Yes, MLK really did say the quote that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism

(EOZ)It is always a pleasure to read the work of Martin Kramer, a real scholar, doing real research. This comes from last March:

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“When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism!” —Martin Luther King, Jr.

Aptly quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. is a common way to make a point or win an argument, and it’s no surprise that his new memorial in Washington includes an “Inscription Wall” of quotes carved in stone. It’s also no surprise that the quote about critics of Zionists didn’t make the cut for inclusion in the memorial. Still, it’s been put to use on many an occasion, most recently by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year, in his address to the Knesset on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. A few years back it even cropped up in a State Department report on antisemitism. So I was perplexed to see it categorized as “disputed” on the extensive page of King quotes at Wikiquote—for better or worse, the go-to place to verify quotes. Indeed, as of this writing, it’s the only King quote so listed.

The attempt to discredit the quote has been driven by politics. In particular, it’s the work of Palestinians and their sympathizers, who resent the stigmatizing of anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism. Just what sort of anti-Zionism crosses that fine line is a question beyond my scope here. But what of the quote itself? How was it first circulated? What is the evidence against it? And might some additional evidence resolve the question of its authenticity?

King’s words were first reported by Seymour Martin Lipset, at that time the George D. Markham Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard, in an article he published in the magazine Encounter in December 1969—that is, in the year following King’s assassination. Lipset:

Shortly before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr. was in Boston on a fund-raising mission, and I had the good fortune to attend a dinner which was given for him in Cambridge. This was an experience which was at once fascinating and moving: one witnessed Dr. King in action in a way one never got to see in public. He wanted to find what the Negro students at Harvard and other parts of the Boston area were thinking about various issues, and he very subtly cross-examined them for well over an hour and a half. He asked questions, and said very little himself. One of the young men present happened to make some remark against the Zionists. Dr. King snapped at him and said, “Don’t talk like that! When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism!”

For the next three-plus decades, no one challenged the credibility of this account. No wonder: Lipset, author of the classic Political Man (1960), was an eminent authority on American politics and society, who later became the only scholar ever to preside over both the American Sociological Association and the American Political Science Association. Who if not Lipset could be counted upon to report an event accurately? Nor was he quoting something said in confidence only to him or far back in time. Others were present at the same dinner, and Lipset wrote about it not long after the fact. He also told the anecdote in a magazine that must have had many subscribers in Cambridge, some of whom might have shared his “fascinating and moving” experience. The idea that he would have fabricated or falsified any aspect of this account would have seemed preposterous.

That is, until almost four decades later, when two Palestinian-American activists suggested just that. Lipset’s account, they wrote, “seems on its face… credible.”

There are still, however, a few reasons for casting doubt on the authenticity of this statement. According to the Harvard Crimson, “The Rev. Martin Luther King was last in Cambridge almost exactly a year ago—April 23, 1967″ (“While You Were Away” 4/8/68). If this is true, Dr. King could not have been in Cambridge in 1968. Lipset stated he was in the area for a “fund-raising mission,” which would seem to imply a high profile visit. Also, an intensive inventory of publications by Stanford University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project accounts for numerous speeches in 1968. None of them are for talks in Cambridge or Boston.

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When King was assassinated, the Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, did write that he “was last in Cambridge almost exactly a year ago—April 23, 1967.” That had been a very public visit, during which King and Dr. Benjamin Spock held a press conference to announce plans for a “Vietnam Summer.” War supporters picketed King.

But in actual fact, that wasn’t King’s last visit to Cambridge. In early October 1967, when news spread that King would be coming to Boston for the Belafonte concert, a junior member of Harvard’s faculty wrote to King from Cambridge, to extend an invitation from the instructor and his wife:

We would be anxious to be able to sit down and have a somewhat leisured meal with you, and perhaps with some other few people from this area whom you might like to meet. So much has happened in recent months that we are both quite without bearings, and are in need of some honest and tough and friendly dialogue…. So if you can find some time for dinner on Friday or lunch on Saturday, we are delighted to extend an invitation. If, however, your schedules do not permit, we of course will understand that. In any case, we look forward to seeing you at the Belafonte Concert and the party afterwards.

Two days later, King’s secretary, Dora McDonald, sent a reply accepting the invitation on King’s behalf: “Dr. King asked me to say that he would be happy to have dinner with you.” King would be arriving in Boston at 2:43 in the afternoon. “Accompanying Dr. King will be Rev. Andrew Young, Rev. Bernard Lee and I.”

Who was this member of the Harvard faculty? Martin Peretz.

...It was against this background that King came to dinner at the Peretz home at 20 Larchwood Drive, Cambridge, in the early evening of October 27, 1967. A few days later, King’s aide, Andrew Young, thanked the couple

for the delightful evening last Friday. It is almost too bad we had to go to the concert, but I think you will agree that the concert, too, proved enjoyable but I am also sure a couple of hours conversing with the group gathered in your home would have been more productive.

In fact, the evening’s significance would only become evident later, after King’s death. For the dinner was attended by Peretz’s senior Harvard colleague, Seymour Martin Lipset, and it was then and there that Lipset heard King rebuke a student who echoed the SNCC line on “Zionists”: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism!” Peretz would later assert that King “grasped the identity between anti-Israel politics and anti-semitic ranting.” But it was Lipset who preserved King’s words to that effect, by publishing them soon after they were spoken. (And just to run the contemporary record against memory, I wrote to Peretz, to ask whether the much-quoted exchange did take place at his Cambridge home on that evening almost 45 years ago. His answer: “Absolutely.” )[MORE]

'The UN Has Inverted Right and Wrong', Says Expert.

'The UN Has Inverted Right and Wrong', Says Expert.(INN).

It's time to re-think the United Nations, which turns Israel into a villain, says human rights scholar Anne Bayefsky.

The United Nations has been a “major disappointment” in the 21st Century and has “inverted right and wrong,” human rights scholar and activist Anne Bayefsky.
The UN “was founded in the middle of the 20th Century to offer a new world order based on peace and security and protection of human rights, and it has inverted right and wrong so that Israel becomes the villain and the victims become those who are some of the most intolerant people in the region,” said Bayefsky.
She said that a “re-thinking” about the organization is in order, adding, “I think there is some mistaken belief on the part of democracies that the UN is some kind of harmless talking shop and that the kind of anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, anti-Americanism that goes on at the United Nations won’t have its effects. But it does.”
Two weeks ago, noted Bayefsky, “the major committee that’s been tasked with drafting a comprehensive convention on terrorism for the first time in history ended once again - as it has done year after year - in disarray, because they can’t agree to define terrorism. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation believes that there should be an exception clause for so-called ‘legitimate struggle.’”
She mentioned the remarks this week of Richard Falk, the United Nations Human Rights Council-appointed “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.” Falk implied that the Boston terror attack was a justified response to U.S. policies in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.
“This isn’t harmless talking,” stressed Bayefsky. “When people don’t understand the difference between right and wrong it encourages terrorism to the detriment of both Israel and the United States.”

via mfs-theothernews.com

Haters stop concert in SA - because pianist was born in Israel (UPDATED)

Elder of Ziyon: From the Wits (Johannesburg) Vuvuzela: Israeli-born pianist Yossi Reshef was escorted off stage by Wits Campus Control last night as students protested his presence on campus during Israel Apartheid Week.
“This guy coming here is trying to undermine Israel Apartheid week,” SRC vice-president (internal) Tokelo Nhlapo told Wits Vuvuzela. Members of the Wits Student Representative Council (SRC), Muslim Students Association (MSA), Palestinian Solidarity Committee (PSC) as well as Progressive Youth Alliance (PYA), called for the protest as they did not want the concert to happen during international Israel Apartheid week. Campus control had initially prevented the group of about 50 protesters from entering the Atrium Hall in the South West Engineering building where the concert was being held. Students chanted and banged on the doors. The protesters sang songs such as “Dubula ibhunu” a song that was previously under review due to what the AfriForum referred to as “hurtful lyrics”. Once Campus Control opened the doors students stormed into the hall. They disrupted the performance by jumping on stage as well as blowing their vuvuzelas. Student activist Mbuyiseni Ndlozi addressed the crowd after they stormed the hall. “Our visitors must understand that we are Wits students in good standing. They must understand that in this university Zionism will not enjoy (sic) anymore. They will not bring anything related, sponsored, corroborating with Israel and will expect it will be romantically accepted.”

