The Zionist Connection II
What Price Peace?
By Alfred M. Lilienthal
Printed and Published by
Veritas Publishing Company (Pty.) Ltd.
P.O. Box 20, Bullsbrook, Western Australia, 6084
Telephone: (095) 71 8010
1983
"To the Jew as a man-everything: to Jews as a nation-nothing."
- Count Stanislas Clermont-Tonnerre
to the French Assembly, October 12, 1789
"Peace in Palestine cannot be achieved by force, but only through understanding."
- Albert Einstein
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."
- William Shakespeare
To Christians, Jews, Muslims and Non-Believers, living and dead, who have had not only the courage to place their concern for mankind above their allegiance to any group or sect but also the willingness to do battle in behalf of this conviction.
- Alfred M. Lilienthal
Part Three. The Cover-Over
"Jews have suffered, and Christians have suffered. Mankind has suffered. There is no group with a monopoly on suffering, and no human beings which have experienced hate and hostility more than any other. I must say, however, that it is my impression that Jewish history has been taught with a whine and whimper rather than with a straight-forward acknowledgement that man practices his inhumanity on his fellow human beings... Out of this peculiar emphasis on suffering there has developed a new attitude of vicarious suffering - a feeling among numbers of Jews today that because other Jews have suffered and died they, the living, are somehow entitled to special consideration."- RABBI RICHARD E. SINGER
Highland Park (Illinois)
Lakeside Congregation
Bracketed numbers, i.e. [411][412], are the original page numbers in the paperback edition and are located at the original page breaks, give or take a word or two.
XI - Exploiting Anti-Semitism
"In a democracy every group that affects public policy must be accountable to the entire citizenry. A democracy cannot survive if Iron Curtains are placed around groups, secular or religious, that Intervene in public affairs."- Paul Blanchard
THROUGHOUT HISTORY, important civilizations have fallen due to reasons ranging from external overexpansion to internal corruption. Should the Western way of life, of which the U.S. is the chief progenitor, fall victim to the ravages of time, future historians might well ascribe the downfall to a scarcely known disease, "labelitis." The "label" has contributed to the paralysis of individual thinking and has led to the concomitant mass conformity which, together with fear, has helped transform America into a nation of sheep years before "1984."
The influence of the label and slogan is infinite. The unadorned cliche' parades forth shamelessly and unchallenged, sweeping politicians everywhere in and out of office. Slap the word "liberal," "Fascist," "reactionary," or "Communist," as the case may dictate, on any point of view you do not like, and a sure, quick victory can be yours Immediately.
Nothing has accounted more for the success of Zionism and Israelism in the Western world than the skillful attack on the soft underbelly of world opinion - "Mr. Decent Man's" total repugnance toward anti-Semitism. The charge of this bias, instantaneously bringing forth the specter of Nazi Germany, so totally pulverizes the average Christian that by contrast calling him a Communist is a pleasant epithet. It was the Christian revulsion toward anti-Semitism in the wake of Hitlerian genocide, not the superiority of Zionist over Arab rights, that first created and then firmly entrenched the Israeli state, even permitting [403] [404] the occupation of conquered territories in the face of the U.N. charter and international morality. So strong has become the general aversion to anti-Semitism that even the full-blooded Semite, the Arab, absurd as it may be, has difficulty defending himself against this charge. The Jerusalem peace talks in January 1978 were disrupted when Prime Minister Begin hurled accusations of "anti-Semitism" at both President Sadat and his Foreign Minister.
The emotional reaction, engendered by Nazi genocide, has given rise to an eleventh commandment, "Thou shalt not be anti-Semitic," and to a corollary twelfth commandment, "Thou must be anti-anti-Semitic." No Christian wishes to run afoul of these supplements to the interdictions handed down by Moses from Mount Sinai. In their zeal to carry out the new commandments, the anti-anti-Semites, guided by Organized Jewry, have rejected the basic distinction between those who are against Zionism-Israelism because they deplore its political precepts and abhor the consequences wrought by its measure, and those who are against Jews because they simply dislike Jews. Christian anti-Zionists and even Jewish anti-Zionists are alike denounced as antiSemites- discussion, muted doubts, and debate on Middle East policy are crushed.
As Harvard's Dr. David Riesman noted some years ago in the Jewish Newsletter : "The Zionists can muster not merely the threat of the Jewish vote and the no-less important Jewish financial and organizational skills, but also the blackmail of attacking anyone who opposes (heir political aims for Israel, as anti-Semitic."1 For writing that "it is a sign of mediocrity in people when they herd together," Boris Pasternak, the Russian author of Dr. Zhivago, was immediately stigmatized by responsible Zionists, including the then Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, as an anti-Semitic Jew.
That there are bigots and haters, that there was a Nazi Germany whose unparalleled genocide still stings the conscience of Man, and that there still is anti-Semitism, no one but the most irrational would deny. It is one of an infinite number of prejudices that ought to be eradicated. However, the presence of this sociological phenomenon should not give inviolability to the ruthless suppression of even the most constructive criticism of the State of Israel and of the multifold Zionist organizations. Anti-Zionism can no more be equated with anti-Semitism, the racist ideology directed against Jews as Jews, than Zionism can be equated with Judaism.
