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

 

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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

 

XIV - The Blitz

 

No matter whose the lips that would speak, they must be free and ungagged. The community which dares not protect its humblest and most hated member in the free utterance of his opinions, no matter how false or hateful, is only a gang of slaves.

- Wendell Phillips

  

WHY IS THE SUBJECT of this book sui generis ? A Dr. Timothy Leary could talk openly in favor of pot. Others might argue pro and con on the subject of abortion. One is quite able to attack his Holiness the Pope, or Her Majesty the Queen of England. This country carried on a lengthy, bitter, acrimonious debate on Vietnam, which finally led to the U.S. withdrawal. But why can only one side of the Arab-Israeli question be discussed in the U.S.?

In the case of every other issue of public interest, there is room for both the pros and the cons. Arguments are aired and, as befits a democratic society, disagreement is permitted to exist. Although this is the one area of foreign policy that has deep domestic as well as international implications, relating closely to the survival of the entire civilized world, no one may freely talk about it. Only when it comes to the Israeli problem is there so concentrated an attempt to crush all opposition.

At critical moments in U.S. relations with the Arab world and Israel there has invariably been some one person who has seen the problem in full perspective, bestirred himself, and attempted to tell the story to the American public. Equally invariably, like the wolf at the head of the pack, he has been forthrightly shot down, his pen or voice stilled, and the gaping vacuum once more becomes apparent. With the help of the ever-willing media, the critic of Israel or of U.S. "Israel First" policy has been made out to be a reincarnation of Hitler. The [421] [422] [423] history of these personal repressions will astound Americans quite as much as did the revelations of Watergate in the spring and summer of 1973. Those who have dared break the silence barrier have paid grievously for their courage in exercising what they considered to be their democratic prerogative.

The roster of renegade libertarians, liberals and conservatives alike, who over the past thirty years have tried to buck the tide of Jewish-Zionist nationalism and then found themselves victims of a smear campaign, reads like an international Who's Who. Included in this illustrious list drawn from top educational, clerical, literary, political, and journalistic circles are: Yale's Millar Burrows, Harvard's William Ernest Hocking, Dean Virginia Guildersleeve, Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin, Henry Van Dusen, Dean Francis Sayre, Rabbi Elmer Berger, Dr. A.C. Forrest, Dr. John Nicholls Booth, Father Daniel Berrigan, Morris Ernst, Arthur Garfield Hays, Vincent Sheean, Dr. Arnold Toynbee, Norman Thomas, Howard K. Smith, J. William Fulbright, James Abourezk, Ralph Flanders, General George Brown, James Forrestal, Henry A. Byroade, Moshe Menuhin, Dr. Israel Shahak, Dorothy Thompson, Willie Snow Ethridge, Margaret McKay, Hannah Arendt, Sir George Brown, Folke Bernadotte, Dag Hammarskjold, Bruno Kreisky, Georges Pompidou, and Charles de Gaulle.

The relentless and persistent attacks waged on those who have dared raise even a note of caution, let alone a voice of protest, against the prevailing one-sided pro-Israelism line can find few parallels in a society that has not as yet extinguished free speech or opinion-expression and otherwise permits some talking out against the Establishment. It is hard to believe that such things have been taking place in this country, so persistently, for so long, and so quietly. To preserve the massive cover-up and cover-over, there has been an onslaught that can be compared only to the Nazi blitz, which sought to level London to the ground at the outset of World War II. Surveillance, harassment, character assassination, guilt by association, guilt by juxtaposition, suppression of free speech, repression of even minimal dissent-these are some of the basic techniques employed by the plethora of Zionist "humanitarian," "defense," and lobbying organizations in silencing any and all opposition to the Israeli state and its policies.

One of the earliest victims was James Forrestal, first U.S. Secretary of Defense (prior to the Truman administration the Cabinet included separate Secretaries of the Army and Navy). 'While other Americans were being pressured into accepting the historical necessity and validity of the State of Israel, this perspicacious man was willing to fight for what he believed to be the American national interest.

The publication of the Forrestal Diaries in 1950 revealed the lengths to which Forrestal went in trying to obtain an agreement from both major political parties to lift the question out of the 1948 political contest. He argued in vain to persuade Democratic National Chairman and Attorney General Howard McGrath that he would rather "lose two or three pivotal states which could not be carried without the support of people who were deeply interested in the Palestine question than run the risks which, he felt, would ensue from that kind of handling of the Palestine question." He added, "No group in this country should be permitted to influence our policy to the point where it could endanger our national security."1

Vilification was Forrestal's only reward for his persistent efforts. Bernard Baruch, the adviser to Presidents and a good friend, warned him that his deep involvement in this attempt to forestall the inevitable movement toward the creation of a Jewish state was already identifying him to a dangerous degree with the opposition to U.S. policy on Palestine. But Forrestal ignored such counsel. When Congressman Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., expressed fear that the party might lose votes should a bipartisan agreement be reached, the Secretary almost angrily retorted: "I think it is about time that somebody should give some consideration as to whether we might not lose the United States."2

The Defense Secretary argued in vain with Attorney General Howard McGrath, his fellow cabinet member and Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. McGrath, always the politician, would not change his mind even after he was shown the report on Palestine prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency, which underlay Forrestal's tormenting worry that the Soviet Union might take advantage of the breach of U.S. relations with the Arabs to move into the vitally strategic Middle East with its vast oil resources. It was this concern that motivated Forrestal's lonely crusade to retain a modicum of Arab friendship with the U.S. He acutely sensed the tremendous strategic importance of the area, globally and oil-wise, and his military advisers agreed that the withdrawal of the British from Palestine would result in serious troubles that could only help the Soviet Union. (History has proven how right he was in visualizing the Kremlin's "Open Sesame" to the Arab world.)

Secretary Forrestal enjoyed a short-lived triumph during the U.S. temporary shift to trusteeship, but then came President Truman's May 14 recognition of Israel.[424]

Cries of "tool of Wall Street" and "oil hireling" greeted Forrestal's tireless efforts to divorce Middle East policy from domestic politics. Zionist lawyer Bartley C. Crum, in a widely publicized Cleveland speech, assailed Forrestal as the man "who has the power to decide whether there is a Jewish state in Palestine. 'Upon what meal does our Caesar feed that he has grown so great?' The answer is that Mr. Forrestal has found a new diet that even Caesar might envy. It is oil -Arabian oil."3 Attacks like this, widely distributed by the American Jewish Committee, the ADL, and other Zionist groups, helped inspire the "tormenting, persecuting columns"4 by Drew Pearson and broadcasts by Walter Winchell, aggravating the Secretary of Defense's illness.

Unfortunately Forrestal never lived to see the vindication of his judgment concerning the dire long-term consequences to the U.S. of the partition decision. This sensitive man, so deeply hurt, not so much by his failure to achieve a bipartisan Palestinian policy as by the fact that his motivations should have been impugned with the smears of "anti-Semite," threw himself from his room in the Bethesda Naval Hospital where he was being treated following a nervous breakdown. (Several articles and at least one book have hinted that he was pushed out of the window from which he allegedly fell to his death.)

It was slightly ironic that the devout Zionist and the first U.S. Ambassador to Israel, James G. McDonald, in his book My Mission to Israel,5 should have been the one to come to Forrestal's defense:

"He was in no sense anti-Semitic or anti-Israel nor influenced by oil interests. He was convinced that partition was not in the best interests of the U.S., and he certainly did not deserve the persistent and venomous attacks on him which helped break his mind and body. On the contrary, these attacks stand out as the ugliest examples of the willingness of politician and publicist to use the vilest means - in the name of patriotism - to destroy self-sacrificing and devoted public citizens."

When that irrepressible firebrand, Charles de Gaulle, whose pronouncements were already offensive to so many on so many grounds, added Israel in 1967 to his long list of antagonists, he really "put his foot into it.,' This time he took on a foe more powerful than any empire on earth, the cult of anti-anti-Semitism, and there was no American Ambassador to come to his aid.

At a press conference held at the Elysée Palace November 27, 1967, de Gaulle fired a new "shot heard 'round the world." When the information media pulled a phrase out of context from his exposition [425] on the Middle East and gave it an inaccurate translation, they provoked pressures such as have scarcely been visited on anyone, let alone a Chief of State, since those directed at Harry Truman in 1947 to influence the final vote on the U.N. Partition Resolution. Banner headlines proclaimed that the General, who up to the very morning of the June 5 attack continued to supply the very Mystères with which the Israelis knocked out all Arab air bases, had assailed the Jews as an "elite people, sure of itself and domineering." Americans were only too ready ("Give a dog a bad name and then hang him" is an old adage) to add anti-Semitism to the long list of their grievances against the French President.

The incident caused a furor in the French press. Le Monde called the President "anti-Semitic," while former presidential candidate Francois Mitterand, interviewed in New York, labeled de Gaulle "materialistic." Some editorials accused the General not of being an anti-Semite but only of sounding like one. The New York Time's even added yeast to the brew by noting that "some men with frankly racist views declared themselves elated"

This is what de Gaulle actually stated, as reported in the official French translation distributed by the French Information Service:

"The establishment between the two world wars-for it is necessary to go back that far~of a Zionist home in Palestine, and then, after World War II, the establishment of a State of Israel, raised at the time a certain number of apprehensions. One could indeed, and people did wonder, even among Jews, if the implantation of this community on land that had been acquired in more or less justifiable conditions and in the middle of Arab peoples who were thoroughly hostile to it, was not going to produce constant and interminable friction and conflicts. Some even feared that the Jews, up to then scattered but who had remained what they had been down through the ages, that is an elite people, sure of itself and dominating; once they gathered on the site of their former grandeur, might come to change into a fervent and conquering ambition the very touching hopes that they had for nineteen centuries." 6 [Italics added]

The press reportage conveniently changed "dominating" to "domineering," contradicting the official translation and thus making it simpler for the Israelist propaganda campaign to affix the heinous label. The remotest implication of bias was built into booming headlines of fact. The New York Time's "Week in Review"7 reported that "Jews had been described as a people with a secular inclination to seek domination." 8 One Israeli newspaper charged de Gaulle, according to the Times, with "surpassing the invective of Federenko"; another claimed, "There arises the stench of the 'Protocols of Zion.' "9 Where [426] the General was not accused of being an anti-Semite, he was condemned for "sounding like one." The Chief Rabbi of France as well as Michel Debre', the Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs (described as a rabbi's grandson), were brought into the pressuring act.

