[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 30 (Thursday, March 7, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E312-E313]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        HATRED MARKS PAPER TRAIL

                                 ______


                           HON. PETER DEUTSCH

                               of florida

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, March 7, 1996

  Mr. DEUTSCH. Mr. Speaker, during these political primaries, it is 
important that the American public has as much information on the 
candidates as possible. In pursuit of that goal, I am submitting for 
the Congressional Record an article written for the Jerusalem Post on 
past statements made by Pat Buchanan.

                [From The Jerusalem Post, Feb. 23, 1996]

                        Hatred Marks Paper Trail

       Pat Buchanan has toned down his comments, but hasn't backed 
     down, Elli Wohlgelernter reports.
       Pat Buchanan's upset victory in the New Hampshire primary 
     on Tuesday has once again focused heightened attention on the 
     man and his words, and on the people surrounding him in his 
     campaign.
       When two staffers in two days last week had to step down 
     for questions that were raised over their ties to white 
     supremacists, it came as no surprise to Jews here and in the 
     US who remembered what Buchanan used to say and write, before 
     he toned down his rhetoric when he began running for 
     president in 1992.
       It goes back to the 1970s, when what began as a trickle--a 
     snide comment here, a hard-line position advocated there--
     soon started snowballing until, on the eve of the Gulf war in 
     1990, a mini-war broke out over flagrant and vicious 
     antisemitic comments made by Buchanan.
       To recap a few: In 1976, when the Ford administration 
     proposed selling arms to Egypt, Buchanan urged Congress not 
     to ``hearken * * * to the counsel of the Jewish lobby and its 
     Washington representative Henry Jackson.''
       In 1977, when president Jimmy Carter endorsed legislation 
     against the Arab boycott of Israel, Buchanan objected and 
     warned that Israel would be blamed as a result when Americans 
     lost their jobs.
       He later maintained that Americans were asking ``why the 
     U.S. is siding with three million Israelis instead of 100 
     million Arabs who have oil.''
       In 1981, he wrote, ``Many Americans are growing bone-weary 
     with carrying the diplomatic, economic and military cost of 
     underwriting Menachem Begin's policies.''
       Throughout the 1980s, Buchanan exhibited a fiery and 
     indignant pose in a campaign to defend former Nazis, whomever 
     they were and however evil their prior deeds.
       As early as 1977 he wrote of Hitler: ``Though Hitler was 
     indeed racist and antisemitic to the core, a man who without 
     compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an 
     individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier in the Great 
     War, a political organizer of the first rank, a leader 
     steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical 
     powers that could awe even those who despised him.''
       From this followed his strong defense of Nazi criminals, 
     and his denunciation of the U.S. Justice Department's Office 
     of Special Investigations, which pursues Nazi criminals: 
     ``You've got a great atrocity that occurred 35, 40 years ago 
     * * * Why put millions of dollars [into] investigating 
     that?''
       There were other remarks he made about targets of war-
     crimes allegations, including:
       When the U.S. apologized to France for sheltering Klaus 
     Barbie, the ``Butcher of Lyon,'' Buchanan complained: ``To 
     what end all this wallowing in the atrocities of a dead 
     regime.''
       He campaigned against the deportation to the Soviet Union 
     of Karl Linnas, who ran a Nazi death camp in Estonia, when 
     the US Court of Appeals ruled that there was overwhelming 
     evidence of his guilt.
       On the isolating of Kurt Waldheim: ``The ostracism of Kurt 
     Waldheim [has] an aspect of moral bullying and the singular 
     stench of selective indignation.''
       And of course, there was his spirited defense of Ivan 
     Demjanjuk and his statement that he could never get a fair 
     trial in Israel.
       Alan Ryan Jr., former head of OSI at the Justice 
     Department, said then that ``Pat Buchanan is going to bat for 
     any Nazi war criminal in the US,'' and called him ``the 
     spokesman for Nazi war criminals in America. His campaign on 
     behalf of these people is so infused with distortions and 
     misrepresentations of the facts that it's almost impossible 
     to engage in any sort of response. He simply piles lie upon 
     inaccuracy upon surmise up personal attack.''
       Not content to defend Nazis, Buchanan shifted to 
     questioning aspects of the Holocaust. Gas chambers could not 
     have killed human beings, he wrote, because ``in 1988, 97 
     kids, trapped 400 feet underground in a Washington, DC, 
     tunnel while two locomotives

