Charles Krauthammer Passes Away

Wikipedia

Charles Krauthammer, the American conservative intellectual whose weekly column was syndicated to more than 400 publications worldwide, passed away from cancer at the age 68.

Krauthammer was born on March 13, 1950, in New York City to parents who were Orthodox Jews. When he was 5, the family moved to Montreal, Canada. Charles and his brother Marcel Krauthammer were educated at a Hebrew school.

While Marcel served as Ba’al Koreh for 18 years for Chabad of Northridge in California, Charles considered himself “not religious” and “a Jewish Shinto” who engages in “ancestor worship.”

Charles said he was influenced by his study of Rambam at McGill University in Montreal with Rabbi David Hartman, head of Jerusalem’s Shalom Hartman Institute and professor of philosophy at McGill during Krauthammer’s student days.

At the time, McGill University was a hotbed of radical sentiment, something that Krauthammer says influenced his dislike of political extremism. “I became very acutely aware of the dangers, the hypocrisies, and sort of the extremism of the political extremes. And it cleansed me very early in my political evolution of any romanticism.”

While in his first year studying at Harvard Medical School, Krauthammer became permanently paralyzed from the neck down after a diving board accident that severed his spinal cord at C5. After spending 14 months recovering in a hospital, he returned to medical school, graduating to become a psychiatrist involved in the creation of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III.

In the 1980s, Krauthammer embarked on a career as a columnist and political commentator. In 1985, he began writing a weekly editorial for The Washington Post and went on to contribute to Fox News and newspapers around the country.

In 1978, Krauthammer moved to Washington, D.C., to direct planning in psychiatric research under the Carter administration. He began contributing articles about politics to The New Republic and, in 1980, served as a speechwriter to Vice President Walter Mondale.

In August 2017, due to his battle with cancer, Krauthammer stopped writing his column and serving as Fox News contributor. On June 21, 2018, Krauthammer died.

VIDEO: The life and times of Charles Krauthammer

Krauthammer strongly opposed the Oslo accords and said that Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat would use the foothold it gave him in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to continue the war against Israel that he had ostensibly renounced in the Israel–Palestine letters of recognition.

In a July 2006 essay in Time, Krauthammer wrote that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict was fundamentally defined by the Palestinians’ unwillingness to accept compromise.

During the 2006 Lebanon War, Krauthammer wrote a column, “Let Israel Win the War”: “What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression across a recognized international frontier, is then put on a countdown clock by the world, given a limited time window in which to fight back, regardless of whether it has restored its own security?”

He later criticized Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert‘s conduct, arguing that Olmert “has provided unsteady and uncertain leadership. Foolishly relying on air power alone, he denied his generals the ground offensive they wanted, only to reverse himself later.”

Krauthammer supports a two-state solution to the conflict. Unlike many conservatives, he supported Israel’s Gaza withdrawal as a step toward rationalizing the frontiers between Israel and a future Palestinian state. He believes a security barrier between the two states’ final borders will be an important element of any lasting peace.

When Richard Goldstone retracted the claim in the UN report on the 2008 Gaza war that Israel intentionally killed Palestinian civilians, Krauthammer strongly criticized Goldstone, saying that “this weasel-y excuse-laden retraction is too little and too late” and called “the original report a blood libel ranking with the libels of the 19th century in which Jews were accused of ritually slaughtering children in order to use the blood in rituals.”

Krauthammer thought that Goldstone “should spend the rest of his life undoing the damage and changing and retracting that report.”

During the Obama administration, he didn’t hesitate to criticize President Barack Obama for his treatment of Israel.