Ralph Nader's latest run for president has been much more negatively received than his 2000 attempt. A prominent criticism in the anti-Bush fever-swamps is that the damage Nader could cause this time by draining Democratic votes would not only be epic, but inversely proportional to the value of his political career. Certainly his critics are on to something with this last bit - Nader, once an impressive and prolific activist, seems to have been transformed into an oblivious gadfly bent on undermining the movement he ostensibly cares about.

Few people realize, though, just how precipitous Nader's fall has been. Driven into a corner by both his lousy political gamesmanship and the tectonic redefinition by 9/11 of the ideological playing field, Nader has begun to flirt with something that has been embraced by so many on the Left: anti-Semitism.

On June 22, the Jerusalem Post reported that Nader had given an interview to the United Arab Emirates' Al-Khaleej newspaper in which he 'called on the Bush administration to stop backing Israel's policies regarding the Palestinians.' Nader also 'said that Israeli officials 'control' the White House, and coerce American leaders to supply them with billions of dollars in arms and support.'

One week later, Nader appeared at a conference called 'The Muslim Vote in Election 2004.' Organized by the Council for the National Interest, a staunchly anti-Israel think tank, the gathering discussed rallying the Islamic-American vote against Bush. In his speech to the audience of head-scarved women and fourth-rate journalists, Nader said:

"What has been happening over the years is a predictable routine of foreign visitation from the head of the Israeli government. The Israeli puppeteer travels to Washington. The Israeli puppeteer meets with the puppet in the White House, and then moves down Pennsylvania Avenue, and meets with the puppets in Congress. And then takes back billions of taxpayer dollars."

The Council for the National Interest is staffed by former diplomats and ambassadors to Arab countries. Two of its founding members, Andrew Killgore and Richard Curtiss, are also founding publishers of the Washington Report for Middle East Affairs, an anti-Israel pseudo-journal that, among many anti-Israel memes, sustains and promotes the USS Liberty conspiracy industry.< BR>
In what is characteristic of its activities, Council President Eugene Bird, who co-hosted and spoke at 'The Muslim Vote,' suggested in May at a press conference about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal that Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, had actually tortured the Iraqis.

Nader's fellow speakers included Nihad Awad, Executive Director of the radical Islamic Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and Hassan Ibrahim, a director with the similarly extremist Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). Steven Emerson, a journalist and veteran terrorism investigator, alleged in 1998 Senate testimony that Awad has ties to Hamas.

In his book American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us, Emerson wrote:

"On December 22, 2000, MPAC's Mahdi Bray organized a rally in Lafayette Park outside the White House to celebrate a 'Worldwide Day for Jerusalem.' In Arabic, the crowd responsively chanted with the emcee, "Khaybar, Khaybar oh Jews, the Army of Muhammad is coming for you!" Posters calling for "Death to Israel" and equating the Star of David with the Nazi swastika were openly displayed and anti-Semitic literature calling for the destruction of the Jews and Israel was distributed. Members of the crowd burned the Israeli flag while marching from the White House to the State Department."

Nader's interview with al-Khaleej and appearance before the Council closely followed something that once would have been unthinkable to political watchers: his consorting with Patrick Buchanan. Just before the Reform Party endorsed him in the 2004 election, Nader gave an interview to Buchanan in his American Conservative magazine. After identifying American support for 'the Israeli military regime' as a chief agitator of Muslims, Nader elaborated:

Nader: The subservience of our congressional and White House puppets to Israeli military policy has been consistent [throughout multiple presidencies]. Until '91, any dictator who was anti-Communist was our ally.

Buchanan: You used the term 'congressional puppets.' Did John Kerry show himself to be a congressional puppet when he voted to give the president a blank check to go to war?

Nader: They're almost all puppets. There are two sets: Congressional puppets and White House puppets. When the chief puppeteer comes to Washington, the puppets prance."