Leading the high-pressure, efficiently organized, continuous campaign to keep anti-Semitism in the limelight through the pursuit of [405] alleged anti-Semites, as well as to suppress all dissent with Washington's "Israel First" policy, is the well-financed offspring of the 130-year-old B'nai B'rith, the Anti-Defamation League, which was founded in 1913. Known as the ADL, this most powerful organ is supported on most occasions by other Jewish organizations. The ADL's earlier emphasis on stamping out genuine prejudice and bigotry gave way long ago to acts of defamation, spying, and publishing spurious literary productions, motivated by support of Israel and effected by eliminating critics of Zionist tactics.
The ward of the oldest and most powerful Jewish organization in the world, the ADL backs up its New York City national headquarters with an annual budget of $7.4 million (1975); twenty-eight regional offices around the country and two in Canada; a professional staff of 300, including specialists in the fields of human relations, communications, education, urban affairs, social sciences, religion, and law. It has representatives in hundreds of communities from coast to coast, and has thousands of secret dossiers on citizens of Canada and of the U.S. According to its own pamphlet: "Each regional office has its own board drawn from leaders and prominent citizens in its areas. Thus, in hundreds of communities throughout the nation, the ADL is able to cooperate as a neighbor to solve important local problems. Through its multifold private and public reports, allegedly directed against prejudice and bigotry, the ADL exerts enormous prejudice, often bordering on blackmail.
In a True magazine interview in February 1971, three top leaders of the ADL, Benjamin Epstein, Seymour Graubard, and Dore Schary, boasted of their use of undercover agents and entrapment through impersonation. "ADL must have a pretty extensive spy network to do all this," the interviewer commented. Newsweek, trying to be as inoffensive as possible, called the ADL's methodology "highly selective," and, "never a total portrait."2 A review of ADL "Reports," often issued in book form by outside publishing houses, revealed the organization "straining to fit the products of its own espionage into the procrustean bed of its own personal predilections," to use the words of Unitarian minister and author Dr. John Nicholls Booth, a victim and a critic of that same organization. While sounding plausible, many of the charges leveled by this group were full of half-truths, inaccurate and questionable. The secret and confidential reports of the ADL, widely distributed in liberal circles, often resorted to placing the stock apology "but some of my best friends are Jews" in the mouths of critics to impute an innuendo of anti-Semitism. Odious impressions were often [406][407]created by twisting a few words, distorting the original text.
Increasingly, the B'nai B'rith and the ADL have directed their activities, allegedly against bigotry, toward assisting Israel. When Israel's Ministry of Tourism decided to offset adverse 1967 headlines in the American press about the constant aerial bombing of Arab lands by inviting 1,200 foreign newsmen to Israel for a visit, the B'nai B'rith not only recruited journalists but organized their subsidized tours.3 The ADL continuously employed its "nonprofit organization" postal permit to disseminate Israeli propaganda publications, as it did during the June 1967 war 4 and on an infinite number of occasions since. As former B'nai B'rith officer Saul E. Joftes brought out in his suit against the brotherhood, which he carried successfully to the Supreme Court despite efforts of attorneys to stall adjudication for almost four years, charitable, tax-deductible funds were diverted into Israel-related projects of a political or quasi-political nature.
Americans who have recently shown how sensitive they are to threats to their privacy and liberties when CIA wiretapping and spying were revealed have never been told about the building of what might be called the Jewish Gestapo or the largest nongovemment spy system function mg in the Western hemisphere. In his book The Pledge,5 Leonard Slater, a staunch Zionist sympathizer, detailed the many illegal programs devised to assist in bringing Israel into being. Starting in 1945, Zionists enlisted key Jews and Gentiles in many countries around the world; connived with judges, custom officials, and politicians; and according to FBI reports, even smuggled weaponry and men out of the U.S. and Europe, past the British into Palestine for the day of reckoning with the Arabs. Washington economist Robert Nathan interceded with J. Edgar Hoover to help free Zionist agents arrested at the Canadian border for smuggling arms destined for Israel. 6 Cases of rifle barrels were stolen from the U.S. Naval Supply Depot in Hawaii.
Under the lead of the "Sonneborn Institute," named after U.S. Haganah leader Rudolf Sonneborn, the quest for an armament industry was realized. Material was gathered for Palestine into depots from Zionist organizations across the U.S. From Wisconsin came 350,000 sandbags, from Ohio 92,000 flares, from New Jersey 25,000 helmets. Chicago supplied 100 tons of barbed wire and ten tons of khaki paint; while New Orleans sent salt tablets and penicillin. San Francisco offered mosquito netting, Minneapolis 600 mine detectors, and from the port city of Norfolk, Virginia, two corvettes, an ice cutter and, "to guide the naval strategists of the future Jewish state, the complete memoirs of Admiral von Tirpitz."7
Under the guise of Talmudic studies in New York City, attorney Nahum Bernstein was teaching espionage and hand-to-hand fighting. This intelligence school met in an Orthodox religious tax-exempt institution which called itself the National Council of Young Israel.
