Selections From Zionist Connection II

Alfred Lilienthal*

http://www.alfredlilienthal.com/

Introduction and four complete chapters
from the book

Back to Studies page

•  Terror:  The Double Standard

• Exploiting Anti-Semitism

• The Blitz

• The Holocaust: Stoking the Fires

       Introduction

   IF SOME COMPELLING justification was required for bringing a most controversial book, with a most unorthodox approach, before a world in which the human psyche has become far more attuned to the pleasant process of being softly lulled by Big Brother than to the painstaking task of absorbing upsetting, nonconsensus material, then the astounding November 19-20, 1977, pilgrimage of Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat to Jerusalem supplied the reason. The Middle East imbroglio, always complex, had now become "curiouser and curiouser," to borrow words from Alice in Wonderland.

   Euphoric Americans clung to their video sets over that weekend. Sadat was addressing the Knesset--Egyptians and Israelis were not only talking to one another, but smiling. The "A-rabs" were at last willing to give up war. Peace, surely, must be on the way.

   This wishful thinking of course overlooked the fact that since 1948 there had been two wars going on simultaneously in the Middle East. The one between Israel and the Arab states was only a secondary consequence of what Syrian President Hafez al-Assad has called the "mother question"-the conflict between the Israeli Zionists and the Arab Palestinians. While there was some possibility of a separate agreement ending the Egyptian-Israeli war, a solution for the core of the dangerous Holy Land conflict seemed as distant as ever.

   The November 10, 1975, U.N. resolution equated Zionism with racism and racial discrimination, and for the first time placed the genesis of the continuing Middle East struggle squarely before a startled American public. But fervent supporters of Israel, Christians as well as Jews, reacted with unprecedented furor to the overwhelming U.N. censure and stirred the media to direct an equally unprecedented onslaught against the U.N., the Arab states, and the Third World bloc. The supporters of the resolution were denigrated with the charge "emulators of Hitler." The pro-Israel American public was led to believe that this was indeed but another attack on Jews and Judaism, a Nazi renaissance. The pertinency of this U.N. action to the continuing Arab rejection of the State of Israel was totally covered over by whipped-up emotionalism.

   What is Zionism, and what is its connection with the Middle East conflict? How, if at all, is it differentiated from Judaism? Why has Organized Jewry, invariably an unequivocal exponent of the separation of church and state, condoned their union in an Israeli state demanding the allegiance of everyone everywhere who considers himself a Jew, whether he be an observant practitioner or not? What validity is there to the insistence of a persistent minority that anti-Zionism is the equivalent of anti-Semitism? Such questions may mystify 90 percent of Americans, yet the answers go to the very heart of the Middle East conflict.

   It was the serious confusion between religion and nationalism that led directly to the 1948 establishment of the Zionist state of Israel in the heart of the Arab world, causing disastrous consequences for all concerned, including Americans whose government had played a major role in that nation-making. The resultant uprooting of Palestinian Arabs, whose numbers today have swollen to more than 1.6 million, many exiled for thirty years to refugee camps living on a U.N. dole of seven cents per day, brought down on the U.S. the enmity of an Arab-Muslim world, eroding a measureless reservoir of goodwill stemming from the educational and eleemosynary institutions America helped found. The creation of Israel, likewise, led to the penetration of the area for the first time by the Soviet Union, endangered the security interests of the U.S., and thrust the burden of a premature energy crisis into every American home.

   However much the essence of Judaism may have remained as distinct as ever from Zionism, the nationalist shadow has so overtaken the religious substance that virtually all Jews have, in practice, become Israelists, if not Zionists. Many who mistrust the Zionist connotation can still have their cake and eat it, through Israelism.

   While the vast majority of Jews in the Diaspora (the aggregate of Jews living outside of Palestine) do not believe in Zionist ideology, out of what is mistaken for religious duty they have given fullest support, bordering on worship, to Israel. Such worship of collective human power is just about as old as Pharaonic Egypt, and was practiced by the Sumerians, pre-Christian Greeks, and Romans as well. As Dr. Arnold Toynbee pointed out in A Study of History.

The prevalence of this worship of collective human power is a calamity. It is a bad religion because it is the worship of a false god. It is a form of idolatry which has led its adherents to commit innumerable crimes and follies. Unhappily, the prevalence of this idolatrous religion is one of the tragic facts of contemporary human life.

And these Jewish Zionists-Israelists have been joined by a large segment of articulate Christian opinion in the new worship of the State of Israel, which has been accorded the same privileges and immunities that have been vouchsafed to religionists who follow a genuine faith.

   On every other issue of concern to Americans, both sides have invariably been publicly presented, no matter how controversial: the cigarette lobby vs. cancer research, the drug alarmists vs. the upholders of pot, traditionalists-oldsters vs. Beatles-hippies, civil rights gradualists vs. extremists, hawks and doves over Vietnam, pro-Watergate outcome vs. Nixon apologists-to mention but a few. It has only been on the subject of Jews, Zionism, and Israel that the U.S. and most of the Western world have had a near-total blackout. The mere presence of the powerful Anti-Defamation League, even before the fearsome "anti-Semitic" label might be brandished, has imparted a sensitivity so powerful as to smother any idea of private discussion, let alone public debate, on the grave issues involved.

   The record of pressures, suppression, and terrorization practiced against many-including Presidents of the U.S., who in undisclosed memoranda, letters, and documents have entertained serious doubts about the course upon which Zionism has embarked-is massive and yet incomplete. The more submissive of the Victims of Jewish nationalist pressure have usually been either too ashamed or too afraid to publicize their experiences.

   Rarely has the deceit of so few been so widely practiced to the disastrous detriment of so many, as in the formulation and implementation of U.S. Middle East policy. Guilt, fear, and the preoccupation with domestic politics rather than consideration of policy, justice, and security interests have molded the direction of the deep U.S. involvement. And if John Q. Citizen was unmindful of what was really taking place, it was largely due to the inordinate power of the media to penetrate the inner sanctum of every home with its slantings, distortions, and myth-information. "T'ain't people's ignorance," as Artemus Ward once quipped, "that does the harm, 'tis their knowin' so much that ain't so." Barnum notwithstanding, the media has been able to fool the people most, if not all, of the time.

   The Watergate cover-up has to play second fiddle to the concealments in the Middle East fiasco for more than thirty years, involving, as it has, the continuous serious threat to world peace manifested by four regional wars and three serious Big Power confrontations, which only narrowly missed becoming World War III. The stationing of American technicians in the Sinai to help supervise the second Egyptian-Israeli disengagement accord may have been a step in the making of a new Vietnam. "One day," predicted a senior U.S. diplomat, according to Newsweek magazine, "there will be a congressional investigation into how we lost the Middle East that will make the great China debate seem trivial."

   This book, it is hoped, will contribute to a great Middle East debate that should take place before, rather than after, catastrophe strikes again in that already harassed portion of the globe. Certain basic questions require. answers: "Whose legal and moral claim to Palestine is stronger, the Israeli Zionists or the Arab Palestinians? How, if at all, may these claims be reconciled? How may the U.S. protect its vast political and economic stake in the area and simultaneously continue to foster its special, unique relationship with Israel? Will the undeniable, overwhelming public statement of "never again," as to another Vietnam, be meticulously regarded in our pursuit of Middle East peace? And above all, this clincher: Will President Reagan and his policy advisers cease avoiding and openly face the central issue in the entire problem--not the existence of an Israeli state, nor even the nonexistence of a Palestinian state, but the kind of a state Israel has to become so as to bring lasting peace to the area?