For the third time in less than two weeks, Nader invoked the troubling theme of Jewish control, and it would behoove us to recall that Pat Buchanan has consistently devoted himself to denigrating American Jews and Israel. Adumbrating Nader, Buchanan has spoken of Israel's 'amen corner in the United States' and Congress being 'Israeli-occupied territory.' He once wrote the jaw-dropper that ex-camp guard John Demjanjuk, extradited from Cleveland to Jerusalem to stand trial as a Nazi war criminal, 'may be the victim of an American Dreyfus case.' He described Hitler as 'an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier in the Great War.'

More interesting, however, is the cooperation between Nader and the Reform Party. Far from being a Buchananite organization, as many people assume, the Reform Party is a political incubator through which a far Left political cult once called the International Workers Party (IWP) is attempting to deliver itself into the mainstream. It has come far closer to this goal than casual observers might believe.

The sect is led by Fred Newman, a psychologist and cult leader. Newman got his start in the 1960's, after receiving a doctorate from Stanford University in the study of belief structures. He left academia in the late 60's and founded a therapeutic paradigm called 'Social Therapy' that blends Maoist dogma with the ideas of Soviet Marxist psychologist Lev Vygotsky.

Newman had no license or training to practice psychotherapy, but soon he garnered a small group of devoted followers. Rooting out their most emotionally vulnerable clients, Newman and his Social Therapists ensnared them by exploiting what is sometimes loosely called 'transference' - the deep feelings of love and admiration that patients often develop for their caregivers.

Social Therapy leveraged a group dynamic, using peer pressure to suppress dissent. Sessions involved a leader thrumming the group with Newman-speak. Much of this was a jejune deployment of Marxist jargon, in which the patient had to overcome his mental entombment in 'bourgeois' thought and make a 'revolution' out of his recovery. The way to do this was to rise from the couches and join Newman's cult, where acolytes would spend sixteen-hour days seven days a week working on his political projects. This is what became the International Workers Party.

In 1974 Newman fused his sect with Lyndon LaRouche's National Caucus of Labor Committees. Though the dalliance was short-lived, their ideologies were similar (LaRouche began his career as a Trotskyist).

On the matter of Jews, they were in sync in a way predictable to watchers of leftist anti-Semitism. Both drew on Marxist principle, in which Jews and Judaism are conflated with capital. LaRouche wrote, "Hebrewism was an assimilationist doctrine developed... for a caste of merchant-userers [sic] within a pre-capitalist society."

And Newman, a Jew himself, declared: "The Jew, the dirty Jew, once the ultimate victim of capitalism?s soul, fascism, would become a victimizer on behalf of capitalism."

Newman broke with LaRouche and formally established the IWP. Not long afterward, he began to shake down his patients, adding assets control to his portfolio of cultic tricks. Negative publicity followed, and in 1979, having decided to pursue power through mainstream politics, Newman disbanded the IWP and replaced it with the New Alliance Party (NAP). His army of therapy drones, having grown over the years, was a natural source of labor. At this time, future party luminary Lenora Fulani became one of Newman's patients. Seeing something special in her, he began to cultivate her for a leadership role.

The group's rhetoric became more mainstream. This makeover, and the indefatigable efforts of the Newmanite cadres, allowed the sect to achieve a measure of success, as it fielded socialist Dennis Serrette in 33 states as its presidential candidate in 1984. Fulani, however, was largely the NAP's standard-bearer. In 1988 she improved on Serrette's showing and became the first black and first female presidential candidate to achieve ballot access in all 50 states.

Fulani's ship, navigating the sump of Newman's now-Marxist, now-fascist ideology, occasionally beached itself. As early as 1985, she began making overtures to anti-Semitic demagogue Louis Farrakhan, hoping to cobble together an NAP and Nation of Islam alliance. Fulani and company also lent early support to Al Sharpton's race-huckstering enterprise.

Famously, Fulani carried Newman's anti-Jewish torch with this 1989 sound bite: "[Jews] had to sell their souls to acquire Israel and are required to do the dirtiest work of capitalism - to function as mass murderers of people of color - in order to keep it."

Things persist in this vein today. One of the various Newmanite front groups, the theatrical All Stars Project, recently staged a revisionist drama blaming the Jews for Crown Heights.

