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Buchanan Lets Perle Off Hook!Another slur from America's most respectable anti-Semite.

ByTimothy Noah Posted Thursday, Sept. 9, 2004, at 6:39 PM ET

Pat Buchanan has achieved what I never would have thought possible. He has created sympathy for Richard Perle, the belligerent Iraq hawk, aspiring litigant, expense-account jockey, and best pal a guy ever had on Hollinger International's Executive Committee. Buchanan managed this feat by tossing an anti-Semitic slur Perle's way in his new book, Where the Right Went Wrong. It hasn't gotten much pickup yet; Jacob Heilbrunn, a Los Angeles Times editorial writer, flagged it on Aug. 29, and Michael Kazin mentions it in the Sept. 12 New York Times Book Review. But I suspect it will create yet another hue and cry about Buchanan's animosity toward Jews, which is getting harder and harder to explain away.

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Let's turn to page 42 of Where the Right Went Wrong. In a passage introducing the group of Iraq hawks who called themselves "the Vulcans," Buchanan observes that the best known members

were Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. Perle's depiction of his delight at first meeting the future president reads like Fagin relating his initial encounter with the young Oliver Twist.

Buchanan is trying to evoke, humorously, the con artist's delight at finding an innocent to corrupt. But Fagin is second only to Shylock as the most famously anti-Semitic portrayal of a Jew to be found in English literature. Scholars often argue that, as characters in The Merchant of Venice and Oliver Twist, respectively, Shylock and Fagin possess human qualities that transcend the ugly stereotype of the grasping Jew. But nobody would dispute that any comparison between Fagin and an actual, living Jew—particularly one made by a writer (Buchanan) who has more than once been called anti-Semitic—is, well, anti-Semitic.

At the risk of getting pedantic, let's compare "Perle's depiction of his delight at meeting the future president" as quoted by Buchanan and the passage in Oliver Twist in which Fagin first encounters young Oliver.

Here's Perle:

The first time I met Bush 43, I knew he was different. Two things became clear. One, he didn't know very much. The other was he had confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much. Most people are reluctant to say when they don't know something, a word or a term they haven't heard before. Not him.

Here's Dickens:

In a frying-pan, which was on the fire, and which was secured to the mantel-shelf by a string, some sausages were cooking; and standing over them, with a toasting-fork in his hand, was a very old shriveled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair. He was dressed in a greasy flannel gown, with his throat bare; and seemed to be dividing his attention between the frying-pan and a clothes-horse, over which a great number of silk handkerchiefs were hanging. …
"This is him, Fagin," said Jack Dawkins; "my friend Oliver Twist."

The Jew grinned; and, making a low obeisance to Oliver, took him by the hand, and hoped he should have the honour of his intimate acquaintance. …
"We are very glad to see you, Oliver, very," said the Jew. "Dodger, take off the sausages; and draw a tub near the fire for Oliver. Ah, you're a-staring at the pocket-handkerchiefs! eh, my dear! There are a good many of 'em, ain't there? We've just looked 'em out, ready for the wash; that's all, Oliver; that's all. Ha! ha! ha!"

To say that the Perle passage resembles the Dickens passage is tantamount to calling Richard Perle a kike. Buchanan must apologize.

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

..I'm no fan of Pat Buchanan. But this is ridiculous. When I heard that Buchanan had cast an "anti-Semitic slur" at Perle, I assumed he had called him a "cheap Jew," or part of the "Zionist conspiracy," or accused him of "controlling the media" or exerting "dominating influence over the West" -- you know, something... what's the word I'm looking for here... oh yeah, ANTI-SEMITIC. Instead I find this bullshit about a reference to Dickens. This is on par with the county that fired an employee for describing an ungenerous person as "niggardly."

Noah had to talk so fast to try to make this connection, I thought even his gasbag might get depleted. No dice. As for me, maybe I'm just a rabid anti-Semite too, but I'd be inclined to go with Occam's Razor. Buchanan describes Perle's reaction as the happiness of a con artist meeting a pigeon. Fagin happens to be one of the more famous con artists in history. Maybe the simplest explanation is the true one? In other words, the throwaway line -- which doesn't mention Jews at all -- needs 10 times as much "interpretation" to be anti-Semitic as the actual length of the paragraph in which it occurs.

I don't mind a bit that Buchanan is labeled as anti-Semitic. He's shown enough of that side to deserve the label. But not from this instance. I strongly resent the thought police trying to claim that every time I reference literature that casts Jews in a poor light (i.e. most of European lit for the last millennium), I'm being anti-Semitic. After all, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Oops, Freud was a Jew! I must be an anti-Semite. Or maybe, just maybe, Buchanan isn't the only one prone to paranoid conspiracy theories…

--HLS2003

(To reply, click here)

…I'm waiting on the Noah column that declares that the phrase "goose-stepping" is anti-geese and that anyone using the term "midas touch" is displaying anti-Phrygian tendencies.

Now if good old Dickens had only had the foresight to call his character Fagin "the Arab" then no one would mind...

If I were to call Mr. Noah a modern day Bowdler, woud that be anti-English? Or accurate? Or both?

--fozzy

(To reply, click here)

Let's look at this Buchanan passage again, "Perle's depiction of his delight at first meeting the future president reads like Fagin relating his initial encounter with the young Oliver Twist."

You seem to read this as saying "Perle's depiction etc. reads like Dickens' depiction of Fagin's first encounter with ..." and then you prove it doesn't read like that at all. Well and good, but not Buchanan's claim. Dickens didn't write the novel in the form of a memoir by Fagin! PB is simply saying that if there WERE a hypothetical memoir by Fagin, describing that moment, the passage in THAT book may sound like the Perle passage.

Is this anti-Semitic? Yes. But the Dickens quotation is just padding here.

--Christofurio

(To reply, click here)

I think that the crypto portion of Buchanan's cryptoantisemitism has come off now if it had not done so earlier. Instead of underscoring Fagin's delight in the orphan's innocence, the Dickens text in question takes delight in the vilification and stereotyping of Fagin as a Jew. Since Buchanan believes that Perles' vileness, like Fagin's, arises from his Jewishness, Buchanan is an anti-Semite.

It is entirely possible to show that our President is error prone, hardheaded, and gullible without resorting to Buchanan's silly tricks. William Saletan has done it ably and thoroughly over his last few columns. But addled thinking is all that can be expected from nutty bigots. I hope that as a result of this episode Mr. Buchanan will have less access to the media to fling his foul fanatical filth.

--SillyWarInIraq

(To reply, click here)

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