   For some time it has been apparent that someone would have to assume the burden of carefully examining the historical record of the Arab-Israeli conflict, starting with the "original sin" in uprooting the indigenous Arab Palestinians, and daring to articulate conclusions seldom aired. As Norman Thomas once observed, one of the Jewish faith is perhaps able to speak with "the necessary moral authority that no Gentile can express."

   However strong the temptation may be for any author to succumb to the prevailing mood of his surroundings and to indulge in indiscriminate stereotyping, heightened by cliche's and slogans, I have tried to maintain a fair perspective and not to allow personal experiences to dull the observer's vision, nor instill too deep-seated a passion. It is out of sadness, not anger, that I am forced to conclude that in embarking upon the new path that Organized Jewry has hewn for it, prophetic Judaism has incurred an incalculable loss in moral values, which author Moshe Menuhin has described as "the Decadence of Judaism in Our Times." What else can account for the anomaly by which the once-persecuted have adopted the philosophy of their chief persecutor?

   In doling out incarceration and death while sweeping through conquered Europe, did not the Führer undo the laws of emancipation for which so many Jews had so long struggled, as he decreed: "You are not a German, you are a Jew-you are not a Frenchman, you are a Jew, you are not a Belgian, you are a Jew"? Yet these are the identical words that Zionist leaders have been intoning as they have meticulously promoted the in-gathering to Israel (Palestine) of Jews from around the globe, even plotting their exodus from lands in which they have lived happily for centuries.

   If at times this book seems unduly critical of Israel, and neglects to place in balance the oft-repeated arguments in its favor, it is simply because the gigantic propaganda apparatus of Israel-World Zionism has spun such extensive and deeply ingrained mythology that there is hardly enough space to refute widely accepted theses and expose the picture as it really is. The reader, however, is particularly cautioned to keep in mind at all times the very vital distinction between the State of Israel and the people of Israel. Nor can he overlook the fact that one of Western man's most precious possessions is the inalienable right to dissent. As Thomas Jefferson expressed it, "For God's sake, let us freely hear both sides."

   This new, updated paperback edition has been published as an answer to the widespread demand to learn more about the untold side of a subject, the understanding of which may be vital to man's very existence.

   In giving fair consideration to what to many will come as an astounding recital, my readers are asked to display what William Ellery Channing once defined as the free mind:

 "I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, and which receives new truth as an angel from heaven."

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·                      Terror:  The Double Standard

And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand.

- George Bernard Shaw. Caesar and Cleopatra

 IT IS NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE to pick out the one particular subject of Middle East reportage the media has most slanted and distorted. But certainly the manner in which the use of violence has been presented probably has had the most influence in formulating American public opinion.

   The media has succeeded in getting Western man to accept a double standard: one, that Jews and Zionists have been freedom fighters in pursuit of a moral, legal, historical imperative, namely, the establishment of their own state, Israel. On the other hand, the media has stressed that when Palestinians resorted to armed violence to regain their homeland, they were terrorists. Whereas the Hitler experience was readily invoked to condone Zionist intemperate acts, the desperate frustration of being deprived of their homes for thirty years, and any hearing for their grievances, was deemed no excuse for Palestinian excesses.1 The choice of words and pejorative adjectives, the shadings, the explanatory material spelling out the particular incident, and the amount of sympathy employed in describing the victims were all instrumentalities in applying this double standard.

   As an example, few voices were allowed to be heard in dissent of the totally accepted Zionist labeling given the October war. One of these appeared on WEEI, the CBS outlet in Boston, three days after the fighting erupted. Following four callers, who were to varying degrees pro-Israel, the moderator introduced a soft-spoken voice unmistakably Indian or Pakistani, who complained of the use of slanted language by the reporters. He stated that the moderator had no right [357] [358] to call the war an act of aggression when all Egypt and Syria were trying to do was get back their own territory. Moderator Howard Nelson tried unsuccessfully to rebut the gentleman by reading the dictionary meaning of the word "aggression," totally refusing to take into consideration the initial 1967 Israeli seizure of Arab lands. The persistent questioner countered by pointing to the persistent media slanting. "Why is it, when Israelis hijack a Lebanese plane and force it to land in Israel, newscasters call it a 'diversion,' but when the Palestinians engage in air thievery, it is called 'hijacking.' Why," he asked again, "is there this double standard?"

   A study 2 made of U.S. press reportage showed that although all acts of terrorism were generally bemoaned, Israeli actions were usually justified as responses to 'intolerable situations." The Washington Post, for example, justified the 1973 Israeli assassinations in Beirut as "the best kind of terrorism," since they killed "the worst kind of terrorists."3 In editorials dealing with the commandos, 95.2 percent of the coverage by the New York Times, 91 percent by the Washington Post, and 100 percent by the Detroit Free Press was against commando terrorist activity. While condemning the commandos, the Times did manage to publish three features indicating sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian refugees as refugees. The Washington Post had three editorials and one feature on the refugee problem.

   Under rules of the media, the Israelis are "freedom fighters" and the Arabs are "terrorists," the Israelis "make reprisals" while the Palestinians "commit atrocities," the Arabs constantly stand vilified, the Israelis glorified. As stated in an October 1968 "Letter to Christians" signed by sixty-six ministers from nine denominations:

Westerners in general are already aware of what the Israeli feels: pride that he is once more, after so long, master in Palestine, where he no longer need apologize for being Jewish. But Westerners are not so aware of what the Arab feels: resentment at losing his land, humiliation at military losses, frustration at being unable to make his claims understood to the rest of the world....... Westerners should understand that the Arabic term for the underground fighters,fedayeen, means "those who sacrifice themselves," and that the Arabs compare them to the underground fighters in Europe during the Nazi occupation.4

This double standard came into play long ago and slowly permeated reporting from the outset of the struggle in Palestine, helping to mold the popular impression of events there. Most people became conditioned to believe that it was the Arabs alone who resorted to [359] violence. But the record of the Zionist use of violence in behalf of their cause, carefully blacked out from public surveillance,5 is a lengthy one that could be traced back to the days of the British mandate.

   Violence was often used against their own, as on November 25, 1940, when the S.S. Patria was blown up in the Haifa harbor, killing 276 illegal Jewish immigrant passengers. At the time of the incident these deaths were attributed to the British, and it was not until ten years later that the responsibility for this disaster was placed at the door of the Zionists. David Flinker, Israeli correspondent of the Jewish Morning Journal (the largest Yiddish daily) described what had happened:

It was then that the Haganah General Staff took a decision at which their leaders shuddered. The decision was not to permit the Patria to leave Jaffa. The English must be given to understand that Jews could not be driven away from their own country. The Patria must be blown up. The decision was conveyed to Haganah members on the Patria and in the hush of night, preparations had begun for the execution of the tragic act. On Sunday, November 26, 1940, the passengers were informed by the English that they were being returned to sea. The Jews remained silent, save for a whisper from man to man to go "up the deck, all up the deck." Apparently, the signal did not reach everybody, for many hundreds remained below-never to see the light again. Suddenly an explosion was heard and a panic ensued.... It was a hellish scene; people jumped into the water, children were tossed into the waves; agonizing cries tore the heavens. The number of victims was officially placed at 276. The survivors were permitted by the High Commissioner to land.6

Fifteen months later the S.S. Struma exploded in the Black Sea, killing 769 illegal Jewish immigrants. The Jewish Agency described it as an act of"mass-protest and mass-suicide," and the U.S. media once more placed the responsibility for these deaths at the door of the British and their Palestine immigration policy.