Additional reportage further embellished the case. Henry Tanner's front-page stories in the Times on January 6 and 10, 1968, respectively headlined "De Gaulle Assures Rabbi He Intended No Insult to Jews" and "De Gaulle Says He Praised Jews," were intended to lend further support to the thesis of neo-anti-Semitic remarks. These stories, together with his Sunday piece of January 14 under the headline "De Gaulle: He Has Some Second Thoughts on Jews," besides pointing up the tremendous influence of Jewry (no reader of the bestseller Our Crowd needed a reminder of this), implied that the General was retracting his statement. Tanner, David Susskind, and the Anti-Defamation League notwithstanding, there was not a single word of recantation or retraction by de Gaulle. The French President had nothing to recant.

"Informed Jewish sources" were Tanner's sole attribution for the first alleged recantation at the New Year's Day reception, where "Rabbi Kaplan told the General of his concern over the fact that the statement had been used by 'real' anti-Semites as an instrument against the Jews." (Moral to everyone: "Say nothing against Israel, Zionism, or Jews, however true, because somewhere, sometime, some real anti-Semite might pick it up and use it.") The second de Gaulle "recantation" was supposedly contained in an answer to a letter from former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who had written a fifteen page, single-spaced tome tracing Jewish suffering down through the centuries.

As in all Israelist propaganda moves, there was real purpose behind the expertly executed hue and cry. The "bad wolf" de Gaulle was pitted against "little Israel" and the "persecuted"Jews to build favorable sentiment just prior to the U.S. visit of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, who was seeking more American planes for "defensive" purposes after the June 5 Israeli sneak attack had virtually destroyed the air arms of all Arab countries. Jewish nationalism once again sought to exploit prejudice so as to achieve political goals.

Likewise, the anti-Semitic charge shifted attention from de Gaulle's clear, concise, and unambiguous condemnation of the course taken by Israel, "whose existence and survival," according to the French President, must "depend on policies she follows, as is the case for all others." In his reply to the lengthy Ben-Gurion letter, the [427] President of France made crystal clear what the controversy was all about. After reviewing the "old and natural friendship France felt for Israel," de Gaulle referred to the "unfortunate blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba" and the reasonableness of Israel feeling threatened. "But," he went on:

". . I remain convinced that by ignoring the warning given in time to your Government by the French Government, by taking possession of Jerusalem and of many Jordanian, Egyptian and Syrian territories by force of arms, by exerting repression and expulsion there-which are the unavoidable consequences of an occupation which has all the aspects of annexation [How clairvoyant the General was!]-by affirming to the world that a settlement of the conflict can only be achieved on the basis of the conquests made and not on the condition that these be evacuated Israel is overstepping the bounds of necessary moderation."

Only in the third paragraph from the very end of his own lengthy letter to Ben-Gurion did de Gaulle allude to the controversial "elite, sure of itself" clause for which he had been so vilified, holding that "there cannot be anything disparaging in underlining the character, thanks to which this people were able to survive and to remain itself after nineteen centuries spent under incredible conditions."

This response to Ben-Gurion, far from being an apology, was a reiteration of de Gaulle's original complaint, set forth in his press conference, that Israel had ignored his May 24 warning imparted to Foreign Minister Abba Eban in Paris just twelve days before the outbreak of the 1967 hostilities:

"If Israelis attacked, we will not allow it to be destroyed. But if you attack, we will condemn your initiative. To be sure, despite the numerical inferiority of your population, considering that you are much better organized, much more united and much better armed than the Arabs, I do not doubt that you would win military success. But later you will yourselves be engaged locally and on the international level in growing difficulties, all the more that war in the Middle East cannot fail to increase a deplorable tension in the world and to have very unfortunate consequences for many countries, so much that it is on you, having become conquerors, that the disadvantages would be blamed."

The General had been elevated to the rank of number-one antiSemite because he had dared to remind Israel that "France's voice was not heard and that Israel remained in possession of the objectives it wanted to acquire." After Israel in February 1972, following the U.S. agreement to supply forty-two Phantom jets, terminated its order for fifty French Mirages, which had been fully paid for and were to have [428] [429] been delivered in the middle of 1967, and French-Israeli relations had further deteriorated, the Time's' Jerusalem correspondent summarily analyzed the breach between the French and the Israelis in this manner: "President de Gaulle apparently decided that France's interests would be better served by building ties with the Arab states than by maintaining the relationship with Israel."10

De Gaulle had been in retirement when France joined Britain and Israel in the secret treaty of Sèvres leading to the 1956 tripartite invasion of Egypt. Despite the strong words of friendship for Israel after his return to power, he had never subscribed to the bitter anti-Egyptian sentiments of Gaullist leader Jacques Soustelle, voiced in the course of Algeria's struggle for independence. It was not too difficult for Charles de Gaulle to look beyond his nose and see where French interests lay. A leader who, when France was completely under the Nazi yoke, could envision a future for his country with grandeur, certainly could understand that the many Arab countries must eventually become infinitely more important to her interests than the State of Israel. The same vision that had carried France through its darkest moments forged a new Middle East policy after France had served for so many years as Israel's staunchest ally, not excluding the U.S.

This, and this alone, was what the Israelist case against de Gaulle was all about, and why the cult of anti-anti-Semitism pursued him relentlessly until his body was laid to rest in the small cemetery of Colombey les Deux Eglises.

From the outset of Georges Pompidou's takeover of the French Presidency, guilt through association was affixed to him by Organized Jewry. After all, he was de Gaulle's successor as well as de Gaulle's man. Few had seen fit to discredit him during the years he served with the Rothschild banking house in France. But as soon as he became Chief of State, his motives came under suspicion. Pompidou sensed this and tried to defuse it by kowtowing to the ever-present bogey of anti-anti-Semitism. The New York Times report on his first news conference pertinently included the following: "Mr. Pompidou described French attitudes in the Middle East in an unemotional matter-of-fact way. 'France's interest in the Mediterranean area requires good relations with the Arabs,' he said pointedly. But he added: 'France is not forgetting anything, and in particular has not forgotten the martyrdom inflicted by the Nazis on the Jews in all occupied countries, including France.' "11

This did Pompidou little good, however, for he found himself constantly under attack by the pro-Israelists whenever he took any position on the Middle East that did not hew 100 percent to the pure Zionist line. Perhaps the climax, at least as far as Americans were concerned, came with the French President's February 1970 trip to the U.S.

This visit, pursuant to the Nixon goal of seeking more cordial Franco-American relations, happened to follow closely on the heels of the French refusal to permit Mirages planes, contracted and paid for by Israel, to be shipped, and of the suspension of the submarine contract, which eventually was circumvented when the Israelis dramatically smuggled the ships out of the Cherbourg harbor. As a result, President Pompidou had become just about as popular with the Israelis and American Zionists as de Gaulle had been following France's major policy shift in the face of Israel's continued possession of occupied territories.

The abnormality that Israel had become was visibly demonstrated during this state visit. There were demonstrations against President Pompidou in Chicago, booing in Westchester, and picket lines in New York, which led the French Chief of State to call off the appointment that had been scheduled with Jewish leaders there. In the Windy City he had conferred with local Israelists, who used "very measured tones" and conducted themselves in sharp contrast to the demonstrators outside the Chicago and New York hotels housing the visitor from France. Mayor Daley's police treated these Zionist demonstrators with a deference not accorded to the pickets at the 1968 Democratic Convention.

President Pompidou suffered from near-physical contact with protesters who crowded in close enough to jostle him and members of his party, "shouting insults into my face and the face of my wife," to use his words. This threat of violence led to plans of Madame Pompidou to return home forthrightly, which were only reversed when President Nixon phoned from Washington to express his regrets and say that he himself was coming to New York to be present at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel dinner of the U.S.-French Society honoring the French President. That the President of the U.S. was obliged to apologize to his guest, the President of France, for the lack of manners and behavior of a small minority of Americans, constituted both a testimonial to Zionist power and also represented a damning example of the tragic Jewish dichotomy.

The indignation with which the presidents of American Jewish organizations received word of the cancellation of their New York meeting with President Pompidou can appropriately be described as "chutzpah," the Yiddish word for colossal gall. Weeks before the visit,[430] [431] organized Jewry had gone into action. On January 28 a Jewish delegation visited New York's Mayor Lindsay to make certain there would be no reception there for President Pompidou. A few days later plans were advanced for picketing demonstrations in New York, Westchester County, Chicago, and other cities on the Pompidou route. It was then that certain congressmen, led by Israelists Bertram Podell and Lester Wolff~ both of New York, called for a boycott of the French President's address to the Joint Session of Congress. A full-page advertisement under the aegis of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, which called for Phantoms for Israel to counterbalance Mirages for Libya and was signed by 64 Senators and 243 Representatives, added to the rising temperature.

The President of the Conference of Major Jewish Organizations, Dr. William Wexler, responded to the Pompidou refusal to meet, in this not-surprising, ever familiar vein: "The cancellation comes when we have every right to be concerned with the safety of the State of Israel. There was the holocaust. Six million Jewish men, women, and children died."

The media headlines, if they were not so sad, further suggested a comedy smash hit: "U.S. President Flies In; Wary Mayor Flies Out," and "Governor Goes Into Hiding." The Time's photograph showed screaming, youthful demonstrators, many recruited from Stern College of the Yeshiva University, waving Israeli flags and placards in compliance with the Wexler theme, "Israel Must Live."12 The same newspaper had a full-length bannerhead, "Israelis Fascinated by Demonstrations Against Pompidou But Deny Responsibility."

While Golda Meir was said to have been most pleased, it was the Jewish leaders in Israel and in the U.S., rather than the Israeli government, who were directly responsible for this unsavory incident. For decades Zionist leaders had been quietly spreading their philosophy, and now they had persuaded their stateside followers to respond in the correct manner to a conflict in loyalty. The abnormality that is Israel had found its counterpart in Jewish-American reaction to this and to every crisis involving the new state.

