‘Wash. Post’ Whitewashes an Extremist

by Philip Weiss on April 3, 2008 · 50 comments

When I was a kid, we didn’t drink Welch’s Grape Juice, didn’t eat Welch’s grape jelly. Any Welch product. That’s because Robert Welch was one of the founders of the John Birch Society, which my family saw as anti-semitic. Probably was for all I know. But that’s why we couldn’t have Welch’s. And I approve. I wonder how my mom knew that. Maybe from the liberal press, such as it was.

Well today George Will writes a whole column about Sheldon Adelson in the Washington Post, third richest man in America, and it is entirely about his business activities. Not a word about his political activity: the biggest backer of birthright, the turn-them-into-Zionists-and-get-them-to-marry-Jews free trips to Israel; a big backer of the Israeli right; and most important, a giant backer of Freedom’s Watch, the pro-Iraq-war group started after meetings at the Republican Jewish Coalition.

One of the great failures of American journalism has been its failure to out extremists, including Jews who are undermining the peace process, which I thought was U.S. policy. Adelson is said by Haaretz to be close to Netanyahu. I believe his thinktank in Israel is headed by Sharansky. Shouldn’t the Washington Post be reporting on this? Forty years ago my family got the news. Today there is none.

P.S. Larry Zuckerman tells me I’m wrong, that Welch of the John Birch Society manufactured candy not Welch’s grape juice. There goes a beautiful analogy! The point holds.

Related posts:

  1. Pressure Campaign on Wash. Post for Daring to Humanize Palestinians Is Itself Newsworthy
  2. Lieberman continues to influence the discussion in the US – Wash Post refers to Israel’s ethnic cleansing
  3. ‘J Street’ finds a wedge issue to realign Jewish leadership: ‘extremist settlers’
  4. The Washington Post Can’t Stop Talking About Jewish Power (and Walt and Mearsheimer)
  5. Why Won’t the Washington Post Explore ‘Obdurate Narrowmindedness’ of Pro-Israel Religious Politics?

{ 50 comments }

1 the Sword of Gideon April 3, 2008 at 10:43 am

Here is the thing. We live in a free country, Sheldon Adelson is free to make contributions to Jewish causes. And LWB, Pig Weiss, MM, and all the rest of them are freeto make contributions to Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the nation of Islam, and the American Nazi Party. Plenty of other casino's so ape Weiss doesn't have to go to one of Adelsons, I think he will survive the blow..

2 Joachim Martillo April 3, 2008 at 10:55 am

There is a good possibility that Miriam Adelson is the politically dominant member of the Adelson couple.

Miriam Adelson committed fraud on her immigration forms and should be expelled from the USA (after investigation for other crimes under the US code).

Sheldon Adelson seems to have been involved in criminal conspiracy against rights in the controversy over the Roxbury Mosque.

They are both involved in the support of Zionist terrorism and should be sent to Guantanamo, where they can be interrogated under Dershowitzian principles to learn the extent of their anti-American conspiracy.

All their assets must be forfeited.

3 tinynabka April 3, 2008 at 11:23 am

For a billionaire political activist who is on his way to becoming the richest man in the world, with access to nearly unlimited amounts of cash from his gambling bonanza in Macao, the MSM has dedicated very little attention to Mr. Adelson.

4 Jim Haygood April 3, 2008 at 11:37 am

.

As a house organ of government, the stenographic WaPo serves to "mainstream" the predatory activities of Adelman. Besides steering clear of Adelman's zionist connections, George Will also politely refrains from characterizing gambling as the regressive tax on the poor and uneducated that it is. Rather he chirps about Vegas fulfilling the American dream of "families driving to Europe in their station wagons."

Fortunately, in the Free World outside the United Snakes, intellectual sustenance can be found to combat Will's deadly-dull party-line bilge. The London Review of Books, for instance. Two years after publishing Mearsheimer and Walt's groundbreaking essay "The Israel Lobby," the LRB has unleashed an incendiary review by a University of London professor, Henry Seigman. His review covers two books about Israeli settlements, both written by Israelis: *The Accidental Empire* by journalist Gershom Gorenberg, and *Lords of the Land* by historian Idith Zertal.

From both books, Seigman draws the lesson that "there has been general agreement that, rather than adopt a formal position on the future status of the West Bank’s residents and risk provoking international opposition, Israel should continue to create ‘facts on the ground’ while remaining discreet about their purpose. In time, it was thought, the world would come to accept the Jordan River as Israel’s eastern border."

Siegman goes on: "These books give the lie to the carefully cultivated narrative that has sustained the [post-1967] occupation. Israel’s military and political leaders never had any intention of returning the West Bank and Gaza to their Arab residents. *Lords of the Land* and *The Accidental Empire* reveal the massive scale of Israel’s theft of Palestinian lands and the involvement of every part of Israeli society in advancing the settlement enterprise in clear and deliberate violation not only of international law but of Israel’s own laws."

