When Will the Press Lift the Hood on the New Jewish Aristocracy?

Today’s WSJ has a front-page piece on casino-king Sheldon Adelson saying that the cash-strapped Republican Party is counting on him to fund a lot of races. I can’t get the whole piece online, I’m going to go out and buy it. But apparently the Israel angle is prominent. I wonder if they talk about his relations with Douglas Feith and One Jerusalem, and other neocon extremists.

Of course Obama’s biggest backers include members of Chicago’s “billionaire first families,” both Jewish: the Pritzkers and the Crowns. Here’s a Tribune article about the “mammoth mansions” that Penny Pritzker, Obama’s finance director, and a member of the Crown family are building right across the street from one another. James Crown is said to be on Obama’s team. He’s my age and went to Hampshire College, says Wikipedia. His father Lester chairs the Global Affairs Council in Chicago, which banned/censored John Mearsheimer last year, and has his tentacles [apologies; over the line] hands in at the Council on Foreign Relations too. Lester is said to be hawkish on the Middle East. The FEC reports that Lester Crown gives a lot of money to Dems and so does son James, who supported Obama early and often (as well as many other Dems). Scarily, father and son gave money to Joe Lieberman after Ned Lamont knocked him off in the primary in Connecticut. Lieberman is neoconnish. Where are the Crowns? In this letter of January (reported in Aspen, where the Crowns are aristocracy), Lester supports Obama as a stalwart on Lester’s “fundamental” issue, Israel; and calls for a two-state solution, even as he signs up for a war on terror from Gaza to Tehran.

I see that Ryan Lizza’s piece in the New Yorker on Obama’s political rise touches on the Pritzkers but doesn’t mention the Crowns. Doesn’t really go near the Jewish angle. This Washington Post piece scants the Israel angle, too. When is someone going to open the hood on the new Jewish aristocracy and where all the sons and daughters are on Israel, Jerusalem, the two-state solution, etc.?

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in Beyondoweiss, Neocons, US Policy in the Middle East, US Politics

{ 17 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. jonathan ekman says:

    Despite this courageous and valuable blog,
    it is highly unlikely that the taboo on
    discussions of Jewish wealth, Jewish power
    and Jewish influence will ever disappear
    in the MSM.

  2. Charles Keating says:

    I love you Phil, but we should be careful not to play into hysterical zionists hands.Was tentacles really the best word you could come up with? Would you call obama's arms simian?

  3. Richard Witty says:

    Hard to know about what drives an aristocracy.

    In the case of the Bush administration, the funders of Bush's campaign bought low taxes and deregulation.

    Did the Obama supporters previously support Bush?

    What happens to the tax law when Obama is elected, with a democratic Congress?

    If it passes rational tax law (progressive, and increases sufficient to fund good governance), then I would conclude that the Jewish donors did so from principles and conviction, NOT from self-interest, and certainly not as a "corruption" of the system.

    What do you think?

  4. Anonymous says:

    Poor taste. Why don't they ask Dennis Wedlick to build them some giant Malden Bridge House

  5. Phil Weiss has discussed the New Jewish Elite on his Mondoweiss Blog, and recently he added an entry on Journalism's Old-Boy-Network and Zionism.

    Boston Magazine's July issue includes an article entitled Seeking: Nosy Jewish Moms that provides some strong circumstantial evidence both of

    • the Jewish old boys (and girls) network in the news industry as well as of 
    • the elite status of the American Jewish community. 

    Could the article possibly have been published without such a Jewish journalistic network? Would anyone care about the topic if Jews did not constitute the New American Elite?

    I can't find a shred of news or even interesting feature information in the article except perhaps the paragraph:

    Simcha members continue to meet monthly at Gewirtz's home, matching everyone they can: singles, divorcees, widowers of all ages. (Sorry, no goyim allowed.) They can't yet boast a marriage, but they're optimistic.

    Would a white gentile matchmaking coffee klatsch with no successes merit a feature article in Boston Magazine?

    How would the writer have treated such a gentile group if it applied a rule to disqualify blacks as marriage candidates?