During the Pompidou visit the Zionists took out several full-page ads in the New York Times - outrageous, screaming mouthings that led former French Ambassador to London Ranier Massigli, in a letter to Le Mona' in Paris, to question the loyalty of Jews to France, inasmuch as they had been behaving more like French Jews than Jewish French.

Another Israelist ad of March 1, 1970, screamed: "J'accuse." It indicted the French President in terms parallel to those with which Emile Zola in his historic letter had indicted France in the Dreyfus case for its "crime against humanity." President Pompidou was accused of selling out the French to Arab oil, of selling arms to Libya which he knew were destined to Egypt, of pretending to seek peace in the Middle East "while promoting war by upsetting the balance of power," and of "using Arab fanaticism against Israel to line your nation's pockets. . . . We accuse you of promoting the likelihood of war in an area that could spark a world holocaust."

At a press conference before leaving New York, Pompidou indicated that Israel could have the money back that had been advanced for the payment of the Mirages, still undelivered under the French boycott. Then, defensively, he added: "People can say what they like. I am not an anti-Semite"-an assertion that no President of France ought to have had to make, even if he had not in private life handled Jewish banking interests.

Upon his return to Paris, Pompidou found himself plagued by a remark attributed to him in his Chicago meeting with Jewish leaders to the effect that he thought Israel "must cease being a racial and religious state and must become simply a state among others." In reporting on the Cabinet meeting after the Pompidou statement, government spokesman Leo Hamon tried to draw back somewhat from what, in the words of the Christian Science Monitor, might possibly become "a rising problem with French citizens of Jewish descent." Public relations advisers to the President no doubt recalled the previous storm over de Gaulle's widely publicized reference to the Jewish people.

Even a Jewish head of government had not been safe from vituperative labeling at Zionist hands. In late September 1973, two Palestinians of a heretofore unknown guerrilla group calling themselves "Eagles of the Palestinian Revolution" seized three Russian Jews en route to Israel on the Moscow to Vienna train and at gunpoint held them, together with an Austrian customs guard, as hostages for thirteen hours at Vienna's Schwechat Airport. They demanded that the government close the Jewish Agency's transit camp facilities at Schönau Castle, once a royal Hapsburg hunting lodge just south of Vienna, where Jews arrived from the Soviet Union by plane and train en route to Israel. The Palestinians also demanded a plane to carry them to safety.

Austria's Chancellor Bruno Kreisky came to world attention when he defied the U.S., the Israeli government, and global pressure mounted by World Zionism and most reluctantly met the Palestinian demands, the price exacted for the lives of the four hostages. The [432] [433] Eastern seaboard press accounts of the Kreisky Affair, redundant with the word "blackmail," spread worldwide hysteria. Typical was the statement of Jacob D. Stein, President of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, on the second day of this Austrian crisis: "It is going to be very hard to accept the theory that Austria is closed to a single Jew without every Jew replying that it is closed to him."13

Although Vienna officials clearly indicated that the measures taken would not affect individual Jews passing through, only the group facilities in Vienna itself-and six months later it was revealed that actually more Jews had transited through Vienna than in the previous period-this did not stop Stein and Chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry Richard Maas from sending a well-publicized cable protesting the Austrian government's "refusal to grant entry to Israel bound Jews," Added fuel to the fire was the reference by New York Times correspondent Terrence Smith to the Austrian cruelty to "tens of thousands of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe and Russia."14

The Nixon administration, already under pressure from Capitol Hill's pro-Soviet Jewry block, made known its strong opposition to Austria's decision. Senator Jackson charged that Austria's action "represents the most serious and short-sighted submission to intimidation and blackmail." But Kreisky was not easily intimidated and resisted tremendous pressures and coercion, from abroad and home. Leaders of the opposition parties in the Austrian Parliament, even the small Freedom party with its many former Nazi members, denounced the Chancellor in a play for votes. He declared: "What we cannot accept is that Austria should become a secondary theater of the Middle East conflict with violence and confrontations of armed men from both sides. We shall maintain our humanitarian traditions." The Austrian leader issued this challenge to Washington:

"Why doesn't the U.S. share the burden of assisting the Jewish immigrants? Why does not the U.S. operate an airlift? Instead of giving good advice, the U.S. might send ships to Odessa or some other Black Sea port and evacuate Jews from the Soviet Union. Ships could be sent to Leningrad. There are many possibilities."

The Chancellor firmly stood his ground and vehemently denied that Austrian borders had been closed to refugees: "This is simply untrue. All we want is for the emigrants to leave Austria as fast as possible-preferably the same day they arrive."15

Premier Golda Meir, always quick to recognize an opportunity to exploit an "affaire celebre" to her own propaganda advantage, at first shrewdly only implored Vienna to keep the camp open and even praised Austria for her role in enabling Jews in the past to reach Israel. But later, in an address to 2,000 of Strasbourg's Jewish community, she charged that Austria had "betrayed her own greatness" by yielding to Arab terrorist demands, and alleged that "whoever accepts the conditions of terrorists only encourages them to pursue their criminal acts."

Meir flew to Vienna for a confrontation with the Chancellor, but came away a most disappointed woman. (The Viennese Police Code for the security during the Israeli leader's visit was "Schinkensemmel"-ham sandwich.) She stormed out of Kreisky's office, complaining, "He didn't even offer me a glass of water." Meir had made a tactical error in appealing to Kreisky, the humanist, on the grounds that he was a fellow Jew.

Chancellor Kreisky happens to be an agnostic. The Chancellor's wife is a Protestant and his two children were baptized into that faith; he resents references to himself as a Jew, preferring to be called "of Jewish origin." And he, above all, knows the meaning of the Nazi peril. Although from a wealthy family, he had joined the Socialist movement as a teenager, and after the Nazis had annexed his country, he fled to Sweden. It was thirteen years before he was permitted to return home to start his career as a diplomat, which led him to the Foreign Ministry and then to his country's highest post.

Kreisky's involvement with the Middle East hardly ended with the closing of the Schönau transit facilities. During the controversy the Israeli press had used statements of Kreisky's brother, an émigré in Israel, who had been mentally ill since his youth, to attack him. And thereafter the Israelis continued to hound him, trying to add to his embarrassment everywhere, notably at Socialist gatherings. Before leaving with members of a Socialist International delegation on a tour of the Middle East early in 1974, the Chancellor was forced to explain in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv (January 20, 1974) why they were going only to the Arab countries and not to Israel:

"Because of close relations with the Israeli Labor party, we know how the solution of the problem is seen in Israel. We've heard and heard again the opinion of Golda Meir, but on the other hand, the International has no connections with the states or parties in Arab countries. Therefore, a time came at last to see the problem through the Arab eyes so that the International could arrive at a balanced position. Of course, before our eyes there will always be an approach of solidarity with a member party, the Israeli Labor party."[435] [434]

Further in the interview, Kreisky went out of his way to declare he did not recognize a Jewish nationality. He argued: "There is no Jewish race; there are only Jewish religious groups. Israel was only the ancient, religious fatherland of Jews, but not their true fatherland." Israel's Chief Rabbi Goren assailed the Austrian: "Kreisky can do what he wants, he was and will always remain a Jew." The Austrian Chancellor's reaction: "In this, Rabbi Goren does in his own way what Hitler did."

But of far greater concern to the watchdogs of Israel in the U.S. than the attitude of the French Presidents and Austrian Chancellor was the outlook of opinion molders who commanded large followings. Those iconoclasts among the clergy and media who dared direct attention to another side of the Middle East conflict soon found themselves literally under siege.

One such victim was Francis B. Sayre,Jr., Dean of the Washington Cathedral, who in his 1972 Palm Sunday sermon suggested that the "once-oppressed Israelis have become the oppressors of Jerusalem." In emphasizing his conviction that contemporary events in the Holy City were simply one of the many examples of the moral tragedy of mankind, the Cathedral dean exclaimed: "What a mirror, then, is modern Israel of that total flaw in the human breast that forever leaps to the acclaim of God only to turn the next instant to the suborning of his will for us.

Sayre asserted that Arab residents were deported, deprived unjustly of their land, and forbidden to bring their relatives to settle in Jerusalem. Arabs, he added, "have neither voice nor happiness in the city that is the capital of their religious devotion, too." To support his views, the Dean quoted from the writings in Christianity and Crisis of Israeli League for Human Rights Chairman, Dr. Israel Shahak.

Sayre's brief fifteen-minute sermon caused an uproar in the nation's capital when the Washington Post stirred up the opposition through a bitter editorial and the publication of vindictive letters. This journalistic citadel of Zionism (second only to the New York Times) carved two sentences out of context to build an alleged picture of bigotry: "Now the Jews have it [Jerusalem] all. But even as they praise their God for the smile of fortune, they begin almost simultaneously to put Him to death." For this, ADL cultists Forster and Epstein accused Sayre of repeating the central theme of anti-Semitism - that the Jews collectively were guilty of having killed Jesus. In the three previous sentences the Washington theologian had expressed "sympathy with the loving hope of that little state [Israel] which aspires to be the embodiment of a holy peoplehood . . . to achieve a government there is to realize the restoration of a scattered remnant; it is the fulfillment of cherished prayer, tempered in suffering."

Still seeking to bring about the removal of Sayre from his post at the Cathedral, or to force him to recant, Forster and Epstein further assailed the Washington clergyman in The New Anti-Semitism because he dared later to say at a memorial service in the National Cathedral that he was mourning not only the innocent Israeli athletes slain at Munich "by murderous guerrillas and ruthless revolutionaries, but also those additional victims of violence in Munich: those villagers in Lebanon and Syria whose lives have been extinguished by the Israeli Air Force even as the Twentieth Olympiad yet endures."

Praise of the Sayre sermon by Gerald L. K. Smith, widely reputed to be an anti-Semite, was adduced by the ADL as proof that the clergyman was himself a bigot.