   There followed the assassination in Cairo on November 6, 1944, of Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident; the Irgun's blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing ninety-one and injuring forty-five British and Arabs (subsequent evidence indicated the involvement of the Haganah and the Jewish Agency), and the 1947 dispatch of letter bombs to British Cabinet Ministers and the bomb attacks of December 11, in and near Haifa, killing eighteen Arabs and wounding fifty-eight others. In subsequent years the Arab-owned Semiramis Hotel in Jerusalem was blown up, killing twenty persons, among them the Viscount de Tapia, the Spanish Consul. The Haganah admitted responsibility for the outrage. 360

   In 1948, following the adoption of the U.N. partition resolution but prior to the May 15 promulgation of the Israeli state, Irgun, Stern Gang,7 or Haganah terrorists repeatedly struck with bombs, loads of explosives, or even armed forces at Arab civilians in villages, towns, and cities. The grossest outrage, of course, was the April 9 massacre at Deir Yassin of 254 women, children, and old men.

   On September 17, 1948, U.N. Palestine Mediator Count Folke Bernadotte, nephew of Swedish King Gustav V, and his aide, Colonel Andre Pierre Serot, were assassinated by members of the Stern Gang while driving in the Israeli-controlled sector of Jerusalem. American Ambassador Stanton Griffis, convinced that the identity of the assassin was well known to the Israeli government, commented in his memoirs: "The murder of Bernadotte will remain forever a black and disgraceful mark on the early history of Israel."8

   During a February 1977 press conference marking the publication in Israel of a new book on David Ben-Gurion, The Secret List of Heinrich Roehm, it was definitely admitted by author Dr. Michael Bar Zohar (writing in the U.S. under the name of Michael Barak) that the late Prime Minister had the names of the three who had carried out the assassination; one of them, Yehoshva Zeitler, was one of Ben-Gurion's best friends.9 Zeitler explained that "we executed Bernadotte because he was a one-man institution who endangered the status of Jerusalem by his declared intention of turning her into an international city. He was hostile to Israel from the moment the state was established and actually laid the foundation for the present U.N. policy of supporting the Arabs." The decision to kill Count Bernadotte had been taken by three Stern Gang leaders, Nathan Yelin-Mor, Dr. Israel Eldad-Scheib, and Zeitler, commander of activities in Jerusalem and an intimate friend of the first Prime Minister.

   In 1950 Zionist agents in Baghdad threw bombs at a synagogue and at other Jewish targets in order to pressure Jews into emigrating to Israel. In 1953 the small Jordanian hamlets of Kibya and Nahalin, and the UNRWA refugee camp at Bureij in the Gaza Strip, were attacked; 102 villagers and refugees were killed. Between 1952 and September 1956, prior to the first Suez war, the Arab villages of Beit Jalu, Falame, Rantis, Bani Suhaila, Baheya, Gharandal, Wadi Fukin, and Gaza were shelled on raids, killing 118 civilians.

   A few hours after the Israeli army began its march into Sinai on October 29, 1956, a curfew from 5 P.M. to 6 A.M. was imposed on Kafr Kassem and other villages of the Little Triangle within Israel. This curfew advance of one hour was transmitted at 4:45 P.M. to the Mayor of the village, who informed the Israeli officer in charge that a large number of villagers were working in the fields and could not be notified of the change; forty-nine villagers returning after 5 P.M., including fourteen women and small children in the arms of their mothers, were mowed down without any warning whatsoever by machine guns as they came in from their work.

   These facts, suppressed for a long time, seeped through when the border policemen were finally brought to trial. The proceedings lasted more than two years, and the Israeli High Court passed light sentences: one officer received seventeen years, another fifteen years, three were acquitted, and five constables received sentences of seven years. All were set free one year later by government amnesty. And from the ever intensely active libertarian-human rights movement in the U.S., only silence. Identical reaction followed the 1966 Israeli armed force attack, including tanks and armored cars, practically wiping out the small Jordanian village of Es-Samu'a, killing eighteen and wounding fifty-four others.

   By 1972, with the emergence of the PLO movement, Israeli espionage agencies concentrated their attention on individual Palestinians, who were struck down by letter bombs, regular bombs, and machine guns in Beirut,10 Los Angeles,11 Rome, 12 Tripoli ,'8 Stockholm, 14 Copenhagen,15 Paris,16 Cyprus,17 and in Oslo.18

   The task of seeking out and destroying Palestinians known to be connected with recurring fedayeen attacks on Israelis rested with the Mossad, the Israeli version of the CIA, known familiarly as the "Institute." A special branch within Mossad, set up in 1972, had been responsible for the April 10, 1973, raid on Lebanon and the assassination of the three PLO leaders, Kamal Nasser, Mohammed Yusuf Najjar, and Kamal Adwan. The meticulously executed operation was part of a plan, "Operation: God's Wrath," under the command of Prime Minister Meir's Special Adviser on Security Affairs, General Aharon Yariv, whose goal had been the elimination of the 1,000 Palestinians capable of providing leadership to the movement. The elimination of this select number, it was thought, would liquidate the movement itself. And the outbreak of fierce fighting in Lebanon's civil war in the spring of 1975 facilitated other raids by the Israeli secret service, which soon added twenty-three victims to its roster.19

   Starting with the December 28, 1968, helicopter raid on the Beirut Airport, Lebanon was the continuous site for Israeli attacks on civilians and civilian targets, most of which occurred in the south of the country. These commenced with a number of small raids in 1969 and 1970,[362] reported to the U.N. but generally ignored. In 1972 the Israeli armed forces began their serious raids with an attack on the Arkoub region, in which two civilians were killed; on the Nabatiyeh refugee camp, in which ten were killed; on Nahr al-Bared and Rafed and Rashaya-al Wadi camps, causing the deaths of sixteen; on Baddawi and Nahr-al Bared, killing twelve.

   In April 1974 six South Lebanese villages were attacked by Israeli armed forces, and in May the village of Kfeir was bombed with four persons killed, including a woman and her seven-year-old daughter. Eleven days later Israeli planes again raided the refugee camp of Nabatiyeh and that of Ein-el-Helweh as well, killing fifty and wounding 200, and completely obliterating the former Palestinian site. On the 19th of the same month, Israeli naval units bombarded the Rashidiyeh refugee camp, killing eight civilians. The next month the Israeli planes returned to bomb three U.N. camps, killing seventy-three and wounding 159. In July Israeli naval units raided Tyre, Sarafund, and Saida, sinking twenty-one fishing boats. The aerial bombing and ground raids of Lebanese towns and U.N. refugee camps in the south of the country continued into 1975.

   The idealization of Zionist terror, far beyond mere condonation, assumed its inexorable course when twenty-two-year-old Egyptian Jew Eliahu Betzouri and his seventeen-year-old friend Eliahu Hakim slew Lord Moyne in 1944. Years after the conviction, David Ben-Gurion admitted "his reverence for the dedicated patriots who were hanged in Cairo" for this assassination of Great Britain's Resident Minister. (Israel's first Prime Minister also referred to terrorist Abraham Stern, the poet who founded the group bearing his name, as "one of the finest and most outstanding figures of the era.")

   The reportage on the trial by such illustrious newsmen of the day as the Times' C.L. Sulzberger, AP's Relman Morin, and UP's Samir Souki featured the defense counsel and the defendants' condemnation of the British administration for graft, anarchistic rule, and acts of injustice. Popular sympathy was established in the U.S. with the young "heroes," even though in his House of Commons eulogy of the slain British Minister of State, Prime Minister Winston Churchill referred to "the shameful crime" and boldly declared: "If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins' guns and our labors for its future to produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, then many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently and so long in the past." No wonder that political adviser to the Jewish Agency Leo Cohen, after listening to the Churchill BBC broadcast, stated: [363]

When I think how proud we have been that Zionism could come before the world with clean hands as a creative movement of the highest order, and when I think of what those boys have been led to do... it is something so exasperating, so awful and dreadful.

