Pernicious
Zionism Revealed
If Alison Weir has not
driven a wooden stake through the heart of the modern grotesquerie know as
Zionism, she has at least held a cross to its face with her short, tight,
understated and heavily documented new book, Against
Our Better Judgment, The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create
Israel. Did we say
documented? The text of the book proper only runs to a
power-packed 93 pages while the supporting endnotes continue for another
108. Anyone wanting to know how the American democratic system
was infiltrated and abused to further the interests of what was initially, even
within the Jewish community, only a relatively small group of extremists could
hardly find a better starting place than this book.
Weir, in her brief
overview of Zionism’s beginnings, conventionally credits the Austrian
journalist Theodor Herzl as
the founder of political Zionism in the late 19thcentury, a movement
that sought a homeland, or state, for Jews somewhere in the world. “While
Zionists considered such places as Argentina, Uganda, the Mediterranean island
of Cyprus, and Texas, they eventually settled on Palestine for the location of
the proposed Jewish State, even though Palestine was already inhabited by a
population that was 93-96 percent non-Jewish.”
Up to now, I regarded British
journalist Douglas Reed’s The Controversy of Zion as the ultimate
book to read on the origins and the ills of Zionism. Reed
might still be a better source, but his book is almost 600 pages
long, and it was published in 1978. Weir, with all her
excellent references, doesn’t even find it necessary to refer to Reed. Weir
has some important new revelations that, for all its brevity, push Against
Our Better Judgment up to the head of the line of “must read” books on
Zionism, and one can see from the many favorable customer reviews that it has
had on Amazon, a lot of people agree with me.
The Parushim and Its Secret Oath
No more important new
revelation, to this reader, is of the powerful role played in advancing the
Zionist cause in the United States by Supreme Court justices Louis Brandeis and
Felix Frankfurter and the existence of a secret society for that purpose called
the Parushim.
A member swearing
allegiance to the Parushim felt
something of the spirit of commitment to a secret military fellowship. At the
initiation ceremony the head of the Order informed him:
You are about to take a step
which will bind you to a single cause for all your life. You will for one
year be subject to an absolute duty whose call you will be impelled to heed at
any time, in any place, and at any cost. And ever after, until our purpose
shall be accomplished, you will be fellow of a brotherhood whose bond
you will regard as greater than any other in your life-dearer than that of
family, of school, of nation. (p. 12, emphasis added)
The source for the
information is an Israeli professor, Sarah Schmidt. Justice Louis
Brandeis was one of the most active members of the Parushim. Its
primary purpose was the promotion of the Zionist cause, the creation of the
ethnic-supremacist state of Israel on Arab land in Palestine, which it did all
too effectively. Who all the members of the group were is not known,
though Weir tells us that Brandeis was a key member and Frankfurter was likely
a member as well. The organization was founded in 1913 by a
University of Wisconsin philosophy professor by the name of Horace
M. Kallen. It
is of some interest that Kallen is also
considered to be the father of cultural pluralism in the United States,
concerning which we find this observation on Wikipedia:
He advanced the ideal
that cultural diversity and national pride were compatible with each other and that ethnic and racial diversity strengthened
America. His critics pointed out his disingenuousness since, as a Jewish
intellectual and member of the Zionist
Organization of America, his vision of
multicultural America was quite the opposite of his vision of the Jewish state
of Israel as a totally Jewish nation. Kallen is
credited with coining the term cultural pluralism.
Weir speaks of the Parushim completely in the past tense, giving the
general impression that it worked most effectively in the 1920s and 30s. One
must wonder, though, why such an effective organization would have been
disbanded. How would we know if it has continued to operate right up
to the present day? It was/is a secret organization, after all. And
doesn’t it, with its oath, confirm all of our worst
suspicions? We suspected that many powerful Jewish leaders in the
United States were not really loyal to the country of
their residence. What we did not suspect was that many of them,
including two of the most influential Supreme Court justices of the 20th century,
had actually taken a secret oath not
to be loyal.
And if the organization,
or something very much like it, continues to operate, would not the list of
likely members be quite long? In politics, people like Joe Lieberman
and Eric Cantor come readily to mind; in academia, Alan Dershowitz and
Daniel Pipes; in the media Charles Krauthammer and Richard Cohen, and the whole
neocon crowd in the think tanks and the national opinion molding
community.