[[Page E313]]

     spewed diesel exhaust into the car, emerged unharmed.''
       And finally, an attempt was made to discredit survivors 
     themselves. ``Since the war, 1,600 medical papers have been 
     written on `The Psychological and Medical Effects of the 
     Concentration Camps on Holocaust Survivors.' This so-called 
     `Holocaust Survivor Syndrome' involves `group fantasies of 
     martyrdom and heroics.' ''
       Writing in the January 1991 issue of Commentary, Joshua 
     Muravchik responded: ``What can Buchanan possibly be talking 
     about here? Can be furnish a bibliography of, say, the first 
     100 of these `1,600 medical papers'? And do quotation marks 
     diminish the sewer-level bigotry of the reference to 
     `fantasies and martyrdom'?''
       His antisemitic and anti-Israel statements continued to 
     build over the years.
       He called the Democratic Party the ``diapered poodle of * * 
     * the Israeli lobby'';
       Called Capitol Hill in Washington ``Israeli-occupied 
     territory'';
       Called the massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese Christians 
     in Sabra and Shatilla the ``Rosh Hashana Massacre,'' and the 
     ``the Israel army is looking toward a blackening of its name 
     to rival what happened to the French army in the Dreyfus 
     affair'';
       Said of the Vietnamese ``Boat People'': ``Can one imagine 
     what a cauldron of boiling rage the Senate would be if--
     instead of Vietnamese--there were Jews in those boats?''
       In protesting the alleged blasphemy of the film ``The Last 
     Temptation of Christ,'' asked: ``Would [Jack] Valenti, [chief 
     executive officer of the Motion Picture Association of 
     America] employ his eloquence to defend a film portraying 
     Anne Frank as an oversexed teenager fantasizing at Auschwitz 
     on romancing some SS guards?''
       He also chided the New York Times for not criticizing the 
     film strongly enough: ``We have a `newspaper of record' that 
     can sniff out antisemitism in some guy turning down a kosher 
     hot dog at the ballpark.''
       In the protest over the Catholic convent at Auschwitz, 
     Buchanan wrote on September 24, 1989: ``The slumbering giant 
     of Catholicism may be about to awaken. * * * When Cardinal 
     John O'Connor seeks to soothe the always irate Elie Wiesel by 
     reassuring him that `there are many Catholics who are 
     antisemitic. * * * It's deep within them,' when he declares 
     this `is not a fight between Catholics and Jews,' he speaks 
     for himself. But not afraid, your eminence; just steps 
     aside, there are bishops and priests ready to assume the 
     role of defender of the faith.''
       When president George Bush asked Congress to delay for four 
     months the $10 billion in loan guarantees, Buchanan wrote on 
     September 18, 1991: ``Even if his veto of the guarantees is 
     overridden, he will have won high marks for courage and 
     exposed Congress for what it has become, a Parliament of 
     Whores incapable of standing up for US national interests, if 
     [the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee] is on the 
     other end of the line.''
       Perhaps his most outrageous statement came shortly after 
     Iraq's Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. On the CNN show ``The 
     McLaughlin Group'' of August 26, 1990, two months after he 
     made the comment on the same program about Congress being 
     ``Israeli-occupied territory,'' Buchanan made this infamous 
     remark:
       ``There are only two groups that are beating the drums for 
     war in the Middle East: the Israeli Defense Ministry and its 
     amen corner in the US.''
       The remark generated an outpouring of condemnation from 
     Jewish groups across America. It was a new kind of charge 
     from Buchanan, one that Anti-Defamation League national 
     director Abraham Foxman said lifted Buchanan's 
     ``characteristic anti-Israel rhetoric to new and graver 
     heights.''
       Later in the program, Buchanan said: ``The Israelis want 
     this war desperately because they want the US to destroy the 
     Iraq war machine. They want us to finish them off. They don't 
     care about our relationship with the Arab world.''
       Refuting the charge of antisemitism, Buchanan said: ``Were 
     I expressing such views * * * I wouldn't have lasted 10 
     minutes in a profession where I have reveled, on and off, for 
     30 years. The newspapers that carry the Buchanan column don't 
     print hate literature.''
       The charge of antisemitism, he wrote, ``is used to 
     frighten, intimidate, censor and silence; to cut off debate; 
     to so smear men's reputations that no one will listen to them 
     again without saying, `Say, isn't he an antisemite?' ''
       Buchanan confessed in that column that, ``yes, a change has 
     taken place'' in his attitude toward Israel as compared with 
     the time ``from June of `67 * * * until I went back into the 
     White House in 1985,'' a time he claimed to be ``an 
     uncritical apologist for Israel, a Begin man all the way, 
     defending everything from the attack on the Iraqi reactor to 
     the invasion of Lebanon. I thought they were terrific 
     friends.
       ``And yes, a change has taken place. For many reasons.
       ``Among them: The manipulation of the traitor Jonathan 