Here we see the ugliness of the "progressive" Left.

Reshef does not even live in Israel - he lives in Berlin and spends most of his time in Europe and the US. (The concert was partly funded by the Israel Embassy. Horrible, I know. Although according to MyShtetl, the Israel embassy was not involved.)

The University apologized:

The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, deeply regrets that a concert held on its campus last night was disrupted by some members of the University community and representatives of external organisations. In light of this incident, the University takes this opportunity to issue a public apology to all those who attended the concert. The disruption of this event points to intolerance on the part of some members of the University community and goes against the core values espoused by the University. The University is investigating this matter and will take the necessary action based on its policies, processes and procedures. The University reiterates that the views and opinions expressed by the Students' Representative Council or any other student groups on campus do not represent the official views of the University, nor are they necessarily an accurate reflection of the views of the majority of students, staff and alumni. (h/t Steven Z) UPDATE: Here is a description of the events: Eventually all the doors were closed and the concert was finally allowed to begin. However, as Mr Reshef began to play the protestors outside were blowing vuvuzelas and chanting loudly as a means of trying to disrupt the piano recital. During this time, the security remained outside to guard the main door. After some time, things became quiet. Suddenly, while Mr Reshef was in middle of playing Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata, another door within the concert hall burst open. The protestors started streaming into the venue whilst chanting and making loud noises as they attempted to sabotage the recital. It was later discovered that the protesters had actually broken into a fire exit and come in through that door. Security swiftly arrived on the scene and managed to push the protesters out of the hall for a time. Nevertheless, the protestors became so forceful that the security officers were actually pushed backward and once again they came into the main hall screaming, jumping and blowing vuvuzelas. Yossi Reshef was ushered out of the venue very quickly as chaos began to reign within the hall. An eyewitness who wished to remain anonymous even stated he saw the Vice-President of the Wits SRC, cheer one of the protestors who began to violently hit the piano keys of a Steinway Piano that was being used by Mr Reshef. One of the music professor’s, who was truly horrified by what was taking place quickly, ran over to close this very expensive piece of musical equipment. By this time, five members of the Wits SRC, including the President were present in the hall watching this all take place but were doing nothing to put a stop to it. The guests were all forced to leave as security was unable to get a handle on the pandemonium taking place within the venue. As the guests left in a hurry, the protesters began to shout in unison “down with Israel.” Eyewitnesses have described the protestors as “hooligans” who were purposefully trying to destroy a beautiful evening that was supposed to be memorable; unfortunately for the wrong reasons. It must be noted that Yossi Reshef resides in Berlin and is not in any way politically affiliated with Israel. This hate action against Mr Reshef and the guests was done purely because he was just born in Israel.

How Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez is Using Anti-Semitism to Maintain His Power—Against a Challenger Who Isn’t Even Jewish

Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles delivers a speech in Caracas on June 10, 2012 (Leo Ramirez/AFP/Getty Images) The Dispossessed (Tablet/By Matthew Fishbane) Hugo Chávez is ramping up his assault on Venezuela’s upper class, and now a rare Jewish paradise is squarely in his sights. Can it be salvaged? Four days ago, Henrique Capriles, the youthful governor of Miranda state in Venezuela, launched his campaign to rid the country of Hugo Chávez at the presidential election scheduled for October this year. Joined by thousands of supporters, the newly minted candidate led a six-mile procession through the capital city, Caracas. Their final destination was the office of the national election board, where Capriles formally registered his candidacy. The march showcased Capriles, whose Jewish origins have been mercilessly attacked by the Chavistas, as the anti-Chávez—not just figuratively, but literally as well. By marching for a long distance over a short space of time, Capriles wanted his fellow Venezuelans to see him as the picture of health, in marked contrast to the ailing Chávez. For more than a year now, Chávez’s physical condition has been subjected to the sort of rolling speculation typically reserved for dictators. Until Saturday, Chávez had released virtually no information about the terminal cancer he is widely believed to be suffering from. Then, one day before the Capriles march, he summoned journalists to his presidential palace to tell them, “I feel very good.” The following day, Chávez held a buoyant election rally of his own.
The rally didn’t disguise the fact that Chávez, who is currently serving his third term as president, has never looked so vulnerable. His failing health is only part of the story; in the six years that have passed since the last election, the country has become mired in poverty, violent crime, and corruption. Fired by the high price of oil, Venezuela’s principle export, Chávez lavished cash on social spending, while the underlying economy suffered from inflation and capital flight. These days, Venezuela looks less like a socialist version of Singapore and more like the Latin American equivalent of Zimbabwe. According to Sammy Eppel, the head of the Human Rights Commission of the Venezuelan Bna’i Brith and a frequent commentator on Venezuelan affairs, not even the 8 million beneficiaries of Chávez’s grandiose social justice programs, who combined make up nearly half of the electorate, can be relied upon to cast their votes for the commandante. Capriles, a moderate leftist who leads a coalition of 30 opposition parties, plans to capitalize on this uncertainty.
Yet in a country like Venezuela, where infrequent elections are the only glimmer of democratic hope in the face of a regime that has acquired the core features of a dictatorship, no opposition candidate can be considered a shoo-in. Most polls show Chávez comfortably in front; nonetheless, the regime has several options up its sleeve in the event of a Capriles victory.
There is the prospect of Chavismo without Chávez, whereby a handpicked successor continues the path of the revolution; Chávez’s daughter and brother are spoken of as possible candidates, as is current Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro. There is the constantly swirling talk of a military coup, a measure that the country’s generals, who are immersed in drug trafficking worth hundreds of millions of dollars, might decide is a preferable alternative to being arrested and imprisoned by a democratic government. In addition, Chávez could follow the example of his close ally Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and simply steal the election. “We do not have an electoral arbiter,” I was told by Diego Arria, a leading opposition figure and former Venezuelan U.N. ambassador. “We have what I call the ‘Ministry of Elections of Mr. Chávez.’ And they will do whatever they have to in order to prevent a defeat.”
Lastly, and arguably most importantly, Chávez can marshal his extraordinary media and propaganda resources to pound away at Capriles’ reputation. Central to that effort is the demonization of Capriles as an agent of capitalism, gringoism, imperialism, and—critically—a concoction of conspiratorial tropes that point to the greatest lurking danger of all: “Zionism,” which for many is interchangeable with “Judaism.” As a recent headline in the weekly pro-Chávez rag Kikiriki so elegantly put it, “We are fucked if the Jews come to power.”
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Henrique Capriles may be a devout Catholic, but he comes from Jewish stock. His mother’s family, the Radonskis, were Jewish émigrés from Poland; his great-grandparents were exterminated in the Treblinka concentration camp; and his grandmother spent nearly two years in the beleaguered Warsaw Ghetto. His father, meanwhile, is descended from the long-established Sephardic community on the Caribbean island of Curaçao. Although Capriles has expressed pride in his background, his family never considered themselves part of Venezuela’s diminutive Jewish community. For the purposes of the regime’s propaganda operation, that brooks no difference.
“The best opposition candidate for Chávez is Capriles,” said Sammy Eppel. “Any other candidate, like Diego Arria, would be different—they couldn’t call him a Zionist. But Capriles fits the bill perfectly.” Eppel points out that the cartoons lampooning Capriles in the Chávez-controlled press invariably feature him wearing a Star of David. And because Capriles is unmarried, the Chavistas can’t resist a homophobic swipe either; in many of these same cartoons, he wears a pair of pink shorts.
“There is no anti-Semitic tradition in Venezuelan culture,” asserts Daniel Duquenal, one of the few dissident bloggers in Venezuela. “But Chávez has been systematically developing anti-Semitism in Venezuela.” All of which is eerily reminiscent of “anti-Semitism without Jews,” a phenomenon that emerged in the eastern bloc and in certain Arab countries following the Second World War. Absent a numerically significant Jewish community, anti-Semitism becomes a largely ideological weapon, designed to stoke fears of shadowy outside forces hatching conspiracies.
What, if any, are the potential gains of such a strategy for Chávez? Diego Arria is adamant that while the regime is unambiguously anti-Semitic, its deployment of anti-Semitic discourse will yield few concrete advantages. “Capriles says, ‘I am a mariano, a follower of the Virgin Mary,’ ” says Arria, who attended school with Capriles’ father. “People in Venezuela do not see him as a Jew. I don’t believe that an anti-Semitic campaign will have much impact on the Venezuelan population.”
Contrastingly, Duquenal argues that the value of anti-Semitism lies outside the domestic arena, pointing to Chávez’s geopolitical calculations. Chávez has actively promoted a close commercial and political relationship with the mullahs in Iran. He has established himself as a loyal ally of Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad going so far as to dispatch 300,000 tons of diesel, which arrived on a Venezuelan freighter, La Negra Hipolita, two days before the gruesome massacre in the town of Houla. Last week, Chávez ended another long period out of public view by publicly welcoming a delegation from Belarus sent by that country’s dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, who plans to visit Caracas personally in a few weeks from now.
“Anti-Semitism has been created artificially because Chávez wants to align himself with radical regimes against the United States,” Duquenal said. “That’s the only logical explanation I can find for why Chavismo has deliberately decided to become an anti-Semitic political movement.” Continue reading: ‘The Jewish Problem’ Both Duquenal and Sammy Eppel point to the enduring influence over Chávez of Norberto Ceresole, the late Argentinian fascist intellectual with whom he struck up a friendship. “Ceresole was like the parrot on Chávez’s shoulder,” Eppel says. “He wanted bring the far left and the far right together, and he persuaded Chávez that he was the man to do that.” Once Chávez, following Ceresole, aligned the dregs of fascism with those of communism, anti-Semitism became the ideological glue binding the Chavismo model of government, in which the relationship between the leader and his people is central, unencumbered by pesky interferences like an independent judiciary. It is no accident, Eppel believes, that the first chapter of a book by Ceresole extolling this model was titled “The Jewish Problem.”
Occasionally, the vulgar rhetoric of Venezuelan anti-Semitism has strayed into physical attacks. In January 2009, an armed gang stormed the Tiferet Israel synagogue in Caracas, spraying choice slogans like “Damned Israel, Death!” on its walls. This particular theme echoed a speech that Chávez delivered in China in 2006, in which he claimed that Israel had “done something similar to what Hitler did, possibly worse, against half the world.”
In a monograph published in April, “Chávez, The Left and The Jews,” the academics Claudio Lomnitz and Rafael Sanchez contend that in Chávez’s Venezuela, “politics and political life represent a kind of hand-to-hand combat between the ‘people,’ united by ‘love,’ and its enemies, united by hatred—the ‘ire’ that Ceresole imputes to the Jews.” Such cloyingly emotional, anti-rational politics are the perfect breeding ground for the fantasies about Jewish power that Chávez has actively promoted and that will doubtless be wheeled out against Capriles as the election approaches.
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For Venezuela’s remaining Jews, these anti-Semitic fantasies underline their own harsh reality. Diego Arria describes the community as having been “decimated”; under Chávez, its numbers have declined from a height of 30,000 to just 9,000. Moreover, the Chavista bureaucracy seemingly delights in placing obstacles in the community’s way. Just before Passover this year, the interior ministry announced that extra sanitary permits would be needed if the importation of matzo, the unleavened bread consumed during the festival, was to be approved. And when the Jewish community needs to make official representations, its leaders are directed to the Foreign Ministry—proof, Sammy Eppel asserts, that the regime fundamentally regards Jews as aliens, not Venezuelan citizens.
All the indicators are that Venezuelan Jews will continue to leave the country, heading for more benign destinations like Colombia, Mexico, and Miami. “They are an integrated Latin community, so they go where there is a Latin culture,” says Eppel. “This isn’t a Polish shtetl.” It is possible that a Capriles victory will stem the tide of emigration, but even then, the years of destruction wrought by Chávez will remain a powerful push factor for Jews and non-Jews alike.
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Nick Cohen, Colin Shindler and left antisemitism

The idea that only fascism is the cause of hate and that Communism stands apart from it is naive and ignorant. There are other reasons to hate someone other then their race. I could hate you because of the brand of shoes you wear and given power, your shoes could be the means of which I will attempt to divide you from a populist mob rampage or in the back rooms of a dictatorship. The great irony that we have accepted RACE as being the only prejudice humans can have... and yet it's an artificial construct that can be taylor made for the elite. Of course you can change your shoes... or you can change your philosophy or religion... but what if you really liked those shoes?

...In the early 20th century, Eastern European Jews had two love affairs - with Communism and with Zionism. But the Communists betrayed them. The Hungarian intellectual, Arthur Koestler, compared his time as a Communist with the deception practised on Jacob when he slept with the ugly Leah instead of Rachel.
Early Communists didn't want to be bothered with Jewish issues which, they thought, would be automatically resolved under socialism. By the 1920s, Stalin was using antisemitism to defeat his opponents in the party, many of whom were Jewish. One, Karl Radek, asked: "What's the difference between Moses and Stalin? Moses took the Jews out of Egypt. Stalin takes them out of the Communist Party".
By the 1930s, Stalin's great opponent, Trotsky, had come to believe that Jews might well not assimilate after all. He began to speak of "the Jewish nation". A socialist Zionist who met him in 1937 thought her words "penetrated deep into his heart, that he was glad to hear about a world from which he had dissociated himself". She thought that "he was listening not like a man who placed himself above all nationality," and that, "our great idea found an echo in his heart". Trotsky's biographer and disciple, Isaac Deutscher, a self-confessed "non-Jewish Jew", later admitted that, had he urged Jews in the 1930s to go to Palestine, many, including his own family, would have been saved.
The non-Communist left was more sympathetic to Zionism. Ralph Miliband, father of Ed and David, insisted, in a long correspondence with a Belgian socialist, Marcel Liebman, that his kind of socialism did not preclude recognition of Jewish identity. "What right do the Jews have to be in Palestine… Their right stems from the fact that the world is what it is". Perhaps there is no better answer.
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(Simply Jews)stumbled across this, sort of, on the Standpoint website. It's Nick Cohen's review of Colin Shindler's "Israel and the European Left". Actually, (Simply Jews) was chasing down a link in a comments thread elsewhere, but what matters is that (Simply Jews) found it!(Nick Cohen, Colin Shindler and left antisemitism)
Cohen starts off with a set of general comments on the original ideological links between Communism and Zionism, before they became, in his own words, separated at birth. Then he comes to Shindler's book. Almost his first direct comment on it is the following: "If [Colin Shindler] has not produced a secret history, then it is a history of a secret in plain view; an account of facts that are available but not discussed. After (Brian Goldfarb) interviewed him at Jewish Book Week, members of the audience said they had never before heard anyone examine the racist strain in left-wing thinking, even though it was there from the beginning."
Of course, the readers of this and similar sites will not be at all surprised that this strain, as Cohen puts it, in left-wing thinking. If we weren't aware, we wouldn't be here in the first place. Anne's opinions (another Israel based website, in English) was kind enough to post a longish article By (Brian Goldfarb) on the Jewish Book Week, including his reactions to the Shindler/Cohen session.