The oath also bespeaks a
degree of fanaticism that is almost unfathomable to the average person. The
mentality—or shall we say the psychological complex—is perhaps best explained
by Eric Hoffer’s quote from Oliver Cromwell in The
True Believer, “No one
rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going.” Certainly
as the most powerful country in the world, the United States was key for the
Zionists to get their wishes, but it has never made much sense for any
American, Jewish or otherwise, to be a fanatic for the Zionist cause. The
founding principle of the movement, after all, is that Jews can never be
accepted in any country and, therefore, must have a country of their own. It
is a foolish notion generally, but nowhere is it more foolish than in the
United States. The United States from its beginning has been the
land of opportunity for Jews as much or more than for any other people. It
is truly a supreme irony that precisely those who benefitted most from the
opportunity presented by the United States should use the fruits of that
opportunity to further a cause that denies that such opportunity for them is
possible.
Twin
Monsters
The reader may be excused
at this point for noticing a great similarity between Zionism and the
attraction toward it of a certain privileged group of people and another
misguided but powerful ideology, Communism. Those who fall for it
fall heavily and have a tendency to subordinate all
questions of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, and patriotism and
disloyalty to the furtherance of this one “noble” cause. Not many
people know it these days, but in the 1930s and early 1940s the Soviet Union
itself got the sort of favorable coverage from America’s
leading newspaper that Israel gets
today across the board, and numerous Americans were lured
into betting their lives that Joseph Stalin’s
fiefdom really was a workers’ paradise.
The biggest victims of the
Zionist zealotry have certainly been those non-Jewish residents of Palestine
whose forbears had lived there for thousands of years, but the price that has
been paid by others, particularly in the United States is of no small consequence. Weir
makes a strong case that American entry into World War I was the quid
pro quo of powerful Zionists close to President Woodrow Wilson for the
British Balfour Declaration promising a home (though not a homeland) for the
Jews in Palestine should Britain and its allies win the war. She
supports her argument without relying once upon the Jewish apostate Benjamin
Freedman so, taken together, Weir and Freedman support one
another.
The importance of the
Balfour Declaration in bringing the United States into WWI against the Germans
might not have been widely known in this country, but, according to Weir, it
was well known in Germany and it engendered the sort
of antagonism toward their resident Jews that one might expect. Opportunity
for Jewish advancement had been greater in Germany than in any other European
country.
It is hard to say which
was the greatest big break for the Zionist cause, the persecution suffered by
Jews under the Nazis, the Second World War’s creation of hundreds of thousands
of Jewish refugees ripe for the peopling of Palestine, or the death of President
Franklin Roosevelt. FDR had been completely against the Zionist
cause. Harry Truman was weak and unpopular and needed all the help
from powerful Zionists that he could get to be reelected in 1948. Surprisingly,
Weir makes no mention of the negative reinforcement that Truman received in
1947 in terms of the attempt
on his life by the Stern Gang, which sent a
letter bomb to the White House. She also fails to mention the fact
that Truman’s long association with the Kansas City political machine of the
gangster Tom Pendergast made him eminently blackmailable,
and something of an archetype for U.S. presidents in
the Zionist-dominated era in which we live.
There are heroes in Weir’s
book. They are the patriotic Americans within the foreign policy
establishment of the U.S. government who energetically opposed the
superimposing of what was essentially a European country upon Palestine, an act
that these officials saw as in conflict with U.S. national interests and
ideals. Theirs was the better judgment that Truman went
against. A few names worthy of mention are State Department officers Edwin
Wright and Loy Henderson and
their superiors, Under Secretary of State Robert A. Lovett and Secretary of
State George C. Marshall. Foremost among the patriots, though, would
have to be Truman’s Secretary of Defense, James V. Forrestal, and Weir gives
the courageous Forrestal his due. He foresaw the Middle Eastern mess
in which the United States has become entangled, and the cost in blood and
treasure and moral capital that it would entail, and he paid dearly for his
efforts to prevent it.