While Philip Weiss discerns a younger generation of American Jews who are less identified with Israel than their parents, Seigman identifies in Israel "a far more radical younger generation born and bred in the settlements. This new generation draws inspiration from the ‘hilltop youth’, young people who responded to Sharon in October 1998 when … he called on settlers to ‘grab’ hilltops in the parts of the West Bank from which he and Netanyahu had agreed to withdraw, as stipulated by the Oslo Accords. The ‘hilltop youth’ reject the authority of the Jewish state and its institutions. They run around in what they imagine to be biblical dress, assaulting Palestinians, stealing and destroying their homes, crops and orchards, occasionally beating them and every so often killing them. Occasionally the IDF intervenes, but their efficacy is undermined by their belief that their main job is to protect the settlers, not the population under occupation."

Seigman emphasizes the character-shaping role that an increasingly settler-influenced IDF has on Israeli Jewish youth, who are subject to universal service requirements. But whatever may be in the minds of Israel's younger generation, what matters to the outside world is this: "According to [former Ministry of Defense official Haggai] Alon, the IDF is ‘carrying out an apartheid policy’ that is emptying Hebron of Arabs and Judaizing (his term) the Jordan Valley, while co-operating openly with the settlers in an attempt to make a two-state solution impossible. As I argued in the LRB (16 August 2007), the assiduously promoted story of Israel’s pursuit of peace and its search for a Palestinian ‘partner for peace’ was fashioned to buy time to establish ‘facts on the ground’: settlements that would so completely shatter the territorial and demographic contiguity and integrity of Palestinian land and life as to make the establishment of a Palestinian state impossible."

Study Seigman's assertions, then study a map. The Judaizing of the Jordan Valley means that a West Bank Palestinian statelet would be surrounded by Israeli-controlled territory on both the west and the east. If the loony notion of transforming Palestinians into ersatz Jordanians ever came to pass, the West Bank would be isolated from Jordan by Israel's Jordan River Valley security zone, just as West Berlin was isolated from the rest of West Germany by a hundred miles of East German territory. And unlike U.S.-occupied West Germany, Jordan has neither the will nor the means to mount an airlift to Ramallah from Amman. Hell, the West Bank doesn't even have an airport. And Israel wants to retain control of its airspace in any event.

VIZUALIZE THE TRAIN WRECK, folks. Well-meaning people worldwide believe it's a magnanimous gesture of tolerance and liberalism to support a 'two-state solution.' Governments (e.g., the Quartet) concur. Yet the two-state solution was systematically sabotaged decades ago by Israel. It is already precluded. So the world is chasing a carefully-crafted chimera, while granting Israel more time to establish more settlements on more territory. Those who buy into the doomed 'two-state solution' myth are zionism's unwitting enablers.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n07/sieg01_.html

5 Rowan Berkeley April 3, 2008 at 11:42 am

I see Bill is slithering back into his "muscular" american clichés… "here's the thing"

6 liberal white boy April 3, 2008 at 11:46 am

Do you really think this is journalisms greatest failure Mr. Weiss? How bout the dearth of news coverage concerning the Rosen and Weissman espionage trial. The April trial date is off. The prosecution in disarray. The lead prosecutor takes a bag of cash and employment with an international law firm two months before the trial date. Who is responsible for this? Why was Schumer so eager to push Mukasey as Attorney General. Try to find some news somewhere on these things. This could be your break out story.

Mukasey Prepares DOJ's Exit Stategy From AIPAC Espionage Trial Prosecution
http://homo-sapien-underground.blogspot.com/2008/04/mukasey-prepares-dojs-exit-stategy-from.html

7 Jim Haygood April 3, 2008 at 11:49 am

.

"When I was a kid, we didn't drink Welch's Grape Juice, didn't eat Welch's grape jelly. Any Welch product. That's because Robert Welch was one of the founders of the John Birch Society, which my family saw as anti-semitic."

Not only did I grow up on Welch's Grape Juice. Not only did all of our 'glassware' consist of Welch's grape jelly jars, after we'd spread their gooey contents on our white zero-whole-grain Wonder Bread toast. Oh no, it's much worse than that.

In the anti-alcohol church to which we belonged, Welch's grape juice was served in little glasses for communion, on the first Sunday of every month. Lord help me, Welch's grape juice was the Blood of Christ!

If this was some kind of cryptic antisemitic gesture, my dad, who was ferociously anti-John Birch Society, sure didn't know it. But who knows, maybe the unfermented purple poison corrodes your mind at the molecular level.

8 Joachim Martillo April 3, 2008 at 12:28 pm

On the Mukasey issue

From http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2008/04/followup-ii-origins-of-modern-jewry.html :

Zionists are engaged in criminal conspiracy against rights (18 USC 241) of Americans in order to control American public, political, and academic discourse. At time of war such a crime easily crosses over into seditious conspiracy.