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But Churchill's reassessment never reached fruition, and the Western world's honeymoon with Zionism continued. Chaim Weizmann had written at the time to Churchill: "I can assure you that Palestine Jewry will, as its representative bodies have declared, go to the utmost limits of its power to cut out, root and branch, this evil from its midst."20 Two years after that assurance, the Anglo~American Committee of Inquiry in its report was still requesting the Jewish Agency "to resume active cooperation with the Mandatory Authority in the suppression of terrorism and of illegal immigration and in the maintenance of that law and order throughout Palestine which is essential for the good of all, including the new immigrants."21

   Author Gerold Frank, who ghosted Bartley Crum's Behind the Silken Curtain and Jorge Garcia-Granados' The Birth of Israel, both extremely pro-Israel books, had the final word to say in his elegy to the Moyne assassins in his book, The Deed: 22

Here in the remote corner [the cemetery of Bassatin which contains the bodies of such great Jews as Moses Maimonides], amid the debris and neglect of ages one finds a single square stone, not large~two feet high, three feet wide-no names on it, but in Hebrew "pray for their souls." Beneath it, Eliahu Hakim and Eliahu Betzouri sleep together, as they were buried in one coffin, curled in each other's arms as children. They lie curled together like sleeping children under the eternal stone. No one guards their grave now. The sands of the desert blow, nothing grows there, and no weeds, no foliage. Only the sifting, creeping yellow dust over everything, and in the cloudless sky a molten sun. In the ancient earth in the nameless grave they lie together under the imperishable stone. Few remember them now.

This is how the people have been prepared to accept Zionist acts of violence and to judge the continuing conflict. Thus when the Irgun led by Menachem Begin 25 blew up the King David Hotel and some of his followers were apprehended, the compassionate but often misled Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to Lady Reading, a friend in England: "If these young people are killed, there will be without any question a sense of martyrdom and a desire for revenge which will only bring more bloodshed. A generous gesture will, I think, change the atmosphere."

   A special variation on the double standard is to be seen in the handling of espionage activities by the Israelis and their Arab counterparts. [364] [365] As to the Israeli cause, the end always justifies the means. The Zionists and Israelis are admired no matter what dirty tricks they use, often by the very people who are the first to condemn the use of "dirty tricks" at home, by the CIA or other American intelligence-espionage agencies. The Zionists and Israelis are allowed to break all the rules of international law, and to make their own. The kidnapping of Adolph Eichmann from Argentina was only the best publicized of many instances of how the Israelis have been able to get away with defying international edict. Imagine if the CIA were to kidnap some wanted criminal for crimes against the American people! Imagine if the Arabs were to abduct an Israeli for crimes against the Palestinians! Yet so long as it is Jews, Israelis, Zionists - everything goes.

   This has long been true in the attitudes toward Israeli spies. One of the major instances of this, now forgotten by most of the few people who ever knew about it, was the Lavon Affair that once rocked Israel to the very core.

   After the Egyptian revolution of 1952, relations between the U.S. and the new Gamal Abdel Nasser government steadily improved. Cultural and economic agreements between Egypt and other Arab states and the U.S. were being discussed, and it was sincerely hoped that the U.S. would aid the projected Aswan Dam development program. By 1954 American Ambassador Henry Byroade's personal friendship with Nasser seemed likely to produce results. A U.S. aid program of $50 million had been started.

   The situation was viewed in high Israeli quarters as a grave threat to the continued flow of American dollars into Israel from public, if not private, sources. A direct severance of relations between Egypt and the U.S. was deemed desirable. An Israeli espionage ring was sent to Egypt to bomb official U.S. offices and, if necessary, attack American personnel working there so as to destroy Egyptian-U.S. relations and eventually Arab-U.S. ties. The creation of simulated anti-British incidents was calculated to induce the British to maintain their Suez garrison. Several bomb incidents involving U.S. installations in Egypt followed.

   Small bombs shaped like books and secreted in book covers were brought into the USIA libraries in both Alexandria and Cairo. Fish skin bags filled with acid were placed on top of nitroglycerin bombs; it took several hours for the acid to eat through the bag and ignite the bomb. The book bombs were placed in the shelves of the library just before closing hours. Several hours later a blast would occur, shattering glass and shelves and setting fire to books and furniture. Similar bombs were placed in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Theater and in other American owned business buildings.24

   In December two young Jewish Egyptian boys carrying identical bombs were caught as they were about to enter U.S. installations. Upon their confession, a sabotage gang of six other Jews was rounded up. Five more were implicated in the plot. The conspirators, who received sentences ranging from fifteen years to life, were the objects in the U.S. of multifold sympathetic editorials and articles. Nothing appeared in print at the time to refute the image that this had been but another Nasser conspiracy to unite his country against Israel. The cry "anti-Semitism" widely reverberated.

   In 1960 an investigation in Israel called attention to the forgery of an important document in what had been announced as a "security mishap" that had precipitated the resignation of Pinhas Lavon as Minister of Defense in 1955. Shimon Peres, then Deputy Minister of Defense, and Moshe Dayan had, with the forgery, attempted to place the legal responsibility for the unsuccessful 1954 sabotage attempt at Lavon's door. Ben-Gurion had fought the reopening of the case, but a subsequent rehearing revealed that Lavon had been an innocent victim of the machinations of Peres, Dayan, and Brigadier Abraham Givli.

   Even though the army, through censorship, attempted to cover up its own blunders, the affair led to a Cabinet crisis and the resignation of the Ben-Gurion government in 1961. As late as December 29, 1960, the Times was still referring to the scandal only as "a disastrous adventure in 1954." As the already abnormal ties between Israel and the U.S. grew stronger, scant attention was paid to the disclosure in Israel of this blatant attempt to torpedo U.S.-Arab relations.

   In 1971 one of the spies who figured in the Lavon Affair, Marcelle Ninio, broke into the headlines of Israel and of the satellite Israeli press in the U.S. Ninio, the only woman involved in the affair that so rocked the political life of Israel, had been exchanged for Egyptian prisoners of war after the June 1967 war, along with Victor Levy, Robert Dassa, and Philip Nathanson, her cosaboteurs, and "Champagne Spy" Wolfgang Lotz, who had been apprehended in 1965 after four years of spying in Egypt. According to a five-paragraph story in the New York Times of November 16, 1971, Premier Golda Meir was to attend the wedding of a girl "who at the age of 16 was convicted of espionage for Israel and spent 10 years in an Egyptian jail." The Lavon Affair was referred to as a "mysterious sabotage mission inside Egypt" in 1954, about which "full details remain a secret." [366] [367]

   The entire tone of the article suggested innocence on the part of Israel and of the bride-to-be. It had been just another case of those "hating Egyptians" trying to put a spy rap on a nice Jewish girl. The New York Post carried a four-column story on page 4, "Israeli Heroine to Marry," and referred to the "dark-haired woman who spent fifteen years in a Cairo prison for alleged sabotage activities."

   Both newspapers slanted the reportage, withholding undisputed facts in this true spy story. Although the so-called "heroine" had been deeply involved in proven espionage, seventeen years later the same "editorial papers" were compounding the felony they had originally committed. To avoid presenting the established facts of Israeli sabotage against the U.S., which had involved Israeli Cabinet ministers Dayan and Peres, the Times covered up the affair in this fashion: "The mission quickly was shown to be a far-fetched idea."

