My criticism of National Conservatism and its disciples and propagators at the Quincy Institute and The American Conservative magazine will become much more infrequent if at all, after the installment of the incoming Cabinet with each of the appointees having made it clear their loyalty to furthering Israeli Settler fascism, with this article one of the most insightful I've seen on Hazony, and his inspiration by Meir Kahane.
I only have one nitpick of it, which is to this point:
"Hazony’s one scruple was Kahane’s advocacy of non-state violence as a means of advancing his views. This Hazony did not like. The other stuff however was not just tolerable, but exemplary, it was what “needed to be said”.
. . .
"Whatever they and others might have thought they were attending, they were in fact taking part in an internationally organised propaganda effort that has a coherent political philosophy. And though National Conservatism abjures the street violence (Hazony condemned the January 6th riots in the US) that is a necessary characteristic of fascism, the question arises in my mind whether the ideology it espouses could not be described as “fascist adjacent” – in that it shares much of the politics, but not the methods."
Hazony in fact does not oppose "non-state violence," as that is exactly what the Israeli Setter movement of which he is part, and ideologists of for presenting their ideology to Europe and the U.S., in sanitized form, through media platforms like The American Conservative magazine and to promote their politicians through the same, and through the Quincy Institue, as I've shared ample evidence of, to include most flagrantly here perhaps when they even justified and incited Israeli genocide as Ramaswamy most flagrantly did, and Vance only slightly more subtly:
We’ll begin with a dead rabbi. A racist dead rabbi. Meir Kahane was a Brooklyn-born Orthodox Jew who, in the 80s, was active both in the US and in Israel. He founded first the Jewish Defence League in America, where he was convicted as a terrorist and imprisoned for organising bomb attacks on Soviet interests. Released, he set up an Israeli political party called Kach and was elected to the Knesset in 1984. He lost his seat when his party was banned from running for parliament in 1988 on the basis that it was racist and anti-democratic. He was assassinated by an Arab terrorist in New York in 1990.
That’s the barest of bones – more flesh comes later. For now we need to know that shortly after Kahane’s murder a young Israeli political philosopher called Yoram Hazony wrote an article in the Jerusalem Post about how he and others had been profoundly influenced by the rabbi. He had, he said, met Kahane at Princeton in the 8os.
Hazony’s “heartfelt farewell” told readers how he and like-minded American Jews “found ourselves drawn to Kahane in spite of ourselves because, unlike any other Jewish ‘leader’ we had ever met, he was willing to say what needed to be said. He returned to us the belief that Judaism could have truth on its side, that it could be something we didn’t have to embarrassed about, that we should be proud to wear a kipa and make our stand on the world stage as Jews.”
Hazony’s one scruple was Kahane’s advocacy of non-state violence as a means of advancing his views. This Hazony did not like. The other stuff however was not just tolerable, but exemplary, it was what “needed to be said”.
Shouting the needful: Hazony’s hero. Meir Kahane in Jerusalem 1986. Picture David H. Wells/Corbis via Getty Images
This, apparently, also needed to be said. In September 1984 the Washington Post reported a rally held by Kahane at the Silver Spring Jewish Center in Maryland. In his address Kahane talks about the problem of “Arabs” (ie Palestinians) living in Israel and the occupied West Bank. “Now”, he asks his audience, “how do we get the Arabs out?" Well, first by electing him to government in Israel. He continues, "picture Arabs putting on the radio one morning and hearing that the new minister of defence is Meir Kahane”. The Post reporter says the audience at this point laugh and applaud. Kahane: "How will we get them out? When they hear that, they'll pack themselves. I understand the Arabs [Reminder: Kahane was born and raised in New York]. They understand me . . .If the Arabs are convinced that I am that determined to move them out, that nothing will stop me -- 'He's so mad, he's so insane, nothing will stop him' -- then they'll stop and say to themselves, 'Now, look, the man will throw us out. Maybe it's better to leave with the money and leave quietly than to be thrown out without the money, since he apparently will do it anyhow.'”
In an interview following the speech he is questioned as to what happens if Palestinians won’t take the money? "I'm not asking them," he replies, "They'll be thrown out.” They could then find homes in the Arab world, in places like “Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq”. Scripture, according to Kahane, has ordained that Jews should occupy the whole land of Greater Israel. “Arabs” can only stay if they convert to Judaism or agree to lose rights of citizenship. Otherwise…
This report was just an example of the rabbi’s approach. In Israel itself Kahane’s message was even more incendiary, he called Palestinians “Arab dogs” and, following the murder of two Israelis in Jerusalem’s old city by a Palestinian terrorist in 1989, Kahane was part of a revenging mob chanting “death to the Arabs” which tried to lynch two Palestinian bystanders.
