Oliver Wiseman and Ayaan Hirsi Ali on: 'The ideological insurgency against the Jewish people'

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By The Free Press

It’s Monday, June 29. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Arthur Brooks on the secret to a fulfilling life; Jed Rubenfeld on a blockbuster Supreme Court decision; Olivia Reingold on how New York’s political establishment is scrambling to stop Zohran Mamdani; River Page on the revisionist history of Pride Month; and much more.

But first: The ideological insurgency against the Jewish people.

Glastonbury is a music festival organized by hippie farmers in the southwest of England. For years it’s been a place people go to camp, drink too much cider, and listen to music. At least, that was roughly the deal when I skipped school to attend 18 years ago. But if the footage out of Somerset this weekend is anything to go by, moments at this year’s festival resembled a hate rally.

In a performance on Saturday afternoon, the front man of the punk duo Bob Vylan led the crowd in anti-Israel chants. Among them: “From the river to the sea,” and perhaps most disturbingly: “Death, death to the IDF.” Thousands in the crowd joined in. This was on one of the festival’s main stages, and broadcast live on the BBC.

The presence of a performer like this, chanting things like this, with thousands joining in, at a mainstream festival is deeply troubling. And the incident was quickly condemned by British prime minister Keir Starmer. But if you think these were just the hateful chants of a few bad apples, you’re missing the point, says Ayaan Hirsi Ali. They are part of something much bigger, much scarier, she argues: a movement that wants to cleanse the culture. First, of Israel. Then, of Jews. Then, of the rest of us.

—Oliver Wiseman

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Glastonbury—and the Purge of the Jews

Editor: Neither Oliver Wiseman nor Ayaan Hirsi Ali understand that Hip-Hop has become the voice of ‘Popular Resistance’, across language and time: Glastonbury is its natural place! Both Wiseman & Hirsi Ali are not just the fellow travelers, of the Zionist Faschist State, but its propagandists, as the number of dead,wounded, and murdered lie under the rubble as yet to be found!

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Editor: The Neo-Cons have a long and toxic American History: Oliver Wiseman & Ayaan Hirsi Ali share in that legacy!

Fathers and Sons

By Timothy Noah

Jan. 13, 2008

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/books/review/Noah-t.html

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The first half of Heilbrunn’s book relates neoconservatism’s origins and its journey to the brink of political power in the late 1970s. It’s a familiar tale, told better in “The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America’s Politics,” published in 1979 by Peter Steinfels (then the executive editor of Commonweal and now a columnist on religion for The New York Times). Steinfels came at the neocons from farther to the left than Heilbrunn and consequently was more critical. But the Steinfels book was also more rigorously analytic and, strangely, more generous in granting neocons their due as thinkers. Chalk it up to the narcissism of small differences. As best I can make out, Heilbrunn retains most of the foreign-policy views that he held before but applies them with greater judiciousness, and can no longer bear the sight of those who don’t. (The neocons’ domestic policies seem to interest Heilbrunn not at all; he scarcely mentions them.)

From both Steinfels and Heilbrunn, we learn that neoconservatism was the final stop of an ideological journey for a group of New York intellectuals, typically the children of Jewish immigrants, that began during the early 1940s in Alcove 1 of the cafeteria at City College. Alcove 1 was the gathering place for a group of brilliant young Trotskyists that included Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer and Melvin Lasky. Along with Irving Howe, who would later break with Trotskyism but not with the left, and Daniel Bell, who never accepted Marxist orthodoxies in any form, the Alcove 1 Trotskyists waged intellectual battle with the Stalinists in Alcove 2, who vastly outnumbered them.

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From both Steinfels and Heilbrunn, we learn that neoconservatism was the final stop of an ideological journey for a group of New York intellectuals, typically the children of Jewish immigrants, that began during the early 1940s in Alcove 1 of the cafeteria at City College. Alcove 1 was the gathering place for a group of brilliant young Trotskyists that included Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer and Melvin Lasky. Along with Irving Howe, who would later break with Trotskyism but not with the left, and Daniel Bell, who never accepted Marxist orthodoxies in any form, the Alcove 1 Trotskyists waged intellectual battle with the Stalinists in Alcove 2, who vastly outnumbered them.

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Coaxed by a diverse group of thinkers that included Sidney Hook, Reinhold Niebuhr and Samuel M. Levitas, known as Sol, the veterans of Alcove 1 eventually drifted away from Trotskyism, becoming stalwarts of the anti-Communist left, where they were joined by Norman Podhoretz, then a young literary scholar. With the advent of the cold war, the proto-neocons pushed for a hard line against the Soviet Union, sometimes harder than that of anti-Communist liberals like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and George F. Kennan; few if any of them expressed concern when they discovered that Encounter, a magazine that Irving Kristol co-founded in 1952, was secretly underwritten by the Central Intelligence Agency. The student radicalism of the late 1960s disillusioned proto-neocons about the left; George McGovern’s landslide defeat in 1972 disillusioned many of them about mainstream liberalism and the Democratic Party; and after Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, a number of them stopped resisting the “conservative” label, joined the Republican Party and began to exercise power.

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2 - The Premature Jewish Neoconservatives

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012

Murray Friedman

Summary

For poor, young Jewish intellectuals in New York in the 1930s, City College was where the action was. In dingy, horseshoe-shaped alcoves lining the college lunchroom, the students spent hour after hour in ideological debate that was often more spirited and stimulating than the classroom lectures.

There were separate alcoves for Catholics, Zionists, and Orthodox Jews, but the pro-Stalinist and anti-Stalinist radicals made the most noise and commanded the most attention. The Stalinists in Alcove Two outnumbered the other factions and controlled the student newspaper, which defended the Moscow trials in editorials. They had close to fifty allies among City College's left-leaning faculty, and, Irving Howe remembered, one in their group, Julius Rosenberg, would later be executed along with his wife, Ethel, for conspiring to steal America's atomic secrets.

The group in Alcove One was a mixed bag. Although they were all pretty radical in their college days, many would later make their names as prominent neoconservatives. They were united in their opposition to the Soviet dictator and often sought to provoke his backers (who were not permitted to speak to them) in Alcove Two. On other political issues, however, they disagreed with one another as often as not. For example, while Howe and Irving Kristol backed the revolutionist Leon Trotsky, who broke away from Stalin and was later murdered in Mexico, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell were anti-Trotskyites.

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https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/neoconservative-revolution/premature-jewish-neoconservatives/03421AA4A187DB7E0773CBE2740548EE

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