(How the Left Turned Against the Jews | Standpoint)"You cry out against Jewish capital, gentlemen?" cried one. "You are against Jewish capital and want to eliminate the stock manipulators. Rightly so. Trample the Jewish capitalists under foot, hang them from the street lamps, stamp them out."

Ruth Fischer sounded like a Nazi. She used the same hate-filled language. She wanted to murder Jews. But Hitler would never have accepted her. Fischer was a leader of the German Communist Party. She made her small differences of opinion with the Nazis clear when she went on to say that her audience should not just trample Jewish capitalists to death, but all capitalists.

Unconcerned by the contradiction, Hitler said the Jews were at once a "Judaeo-Bolshevik" conspiracy and a capitalist conspiracy. In Fischer's case, he was half right. The rabble-rouser who wanted to hang Jewish capitalists was a Jewish Communist, the sister of Hanns Eisler, who wrote music for some of Brecht's early plays. Eisler and Brecht fled the Nazis in 1933. A sense of self-preservation triumphed over ideology, and they found permanent sanctuary in America rather than in Stalin's Soviet Union. Hanns could not have been surprised when the House Committee on Un-American Activities demanded his deportation. He was a prominent Communist composer who worked for Hollywood, which the American Right considered a nest of reds. Eisler was perhaps more surprised to discover that his own sister Ruth was a witness for the prosecution when the McCarthyites arraigned him in 1947. Supporters of Stalin had denounced her as a "Left oppositionist" Trotskyist. She responded by not only going over to the "capitalist camp" but by providing evidence against Hanns, and against a second brother, Gerhart, who was a leading agent in the Comintern.(MORE)

(How the Left Turned Against the Jews | Standpoint)Shindler is a properly impartial historian, but when his beliefs show through he reveals himself to be a social democrat rather than an Israel-firster or man of the Right. The left-wing press won't like it for the same reason Caliban did not like the sight of his face in the mirror.(MORE)Beyond the ideological divide lies the almost taboo nature of Shindler's subject. Conventional wisdom does not regard Communism with the same abhorrence as fascism, even though if you want to be an accountant about it and add up the skulls of the dead, you will find that the Communists murdered many more people than the fascists did, began murdering before fascists came to power and carried on murdering after the fascists had gone. Yet few can bring themselves to see fascism and Communism as moral equivalents. Even Robert Conquest, who mapped the crimes of Stalin, and had been mocked by the know-nothing Left of his day as a Cold War fantasist, said he thought the Nazis were worse than the Communists. He couldn't explain why, they just felt worse.

(How the Left Turned Against the Jews | Standpoint)The movements for Jewish self-determination and Russian Communism were twins separated at birth. The First Zionist conference met on August 27, 1897, to discuss the escape from anti-Semitic Europe to Palestine. The General Jewish Labour Bund held its first conference in Vilnius on October 7, 1897, to organise the Russian Empire's Jews in a united socialist party. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, from which the Bolsheviks split, held its first conference in March 1898. Naturally, the Bund sent delegates. For liberal and left-wing Europeans of the late 19th century, no regime was more repellent than Tsarist autocracy, and nothing better symbolised its reactionary nature than its anti-Semitic pogroms. Jews responded to the terror by keeping their Jewish identity and joining Jewish socialist movements, such as the Bund, or by becoming entirely assimilated Communists, as Trotsky and many others did.(MORE)

(How the Left Turned Against the Jews | Standpoint)The coincidences of history do not end there. On November 2, 1917, Arthur Balfour sent his declaration to Baron Rothschild that the British Empire would allow the Jewish people to find a home in Palestine "it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities". On November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace.(MORE)

(How the Left Turned Against the Jews | Standpoint)As so often the theory was one thing and the practice another. The belief that Communism was better than Nazism stops us seeing that the Bolshevik Revolution was an insane idea from its inception. A "vanguard" party, composed of a tiny band of professional revolutionaries, could hold on to power only by terrorising the subject population. The Bolsheviks had to crush independent Jewish organisations, as they had to crush all other independent organisations. Yet even before the Bolsheviks produced a left-wing variant of the Nazi conspiracy theory, the Jews were a special case in the old Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks recognised other minorities as minorities with homelands. They never said that there should be a Jewish homeland in their empire. Socialist Zionism was a particular threat to the new regime. If Jews succeeded in building a socialist state in Israel, it would be a rival. Lenin set a loyalty test. Before he came to power, he purged the Communist movement of supporters of the Bund. The only Jews he permitted to remain were Jews who were so thoroughly assimilated that they were barely Jews at all.(MORE)

(Trotsky: heartfelt echo By Colin Shindler, Continuum, £17.99 Review: Israel and the European Left | The Jewish Chronicle By Vernon Bogdanor) Unlike Lenin, Stalin was an anti-Semite and understood the uses of irrational hatred. His crimes took the forms of the sins of omission and commission. The omission was not to see Nazism for what it was, and ally with it in the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939. It remains one of the most hypocritical and stupid acts in the annals of diplomacy, where examples of hypocrisy and stupidity are not hard to find. Throughout the 1930s Communist writers, poets and propagandists had denounced fascism and urged a popular front against the Hitlerian menace. Then in August 1939 Stalin stood on his head and announced a Soviet reconciliation with Nazi Germany so they might partition Poland between them. Stalin believed in Hitler. Solzhenitsyn speculated in The First Circle that Hitler was the only man he ever really trusted. The complete surprise Hitler achieved when he invaded an unprepared Soviet Union in 1941 suggests that Solzhenitsyn was right. By signing the pact, the Soviet Union agreed to hand over the Jews of western Poland to the Nazis. Although conventional historians lazily say that the pact shocked a generation of leftists, Shindler points out that membership of the British Communist Party actually rose after the tyrants had cut a deal, and hardly anyone worried about the fate of Polish Jewry. Those who had shouted loudest about the dangers of fascism from 1933 to 1938 were as willing as Chamberlain and Halifax to appease it in 1939.(MORE)

It's gotta be the shoes

Who guards us from the Guardian's guardian?

Bradley Manning
May Face Death Penalty...

ANNA ARDEN

Julian Assange might be hostile to Jews

(StoneGate) Julian Assange, was plunged into anti-Semitic row as he told a journalist he thought a Jewish conspiracy was being worked against him, which "included" the Guardian's editor Alan Rusbridger. When told Rusbridger was not Jewish, Assange reportedly noted that Rusbridger was "sort of Jewish" because he was related to David Leigh, a Jewish journalist. How do his views and convictions possibly filter down to the way he runs Wikileaks? As it took Helen Thomas close to six decades to come out about her true feelings, this is something that perhaps one can only speculate about.

Who guards us from the Guardian's guardian? 

So called Israel Firster: Anatomy of an Antisemitic Smear

(cifwatch.com) Beginning in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, approximately 2800 Americans fought in Spain on behalf of the Republican cause, in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and elsewhere. Most were members of the Communist Party or other leftist organizations. They served without the support of the U.S. government, were treated with suspicion after the war, and in some cases were even prosecuted by the Roosevelt Administration for recruiting volunteers into the Brigade. These volunteers into a foreign army are universally regarded with respect and even reverence by American liberals and the broader left. (image via alba-valb.org)(MORE)

Ambassador Gutman to Jews: it’s your own fault!

