THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, April 15, 1995 TAG: 9504150011
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A7 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
DATELINE: BOSTON LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
In myth there was a sword so sharp that a man decapitated by it did not know until he tried to nod. Something like that has happened to Pat Robertson, leader of the Christian Coalition, and to the conservative intellectuals who have allied themselves with him.
The sword was wielded by Michael Lind of Harpers magazine. It was a sword of simple truth. Lind read Robertson's 1991 book, The New World Order. In February, in The New York Review of Books, he told us what was in it.
Robertson said in his book that George Bush, Jimmy Carter and others might well be ``unwittingly carrying out the mission and mouthing the phrases of a tightly knit cabal whose goal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer and his followers.''
This satanic plot was traced by Robertson to ``a small secret society called the Order of the Illuminati'' founded in 1776 by ``a Bavarian professor named Adam Weis-haupt.'' The Illuminati infiltrated the Freemasons, but they needed money. Robertson wrote:
``The headquarters of Illuminated Freemasonry moved to Frankfurt, a center controlled by the Rothschild family. It is reported that in Frankfurt, Jews for the first time were admitted to the order of Freemasons. . . . New money suddenly poured into the Frankfurt lodge, and from there a well-funed plan for world revolution was carried forth.''
According to Robertson, the Illuminati planned the French Revolution, commissioned Marx and Engels to write The Communist Manifesto and through the banker Paul Warburg created the Federal Reserve system. Another conspirator, the banker Jacob Schiff, ``gave the essential seed money to finance the Russian Revolution.''
All of that sounds like the paranoid classics of anti-Semitism. Robertson did not speak of a Jewish conspiracy. But one after another of the bankers and revolutionaries he pictured as conspirators were Jews.
When my colleague Frank Rich wrote about Lind's work last month, Robertson denied that he was anti-Jewish. His book was ``carefully researched,'' he said, ``and contains seven single-spaced pages of bibliography from original historical sources.''
Now Lind and Jacob Heilbrunn of Georgetown University, in the April 20 New York Review, point out what Robertson did not mention: that his book relied heavily on a British anti-Semitic writer of the 1920s, Nesta H. Webster. Indeed, one sometimes thinks of plagiarism.
Thus Ms. Webster wrote that Weis-haupt, supposed founder of the Illuminati, was ``indoctrinated into Egyptian cultism by a certain merchant of unknown origin from Jutland, named Kolmer. . . .'' Robertson wrote: ``Weishaupt had been indoctrinated into Egyptian occultism in 1771 by a merchant of unknown origin named Kolmer.''
Ms. Webster wrote that ``a power'' sought to destroy ``all ordered government in every country. . . . What is this power? A large body of opinion replies: the Jewish power.''
In the winter issue of the quarterly Dissent, Lind's sword struck another target: conservative intellectuals. The Kristols, Podhoretzes and others, he said, had bent their knees to Pat Robertson because of the Christian Coalition's political power. They had lost all intellectual integrity and were reduced to such things as defending ``creationism'' - teaching children ``that the dinosaurs lived with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and drowned in Noah's Flood.''
Conservative magazines savaged Lind. The New Criterion said he had used ``Marxian techniques.'' National Review said ``the liberal establishment'' had got him ``to do a hit on Pat Robertson.'' In fact Lind, as a conservative, had edited and written for several of the conservative journals. Heilbrunn also has a conservative background.
Perhaps Pat Robertson in his heart is not an anti-Semite. He just thinks there's a satanic conspiracy led by Jews that has threatened the world for centuries. The best you can make of such a defense is that he is a plain, ordinary crackpot. And the intellectual conservatives defend him because he lines up votes for the Republican Party. As Jim Farley might have said, ``He's our crackpot.'' MEMO: Mr. Lewis is a columnist for The New York Times, 122 E. 42nd St., New
York, N.Y. 10168.
(Editor's note: Pat Robertson explicitly denies that he is
anti-Semitic. In ``A Reply to My Critics,'' published in the April 12
Wall Street Journal,'' Mr. Robertson writes: ``On my daily television
program, I held up a copy of `Spotlight,' and denounced the
anti-Semitism of the Liberty Lobby and other Holocaust deniers. On
national television prior to the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial election,
I rejected the candidacy of former neo-Nazi and clansman David Duke with
these words, `It's very dangerous in America to foster hate, and racial
hatred, hatred of the Jews, bigotry - that kind of thing. It is
something we just don't need in this country.' '')
by CNB