The Anti-Semites and Their Betrayal of Conservatism

By Geoffrey Clarfield

Peter Wood is the Executive Director of the National Association for Scholars, one of the best academic organizations in the US pushing back against Woke.He is also a brilliant anthropologist, a Christian, a friend of the West and Israel and, a colleague who is so close that I feel privileged to call him  my friend.  I hope you agree that this piece, published recently in Minding the Campus,  deserves a wide audience.

As a young man, I was invited to dinner at the home of a senior professor at a respected liberal arts college. A man of conservative views and polished manners, he was cordial and witty. After dinner, he took me into his well-appointed library filled with the volumes that represented glories of Western art and literature from several hundred years. He sat me down for a serious conversation about culture—or, perhaps better put, Culture.  Here were the plays of Racine, the Memoirs of General Lafayette, essays by Jacques Barzun, tomes on art history, and gilded 19th century editions of classic works.  

The professor was European by birth, spoke a variety of languages, and was well published in history and literature. But as he warmed to conversation, he suddenly became confidential. This started with questions about how I, as an anthropologist, could explain the fall of once flourishing nations and empires. They really were just the precipice from which he was about to launch his own explanation:

Because of the Jews. It was the Jews who ruined Spain in revenge for Ferdinand and Isabella expelling them in 1492. Contrariwise, England rose to its status as a world power because Cromwell, in 1655, readmitted Jews after a 400-year ban. The Jews everywhere pulled the strings, punishing their persecutors and rewarding their benefactors. But even the benefactors eventually suffered from Jewish duplicity.

I listened in astonishment for more than an hour of this before excusing myself. It was the first time I encountered such a frank—and highly intellectualized—expression of anti-Semitism. And for many years, it stood out to me as a singular experience.

In the 1950s, William F. Buckley, Jr. rose to prominence in a newly refurbished conservative movement. One of his most important steps was to expel the anti-Semitic conservatives, which is why my conversation with the professor in his library struck me as a strange aberration. Late in his life, Buckley drew the same line again when he rebuked Patrick Buchanan for calling American Jews a “fifth column” for Israel and other such Jew-baiting pronouncements.

That was then. Today, the conservative movement has become a tree with many branches. There is no Buckley figure ready to saw off the diseased limbs.

This is just the first few paragraphs as an extract; I recommend you read it all here.