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an action in the courts, where there is a strong commitment
to
the First
Amendment, you'd lose. I'm also leery of that kind of tactic myself be–
cause of its chilling effect on speech.
Question:
Why do they have the right
to
assert what is "wrong" with
the Jews?
Norman Podhoretz:
Well, presumably we all have the right to say just
about anything in this country, which sometimes becomes extremely un–
comfortable. That's a price many people are willing to pay and others
are not so willing to pay, depending on whose ox is being gored.
Question:
How do you feel about the anti-Semitism of President Nixon,
and also about President Reagan's visit to Bitburg?
Norman Podhoretz:
Nixon's anti-Semitism was, so far as I know, pri–
vately expressed in the form of cracks about Jews to his intimates. He
was not in any public sense, or any political sense, an anti-Semite, and in
fact Rabin himself said, on the occasion of Nixon's death, that Nixon
had been a very strong supporter and friend of Israel. To me, inciden–
tally, as I've often written, attitudes toward Israel have been the single
most important touchstone of attitudes toward Jews in general, in the
last twenty-five years or so. I don't see how anyone who supports Israel
can be considered anti-Semitic.
I condemned Reagan's visit
to
Bitburg, and I thought it was a very
bad thing for him
to
have done, but I know of no evidence whatever
that Reagan was or is anti-Semitic even
to
the extent that Nixon was.
As far as I know, nobody has accused Reagan even of making cracks
about Jews in private. I think the Bitburg visit was a highly ill-advised
action he took in order
to
help Chancellor Kohl of Germany through
an electoral crisis. I don't think he should have done it, and I gather
that he himself regretted having done it.
I once had a public debate in print with Bill Buckley on the issue of
Sobran and Buchanan. Buckley got angry because at one point in this
debate I said that Sobran and Buchanan were anti-Semites. Although he
was willing to condemn what they had written as anti-Semitic, he ob–
jected to calling them anti-Semites. Sobran, he argued, was not an anti–
Semite: through carelessness, or stupidity, or whatever, he had written
bad things, but in fact he was not an anti-Semite in his heart. My answer
was that I had no way of probing the human heart; all I could do was
judge the man's words and judge him by those words.
I think that is a good guideline in these discussions. That is, we need