Another reason for
beginning with the more recent Weir book than with Douglas Reed’s is that Reed,
deceived by the American press coverage and without the discoveries that this
reviewer would later make, wrote that Forrestal had committed suicide. Weir
is aware of our findings, however, and refers her readers to our “Who
Killed James Forrestal?” (With the
same preference for brevity for introductory purposes with which I recommend
her book over Reed’s, I suggest that newcomers to the subject start with “New
Forrestal Document Exposes Cover-up.”) She
also strongly recommends Chapter 12, “The Forrestal ‘Suicide’,” of Vol. 1 of Zionism:
The Real Enemy of the Jews by prominent British
journalist Alan Hart. Volume 1 is titled, The False Messiah, and
Hart quotes this writer’s work on Forrestal’s death extensively.
Control of the molders of
public opinion has been crucial for Zionist success in the United States. I
recall that in my formative years in North Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s it
was almost impossible to turn on the radio without hearing the evangelist
Oliver B. Green. Like PBS when they do their fund-raisers, Green
offered goodies to people who would send him money. The first goodie
on his list was a copy of the Scofield Reference Bible. We
wouldn’t have learned it from the Reverend Green, but the Scofield Bible
pushes “what was a previously somewhat fringe ‘dispensationalist’ theology
calling for the Jewish ‘return’ to Palestine.” Cyrus Scofield, we
learn from Weir, referencing primarily Joseph M. Canfield’s The
Incredible Scofield and His Book, was
something of a charlatan and a scoundrel who was heavily promoted by wealthy
early Zionists. It explains a lot about America’s Christian Zionist
movement and really makes one wonder who props up men like Green and
Jerry Falwell and John Hagee. It also makes one
wonder about the current pro-Zionist Pope, who is
receiving such a glowing press in the United States.
In lieu of further
characterizing of Zionist influence on American opinion molders, we have, with
permission of the author, provided as an appendix her entire short penultimate
chapter, “Zionist Influence in the Media.” Her concluding chapter,
which is even shorter but just as powerful, is an example of that influence
wielded in the nastiest sort of way. It is about the destruction of
the career of the famous journalist Dorothy Thompson, one of
the earliest critics of Nazi Germany. Thompson had also been an
early supporter of Zionism until she went to Palestine and reported honestly on
what she saw. That was it for her.
Thompson’s experience is
quite reminiscent of what happened to Eugene Lyons. Lyons
was a young Jewish-American reporter and Communist sympathizer who covered the
Soviet Union for United Press in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He
was among the few Western journalists to attempt to write honestly about what
he saw and was forced to leave in 1934. His devastating exposé, Assignment
in Utopia, was
generally ignored and his 1941 revelations of Communist Party power and
influence in the United States, The
Red Decade, was
greeted mainly with hostility. Lyons spent most of the rest of his
career on the margins of American journalism.
Readers can learn about
the planned documentary called The Silencing of Dorothy Thompson at http://thesilencing.org.
David Martin
May 17, 2014
Appendix: Chapter
15 of Against our Better Judgment:
ZIONIST
INFLUENCE IN THE MEDIA
As historian Richard
Stevens notes, Zionists early on learned to exploit the essential nature
of the American political system: that policies can be made and un-made through
force of public opinion and pressure. Procuring influence in the media, both
paid and unpaid, has been a key component of their success.[i]
From early on, the Zionist
narrative largely dominated news coverage of the region. A study of four
leading newspapers’ 1917 coverage showed that editorial opinion almost
universally favored the Zionist position.[ii] Author Kathleen Christison notes that “editorials and news
stories alike applauded Jewish enterprise, heralding a Jewish return to
Palestine as ‘glorious news.’” Other studies showed the same situation for
the 1920s. Christison writes:
“The relatively heavy
press coverage is an indicator of the extent of Zionist influence even in this
early period. One scholar has estimated that, as of the mid-1920s,
approximately half of all New York Times articles were placed
by press agents, suggesting that U.S. Zionist organizations may have placed
many of the articles on Zionism’s Palestine endeavors.”[iii]
At one point when the
State Department was trying to convince Israel to allow Palestinian
refugees to return, Secretary of State George Marshall wrote:
“The leaders of Israel
would make a grave miscalculation if they thought callous treatment of this
tragic issue could pass unnoted by world opinion.”[iv]
Marshall underestimated
the ability of Zionists to minimize the information on Palestinian
refugees reaching Americans. A State Department study in March 1949
found the American public was “unaware of the
Palestine refugee problem, since it has not been hammered away
at by the press or radio.”[v]
As author Alfred
Lilienthal explained in 1953:
“The capture of the
American press by Jewish nationalism was, in fact, incredibly complete.