It was slightly ironic, indeed, that Sayre should have given the eulogy at the memorial service in Washington for President Harry S. Truman three months earlier and that he should have been widely quoted for noting, "There were no wrinkles in his honesty." Sayre was the grandson of Woodrow Wilson, President at the time of the Balfour Declaration, which gave the Zionists their first foothold in Palestine. And it was President Truman without whose invaluable assistance the State of Israel would never have come into being.

One of Sayre's defenders at a Washington press conference called to counteract the charges leveled against the churchman was the Reverend A. C. Forrest, editor of the United Church Observer, which boasts of being the most widely read Church paper (800,000 readers) in the British Commonwealth. When the Observer published a special report on the Palestinian Arab refugees in the wake of the 1967 six-day war, Forrest became a victim of a campaign of hate speeches and concerted personal attacks launched by the ADL and carried out by the plethora of Canadian Zionist-oriented organizations. As Forrest explained it, "My sin was and is that I am critical of Israel's policies since the war in June. My conviction is that the pathetic refugees should be permitted to return to their homes as Israel promised last July 2 they would do. . .I said, and still say, that Israel stands condemned before world opinion."

"Monstrous allegations" and "falsehood" thundered Canadian Zionists. A Toronto rabbi repeated the falsehood that the Observer editor had said that "he hates Israel." Out of a sense of fairness, the Observer, printed a long blast by leading Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut, [436] widely reprinted in the Zionist press. But when it refused to publish a 3,500-word diatribe by Israel Ambassador Gershon Avner, Canadian air again reverberated with cries of "anti-Semitism" against Forrest. A Zionist leader warned "we have a file on you, and it goes back twenty years." (Later, there was an apology. It seems they were talking about a previous editor, who had written critically of Israel in 1948.)

Avid Zionist Professor Emil Fackenheim of the University of Toronto demanded that Forrest be removed from the chairmanship of a teaching panel. To this the besieged editor charitably noted: "Maybe if I had gone through what Rabbi Fackenheim had in Germany, I would be a bit more irrational, too."

Hostile-looking individuals started showing up at churches and meetings when the editor spoke. They took notes. They did not hang around to shake hands. And they were not from the Globe and Mail. The Globe quoted an officer of the Jewish Congress calling Forrest "a dupe of Communist and Arab propaganda." When the Observer editor was not labeled anti-Semitic, he was accused of using anti-Semitic sources and thereby creating anti-Semitism. Dates for his speaking engagements were changed, if not canceled. And the Zionists left no stone unturned in their efforts to have Forrest removed from his post or, at the least, censored in his writings.

When the intrepid Canadian churchman carried the Palestinian plight to the public in 1971 through a moving book, The Unholy Land, readers in Canada flatly rejected a blatant attempt at censorship. Coles Bookstores, one of the largest booksellers in Canada with more than thirty outlets, suddenly cleared their shelves of the book, which was not only critical of Israel' policy vis-à-vis the Palestinian refugees but also linked the Zionist state to South Africa and Rhodesia in the "practice of apartheid." Alert public relations strategy by McClelland and Stewart Ltd., the publishers of the Forrest book, brought this attempt at book burning to the attention of the book and news editor of the Canadian press. The reaction was instantaneous. People who never heard of the book became curious. Columnists wrote that the book removal "lent color to the Forrest claim that there is a pattern in Canada of suppressing criticism of Israel." In Toronto Buckley's bookstore advertised the book by saying: "We do not suppress books however truthful they may be."

The ban led to a stormy debate in newspapers, on radio, and on television. Even as the Canadian Jewish News tried to quell rising interest by calling the book "political pornography" and "trash," sales mounted; the controversy pushed the book onto the bestseller list. [437]

While the General Council of the United Church of Canada voted nearly 100 percent support of the editor of their church paper, and accorded him a standing ovation at a Toronto Dominion-wide meeting in late 1972, the persistent assault against Forrest continued. In the latest Forster and Epstein book, Forrest was described as "Canada's most notorious and perhaps most denominationally protected Christian anti-Semite." Harassment continued as a libel action was brought against Forrest and the United Church for the publication in 1972 of two controversial articles, based on sermons, by well known Unitarian anti-Zionist minister Dr. John Nicholls Booth.

In the name of reopening dialogue with the Jewish community, Church Moderator Dr. Bruce McLeod and Secretary Rev. George Morrison jointly declared with officers of the B'nai B'rith "that we regret and disavow the insensitivity and inaccuracies contained in the article."

Forrest had repeatedly asked for proof of the alleged libelous inaccuracies, which he offered to publish. Instead, a sea of pressures-financial, political, economic, social, and otherwise, as noted in an editorial 16 by the Canadian Churchman (a rival journal whose circulation is second only to that of the Observer in Canada)-were brought to bear on his Church leaders who yielded.

The Churchman editorial noted how "relentless the Jewish community, especially the B'nai B'rith, can be to anyone who has the temerity to question the policies of the State of Israel."

The editorial continued: "If the Church is to enter the field of journalism, it should adopt the highest journalistic ideals rather than the bastardized journalism (public relations) that may be appropriate or inevitable in other institutions." In noting the shift in heart of the leadership, which had earlier supported Forrest but had yielded then in the name of ecumenism, the Churchman declared:

"But what price reconciliation? The Church needs a free press, a society needs a free press, to hold before its readers a true picture of the institution. It can serve only if it is unfettered, honest and responsible. When church leaders, no matter how well motivated, diminish that freedom, we believe they diminish the freedom of Christian people to know what is being done, said and thought."17

This Canadian affair was closely linked to unprecedented suppression of freedom of speech in the famed Community Church pulpit in New York City, where John Haynes Holmes had once preached his renowned Voltairian liberalism. In the spring of 1971 Rev. Donald S. [439] [438] Harrington, Pastor of the church, invited Dr. Booth to come East and deliver five Sunday sermons in his place during a leave of absence. The Unitarian minister, who was retiring after lengthy service at his Long Beach, California, parish, had long ago awakened the ire of the ADL through his articles in the Observer and in Middle East Perspective, including, "The Dubious Ethics of B'nai B'rith."

In his initial sermon on May 2, Wesak Sunday (honoring Buddha's birth), Booth spoke of the revulsion of Gandhi and Buddha toward warfare, violence, and armament profiteering. He described at length the U.S. as the "number-one merchant of death," naming the ten American firms that are allegedly the foremost dollar earners from this trade. No one protested this portion of the sermon, which as customary was carried on the New York Times' radio station, WQXR. But the eighty seconds that followed shook New York City. The station was bombarded with calls, and the church received two threats of bombing because the California Unitarian had stated that "according to a radiocast of the previous week on KFWB, the Los Angeles Westinghouse outlet, Israel's number-one way of earning dollars was through the manufacture and export of weapons, munitions, explosives, helmets, and military uniforms."

Business Week in April had reported that Israel Aviation industries ($100 million in sales 1970) was seeking aerospace experts for its manufacturing products, including guided missiles and warplane parts. And Newsweek had announced that Israel was going into production with forty-ton tanks, having already manufactured 105-mm guns, not to mention the heavily exported UZI 4 and napalm widely used in the six-day war. (By 1977 U.S. officials were "expressing deep concern" over the export of Israeli armaments.18)

What burned the Christian and Jewish Zionists most was the Booth lamentation that "it was the ultimate in desecration for present day stewards of the Holy Land, of the Prince of Peace, of the manger and the cross, to be manufacturing and selling to other nations the instruments for killing." A large number of Unitarians are Jewish, and many of these that Sunday verbally abused Booth following the sermon.

The crisis in the church forced Harrington to fly back to New York from Chicago. Booth was asked to apologize "for his broadcast lies" to the New York Times. The church officially invited the Consul General of Israel in New York and the Zionist organization to send a representative to share the May 16 sermon and to broadcast with Booth. This offer was declined. The church then banned any further reference to the Middle East conflict in any of the Unitarian minister's scheduled sermons. The trustees' "Talk Back" session at the church had voted to distribute to all parishioners an explanatory statement of Booth's position as well as his reply to personal slander. But the prepared document was buried, despite the congregation's vote, so as "to prevent more trouble," according to the explanation of the church's Board Chairman. It was never pointed out that Harrington was Chairman of the heavily Jewish-dominated Liberal party in New York State; that Metropolitan Synagogue, which used the church facilities as guests, paid an annual "honorarium" of $7,000; or that Harrington had been honored with a B'nai B'rith plaque for a penultimate presabbatical sermon titled "The Miracle of Israel."

On June 21 ADL's Arnold Forster was given twenty minutes on WQXR's "Point of View" to answer the eighty-second "attack" after the Times had rejected the publication of a letter from Booth explaining the incident in full. Forster used this opportunity to engage in a diatribe directed against everything Booth had written or said regarding Israel, taking particular exception to the "frightful picture" conjured up by Booth in his words "Napalm from Nazareth" and "Bombs from Bethlehem." Harrington had justified censorship in his church on the grounds that these malicious phrases were "equivalent to Christian anti-Semitism."

Meanwhile, the Unitarian Church in Gainesville, Florida, which had all but reached an agreement to make Booth their new minister, was visited by an ADL representative who leveled charges of anti-Semitism against him, provided the trustees with a copy of the B'nai B'rith article, and declared that eleven Unitarian/Universalist clergymen had signed an anti-Booth protest. Booth forthrightly flew to Florida and faced his critics, pointing out that free speech was being curtailed in the guise of suppressing anti-Semitism. Despite the ADL pressure, the Florida church by a 72 percent vote designated Booth as interim minister starting September 1.

But this did not halt ADL efforts against Booth. A memo had been sent from the national offices to its representatives across the country "to alert you to possible forthcoming appearances by Dr. Booth in your area. If, indeed, he does appear, I suggest you contact friendly Christian clergy to inform them that Booth is vehemently anti-Israel and anti-Zionist, whose diatribes border on anti-Semitism.... We are attempting to ascertain Booth's traveling and speaking schedule. Any information about him that comes to your attention should be sent to me, quickly." (Shades of the Gestapo and the SS!) [440]

Only after a six-week campaign of letters and phone calls from the West Coast and New York did station WQXR finally agree to permit a four-minute taped reply to the Forster attack, which Booth ended with these words:

"We want peace, peace with justice for all. But it must be achieved not in terms of being pro-Arab or pro-Israel, but pro-humanity. And it will not be secured by name calling and fabrications, may I remind the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith."