Through the B'nai B'rith, the ADL, the American Jewish Committee, and varied Zionist and pro-Israel groups, Israeli intelligence continued to penetrate into every part of the U.S. Temples, synagogues, and rabbis unabashedly cooperated. In fact, there was a cynical joke that is said to have circulated in the Pentagon: Every confidential military memo apparently was typed in triplicate, "one for the White House, one for the State Department, and one for Tel Aviv." At one point the Israeli navy was a photocopy of the U.S. Navy even as far as training from the Blue Jackets Manual.
Outside of the U.S., too, secretive surveillance and purchased support for Israel went forward. The February 1970 hearings of the U.N. Non-Governmental Organization Committee heard a report that there was "a clandestine program of quasi-espionage in Eastern European countries, through American Jewish tourists, conducted by the Israeli government and paid for by the Israeli government, but run from inside B'nai B'rith, which was used as a cover-up."
There are many ways of using anti-Semitism as an instrument to compel agreement with the Zionist position and to still any criticism of the Israelis. Foreign Minister Abba Eban, on the occasion of one of the many Israeli reprisals against Lebanon, defended Israel's actions: "The attitude of foreign countries cannot be entirely divorced from 'he traditional attitude of the non-Jewish world to the Jewish world." According to this theme on which the eloquent Israeli spokesman elaborated in 1974 and 1975 after he had retired from his Cabinet post and was lecturing on American university campuses while teaching at Columbia University, any and all criticism of Israel could only be considered anti-Semitic.
Dr. Willard Oxtoby, writing in Presbyterian Life,8 had this to say on 'he effect of the anti-Semitism labeling:
"Hopefully, anti-Semitism may soon become a sin of the past, but for the time being, it is still an emotionally potent word and nobody wants to be caught being anti-Semitic. . . . Like the news media, and for the same reasons, the Christian critic of Zionism is paralyzed. He cannot condemn Israeli armed conquest because he must pussyfoot in the delicate area of religious prejudice. As a result, Zionism is a subject on which in the United States there is more effective suppression of freedom of speech than any other." [408] [409]Since criticism of Jews by blacks automatically became labeled anti-Semitism; since censure of Israel by Christians ranging from President Charles de Gaulle to the General Assembly and Security Council of the U.N. was held by the world Jewish community to be but another "manifestation of perennial anti-Semitism," according to Abba Eban; since anti-Zionism was declared by the Rabbinical Council of America to be but a new guise for anti-Semitism, it was inevitable that freedom of expression in the U.S. became totally restricted. Veteran Zionist leader Dr. Nahum Goldmann alleged there was a new kind of anti-Semitism that had sprung up in Communist countries and elsewhere among those whom he chose to term "members of the left wing." This variety of anti-Semitism, he asserted in February 1969, was being propagated in the form of anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist positions.
Exploitation of prejudice reached unheard of heights in the 1974 study of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), The New Anti-Semitism, written by its high priests of the cult of anti-anti-Semitism, General Counsel Arnold Forster and National Director Benjamin R. Epstein. According to the press release, headed "Searchlight on Hatred," widely distributed by publisher McGraw-Hill, the new anti-Semitism is based on the old, only it emanates from different and surprisingly respectable sources. "The hostility of the Radical Left, the Radical Right, pro-Arab groups, black extremists, and a malingering anti-Jewish hate-mongering that has plagued the United States since the early twenties" has allegedly now been augmented by "others within the government, the media, the clergy and the arts, who are insensitive to Jews and Jewish concerns, particularly to the needs and wants of the State of Israel."
And as authors Forster and Epstein indicated in their two-hour, unopposed radio interview on New York's popular WMCA Barry Gray talk show, anyone who does not go along 100 percent with their views on Israel is deemed "insensitive" and therefore "anti-Semitic." The ADL leaders made it very clear that "any threat to the security of the State of Israel" must be considered a threat to the Jews of the U.S. and hence must be viewed as anti-Semitism. The reason given by them for this new bigotry: "The hard-won status of American Jewry."
The publication of this much ballyhooed study and book just happened to coincide with the growing feeling in many parts of the country that Zionist pressure, influence, and financial power had been responsible for the energy crisis that brought gas shortages and grave dangers. The cultists bitterly complained that Jews were no longer protected by the "moral indignation that followed the holocaust." Apparently, they wished to extend a protective curtain over the Zionist-imposed Middle East policy and other positions espoused by the Jewish Establishment.
This was the seventh of the books on which these same authors had collaborated. 9 As usual, the book was released to the press first as a study one month before publication to lay the groundwork for a vast publicity follow-up. The New York Times obliged, as customary, with solid three-column coverage headed "Report by Anti-Defamation League Sees Example of New Kind of Anti-Semitism."10
This latest ADL work contained no index, probably purposely because it would have quickly revealed an imposing roster of respectable people listed as "anti-Semites." The tightly woven volume, set in smaller than usual type, contained infinite words and multifold unproven charges based on innuendo and insinuation. The names of those who were vilified were interwoven with those of a few recognized bigots and were adroitly dropped among members of the Radical Left, the Radical Right, Arab, and black extremists - a perfect example of the deceptive method of affixing guilt by juxtaposition.