The US civil and criminal code is more than adequate to deal with the infractions of American Zionists if the US government can be compelled to enforces its laws in the same manner for both Jews and non-Jews. Unfortunately, a lot of US government officials are not carrying out their responsibilities. They are either derelict in their duties or engaging in obstruction of justice. They must be removed from their positions and possibly charged with criminal malfeasance.

Zionists have conditioned the American public to respond reflexively to accusations of genocide, terrorism and Nazism or fascism.

An effective book would have to address Zionist genocidalism, the Zionist use of terrorism in achieving genocidal goals, and the hypocrisy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (See USHMM: National Thought Control.)

From there the book must make explicit what Sand could only state indirectly. Zionism is ethnic Ashkenazi Nazism in every way comparable to German Nazism of the 30s and through 1940. Zionist Israel is heading from the Holoexaleipsis (or Nakba) to a Holocaust that could cover the whole Middle East and a good part of the larger world.

The USA has a lot of laws on the books to deal with securities fraud, elections violations, genocide, terrorism, and Nazism. If they were enforced when Zionist Jews break them, the hyperwealthy Zionist elite and all Zionist organizations would be stripped of assets while the leaders would be incarcerated and minor players like the Harvard hate-monger Ruth Wisse would be subjected to other fines and punishments like expulsion to other countries where they could be tried under local laws against racial incitement. (See Wisse Kokht Kugl mit Khazershmaltz!)

Turnabout is fair play. Israel advocates, American Zionists and their fellow travelers have been subverting the legal system against loyal Arab Americans, Muslims Americans and Arab or Muslim businesses or charities for years in order to distract from Zionist depletion and depredation of America. Patriotic Americans must take action now against Zionists on behalf of the United States legal system and Constitution before American freedom and democracy is lost forever.

9 Rowan Berkeley April 3, 2008 at 1:04 pm

Joachim, you seem to have fallen from polemic into mere bluster.

10 Teddy April 3, 2008 at 1:25 pm

Re: Joachim Martillo.

Who is going to write a post entitled "MondoWeiss Whitewashes an Extremist?" He whitewashes this guy by letting these comments stand and never arguing with them.

11 Joachim Martillo April 3, 2008 at 1:51 pm

Possibly I am blustering, but I seem to have been fairly successful in driving Summers from Harvard's presidency, in creating an intra-Jewish food fight over the Roxbury Mosque, and apparently (or so I am told) in scaring the Anti-Racist blog into shutting down.

There are ways to deal with people like Adelson, and there really are irregularities in Miriam Adelson's immigration.

If she were Muslim instead of Jewish, she would have been sent out of the country long ago, and that really is the problem.

Jewish Zionists unlike non-Jews can violate any number of important US laws with impunity. It is a situation that threatens the foundation of the whole American legal and constitutional system.

Anyway, the original article (http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2008/04/followup-ii-origins-of-modern-jewry.html ) dealt with the new book "How and Why the Jewish Was Invented" and the reasons why I believe it will be ineffective for the author's purposes.

These reasons relate to both the Adelson and Mukasey issues as well.

Anyway, the US government printed a lot of money to make the ME safe for Israel, became concerned about inflation, and then triggered the subprime collapse.

Someone is going to have to pay for it, and so far it has only been the American public and not the people responsible for the Iraq debacle, the subprime bubble, and the Internet bubble.

When I look over the data, which is fairly publicly available, the preponderance of the evidence indicates that the same groups and individuals are responsible for all three.

Without action soon a recession will be least of American problems.

12 Jim Haygood April 3, 2008 at 2:07 pm

.

"… the new book 'How and Why the Jewish Was Invented'"

Is that a transation from the Hebrew? Someone needs to consult the grammarian classic, "How and Why Subject/Verb Agreements Was Invented".

My apologies if "the Jewish" is some watering hole. Like the one ZZ Top sang about in "Balinese":

You could dance all night if you felt all right
Drinking whiskey and throwing dice
And everybody knows
it was hard to leave
And everybody knows
It was down at the Balinese

13 Joachim Martillo April 3, 2008 at 2:31 pm

Sorry — How and Why the Jewish PEOPLE Was Invented

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/966952.html

14 bondo April 3, 2008 at 2:44 pm

the wash post is a leading pillar of the MSM and is jewish. can we yet say the MSM is jewish and that is why information re adelson and others is seldom heard unless it is in the jewish weeklies.

15 bondo April 3, 2008 at 3:35 pm

"Here is the thing. We live in a free country, Sheldon Adelson is free to make contributions to Jewish causes. And LWB, Pig Weiss, MM, and all the rest of them are freeto make contributions to Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the nation of Islam, and the American Nazi Party. Plenty of other casino's so ape Weiss doesn't have to go to one of Adelsons, I think he will survive the blow.."