Walter Neiman, Vice President and General Manager of the station, wrote Booth to ask permission to delete from the tape the words "fabrications," "character assassination," and "destroy people's character." This request was made upon advice of the station's same counsel, who without any hesitation had previously permitted ADL's Forster to smear Booth, to play down the facts about the Israeli defense industry, and to otherwise propagandize for Israel. To end the controversies, Booth had graciously consented to the deletion, although protesting the censorship. But the New York Times subsidiary never satisfactorily answered his query as to why the ADL had been given time to talk about articles, sermons, and matters neither germane to the original eighty-second reference to Israel nor ever heard by the listeners of station WQXR.

Booth, who had once been a journalist and whose stirring sermons and writings, including the classic Introducing Unitarianism, had won him wide acclaim, explained how he had become involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict:19

"When I preached a single sermon in 1967 entitled The Moral Case for the Arabs, I did not realize that a turning point in my life would occur. Anyone familiar with my ministry in the metropolitan Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles areas can rattle off the issues that I have staunchly faced in pulpit and press: abortion, race, Vietnam, censorship, conservation, over-population, war, munitions manufacturing . . . and the rest.

"The headaches resulting from these latter controversies paralleled those of liberal colleagues who have been unafraid to tackle prophetic issues. An occasional parishioner became inactive or resigned; some persons in the community viewed me as a "communist," a destroyer of social safeguards, or one who ought to stick to the Bible.

"The reaction to the Middle Eastern sermon staggered my understanding. I learned the meaning of being defamed, isolated, threatened, and facing professional ruin for having taken a forthright stand. And it mattered little that my entire life has been fighting on many fronts for the underdog, human rights and international justice. [441]

"Rabbinical friends abruptly became abusive beyond belief. Had their reaction been framed in courteous but firm analyses of areas of disagreement, it would have been understandable and proper. But name calling, accusations of prejudice, ignorance or Hitlerism larded their letters and phone calls.

"A brief letter published in the Los Angeles Times (1/4/69), scoring our government for selling fifty jet fighters to Israel, kept my phone ringing every fifteen minutes, night and day, for about fifty-six hours. Obscenity and vilification flowed over the line. Letters and telegrams called me a "fucking bastard," "a paid agent of the anti-Semite groups," and one for whom "a gas oven would be too good."

"As the months passed, our home in Southern California was splattered with rotten eggs; during a service in the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, while I was preaching on American Freedom and Zionist Power, security men were stationed in the sanctuary for my protection. I was warned that my ministerial career would fade away or be abruptly terminated. Clergymen with an idealistic view of Zionism are shocked to learn that we are not necessarily dealing with altruistic humanitarians or respecters of democratic freedoms."

Booth still bears the scars of the traumatic experience of having Rabbi Elisha Nattiv of Temple Shalom, West Covina, California, march down the aisle of the Covina Church at the conclusion of the sermon on the Middle East conflict and, after an hysterical harangue, raise his arm, point to the pulpit, and cry out: "I am going to run him out of here."

Because a clergyman's sermons are in the public domain, Booth found that his pulpit remarks directed against Zionism, particularly one on the B'nai B'rith exposing the Zionist apparatus, were picked up without his permission and reprinted by extreme right wing, if not anti-Semitic groups. For this the California clergyman was further assailed and labeled. But it was his article in Forrest's United Church Observer that subjected both that editor and himself to further harassment and character assassination. Instead of trying to refute the facts, a gaggle of professors, rabbis, and editors employed vivid and personal invective against Forrest and Booth, invoking guilt by association through the appearance of the latter's heavily documented sermon in Gerald L. K. Smith's The Cross and the Flag.

In a widely reported speech,20 Booth was torn apart by Catholic Father Gregory Baum, teacher of theology at the University of Toronto and a convert from Judaism, for having quoted Jean Paul Sartre in his Observer piece to support "the idea that Jews must invent anti-Semitism as a myth for their survival." The article actually had read: "Sartre regards some threat of anti-Semitism as essential to hold jews together." [Italics added.] Numerous groups in history have required an [442] outside threat to bring about unity, and Booth had noted a common, unethical Zionist defensive strategy: "If there is no actual anti-Semitism present, then it [meaning the claim that is present] must be created. The fact that it is a falsehood and a reputation may be damaged seemingly offends few consciences." The Booth article set forth varied devastating examples of this, and the Toronto reaction provided additional substantiation of his thesis.

Ominously, stringent censorship over dissent in pulpit and press emerged as the ultimate goal of Canadian Zionists. In an acceptance address for an honorary degree from St. Andrew's College, a United Church institution in Saskatoon, Dr. Fackenheim slashed out at the host's denomination, its magazine, the editor, and this writer, and added to the astonishment of his listeners: "Merely to call the Jewish state into question is implicitly to condone the continuation of the unholy combination of anti-Jewish ideology with Jewish powerlessness. ..."

In the Toronto Globe and Mail May 4, 1972, the Zionist leader disclosed his true motivation to smother a free press: "True reconciliation can come for the Jewish community and the United Church of Canada only when the church acts so as to place all anti-Jewish bias, however shabbily disguised as 'anti-Zionism' or 'concern for Arab refugees,' firmly beyond the bounds of editorial freedom." [Italics added.] A more total suppression of the communications media, ban on discussion of a critical subject, or disregard for the plight of refugees can hardly be imagined. Fackenheim, ironically enough, is himself a refugee from Germany.

The trials and tribulations of John Nichols Booth were heightened by an early 1973 incident that rocked the Detroit area. South End, the Wayne State University campus paper, reprinted in installments running from January 10 to 12 a sermon that had been delivered by Booth at the First Unitarian Church the previous November. But the articles appeared under a superimposed drawing of a swastika inside a Jewish Star of David. The articles, thus unfortunately emblemed, roused to fury the Jewish community, which otherwise probably would have paid scant attention to the ordinary writings of a well known anti-Zionist.

College President George E. Gullen,Jr., issued a blistering statement declaring the articles "an affront to the Jewish community and an embarrassment to the University." The campus paper was supported by university funds, and it was a little ironic to hear Zionist voices raised in protest against the "misuse of government tax-free dollars." The Detroit Free Press had a full banner headline "WSU Head Assails School Paper for Insulting Jews." [443]

The South End editors apologized for the illustration and admitted that "the Middle East was not an issue we want to live or die for"; they merely had wished to attract attention to a different viewpoint on the Middle East. Such attention-getting tactics (also unfortunately occasionally used by the Palestinians to their grave detriment) played right into the hands of the Zionists and further victimized Booth.

Although still being subjected to an organized and thorough "tailing," Booth undauntingly sought to bring the facts to "the undecided, confused or perhaps not-yet concerned 80 percent of the American people." But he soon learned that even his own liberal Unitarian Church was no longer free. The Journal of the Liberal Ministry, the official organ of the Unitarian/Universalist Ministers Association, flatly rejected an article from him after they had requested contributions to a special issue on "freedom of the pulpit." In returning the piece, the editor frankly stated the reason:

"We would like to publish your views on this very important topic, but frankly, after some lengthy study and thought about your article, I have concluded that it would not be to our advantage to publish material which arouses dissension among members of the association, not on matters of principle, but on ways of assuring that principles are implemented."

Apparently this was a religious editor who had little respect for Winston Churchill's observation that "it is the church's duty to lash the conscience of a guilty age" - particularly where the sensitive issue of Israel and Zionism is involved.

Another clergyman who felt the brunt of the blitz was the Catholic priest Father Daniel J. Berrigan. Ironically, he had been the idol of the liberals and radicals, including a number of Jews, for some years due to his courageous stand on the Vietnam war. But then he made the mistake of also speaking out against what he felt were wrongs in the Middle East. Admittedly, Berrigan used some strong words in his speech at the Arab American University Graduates Convention in Washington, D.C.:

"It is a tragedy that in place of Jewish prophetic wisdom, Israel should launch an Orwellian nightmare of double talk, racism, fifth-rate sociological jargon aimed at proving its racial superiority to the people it has crushed. . . The dream of Israel has become a nightmare. Israel has not abolished poverty and misery; rather, she manufactures human waste, the byproducts of her entrepreneurs, the military-industrial complex.... Israel has not freed the captives, she has expanded the prison system, perfected her espionage, exported on the [444] world market that expensive, blood-ridden commodity, the savage triumph of the technologized West: violence and the tools of violence." 21

Not words to everyone's taste or opinion, but certainly within the limits of free speech and open debate in this country. Far harsher things were said by Berrigan about his own nation during the Vietnam war years, and still far harsher things have been said by the Israelists about the Palestinians and Arabs. But the storm that broke around Berrigan was scarcely believable. His previous forthrightness and courage were totally forgotten by his liberal friends as he came in for the full repression treatment. For instance, he had been slated to receive the Gandhi Peace Award for his antiwar activities from a New Haven group. The presentation was to have been made by Rev. Harrington on January 9, 1974, but was canceled. Harrington assailed Berrigan for "aggravating Israeli fears and Arab intransigence at a time when the only hope for peace is to calm Israeli fears and to reduce Arab intransigence." (If ever a statement revealed how biased the anti-anti-Semitism cultist can become, it was this declamation, implying that Israel alone is justified in having fears and the Arabs are the only intransigent force in the Middle East.)

In a critical article in the Times, reporter Irving Spiegel brought to light an attack in the liberal Catholic periodical Commonweal, in which Michael Novak stated that Berrigan's charges "are as ominous as any tone the human voice can utter."22 While the two attacks on Berrigan were prominently displayed up front in the Times, Berrigan's rejection of the award in a letter to Harrington as "a degrading consensus game" was buried away at the bottom of page 23. When the office of Middle East Perspective phoned the Times to give a wrap-up statement on the affair, attacking the cult, Spiegel, thinking that this was to be another anti-Berrigan attack, informed the caller: "Sorry, I can't give any more attention to that. We have fanned that fire as much as we can."