While the Foreword of its latest "study" set forth the ADL's longterm goal to "fight against prejudice, bigotry and discrimination" with "the weapons [of] law, education and public persuasion . . . to seek justice and fair treatment for all citizens alike," this widely accepted image of the organization was destroyed by the repeated insistence of the authors that "American Jews regard attacks on the existence of Israel as the ultimate anti-Semitism." As stated in the last paragraph of the Epilogue, "the heart of the new anti-Semitism abroad in our land" lies in the "widespread incapacity or unwillingness to comprehend the necessity of the existence of Israel to Jewish safety and survival throughout the world." Therefore, the mildest criticism of Israel or of Zionist activities was viewed as offensive "insensitivity" or "callous indifference" and was equated to anti-Semitism, distinguishable from the traditional kind, the authors averred, in that "the new antiSemitism is not necessarily deliberate in character and is more often expressed by respected individuals and institutions here and abroad people who would be shocked to think of themselves or have others think them as anti-Semites."
In this Foreword ADL National Chairman Seymour Graubard laid the groundwork for old, recognizable tactics:
"While the memory of the Nazi Holocaust was fresh in mind, anti-Semitism was silenced. As that memory fades, however, as Jews are more and more being [410] [411]considered a part of the Establishment, there are new growths of anti-Semitism. They are being nurtured in a climate of general insensitivity and deterioration of morality and ethics, the kind of climate, history reminds us, in which anti-Semitism grows best."Having recalled the past to build fear and to invent present hostile situations, the ADL was ready to apply the smear and vilification so as to censor and silence, thus building an iron curtain over America that would bar any criticism, however constructive, of Israel, Zionists, or Jews (Judaism is rarely, if ever, involved). Even the New York Post's James Wechsler, long an avid friend of Israel, was objective enough to write that the latest Forster-Epstein ADL work is "grievously flavored by an intolerance of their own in equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism." Calling the presentation "illegitimate and uncivil," the columnist described a standard
"..which requires a kind of political psychiatry to isolate hidden intent, by proceeding from a well-documented dissection of the frenzies of Gerald L. K. Smith to a loose indictment of Senator J. William Fulbright and columnists Evans and Novak. They do not explicitly apply the label anti-Semitic to the latter three. But the context in which the attack appears - indeed their inclusion in the volume carries, to borrow their words, 'an unmistakable message' and inescapable 'innuendo.' "11The assumption of the simultaneous role of judge, prosecutor, witness, and juror brought this sole protest from the "brave" band of liberals who are otherwise frothing at the mouth at such stifling of freedom. All of the ADL books, with the tremendous publicity given to them before, during, and after publication (they were widely promoted on radio and otherwise by among others, Walter Winchell, during his days of fame) and the extensive advertising, ought long ago to have earned for the organization its appropriate name, "The Defamation League."
The growth of anti-Semitism, which the ADL and other Israelist groups allegedly feared, suited the needs of the Zionists who wished to make Jews more conscious of their Jewishness. The worship of ethical universal Judaism, in their eyes, was for the few skull-capped old men and Talmudic scholars. But for the masses, who were turned off by the tedium of synagogue worship, there was the new exciting Israelism and the worship of anti-anti-Semitism.
From its outset the Zionist movement had clearly indicated the extent of its vested interest in prejudice. Herzl expressed the hope that any anti-Semitism would "act as a propelling force which, like the wave of the future, would bring the Jews into the promised land."12 At the same time he also wrote: "Anti-Semitism has grown and continues to grow-and so do I" 13 The father of Zionism predicted: "The governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want."
The rabbinate had long employed anti-Semitism as a means of keeping the flock within the fold, and since the creation of Israel, support in the Diaspora has been continuously and easily enlisted by depicting the new Jewish state as a kind of insurance policy in case of a renaissance of anti-Semitism. Consequently, Zionist leadership has cared little about how much anti-Semitism their own separatist activities might generate.
The late British Parliamentarian Richard H. S. Crossman, an ardent Anglo-Saxon proponent of Zionism, cited Dr. Chaim Weizmann's contention that "anti-Semitism is a bacillus which every Gentile carries with him wherever he goes and however often he denies it."14 At this first meeting Dr. Chaim Weizmann allegedly bluntly asked Crossman whether he was anti-Semitic, to which the Labourite frankly answered, "Of course." Their friendship was sealed, and Crossman's energetic crusade, partly expiation for that original prejudice, followed.
Bigotry has only been so much grist for Zionist mills. Crossman expressed it thus: "Who achieved that majority vote for partition at Lake Success? Not the terrorists of the Irgun nor the soldiers of the Haganah, but the aged leader of international Jewry [Weizmann], who could still sham and magic the Gentile world into recognizing its debt to her people."15 It is this continued process of shaming the Christian world into accepting the guilt for the genocide of six million Jews that first brought Israel into being, and since then has been the means of rallying continued support for Israel's cause in the U.S. and in the Western world.
