NYC was my stomping grounds for years, surely I recognized the seepage of anti-semitism into party politics, as well as within its NY Times halls of slime, cheered on by leftist profs/props – /2012/06/27/anti-semitism-anti-zionism-takes-center-stage-in-nyc-democratic-primary-race-heres-the-results-commentary-by-adina-kutnickii-2/
Nevertheless, Dowd and her fellow travelers should understand the following – leftist Jews within her purview are not in the same league as Zionist Jews in Israel. Strong Jews are the majority in Israel, as opposed to the small percent of leftists, however vocal they are. Therefore, whether her head flies off or not, our enemies will get clobbered, and she will have nothing to say about from her venemous perch to change our course – /2012/07/20/non-quenchable-jew-hatred-jewish-justice-necessitates-revenge-the-more-punishing-the-better-nothing-less-will-suffice-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki-152/
To hell with all our haters!
You’re shocked? Read this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/opinion/a-preventable-massacre.html?hp
Reagan learned the hard way a lesson that we all should keep in mind:
“Sometimes close allies act contrary to American interests and values. Failing to exert American power to uphold those interests and values can have disastrous consequences: for our allies, for our moral standing and most important, for the innocent people who pay the highest price of all.”
What a brainless and atrocious column! Resorting to open incitement against a minority in this way would be unthinkable from any respectable right-wing publication, and I should have considered it unthinkable from the Times itself. I hope the owners of that paper will have the courage at least to censure her, or better yet fire her.
Obama Campaign Endorses ‘Anti-Semitic’ Maureen Dowd Column
So I am to assume from her position that for us to aid our ally Israel is to copitulate to them. Hmmmm…………There were in days gone by a sentiment of shame attached to anyone who dare share those racist remarks about Jews. Now it seems to be the thing to do. My what 4 years have done to this country.
4. Slyfox
“So I am to assume from her position that for us to aid our ally Israel is to copitulate to them.”
This is the most common form of rhetoric in propaganda and biased political discourse: the false dichotomy.
“We can either ignore Israel or give in to their selfish needs that hurt us.”
Both are incorrect. Israel’s future and success is tied to American hegemony and world stability. If we we stupid and completely devoid of morality, and decided to stop supporting Israel, you’d get fluffy words of praise from the same actors who took over the “Arab Spring” nations.
I can’t imagine how it could be more clear how crucial it is to support Israel. It was bad letting “strong men” fail because they struck the best pragmatic balance possible. Now what do we have?
If you think we failed by allowing Islamists to take over after these strong men in Egypt and elsewhere, how on earth can you then say that Israel does not deserve the full support of the USA? Israel is the lynchpin of our foreign policy in the region and the globe. If we fail to adequately support Israel, we lose all credibility forever. Islamists realize this too. That is part of what they want. The genocidal maniacs with blood directly on their hands are mere tools. The truly evil leaders know precisely what I’ve explained here.
People say that Islamists attack the USA because of Israel, but Israel is just as often attacked politically because of its relationship with the USA. We failed to keep the Islamists in check since the end of WWI, and we failed to keep out Communist traitors from taking over the universities and eventually most jobs with influence over the constituents.
The reason it won’t be a tipping point for many Jews is that many Jews think of themselves as swinging withit secularists first and Jews maybe third. And how can you vote Republican and remain in the ranks of the swinging withits? You can’t. That status can only be maintained by pulling the Democrat lever. Which they will continue to do. Slavishly.
And it is why many Jews can’t stand going to the synagogue, even on a holiday. Democratic politics through and through.
I see the reasoning behind the connection you are making, Mr. Radosh – there seems to be a TWINGE of IMPLIED antisemitism – and I also think I understand your sensitivity. But I’m also sick unto nauseousness at the endless seeking out of dog whistles by both sides (though their level of derangement on this subject has reached stratospheric elevations).
But the menopausal Dowd is free to rant, and of course you are free to criticize, but her vitriol is simply met by your (in my opinion) slightly overblown umbrage – it all eventually devolves into babble.
That’s not to say there isn’t a malignant and rising tide of menacing and fascist rhetoric on the Left – and the nexus has never been clearer than in the person of Obama, that the retrograde forces of Islam, Anarchy, and Communism are in confluence.
Obama is a Frankenstein monster. He is the synthesis of the Red (communism), the Green (Islam), and the Black (representing both Anarchist terror and the toxin of Black Liberation Theology). I believe Obama and his press lackies are a dire menace to America. But we also seem to be living in a time when so many people attack other people whenever they speak that all perspective is lost, and words fail to have meaning or impact.