Nor did the violence incited by his language die with him. Third on Kahane’s party list for the Knesset in 1984 was another Brooklyn-born Jew called Baruch Goldstein. In February 1994, as the Oslo Accords were being implemented, Goldstein dressed up as an army reservist, went to the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron in the occupied West Bank, and massacred 29 unarmed Palestinians. Formerly a doctor in the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba, Goldstein’s grave is opposite a park named for Meir Kahane.
I’m telling you all this in my second piece about National Conservatism because Kahane is Hazony’s hero and Hazony – who repudiated the Oslo peace accords on the basis that they “granted control over the geographic core of ancient Israel to the PLO —and thus explicitly abjured the return to these areas promised by the biblical prophets” - is the political philosopher and “Bible scholar” who invented National Conservatism and also the organising genius behind the event in London a fortnight ago. The one that attracted several leading Conservative politicians to speak at it, as well as Lord Frost. The one that was written up so positively by the two Times columnists who both spoke at it.
Whatever they and others might have thought they were attending, they were in fact taking part in an internationally organised propaganda effort that has a coherent political philosophy. And though National Conservatism abjures the street violence (Hazony condemned the January 6th riots in the US) that is a necessary characteristic of fascism, the question arises in my mind whether the ideology it espouses could not be described as “fascist adjacent” – in that it shares much of the politics, but not the methods. See what you think.
Hazony addresses the faithful. Image: JNS
A Statement of Principles
In July last year the American Conservative magazine published a National Conservative “Statement of Principles” on behalf of an organisation called the Edmund Burke Foundation. Nine of the 72 signatories appeared at the event in London two weeks ago, some as speakers and others to chair sessions. The significant majority of signatories were American. They included the tech multi-billionaire Peter Thiel, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Anton. The draft authors consisted of nine men, including Yoram Hazony.
It begins with a jeremiad: “We are citizens of Western nations who have watched with alarm as the traditional beliefs, institutions, and liberties underpinning life in the countries we love have been progressively undermined and overthrown.” The authors wish to see this reversed “by restoring a proper public orientation toward patriotism and courage, honor and loyalty, religion and wisdom, congregation and family, man and woman, the sabbath and the sacred, and reason and justice” and rejecting “universalist ideologies now seeking to impose a homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe”. For political philosophers, it appears, nothing is as imposing as an abstraction.
Ten principles are then affirmed. I won’t list them all, but the first is the idea that the nation state is the proper basis for all representation and identification. The authors do not address the problem of what to do when nation states don’t agree on what their borders are and therefore who should identify with them and Principle Two – the rejection of “globalism” (ie the EU, the UN, the International Criminal Court etc) specifically rules out any internationally adjudicated set of rules for resolving such conflicts.
Principle Three extols the metaphysical virtues of the nation-state, which should be “a strong but limited state, subject to constitutional restraints and a division of powers”, but lest anyone get the wrong idea about exactly how powers are divided, “we recommend a drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state and the policy-making judiciary that displace legislatures”. No Lady Hales, refugee conventions or ECHRs for us, thank you very much. And just in case things get out of hand, “in those states or subdivisions in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order”. Not just lawlessness, note, but immorality and dissolution. Iran’s Supreme Council couldn’t have put it better.
Coming back into your lives. God as depicted by Vittore Carpaccio. Bridgeman Art Library
Principle Four brings God (or rather, the approved God) back into political life. “The Bible” say the National Conservatives “should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.” Naturally the authors do not deal with the possibility that Christians (or Jews, in the case of Israel) might dispute among themselves what the inheritance actually is or what the moral vision perceives. They know, and that is enough.
But in Principle Seven (Public Research) the authors have noticed that there may be significant dissent from the preceding principles, not least in institutions of higher learning. So, “we recognize that most universities are at this point partisan and globalist in orientation and vehemently opposed to nationalist and conservative ideas. Such institutions do not deserve taxpayer support unless they rededicate themselves to the national interest. Education policy should serve manifest national needs.”
“Family and Children” are the subject of Principle Eight, which (as you will probably have anticipated by now) asserts that “the traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilisation” That being the case “the disintegration of the family”, which is due in no small part to “ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation” (alas, unspecified) is to be reversed by optimising – by means (again unspecified) – the “economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising”.
Principle Nine concerns immigration where the authors, in true Trumpian style “call for much more restrictive policies until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies. Restrictive policies may sometimes include a moratorium on immigration.” May they?