Parliamentarian Ian Gilmour, writing in the British magazine The Spectator, noted the inevitable link between Zionism and anti-Semitism:
"Since the basis of Zionism is that Jewish assimilation in other countries is in the long run impossible and that anti-Semitism and persecution are bound to break out sooner or later, Zionism has almost a vested interest in racial discrimination. The Israelis mount 'rescue operations' to save allegedly threatened Jews in other countries. . . . In Arab countries, Jewish difficulties and emigration to Israel were the result not of anti-Semitism, but of Zionist activities and the existence of the State of Israel. Zionism aggravated the disease that it professed to cure." 16 [412] [413]This was a reecho of the words voiced earlier by Dr. Judah Magnes, the first President of Hebrew University: "We had always thought that Zionism would diminish anti-Semitism in the world. We are witness to the opposite."17
The separatist philosophy of Zionist dogma, staunchly supported by Organized Jewry after the holocaust, has been picked up alike by "retrogressive" conservatives and by liberal friends who would otherwise look askance at the mere mention of apartheid. And this overwhelming sentiment manifested itself, almost as if in answer to the blunt warning of Goldmann that a "current decline of overt anti-Semitism might constitute a new danger to Jewish survival. . . . The disappearance of 'anti-Semitism' in its classic meaning, while beneficial to the political and material situation of Jewish communities, has had a very negative effect on our internal life."18 Counsel Leo Pfeffer of the American-Jewish Congress voiced a similar statement: "Such discrimination may well be a blessing. It is possible that some anti-Semitism is necessary in order to insure Jewish survival."19 In Britain, too, an article in Blackfriars Magazine pointed to the danger of the extinction of the Jewish community because of the absence of anti-Semitism. 20
The large-city media came to the rescue and prevented such a catastrophe from occurring by keeping the anti-anti-Semitic pot boiling. Through its virtual control of the media, the Zionist machinery had no problems orchestrating three important themes:
(1) Arab anti-Semitism: the hostility of the Arab world, and particularly of Gamal Abdel Nasser and later of Yasir Arafat and the PLO, allegedly stemming from the same kind of bigotry and hatred that was manifested in Hitlerian genocide.(2) Russian anti-Semitism: the Jews in the Soviet Union and elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain were singular victims of Communist terror and must be permitted to go to Israel.
(3) Christian anti-Semitism: the bigotry that first persecuted Jews as followers of Judaism and then permitted six million Jews in Europe to be wiped out allegedly still manifested itself in continued acts of hostility toward Jews and particularly toward the State of Israel.
An attempt was made to link alleged Fascist activities in Argentina with increasing anti-Semitic overtones in Egypt. In the spring of 1975 Argentine Ambassador in Washington Alejandro Orfila asked his good friend Egyptian Ambassador Ashraf Ghorbal to briefly see a visiting writer for a supernationalist publication called Marchar. In response, Ghorbal received the writer for just three minutes. Patricio Kelly, this particular writer, spoke no English whatsoever and the Egyptian Ambassador speaks but a few words of Spanish and Italian. The only other person present was a photographer whom Kelly brought along; most unfortunately, no effort was made to obtain an interpreter. Several weeks after the story of the interview appeared-and the paper went out of business not long after-the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in Buenos Aires fed a long section of the alleged interview, "Extermination of Judaism in the Mideast Is Point of Departure for Arab Liberation," through its main trunk wire extending worldwide to the specialized Jewish press, which immediately picked up the story.
Jewish Week of Washington headlined its April 3 story: "Egyptian Ambassador Foresees Extermination of judaism." An additional commentary on the alleged interview was carried by the national chauvinistic Brooklyn Jewish Press (April 11) with the headline: "Extermination of Jews." Letters containing clips of this alleged interview poured into the Egyptian Embassy in Washington. Even the respected and fair Guardian in England published a large portion of the alleged interview, but later carried a full retraction apologizing "for running a piece of black propaganda," which the newspaper admitted was obtained from an Israeli source that was impeccable."
The opposition Herut party demanded in the Knesset that the Israeli Foreign Ministry "reprint and distribute millions of copies of the interview by one of President Sadat's principal advisers," which they claimed proved what Israelis had always contended: "The conflict is not over territories, but over the very existence of Israel and the Jewish people."
Executive Vice President of the Synagogue Council of America Rabbi Henry Siegman wrote Ghorbal: "Based on our association, I simply find it impossible to believe that you could have said the things attributed to you."21 Chairman of the Board of the World Jewish Congress Philip M. Klutznick forwarded to Ghorbal a similar message. Evans and Novak described the defamation of the Egyptian Ambassador as "cruel and tragic and without any effort to check the accuracy of the inflammatory report in a worthless publication . . . the understandable emotions and fears of thousands of Jews have been manipulated in the rising crescendo of the propaganda battle."22
Every incident everywhere in the world in which a Jew or someone reputed to be of "Jewish ethnic background" was victimized was being incessantly presented by the Times as another example of Hitlerian anti-Semitism. (Managing editor A. M. Rosenthal early in his career wrote a sentimental piece as a correspondent in Europe following his visit to Auschwitz and admitted "that there is no news to report," but [414] "there is merely the compulsion to write something about it," which he did. 23) The campaign was led by Professor Seymour M. Lipset's New York Times Magazine article,24 "The Socialism of Fools-the New Left call it 'Anti-Zionism,' but it's no different from the anti-Semitism of the Old Right" and by Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz in an address before the American Jewish Committee warning that the "taboo on anti-Semitism is waning" and that a version of Nazism is the "in thing" today. When there were other victims in a mass tragedy, as in the Iraq hangings, the fate of Jews was singled out as evidence of persecution of Jews as Jews, rather than as a ruthless power play to tighten control.