In the early 90's, the Newmanites corralled more converts and began to colonize and subsume unsuspecting political organizations. After disbanding the New Alliance Party in the shadow of mounting fraud allegations, Newman and Fulani reconstituted their front groups, and parlayed their extensive resources, skills and contacts into controlling the elements of what would become the Reform Party.

By 2000, Newman and Fulani had enough control over Reform Party delegates to entice Pat Buchanan into a working relationship with them. The relationship was symbiotic: the Reform Party got Buchanan on the ballot in many states, and Buchanan brought a windfall of $12.6 million into the Party. The isolationist demagogue lost, and he and the Newmanites parted ways. The stage was set for a reprise with Nader in 2004.


Nader's indulgence of populist scapegoating highlights a continuity among third party demagogues: the targeting of Israel or Jews. A couple of questions are in order: Why is Nader cavorting with anti-Semites, and why has he lately deployed Zionist conspiracy motifs? Why would he consort with the Hamas-friendly Council, and give statements about Israeli 'control' of the White House to Al-Khaleej, an Arab newspaper that, according to the ADL, defended Holocaust-denier Roger Garaudy?

Nader and the Green Party abandoned each other, so he is faced with greater difficulty in obtaining ballot lines than he was in 2000. This accounts for at least some of his calculus; the Fulani faction controls much of the Reform Party. But more important, 9/11 dealt a lethal blow in America to the influence of the left-wing perspective on current events. Pragmatically the fall of the Berlin Wall set the stage, but the contemporary damage to the credibility of the Left was wrought by its attempt to filter the Al Qaeda attacks through its ideological prism.

Nader's anti-corporate activism has been a singularly American - that is, practical - application of conflict theory, the Marxist notion that the central theme of history is endless struggle between haves and have-nots. And it has met with much domestic success because it has often made practical sense. But things have changed in the post-9/11 world. And when applied to Israel, Nader's analysis suffers from the sickness that is the shibboleth of the anti-globalization Left.

In times of crisis, revolutionary thought often has trended toward anti-Semitism, even when it bears no direct relationship to Jewish issues. And since the late 19th century, socialism and Zionism have vied for the moral imagination of the Jewish people. The victory of the latter, with its fusion of religion with nationalism, has been a uniquely discomfiting thorn in the side of irreligious internationalists - one that has long festered, proceeding through phases of Soviet, New Left and Third World demonization of Zionism. Recently we have seen the Apartheid calumny advanced by the academic Left through its divestiture campaign.

The Left also feels betrayed by the contemporary success of a once dramatically oppressed people, which in its view emulates the American example it has relentlessly demonized. All of this, as well as the socialist animus against religion and romanticization of the Palestinians, helps explain the Ahab-like fixation of various leftist strains on Israel. It is why so much anti-Israel rhetoric has come to echo the anti-Jewish propaganda of an earlier era.

Nader, while not a power player, represents the American wing of the ideological ancien regime cast aside by 9/11. The steepness of his fall sharpens the example. Nader is an accomplished and respectable activist. Prior to his electoral misadventures, he single-handedly established automobile safety in this country. Now that history has left him and his set behind, he is reduced to smacking the anti-Israel pinata with all the other screaming kids.

Is Nader an anti-Semite? His recent associations notwithstanding, I doubt it. Rather, his particular obsolescence in the wake of 9/11 encourages his collaboration with anti-Semites, with a man like Fred Newman, who once called Jews 'the storm troopers of decadent capitalism.'

Revolutionary thought, even its more grounded American manifestation, is in crisis. Now, Nader resembles a newly thawed Neanderthal trying to negotiate a Game Boy or some other frustrating bauble he tripped over while trying to chart this inscrutable modern world.

John-Paul Pagano is a Brooklyn-based systems engineer who doubles as a political and historical writer. His abiding interest is the history of ideas in reaction to modernity. Since November 2002 he has maintained a blog called Fightin' with Grabes (guanubian.blogspot.com), which has focused on documenting left-wing anti-Semitism.

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