First things first, I am Jewish. Today I received a forward from my mother (also Jewish), which she had sent out to various Jewish friends and family, listing various items of "Presidential Trivia" involving Jews (
e.g., "
ULYSSES S. GRANT was the first President to attend a Synagogue service while in office"; "
THEODORE ROOSEVELT was the first President to appoint a Jew to a presidential cabinet.").
The email concluded like this: "GEORGE W. BUSH is the first President since Herbert Hoover who has no Jews in his cabinet at all. No wonder he screws up so stupendously."
I knew that this was false, because Chertoff is Jewish, as are numerous present and former members of his Administration. But what I learned in refuting this bit of false "trivia" made me worried and conflicted...
Here is the full text of the response I sent to my mother and all the folks she had cc'ed in her initial email:
Au contraire. While I abhor George W. Bush, this claim is just not true. In fact, I wish it WERE true. (To see why, please scroll down to the bottom, even if you don't read the entire email.)
The following current and former Bush Administration members are all Jewish:
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MICHAEL CHERTOFF is Secretary of Homeland Security. He is the son of a rabbi, and, in addition to being an American citizen, is also a citizen of Israel under Israeli law, as his mother is an Israeli citizen. He coordinated the federal government's "response" to Hurricane Katrina, and designated Michael D. Brown, head of FEMA, as the primary federal official to lead the deployment and coordination of all federal response resources and forces in the Gulf Coast region. Later, Chertoff came under criticism for his incompetence in handling the Katrina response. 1,604 Americans died; many of those deaths could have been prevented. While Bush said afer the fact that "nobody could
have anticipated the breach of the levees," a leaked video later established that both Bush and Chertoff knew that the levees would likely be breached well before the storm hit land, while there was still time to act on this information. Bush and Chertoff did not.
PAUL WOLFOWITZ was Deputy Secretary of Defense from 2001-2005. In 2005, Bush nominated him to be president of the World Bank. He lived in Israel for a year while his father, Jacob, taught at the Technion. His sister made aliyah and lives in Israel. He is a primary architect of the Iraq War.
DOUGLAS FEITH was Undersecretary of Defense for Policy from 2001-2005. His father, Dalck Feith, was a Holocaust survivor. He has served on the board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. He is also a primary architect of the Iraq war.
ELLIOTT ABRAMS served during Bush's first term in office as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs. At the start of Bush's second term (February, 2005), Abrams was promoted to be his Deputy National Security Adviser. Under Reagan, after the Iran-Contra Affair, he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of unlawfully withholding information from Congress.
JOSHUA BOLTEN is the new White House Chief of Staff, elevated to this position in March, 2006. Formerly, he was the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). According to the Stanford Law School Lawyer (magazine), Bolten "belongs to a local temple, tries to attend Sabbath dinner at his sister's house when he can on Friday nights, and doesn't eat pork."
DOV ZAKHEIM was Undersecretary of Defense from 2001-2004. He is an ordained Orthodox Jewish Rabbi. During the 2000 U.S. Presidential election campaign Zakheim served as a foreign policy advisor to George W. Bush as part of a group led by Condoleezza Rice. He has been an adjunct professor at Yeshiva University.
I. LEWIS "SCOOTER" LIBBY is Jewish. (The "I" stands for "Irve.") He was former Chief of Staff and Assistant for National Security Affairs to Vice President Dick Cheney. He resigned after being indicted for obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements.
MARK D. WEINBERG served as Bush's Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Public Affairs.
BRAD BLAKEMAN formerly served as lead advance representative for the Bush-Cheney 2000 Presidential campaign. He was later appointed the Deputy Assistant to the President for Appointments and Scheduling. He formerly served on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.
JAY LEFKOWITZ formerly served as the Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy at the White House. He is now Special Envoy on Human Rights in North Korea. He has previously served as a member of the U.S. delegation to the International Conference on Anti-Semitism sponsored by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
ARI FLEISCHER was formerly the White House Press Secretary.