Magazines as well as newspapers, in news stories as well as editorial columns,
gave primarily the Zionist views of events before, during, and after partition.”[vi]
When the Saturday
Evening Post published an article by Milton Mayer that criticized
Jewish nationalism (and carried two other articles giving opposing views),
Zionists organized what was probably the worst attack on the Post in
its long history.
Zionists inundated the
magazine with vitriolic mail, cancelled their subscriptions, and withdrew their
advertising. The Post learned its lesson, later refusing to
publish an article that would have again exposed it to such an onslaught, even
though the editor acknowledged that the rejected piece was a “good and eloquent
article.”[vii]
This was typical in a
campaign in which Zionists exploited sympathy for victimized Jews, and when
this did not sufficiently skew reporting about Palestine, used financial
pressure. Lilienthal writes:
“If voluntary compliance
was not ‘understanding’ enough, there was always the matter of Jewish
advertising and circulation. The threat of economic recriminations from Jewish
advertisers, combined with the fact that the fatal label of ‘Anti-Semite’ would
be pinned on any editor stepping out of line, assured fullest press
cooperation.”[viii]
Author Christison records that from the moment
partition was voted by the UN, “the press played a critical role in
building a framework for thinking that would endure for decades.” She writes
that shortly before May 15, 1948, the scheduled beginning of the Jewish State,
a total of 24 U.S., British, and Australian reporters converged on Palestine.
“Virtually all reporting
was from the Jewish perspective,” reports Christison.
“The journals the Nation and the New Republic both
showed what one scholar calls ‘an overt emotional partiality’ toward the Jews.
No item published in either journal was sympathetic to the Arabs, and no
correspondent was stationed in Arab areas of Palestine, although some reporters
lived with, and sometimes fought alongside, Jewish settlers.”[ix]
Bookstores were inundated
with books espousing the Zionist point of view to enthusiastic press
reviews. Conversely, the few books published that dared to provide a different
perspective were given scathing reviews, when they were reviewed at all.[x]
When Professor Millar
Burrows of the Yale School of Divinity, a distinguished scholar and
archaeologist, wrote Palestine Is Our Business, the American
Zionist Council distributed a publication labeling his book “an
anti-Semitic opus.”
In fact, Professor
Burrows‘ life history showed the opposite. He had been one of the organizers
and Vice-President of the National Committee to Combat Anti-Semitism and
had long been active in the interfaith movement in New Haven.[xi]
In his book
Burrows wrote, “A terrible wrong has been done to the native people of
[Palestine.] The blame for what has happened must be distributed among all
concerned, including ourselves. Our own interests, both as
Americans and as Christians, are endangered. The interests of the Jewish
people also have suffered. And we can still do something about it.”[xii]
Burrows emphasized:
“This is a question of the most immediate and vital concern to many hundreds of
thousands of living people. It is an issue on which one concerned with right
and wrong must take a position and try to do something.”[xiii]
Burrows wrote that
imposing a Jewish state on Palestine violated the principle of
self-determination, and noted that the “right of a majority of the people of a
country to choose their own government would hardly be questioned in any other
instance.”[xiv]
Burrows criticized
what he termed “pro-Zionist” writing and pointed out that a “quite
different view of the situation would emerge if the word ‘resistance‘ were
used” when describing Palestinian and Arab fighting in 1948.[xv] He wrote that the “plan for
Palestine advocated by the Arabs was a democracy with freedom of religion
and complete separation of religion and the State, as in this country.”[xvi]
Burrows also discussed
religious aspects, stating: “One thing is certain. Nothing that is essentially