Posted by: the Sword of Gideon |

make a contribution to hamas or hezbollah or to any group not favored by israel or jewry and go straight to prison.

such are the freedoms we enjoy in this totalitarian "democracy".

change your moniker from "sword of gideon" to "toothpick or swab of beavis the butthead"

16 Joachim Martillo April 3, 2008 at 3:36 pm

If I am not mistaken, the Washington Post is Jewish owned.

Anyway, here is the other article on "How and Why the Jewish People was Invented."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/959229.html

BTW, "How and Why the Jewish was Invented" is not necessarily incorrect grammatically because an adjective used as an abstract noun can be used in the singular.

17 the Sword of Gideon April 3, 2008 at 4:50 pm

I'll take that under advisement, "Bondo the roach". From a giant intellect like yourself how can I go wrong. BTW, how often do you beat off to your poster of the Fuhrer.

18 Richard Witty April 3, 2008 at 5:42 pm

Teddy,
Phil seems to be attempting "constructive engagement".

But he's not speaking of any issues that would transform. Not a lot of invitation or insistence on self-reflection.

Its sad that the left/right is the sum total of his audience here.

He is largely responsible though, in the leading and repititive tone of his headlines, in particular.

19 Teddy April 3, 2008 at 7:15 pm

Richard,

I think he is interested in "engagement" but I don't think he is interested in discovering the truth. Like Mearsheimer and Walt, he is interested in grabbing bits and pieces of news when they confirm what he wants to believe –or what he wants to promote in order to get more attention–and ignoring everything else…

20 Ed April 3, 2008 at 7:28 pm

Joachim wrote:
"The US civil and criminal code is more than adequate to deal with the infractions of American Zionists if the US government can be compelled to enforces its laws in the same manner for both Jews and non-Jews."

I've long suspected that a major motivation for the Iraq war and it attendant national security regiment was the establishment of an elitist caste system not only in the Mideast, but in America as well. The Jewish Zionists, along with various other partners in the Neocon coalition, were to be at the hierarchal apex, with their advantages imposed, guaranteed and abetted by the federal government in the same way the US government guarantees Israel preferential status over the world's other nations and exempts it from the international community's laws by virtue of US UN veto power.
Organized Jewry and the Judeo-Christians (as opposed to modern Christians) seem to have a fixation on the authoritarian imposition of Jewish supremacism on the rest of the world, no matter how loathsome organized Zionism’s behavior. It's not unlike the mindset of Middle Age convert-or-die Christianity — part religious vanity, part pig-headed stubbornness, and part organized ponzi-scheme. Word comes down from above: certain laws affecting certain people are to be vigorously applied while other laws in other areas are to be ignored. The intractable criminal conduct in the Jewish-dominated US financial sector, for example, has been given a complete pass, even as routine banking transactions carried out by Muslims have been gone over with a fine tooth comb by US regulators. The attempted message has been clear: organized Zionism is your master; submit or suffer. The irony is, the more the Judeo-Christians/Neocons/statist authoritarians squeeze, the worse the opinion of organized Zionism gets around the world, and in the US as well. In fact, America is now on the cusp of electing a president who in another time, given his name, would have been utterly dismissed as a Muslim. Look where all the scheming has gotten the Zionists.

21 Teddy April 3, 2008 at 7:33 pm

Fellas,

There's really nothing that anyone can do about the cavalcade of ignorant generalizations about "THE JEWS' that find a home on MondoWeiss. So it's useless to respond. But the idea that "the Washington Post is Jewish" is, for some reason, especially galling and laughable. It's been controlled by Katherine Graham and the Graham family for decades, and is owned by the Washington Post Company, whose largest shareholders are the Grahams and Berkshire Hathaway (e.g., Warren Buffet). They are not Jewish. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Post_Company.

22 Joachim Martillo April 3, 2008 at 8:34 pm

I guess I met Katherine Graham during a phase of ethnic Jewish identification.

Here is some autobiographical info from Graham on Amazon.

My father came from a distinguished Jewish family with roots going back many generations in Alsace-Lorraine, France. It was a family that numbered many rabbis and civic leaders. Jacob Meyer, my great-greatgrandfather, who was awarded the Legion of Honor, had actually been a member of the Sanhedrin, the college of Jewish notables called by Napoleon I in connection with recognizing the rights of Jews as citizens.