RICHARD PERLE was formerly the Chairman of the Department of Defense's Defense Policy Board (until 2003), and remains a member of that Board. Perle is said to be the person behind the US policy on Iraq. In a 2002 interview with PBS, he said that "[s]upport for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder. Now, it isn't going to be over in 24 hours, but it isn't going to be months either." (This was four years ago.) Perle advocated invading Iraq with only 40,000 troops, and complained about the calls by then Gen. Eric Shinseki to use 250,000 troops. On September 22, 2003 at a luncheon gathering at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, he stated that "a year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush. There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they've been liberated. And it is getting easier every day for Iraqis to express that sense of liberation."
Perle is now a Consultant to the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. (He was Assistant Secretary of Defense under Reagan.) He is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and a director of the Jerusalem Post. During the Reagan Administration, he was widely criticized for corruption after it was reported that he had recommended that the Army purchase an armaments system from an Israeli company that a year earlier had paid him $50,000 in consulting fees. He was also accused, in a report submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, of having breached his fiduciary responsibilities as a director of Hollinger International by authorizing several controversial transactions which diverted the company's net profit from the shareholders to the accounts of various executives. At Hollinger, Perle received over $3 million in bonuses on top of his salary, bringing the total to $5.4 million, and the investigating committee called for him to return the money.
AARON FRIEDBERG served from 2003 to 2005 in the office of the Vice President as deputy assistant for national-security affairs and director of policy planning.
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While only Chertoff, as Secretary of Homeland Security, is an official "member of the Cabinet," Bolten, as Chief of Staff, is also a "Cabinet-level official" and can attend Cabinet meetings. The other members named above are not technically members of the Cabinet or Cabinet-level officials, but nonetheless are Bush Administration insiders, many with significant policy influence.
Note also that Wolfowitz, Libby, Abrams, Zakheim, Friedberg, and Perle, as members of the neo-conservative "Project for a New American Century," were among the lead architects of the disastrous Iraq War. (Many other prominent neo-cons involved with the Project for a New American Century are also Jewish, including Yale professor Donald
Kagan, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, and Hudson Institute Fellow and former Editor-in-Chief of the American Jewish Committee's monthly magazine Norman Podhoretz.)
So, to sum up:
(1) Bush does have at least one Jewish Cabinet member, two Jewish "Cabinet-level officials," and numerous Jewish members of his administration.
(2) One of these Jews, Libby, has been indicted for perjury, obstruction of justice, and false statements for his involvement in the Valerie Plame CIA leak scandal (Libby). Another, Abrams, pleaded guilty to unlawfully withholding information from Congress during Iran Contra. A third, Perle, was accused of corruption in his business practices.
(3) At least six of these Jews are prominent neo-cons and members of the "Project for a New American Century" who helped engineer the fiasco in Iraq (Perle, Wolfowitz, Libby, Abrams, Zakheim, Friedberg).
All in all, it seems that the George W. Bush administration has not "screw[ed] up so stupendously" due to a LACK of Jews. There are plenty of Jews in his coterie. They are, however, almost to a one, corrupt, lawbreaking, power-hungry opportunists with delusional views of foreign policy. They got us into this Iraq quagmire. They surround Donald Rumsfeld and tell him what to do. They give the rest of us Jews a bad name, and cause many on the Left to wonder whether our foreign policy isn't in fact controlled by a "Zionist cabal." While I certainly disagree, in light of all the above information I can imagine why they might suspect this.
I, for one, wish that the Bush Administration HAD NEVER HAD ANY of these Jews in the first place. There would perhaps be 2400 fewer dead American soldiers, who knows how many tens of thousands fewer dead Iraqi civilians, and our country would not be hated around the world, nor have its hands tied militarily in dealing with the current situation with Iran.
God help us in November, 2006.