unjust or contrary to the Spirit of Christ can be the will of God. Let him who
speaks of the fulfillment of prophecy remember Jer. 22:13: ‘Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness’...”[xvii]
In his conclusion,
Burrows stated: “All the Arab refugees who want to return to their
homes must be allowed and helped to do so, and must be restored to their
own villages, houses, and farms or places of business, with adequate
compensation from the Government of Israel for destruction and damage.”[xviii]
He also stated: “Homes
must be found in this country or elsewhere for Jews desiring to become citizens
of other countries than Israel, and their religious, civic, social, and
economic rights must be guaranteed.”[xix]
In their onslaught against
him, Zionists accused Burrows of “careless writing, disjointed
reporting and extremely biased observation.”[xx]
Another author who
described the misery of Palestinian refugees (as well as Jewish suffering
in Israel), Willie Snow Ethridge, was similarly attacked by pro-Israel
reviewers. When she was invited to address the Maryland Teachers
Association and chose to speak on her book, Journey to Jerusalem,
she was told she must speak on a different subject. The secretary of the
association explained that so much pressure had been brought on him that he
would lose his job if she didn’t change to another topic.[xxi]
Still another was the
eminent dean of Barnard College, Virginia Gildersleeve, a highly
distinguished personage with impeccable credentials as a humanitarian. When she
wrote that Palestinian refugees should be allowed to return to their
homes, a campaign was launched against her, labeling her a Christian
“anti-Semite.”[xxii]
Gildersleeve, who had been
instrumental in drafting the Preamble to the U.N. Charter and had
taken a leading role in creating the U.N. Human Rights Commission, later
devoted herself to working for human rights in the Middle East.[xxiii] She testified before
Congressional committees and lobbied President Truman, to no avail.[xxiv] In her memoir, she attributed such
failures to “the Zionist control of the media of communication.”[xxv]
[i] Stevens, American Zionism, 207.
[ii] Christison, Perceptions, 38.
[iii] Christison, Perceptions, 40.
[v] Neff, Pillars,
72-73.
A notable exception were the reports
by Anne O’Hare McCormick, a Pulitzer Prize winning foreign news correspondent
for the New York Times, who reported that “[Israel] is born at the
expense of another people now fated to join the ragged ranks of the displaced”
and, in another reported, noted that “no one [in Israel] has expressed any
sense of responsibility or sympathy for these wretched victims.”
[vi] Lilienthal, What
Price Israel, 94.
[vii] Lilienthal, What
Price Israel, 103.
[viii] Lilienthal, What
Price Israel, 94.
[ix] Christison, Perceptions, 80-81.
[x] Lilienthal, What
Price Israel, 96-97.
[xi] Lilienthal, What
Price Israel, 97-98.
[xii] Millar
Burrows, Palestine Is
Our Business (Philadelphia: Westminster,
1949), 11.
[xiii] Burrows, Palestine Is
Our Business, 11-12.
[xiv] Burrows, Palestine Is
Our Business, 63.
[xv] Burrows, Palestine Is
Our Business, 75.
[xvi] Burrows, Palestine Is
Our Business, 131.
[xvii] Burrows,
Palestine Is Our Business, 91.
[xviii] Burrows, Palestine Is
Our Business, 154.
[xix] Burrows, Palestine Is
Our Business, 155.
[xx] Lilienthal, What
Price Israel, 97-98.
[xxi] Lilienthal, What
Price Israel, 97.
[xxii] Berger, Memoirs, 35-38.
Dean Gildersleeve, a Protestant
Christian, had been the only woman member of the U.S. UN delegation in San
Francisco. For more information on her see:
“Who was Virginia Gildersleeve?” Virginia Gildersleeve International Fund, accessed
December 20, 2013, http://www.vgif.org/a_vg.shtml.
Rosalind Rosenberg, “Virginia Gildersleeve:
Opening the Gates,” Living Legacies (Columbia University),
accessed January 1, 2014,
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Summer2001/Gildersleeve.html.
[xxiii] Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve, Many
a Good Crusade: Memoirs of (New York:
Macmillan, 1955), 187.
[xxiv] Merkley, Christian
Attitudes, 7.
[xxv] Gildersleeve, Many
a Good Crusade, 412.
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