   When Israeli spy Elie Cohen, alias Kamal Amin Tabas, was uncovered by Syrian intelligence and hanged in Damascus, an angry hue and cry arose in the West, led by the media with photos (front page of the New York Times) of the condemned's body hanging in the public square. Two popular books, Our Man in Damascus 25 by Eli Ben-Hanan and The Silent Warriors 26 by Joshua Tadmor translated from the Hebrew by Israeli Ha'aretz. U.S. correspondent Raphael Rothstein, made a martyr of the spy (the latter tome was dedicated ironically enough to Elie Wiesel, the godfather of anti-anti-Semitism) and attacked the lack of a fair trial to which the press was not admitted. In the course of their glorification of the Israeli superspy, the authors unwittingly further proved his guilt. Cohen had been arrested in Egypt as part of the Lavon Affair spy ring but held only for two years, released, and then had joined Israel's Secret Service as a trained espionage agent with Damascus to be the base of his operations. As an Oriental Jew he was fluent in Arabic and was scarcely distinguishable from any Muslim or Christian Arab. Most of the important Israeli spies were Arab Jews.

   Cohen cleverly worked his way into affluent social and political circles in Damascus, even becoming acquainted with General Amin el-Hafez, who was to come into power in March 1963. Through his contacts Cohen was able to ascertain the number, type, and placement of MIG-21 planes, T-54 tanks, and other Soviet armament, which Syria was receiving from the Soviet Union, as well as Damascus plans for the construction of a canal as counterdiversion of the Daniyas, one of the principal sources of the Jordan River.

   The incalculably invaluable information smuggled out to Israel until his apprehension was an important factor in his country's success in the six-day war. This was never alluded to in any way by the American press in their accounts of the "martyred" spy. But author Rothstein sharply pointed this up: "Now the peaceful Golan Heights, where Russian tanks lie rusting and concrete fortifications are piles of rubble, is a tourist attraction, and much of the credit for this turn of events belongs to Israel's silent hero, Elie Cohen."

   In the fall of 1972 the major capitals in Europe, the Middle East, and the U.S. were rocked by a spate of letter and package bombs. This phase of the lethal-letter war opened with the letter-bomb killing of an Israeli diplomat in his London office. Coming on the heels of the Munich tragedy, biased world public opinion was only too ready to believe that these acts had been the responsibility of the Palestinian Black September group, although the strict security watch at the Israeli Embassy had intercepted seven other letters, only one of which contained a leaflet boasting Black September sponsorship. Upon close examination it remained very much of an open question who had been sending what bombs to whom.

   According to neutral observers in Britain, while the popular press tended to lean sympathetically toward the Israelis, "the serious press was more objective. After the thirteen letter bombs intercepted in London in November, British Jewry was talking of retribution, but so far as can be seen, there is no evidence to support the theory that Black September is behind the current wave of incidents." British writers, including those of the London Times, viewed evidence of the Palestinian complicity as "uneasy." Yet in the U.S. there was no indecision. The minds of the public were made up for them by the American press and the politicians, although a New York City episode took on the aura of a Hitchcock movie gone awry.

   In October, letter bombs addressed to two retired officials of Hadassah (Women's Zionist Organization) were discovered when they failed to detonate. Mrs. Rose Halprin, who had not been president since 1952, allegedly received one at her East Side home. There were fifteen Halprins in the 1972 Manhattan telephone directory, eighteen in the edition a year earlier. There was no listing for Rose Halprin. It was difficult to understand how a group of Palestinians 5,000 miles away could ever have obtained her name let alone her address.

   The second letter had been addressed to a one-time executive director (one newspaper referred to her as Hannah Goldberg and another as Mrs. Hannah Rosenberg) and was opened under police supervision without it exploding.27 Following the apprehension of the letter bombs addressed to the New York women, Mayor John Lindsay [368] [369] released this statement: "Terror by mail is the latest, and in some ways, the most vicious technique yet devised by conspirators against Israel. To direct it at two outstanding ladies of Hadassah here reaches a low in the politics of terror."

   At the same time a number of letter bombs sent to the Israeli Mission to the U.N. were also intercepted. (One of these was supposedly addressed to a diplomat not even as yet listed in the U.N. directory.) A spokesman for the Israeli Embassy was quick to be quoted:' The letters sent to New York show that the terrorist organization is not just anti-Israeli, as they claim, but anti-Jewish throughout the world." And to further this impression that the Palestinians posed a threat to all Jews, two letter bombs, also mailed from Penang, appeared in Rhodesia, sent to residents of Bulawayo. One had been addressed to prominent young Zionist leader Colin Raizon, another to the mother of Rhodesian Olympic weight lifter John Orkin. Both were intercepted by the police.

   Was it more than a coincidence that the letter bombs, sent to the Hadassah and to the Israeli Mission, all of which were intercepted, were received at a time when Israel was doing its best to coordinate its efforts with those of the U.S. in forcing the Legal Committee of the U.N. to adopt an antiterrorist pact with muscle as a means of further restraining the operations of the Palestinian guerrillas?

   This alleged introduction of bombs into the U.S., following in the wake of the Munich Olympics incident, played a major role in moving federal authorities to initiate a "dragnet" investigation and interrogation and surveillance of Arab residents and students in the country. Cracking down on Arabs and restrictive measures against all travelers passing through the U.S. was the inevitable result.

   On October 26, on page 2 in a five-column headline, the readers of the New York Times were told: "Israel Intercepts Letter Bombs Mailed to Nixon, Rogers and Laird." The story pointed out that the latest letter bombs were "similar to those mailed to Jews in various countries from Amsterdam last month by the Arab guerrilla organization known as the 'Black September.' One letter bomb killed an official in the Israeli Embassy in London."

   Two days later a UPI story, carried on certain radio stations, revealed that an American tourist, twenty-two-year-old Dennis Feinstein from Stockton, California, had been arrested by the Israeli police as he attempted to cross over into Lebanon. He was being held on suspicion of mailing letter bombs to top American officials. The story appeared in some papers, including the Washington Post.

   The Times News Summary and Index of the city edition on October 28 listed for page 3 under "International": "Israel holds American in mailing of letter bombs." But not one line of the story appeared in that edition. In the later edition the listing was deleted from the Index. In page 3 of the earlier edition there had been an unclear, meaningless photo of "men with opposing views scuffling on a Santiago, Chile, street," which appeared to have been dropped in as a last-minute filler replacement in a spot where the Israeli story might have initially been intended to go. New copy replaced this photograph on page 3 in the later edition.

   It took the Sunday Times of December 24, 1972 in a lengthy article, "How Israelis Started the Terror by Post," to place the responsibility for the spate of bombs. As noted by other European observers, it was out of character for the Black September not to have claimed "credit" for these incidents, as they had done instantaneously at the time of Munich and invariably on other occasions.

   With the exception of the first London bomb, which just missed detection, the bomb in the Bronx post office, and the one mailed from India, which injured jeweler Vivian Prins in London, all the other numerous letter bombs sent in Europe and the U.S. to Jews and Jewish organizations were somehow intercepted or proved to be duds. In contrast, almost all of the bombs addressed to Arabs and Palestinians worked successfully. The device for these bombs is very simple, and they have been generally termed to be uniformly deadly. In the words of the police in New York regarding the Hadassah letters: "They failed to detonate even though the trigger was lying directly against the blasting cap." And the Palestinians proved on many occasions their ability to handle infinitely more sophisticated weapons than these.

   While the invention of the letter bomb went back to a brilliant but unbalanced Swedish chemist, Martin Eckenberg, who killed himself at the age of forty-one in a London prison in 1910, Zionist terrorists, the Stern Gang and the Irgun, had brought the weapon to the Middle East. In 1947 letter-bomb campaigns were directed against prominent British politicians believed to be unsympathetic to the Zionist goal of establishing a state in Palestine, and figured in the internationally publicized incident in which the brother of a British officer, Roy Farran, who had been acquitted of murdering a Jewish youth in Palestine, was killed by a parcel bomb admittedly sent by the Stern Gang.

