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The Strange Case of Joe Sobran

by Michael A. Hoffman II

I am at present investigating the role of “Christian conservative” hero Antonin Scalia in the establishment of a Talmudic law academy for American judges and lawyers. This is a grave development and not all of the fault can be laid at the door of the usual suspects. “Conservative-Christian” attitudes toward the Talmud are mute with fear at best and downright supportive at worst.

It boils down to two factors: cowardice and insanity. Two of the top leaders of the John Birch Society are known to be knowledgeable about the role of the Talmud in the subversion of the West. Neither one will breathe a word about this vital truth in the publications of the organization they lead. After these men are retired from the Birch Society and no longer publish or edit the Society’s “New American” magazine, I predict they will attempt to educate the public about the Talmud. In other words, after their pension is safe and they have betrayed the power and responsibility which God has entrusted them with at present, they will, from the sidelines, fight the battle He charged them to wage while at the head of an influential and financially secure national organization. Woe unto such hirelings!

Then there is the strange case of Joe Sobran. Want of courage is not his vice. He electrified revisionism when he parted ways with the serpentine William F. Buckley. He won well-deserved plaudits from intellectual heavyweights like Hugh Kenner by the simultaneous moderation and cerebral power he exhibited in the course of his exchange with Buckley over the “anti-Semite” canard. Sobran is a wonderful writer, great company (in private he can regale companions with an encyclopedic fund of marvelous old baseball anecdotes); and a polished dinner speaker possessed of formidable charm and eloquence.

Mr. Sobran, like Pat Buchanan in former times, is viewed as a sage by the younger generation of revisionists and unreconstructed Christian intellectuals, who look to him for traditional wisdom and unvarnished candor in otherwise crazy times. Such a position is a sacred trust. It is increasingly patent to radical dissidents that Buchanan no longer fills the bill, with his schizoid attachment to Ronald Reagan (“the best friend Israel ever had” according to former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir), his qualified praise for the Pope and fondness for ridiculous kosher conservative jargon about “the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

For a time Sobran seemed an alternative to Buchanan; more the scholar and hard student of the ancient Fathers, less the habitué of the carnival booths of cable TV. But something was amiss. A patriotic traditional Catholic priest (Sobran is Catholic and famed for his ardor for the Constitution), protested a weird Sobran column in which Joe wondered if the British monarchist Samuel Johnson had indeed been correct in denouncing the “evil” American Revolution. Was this column a joke? If not, how to reconcile a supposed devotion to the Constitution with a back-handed endorsement of Johnson’s attack on the revolution that made the Constitution possible?

More ominously, during the vice-presidential candidacy of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Mr. Sobran wrote a column defending Orthodox Judaism–suggesting that it was too good for the Democrat Party and the likes of Lieberman. He followed that lunacy with an extended endorsement of the theory that Abraham Lincoln was, to his dying day, a committed white supremacist. Actually, Lincoln was only playing a version of George W. Bush’s cynical “Southern strategy,” except that Lincoln’s target constituencies were Border State whites and Congressman David Wilmot’s Free Soil party. When I queried Joe about his Lincoln theory, he behaved like a British lord accosted by a churl and haughtily rebuffed my offer to send him documentation on Lincoln’s authentic racial praxis.

Now, in the midst of growing alarm over the disgraceful role of Supreme Court Justice Scalia in the establishment of a virtual yeshiva for American judges and lawyers, Mr. Sobran has issued a statement on Zionism and Judaism entitled “The Obsession” (Feb. 1, 2003). Much of this statement contains staples of revisionist insight. In this he resembles Mr. Buchanan, who makes some good points generally and then completely contradicts them in his particulars.

Sobran writes, “Anti-Semitism’ has become the chief of sins. No gentile is quite safe from the charge. The Gospels, Catholicism, and the papacy have been indicted; so have Chaucer, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Edmund Burke, Dickens, Henry James, Henry Adams, Dostoyevsky, Mark Twain, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Hemingway. …Then there are whole anti-Semitic nations, among them Russia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Germany, France, and Spain, lately joined by most of the Arab nations…”

So far, so true. But now catch this mind-blowing bit of Sobranphrenia: “It may be said that all this amounts to a caricature of the Jews. In fact, I’ll say it myself. It’s really a self-caricature of the Jews, drawn by the prevalent part of the Jewish community. It reflects neither the older tradition of the Orthodox, which is rooted in the hard objectivity of Mosaic law rather than modern sentimental victimology…”

Say what? The tradition of Orthodox Judaics is possessed of a “hard objectivity” rooted in “Mosaic law”? How can a man of Sobran’s seeming astute observation and renowned erudition retail so Brobdingnagian a lie? The same lie that clouds the mind of Justice Scalia; the lie that was expanded and enhanced in the pontificate of the crypto-rabbi John Paul II and his principal theologian, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. I devoted an entire book to this problem (Judaism’s Strange Gods ) and Joe studiously ignored all three copies that were sent to him.