My paternal grandfather, named Marc Eugene Meyer, but always called Eugene, was born in 1842 in Strasbourg, the youngest of four children by his father's second wife. When his father died, his mother was left penniless, and Eugene could stay in school only until the age of fourteen; then, as his siblings had already done, he went to work to help support the family. He first worked for two Blum brothers who owned one store in Alsace and another — improbably — in Donaldsonville, Mississippi, and when one of young Eugene's bosses said he was going to America, my grandfather decided to go with him. In Paris, on the way, he was introduced by Blum to Alexandre Lazard of the firm of Lazard Freres, who gave him an introduction to their San Francisco partner. Eugene traveled to New York on the fastest boat going, a side-wheeler, for a third-class fare of $110, leaving Europe in September 1859. From New York he took a steamship to Panama, crossed the Isthmus by rail, and then caught another steamer to San Francisco, at that time a city of fifty thousand or so people. He spent two years there, learning English and saving a little money from his job at an auction house, until in 1861 he moved to Los Angeles, where a cousin of the Lazards' was said to need a clerk for his store. As described by Eugene himself, the town was made up of only three or four thousand inhabitants, mostly foreigners. There were four brick houses — the rest were adobe with roofs that cracked. There were no paved streets or sewers. The water for both drinking and irrigation came from ditches. My grandfather stayed in Los Angeles for the next twenty-two years.

He started as clerk and bookkeeper, living in the general store's back room. Sometimes he slept on the counter with his gun, to protect the merchandise. As his reputation for reliability and sobriety spread, some of his new friends began leaving money with him, for there were no banks. Within three years, he became a general partner in the store, which came to be known as "The City of Paris." Within ten years, he and his brother Constant had taken it over. He also started lending money, became director of a bank and organizer of the Los Angeles Social Club, and helped maintain law and order as a member of the Vigilance Committee. He was an incorporator of the city water system, involved in real estate and mining investments, and doubled as the French consular agent. In 1867, he married the sixteen-year-old Harriet Newmark, whose father, a rabbi, performed the ceremony, following which a sumptuous dinner was served at the couple's new home — complete with ice cream, something new to Los Angeles.

My father, named Eugene Isaac Meyer after his father and grandfather, was born in 1875, the first boy in the family after three girls, Rosalie, Elise, and Florence. Four more children followed: two daughters, Ruth and Aline; and two sons, Walter and the youngest child, Edgar. Harriet, not as strong as her husband, became a more or less permanent invalid — whether from having eight children by the age of thirty-two under pioneering medical conditions or because there was some depression involved, or both. As a result, my father's mother-figure in his youth was his sister Rosalie, six years older than he, who left school to help raise her siblings.

These early circumstances help me understand my father's personality. His father was very strict and not particularly loving, as far as I can tell, and the only real mother-figure was a near-contemporary, sweet and sensitive but overwhelmed by being thrust into a position of authority well before she was ready for it. There couldn't have been much parental love for all those children, with the father ambitious and driven and no real mother. My father himself was never very good at personal relations of the intimate kind; the feelings were there, but they went unexpressed.

Early in 1884, my father moved with his family back to San Francisco, a city by then of 225,000 with much better educational and medical facilities than Los Angeles could offer the large Meyer family. It was also safer. I remember my father saying of his early days in Los Angeles that everyone carried a Derringer and almost every night someone was shot. But though my grandfather may have been pleased with the move, my father, a young boy of eight, immediately became embattled. He was a loner and a fighter, forced by his family to wear clothes — including a white starched Eton collar — that made him look "different." Older boys at school would put the younger ones in a circle, pitting them against each other. The fights would stop only when someone had a nosebleed, and this was usually my poor father. Nonetheless, he was forced to learn to fight to defend himself, all the while receiving severe reprimands from his father for his rough behavior. These encounters toughened him to the point where, when the family moved to Alameda, to improve his mother's health by removing her from San Francisco's fog, young Eugene outfought the local bully, who had previously ruled the playground. This victory had the dubious effect of making him the top troublemaker, both at school and at home. He led the younger
children in rebellion against the housekeeper, generally made mischief, and teased the girls, especially harassing poor Rosalie.

Alameda had done my grandmother no good, and it proved too remote to be practical for my grandfather, so after a short time the family moved back to San Francisco. It was the third change of school for my father. After getting hit in the eye by a baseball, he was forbidden to play, on the grounds that it would worry his mother. Football and sailing on a nearby lake had also been forbidden. He was, however, allowed to take fencing lessons, and boxing lessons from Gentleman Jim Corbett, later heavyweight champion of the world, but these too were stopped when a picture appeared in the paper of the lesson with Corbett, who was seeking publicity. He went on having a difficult time in school, and endured being called a sheeny, along with others who were called wops, micks, and chinks.

The family belonged to a Reformed Jewish congregation, and Eugene was instructed in Jewish history, Hebrew, and the meaning of religion, but when it came time for his bar mitzvah, he declined. Asked to declare "perfect faith," he said, "I believe some of these things, but I don't believe them all with perfect faith." He was never overtly religious, yet was later involved in Jewish charities, c…

23 Michael Blaine April 3, 2008 at 9:35 pm

Thanks for pointing this article out, Phil.

How very odd that George Will, a conservative scold, should heap encomiums on a man who has built a gambling empire.

How does gambling square with Will's puritanical outlook?

It is very strange.