The power of the cult was amply demonstrated by the lengths to which syndicated columnist Peter Hamill was forced to go to disprove that he was not anti-Semitic. It is paradoxical when a "liberal" like Hamill, who only rarely deviates from the Israelist line and has never been reticent in pinning the heinous label on the Arabs, is forced to defend himself against charges of anti-Semitism. This occurred at the hands of defenders of the wretched Bernard Bergman, the ordained rabbi who had grossly exploited the aged and poor residenced in his nursing homes and was ultimately convicted for his crime. 23

Outraged and incensed when he himself became victimized by the [445] label callers, Hamill wrote a lengthy piece for the Village Voice. Both to disprove the charges, as well as to retain membership in the "club," Hamill cried out: "I am no anti-Semite, but I know one when I see one," promptly pointing his finger at the controversial Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General George S. Brown, who had recently become the cult's latest victim.

Five weeks 24 after Brown had delivered a lecture at Duke University Law School, not one line of which was reported anywhere in the press save in the North Carolina Anvil, a so-called "alternative" newspaper published in Durham, a totally out-of-context parenthetical remark, made at the end of a lengthy question-and-answer period, was manipulated onto the front pages by the Washington Post on November 13, 1974, and built up the next day by the ever-compliant media into a national scandal. Senator William Proxmire called for Brown's resignation; Senator Jacob Javits demanded an investigation; the Jewish War Veterans insisted on an apology. In a telegram to President Ford, the President of the American Jewish Congress, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, stated that the General's remarks demonstrated "a degree of ignorance and susceptibility to classic anti-Semitic propaganda that cast grave doubts on his ability to serve in his presently critically important position."

Demagoguery raised its ugly head in the Congress. New York's Bella Abzug screamed: "General Brown's remarks are the kind that one would expect from a Nazi general, not from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff." Her fellow congressman from New York, Edward I. Koch (now Mayor of New York), called the Brown words reminiscent of... Charles Lindbergh, who, when leading the America First rally in New York in support of Nazi Germany, talked of Jewish money and power.

In answering the question of one student concerning whether the U.S. was contemplating force against oil-producing nations, the Joint Chiefs Chairman had replied:

"I don't know. I hope not. We have no plans to. It is conceivable, I guess, it's kind of almost as bad as the "Seven Days in May" thing, but you can conjure up a situation which there is another oil-embargo and people in this country are not only inconvenienced and uncomfortable, but suffer, and they get tough-minded enough to set down the Jewish influence in this country.

   "It is so strong, you wouldn't believe it. We have the Israelis coming to us for equipment. We say we can't possibly get the Congress to support a program like that. They say, "Don't worry about the Congress. We'll take care of the Congress." [446]

   "Now this is somebody from another country, but they can do it. They own, you know, the banks in this country, the newspapers. You just look at where the Jewish money is in this country."

Had the General's ill-considered remarks been said of some other ethnic or religious minority, they would have passed without an enormous hue and cry. But the Zionist cultists of anti-anti-Semitism desperately needed to detract attention from the U.N. appearance of Palestine Liberation Organization chieftain Yasir Arafat and the overwhelming 89-8 vote in the General Assembly declaring that the Palestinian people have both a right to nationhood and a right to return to "their homes and property."

Taken out of context and by itself, Brown's remarks may have smacked of "'hoary anti-Semitism," as one writer claimed. But Peter J. Kahn, Chairman of the Duke University group that had invited the General to speak, and who is a Jew himself, said, "From the tenor of his remarks during the speech and the rest of the question-and-answer session, as well as statements throughout the course of his visit here, there is absolutely no indication that General Brown in any way holds anti-Semitic views.

Cultists everywhere gladly added to the distortion by embroidering on the story. Hamill had Brown saying that "Americans would be not only inconvenienced and uncomfortable, but suffer unless they get tough-minded enough to set down the Jewish influence in this country." This conveyed a totally different meaning from what the General had said.

As Air Force Chief of Staff, Brown had been in charge of the 1973 U.S. airlift that helped stave off military defeat for the Israelis. Consequently, he was only too familiar with the tremendous, unbelievable pressures then exerted by the Israelis directly on the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon to speed this airlift, even as U.S. military strength was denuded. This was minutely described in the celebrated Marvin and Bernard KaIb biography of Kissinger. 25

By latching onto Brown's gratuitous misstatement regarding the Jewish ownership of the banks and the newspapers-ill-advised but in no way anti-Semitic-the ADL, the politicians, Hamill, et al., hoped to divert public attention from the real thrust behind the Chief of Staff's remarks: the unabating pressure on Washington to continue to give away to a foreign country scarce American military equipment paid for by U.S. taxpayers for the defense of their own country. As Evans and Novak stated it, "quite apart from the General's inexcusable rhetoric, [447] the Pentagon views the Middle East in terms of long-range U.S. strategic interests, a view that does not always parallel those of Israel."

It was on the very day of the bitter confrontation at the U.N. between the PLO and Israel that the media blew up this out-of-context parenthetical remark by Brown. The Zionist press had a field day for weeks with the Brown affair. James Wechsler in the New York Post assailed President Ford for dismissing this "anti-Semitic tirade" as "one unfortunate mistake" and administering only a mild reprimand. Calling the Brown performance "a crime and a blunder," the New York editor-columnist maintained that dismissal or resignation should have been meted out for this act of "military demagogy," all the more necessary because of the "many hidden currents of prejudice in the military."26 And his fellow Post columnist, the last authority on all "liberal" subjects, Harriet Van Horne, used the uproar to take off on the military, whose "warped philosophy" is part of "an entrenched system that is doing the country no good."

A lengthy article by the Washington Post's deputy editorial page editor, Meg Greenfield, "Jewish Control of the Banks is about as Real as Jewish Control of the Archdiocese," adroitly twisted around a few words and grossly distorted what the General had said: "[there was] need to get tough-minded with the Jews who own the banks, you know." Without a shred of evidence, she then denied the influence of an Israel lobby.

As their answer to the charge of Jewish press control, the real point behind the Brown allegation of ownership, Hamill, Time, Greenfield, and other cultists noted that "in 1972 of 1,748 newspapers, only 3.1 percent were owned by Jews." These ownership figures tell nothing, whatsoever, of course, about the control exercised by a large number of strategically placed Jews.

Even President Ford's rebuke of General Brown's gaffe did not halt the continuing furor, although Senator Fulbright's kindred thoughts on November 2 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, where Churchill had made his famed "iron curtain" address, had drawn sketchy coverage and minor condemnation. The Arkansas Senator charged in his address, "The Clear and Present Danger," that "the majority of officeholders in the U.S." had fallen under "Israeli domination" and commented:

"Neither the Israelis nor their uncritical supporters in our Congress and in our media have appreciated what is at stake in the enormous distortion of American interests in our Mideast course. Endlessly pressing the United States for [448] money and arms-and invariably getting all and more than she asks-Israel makes bad use of a good friend. We and we alone have made it possible for Israel to exist as a state. Surely it is not too much to ask in return that Israel give up East Jerusalem and the West Bank as the necessary means of breaking a chain of events which threatens us all with ruin." 27

But Senator Fulbright already had paid the price for his "Face the Nation" charge that the Israelis control the policy in the Congress. He had been "taken care of,' in the Democratic primary by Zionist candidate Governor Dale Bumpers, while Brown was still at his desk in the Pentagon.

Two weeks before Election Day 1976, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was under attack again. In an interview with Israeli-born Newsweek journalist and cartoonist Ranan Lurie (who had served in the Israeli army), Brown had suggested that from the "pure military point of view to the United States, Israel has just got to be considered a burden."28 As the release of the previous controversial statement had been delayed for the appropriate timing, so this new Brown gaffe was released six months after the April 12 interview and right in the midst of the presidential campaign. Aimed obviously at embarrassing President Ford - and possibly at forcing the dismissal of the General - the statement galvanized a call for Brown's resignation from every piddling Democrat - and many Republicans, too - pandering the Jewish vote. Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Walter Mondale declared the Brown statement a "vicious attack on American Jews," and he said people like the General "should not be sewage commissioners." President Ford indicated that he did not agree with his top general's "poor choice of words," but admitted that Israel had been a liability at the time of the 1973 war because of the drain the airlift caused to our military supplies, but that "her situation had since changed."

Ironically, despite the public uproar which Jewish organizations had inspired, American Jewish Committee Washington lobbyist Hyman Bookbinder is said to have admitted privately that General Brown was "an intelligent, thoughtful, civil guy who helped save Israel in 1973 by running down U.S. Air Force stocks in Germany. If he can be provoked into saying things like that, we have reason to be worried......We should not overreact. Getting his scalp would give credence to his charges."29 Israel's Premier Yitzhak Rabin took a similar line, telling a December 5, 1974 Tel Aviv audience that General Brown "probably helped Israel during the last war more than anyone else did."30

The Zionist blitz has even attempted to impose rigid censorship [449] over full-time working journalists. Nationally syndicated columnists Evans and Novak earned a place of honor for themselves in the Forster-Epstein epic merely by reporting that leaders of the powerful American Jewish community were annoyed with Israel over the 1973 Lebanese plane incident (Israel had intercepted a Lebanese plane and then forced it to land in Israel), which ought to be "an ominous warning to the country which controls by far the most powerful military might anywhere in the Arab Middle East." Further "anti-Semitism" was depicted in the columnists' caution against "the explosive ingredient in Israel's seeming contempt for the opinion of major U.S. allies, particularly in Western Europe, and for the U.S. itself,' and for their mention of Israeli plans "to build a city for 50,000 on the Israeli-occupied (but Syrian) Golan Heights and an urban center in Israeli-occupied (but Egyptian) northern Sinai." Nothing untrue, nothing libelous, nothing bigoted, but nevertheless set forth in the ADL book annotating examples of alleged anti-Semitism.