Every Times writer, correspondent, stringer, et al., with magnifying glass in hand, has undoubtedly been sworn to a Sherlock Holmeslike preoccupation with uncovering the most remote evidence of this prejudice and sending in his "find" to the news editor, who stands ever-prepared to build the remotest implication of bias into booming headlines of fact, to make atypical examples of prejudice appear typical. When Reverend George French Kempsell, Jr., of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Scarsdale, New York, condemned in a sermon the barring of Jewish escorts for debutantes going to a coming-out ball at the Scarsdale Golf Club, three lengthy stories appeared in the Times, two on the front page. 25
When the winner of the Freshman First Honor prize in a letter to the Daily Princetonian 26 dared question the appropriateness of bringing the Warsaw Ghetto Exhibit to the university, and pointed to "the martyr image of 6 million dead" as the primary theme of the Jewish drive toward Gentile acceptance, a raging controversy took over this ivy college campus. Princeton President Dr. Robert F. Goheen stigmatized the letter as "blind prejudice." The New York Times promptly made national news by picking up the presidential letter from the campus paper and featuring it prominently. 27
The Times continued to be the willing efficient transmittal belt in supplying the American public with constant alleged examples of Arab, Russian, and Christian "anti-Semitism" as a means of molding favorable sentiment for the Israeli state. And occasionally the trials and tribulations of a famed man of letters served the same purpose.
The death in Venice on November 1, 1972, of poet Ezra Pound, who probably did as much for English literature in the 20th century as any single individual, brought wide press reportage on the stormy life of the famed expatriate. There was little reference, however, to the final turbulent event in the hectic eighty-seven years of Pound's life in [415] which the cult of anti-anti-Semitism gained another resounding victory, and Pound was the victim.
While still living in Italy in 1972, the poet became the center of a swirling controversy when he was awarded the annual Emerson-Thoreau medal of Boston's American Academy of Arts and Sciences by a panel of distinguished writers and critics. The Academy's governing council vetoed the panel's recommendation on what they called "moral grounds, because of other aspects of his life." What this meant was that the council, with a large number of Jewish members, was penalizing Pound for his wartime Fascist leanings and alleged "anti-Semitism."28
Like most incidents involving the cult, the affair was wrapped in secrecy and would have remained hush-hush had there not been a leak of the letter from Academy President Harvey Brooks (Harvard) to certain members, in which he noted that "with memories of the Holocaust so prominent, there was the unavoidable implication that the award carried special approval of life as well as work." An award to Pound, it was felt, would be "deeply offensive to many members of the Academy."
Three of this privately supported honorary society's 2,700 members resigned, protesting the relevance of social ideas in judging poetry. These were Professor Jerome Y. Lettvin of MIT; 0. D. Hardison, Director of the Folger-Shakespeare Library; and Professor W. Hugh Kenner of the University of California at Santa Barbara, who perceived an inconsistency in the membership honoring Pound for his book, The Pound Era, while Pound the poet was not acceptable.
As Robert Reinhold's front-page article in the Times of July 5 1972, pointed out, many of the most distinguished creative writers, composers, and scientists down through the ages have embraced ideologies or led lives that most people would consider despicable: "Shakespeare was a usurer, Christopher Marlowe a blasphemer and probably a homosexual, Rimbaud ventured into slave trading and Baudelaire led a violent, depraved life, etc." In his letter of resignation Lettvin protested: "It is not art that concerns you but politics, not taste but special interest, not excellence but propriety." The MIT academician went on to note that to this day he himself was unable to bring himself to visit Germany, but he nevertheless felt strongly about the integrity of artistic intellectual expression.
"We are witnessing the institutionalization of a very dangerous pathology in American intellectual life," stated Martin L. Kilson, a black professor of government at Harvard, the theme which he reiterated in a letter to the Times. 29 He attributed the decision to a "perverse ethnic defensiveness" on the part of Jewish intellectuals, whom he likened to "ethnically defensive blacks who want opposition to white racism established as a precondition for the recognition of an intellectual's work by intellectual institutions."
Kilson went on to say that he was as outraged about anti-Negro intellectuals as a Jew is about anti-Semitic ones, but such outrage "is not a matter of intellect but of politics," and in evaluating an intellectual's work, he believed that "short of the intellectual himself committing criminal or atrocious acts against humanity under the influence of his politics, his intellectual works should stand on their own.
Who is to judge what anti-Semitism is? Those who opposed the decision of the Boston Academy pointed to Pound's generous efforts not only to promote the careers of other writers, including James Joyce, Robert Frost, and T. S. Eliot, but also to his personal warmth toward many Jewish writers. Was he an anti-Semite? Eliot, a previous Emerson winner, was also alleged to have shared Pound's anti-Semitic outlook in his earlier works.
