Are Neocons Losing ‘Antisemite’ As a Blanket Smear?
War hawks have long insisted that those who question American foreign policy have bigoted reasons. That may have come to an end.
The conservative radio legend Mark Levin recently insinuated that President Donald Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, might be anti-Semitic.
Witkoff is Jewish.
Describing the “neocon element” in an interview with Breitbart, Witkoff said, “In their minds, anything that is of a military nature to be a solution to that problem, they have a bias towards that. They give no consideration whatsoever on what the consequences are on that.”
Witkoff then added, “The neocon element believes that war is the only way to solve things.”
Levin, who is also Jewish and a longtime advocate of neoconservative foreign policy, said of Witkoff’s remarks, “lol. The envoy talks like the fifth column isolationists. Nobody believes war is the only way. We wait with great interest to see the deal you’re negotiating with the warmonger Iranian terrorist regime.”
Levin would then add in a repost of Witkoff’s remarks, “By the way, neocon is a pejorative for Jew. Unbelievable.”
The Community Notes feature of X rightly gave Levin’s accusation proper context, “Neocon,’ short for ‘Neo-conservative,’ is a term for a political philosophy focused on active foreign policy to spread liberal democracy. While many Neocons have been Jewish, nowhere near all have been.”
Calling someone, particularly someone who is Jewish, an antisemite because they prefer diplomacy to war is little different than Democrats who call Donald Trump a “white supremacist” based on, well, nothing really at all.
The point is that “white supremacists” are bad, and therefore Trump is bad. For so many on the left, no further logic or reasoning is required.
In this century and the last, neoconservatives have often accused anyone who opposed their hawkish agenda of being antisemitic. Whether or not these realist or restrainer figures were actually malicious towards Jews was always beside the point. The point is antisemites are bad, therefore anyone who opposes the neocons’ wars are bad.
There are genuine antisemites who are also antiwar, just as there are genuine white supremacists who support Trump. But just conflating all of this to use as a junky verbal battering ram is not only untrue but dishonest.
If this sounds dumb or simplistic, that’s because it is. But this was characteristic of the overall pre-Trump conservative environment that Levin came of age in and that shaped him, with the Bush-Cheney administration at the apex of the era.
Putting Witkoff’s own Jewishness aside, there is literally nothing in what he said that could fairly qualify as antisemitism. Levin was simply using the same old smear tactic borrowed from the left that neoconservatives have long relied on, often successfully.
But even a conservative voice as powerful as Levin has not made a dent on Witkoff or Trump’s larger MAGA movement. Witkoff is respected on the right and if he has something to say about the “neocon element” and the problems they cause, conservatives are going to listen.
Which is probably part of what drives Levin mad. This would not necessarily have been the case even a decade ago. Neoconservatives have long seen themselves as gatekeepers. The neocon David Frum would write after Rand Paul won his first Republican Senate primary, “Is it that the GOP has lost its antibodies against a candidate like Rand Paul?”
That was in 2010. Trump has just begun his second term. Has the American right entered a new era?
Tucker Carlson wondered the same in a recent interview with libertarian activist and comedian Dave Smith.
“If Mark Levin is calling the Trump administration antisemitic, Steve Witkoff, we’re at the end of something and the beginning of something new,” Carlson observed.
He continued, “I almost called Mark when I saw it because I really, I know him, but I really love Steve Witkoff and I think his decency. I don’t agree with him and everything at all, but his decency is just palpable. I mean, it just comes through his concern for people. His reasonableness is just so obvious. And the effects of what he’s done have been so great. Great for America, great for the world.”
“So I almost. I was so offended,” Carlson said, giving Levin the benefit of the doubt. “And then I thought, I’m not going to solve anything by calling Mark Levin and scolding him. Probably scream at me, but. But I did think, like, he’s not stupid.”
He continued, “If you’re calling Steve Witkoff an antisemite on Twitter, like, you know, you’re losing. Right? Is that what that is?”
Dave Smith did not disagree.
Carlson would add, “So you have Mark Levin calling Steve Witkoff an anti-Semite. We’ve reached peak crazy, I mean, I think Witkoff is Jewish, right?”
“Peak crazy” is one way to put it.
But for Levin or any other neoconservative who still stubbornly insists on equating the use of the term “neocon” with antisemitism, it got worse for them on Tuesday.
Donald Trump said in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, “The so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”
The president continued, “The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called ‘nation builders,’ neocons, or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Baghdad, so many other cities.”
Dave Smith could not contain himself.
“The other day Mark Levin responded to Steve Witkoff by saying ‘neocon is a pejorative for Jew’ essentially calling him an antisemite,” Smith posted on X. “Today, Donald Trump blasted neocons in his speech in Saudi Arabia. So, is Trump a woke right antisemite too?”
“I bet these cowards won’t dare,” he added.
For decades, the same people who helped craft and promote some of the worst foreign policy mistakes in American history, who still assume no responsibility and have faced zero accountability for their mistakes, and who, at one time, wore the badge of neoconservatism as an honor, decided that now that their term is so sullied, anyone who uses it must be a bigot.
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“Isolationists” is another barb they have loved. “Unpatriotic conservatives” was another they invented. Straight up calling war critics “traitors” has happened. Yet blanket and usually baseless accusations of antisemitism against anyone who questions U.S. foreign policy has long been the favorite weapon of neoconservatives, and perhaps most effective.
But is this over? Antiwar sentiment now flourishes on the right. Did the president just declare war on the neocons? Is what Trump said something we can discuss openly, now?
Mark Levin, is Donald Trump “antisemitic”?