24 Charles Keating April 3, 2008 at 9:49 pm

Here's some more on Katharine Graham's father: Eugene Isaac Meyer (October 31, 1875 – July 17, 1959) was an American financier, public official, publisher of the Washington Post newspaper. He served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1930 to 1933.

Born in Los Angeles, California, he was the son of Marc Eugene and Harriet (Newmark) Meyer. He grew up in San Francisco and attended college across the bay at the University of California, but he dropped out after one year and later enrolled at Yale University. He received his A.B. in 1895.

After college, Meyer went to work for Lazard Freres–his father was a partner there–but quit in 1901 after four years and struck out on his own. He was a successful investor and speculator and owned a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. He married Agnes Elizabeth Ernst in 1910; they had five children, including the future Katharine Graham

25 Charles Keating April 3, 2008 at 10:11 pm

George Will doesn't gamble at all. He's a house boy and knows very well on which side his bagel is buttered.

26 Rowan Berkeley April 3, 2008 at 10:18 pm

Joachim, you are attempting exactly the same thing that Arthur Koestler attempted, in "The Thirteenth Tribe", which is to deligitimate the mythic relation between 'jews' and 'israel' by arguing that the ashkenazim are overwhelmingly of convert descent. This consideration may awe some israeli jewish youths who are as prone to racial fantasies as anyone else, but it is not relevant to the formal criteria of jewish identity.

27 Hannah April 3, 2008 at 10:54 pm

Hi Phil – I wrote an article about some Palestinians I interviewed in Bay Ridge, for the New School paper. Thought you might be interested in reading it. thoughtsatthemeridian.blogspot.com.
Best – Hannah (Rob's student)

28 Teddy April 3, 2008 at 11:12 pm

I see the pattern here. Someone has a Jewish father and even though, according to her BBC obit "she was baptised and raised as a Lutheran, like her mother…." and even though the man she married was not Jewish and she didn't raise her kids as Jews, her paper is a "Jew paper," right? And that means it exists to serve the Zionist cabal that controls this country, yes?…And even though she's dead, and her son Donald Graham has controlled the company since the early 1990s, and even though he is not Jewish, it is still a "Jew paper," right?

I knew it was a mistake to answer you, because I am playing your crude and dangerous game. Its not just the Henry Ford game, it is precisely the game the National Socialists played in Germany, and Weiss allows you to play it. Weiss, of course, considers himself a leftist, a progressive, a softhearted humanist, but he does nothing to clean up this sewer…He should be ashamed of himself.

29 neocognitism April 3, 2008 at 11:18 pm

Teddy,

I guess you've been put in your place in regard to the Grahams.

Also, as to Buffett, he is a known Zionist cause sympathizer. In 2006 he invested heavily in Israel, and said very publicly "Berkshire Hathaway and Israel will be here forever, as Israel and the US will be here forever."

Buffett invested in a company owned by the Wertheimers, one of the wealthiest families in Israel. "This is the place we love, and this is what we love doing," Eitan Wertheimer, 54, said. "We wanted to stay the way we are, to keep the same culture, but be part of something bigger.

"Buffett understands this."

Therefore, all the publishers and major investors in the WaPo are extremist Likudnik Zionists, no different than Adelson.

You should be aware that on this blog, like Phil, people know what they're talking about, unlike reddit or other places where you are used to crying wolf about antisemitism.

30 the Sword of Gideon April 4, 2008 at 12:14 am

Try to follow this, because your obviously retarded. Warren Buffet put money into Iscar metal working because he thought it was a good investment. You see unlike the Arabs who without oil would be back riding their camels and using their left hands instead of toilet paper. Israel has a thriving high tech economy that moves forward even under a major defense burden. He is not known for sentimental gestures, Berkshire Hathaway is about money, making money.

"All the Publishers and investors in the Wapo are extremist zionists"

Please enlighten m,e to your reasoning and try to go with something other than your well thumbed copy of mein kampf

31 JH April 4, 2008 at 1:08 am

Good for Adelson. Most Jews support Israel. Maybe not in every way, but just so. Not a secret.

I'd rather an Israel-supporting Jew like Adelson than an Obama-supporting mental case non-Jewish Jew like George Soros. The great thing about Zionism is that it's given us more Adelsons and less Soroses. Thank you Lord. No doubt Adelson isn't as interested in destroying America and the West as Soros is.

32 neocognitism April 4, 2008 at 1:17 am

"You see unlike the Arabs who without oil would be back riding their camels and using their left hands instead of toilet paper."

That is the most openly racist and hateful thing I've ever seen said on Phil's blog. Your level of discourse belongs elsewhere.

Then you have the audacity to bring up Mein Kampf, after what you just said, when I wasn't even talking about Jews or Judaism. Apparently you didn't read how I ended my post, or you would have seen the irony of your words since "you are used to crying wolf about antisemitism."

33 Rowan Berkeley April 4, 2008 at 1:36 am

It's rather a stupid criticism, because people in cultures that wash themselves after excretion regard the use of 'toilet paper' as 'dirty'.