Ambassador Howard Gutman explains
Obama policy to stunned Smurfs

(calev ben yefuneh) Fresnozionism.org
04 December '11
http://fresnozionism.org/2011/12/ambassador-gutman-to-jews-its-your-own-fault/
Last week a conference was held in Brussels to develop a legal strategy to fight antisemitism :

Almost 100 people from 16 countries gathered in the capital of Europe to discuss means to confront growing anti-Semitism and its new forms, anti-Zionism and the delegitimization of the State of Israel, particularly in some European countries where the issue of Jew-hatred appears to be more acute and where legal weapons do not yet exist.

One of the speakers was Howard Gutman, the (Jewish) Ambassador of the US to to Belgium. His remarks reportedly ‘stunned’ attendees, who heard him blame the Jews and Israel for antisemitism:

He said “there is and has long been some amount of anti-Semitism, of hatred and violence against Jews, from a small sector of the population who hate others who may be different or perceived to be different, largely for the sake of hating.” “Those anti-Semites are people who hate not only Jews, but Muslims, gays, gypsies, and likely any who can be described as minorities or different. That hatred is of course pernicious and it must be combated…” 

He sees growing intimidation and violence directed at Jews as a result of the continuing tensions between Israel and the Palestinian territories and other Arab neighbors in the Middle East. 

Peace in the Middle East, he said would significantly reduce this form of anti-Semitism in Europe. “The solution for this second type of problem – too often lumped under a general banner of anti-Semitism – is in the hands of Israel, the Palestinians and Arab neighbors in the Middle East,” the ambassador declared.

In Gutman’s world, there are only two kinds of antisemites: those that also hate Muslims, gays, etc. — neo-Nazi xenophobes — and those who hate Jews and Israel because of the conflict with the Palestinians.
Note that this is in keeping with the Obama Administration’s rule book: it is forbidden to say anything bad about Islam or Muslim culture. You cannot say that it is imbued with antisemitism, which it is, and which in fact makes antisemites out of many Muslims. So Muslim antisemitism must be in some way justified.
Gutman seems to think that Muslim antisemitism sprang full-grown from the head of the Israeli-Arab conflict, in 1967 or perhaps as as early as 1948. If this conflict could be solved, he suggests, then suddenly Muslim and left-wing antisemitism would vanish, leaving us only the neo-Nazis to worry about.

He ignores Muslim Jew-hatred which goes back to the Quran and other teachings of Mohammad, and which, like the Christian variety, was often expressed quite brutally, long before there was an Israel, and indeed before Zionism was a gleam in the eye of Theodore Herzl.
Yes, there were times and places where Jews could accept a second-class dhimmi status and live alongside Muslims relatively unmolested. But the antisemitic teachings were always there, ready to explode in violence if the Sultan owed money to Jewish merchants or simply decided that there were too many of them.
Pogroms were not rare in the land of Israel, even before Zionist immigration. For example, in 1834 — the First Aliyah began in 1881 — there was a murderous pogrom in Tzfat, which went on for 33 days:

The forgotten pogrom in Tzfat was a regular pogrom, a dreadful yet familiar experience to Jews in both the Islamic world and in Christian Europe. Like all pogroms it was an act of senseless brutality, where the victims were totally helpless. It had no political agenda or motive behind it. There was no ‘Zionist entity’ whose existence served as an excuse to murder civilians; it was motivated by pure greed. The Palestinian Arabs of the Eastern Galilee took advantage of a regional crisis, the war between Egypt and Turkey, to attack their Jewish neighbors and strip them of everything they had, clothes, property, houses, and the like. In the process people were beaten in the streets, many times to death, synagogues destroyed and holy books desecrated.
– Dvar Dea, The Forgotten Pogrom of Tzfat

Later, Arab hate made it impossible for them to live together peacefully with the Jewish immigrants. Despite the fact that Zionist development of the land made it capable of supporting more and more inhabitants — and more Arabs came to enjoy the benefits of it — the Arab world fought diplomatically, and the Palestinian Arabs violently, in anti-Jewish riots in the 1920′s and 1930′s, to keep Jews out.
The WWII period was particularly fruitful for cross-fertilization of the Muslim and European streams of hate, with the Palestinian Arab leader al-Husseini visiting Hitler and laying plans for his own hoped-for Holocaust in the Middle East.
After the war, many Nazis found refuge in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, etc. where their ideology was congenial.
Today a good example of contemporary Muslim antisemitism can be found in the Hamas Covenant, which quotes the sayings of Mohammad as well as ideas from the European “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
If you read the Hamas Covenant, or pay attention to the statements of the PLO leadership (whose ideology comes from al-Husseini via Yasser Arafat), you can see that no possible withdrawals or other concessions could possibly mollify them.They will have no Jewish state of any size in what they consider “Arab (or Muslim) land.”
Gutman has it backwards. Antisemitism is not a result of the Israeli-Arab conflict. It is its cause.
The view that the Jews cause antisemitism by their actions is an old one. A 1942 article in Der Stürmer by one Ernst Hiemer begins thus:

Anti-Semitism is as old as Jewry itself. The Jew was a liar, a swindler, an exploiter, a troublemaker, a poisoner of the blood, and a murderer from the beginning. The non-Jewish peoples thus responded to this people of criminals throughout history with contempt and rejection.

Although Gutman suggests that the solution “is in the hands of Israel, the Palestinians and Arab neighbors in the Middle East,” the position of the Obama Administration that he represents is that the conflict continues because Israel refuses to meet Arab demands. For example, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta expressed this view last week.
Gutman, a Washington lawyer, raised at least $500,000 for the Obama campaign in 2008. He was appointed Ambassador in 2009 .

Christian Biblical ethicists claim God didn't promise Israel to Jews

(EOZ) In September, David P. Gushee and Glen H. Stassen, two Christian ethicists, wrote "An Open Letter to America's Christian Zionists." The main point of this letter was to dispute the biblical idea that God gave Israel to Jews alone:

