[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
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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.''
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