     Pollard to systematically loot the secrets of the most 
     generous friend Israel will ever have. The gratuitous 
     brutality against Palestinian old men, women, teenagers and 
     children. The Good Friday land grab at the Church of the Holy 
     Sepulcher in Jerusalem. The shipment of cluster bombs to the 
     Stalinist Mengistu regime in Ethiopia. The caustic cutting 
     cracks about my church and the popes from both Israel and its 
     amen corner in the US.''
       Foxman issued a statement saying, ``While Buchanan's attack 
     on Jews and Israel are nothing new, they appear to be an 
     obsession. He is obsessed with Jonathan Pollard, but not with 
     the Walker spy ring. Obsessed with the deaths of Palestinians 
     who are waging war on the Jewish state, but not with the 
     cold-blooded mustard-gas massacre of 5,000 Iraqi Kurds by 
     Saddam Hussein. He dismisses the murder of millions of 
     Jews during the Holocaust but derides the Office of 
     Special Investigations for pursuing Nazi war criminals.
       ``He claims that the newspapers that carry his column `do 
     not print hate literature.' True, they rarely do. But today, 
     every newspaper which ran Pat Buchanan crossed that 
     boundary.''
       Among the papers carrying his column that day was the New 
     York Post. In an unprecedented display of criticism, an 
     editorial by editorial editor Eric Breindel, appearing 
     opposite Buchanan's column, cited his previous antisemitic 
     remarks and innuendos, and explained why the paper felt it 
     had to publicly distance itself from one of its own regular 
     columnists:
       ``What concerns us is Buchanan's attitude toward Jews as a 
     group. When homosexual activists demonstrated against John 
     Cardinal O'Connor at St. Patrick's Cathedral, desecrating 
     that sacred place, Buchanan wrote a blistering column 
     denouncing the demonstration. Indeed, the condemnation, in 
     this instance, was widespread.
       ``But only Buchanan managed, somehow, to drag Jews into the 
     discussion. He chided the New York Times for relegating its 
     news story on the St. Patrick's incident to Page B3. And he 
     asked rhetorically whether the Times would have been so 
     restrained `had a synagogue been so desecrated.'
       ``How did synagogues enter the picture? Was it impossible 
     for Buchanan to write a column about the sacrilege at St. 
     Patrick's Cathedral without a snide reference to 
     synagogues?''
       It concluded: ``When it comes to Jews as a group--not 
     Israel, not US-Israeli relations, not individual Jews--
     Buchanan betrays an all-too-familiar-hostility.'' A month 
     later on ``the McLaughlin Group,'' Buchanan lashed back at 
     the ADL, saying the organization, in a ``pre-planned, 
     orchestrated smear campaign,'' was calling newspapers around 
     the country and ``threatening them'' if they didn't cease 
     publications of his columns, which was being carried by 180 
     newspapers.
       The ADL denied calling ``a single editor to request the 
     removal of Buchanan's column, nor would we. Buchanan knows 
     that, and he knows that league is against censorship of any 
     kind.'' Buchanan, Foxman said, ``employed the same `big lie' 
     tactics perfected by the Nazis during World War II.''
       Buchanan continued his Israel-bashing after the Gulf war. 
     On March 13, 1991, he wrote: ``Israel is not Syria, she is 
     not Iraq, she is not Iran. But she is not our `strategic 
     asset' either.
       ``As the Gulf war demonstrated, she is a strategic 
     albatross draped around the neck of the US.''
       The New Republic, on October 15, 1990, wrote: ``The 
     virulence of Buchanan's comments on the Jews, the 
     indifference to evidence, the inflamed rhetoric, the rich 
     conspiratorial imagination, the mystical certainty of 
     rightness, the appetite for enemies, are not characteristic 
     only of his opinions about Israel and the Jews. He is a 
     connoisseur of intolerance. It is proof of the tolerance of 
     America, if proof is needed, that this disgraceful man ranges 
     through the corridors of power and lives in our midst as a 
     star.''
       When his campaign for the 1992 election got under way, 
     Buchanan's rhetoric softened, and continued in that manner 
     while he waited to run again this year.
       ``He's a different person today in terms of what he's 
     saying,'' Foxman said yesterday. ``The language is a lot 
     different. He used to speak of Christian values, Christian 
     America. Now it's Judaio-Christian values. But the baggage of 
     the past is still with him. He has not apologized for his 
     anti-Israel, antisemitic and Holocaust-denial statements, he 
     has not retracted them and he has not repudiated them.''
       The Jewish community, Foxman said, ``is concerned, and will 
     be concerned, but there is no panic yet.''
       He said he didn't think ``a racist will be able to maintain 
     the support of the mainstream,'' but the problem so far has 
     been that ``the media has not asked the questions yet. He has 
     not been challenged. If he moves into the mainstream, the 
     media will seriously challenge him, and then will see the 
     response of the American public.''

                          ____________________