The Left’s endless slanders of “racism” “dog whistles” and, again I apologize, but your almost singular focus on anti-Semitism have become an almost indecipherable cacophony. I already tune out what that wicked woman has to say. I bluntly suggest you are probably making others tune out to you and PJM. Is that really what you want?
Sorry to bring it up but RACISM has been over used ,it lost it’s sting,a more potent word should be STUPIDITY, people are still touchy about this word,it implies permanent state getting crashed by reality. The Left is running out of options, they still use a barrel loading gun, slow and the powder is wet from all those tears.The voter got them into the office they should get them out with a vote. Maybe the teachers union in Chicago should teach us all what the Left is all about ME,Me the hell with the rest of you and your children who cares they are too stupid to learn anyway.
I stopped reading Dowd’s columns years ago. The lady has a screw loose and is no longer capable of logic or reason.
If the NYT’s Rosenthal avers that Dowd’s column in no way refers to anyone’s religion, well then, let’s dispense with all the “racist dog-whistle” alarums that the Left reflexively (nay, devotedly) sound all the time in response to criticisms of Dear Leader. Sauce for goose and gander, and all that, after all.
– columns she has devoted to Ryan, she has a crush on him. Mo’s Mash Notes.
“…the disastrous legacy of war-obsessed Republicans.”–Dowd
That’s rich coming from a whore for the liberal Democrats, whose legacy includes 600,000 American war dead over the last 100 years, thanks to the collective genius of Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson.
I’ll take the war-obsessed Republicans over the peacenik liberal Dems any old day of the week.
Maureen Dowd is ignorant, foolish – and a bad writer. She thinks a laughably pretentious sentence like “The hawkish Romney adviser has been secunded to manage the running mate and to graft a Manichaean worldview onto the foreign affairs neophyte” constitutes good writing (and the lowbrow readers of the Times think so too).
The Jewish-neocon-puppetmaster line, clearly insinuated in Dowd’s piece, is merely visceral, the result of intellectual laziness and a by-product of stupidity and ignorance. The vices of the NYT are all on disply here.
I don’t see that that sentence is pretentious, although it employs a word that does not exist. What makes it bad is the “Manichean worldview” (a cliche that never meant anything), “neophyte” (one of the tiresome vogue-words of political writing these days), and the bizzare idea that one can “graft” a worldview onto a person.
In spite of such flaws, Maureen Dowd still writes better than every regular contributor to PJ Media, I daresay.
Dowd is just another datapoint.
The real barn burner was the vote on the floor of the Democrat Convention. If that wont wake some Jews up, to reconsider….Dowd who can be written off as a crank individual….certainly wont.
REference to the last paragraph in this article. American liberal jews will have blood of 6million Israeli jews on their hands. Despicable.
“Oldest of anti-Semitic tropes: that smart Jews manage to bamboozle their Christian friends by pulling the wool over their eyes and getting them to unwittingly do their bidding.”
It’s curious that this is seen almost exclusively as anti-Semitic, instead of also anti-Christian.
I think we will survive Maureen Dowd.
Today we made another election with God. Three thousand years plus. Still running strong.
Kol yehieh b’seder.
Shanah Tovah
Best wishes to PJ staff and readers. A healthy happy new year to all.
Dowd is insufferable no question, but “slithering” was a response to Paul Wolfowitz’s use of the word slither in reference to Obama in his Fox news interview. Was Wolfowitz being anti-Semitic towards Obama? The issue with Dowd is stupidity not racism.
As for Senor and neoconservatism, to claim that he’s not a neocon just because he worked for Bremmer implies that there is one “line” that all neocons adhere to when in fact they have all sorts of different positions when it comes to the Middle East, e.g look at the differences between, say, Elliott Abrams and Frank Gaffney on the Arab Spring!
Senor qualifies as a neocon IMHO because he helped found the Foreign Policy Initiative with Kristol and Kagan and, more generally, because of his strong espousal of an engaged assertive America supporting freedom abroad.
I agree Dowd is an idiot, but we need to be sharper in our critiques or we simply give the other side an out.
Cheese Louise, Ron, Dowd regularly attacks the Pope as a Nazi in red shoes and your worried about Dan Senor?
I’d love it if Dan Senor ended up having as much influence in a Romney administration as she suggests….Bolton, too.
One can only hope.