Not to put too fine a point on it, we wish to claim here that the prevailing version of American Christian Zionism—that is, your belief system—underwrites theft of Palestinian land and oppression of Palestinian people, helps create the conditions for an explosion of violence, and pushes US policy in a destructive direction that violates our nation’s commitment to universal human rights. In all of these, American Christian Zionism as it currently stands is sinful and produces sin. We write as evangelical Christians committed lifelong to Israel's security, and we are seriously worried about your support for policies that violate biblical warnings about injustice and may lead to the outcome you most fear—serious harm to or even destruction of Israel.
We write as evangelicals to you, our fellow evangelicals. On the shared basis of biblical authority, we ask you to reconsider your interpretation of Scripture, for the sake of God, humanity, the United States, and, yes, Israel itself, the Land and People we both love.
We acknowledge that your evangelical-fundamentalist American Christian Zionism (henceforth simply “Christian Zionism”) is a product of a Christian community that loves and reads the Bible. This is on its face a good thing--for there appear to be fewer and fewer American Christians whose love of the Bible and whose devotion to reading it can be taken for granted. We commend your love for the scriptures.
Both now and in the past, whenever Christian Zionism emerges its essential origin is simply Christian reading of the Hebrew Bible, or what Christians call the Old Testament. Our love of the Bible takes Christians into the pages of the Old Testament; there we cannot help but discover the centrality of a Promised Land for the Jewish people. The trajectory of the canonical Old Testament moves inexorably toward and away from the Promised Land—the patriarchal narratives in which a people and land are promised despite humble origins; enslavement in Egypt; the miraculous Exodus and grim wilderness wanderings under Moses; the conquest of the Promised Land; the establishment, split, and eventual conquest of Israel as a political entity; the Babylonian exile and dispersion of the Jewish people; and a partial return to the land, at which point the OT historical narrative ends.
...
We suggest to you that contemporary Christian Zionism is well-intentioned but needs correction at some very important points. This requires some careful biblical and theological work—from within the basic framework of evangelical Christianity. This means that the relevant scriptural texts need to be studied in detail, and that Christian theology needs to do its proper work with those texts.
For example, we suggest that Christian Zionists who move from a generalized love of Israel to a specific claim that the contemporary state of Israel has divine title to the entire Holy Land, need to take more seriously the complexity of what the Bible actually says about God’s promises to Abraham.
Genesis 15:18 reads: “On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.” The next verse goes on to name the various peoples to whom the land belonged at the time.
The territory denoted by the space between these two rivers includes modern-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, half of Iraq, half of Egypt, parts of Turkey and Saudi Arabia, the modern state of Israel, as well as the occupied Palestinian territories.
A literal reading of the text that assumes that the descendants of Abram are only the Jewish people faces a problem here. Either God is not very good at keeping his promises, or God’s plan is for contemporary Israel ultimately to conquer all of these other countries and occupy their land. That would result in an Israel ruled by its 90% majority Arabs, or an Israel attempting to subjugate that 90% by force.
But the promise looks very different if we take seriously all of the offspring of Abraham. Genesis 15:4-5 has God taking Abram outside and telling him that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars of the heavens. Genesis 17:4, probably the pivotal text, has God saying to Abraham: “This is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations.” Many nations, a multitude of nations; many offspring, many kings—read Genesis 17 again and see the plural nouns here.
Close readers of Scripture will know that in fact Abraham did become the father of many nations. With Sarah he became the father of Isaac and the ancestor of all in his line, via Jacob and Esau. With Hagar he became the father of Ishmael and all in his line. And with the long-forgotten Keturah (Gen. 25:1) he became the father of Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah. The Old Testament clearly positions Abraham as the father/ancestor of not only the Jewish people but of a vast number of other peoples, all scattered through the territories promised in Genesis 15. Abraham becomes the father of dozens of peoples, exactly as the Bible says! It is certainly true that the Old Testament primarily tells the story of the line of Isaac and therefore of what became the Jewish people, but that cannot cancel the significance of the promises to Abraham and the many peoples credited to him in Genesis.
...Perhaps you will respond by saying that God promises the land of Canaan specifically to the Jewish people. You might cite here Genesis 17:8: “I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding.” This interpretation would require restricting the “offspring” in question to Abraham’s offspring through Sarah via Isaac and then on to Jacob and excluding Esau. But the promise to possess the land includes the offspring of Isaac, and the offspring of Isaac includes Esau, with his five Edomite sons and their offspring, as Genesis 36 states, and that includes multitudes of Canaanites, not only Jews. It would also require the assumption that we know what Gen. 17 means territorially with the term “Canaan” and that it corresponds with the Zionist’s version of the proper boundaries of the modern state of Israel.

In a later letter, published November 12, the same two wrote:

The responses that disagreed did not discuss the biblical passages, but shifted the topic to the politics of the present government of Israel and the West Bank, and Hamas, and whether Israel forced Palestinians out of their homes or not.
These are important topics, but we are hoping for biblical discussion.
What we are asking is whether our readers see Genesis 15 and 17 saying that Abraham is the father of many nations, with descendants as many as the stars of the universe. And whether the territory includes all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates, which of course includes many nations, most all Arab. We believe ours is the plain, literal reading. No one has explained a different reading in response.

I have no idea why no Christian Zionist took it upon themselves to answer this letter within the worldview of Christian theology. Honestly, if it is true, it is a bit disappointing.
So, even though I am not a Christian nor a Jewish Biblical scholar by any means, I would like to make a point.
It seems strange that the authors' arguments that God's promises apply to all of Abraham's descendants do not take into account later declarations by God.
For example, God explicitly told Jacob in Genesis 28:13 that "I am the LORD, the God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac. The land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed."
This happened at Bet El (Bethel). One can argue about the size of the land promised by God at that point, but one cannot argue that the promise was made to anyone but the Jewish people. And Bet El is on the "wrong" side of the Green Line. Would the authors admit that, Biblically, this must remain a part of Israel?
More explicitly, in Exodus 23, God tells the Israelites:

But if thou shalt indeed hearken unto his voice, and do all that I speak; then I will be an enemy unto thine enemies, and an adversary unto thine adversaries. For Mine angel shall go before thee, and bring thee in unto the Amorite, and the Hittite, and the Perizzite, and the Canaanite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite; and I will cut them off. ...And I will set thy border from the Red Sea even unto the sea of the Philistines, and from the wilderness unto the River; for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand; and thou shalt drive them out before thee.

And in Deuteronomy chapter 1:

The LORD our God spoke unto us in Horeb, saying: 'Ye have dwelt long enough in this mountain; turn you, and take your journey, and go to the hill-country of the Amorites and unto all the places nigh thereunto, in the Arabah, in the hill-country, and in the Lowland, and in the South, and by the sea-shore; the land of the Canaanites, and Lebanon, as far as the great river, the river Euphrates. Behold, I have set the land before you: go in and possess the land which the LORD swore unto your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give unto them and to their seed after them.'

The straight translations of these passages are somewhat contradictory and without further study I imagine it is difficult for Christians to know how to reconcile them. But it is extraordinarily dishonest to interpret only one of God's promises to Abraham and his children in a vacuum without even considering the more explicit promises He made later to Jacob, Moses and the children of Israel. Is it not the same God who made all of these promises? Are not all of them of equal weight? If so, then the issue is not interpreting one of them, but reconciling and interpreting all of them together.
Beyond that, it seems to me that the entire Biblical narrative would be problematic if most of the peoples who were God's covenental partners simply disappeared from the story or played only bit parts. If the children of Israel were not the main intended recipients of God's promises, then why would the Bible spend so much time only dealing with them and all but ignoring the Ishmaelites and the Edomites?
The writers make other arguments about whether today's Jews should still be considered to be within the same covenant, but that is a much bigger topic. And before I spend time on that, I would love to know how they interpret and reconcile the many other Biblical verses tying the Land of Israel with, specifically, the Jews.

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(Parenthetically, I think it is not clear at all that you can consider Esau's progeny to be "Canaanites." While Gen. 38 says they lived in Canaan, the Canaanites were presumably the descendants of Canaan, Noah's grandson through Ham. Which means, ironically, that Canaanites are not Semites, but rather "Hamites." So don't accuse me of anti-Semitism :) )

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I am afraid that this might turn into a very big theological thread, and I am not really comfortable with that here; Christian theology is not a topic that belongs on this blog. Hopefully  it will spark discussion among Christians that will take place elsewhere.

