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Old March 19th, 2014 #52
Alex Linder
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What was especially noteworthy about him, however, was his penchant for intellectual honesty. Joe Sobran sought to pursue truth, even when it would lead to the destruction of his brilliant career and ultimately contribute to his early death. Specifically, it was his violation of the taboo pertaining to Jewish power and the U.S. Israelocentric foreign policy that led to his fall. In the 1980s, Sobran was the rising senior editor at William Buckley's National Review, and he seemed to be destined for a brilliant future. But owing to pressure from powerful pro-Zionist Jews such as Norman Podhoretz, that future never materialized, and Buckley ultimately fired Sobran in October 1993. Despite Buckley's close relationship with Sobran, who had served 21 years with National Review — 18 as senior editor — Buckley caved in to pro-Zionist Jewish pressure.

It was apparent that Buckley did not want to fire Sobran and, in fact, was pressured for a number of years before doing so. As Sobran wrote in "How I Was Fired by Bill Buckley":

Quote:
Bill and I had been good friends for most of the 21 years I'd worked for him. But the friendship was strained in 1986, when he took the side of my attackers in a row over Israel. When Norman Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter accused me of "anti-Semitism," Bill wrote a weird public disavowal of my columns on Israel, saying in effect that I wasn't anti-Semitic, but deserved to be called anti-Semitic. What made it so bad was that I knew he didn't even believe what he was saying. It was a failure of nerve. That was clear even from the disavowal itself, which included a sweaty digression on Jewish retaliatory power.

Earlier that year, he'd taken me to dinner to warn me of the dangers of being "perceived," as they say, as an anti-Semite. His book [In Search of Anti-Semitism] makes it sound like a long campaign to set me straight, but it wasn't like that at all. Bill didn't suggest I'd done anything wrong or that he disagreed with anything I'd written. But Norman Podhoretz was mad at me. That was enough.... I continued in my wicked ways, criticizing Israel as an albatross for the U.S. In May [1993] the Zionist apparat went public in its smear against me, throwing the National Review into a total panic. There was hysteria in Bill's apartment the night he and the other senior editors discussed it: the disavowal had been prepared behind my back. This was the first I'd heard of it. Bill's statement didn't even mention the Podhoretzes by name, as if he was protecting their anonymity. Every other published account of the incident, on both sides, spoke freely of the Podhoretzes' role; but for some reason, National Review tried to pretend they had nothing to do with it. Furthermore, all responses from the magazine's readers — who were overwhelmingly on my side — were suppressed.... [Most establishment obituaries leave out the Podhoretz factor in Buckley's decision to remove Sobran.]

... With Bill's statement, National Review became, by default, a neoconservative magazine. It had virtually announced that its avowed principles didn't apply to Israel, and that its conservatism had no real separate existence from that of Commentary or The Public Interest.
National Review would champion the neocon Israelocentric war policy in the Middle East. It would have as regular writers such neocon stalwarts as Michael Ledeen. And some of the gentiles at National Review would outdo even the Jewish neocons in their extreme opinions about Muslims, as was the case when senior editor Rich Lowry would propose "nuking" Mecca in 2002 as retaliation for a terrorist attack. As an indication of the exceedingly taboo question of Jewish power, it should be noted that Lowry remained as senior editor of National Review even though he proposed the mass murder of innocent Muslims, while Sobran was removed for maintaining that pro-Israel Jews were influential in shaping U.S. Middle East policy, an obvious truth known to all people with a knowledge of American politics.



[...]

Being removed from National Review was only part of Sobran's punishment, which I think illustrates that there was nothing uniquely craven about Buckley's actions. Buckley acted the way successful people in the United States believe they must act if they are to remain successful. Sobran would also lose his position as commentator on the CBS Radio program "Spectrum," where he had been featured for 21 years, and most newspaper outlets would cancel his syndicated column. And he would be blacklisted not only by other mainstream venues but even by many alternative ones, to the extent that he could not earn a living and would spend his later years in poverty, supported by a few friends but abandoned by the powerful. It should be added that even the self-proclaimed conservative opposition to the neoconservatives, the much ballyhooed magazine The American Conservative, would exclude him from its pages. Chronicles, too, would suspend him for a period of time.

http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_sobran.htm