Crying “racist” where there is no racial component is old and boring no matter who is doing it. Yes, Dowd is an idiot. On the other hand, her addled-brain managed to excrete a salient point: neoconservative foreign policy ideas ought to be considered a bad joke. Paul Pillar of “In the national interest” put it better:
“In some other political system, anyone who had been involved in an official capacity in promoting that war (in Iraq) might, after resigning in disgrace, retire from public affairs to tend a garden, write fiction, or make money in private business. But somehow that has not happened with many of the people concerned in this instance.”
Gosh Professor Radosh, I had concluded from your expressions of pessimism, that you were NOT sanguine about a change of hear among jewish voters.
I’m screwed up by the tenses here. What the hell are you getting at?
It has always been hard for me to understand the concept of a Jew who is an atheist (Woody Allen comes to mind). I can understand them being liberal, but that won’t save them from being an infidel.
Mr. Radosh,
I believe that Morton D. is accurate in his criticism of your piece. Yes, if analyzed closely Dowd’s piece is anti-Semitic, but that is one of the least obvious faults of the egregious piece. With all the blatant anti-Israel
garbage — in both words and actions (vide: Convention, God, Jerusalem) coming out of this administration, to fixate on the unspoken (but real) anti-Semiticism in Dowd’s piece is absurd.
Shana Tova,
parchellan
The majority of Jews will never move to the Republican column. To them, Obama can destroy Israel before they vote with a party they perceive to be CHRISTIAN. The dirty little secret is that many of them are BIGOTS. About time you realized it.
All Quislings exit left. Thank you.
Ms Down: “Ryan was moving his mouth, but the voice was the neocon puppet master Dan Senor. The hawkish Romney adviser has been secunded to manage the running mate and to graft a Manichaean worldview onto the foreign affairs neophyte.”
She’s on acid, right?
When people like Dowd say “neocon” they mean “Jew.” They mean Wolfowitz and Krauthammer and the like. She clearly says in her piece that the neocons control(ed) Rumsfeld and Chaney. As if Rumsfeld and Chaney weren’t neocons. Even if you take out the anti-semitic bits from her piece she still wrote a nasty nasty column.
If the GOP were to want to invite Jews to enter their “tent” they would need to move toward the center on abortion. If you ask Jews about the GOP this is the first item they’ll mention. It’s a signpost of where the GOP stands on social issues, and the majority of American Jews will never vote republican while the GOP plank is against choice.
Please. Mitt Romney could eat a mountain of dead fetuses and 99% of American Jews would still vote Obama.
That is one of the most antisemitic remarks I have ever read on PJM.
99% of Jews favor baby eating. Even Der Sturmer was more circumspect than such a repulsive comment.
This non fetus eating Jew, who very much wants the Republican party to succeed has some concerns about that. So far in the past 3 elections we have Bush, McCain, and Romney. Maybe instead of blaming the Jews the Republican party needs to take stock about why elections are not going so well.
It is not about antisemitism. There is plenty of that to go around from both sides. It is worse because the Republicans need to rally the people around the central message, which is what? Mitt cannot lay down specifics and when he does he seems to have foot fully entangled in mouth. This is hard core politics, it will not work to just be somebody ‘not Obama’.
Republicans cannot seem to unite the party. Mitt is taking heavy hits from within and without. I want a stronger Republican base or the Democrat Liberals continue to take over. That could spell disaster for what we are here in America. We need a bigger tent.
Tomorrow is just another working day. Republicans need to do better or the nation will continue to slip down this slope. We need strong economy and strong defense against our enemies. Government is failing us and buying up our own bonds to shore up what we can produce in this tough environment. Mitt Romney is the best our Republicans can send out in response.
I want to help and work with the Republican party. Your post makes me less interested. If you want to win forget about the 3% of people who still call themselves Jews here. I know it is closer to 1%, the rest were born Jewish but have little connection. That is just a demographic shift which is common when an ethnic group assimilates. What about Hispanics, African Americans or Gays? Add that up and you have some big numbers.
This wasn’t a ‘dog whistle’.
It was a fog horn.
“Secunded”? While there is an adjective “secund”, meaning “arranged on one side only; unilateral.”, there is no verb form. If one were to assume she meant it in a verb form, she’s saying that Dan Senor was “arranged to one side to manage Paul Ryan”. Perhaps she did that, or perhaps she thought spelling it “seconded” didn’t seem to match well with “Manichean” as far as seeming intellectual. “Secunded” sure looks more like a graduate school word than “seconded”.
Didn’t editing used to be one of the strengths of major city newspapers, especially those with national reputations?