President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden shared a heartfelt paean to Desmond Tutu upon learning of his death shortly after Christmas, praising his role standing up to Apartheid and “the power of his message of justice, equality, truth, and reconciliation as we confront racism and extremism in our time today.” Omitted was Tutu’s blind spot toward antisemitism or his incitement against Jews.
Tutu, for example, supported the “Free Gaza” movement, even after its co-founder Greta Berlin tweeted, “Zionists operated the concentration camps and helped murder millions of innocent Jews.” He supported Hamas despite its genocidal rhetoric and violence against women and children. He diminished Holocaust-era gas chambers, explaining that they “made for a neater death” than displacement during Apartheid. Certainly, Tutu’s anti-apartheid activism deserves praise, but he was a flawed hero. No other hatreds are today so readily ignored as antisemitism.
The same holds true with former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who died in October from COVID-19 after a long battle with cancer. The Associated Press declared that Powell would be “remembered as a model for future generations.”
Powell was not himself antisemitic, and he was a strong supporter of Israel. Still, he was also a cynic. During his tenure as secretary of state, Powell repeatedly turned a blind eye toward antisemitism, if not purposely operationalizing it to give his department a leg up in the rough-and-tumble world of interagency policy battles. Senior aides, for example, would often dismiss Jews working in the Pentagon as “Israel-firsters.” Sometimes, word that would trickle back of what was said over cocktails or in other offices might be dismissed as hearsay; other times, there was no doubt, such as when the video on a secure video teleconference went down but, unbeknownst to the State Department, the audio remained on.
Powell also remained aloof as his handpicked chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, repeatedly sought to fan the flames of antisemitic conspiracy theories as a means to pillory opponents and sideline alternative arguments on topics related to Iran and Iraq. After Powell’s death, Bob Dreyfuss, a former Lyndon LaRouche acolyte who dedicated his first book to the conspiracy theorist, bragged on Facebook about how he would talk to Powell’s office regularly.
Thus was born the “Office of Special Plans” conspiracy that mainstream authors such as George Packer and Jane Mayer adopted as their own. In reality, Wilkerson and Dreyfuss and the lazy journalists who followed confused the clumsily named “Office of Special Plans,” a normal country desk shop (to which, full disclosure, the Council on Foreign Relations assigned me as an International Affairs Fellow) with the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group.
This confusion may have been purposeful: It made for a less fertile conspiracy because a military reservist who was very open about his Democratic affiliation headed the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group that proposed the Iraq-al Qaeda links. Powell apparently did not care. He found it useful to keep one side of the policy debate defending themselves against often antisemitic calumny. With a simple phone call, he might have ended the leaks and lie. He chose silence. In effect, Powell embraced the idea that the ends justified the means and the belief that antisemitism could be a useful tool in which his staff might indulge so long as he could maintain plausible deniability.
During President Barack Obama’s term, Wilkerson’s bizarre fixation with Israel continued. Syrian President Bashar al Assad’s use of chemical weapons against a civilian population? An Israeli false flag operation. His rants found their way on to Hezbollah’s al Manar and Iran’s PressTV to delegitimize the United States. Alas, antisemitism is like a forest fire: Once lit, it is often hard to contain.
This does not diminish the good Powell did. People are complicated, and Powell was no exception. Those who did not suffer his office’s attacks or were blinded by celebrity were perhaps unaware. Those to whom his office leaked were not. Among journalists, his office’s contribution to the poison that afflicted Washington was an open secret. That it largely remains so reflects that for all the media’s rhetoric of tolerance and combating hatred, antisemitism remains a normal and perhaps acceptable vice.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