34 Joachim Martillo April 4, 2008 at 2:23 am

,,Joachim, you are attempting exactly the same thing that Arthur Koestler attempted, in "The Thirteenth Tribe", which is to deligitimate the mythic relation between 'jews' and 'israel' by arguing that the ashkenazim are overwhelmingly of convert descent. This consideration may awe some israeli jewish youths who are as prone to racial fantasies as anyone else, but it is not relevant to the formal criteria of jewish identity.''

Doesn't a lot of the discussion in this blog relate to the nature of Jewish identity?

Jewish is used in different ways.

As a religious identify.

As an ethnic identity, e.g., ethnic Ashkenazi, German Jewish lapsed religious identity), Yiddish American identity, and German Jewish American identity.

As a political identity, i.e., the claim that ethnic Ashkenazim and German Jews as members of the pan-Judaic ethnonational group have the right to steal Palestine from the native population.

Obviously, multiple identities can be operative for a given individual and the boundaries of the various forms of Jewish identity are not always clearly demarcated and distinct.

In the 80s I ran across the interesting phenomeon of American Spanish lapsed Jews with a strong ethnic Spanish Jewish identity (usually barely able to speak bits of Judeospanish), who become superreligious and then assimilated to a sort of ethnic Ashkenazi religious culture.

Understanding the permutations of Jewish identity is important because there is probably no greater threat to the US constitutional system today than Jewish or ethnic Ashkenazi extremism, fanaticism and racism.

35 Rowan Berkeley April 4, 2008 at 4:15 am

You won't understand anything if you insist on reducing it to polemics.

Anyway, I have been reading the new edition of Arendt's "Jewish Writings", so-called, and I find that in 1944 she made the curious remark that since "the greater part of zionism began looking around for another protector, a certain segment of Revisionism seemd to be betting on Russia" (as opposed to the USA). Does this mean that Revisionism had a National-Bolshevist faction? That would be so funny…

36 hlmeankin April 4, 2008 at 4:24 am

Kudo to Weiss for focusing on the very important role that Jewish Billionaires play in determining policies. The fact is that no one in the mainstream and alternative media, dares to speak to this truth. Yes Sheldon Adelson uses his cash to push not only America but also Israel in a reactionary direction. (It is ironic that he bankrolls a wide circulation "biblical/political" free newspaper in Israel with money made from gambling casinos). Adelson favors Bush like fascists, but the Dem need'nt worry the have Haim Saban http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/798292.html
who uses his billions to lobby the Israeli Defense (sic) Forces and finance the Democratic Party. Recall that he recently signed the letter warninbg Nanci Pelosi not to meddle with the power of the "super delegates". Saban has funded Hillary Clinton, considers her a known quanity, and stays true to his single issue, "Israel".
Imagine what the American public would think and do if they knew that folks with dual loyalties were pulling the strings behind their government. Do I exaggerate??

37 Rowan Berkeley April 4, 2008 at 4:50 am

I got a bit further with the Arendt, and it appears she was talking about the 'Bergson Group', though I don't recall having heard them described elsewhere as pro-Soviet.

38 Rowan Berkeley April 4, 2008 at 4:55 am

Actually, that reminds me of something about which this would be a good place to enquire : is it true that some small number among the Hollywood fans of Revisionism built genuine, physical airplanes, in Hollywood back-lots, airplanes for Israel? Or tried to, anyway.

39 Rowan Berkeley April 4, 2008 at 5:26 am

I don't think Arendt's 1940s articles are reliable – here's one where she talks of "the suicidal proposals of the Magnes group, which is financed in part by plantation owners"!

40 Joachim Martillo April 4, 2008 at 6:49 am

Bergson (Hillel Kook, nephew of Rav Abraham Isaac Kook) was all over the place ideologically.

41 Arie Brand April 4, 2008 at 7:05 am

Rowan Berkeley wrote:

"Joachim, you are attempting exactly the same thing that Arthur Koestler attempted, in "The Thirteenth Tribe", which is to deligitimate the mythic relation between 'jews' and 'israel' by arguing that the ashkenazim are overwhelmingly of convert descent. This consideration may awe some israeli jewish youths who are as prone to racial fantasies as anyone else, but it is not relevant to the formal criteria of jewish identity."

Martillo is merely referring here to the new book by Professor Shlomo Zand.

Not relevant to the 'formal criteria of Jewish identity', eh?

I think here a witty observation by Michael Neumann is apposite:

"here,…, we come up against the venerable shell-game of Jewish identity: "Look! We're a religion! No! a race! No! a cultural entity! Sorry–a religion!" When we tire of this game, we get suckered into another: "anti-Zionism is antisemitism! " quickly alternates with: "Don't confuse Zionism with Judaism! How dare you, you antisemite!"