What is this thing called anti-Semitism? Is any criticism of any Jew because he happens to be a Jew per se "anti-Semitism"? Even when Anna Pauker, a Rumanian Communist who had murdered thousands, was herself purged, certain quarters raised their inevitable hue and cry because she happened to be Jewish. If a Jewish politician is corrupt, is he to be given the protective cover of the label "anti-Semitism"?
In his Canto 52, Pound had written: "Poor yitts paying for the Rothschilds/paying for a few big Jews' vendetta on goyim." From the earliest moments of his career, Pound had criticized the vulgarity of life and the international bankers, particularly those who were Jewish. His venom expressed itself in: "Usury is the cancer of the world." The Rothschilds have been assailed from the Right and the Left for their usurious practices in building their nearly inexplicable fortune. Is all such censure automatically verboten because the persons concerned are Jewish? Since the Nazi tragedy, Jews too often have managed to take shelter under the exemption: "Don't dare incriminate a Jew lest you be taking Hitler's side."
But it took a 1973 column in the Boston Globe by Kevin Kelley to really expose the cult of anti-anti-Semitism. Strangely enough, this time the cultists were going after the movie industry, which has always been more than 100 percent subservient to Zionist nationalism. Certain Christians might well level the charge against Jesus Christ Superstar that it is irreverent (Catholics called it morally unobjectionable, but [416] [417] libertarian)-but that it is anti-Semitic carries this too far.
The Boston columnist quite appropriately labeled as "hysteria" the outcry and the accompanying claim that producer Norman Jewison's name might fool people into thinking that he was Jewish, thereby somehow giving the movie, magically, a Jewish blessing despite its underlying bias. "That kind of suggestion, like the charge itself, is paranoid," wrote the columnist. 30
Particularly objectionable to the film's Israelist critics was the Jewish role in the crucifixion and the condemnation of Jesus by the high priests, whom they alleged were "libelously depicted as contemptuous, sadistic and blood-thirsty." (Amos, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and other of the Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament had, of course, similarly described the priests of an earlier period.) These one-track-minded Jews also protested a surrealistic scene following Judas's betrayal of Jesus and the use of Israeli tanks and Phantoms (without markings). American Jews charged these damaged the Israeli image-again a case of acting "more Catholic than the Pope," as the Israelis had given their initial approval to the film.
The prerelease publicity for Superstar was tremendous as controversy was continuously fanned. A discussion on "Midday Live," the Channel 5 program in New York City, featured Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum's view that the film was strengthening the misconception held by many Christians, if not most, that the Jews had killed Christ. He would have history entirely rewritten. Apparently the lyrics of the song sung by Pontius Pilate made him appear all too human and shifted the responsibility for the crucifixion to the pressures of a hysterical Jewish mob. Further, the Rabbi insisted, the casting of a black actor in the role of Judas was likely to encourage black anti-Semitism.
The cultists did not cease their "anti-Semitic" branding campaign. They tried to influence reviewers. The American Jewish Committee called a press conference denouncing the musical as comparable to the "anti-Semitic" Passion Play of Oberammergau. Rabbi Tanenbaum, however, was refused a meeting by Universal Pictures President H. H. Martin to discuss the Committee's concern that Superstar might rouse new bigotry in West Germany and Austria, where "a strong residuum of both religious and ideological anti-Semitism continues."
This latest effort at suppression appeared on the same page of the New York Times 31 as a story about a new musical based on Molly, the character created by Gertrude Berg on national radio and television. When would John Q. Jew stand up and protest the blind stupidity of [418] [419] attacking historical facts behind the crucifixion of Jesus while encouraging the dissemination of this kind of Jewish stereotype:
Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Goldberg!Was that "yoo-hoo" for me, Mrs. Bloom?
Who breeds the anti-Semitism these cultists allegedly are fighting? Humorous as the Molly Goldberg series was, it contributed to building the anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jew as someone with an accent, part of a group apart from the other people of the nation in which he lives. Pressure from these same groups was responsible for bringing to an end the very popular television series "Bridget Loves Bernie," because it showed that an Irish-Jewish intermarriage can work despite obstacles. But the attempt to pressure NBC out of its scheduled showing of Lawrence Olivier in "The Merchant of Venice" failed after the cultists,joined by the magazine Jewish Currents, had expressed a deep dread in permitting this production "to be beamed into the homes of the mass TV audience."32
The anti-anti-Semitism cult is vital not only in the silencing of the Opposition to Zionism and Israelism, but it also supplies a principal raison d’etre for followers of the new modern kind of "Judaism." Many Jews insist they will remain in the faith so long as it is still unpopular to be a Jew, i.e., so long as anti-Semitism exists. This alone could account for the fact that the ADL and other "defense" organizations, with the powerful and wealthy Jewish-American community solidly behind them, have never attempted to launch one single objective scholarly study on the causes of anti-Semitism so as to make an honest effort to kill this bias.
The reasoning is obvious. Neither the religious nor the lay leaders of the many Jewish organizations wished to lose their most potent weapon. If they removed prejudice they would lose adherents to the faith. If they made strides toward eliminating bigotry, funds for Jewish nationalist activities would dry up. Hence there must be no real attempt to solve the problem of anti-Semitism. Herein lies the conspiracy between the rabbinate, Jewish nationalists, and other leaders of Organized Jewry to keep the problems of prejudice alive, just as Goldmann and Herzl had advocated. The Christian has not interfered, particularly if he carried any prejudice in his heart-the endemic anti-Semitism to which Herzl and Crossman had alluded.
