Neocons and the Incredible Jewish Ethnic Infrastructure

Yet another glimpse into the massive Jewish ethnic infrastructure, the infrastructure that undergirds the power of the Israel Lobby. A column by Justin Logan in The National Interest (“Memo to Leslie Gelb: The neocons never left“) points out that neocons are alive and well, dominating the foreign policy of the Republican Party. Logan points to Mitt Romney’s foreign policy advisers, most of whom are neocon Jews. And we certainly can’t expect anything better from the likes of Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, and Herman Cain.

The reason the neocons have been so successful in taking over the Republican foreign policy establishment is that they provide careers for like-minded people:

As Scott McConnell has pointed out, neoconservatism is a career. Or as Bill Kristol remarked in 2005, the neoconservatives have done such an excellent job building institutions and infrastructure for developing the next generation of neocons that “soon there are going to be more neoconservative magazines than there are neoconservatives.” There are dozens of twenty-something, thirty-something, forty-something and older neocons throughout Washington, working at think tanks, editorial pages, in government and elsewhere. I could probably count on two hands the number of youngish national-security types I know in town who I could strain to call realists. This imbalance among foreign-policy elites helps create the mistaken impression that there are lots of neoconservatives in America generally, which there aren’t. Neoconservatism really is a head without a body.

But that’s how foreign policy (not to mention immigration policy and policy related to all things multicultural) is made in the US—by elites with money and political connections, not by popular sentiment. The interests of America be damned.

As pointed out here repeatedly, usually in fundraising posts, Jewish causes are lavishly funded, whether it’s the ADL, the SPLC, the Democratic Party, or the neocon foreign policy infrastructure. Compared to this avalanche of cash, money for White advocacy is virtually non-existent. Recently, the American Third Position (please join) ran a candidate for governor of West Virginia, Harry Bertram, on a budget of around $10,000. This is certainly a welcome development, but the amount involved is minuscule compared to the amounts available to Republicans and Democrats—and to the Jewish ethnic infrastructure.

Needless to say, Jews are well aware of the power of money and a there is a long list of Jewish donors to political causes.  As just one example, über-Zionist Haim Saban is quoted listing the sources of political influence: Donations to political parties, establishing think tanks, and controlling media outlets.

Saban has practiced what he preaches: He controls Univision, the Spanish language network and led a group that bought Kirsch Media Group, a German media conglomerate; he has contributed millions of dollars to Democratic political causes and lesser amounts to Republicans; and he funded the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the [left-leaning] Brookings Institution to the tune of $13 million. This strategy, which ultimately stems from Jewish wealth and active engagement in the political process, has given Jews influence far beyond their numbers. (See here)

Indeed, Jewish ownership of media and their prominence as commentators and writers should be properly seen as an aspect of the Jewish ethnic infrastructure (see here, p. 48ff). As Philip Weiss notes,

In the last week or so I typically found myself counting Jewish names in media broadcasts. Everyone from Ezra Klein commenting on Charlie Rose about the Congress to Andrew Ross Sorkin on Terry Gross yesterday, talking financial policy, to Brian Lehrer having on three different Jewish journalists today, and one of them, Nina Totenberg, kvelling about Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.

Sound familiar?

Whereas Saban funds ultra-Zionism from the political left, the financial angel of the neocons is Bruce Kovner, a New York hedge fund billionaire who “over two decades, has underwritten the infrastructure the neocons have used to achieve their current prominence.”  Kovner funds the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the New York Sun. He was also a major backer of President George W. Bush: “when George Bush’s chestnuts were in the fire [over the Iraq war], Kovner helped to pull them out. He wrote checks for $110,000 to a 527 called Softer Voices that was aimed at ‘security moms’ in swing states. Softer Voices is led by, among others, the writer Midge Decter, the wife of Norman Podhoretz, and Nina Rosenwald, a force in the pro-Israel lobby. Kovner was its largest financial backer.” (Nevertheless, as Philip Weiss notes, “the biggest money game in town on the Republican side is Sheldon Adelson, a Zionist Jew, who got engaged in 2000 with the specific aim of nullifying the ‘peace process.'”)

Kovner’s creations led the charge in promoting the Iraq war:

On the fifth floor of the AEI building, the Project for the New American Century helped lay the ground for the Iraq war by regular statements describing Saddam Hussein as the greatest threat to peace in the Middle East. The [New York] Sun [financially backed by Kovner] ran an editorial asserting that people protesting the Iraq war were committing treason, while AEI’s Perle and David Frum published An End to Evil, in which they argued that extreme Islam wants to dominate the world, and the U.S. faces “victory or holocaust.” The U.S. should show as little compunction about “destroying regimes” as a police sniper feels icing a hostage-taker. When George Bush was elected in 2000, Dick Cheney swept in a raft of neoconservative thinkers, many from AEI [American Enterprise Institute].

Importantly, “Kovner has pushed AEI to build an endowment so that scholars are more independent, so they don’t have to hunt up grants for their work.” On the other hand, there are a number of White advocate independent scholars who are basically penniless and can only devote part time to the cause.

Finally, it’s interesting that Kovner’s history “recapitulates the arc of the neocons.” His family was part of the far left Jewish mainstream of the early decades of the 20th century:

Kovner’s grandfather Nathan, along with Nathan’s brother Benjamin, came to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, from Vilna, Russia, in the early 1900s because they were revolutionary socialists who feared arrest by the czar. “They were atheists. They were fleeing religion as much as they were fleeing the czar,” Kovner’s cousin Pat Kovner says of her ancestors.

In the only statements Kovner has made about his background, to the Wall Street Journalfourteen years ago, he said that his family was full of socialists. The word favored by some of his relatives is communist. Two of his father’s cousins were accused of being communists in the labor movement and were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the fifties. Both pleaded the Fifth. Pat Kovner, the daughter of one of them (Julius), remembers, “It was a terrible time of repression and people losing their jobs and being humiliated in public. People were frightened to death.” A few weeks after Congress accused Bruce Kovner’s cousin once removed, Fay Kovner Mukes, of heading the “Hollywood Communist Club,” her lawyer flew out to represent the Rosenbergs in their last-minute appeals before the Supreme Court, shortly before they were executed in June 1953.

Like the other neocons, the only area of social policy where they are “conservative” is in supporting the ethnonationalist right in Israel. His idea of conservativism doubtless includes advocacy of massive non-White immigration into the U.S. (not Israel) as championed by his think tanks (e.g., Tamar Jacoby of the Manhattan Institute).

Now it’s White advocates who are confronting a far worse version of the situation Kovner’s relatives lived through in the 1940s and ’50s—the “terrible time of repression and people losing their jobs and being humiliated in public. People [are] frightened to death.” But don’t expect the likes of Bruce Kovner to try to change that.