  6. Richard Witty says:

    Are there only Jewish donors to the McCain and Obama campaigns?

  7. Richard Witty says:

    Are there only Jewish donors to the McCain and Obama campaigns?

  8. rm says:

    The WSJ article can found here:

    http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB121608018071652749.html

  9. 5 dancing shlomos says:

    "When is someone going to open the hood on the new Jewish aristocracy" – phil

    to me, "aristocracy" is not the right word. these moneyed fanatics are among the worst humans in history.

  10. Wow! He knows what aristos means.

    I prefer American-Jewish Oligarchs as a counterpart to the commonly used Russian-Jewish Oligarchs.

  11. 5 dancing shlomos says:

    tried to post this last week. guess didnt take.

    another sort of jewish "aristoc" trying to rid the world of their perceived undesireables.

    July 12, 2008
    Nuke-Armed Paranoids

    by Gordon Prather
    Emigré scientists – many of them Jews who had fled Europe to avoid persecution under the Nazi regime – were principal instigators of the United States nuclear-fission weapons program known as the Manhattan Project.

    In particular, in 1939, a group of Hungarian-born physicists – including Leo Szilard, Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner – persuaded Nobel Prize winning Physicist Albert Einstein to write President Roosevelt, bringing to his attention the possibility that recent scientific discoveries in Germany could result in "extremely powerful bombs of a new type."

    Roosevelt was interested enough to meet several times with Einstein’s emissaries – Einstein, himself, spoke very little English – who convinced FDR that if we did not develop such bombs before the Nazis did, they would "blow us up."

    Then, as a result of the Japanese attack on our blockade fleet, moored at Pearl Harbor – which Roosevelt provoked by imposing an oil blockade on Japan – Hitler, Japan’s ally, declared war on us on December 11, 1941.

    The Manhattan Project initially focused on a Uranium-235 fission bomb. But the original process for separating the Uranium-235 isotope from natural uranium – the Electromagnetic Isotope Separation (EMIS) process, the same process employed by the Iraqis in the late 1980s – reportedly took 18 months to produce the 120 pounds or so needed for the Little Boy, the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima.

    Hiroshima?

    But the impetus for the Manhattan Project – instigated by the European émigré scientists – was to get nukes before Hitler did. Why bomb Japan?

    Well, there were several reasons.

    For one thing, the war in Europe had essentially been won by the Soviet Union at Kursk, in the summer of 1943.

    For another, by late1944, most of the European émigré scientists – as a result of contacts with their former colleagues – had concluded that the German nuclear program had not gone well, and that Hitler had concluded that it could not (even if successful) contribute to winning his war.

    Furthermore, it soon became apparent that both the Uranium-235 gun-type bomb – Little Boy – and the Plutonium-239 implosion-type bomb – Fat Man – would be so heavy they could only be delivered by specially modified B-29 bombers, all of which were in the Pacific.

    So, as soon as it became known within the Manhattan Project that the bomb would be used against the Japanese and not the Nazis, more than a few scientists left the project and some – notably instigator Leo Szilard – even began to oppose it, as a "terrible mistake."

    Why? Well, as General Leslie Groves, Director of the Manhattan Project, noted "The Japanese haven’t harmed the Jews, and Szilard couldn’t give a crap about potential losses in an invasion of Japan."

    Adolph Hitler committed suicide in Berlin on April 29, 1945.

    The Plutonium-239 implosion-device was tested at Trinity Site in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.

    We dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and the Fat Man on Nagasaki on August 9, thereby "obliterating them," as Hillary Clinton would say.

    Now, fast forward to June 7, 1981.

    On that date, the Israelis "took out" Osiraq, a small French-built research reactor, "safeguarded" by the International Atomic Energy Agency, apparently because they had concluded that Saddam Hussein expected Osiraq – in lieu of the Tooth Fairy – to miraculously leave a few nuclear weapons under Saddam’s pillow.

    According to an official Israeli statement;

    "The atomic bombs which that reactor was capable of producing – whether from enriched uranium or from plutonium – would be of the Hiroshima size. Thus a mortal danger to the people of Israel progressively arose."