That was in 1974, and Evans and Novak were kept under close surveillance. Indeed, they came under such continued fire for some of their independent views that by January 1975 the columnists felt compelled to devote an entire column to a defense against the Near East Report charge that their column "had an anti-Israel bias":

Our consistent thesis is that U.S. policy in the Arab-Israel conflict must be determined by .American interests, not those of Israel or of the Arab States surrounding it. Our reporting on the Middle East has always sought to disentangle real American interests from claims and counterclaims of both Israel and the Arabs-making us neither pro-Israel nor anti-Israel, neither pro-Arab nor anti-Arab. 31

Again, Near East Report put the finger on a correspondent. In its account of the General Brown affair, veteran CBS commentator Eric Severeid had been praised for his customary "felicity, polish, and perception," but he had apparently betrayed his trust by concluding a discussion of the remarks of the Joint Chiefs Chairman with this observation: "A growing number of American Jews are . . . torn in a soul-searching internal debate as to just where their loyalties should lie and how far they should go in honoring them."

Overnight Eric Severeid became a member of that very exclusive club made up of those vilified by' the Zionists and stigmatized as anti-Semites. How the Jewish Establishment could turn on a friend and strike with the deadliness of an asp unless he crossed each "t" and dotted every "i" in accordance with their personal predilections must [451] [450] have been a bitter lesson to the veteran newscaster.

His younger and far more conservative colleague in CBS, Jeffrey St. John, was probably less stunned when he ran aground on the same ADL shoals, likewise for treading, among other things, on the verboten subject of dual loyalties. On the radio network program "Spectrum" St. John had this to say:

"The reason, it seems to me, that we don't have an ongoing debate in this country as to whether we have been paying a high price to guarantee Israeli security, is that American public opinion is shaped largely by a pro-Israeli viewpoint. And whenever someone suggests we should begin changing our policy, as an American oil company executive did recently, the pro-Israeli propaganda machine in America crucifies him in public. [Italics added] What this lop-sided state of affairs suggests is an insecurity on the part of many American Jews to thrash out in the open the issue of Arab oil and U.S. support of Israel. In fact, ever since the founding of the State of Israel, the Arabs have had precious little opportunity to present their point of view in this country.

   "Emotions, not reason, govern our policy toward Israel. This emotion translates itself into political support from American Jews. But I suggest that the Arab oil vs. Israel debate raises a touchy issue that American Jews don't like to talk about, especially those Jews who are devoted Zionists and support the State of Israel. The issue is whether you are an American first and a Jew second and if forced to choose, which commands your loyalty first. The Arab oil vs. U.S. support of Israel may be the first of many hard questions American Jews must face." 32 [Italics added.]

Cultists Forster and Epstein responded with this scarcely believable comment in their tome: "St. John's use of the word crucified in relation to the 'pro-Israeli propaganda machine" was a clear appeal to the hardiest of the roots of anti-Semitism. His raising of the dual loyalty canard was in much the same category. 33 But commentator St. John added insult to injury for later stating that U.S. Middle East policy "has been and continues to be shaped in large measure by the financial and political power of American Jewry." It was shortly thereafter that CBS dropped him from this network show.

There are many others in recent years whose careers or personal lives have been subjected to the Zionist blitz. Parliamentarian Margaret McKay, who represented the constituency of Clapham and had been Britain's delegate to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, expressed a deep sympathy for the sufferings of the Palestinian Arabs in speeches on the floor of the House of Commons and outside. In answer to letters in London's Evening Standard from persons antipathetic to her views, McKay detailed the reaction to her viewpoint:

"In consequence, I am being subjected to extreme pressures. I am enduring unpleasant telephone calls; receiving obscene letters (some containing excreta); I am attacked in the press; similar letters have been sent to the union which sponsors my Parliamentary candidature. I have had a death threat letter. My secretary has been physically pushed around. The police and other services have been sent on hoax bomb threat calls to an exhibition I held in Piccadilly. This exhibition was broken into. The windows of this center were defaced. Rumors are being circulated in my constituency; pressure is being exercised through my local party; other Members have been approached as to my financial probity." 34

Another George Brown-the one-time British Foreign Secretary and Deputy Leader of the Labor Party-also paid a price for expressing an opinion somewhat at variance with the prevailing line. Brown, never one to indulge in British understatement, caused something of an international uproar when seated at a dinner party next to Golda Meir he said, "You are merely a Jewess from Russia who came to Israel via America." The outspoken and often tactless Laborite, whose tongue was often further loosened by demon rum, was merely cautioning the Israeli leader against speaking so possessively about Palestine. Brown was never forgiven by organized Jewish interests for his independent views on Israel, which, added to other pressures, hastened his premature retirement to the House of Lords.

Even the prestigious Christian Science Monitor (generally regarded as the most objective and reliable U.S. paper) has come under violent attack, charged with being "anti-Israel and pro-Arab," the facile allegation so often leveled against those who displease Israel's powerful friends in this country. Like so many other U.S. newspapers, the Monitor has been facing financial difficulties the past several years, which had not been relieved by the change of its format to tabloid size. To broaden its subscription base, a special offer was made to the 153,000 members of the League of Women Voters. But the Zionist apparatus increased the pressures already leveled at the Monitor for its unbiased reporting and went to work to break up this arrangement, which would have been mutually advantageous. In a blistering attack that appeared in the Boston Jewish Advocate, prominent Bostonian Dr. Gerald W. Wohlberg referred to the Monitor as "one of the most persistent and vitriolic critics of Israel and purveyors of pro-Arab sentiment in the U.S."35 [452] Referring to the paper's reaction to the 1972 Munich tragedy, the writer condemned the "mild rebuke to their Arab friends that they were doing their cause no good."

The Monitor's "pervasive style of liberal, pro-Palestine reporting" also came under attack, which the writer claimed was particularly damaging because of the paper's international reputation. "Bright, responsible Jewish women who have devoted enormous energies towards supporting the League" were urged "to write to League headquarters and make them aware of the potential pitfalls involved in their action, which would imply agreement with the Monitor's anti-Zionist declamations."

Shortly thereafter a very noticeable change began to take place in the stance of the Monitor. Creditable ads, which would have helped replenish the Monitor coffers, were rejected when presented by the Arab Information Center and Middle East Perspective (its controversial full-page advertisement had been run in early 1975), and the fluid, concise, on-the-spot reports of John Cooley presenting an in-depth analysis of Arab thinking were relegated to less conspicuous spots. The years of visitations by the ADL and other Zionist groups were having an effect, particularly as the Monitor increasingly was forced to tighten its belt and could not afford to alienate any blocs of readers.

Neither were the Quakers able to escape the tarbrush of the muckrakers. The study of the American Friends Service Committee, "Search for Peace in the Middle East," which was widely distributed,36 was labeled by the ADL pundits a "pro-Arab document masquerading under repeated claims of objectivity in a rewrite of history." This study's gross crime was that, while it had evenly distributed blame for the six-day war on the Arabs and the Israelis, it placed the onus for the failure to bring about peace squarely on Israel. What particularly drew Zionist fire was an earlier draft of the Quaker report, which achieved some circulation:

We do appeal to the leaders of the powerful American Jewish community, whose hard work and generous financial support have been so important to the building and sustaining of Israel, to reassess the character of their support and the nature of their role in American politics. Our impression . . . is that there is a tendency for the American Jewish establishment to identify themselves with the more hard-line elements inside the Israeli Cabinet, to out-hawk the hawks, and to ignore and discount the dissident elements in and out of the Israeli government that are searching for more creative ways to solve the Middle East problems. [453]

   However, the heavy-handed nature of some of these pressures and their intensiveness have served to inhibit calm and rational public discussion of the issues in the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is not a new phenomenon in American politics, but it is nonetheless disturbing to have Congressmen complain privately that they have signed public statements giving unqualified endorsement for Israel, even though they do not believe in those statements, or have agreed to sponsor resolutions concerning American policy toward Israel, of which they secretly disapprove-simply because they are intimidated by Jewish pressure groups. In this situation are clear dangers of an anti-Semitic backlash. No one who is truly concerned about the long-term fate of Israel and the long-term threats to interfaith harmony and brotherhood can be indifferent to these dangers. [Italics added.]

The deep concern only earned the Quakers further calumny, although the language in the first draft was considerably altered and all reference to congressional "intimidation" was omitted. In citing the Christian Century's view that the Quaker study was "an instructive and fair-minded primer. . . , the authors undoubtedly were also implying anti-Semitism on the part of that journal, too.

The American Friends Service Committee came under further Zionist attack when they invited Israeli dissident, Retired Major General Matityahu Peled, who headed the dovish Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, to address its 1977 mid-February national conference in Washington. The AFSC was accused by the President of the Zionist Organization of America "of advocating Arab positions which would endanger the survival of the Jewish state."

Nor were Jews immune from the blitz. Prior to the 1973 war, moderate-minded Jewish supporters of Israel, who believed in an open-minded search for peace, formed a new organization called Breira (meaning alternative). By opposing the "Rally Against Terror" called by Organized Jewry against the 1974 U.N. Arafat appearance and favoring an "affirmation of the legitimate human and national aspirations of the Palestinian people with whom the Israeli people must eventually find a way to live," Breira found itself bitterly attacked by the B'nai B'rith and smeared by Jewish Week, the paper sent gratis to every UJA contributor. Two Breira members had even dared to meet with two PLO members, it was charged.

Before its first national 1977 conference convened in Chevy Chase, Maryland, Breira had been condemned by the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington, and Israeli consulates in three cities had pressured Breira members not to attend. The Jewish Defense League called on its members to demonstrate at the convention. Bearing placards "Breira are Jew-Hating Communists," forty JDL'ers [454] burst into the conference center, overturning tables, tearing up documents, and assaulting some attendants. One JDL member who was then permitted to address the conference harangued the audience, vowing the "destruction of Breira."

The "witch hunt," the words used by Village Voice columnists Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway to describe the campaign against Breira, did not end here. 37 Breira members who were employed by B'nai B'rith Hillel organizations on college campuses were cautioned that they would be fired if they persisted to make contacts with the PLO. Three Boston members were called in by the Israeli consulate there to receive the personal vitriol of a high-ranking member of the Israeli Foreign Office: "People who have not served in the Israeli armed forces have no right to speak out against Israeli foreign policy."38

Professor of political science Klaus Herrmann of Concordia University in Canada found himself facing ouster from a 26-year membership in the University Lodge of B'nai B'rith after he had written an article on his interpretation of anti-Zionism for the Protestant Student Movement of Germany and attended, with other anti-Zionist Jews from Europe and North America, a conference on Zionism and Racism in Tripoli, Libya.

