Pat Buchanan and the Menace of Anti-Anti-Semitism

This file is a single-author political polemic/commentary by Murray N. Rothbard, dated December 1990. Its scope is the public campaign against Pat Buchanan after Buchanan criticized war with Iraq and the influence of Israel’s American supporters. Rothbard’s main thesis is an inversion: the pressing danger is not a new antisemitism but what he calls an organized machinery for branding dissenters as antisemitic.

There is indeed a menace in this area, Barbara, but it is precisely the opposite: the cruel despotism of Organized Anti-Anti-Semitism.

The essay’s first conceptual move is to define “Organized Anti-Anti-Semitism” as a reputational weapon. Rothbard argues that the charge of antisemitism, once attached, does not invite reasoned reply but pushes its target toward exclusion, apology, or silence. He then identifies the ADL as the principal institution behind this dynamic and claims that postwar anti-antisemitism has expanded its object from hatred of Jews to criticism of Israeli policy.

Since the end of World War II, the key strategy of the ADL has been to broaden its definition of anti-Semitism to include any robust criticisms of the State of Israel.

Rothbard situates Buchanan’s case in the Gulf crisis. Buchanan’s antiwar stance and return to Old Right “isolationism” made him, in Rothbard’s view, a central target for pro-war commentators and organizations. The controversy is therefore presented not as a private quarrel over Buchanan’s character, but as a test of whether criticism of Israel-linked foreign policy can remain legitimate public speech.

What we are witnessing is nothing less than a venomous attempt to suppress dissent, to eliminate Buchanan’s fearless and independent voice on the social and political scene.

The middle of the essay is a caustic survey of Buchanan’s critics: A. M. Rosenthal, Elie Wiesel, Mona Charen, Fred Barnes, John K. Roth, Leon Wieseltier, the New Republic, Jacob Weisberg, John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, and others. Rothbard’s rhetoric is combative and often personal, but the argumentative pattern is consistent: he says Buchanan’s opponents concede he is not personally hostile to Jews, then redefine antisemitism to include criticism of Israel, insufficient “sensitivity,” Christian social conservatism, or unintended “objective” effects. He calls this a shifting “shell game,” and compares “objective” antisemitism to Stalinist “objective” crimes.

A related move is Rothbard’s defense of Christian cultural language against what he sees as hostile decoding. When critics treat Buchanan’s concern about “de-Christianization” as veiled anti-Jewish rhetoric, Rothbard insists the phrase means secularization, not antisemitism.

“De-Christianization” is not a code word for anything: it means what it says: the growing secularization of our society, our culture, and our school systems.

The final section, “ANTI-SEMITISM DEFINED,” changes register from denunciation to definition. Rothbard argues that a charge as serious as antisemitism must have stable criteria. He offers two legitimate definitions: one subjective, centered on hatred of Jews as Jews, and one objective, centered on advocacy or imposition of disabilities against Jews.

It seems to me that there are only two supportable and defensible definitions of anti-Semitism: one, focusing on the subjective mental state of the person, and the other “objectively,” on the actions he undertakes or the policies he advocates.

Applying these tests, Rothbard argues that Buchanan fails to qualify as antisemitic: acquaintances describe him as personally friendly to Jews, and he has not advocated legal, economic, political, or social discrimination. Rothbard does not deny that antisemitism exists; he locates it in explicitly marginal movements rather than in Buchanan’s foreign-policy dissent.

Well, in that case, the only rational definition of an anti-Semite is one who advocates political, legal, economic, or social disabilities to be levied against Jews (or, of course, has participated in imposing them).

The essay’s relevance lies in its intersection of Gulf War politics, paleoconservative noninterventionism, criticism of the Israel lobby, and debates over public moral accusation. Its scholarly value is not neutrality—Rothbard writes as Buchanan’s defender and with heavy invective—but its clear expression of an Old Right framework: free speech over enforced sensitivity, nonintervention over alliance politics, and strict definitional tests over reputational sanction.