Israel’s Supporters Must Learn from the Enemy

(Bill Levinson) We removed our post that compared Henry Ford’s proven job creation methods with Barack Obama’s proven job destruction methods because a couple of readers expressed outrage against Ford personally because of his involvement in anti-Semitic activities. We do not agree with these readers (as shown below) but we don’t want to put Ted in the position of circulating a piece to which people might take exception. This shows, however, that Euro-Americans in general and Jews in particular have failed to understand a simple point: a person we might find offensive or unsavory, or even an outright enemy, is often the best teacher. Our collective failure to learn this lesson puts Israel in particular and Civilization as a whole at considerable and even mortal risk. We will begin with a couple of extremely simple examples of this principle. The United Kingdom is famous for the 95th Rifles, a regiment immortalized by Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series.The UK is also famous for its rocket artillery, as immortalized by “the rockets’ red glare” in our National Anthem. Neither rifle-armed skirmishers nor artillery rockets were however British inventions; both were examples of learning from the enemy.The War of Independence taught the British that a man in a bright red coat with a musket that could not hit reliably beyond 70 to 100 paces was an easy mark for a rifleman in dull-colored clothing who could melt into a forest after firing. They accordingly created an Experimental Corps of Riflemen (later the 95th Rifles) who wore dark green uniforms to blend in with foliage, much as their American opponents had blended in with their surroundings. The Congreve Rocket was meanwhile the result of the British being on the receiving end of Tipu Sultan’s rocket artillery during the Anglo-Mysore Wars.
We obviously do not agree with what Henry Ford published about Jews, or for that matter his support for Prohibition or his “sociology department” that intruded on his employees’ private lives. We did an Internet search on suspicion and found Henry Ford on a list of historical figures (along with Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, and George Washington) who were suspected of having Asperger’s Syndrome.
People with Asperger’s Syndrome are often described, as having social skills deficits, reluctance to listen, difficulty understanding social give and take, and other core characteristics, is typically quite misunderstood and/or misdiagnosed in our country today.
Other characteristics include a lack of empathy and a fascination with systems, i.e. “how things work.” The latter certainly describes Ford, noting his boyhood fascination with taking watches apart and even being able to put them back together. His production line was described as a giant clock, and it relied on workers as “components” who performed repetitive tasks to make the clock work. The system’s success paid the “components” high wages but it is quite likely that Ford viewed people as something like elements of a machine–hence his infamous Sociology Department–with roughly identical desires and motivations. If Ford did have Asperger’s, he could have understood intellectually that he needed to pay fair wages to gain his workers’ commitment but it is doubtful that he could really empathize with them on an emotional level. If true, this theory explains quite a bit. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (in which Ford is God, My Life and Work is the Bible, and people are manufactured to fit society’s needs) constitutes Fordism taken to the extreme.
In any event, The International Jew was not Henry Ford’s creation. It a translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that was given to Ford by the Tsarist Russian propagandist Boris Brasol. To put this in contemporary terms, Ford saw the equivalent of a sensationalistic Web site or E-mail, copied it to everybody on his mailing list, and pressed the “Send” key. His “Send” key unfortunately consisted of the Dearborn Independent, so what he circulated caused substantial harm to Jews and, in the end, Ford’s own reputation.
What then are the lessons to be learned from this experience? How many of us have, at one time or another, forwarded an E-mail or Web posting without investigating thoroughly? We have received them from highly intelligent and well educated friends only to find, after investigating, that the material was untrue. The National Jewish Democratic Council relied on somebody else’s blog posting or equivalent to publish a vicious falsehood about the Christian computer game “Left Behind: Eternal Forces.” None of this excuses Ford for his own failure to investigate Brasol’s material thoroughly but we must make sure we do not repeat the same mistakes.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument the absolute worst about Henry Ford. This does not change the fact that his methods created the American middle class along with the 40 hour work week, and made the United States the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. Our thoughts must now move to application of this knowledge to our country’s current problem: an incompetent buffoon in the White House who has proven repeatedly that he knows nothing about how to create jobs or prosperity. (The same individual wishes to reward Palestinian terrorism with territorial concessions at Israel’s expense.) We should welcome assistance from any source that will help remove Obama from office next year and, even more importantly, create high wage jobs for the millions of American workers who need them!
Now let’s move on to a genuine Nazi who has plenty to teach us. Most people cannot get past their revulsion at Hitler’s statement, “If you win, you need not have to explain. If you lose, you should not be around to explain,” to internalize the truth of this observation. Hitler lost so he had to follow his own advice on April 30, 1945. His equally murderous and genocidal counterpart Josef Stalin was on the winning side so he never had to explain. Neither did Mao Tse Tung or Pol Pot, for that matter. This applies directly to Israel versus its militant Islamic neighbors: “If you win, even if you have to kill several million Arab aggressors and inflict some collateral damage while you do it, you won’t have to explain. If you lose by playing nice and worrying about world opinion, you won’t be around to explain.”
We observe further than ancient Jewish history was not very “nice,” with the result that today’s Jews need not explain while the Canaanites and so on are not around to explain. Roman history was not very “nice” either but the sole consequence of Rome’s genocide of the Carthaginian people is that Southern Europe and even England speaks words with Latin instead of Phoenician roots. Modern Hungary and Mongolia have statues, currency, and/or postage with images of Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan, neither of whom were nice people but who did outstanding jobs for the Huns and the Mongols respectively. Ann Barnhardt elaborates further on the problems with being “nice.” (Christian-oriented material can be ignored without loss of continuity.)
This is not to say that Israel or any decent country should initiate aggression today even though history shows it can often get away with it. It does say that, if an aggressor attacks you, you must take him down in such a manner that he will never lift a hand to you again. Only in movies must the hero (or often a terrified female victim who turns the tables momentarily) let the downed serial killer or monster get up again, and that’s only because the movie can’t end at the 45 minute mark. If you put your attacker down for good, you don’t have to explain. If you let him get up again (in the absence of law enforcement personnel who can take him into custody), it is quite likely that you won’t be around to explain. Israel should have put its attackers down for good in 1967.
Most people and especially Jews are meanwhile reluctant to read Mein Kampf because of its content and authorship. This is EXACTLY why the Arabs, who love the book not merely for its anti-Semitic aspects but for its very practical content, are currently demonizing Jews in general and Israel in particular the way the Nazis demonized Jews during the 1930s.
Mein Kampf however goes beyond a discussion of how to use propaganda effectively; it shows explicitly that Hitler followed the advice to learn from the enemy, in this case the Triple Entente. The Entente and its American sympathizers demonized Germans the same way the Nazis later demonized Jews. The following could in fact be described as a blood libel of Germans, noting that it was proven that the Lusitania carried munitions and was therefore a legitimate military target.
Little Lost Children of the Lusitania (to view jpgs click here)
Main Kampf states explicitly that Germany failed to recognize the effectiveness of this kind of propaganda, and failed to reciprocate in kind: with visual images designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, the man in the street and the man in the beer hall. If the Jews in Israel could bring themselves to read Mein Kampf, they would realize that Israel is repeating Imperial Germany’s mistakes to the letter while the enemies who want to destroy it are working straight from the Entente’s (and later the Nazis’) playbook.
Arab propaganda; could have been drawn by genuine Nazis
Our recommendation is and has always been retaliation in kind and with an enormity of compound interest, to dehumanize Israel’s enemies and militant “Islam” in general every bit as thoroughly as the Entente dehumanized the Central Powers. We should not hesitate to adapt propaganda images from the Second World War that were used to demonize Nazis and Japanese, along with similar material from the First World War and Spanish American War. As but one example:
The Palestinian Brute
Ethics and honor require only that the propaganda be truthful (and the militant Muslims have provided our side with an unlimited supply of truth), and that hatred and contempt be directed selectively against a specific behavioral choice (militant Islam) and never against an entire religious identity, race, or ethnicity.
George Santayana wrote that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Those who cannot or will not learn from the enemy, even an enemy as loathsome as Hitler, are likely to become history.