    Now, since 1991, thanks to the IAEA, the whole world has known that Saddam began his quest for nuclear weapons as a direct result of the Israeli raid on his IAEA Safeguarded research reactor.

    And, since for many months now, virtually every U.S. politician – including all Presidential "hopefuls" – have declared, as did Hillary Clinton at the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee hoo-hah last year, that "we cannot, we should not, we must not permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons," and that "in dealing with this threat," no option [including the use of nuclear weapons on its IAEA Safeguarded facilities] can be taken off the table."

    Why not?

    Well, according to Hillary;

    "To deny the Holocaust places Iran's leadership in company with the most despicable bigots and historical revisionists."

    Then, there’s Bush, repeatedly also refusing to take the option of the use of nuclear weapons against Iran "off the table." Quoth Bush;

    "I think anyone who advocates wiping out an entire race of people has to be insane. The president of Iran has advocated for this more times than I could count. Hitler was not sane either and he wanted to do the same thing to the same people, just by different methods."

    Consequently, here we are, perhaps on the eve of the Israelis attempting to "take out" – with the almost explicit support of Bush-Cheney and The Best Congress AIPAC Can Buy – all the IAEA Safeguarded facilities in Iran.

    So, it’s perhaps worthwhile revisiting UN Security Council Resolution 487 condemning the Israeli unprovoked attack back in 1981 on the Iraqi IAEA-safeguarded facility.

    "Fully aware of the fact that Iraq has been a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons since it came into force in 1970, that, in accordance with that treaty, Iraq has accepted IAEA safeguards on all its nuclear activities, and that the agency has testified that these safeguards have been satisfactorily applied to date;

    "Strongly condemns the military attack by Israel – in clear violation of tehe Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct;

    "Calls upon Israel to refrain in the future from any such acts or threats thereof;

    "Further considers that the said attack constitutes a serious threat to the entire IAEA safeguards regime, which is the foundation of the non-proliferation treaty."

    Of course, last time about all the Israelis had going for them was that Saddam Hussein was then fully engaged in the unprovoked war of aggression he had launched against the Iranian Mullahs.

    But this time! Well, they’re finally going to get to nuke "Hitler." Leo and some of his fellow émigrés would be pleased.

  12. 5 dancing shlomos says:

    American-Jewish Oligarchs" – joachim martillo

    more accurate than aristocracy though the american part would have to be modified to something like "jews in american camouflage"

  13. Ken Hoop says:

    Ahmajidinad rules over tens of thousands of Iranian Jews about whom he has never said a bad thing much less threatened to genocide, as the above Bush quote re "the whole race" libels.

  14. Richard Witty says:

    Iranian Jews have lived in a state of threat resulting from murders occurring during periods of purges.

    Persia is their home, and the few that remain there choose to, but to imagine that they live in equality or without fear is really a falsehood.

  15. Ed says:

    How about ‘Jewish Zionist Oligarchs’? The nation-within-a-nation is internationalist, and fungible. Also, I don’t see the need to throw atomized, wealthy Jews who want nothing to do with Zionism or organized Jewry (and thus can’t be seduced into Zionism) out with the bathwater. Some of them even seem to have a strong anti-Zionist streak, albeit latent. (I’m thinking of, for example, Mark Cuban.)

    And remember, organized Jewry also hates goyishe kop half-breeds because it believes them to be prone toward “anti-Semitism,” (which usually really means anti-Judeofascism). All of these are potential allies.

  16. charles Keating says:

    "I love you Phil, but we should be careful not to play into hysterical zionists hands.Was tentacles really the best word you could come up with? Would you call obama's arms simian?

    Posted by: Charles Keating | July 15, 2008 at 11:47 AM"

    This was not posted by me. It was posted by you know who, as he relaxes fully protected by goy USA, a nation he never served a day in his life.

  17. Todd says:

    If Phil is right about Jewish power and influence, then the hood isn't going to be lifted. Why would an unelected minority group that is ruling in a time of unpopular and unprecedented change admit its role?

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