No one understood these machinations better than famed journalist Dorothy Thompson. In 1938 she assumed the leadership of the country's moral mobilization against Nazism, after she risked life and limb in taking on the Nazi Bund in the famed Madison Square Garden incident. Her renowned wartime "Listen, Hans" broadcasts and espousal of the Zionist cause followed. She of course immediately became the darling of the Zionist movement.
Upon her return from visiting newly created Israel, as her biographer noted, she began voicing "concern for the plight of the Arab refugees and dismay at the tactics of Jewish refugees."33 William Zuckerman, editor of the Jewish Newsletter, later wrote in a tribute to the great journalist, "Miss Thompson now saw that Zionism, which had started out as a liberal and humanitarian relief movement, was turning into a reactionary, aggressive, chauvinist movement of the same character as other European nationalisms, which she had been fighting throughout her journalistic career."
A bitter campaign of character assassination was waged against her, even to the point of attributing her new viewpoint to the influence of her "anti-Semitic" third husband, highly respected Czech sculptor Maxim Kopf. As biographer Marion K. Sanders relates:
For Dorothy, the bitterest blow was the discovery that Zionists equated criticism of their policies with anti-Semitism. "I refuse to become an anti-Semite by designation," she said, recalling not only her long record of benevolence to Jewish refugees, her steadfast battle against Hitler, and, perhaps, the fact that she had once been ridiculed for walking out of a dinner party where an anti-Semitic joke was told, with the comment, "I will not remain in the same house with traitors to the United States."34The Zionist pressure directed against Thompson resulted in certain newspapers, including the New York Post from which she received a full quarter of her income, dropping her syndicated "On the Record" column. She was bitterly hurt: "I am crushed at the thought that this campaign has been instituted by 'liberals,' against a writer in a 'liberal newspaper' whose intolerance of an opposing or differing view leads them to character-assassination and career-assassination. It has been boundless, going into my personal life."35
Meyer Weisgal, the intimate associate of David Ben-Gurion and her closest friend within the Zionist hierarchy, testified:
"The attacks upon her became outrageous. She was accused, among other things of having lined her pockets with the fees of Zionist organizations. This stung her deeply.... She had taken nothing for herself.... All monies accruing to her from public lectures to Zionist groups went into a trust fund, which I controlled for the German-Jewish refugees who came into her orbit." 36 [420]As the final word on this terrifying episode, this writer who had earlier been married to Sinclair Lewis wrote a memorable letter "On Creating Anti-Semites" for the Jewish Newsletter:
"Really, I think continual emphasis should be put upon the extreme damage to the Jewish community of branding people like myself as anti-Semitic. It is a little beneath the dignity of anyone with my record to deny such charges in public, so they just tend to make anti-Semitism more respectable than it otherwise might be, for, rightly or wrongly, a great many people in this country respect me highly, and if it is publicized that I am an anti-Semite, anti-Semitism becomes thereby a little bit more respectable."... In the same way, the State of Israel has got to learn to live in the same atmosphere of free criticism which every other state in the world must endure. If the editors of this country's press are forced to suppress critical views because of organized pressure, both in the form of masses of letters to the editor and pressures on the business side of the paper's organization, the net effect - and I know what I'm talking about - is to foment a very ugly resentment, the worse because it finds no outlet. There are many subjects on which writers in this country are, because of these pressures, becoming craven and mealy-mouthed. But people don't like to be craven and mealy-mouthed; every time one yields to such pressure, one is filled with self-contempt and this self-contempt works itself out in resentment of those who caused it." [Italics added.]
"I often think that race relations were actually much better in this country when we took good-natured flings at the characteristics of the various national groups in our midst. People actually don't like paragons, and any group that tries to arrogate to itself all the virtues and admit none of the vices of the common run of humanity does not thereby make itself more lovable. Therefore, I am sure that anti-anti-Semitism, like anti-anti-Negroism, can reach a point where it has exactly the opposite effect from the one which it has striven for. . ." 57
Dorothy Thompson was unable to halt the Zionist juggernaut. Scornful of the long-term effects of its anti-anti-Semitic campaign, the cult has continued its war of suppression and repression, waging an unparalleled blitz on the great and near-great to win acquiescence to its views on Israel.
[End of Chapter]
Lilienthal, Alfred M.
The Zionist Connection II: What Price Peace?Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Jewish-Arab relations. 2. United States Foreign relations - Near East. 3. Near East Foreign relations - United States. I. Title.
DS119.7L52 327.5694'017'4927
82-061135
This is a revised and updated edition of The Zionist Connection:
What Price Peace? published four times by Dodd Mead and once by Middle East Perspective, Inc.This is the first international paperback edition. Printed and Published by
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Copyright © 1978, 1979, 1982, 1983 by Alfred M. Lilienthal All rights reserved.
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Other excerpts from Alfred Lilienthal's book "The Zionist Connection II":
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