via docstalk.blogspot.com

Agreed, but I disagree that Ford merely pressed the send button on facebook. Ford trolled the equivalent of internet forums for decades. He was more then just some guy who distributed Antisemitism. He was completely obsessed with it's philosophy. Asperger syndrome is more then just Rain Man. It is more then just being systematic. Asperger syndrome is a tendency to be obsessed with a system and in this case the system was hate. We still can learn a lot from the most despicable people. On my friendfeed account I follow many twitter accounts that have complete contempt for my being. Should they know that I follow them in this manner they would probably call me a stalker. In fact one person I followed who was a former teacher even put me on the news as such. The point being is these people I follow not because they are complete idiots...many of them are geniuses... and many of them probably hate me. One example of a complete genius who I have been following for years goes by the name of SeanMcBride (on both twitter and friendfeed). He is a complete tech genius, and a debater that leaves me in awe. His contempt for Israel (though he does not hate Jews), leaves many writing him off as a common thug. He is no such thing. His genius for systems has led him to believe in the fear of Zionism and Neo Cons. My guess is he is similar personality to Henry Ford and I can't tell you how informative his feed is. Both in Tech and Israel News (though in the latter it is our enemies spin). The point is that I am wise enough to follow those I don't like. The world is full of grey area. The beauty of open feeds on the internet is that we can peer into the minds of those who are our opposition because those who do not like us have huge egos and want to share their information without realizing how easy it is to subvert that information. I suppose I am guilty of doing the same and I have no doubt that my opinions will be used against me (actually they were used against me in court and my first amendment rights were taken away by the state of Washington). Point being however is that we must not write people off just because they are Nazis or Anti-Zionists. We must enjoy the work of Wagner or the malarkey of the children's book writer Roald Dahl. To reject those brilliant minds that reject us is futile. Sometimes there might even be brilliant Zionist writers who have flaws in other ways. I'd like to tell you who those people are, but it would hurt my own cause. A few people do come to mind however... I won't mention the name. I can tell you that I still have a deep respect for their mind... and I leave them the hell alone because on a social level they are nuts. The worst is when two very flawed Israel supporting geniuses start attacking each other... and then even go so far as to get people out on the internet to take one side or the other. Life is complex. I have no doubt that there will come a day when I might depend on the guy above I mentioned SeanMcBride (who is my enemy) to defend me from people who are supposed to be on my side. I am known to be an opponent of feminism... (though I am a descendant of Emma Lazarus), but when I was in jail I depended on my feminist mother to get me out (The female and probably feminist identifying Jewish judge just would not listen to me). Never write out your opponent... and never assume because a person supports Israel that they are to be trusted. BTW, the teacher I described above... she wasn't stupid either. Just crazy.

Wikileaks Bombshell: New Israel Fund Official Endorses End of Jewish State

THE TRUTH STILL LOOKS GOOD TO ME... But then I think there is a truth and not merely a little information to hide around in theory. No feminist leftist is going to confuse me into not liking that which looks good.

How come we are always on the defensive, always apologizing, and always losing the battle for global public opinion? It is true, of course, that millions of petro-dollars are being used for anti-Israel propaganda (whoops! I’m again buying into their story- this is not anti-Israel propaganda but rather, pure and simple anti-Semitism.) But how the hell did we manage to get to a situation where the truth – the basic, simple, fact-based truth – has gone out of fashion?

(Commentary Magazine) Two Wikileaks cables from 2010 confirm with stunning accuracy the critique of Israel’s foreign-funded NGO movement that many have been making for years — and they do so from the mouths of the NGO leaders themselves. The cables summarize meetings between U.S. officials and leaders of the New Israel Fund, B’Tselem, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, called ACRI, a flagship NIF project. In one cable, we learn that leaders of these groups have been telling U.S. officials the Israeli legal system is incapable of investigating claims against the Israeli government and military. In fact, Israel’s judiciary, both civil and military, is among the world’s most independent, and the former president of Israel’s High Court was cited by President Obama’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Elena Kagan​, as a significant role model. Yet advancing claims of judicial indifference to war crimes has become a central ambition of the NGOs, because establishing Israel’s supposed inability to investigate itself would open the door to international prosecutions where verdicts against Israel are foreordained. The credible prospect of such prosecutions would paralyze the IDF — which is exactly the point: Limor Yehuda of ACRI argued that military police investigations could not resolve the main issues of how Israel conducted the military operation [Operation Cast Lead​], including its targeting and policy decisions…she believed only international pressure could influence the GOI [Government of Israel] to create an independent investigation that could hold senior leadership accountable for alleged violations. And here is Jessica Montell, the head of B’Tselem: She wanted the highest level decision-makers held accountable for the decisions they made on how to prosecute the conflict, including Military Advocate General (MAG) Mandelblit…Her aim, she said, was to make Israel weigh world opinion and consider whether it could “afford another operation like this.” What Montell means by that last sentence is frighteningly clear: she wants to create the conditions in which “world opinion” can prevent the IDF from defending Israelis from attack. Then there is a cable about a draft Knesset bill (since extensively modified) that seeks greater transparency for foreign-funded NGOs: B’Tselem Director Jessica Montell…estimated her 9 million NIS ($2.4 million) budget is 95 percent funded from abroad, mostly from European countries. Here Montell is giving credence to what B’Tselem’s critics, such as NGO Monitor, have been saying for years: that the group is essentially an arm of European foreign policy, more interested in condemning Israel than in promoting human rights. And then there’s the bombshell: New Israel Fund (NIF) Associate Director in Israel Hedva Radovanitz, who manages grants to 350 NGOs totaling about 18 million dollars per year, [said] that the campaign against the NGOs was due to the “disappearance of the political left wing” in Israel and the lack of domestic constituency for the NGOs. She noted that when she headed ACRI’s Tel Aviv office, ACRI had 5,000 members, while today it has less than 800, and it was only able to muster about 5,000 people to its December human rights march by relying on the active staff of the 120 NGOs that participated. She commented that she believed that in 100 years Israel would be majority Arab and that the disappearance of a Jewish state would not be the tragedy that Israelis fear since it would become more democratic. [Emphasis added] The reasoning behind NIF’s multi-million dollar donations to Arab groups such as Adalah and Mada al-Carmel that seek the destruction of Israel as a Jewish State suddenly becomes clear: In the words of a high-ranking NIF official, the group believes Zionism itself — that is, Jewish national self-determination — is anti-democratic and should eventually yield to an Arab state where Jews will once again live as a minority. It seems the “New Israel” envisioned by NIF will not be a Jewish state. Has NIF made this clear to its American Jewish donors? During the past decade, as the New Israel Fund and European governments have funded and fueled the delegitimization war on Israel, critics have argued the NGOs they support have no real constituency in Israel; that they represent foreign interests; that they are funded — all told, the sum is around $100 million per year — almost entirely by foreign foundations and European governments seeking to impose their agendas; that they seek to overturn the democratic choices of the Israeli people; that they foment external pressure and “lawfare” to prevent Israel from protecting herself from threats; and that the groups’ activism is motivated not by the claimed values of human rights and international law, but by varying degrees of anti-Zionism and solidarity with Arab interests and leftist anti-Israel activism. At every turn, the NGOs have angrily denied these charges and smeared those who made them as being (take your pick) anti-peace, anti-human rights, anti-democracy, or extremist right-wingers attempting to silence dissent. It is a remarkable moment in this battle to see the NGOs admit in private the same things they slander their critics for saying about them in public. These revelations should encourage the Israeli government to finally make European funding of anti-Israel NGOs a major point of contention in bilateral relations, and they should encourage greater scrutiny of the New Israel Fund, a philanthropic giant that not only dispenses millions of dollars a year to anti-Israel groups, but creates and helps run the groups through its Shatil organization. The pro-Israel community can expose the destructive ambitions of NIF and its European collaborators for an eternity. But ultimately, the ability of foreigners to wage a political war on Israel from within Israel’s borders will only be stopped when Israelis and their elected representatives recognize the seriousness of the problem and enact legislation to address it. America passed just such a law in 1938. It’s high time Israel followed suit.