The Desert Advocate should dump Buchanan column

In his Aug. 23 Advocate column, Pat Buchanan bristles at the prospect of being deemed “anti‑Semitic” simply for criticizing Israel on political issues.

Pat Buchanan, an anti‑Semite? Let the record speak for itself.

In October 1990, Buchanan described Capitol Hill as “Israeli‑occupied territory.”

Referring to the Gulf crisis on TV’s “The McLaughlin Group” in August 1990, he said: “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 United States.”

Regardless of Adolf Hitler’s anti‑Semitic and genocidal behavior, wrote Buchanan in a 1977 column, the Führer was “an individual of great courage” who possessed “extraordinary gifts.”

During the 1990s, Poland proposed building a Catholic convent outside the gates of Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi concentration camp where countless numbers of Jews perished during Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Seeing this plan as an attempt to “de‑Judaize” the Holocaust, many Jews and their sympathizers expressed pain and outrage, but not Buchanan.

Expressing “Catholic rage,” a fulminating Buchanan wrote that “to orthodox Catholics, the demand that we be more ‘sensitive’ to Jewish concerns is becoming a joke.” In his blistering column, Buchanan warned that “the slumbering giant of Catholicism may be about to awaken,” and that the target of their wrath would be “those who so evidently despise our church”–that is to say, “the Jews”

This “orthodox Catholic” evidently rejects the words of “Nostra Aetate,” issued by the Vatican in 1965 and which declares anti‑Semitism “a sin against God.”

Pat Buchanan has come to the defense of such notorious Nazi war criminals as Klaus Barbie (the “Butcher of Lyon”) and Karl Linnas, and it was he who urged President Ronald Reagan–over worldwide protests–to visit Germany’s Bitburg cemetery, where lie the bones of Nazi SS troops. It was Buchanan who reportedly penned Reagan’s incredible line that the SS soldiers buried there were “victims just as surely as the  victims in the concentration camps.”

Many years ago, Buchanan began rubbing elbows with the Holocaust deniers, even expressing doubt about the gassing of Jews at Treblinka.

Asked to produce the source of his information about the notorious death camp, he replied that, “somebody sent it to me.”

In 1990, William F. Buckley Jr., conservatism’s leading intellectual and a former Buchanan mentor, wrote a 20,000‑word National Review essay denouncing anti‑Semitism. About Buchanan, Buckley wrote: “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge,” thereby dumping the columnist from the ranks of respectable conservatism.

Why doesn’t The Desert Advocate, a respectable and excellent community newspaper, dump him too?

Joe Jordan

Black Canyon