So...as a Jewish American, after doing all this research, I don't know what to feel. On one hand, as a card-carrying liberal, I agree with almost everything I read on the liberal blogs. On the other hand, I've occasionally felt threatened or angered by comments on the blogs that American foreign policy is controlled by "Zionists," that Iraq is about "Oil, Israel, [et al.]," and other vaguely anti-Semitic comments suggesting that "the Jews" control the Pentagon and the White House (much as it has long been alleged that "the Jews" control the media). I daresay that in some liberal circles, it's become okay to say this.
I always thought it was just faddish far-left anti-Semitism that generated these comments. But after putting together my compendium of Jewish officials in the Bush Administration to refute my mother, I found that a disproportionately high proportion of Bush's policy advisers and of the Iraq War planners are Jewish.
What should I make of this, as a Jew? One thing's for sure, these assholes give the rest of us Jews a bad name. I wonder how many liberals whom I agree with on every other substantive issue of policy now think that "the Jews" are responsible for Iraq (and now Iran) and all the rest. It's not hard to connect the dots above and get an anti-Semitic picture, although I think there are many other possible pictures to draw if you zoom out and add more dots. For example, Jews had nothing to do with Halliburton and the military-industrial complex, or (as far as I know) the oil industry, which as we all know is fundamentally responsible for this disastrous war to as great a degree or greater than the Project for a New American Century and any alleged Israel connection.
Still, this dramatis personae list I put together in innocently trying to refute the "no Jews in the Bush Administration" statement has shaken me up a bit. I'm interested in your comments -- whether or not you're Jewish -- are you worried that Bush's Jewish connections have poisoned the Left's opinion of American Jews? To the extent it has done so, do you think that latent anti-Semitism is to blame at all, or is the "anti-Zionism" rhetoric of ANSWER and the like justified in your opinion? If you are Jewish, like me, do you ever feel alienated by your brethren on the Left when they start talking of Zionist conspiracies and our Zionist U.S. foreign policy? What does actually reading all the facts I came across make you think? (And what about the AIPAC spying scandal?) I think that this is often a big elephant in the room when talking about AIPAC, Israel, and the neo-cons...
(If I were a super-tinfoil hat paranoid type, I might wonder whether the military-industrial-oil complex or anti-Semitic interests at the heart of the Right were using these Jews like puppets. You know, hand-pick a non-representative group of Jews that support a disastrous foreign policy, for pro-Israel purposes, that happens to align with the financial interests of Halliburton and the military-industrial complex. Then, when these Jews of course go on to propose a disastrous Iraq policy that enriches the Halliburtons and the military-industrial complex, Bush follows it. Then when public opinion sours on the war and gets restive, but after the Halliburtons get filty rich on war profiteering, blame it on "the Zionists" who sneakily infiltrated the government and caused us to invade and lose in Iraq -- like the Nazi Germans blamed Germany's WWI loss on subversive Jews. Then, the Halliburtons get to sit contentedly on their piles of ill-gotten wealth, while "the Jews" end up taking the fall. Many things make me doubt this is the plan, but I wouldn't put it past Goebbels--I mean Rove--to have thought of this. Incidentally, this also happened in the U.S. Civil War, where corrupt industrialists and military higher-ups were profiteering off of the war. They blamed it on "the Jews," and as a result, General U.S. Grant kicked all Jews out of Union-occupied Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi, lest those truly responsible for the war profiteering have to take the blame. Thankfully, President Lincoln overturned this military order. But anyway, this has all happened before in U.S. history, so it's not inconceivable it would happen again, even if a little paranoid to suggest at the moment.)
*Edit:* I should add that my Holocaust survivor grandfather, who lived through the Nuremberg Laws, scapegoating, warrantless spying, censorship, detention camps, concentration camps, torture, and everything else voted for Bush in 2004, in part because he feels that Bush is "a friend of Israel." I have no idea how to begin to respond to that.