by Jack Cashill

Published Novemeber 10, 2005
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

“ The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.”

With that one sentence, delivered in Des Moines in September 1939, aviator and America First spokesman Charles Lindbergh condemned himself to pariah status in FDR’s America.

“No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany,” Linbergh noted later in the speech, but it didn’t matter. The political damage had been done. Indeed, when Lindbergh tried to enlist after Pearl Harbor, FDR personally intervened to squash his bid.

On June 14, 2003, when former ambassador Joseph Wilson spoke at the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC), he too laid the blame for an allegedly misbegotten war at the foot of an endangered class of Jews. The major difference, though, is that Lindbergh’s analysis of Europe showed more sympathy for those at risk than did Wilson’s analysis of the Mideast. In his conspiratorial zeal, Wilson sheds useful light on the not so subtle anti-Semitism oozing through the cracks in the left’s kumbaya façade.

“I remain of the view,” Wilson tells the EPIC forum crowd two months after the fall of Baghdad, “that we will find chemical and biological weapons, and we may well find something that indicates that Saddam's regime maintained an interest in nuclear weapons.” Wilson made this extraordinary statement after he had started leaking to the media about President Bush’s alleged WMD deceptions and just weeks before his celebrated New York Times op-ed piece. This one sentence would seem to undercut the argument waged by him and literally millions of other self-deluding progressives around the world that “Bush lied” about Iraq’s WMD threat. If Bush’s most hostile critics in the intelligence community believed Saddam possessed such weapons, one has to ask why Bush would have needed to fabricate evidence.

In July 2003, however, Wilson was not denying the existence of weapons of mass destruction. He was suggesting instead that there was an altogether different agenda behind the drive to liberate Iraq, a much more sinister one. Given America’s “real agenda,” Wilson finds it “not surprising” that Saddam would pursue nuclear weapons “in a part of the world where you do have a nuclear-armed country, an enemy of yours, which is just a country away from you." The enemy he refers to here is not Iran, but Israel.

Before this friendly, left-leaning audience, Wilson casually dismisses the liberation of Iraq. Iraq’s terrorist connections, and the talk of WMDs as mere distractions. In Wilson’s book, Israel is the primary reason the United States went to war against Iraq. He might have made a credible case if he spoke of the need to defend the one functioning democracy in that benighted part of the world, to forestall a second Holocaust, to prevent Saddam from destroying Tel Aviv with a few well-aimed VX-tipped missiles, or even to stop him from commissioning suicide bombers. But to do so might impute sensible motives to Bush and his shadowy neocon advisors.

No, as Wilson sees it, the Iraq war was waged for no nobler purpose than “to make Sharon’s life easier.” By “easier” he means that the removal of Saddam among other forced changes in the region would “provide the Israeli government with greater wherewithal to impose its terms and conditions on the Palestinian people.”

As Wilson explains, these plans were hatched by Richard Perle and his study group some years back. And now, as a result, “. . .American boys and girls are dying for Israel.” Wilson does not specify that Richard Perle or Ken Adelman, whom he also mentions, are Jewish. That much is understood. On the left, “neocon” has become code for “Jew.” And as with World War II, it is the Jews who have prodded us into war.

Sharing the podium with Wilson during the question and answer session was his ally, Ray McGovern, representing a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. Some time later, McGovern gave a talk to a group at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington in a forum organized by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.

While some members of the audience were distributing literature accusing Israel of staging the 9-11 attacks, McGovern was telling Conyers and other House Democrats that the Iraq War was part of an effort to enable Israel to "dominate that part of the world."

This potentially embarrassing public display goaded DNC Director Howard Dean into talk if not action. "As for any inferences that the United States went to war so Israel could 'dominate' the Middle East or that Israel was in any way behind the horrific September 11th attacks on America,” said Dean in response, “let me say unequivocally that such statements are nothing but vile, anti-Semitic rhetoric.”

On the question of ant-Semitism, as on the questions of honesty and ethics, Joseph Wilson apparently gets to play by his own set of rules.

And oh, by the way, Wilson’s brief bio in the program for the EPIC event, published a month before the “treasonous” Novak revelations, notes that Wilson is “married to the former Valerie Plame.” Yes, that Valerie Plame, the secret agent.

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