   The Zionist apparatus literally exploded when a Times front-page story headlined an excerpt from Margaret Truman's book alleging a 1947 letter-bomb attempt by the Stern Gang on the life of her father. [370][371] The Anglo-Jewish press across the country reverberated with criticism, one newspaper going so far as to make the familiar charge of "anti-Semitism." In a New York Times Letter to the Editor, Benjamin Gepner, who identified himself as the U.S.-Western Hemisphere leader of the "Stern Group," insisted that it was absurd even to think that there could have been such a plot against the President. The letter-bomb attempt apparently had taken place at a time when the Chief Executive was urging Zionists to be more restrained in their demands and to become more sensitive to the Palestinian plight. Aside from the fact that the authoress had little reason to pull this assassination attempt out of the air, the Stern Gang's own long record of terror supported the plausibility of the story.

   Explosive devices were widely used by the Israelis in a broad campaign directed against German scientists working in Egypt in 1962 and 1963. A bomb placed in a gift parcel exploded, killing scientist Michael Khouri and five others with him, and an attempt was made on the life of Dr. Hans Kleinwachter, another scientist. Another package addressed to a West German scientist working in Cairo blew up when opened, blinding his German secretary. The daughter of German scientist Dr. Paul Goerke was threatened with a similar fate.

   The Israelis succeeded in their reign of terror. Almost to a man, the West German scientists working on the development of rockets for President Nasser's army quit their Egyptian positions and returned home. This is recounted in detail in The Champagne Spy,28 authored by Israeli spy Wolfgang Lotz, who boasted of having sent messages out of Cairo on the wireless hidden in his bathroom scales to his chief, saying that he was "sure we can induce additional German scientists to leave by dispatching more threatening letters and seeing that they are published in the German press." After a public reprimand by Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, Israeli Security Chief Iser Halprin resigned in an admission of Israeli complicity in the campaign against the Germans.

   There were still other bomb varieties in which the Israelis excelled. Prior to the June 1967 war, the Chief Intelligence Officer in the Gaza Strip and' the Egyptian Military Attache' in Jordan were both killed by book bombs. In the wake of the 1972 Lydda Airport massacre, the Palestine Popular Front's spokesman, Ghassan Kanafani, was blown up when a plastic bomb attached to the exhaust of his car exploded. And a series of booby-trapped letters, sent that fall, killed or badly injured a dozen senior Arab guerrillas and prominent Palestinians in Beirut.

   Following the Kanafani death, Ma'ariv the Israeli daily, wrote: "The terrorists' statement linked the death of Kanafani to Israel and accused her of mounting this operation. Israel does not deny this or confirm it." Some eleven days following this incident, Anis Sayegh, a Director of the Palestinian Research Institute in Beirut, received an envelope ostensibly addressed to him from the Islamic Higher Council. When he opened it, it exploded, causing him partial blindness and the loss of three fingers. Within the same time period, another mail parcel exploded in the hands of the Director of a Beirut bank and the security officers of the Fateh in Beirut. (One had to closely scan the small print and the back pages of the Times to find a line or two, if that, about these incidents.)

   In putting together all the pertinent bits of this tragic history, this observation is very much in order: The terrorists of yesterday have since become Prime Ministers, Foreign Ministers, Generals, and other VIPs of the Israeli state of today, and the armies that brought Israel its "liberation" and widely employed terror-the Haganah, Irgun, and the Stern Gang-have become the victorious armies of Israel today. While letter bombs and other forms of terrorism have been used by both sides, it was the Israelis who introduced them into the Middle East and made, as usual, the perfect propaganda use of the deadly explosives. For it was the exploitation of terror, above all, that continued to provide the public excuse for the adamant Israeli refusal to recognize the PLO, which for so long was supported by the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations and greatly complicated the task of reaching a Middle East settlement.

   No single act so totally equated the Palestinians with terror than the killing of the Israeli athletes at the Olympic games in Munich. In the early morning of September 5, 1972, eight Palestinian guerrillas (newspapers more often referred to them as "Arabs" because that word evoked stronger sparks of hatred) invaded Olympic Village in Munich by climbing over a fence and forcing their way into the dormitories of the Israeli team, where they killed two athletes and took nine others as hostages. The guerrillas demanded the release of two hundred of their compatriots held in Israeli jails and an airplane to take them to an unspecified Arab capital. Israel, consistent with her longstanding policy, refused to negotiate with the Palestinians, but high German authorities attempted to do so, offering to pay unlimited ransom and even to substitute four of themselves for the hostages.

   After lengthy parleying and three extensions of the original noon deadline, the Arab guerrillas and their Israeli hostages were flown fifteen miles by helicopters from Olympic Village to the NATO Fuerstenfeldbruck Airport, [371] [372] where they had been told they could board a Lufthansa jet for an Arab airport. Five German sharpshooters backed up by police waited to confront the eight Palestinians. Two guerrillas left the helicopter to inspect the Boeing 727 on which they planned to head for Tunisia. The Germans opened fire. One of the three helicopters was set afire by an exploding grenade thrown by one of the Palestinians as he jumped from the helicopter. But a German government spokesman reported that the hostages were all safe. Three hours later the Olympics Committee announced that all the hostages had been killed.

   In the course of the official government inquiry into the airport shootout, Police Chief Manfred Schreiber admitted he had lost control of the situation during the shooting.29 The original police announcement claimed that the guerrillas had fired first, but most eyewitnesses agreed that the sharpshooters had opened fire. Under dispute, until today, was how the Israeli hostages died: Was it when the Arabs blew up the helicopter, or had they already been killed by Arab machine-gun fire? It also was not beyond the realm of possibility that some had died at the hands of German bullets intended for the guerrillas.

   It has never been established that the airport battle was necessary. All discussion of this very moot point was summarily dismissed by Police Chief Schreiber-and by the U.S. media-with the unsubstantiated allegation that the Arabs would have murdered the hostages en route had they been allowed to leave the airport. This presumption was in no way supported by the meticulous care and consideration shown their hostages by the Palestinian hijackers of the U.S. and European planes in the September 1970 incident in Jordan (or by the treatment accorded in other later hijackings up through Entebbe in the summer of 1976).

   Five and a half months later, on February 21, 1973, a Libyan Boeing 727 with 113 civilians aboard was callously clawed out of the sky by Israeli fighter planes over Israeli-occupied Egyptian territory of the Sinai, about twelve miles from the Suez Canal. Some 102 passengers and 8 crewmen were killed immediately or later died, including 27 women and children. The plane had overflown Cairo, losing its way in a terrible sandstorm, when it was intercepted by Israeli fighters, whom the French pilot mistook for a friendly escort of Egyptian MIGs. The aircraft had already turned around and was headed toward Cairo, nine minutes away, when it was shot down.

   The Israeli version, supported by Moshe Dayan press conferences, insisted that the plane had penetrated "probably the most [373] sensitive area held by Israel," that warnings had been given, that instructions to land had been ignored by the pilot, and that the 727 was not shot down but crashed after landing. The Defense Minister contended that the Israeli fighter pilots had signaled the Libyan plane pilot for fifteen minutes (in that time the plane would have been past Israel and well over the Mediterranean). And from the outset this Israeli fairy tale was accepted - even embroidered upon - by the American press, radio, and television.

   If the media had indulged a bit more in research and study and less in generating hysteria and hatred, they would have discovered a perfect precedence in Israel's 1955 stand when an El Al plane, which had strayed into Bulgarian airspace, was shot down and fifty-eight lives were lost. In a lawsuit brought in the International Court of Justice at Geneva, Israel successfully argued:

It is the duty of any person who seeks to interfere with the normal flying of civilian aircraft by ordering it to land at a designated airport not to deliberately and unreasonably increase the inherent risks and certainly not to provoke completely new and unwarranted hazards inevitable when modern armaments were intentionally brought into play. The Bulgarian admission shows that these safeguards were not discharged. The heart of the present case is that fire was opened on the 4XAK which in the space of a few minutes was callously clawed out of the sky and destroyed. The Israeli government contended that no rule of law, not the liberal interpretations of any provision of the Chicago convention governing international aircraft, nor the rules of general international law, would permit such a degree of violence.

