Bobby Fischer “a Hero,” Ron Paul’s Newsletter Once Said

On September 11, 2001, the world champion chess player Bobby Fischer had this to say:

This is all wonderful news…I applaud the act. The U.S. and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just slaughtering them for years. Robbing them and slaughtering them. Nobody gave a shit. Now it's coming back to the U.S. Fuck the U.S. I want to see the U.S. wiped out.

In addition to accusing Gary Kasparov of being a former KGB agent and a "crook," Fischer also had these delightful observations about Jews:

The Jews are a "filthy, lying bastard people" bent on world domination through such insidious schemes as the Holocaust ("a money-making invention"), the mass murder of Christian children ("their blood is used for black-magic ceremonies"), and junk food (William Rosenberg, the founder of Dunkin' Donuts, is singled out as a culprit).

Fischer died last week at the age of 64, and he'll probably be remembered for his radical views as much as his prowess as a chess champion. His ravings about Jews came to mind as I had just published excerpts from Ron Paul's newsletters on The New Republic website in which Fischer was praised as an "American hero." A cursory investigation reveals who might have been responsible for such passages.

The historian Ronald Radosh sent me the following email last week, recounting his experiences with Murray Rothbard, one of the leading lights of American libertarianism and an intellectual guru to Ron Paul:

You probably know that at one point I co-authored a book with Murray Rothbard that the Von Mises institute has now scanned and put on the web. I had been good friends with him and used to see him a lot during the so-called "left-right" alliance he forged in the 60's. At that point the concentration was on the Vietnam war. I broke with him and indeed never saw him again a few years later. He started to publish a mimeographed newsletter (oh those days before xerox copiers, blogs and the web) that had a very limited circulation. He would give me copies. I wished I had saved them. They were viciously anti-Semitic (even though he was born Jewish he converted and became a Baptist) and anti-Israel. That had never come through when I was associated with him, and I was stunned. He had some crazy analogy that I can't quite remember that put Cambodia and the slaughter there with Israel. I think he took a Chomsky like attitude towards Pol Pot and argued in print that those attacking Pol Pot and the Cambodian slaughter were doing so in order to gain sympathy with Israel through the back door.

For more on Rothbard's extreme anti-statism — so extreme that it is indistinguishable from far-left anti-Americanism — check out the CATO Institute's Tom Palmer, who has been tracking the "fever swamps" of the libertarian movement for years.

Repulsive comments such as the ones above, according to Rothbard — in an essay published in a collection entitled, "The Irrepressible Rothbard" — are at worst, "not Politically Correct." Rothbard had immense admiration for Fischer, a strange person to admire. But the two men had one thing in common; they were both Jews who had tried to erase any sense of their heritage, a severing that manifested itself in the form of self-hating anti-Semitism.