Hazony’s other hero
Enter Burke, involuntarily…
Hazony himself published a tome in 2018, The Virtue of Nationalism, which has pretty much become the source text of the National Conservative movement (I like the fact that his first book, published in 1993, was entitled The Political Philosophy of Jeremiah). As the founder of The Edmund Burke Foundation (which has organised several National Conservatism conferences in the US, Italy, Hungary and the UK since 2019) Hazony not only spoke at the London event but was warmly invoked by several of the main speakers. He is, if you like, their Meir Kahane.
I won’t bother with analysing the posthumous use of the Anglo Irish imperialist Edmund Burke (Burke believed, for example, that India should be governed by commissioners based in London) as a figurehead for an international nationalist outfit. It’s an affectation, of course, but no worse than many. The Foundation’s own skimpy website describes the American based organisation as “a public affairs institute founded in January 2019 with the aim of strengthening the principles of national conservatism in Western and other democratic countries” and promises to “pursue research, educational and publishing ventures directed toward this end.” Readers may like to check out video programmes such as NatConTalk produced by the EBF.
Hazony is the chairman of the EBF and the President is a man called David Brog, who (Wikipedia tells us) “helped found Christians United For Israel (CUFI), an American pro-Israel Christian organization” – ie an outfit appealing to US evangelicals who take the view (to quote one pastor) that “the ethnic nation of Israel has a future in the plan of God in which He will restore her to the Promised Land in fulfillment of the covenant promises He made in the Old Testament.” And what devout Christian wouldn't give any money he had spare in order to help the Almighty with his plan?
Follow the money
This connection is apparent through the funding of the EBF. In the US EBF’s principal funders in its first year were the Jewish Philosophy Fund (itself headed by one Yoram Hazony) to the tune of $174k. Indeed the EBF was the only listed beneficiary of the Fund, which itself was almost entirely funded by the Ner Tzion Foundation of Boca Raton in Florida, which appears to be a family fund run by a Barry Klein described by the Inside Philanthropy website as primarily funding “grantmaking related to Jewish Causes and Israel, as well as health, youth development, and the arts”.
The other principal contributor to the EBF was the Thomas D. Klingenstein Fund ($100k). Klingenstein is one of the signatories to the Statement of Principles, where he is listed as representing the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, a far right pro-Trump outfit to which the Klingenstein Fund contributed nearly $2.5 million in the same year.
Here just a word about Hazony’s rhetoric and to reflect for a moment on what intellectual crimes are committed in the name of “political philosophy” (it was little wonder that the most sceptical voices at the National Conservatism Conference in London belonged to the platform historians, who naturally tend towards an empiricism that many philosophers seem to eschew).
So Hazony’s own contribution, delivered on the first day, began with praise for the Brexit vote with which the international nationalist “fightback” against globalism had begun, but then lamented the wasting in Britain of the subsequent years of national renewal. Instead “woke neo-Marxism” was taking over, a phenomenon that “began with the idea of the destruction of God and Scripture” (at which point I confess I muttered under my breath, “what the fuck is he talking about?”). Then he was on to how Henry VIII had created the English or British nation (he seemed unsure about the distinction) by repudiating the globalist Pope. Then it was economics and how England/Britain had been the great bastion of economic protectionism for 300 years, from the wool policies of Henry VII – presumably until the mistaken free market turn of the late Victorians. The economics of the Empire did not rate a mention, naturally.
Having praised protectionism Hazony finished off by advocating the return of national service in the UK. It was an intellectually vacuous speech and the audience of 700 or so mostly young men - whose families I surmised from their suits and hairstyles would be among the first to get them exemption from such service (see under “Trump”) - applauded as though offered real insight.
GB News’s favourite theologian on “Woke Universities”.
Lazy Orr what?
Author’s note (and whose else’s would it be?): The incontinent use of often contradictory labels like “woke’, “individualist”, “Marxist” and “liberal” either separately or composited, as though they were valid and overlapping analytical categories was testimony to the intellectual laziness of the whole event - no definitions were ever offered. And few speeches were lazier than that of the UK chairman of the EBF, the corporate lawyer-turned-assistant professor of philosophy of religion at Cambridge University, James Orr. In a speech entitled ‘Faith, Family, Flag and Freedom” as well as painting a totally bizarre picture of life in London, Orr managed to entirely confuse immigration policy with asylum policy and advocate significant reductions in legal migration by exiting the European Convention on Human Rights. Given that this was his one concrete proposal, it was suggestive of his attention to the real world.
Indeed only two speeches stood out for their ideological coherence - those of the commentator Melanie Phillips (whose attack on the Conservative party received the largest standing ovation of the three days) and the Professor-turning-politician, Matthew Goodwin. And more on them and what that may mean in the last instalment.
Next, however, the fascinating story of the NatCons and the Hungarian connection. The question is, can you bear it? If you can you’ll have to become a paid subscriber. A boy has to make a living. In the meantime…
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