Thanks to the general ban against discussion of Judaism’s Strange Gods in any conservative, Christian or paleo-conservative publication, the lie has now advanced to such an extent that we are witnessing, incredibly enough, the forthcoming establishment of a Talmud school for America’s legal officers and magistrates endorsed by the supposed judicial leader of the Christian resistance, Justice Scalia.

Orthodox Judaism is rooted in the “traditions of the elders” (later codified as the Mishnah, comprising the first portion of the Talmud), and not the Mosaic law which these Judaic traditions nullify, as Jesus Christ repeatedly and emphatically stated to the Pharisees, who are the founders of rabbinic i.e. Orthodox Judaism. Rabbi Jacob Neusner and other prominent Jewish spokesmen are on record as acknowledging Judaism’s Pharisaic patrimony. Jesus declared to the Pharisees that they were guilty of failing to follow Moses: “For if you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But if you will not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?” (John 5: 45-47). Could Jesus be wrong and Sobran right?

By accepting the Orthodox Judaic lie that they follow Moses, Sobran is contradicting Christ. Orthodox Judaism claims that the Israelites received two halachic transmissions from Moses, one written and public, the other oral and secret. Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai, one of Judaism’s most revered “sages,” ruled that this oral tradition was superior to the written Tanach (Old Testament). The oral tradition contains vicious calumny against Jesus. Moreover, the tradition of Orthodox Judaism is filled with fantastic martyr complexes that form the basis for the psychology of the contemporary Zionists who bedevil Sobran. Orthodox Judaism’s Talmud speaks of “billions” of Jewish victims of the Romans, for example. Orthodox Judaism’s Talmud says Jesus was a sorcerer; that Jesus was an idolater; that Jesus’ Blessed Mother was a prostitute who “played the harlot” with carpenters and soldiers.

Here is Sobran again, from his Feb. 1 column: “The Orthodox Jew, faithful to an ancient and rigorous tradition, commands respect.”

From whom? Not from Chaucer. Who was Chaucer accusing of ritual murder in “The Prioress Tale”? Atheists and Israeli Zionists? Hardly. Chaucer was accusing the followers of Judaism, all of whom were “Orthodox” in that era. Did the “Orthodox Jew command the respect” of Shakespeare, who accused one of their number of murderous usury? Who does Sobran imagine King Edward I of England and the Servant of God, Queen Isabella of Spain, expelled from their kingdoms, Sigmund Freud and Ariel Sharon?

I would like to believe that Joe was drunk or medicated when he disseminated this monumental fraud, not fully cognizant of the impact it would have on his young and impressionable fans, so desperate for intellectual and spiritual direction in these times. But alas, Sobran knows something substantive about the Talmud. In the May, 1999 issue of his newsletter, “Sobran’s” (p. 5), he indicted the Talmud for its “imprecations against Christ and Christians” and he blamed the Talmud for “the eradication of Christian culture.”

The only way one can salvage Mr. Sobran’s credibility is to suggest that he does not know that the “rigorous tradition” of the “Orthodox Jew,” which he praised on Feb. 1, 2003, is in fact based on the Talmud, which he condemned in May, 1999.

In reading the essays of Sobran and Buchanan, there are whole paragraphs to which I find myself bobbing my head in enthusiastic assent, only to be stopped dead in my tracks as I crash head-on into a single sentence filled with the most jaw-droppingly calamitous delusion this side of Bedlam. It is by means of the inhumation of this tiny dram of poison in an otherwise shrewd and seemingly intrepid piece of prose, that the Judaic toxin circulates with ever more virulence in the Conservative-Christian body-politic.

Joe’s bizarre instability underscores the Biblical observation that “the double-minded man is unstable in all his ways” (James 1:8). Sobran knows yet he doesn’t know; he is anointed of God yet he refuses to follow God completely, in all things, making compromises, as did King Saul, and like Saul, for that very reason he becomes a madman and an enemy of God.

The putative “Christian conservative” movement, even in its revisionist and traditionalist manifestation, is, to borrow a term from stage magic, misdirected, and this misdirection results in the continuing bondage of our people to an Orthodox Judaic ideology which seeks “the eradication of Christian culture.”

We desperately need the whole truth in order to contend, as did our forefathers, competently and effectively for our ancient rights against the hellish traditions of Orthodox Judaism which Scalia, Buchanan and Sobran espouse and champion.

It is time to seek guidance from those who see clearly, and who speak and write with commensurate and consistent clarity, however “marginal” they may be. It is time to turn off, rather than wring our hands over, the tragic, self-debased celebrities who are presented to us as visionaries and prophets by an exhausted Conservative movement, but who are in fact part of the very machine steamrolling Christians into madness, defeat and oblivion.