The generally accepted practice is to try to "box" the plane in and lead it in the correct direction. And the Libyan Boeing was already moving out of the danger zone when it was blown to smithereens.

   The language used in page-one headlines of the New York Times the day after the incident carefully concealed what had taken place: "Israelis Down a Libyan Air Liner in the Sinai, Killing at Least 74 - Say it Ignored Warnings to Land... Jet Crash-Lands." The Times, the Post, and other big-city presses avoided the use of the words "shot down," trying to give an impression that the jet crashed on its own after warnings to land.

   The media's obvious aim was to exculpate Israel of any possible guilt and place the guilt on the French pilot, who had been on loan to Libyan Airways, for his refusal to listen to the warnings. Varied types of the art of slanting went into the reportage to the American people. There was, for example, slanting by placement-whatever the Arabs [374] [375] said, including Cairo and Libya, was relegated to unimportant positions; whatever Israel said went into headlines. In other previous air tragedies the papers invariably showed pictures of pretty stewardesses; There were no pictures of the Libyan airline stewardesses in this instance. In fact, there was no picture at all of survivors, which might have evoked some sympathy for the Arab victims. All one saw or read was condonation and excuse of the Israelis.

   At the time of the Munich killing of Israeli athletes, banner headlines carried "the expression of horror by leaders around the world." Bold headlines ran: Head of UN Condemns Raid as Dastardly." But Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim's statement that he "deplored" the fact that a civilian plane had been shot down, and his expression of shock, concern, and condolences on the shooting down of the Libyan airliner, were reported only in the early editions of the New York Post and buried away, the seven-line account obscured under a tiny head: "Waldheim [his name without his title is not familiar] Expresses Shock."30 The quoted Israeli fear that "the Israelis could not guarantee that it was not a kamikaze plane loaded with explosives headed for an Israeli city" was featured prominently and made to sound plausible. And the only mention of the terrible blinding sandstorm, which caused the Libyan plane to lose its way, was as an incidental reference to the more than two-hour delay to Israeli helicopters taking off with wounded survivors.

   The front page of the Daily News in New York 31 carried this bold headline: "Israelis Down Arab Jet." The readers had to turn to page 2 to discover that it had been a civilian airliner. The New York Post headlines were also of interest. The first was: "Israel Forces Down Libya Jet-70 Die." A little later in the day: "Israel Downs [never "shoots"] Libya Airliner; 70 Killed." And then in the continuation off this first page, they reverted to the original headline of the earlier edition: "Israel Forces Down a Libyan Jet; 70 Die."

   Where the Times' story on the Israeli emergency Cabinet meeting featured the Israeli claim that the pilot had acknowledged the warnings and interception signals, the New York Post even went further into the realm of the fanciful, quoting an Israeli newspaper account that the pilot had radioed his pursuers: "We cannot obey your orders because of the political situation. This area does not belong to you." While this yarn was being spread through the combined wire services across the country, the correspondent of Israeli journal Ha'aretz was spreading other propaganda on a two-hour talk show over New York radio station WMCA. Under the usual "fair" media arrangements, the former [375] President of the Zionist Organization of America, another articulate Israelist, and this Israeli writer were pitted against the editor of Middle East Perspective. The "moderator" of this program three days later was among the six commentators of the same station who interviewed prominent guests from Israel, representatives of Israeli-oriented national and international organizations, and their American counterparts in a continuous twenty-five-hour broadcast tribute to Israel's first quarter century.

   The Times which scarcely waits minutes to execute moral judgment editorially, remained silent the day after the plane shooting, although the tragedy had been known in the U.S. before noon the day before. On the third day the editorial page spoke out under the title: "Tragic Blunder." Its words, "horrifying blunder" and "act of callousness," like slapping a child on the wrist for eating too much candy, could be contrasted to those used in its editorial six months earlier on the Olympics tragedy, "Murder in Munich": "Arab fanatics... homicidal hatred... indiscriminate murder... innocent lives snuffed out."32 The editorial reluctantly conceded that the tape of the pilot's exchange with the Cairo control tower "lent credence, though not conclusive evidence" that the pilot had no idea that he would be subject to an air attack if he did not land. The publication's principal concern appeared to be the effect the incident would have on Israel's image and its case before the U.S. public.33

   The murder in Khartoum on March 2, 1973, by the Black September movement of one Belgian and two American diplomats was as sickening an act as the shooting down of the Libyan plane and in no way condonable. As the author of The Game of Nations, 34 Miles Copeland, noted in National Review, "The Palestinian movement is a breeding ground, as is any homeless, idle and hungry population, for what we might call 'unstructured rebellion'-that is, rebellion against things in general, toward no clear goal."35

   Whereas the Times waited three days to publish its editorial on the Libyan incident, less that six hours after the Khartoum deaths had been announced, the editorial page was attacking the act as "lunacy at large."36 Bias was shown not only in the speed with which the paper reacted but in the words of its editorial: "The Palestinian extremists made their move just as Arab propaganda machinery was spinning forth outrage against Israel for the shooting down of an unarmed Libyan airliner . . . Such talk now is even less appropriate than ever " (Italics added.)

   Where the plane had been obviously shot down on what was still [376] [377] Egyptian territory but occupied by Israel, not a single news program on the three major television networks mentioned this fact. CBS' Walter Cronkite declared the plane had been shot down over Israeli territory. 37

   After the Israeli government reluctantly admitted that the crucial black box, recording communications between the Libyan plane and the ground control tower and conversations among those in the pilot's cockpit, had revealed that the French pilot had actually thought he was surrounded by friendly Egyptian MIGs showing him the way home, the New York Times continued to cover up Israeli guilt. The front page of February 24 contained two six-column photos, one captioned "Five Israeli military chaplains read psalms as the coffins [crude, unpainted fruit crates with crooked nails protruding and shrouds showing] of victims of the downed plane are placed on a boat." The other, "A military cortege on the Egyptian side of the Suez Canal waiting for the first boat." The glowing headline, "100 Bodies of Jet Victims Taken Over Suez to Egypt," the reportage, and the publication of the Dayan offer of partial compensation endowed the Israelis with great acts of magnanimity.

   The sole headlined reference to the important revelations of the flight recorder was ambiguously set forth in this manner: 'Israel Confirms Cairo Data." This admission only followed the substantiation by U.S. intelligence sources, which had also monitored the conversation. One had to read well into the article to discover that the important black box had confirmed the control tower tape, played at the press conference two days earlier, the authenticity of which the Times had then questioned.

   In his endeavor to exculpate the Israelis from the guilt the International Civil Aviation Organization had voted 105 to 1 to fasten upon them, the Times' Robert Lindsey, in a June 7 article headlined: "Sinai Crash Study Notes Confusion," unwittingly blew up another Israeli myth widely circulated at the time of the tragedy by his paper: that the curtains of the windows of the Boeing had been closed and therefore the Israelis could not see that the plane carried passengers.

   As on so many other occasions, the Times proved to be more Israelist than the two leading Israeli papers, Ma'ariv and Ha'aretz. One Israeli columnist noted that the downing of the plane had been kept secret for three or four hours before publication of any announcement, which in itself created at the outset a number of question marks. It was the first time in the history of civil aviation that a plane had crashed in an area easily reachable and yet, for twenty-four hours, it was impossible to get a picture of the wreckage. Requests to visit the site were rejected without explanation. Emergency arrangements for the press were refused. Nor was the spokesman for the Israeli defense forces available for any queries or questions until twenty-four hours later, when reporters had a right "to ask themselves what had taken place and what had been erased in the interim."