Well, whether Koestler's and Zand's observations are relevant to this shell-game or not – they are certainly at odds with what the Israeli Declaration of Independence tries to make people believe. Here is Tom Segev (in the article referenced by Martillo):

"Israel's Declaration of Independence states that the Jewish people arose in the Land of Israel and was exiled from its homeland. Every Israeli schoolchild is taught that this happened during the period of Roman rule, in 70 CE. The nation remained loyal to its land, to which it began to return after two millennia of exile. Wrong, says the historian Shlomo Zand, in one of the most fascinating and challenging books published here in a long time. There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened – hence there was no return. Zand rejects most of the stories of national-identity formation in the Bible, including the exodus from Egypt and, most satisfactorily, the horrors of the conquest under Joshua. It's all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel, he asserts."

42 Rowan Berkeley April 4, 2008 at 8:21 am

sure, and in the same way, the english are brought up to believe in someone called king arthur, who lived in a place in the west country called avalon. actually of course the entire arthurian myth cycle is french in origin. but the NAME "avalon" is interesting, isn't it?

43 Arie Brand April 4, 2008 at 8:45 am

Well, if you mean to say that the origin myth in the Israeli Declaration of Independence is as unhistorical as the King Arthur legend that is quite all right with me.

44 idiotes April 4, 2008 at 9:38 am

"I got a bit further with the Arendt, and it appears she was talking about the 'Bergson Group', though I don't recall having heard them described elsewhere as pro-Soviet."

Rowan, I don't quite understand your ecitement? What does this "little-pro-Soviet-item" tagged on the Jewish/Israeli experience tell us?

It would be more correct to talk about a pro-Israel time frame in Russia at the time.

Arendt of course was at the time of writing much more aware that Russia's support was essential for the UN 47 partition plan. Why is this such a surprise to you? And yes, it did take quite some time to establish the close US/Israel relationship. Some of the players would have preferred a closer link to Europe e.g. France, GB.

It is not very difficult to understand either.It might help you to simply take a look at the Russian victims in WWII & remember that the main enemy of Russia and the Jews had been identical as the wound was still fresh then.

45 Rowan Berkeley April 4, 2008 at 10:20 am

What interests me about Arendt's wartime journalism, which I don't think has been published before in collected form, is that it undermines all the left-right distinctions that today's jewish bourgeoisie regard as essential to western survival.

46 Joachim Martillo April 4, 2008 at 10:58 am

The dynanic of the interactions of the various transnational ethnic Ashkenazi political elites in the late 30s and early 40s is quite interesting, complex and insufficiently studied.

Until 1939 Zionists and Nazis collaborated in various ways. When the German Nazis realized the UK would not ally with Germany against the Soviet Union, they blamed British and American Jews. With this assumption temporarily collaborating with Judeo-Bolshevik terrorists (as German Nazis perceived the Soviets) to divide Poland was not much different from a temporary alliance with Zionists.

Once Operation Barbarrosa (invasion of the Soviet Union) commenced, suddenly Zionist and Soviet Ashkenazim were on the same side.

Some Zionist Ashkenazim hoped the alliance could continue after WW2 and after the creation of the state of Israel.

The core Soviet leadership (both Jewish and non-Jewish) began to worry that there were Soviet Jews who felt the same way. The arrests and executions followed very quickly.

This subject begs for more research.

47 Charles Keating April 4, 2008 at 12:02 pm

Stalin figured Hitler was right, the Brit elite were just intent on keeping power, ditto the French; in the end global finance took one side, enter the USA.

48 idiotes April 4, 2008 at 1:47 pm

"Until 1939 Zionists and Nazis collaborated in various ways."

this is absolutely sick, Joachim.

My impression is that most pass over your notes, by the way. As I do most of the time.

But strictly: Under the Hazis there was only cooperation or underground/resistance. One was dangerous the other you couldn't escape. The Zionists worked on both layers. … To deny cooperations with the Nazis would have shortened everybody's expectations quite a little.

Always keep in mind that on German and Austrian ground 2/3 of the Jews escaped the showers or death marches.

Maybe Joachim could give us his sources for the cooperation between Zionists and Nazis?

49 Rowan Berkeley April 4, 2008 at 2:27 pm

I think the story of the Haavara Agreement is fairly well known, and of course there is the one and only official zionist organistion under nazism, which provided a zionist rhetoric in tune with the nazi rhetoric.

You could read almost anything by Lenni Brenner, especially "Zionism in the Age of the Dictators":
http://www.marxists.de/middleast/brenner/

50 Charles Keating April 4, 2008 at 3:29 pm

As soon as Hitler came to power, his Minister of the Economy signed an agreement with the Jewish (Zionist) Agency, on August 28th 1933. This agreement facilitated the "transfer" ("Haavara" in Hebrew) of German Jews to Palestine. Subsequently, as other avenues for getting rid of the Jews opened up, Hitler went there, and there; finally with time of the essence, they went nowhere except to be worked to death, or worse.

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