If ever there was a case of the pot calling the kettle black, this occurred when the ADL leveled the accusatory finger at Walter J. Minton, President of publishing house G. P. Putnam, because of the New York Times advertisement on the book Lansky. 39 Mobster Meyer Lansky had been brought back to the U.S. from Israel under federal indictment. Admitting that the book by Hank Messick was not antiSemitic, the cultists attacked Putnam's Times ad headed "Jews Control Crime in the United States" (June 24, 1971).

Minton, not so easily frightened, answered the ADL:

"I've got enough Jewish, Protestant and Catholic antecedents in my own immediate background so that when I observe a Jew, a Protestant or a Catholic doing something I believe he should not be doing, I judge that action without feeling I am falling prey to prejudice."

 "I regret that your letter suggests that a man in your position is not capable of so doing. There are crooked Jews in America, and if you read Hank Messick's Lansky you will learn something about some of them." 40

Whereas others have refused to bow to blackmail, the head of the second largest U.S. oil corporation capitulated totally to pressure, as revealed in the following correspondence between the National Chairman [455] of the ADL and Bob R. Dorsey, Chairman of Gulf Oil Corporation:

Dear Mr. Dorsey:

As undoubtedly you are aware, there is great concern in the American Jewish community at the revelation that Gulf Oil Corporation contributed a sum of money to a source in Beirut, Lebanon, which was used for a pro-Arab propaganda campaign in the United States. One result was a critical resolution adopted on May 27 last at a plenary session of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. B'nai B'rith and its Anti-Defamation League are constituent members of this umbrella body.

   Our agencies have had, and continue to receive, an increasing number of Inquiries from interested citizens across the land about this Gulf gift. In order that we may more intelligently respond to these inquiries, may we have from you an official statement of explanation.

And Mr. Dorsey's reply:

Dear Mr. Graubard:

I acknowledge and thank you for your letter of August 15. We share your concern about the contribution which Gulf made abroad for educational purposes in the United States.

I must tell you that I had no knowledge of the contribution at the time it was made. It is my view that this company should not have made a contribution to support political activities for foreign interests in the United States, and I can assure you it never was our intention to do so. The contribution in question was regrettable, and you may be certain that it will not happen again. 41

This contribution ($50,000) went to an American effort to tell the untold side of the Middle East struggle, but such has been the power and force of the anti-anti-Semitism blitz that a mighty corporation like Gulf Oil becomes a quivering mass of jelly in the face of a scolding from the Anti-Defamation League. Yet who thinks to raise even a whisper to challenge the many corporations-Jewish and otherwise individuals, and organizations, for their multi-muIti-million-dollar tax-free contributions every year for so-called "educational purposes" on behalf of Israel?

Perhaps the answer to this anomaly lies in the fact that one aim of Israel's "educational purposes" is to brainwash Americans into believing that propaganda for Israel is somehow "right" and "proper," but that in behalf of the Arabs is equally "beyond the fringe," and that whereas the Arabs pertain to something "foreign," the Israelis very much do not. As a writer for Life succinctly expressed [456] [457] it, "The net effect of pro-Israeli propaganda and relentless pressure over the past twenty-five years has been to make us all feel slightly Jewish and to feel that the Israelis are 'our kind of people,' while the Arab is our sworn enemy. It has been a masterwork of brainwashing."42 By this peculiar, twisted logic, Israel becomes an extension of the U.S. And if that is the case, there is certainly no more glaring example of the tail wagging the dog.

This writer, no matter how hard he would try, could never present the record of repression in the U.S. in its massive entirety for the very valid reason that the more submissive victims of Zionist pressure are usually too afraid or too ashamed to publicize their experience. What has been written here is only some of the details in the more renowned cases. And there have been many other Americans from all over the country who have been similarly blitzed. That story perhaps someday will be completely unfolded.

It goes without saying that I have been one of the chief targets of the silencers for nearly thirty years, the full recital of which will be the subject of a future work. But a few select episodes may further impart to readers who have had no first-hand experience with this type of situation, the flavor of the subtle, insidious manner in which this campaign has been conducted.

From my very first lecture on December 16, 1952, in which I mentioned the plight of the Palestinian Arabs to the Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, through my May 10, 1976, appearance at the College of Mann in California, there have been pressures on the sponsor, if not on the lecture agent, to cancel engagements. Where these efforts failed, there have been planned attempts to disrupt the meeting. The few of us who expressed the unpopular "other side" have never known when we started out on a lecture tour what would happen to our engagements and whether we would still have a lecture agent on our return. The Anti-Defamation League was capable of frightening them or bribing by offering them many lucrative lectures for one of their speakers - and this they did with such long-established agencies as Keedick's Lecture Bureau.

Embarrassment often faced a lecturer from the outset of his talk. Shortly after the publication of What Price israel?, the British Empire Club of Providence, Rhode Island, invited the budding young author to speak to them. Chairman Dr. Percy Hodgson in introducing me related that "a certain lady" had telephoned him saying, "Our community has lived in friendship all these years. We do not want to break that relationship." Strongly suggesting that they ought to cancel the lecture, the lady issued a veiled threat: "We will be happy to learn that you have taken the necessary action because Lilienthal's views are dangerous."

Hodgson replied that he would be happy to have one of their speakers at a later date; "We want to hear all views." The trouble was - and is - that 99 percent of the time is given to one point of view, and when by dint of perseverance one percent has been accorded the Anti-Zionist side, one is forced to split even that little time, so that the Zionist position winds up with 99.5 percent of the time. This inevitable pressure, exerted even on the Rotary Club on the small out-to-sea island of Nantucket, has been a great factor discouraging program chairmen from booking any Middle East speakers.

What has been far more than a tempest in a glass of Manischewitz has occurred on the lecture circuit across the country, no matter how remote and academic the setting, in places where one might assume the blitz could not possibly reach. Read exactly as set down in Middle East Perspective-from a "diary" of experiences on a trip to the West Coast in 1968:

Louisiana: Here, at McNeese State College in Lake Charles, I was rudely reminded that Zionist pressures can reach even into the deepest part of the South. The local rabbi had called the President of the College, and other interested parties had hinted elsewhere that it might be better for the school if Lilienthal's lectures were canceled. The morning lecture to the full student body was followed by a tempestuous question period in which both the rabbi's wife and the Anti-Defamation League representative vociferously intervened. "We find democracy only in Israel and the U.S. must therefore support this small bastion of freedom," was the latter's argument. When in my rebuttal I pointed to the treatment of Arabs in Israel and to discrimination against Oriental Jews, the rabbi's wife quickly intervened: "That is a question we (italics mine) will solve in time." I retorted, "Who is we? Are you talking as an American?" Without hesitation her answer was: "I am talking as a Jew, a Zionist, and an American."

And on to California, a state that prides itself on allowing people of every persuasion and extreme to have their say:

Louis Lomax, who had invited me on his KTTV popular interview program, called to say his owners, Metromedia, insisted that I could not appear alone as originally scheduled but must share the program with a Zionist. I was forced to debate with a representative of a local Zionist organization. His charges: "Lilienthal's books are sold by the Paul Revere Society." The Paul Revere Society is "anti-Semitic, anti-Negro" and so, by inference, is Lilienthal. An attorney friend moved subsequently against this slander but the release, which [458] [459] you unwittingly usually sign just three minutes before recording time, as you sit in the dark wings off the set, contains in unreadable small print a waiver for any such damages.

In response to a February 7, 1974 Wall Street Journal ad, "Do Arms for Israel Mean No Gasoline for Americans," which I signed as Editor of Middle East Perspective, we received many positive letters. The vast majority of the negative letters and smut written across ad coupons were unsigned, bearing a New York City postmark. Some were amusing despite their four-letter vulgarity: "Tell the God Damn Arabs that they can stick their damn oil up their stinking ass." "Hitler killed bastards like you. Too bad he missed you." "Considering your name, you are either a German or a Jew. If you are a German, your ad is what we expect from a German, a brother of Hitler. If you are a Jew, my contempt for you is beyond expression. You are a traitor, a liar, twisting the facts which you ignore."

One letter merely listed the names of eighteen concentration camps. Another declared: "You are a Communist Jew paid by Russia to spread distrust so that the Communists can take over." A coupon signed Adolf Hitler had stapled to it a 20,000-mark Reichbanknote: "I will give $5,000 for your funeral."

While heretics naturally arouse a fury beyond all reason, the deadlier threat that unreasoned supporters of Israel pose is to human freedom. Dr. Israel Shahak, who himself has been the object of an organized campaign, from the U.S. as well as his own country, to dismiss him from his academic post at Hebrew University, in these words attributes the blitz to "areas of totalitarianism in the U.S.":

In regard to anything relating to the Middle East or Jewish subjects, the USA has many of the characteristics of a totalitarian country and many of the groups who call themselves "liberal" or "peace camp" or "radical" are on that subject the most intolerant, the most totalitarian, the most dishonest and racist. . . . A totalitarian society not only does not tolerate a freedom of opinion, but it cultivates by all means in its power a "received opinion," which all have to parrot, not only without checking it, but often without any understanding of what it means.

Perhaps some Americans will think that I exaggerate. But the danger of a totalitarian regime was always thought to be exaggerated before it arrived. Only afterwards, when it was too late, was it found that the society was already totalitarian in some aspects which were merely enlarged.

There is only one sure antidote to the totalitarian danger: To fight all aspects of totalitarianism in all the parts of one's society and to follow always the dictum of Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living, and therefore with the utmost freedom and without fear of any blackmail to examine everything in the light of a universal concept of justice, applicable equally to all human beings. 43

In forging their own brand of totalitarianism in the U.S., the Zionists continue to manipulate the victims of the Nazi holocaust as their chief weapon.

 

[End of Chapter]

 

---

Other excerpts from Alfred Lilienthal's book "The Zionist Connection II":

• The Holocaust: Stoking the Fires
  
  
• Terror - The Double Standard
  
  
• Exploiting Anti-Semitism
  
  

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