ON THE DEATH OF JOSEPH SOBRAN
NO DOUBT WE WILL HEAR PRAISE FROM SOME CONSERVATIVE QUARTERS AS WE DID WHEN ROBERT NOVAK DIED. SOBRAN WAS A NASTY ANTI-SEMITE WHO WAS “SKEPTICAL” ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST AND BLAMED 9/11 ON ISRAEL. HE DIED YOUNG WHICH IS ALWAYS TRAGIC BUT I REGRET HIS LIFE AND HIS OEVRE WHICH ALIENATED SO MANY DECENT PEOPLE FROM TRUE CONSERVATISM…..RSK
Joseph Sobran, Writer Whom Buckley Mentored, Dies at 64
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: October 1, 2010
Joseph Sobran, a hard-hitting conservative writer and moralist whose outspoken
antipathy to Israel and what he saw as the undue influence of a Jewish lobby on
American foreign policy led to his removal as a senior editor of National Review
in 1993, died on Thursday in Fairfax, Va. He was 64 and lived in Burke, Va.
Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation
Joseph Sobran
The cause was kidney failure resulting from diabetes, his daughter Christina
Sobran said.
Mr. Sobran (pronounced SO-brun), one of the conservative whiz kids whom William
F. Buckley draft-picked for National Review straight out of college, made his
mark with witty, thoughtful essays on moral and social questions. He was an
unapologetic paleoconservative, opposed to military intervention abroad, big
government at home and moral permissiveness everywhere.
As a conservative Roman Catholic, he made a particular target of the Supreme
Court’s decisions legalizing abortion and protecting pornography as free speech.
Unlike many of his colleagues, he took little interest in electoral politics or
the machinery of government. At the same time, he nourished a libertarian streak
that gradually took over, eventually pushing him to declare himself an
anarchist.
“I much preferred a literary, contemplative conservatism to the activist sort
that was preoccupied with immediate political issues,” he wrote in a 2002 essay
explaining his conversion to anarchism. “During the Reagan years, which I
expected to find exciting, I found myself bored to death with supply-side
economics, enterprise zones, ‘privatizing’ welfare programs and similar
principle-dodging gimmickry.”
In the mid-1980s he ran into trouble with Mr. Buckley for the first time after
writing several columns critical of American policy in the Middle East.
Matters came to a head in 1993. Mr. Sobran, unhappy with National Review’s
support for the 1991 Persian Gulf war, and with Mr. Buckley’s criticism of his
writing on Jews and the Middle East, attacked Mr. Buckley in his “Washington
Watch” column in The Wanderer, a traditionalist Roman Catholic weekly.
When informed by National Review’s editor in chief, John O’Sullivan, that the
column amounted to a letter of resignation, Mr. Sobran was fired.
Mr. Buckley, angry that Mr. Sobran had included conversations from a private
dinner that the two had had, and stung by the depiction of him as kowtowing to
Manhattan’s social elite, wrote in a letter to The Wanderer that the column
“gives evidence of an incapacitation moral and perhaps medical, which news is
both bad, and sad,” adding that Mr. Sobran’s criticisms were “a breath-catching
libel.” The two men later reconciled.
Mr. Sobran’s isolationist views on American foreign policy and Israel became
increasingly extreme. He took a skeptical line on the Holocaust and said the
Sept. 11 terror attacks were a result of American foreign policy in the Middle
East, which he believed that a Jewish lobby directed. Not surprisingly, he spent
much of his time defending himself against charges of anti-Semitism.
“Nobody has ever accused me of the slightest personal indecency to a Jew,” he
said in a speech delivered at a 2002 conference of the Institute for Historical
Review. “My chief offense, it appears, has been to insist that the state of
Israel has been a costly and treacherous ‘ally’ to the United States. As of last
Sept. 11, I should think that is undeniable. But I have yet to receive a single
apology for having been correct.”
Michael Joseph Sobran Jr. was born on Feb. 23, 1946, in Ypsilanti, Mich. He
studied English and American literature at Eastern Michigan University, where he
earned a bachelor’s degree in 1969, and went on to do graduate work on
Shakespeare, a lifelong preoccupation.
In 1997 the Free Press published “Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest
Literary Mystery of All Time,” an argument in support of the theory that
Shakespeare’s plays were written by Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.
While at Eastern Michigan, he sent letters to several professors who objected to
an impending visit by Mr. Buckley, rebutting their criticisms point by point.
Mr. Buckley later saw the letters and in 1972 offered Mr. Sobran a job writing
for National Review.
Mr. Sobran also wrote a syndicated column for The Los Angeles Times and
Universal Press Syndicate, and regularly appeared on the CBS radio series
“Spectrum.” He contributed to The Wanderer, The Human Life Review, The American
Spectator and other publications. In 1994 he founded Sobran’s: The Real News of
the Month, a newsletter that ceased publication in 2007.
Mr. Sobran addressed social issues in his columns, especially questions
pertaining to abortion, the family and marriage. Many of his essays were
collected in “Single Issues: Essays on the Crucial Social Questions.”
He wrote often on the Constitution as well, and as he underwent a slow
conversion to anarchism beginning in the late 1980s, he arrived at the
conclusion, based on his reading of the 10th Amendment, that virtually every act
of the federal government since the Civil War was illegal.
His two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Christina, of
Waterville, Me., he is survived by another daughter, Vanessa Williams of
Virginia Beach, Va.; two sons, Kent, of Toledo, Ohio, and Michael, of
Alexandria, Va.; a brother, Greg, of Ann Arbor, Mich.; 10 grandchildren; one
great-grandchild; and several half-siblings: Thomas Sobran and Eric Sobran, both
of Hingham, Mass.; Paige Sobran of Weymouth, Mass.; Evan Sobran of Duxbury,
Mass.; Gray Sobran and Peter Sobran, both of Madison, Conn.; Gerald Fox of
Chandler, Ariz.; Robert Fox of Ypsilanti, Mich.; and Patrick Fox of Casa Grande,
Ariz.
Correction: October 2, 2010
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the name of a news organization
that published Mr. Sobran’s syndicated column. It is Universal Press Syndicate,
not United Press International. It also misstated the manner of Mr. Sobran’s
departure from National Review and gave an incorrect publisher for “Single
Issues: Essays on the Crucial Social Questions.”
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