   Further, according to Israeli accounts, it was only three days after the incident that General David Elazar, the Chief of Staff, spoke to the public. He had, according to the official version, received the report on the Libyan plane "after some minutes of contacts between the planes-apparently between 14:03 and 14:05, and the contact was finished at 14:11 when the flaming Libyan plane touched the ground." Actually, as revealed by the all-important little black box, the contact ended at 14:09 when the bullets were fired at the wings of the Boeing to force it to land. Therefore the contact had not lasted more than from four to six minutes. As one Israeli newspaper saw it, "the reception of the information from the air force commander and his pondering, as well as the decision, were all executed within a single three minute connection. Why, they ask, was not more time given for the decision? Why did the Chief of Staff hear, think, and decide almost simultaneously?"

   Perhaps the excuse made by the Israeli fighter pilot at a press conference sheds some light. "When I hit him, he was at a minute's flight distance from the canal." This fear that the plane might have crossed back safely into Egypt was in line with the Chief of Staff's remarks that he had "to decide immediately." If the latter had waited to contact Defense Minister Dayan, the Libyan plane could have slipped away, which apparently would have been contrary to his instructions.

   Air Force Commander Mordechai Hod, who had directed the June 1967 air strikes against Arab airfields, claimed that the Libyan pilot could see the airport but had disregarded all signals. Hod ascribed certain words to the pilot that were totally disproved, again by the black box. There was no basis, according to the Israeli press accounts, for the Chief of Staff's statement that the Boeing pilot saw and understood the signals made by the Israeli Phantom pilots, disregarded and stubbornly refused to follow them. The pilot's words of confusion, as recorded, directly contradicted such a version.

   The first signal to land was given by the Israeli Phantom jets two minutes after the Libyan plane was identified. The first warning shots came a minute and a half later. In this briefest interim, Hod came to [378] [379] the conclusion that "there is no doubt that the Boeing crew understood what we were asking from them and that the crew saw the airport and refused to land there." But again according to irrefutable evidence, the Libyan crew did not see any airport. The first warning shots were fired at a time when the plane was moving away from the airport in a westerly direction toward the Suez Canal and Egypt. And Hod talked to his Chief of Staff after the plane had turned away from the Bir Gafgafa Airport, where the Israelis wished it to land, and perhaps even before the first warning shots were fired.

   It was established that the Chief of Staff had acted only after it was clear that the Boeing had not-and could not cause any harm in its mistaken course into Sinai. Fears that the plane had aggressive intentions were groundless. Aggressive intentions are carried out while moving toward a target and certainly not while going away, back to one's home base. Yet the Times continued to allude to this repudiated contention that the destructive design of the Libyan plane was a genuine possibility. Because of the impossible weather conditions, Israeli suspicion that the enemy might be taking air photos was likewise totally unjustified.

   While a Daily News editorial called the incident "a wantonly brutal downing, which shocked and horrified Israel's warmest friends,"38 in the four days following the wanton attack on the Libyan plane, not a single columnist in any of the New York papers carried a single reference to the incident. Moralists such as Peter Hamill, who spouted every time someone was killed in Vietnam or Israel, were glued to their chairs in total silence. Where Tom Wicker had written about the seeds of terrorism on the previous September 7, nothing now came from his fertile pen on Israeli brigandage.

   This U.S. reaction was in marked contrast to the hysteria that raged for ten days after the Israeli athletes had been killed-the endless, overwhelming, nationwide media reportage detailing the mourning, tributes to the dead, and vituperative censure of the Arabs.³⁹

   The media's gross romanticization of the Munich tragedy was exposed in a column by Shirley Povich in the Washington Post "It is time to deflate that guff about the great brotherhood the Olympics promote. They are torn by constant bickering among team officials of all the nations, and political alignments influence the judging in events like boxing, diving and gymnastics." In contrast to the sensationalism in U.S. newspapers that ran photos showing mourning athlete Jesse Owens, handkerchief in hand, and grieving Israeli teammates of the deceased,40 the Washington writer noted:

Olympic Village was a shame to behold on Tuesday afternoon, after the first shock at the news that two Israelis were dead and nine held hostage by Arab raiders. A few hours after the initial excitement subsided, you couldn't find an empty ping pong table in the village, rock music was blaring as usual, and it was just another day in Olympic Village. There was other evidence of boredom all around, even with their Israeli comrades having all that trouble in Building 33. 41

The funeral services both in Israel and in the U.S. for the one athlete who had been born American, but at the time of his death held Israeli citizenship, received the widest coverage. An Associated Press story out of Cleveland, Ohio, indicated that Governor John J. Gilligan, at that time a presidential hopeful, had ordered state flags to be lowered to half-mast in memory of this weight lifter who was one of the nine Israeli hostages "killed by Arab commandos" (two athletes died in the original attack at Olympic Village). The bereavement of the parents of David Berger overflowed onto every television set in the U.S. 42

   The Times' recital of the return of the bodies of the Arab victims of the Libyan plane incident to Cairo noted that six bodies, which were neither Egyptian nor Libyan, had been sent to the governments concerned: five to France and one to the U.S. This, three days after the incident, was the first reference whatsoever to the fact that an American had been among the victims. Only on the last six lines on page 8 of the New York Times 43 did the name of the American appear - Wladyslaw Boysoglebski, sixty-two years old, of Chicago, an American who had taken out citizenship after immigrating from Poland. No flags were ordered to be set at half-mast by Illinois Governor Richard B. Ogilvie when the body of this American was returned, in contrast to the honor accorded in Ohio to a half-American, half-Israeli serving on the Olympic team of a foreign country. A call to the cable desk of UPI to find out whether they knew anything about the disposition of the body that was being shipped via Tel Aviv embassy to the States yielded a total blank.

   While the responsibility or necessity for the German attack killing the Munich hostages was never established, at no point did the media ever call attention to this doubt. However, in the reportage of the Libyan plane incident, every sort of innuendo, excuse, or explanation was indulged in, either by the media on its own or by publicizing the views of the Israeli pilots, the Israeli army, and the Israeli government. Where the Munich story had received banner headlines right across the front page and was continued with large five-column Times [380] [381] headlines on the second day, the 110 innocent victims of trigger~happy Israeli pilots received, on the first day, three columns, and the third line of the heading gave the Israeli point of view, and that was that.

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   More than four years later, the Zionists were continuing to exploit the 1972 Olympics affair. ABC national television provided unpaid prime time (December 1976) at a cost of close to $2 million for a specially produced Sunday evening television film, Twenty-One Hours at Munich, under the meticulous direction of coproducers Edward Feldman and Robert Greenwald (illustrating once more the Zionist connection). The greatest liberties were taken with the facts to portray the Palestinians as the blackest villains, even attributing sorrowful last words to one Israeli athlete, who had died all alone. The ABC press releases, replete with pejorative adjectives, further spawned anti-Arab hatred.

   Everywhere this double standard prevailed 44 with but a few dissenting voices. Robert Pierpoint, CBS White House correspondent, was one of a handful to point out that the U.S. had lost its sense of fair play. He noted that in February 1973, when the Israelis carried out a commando raid deep in the heart of Lebanon, striking at Palestinian refugee camps 130 miles from their own territory with planes and tanks and wiping out thirty-seven lives in the process, "there was next to no outcry in this country." It was on this occasion that an entire Lebanese family of six was crushed to death as they sat in their car, by an Israeli tank. Many other innocents were killed in this same raid, along with a few Palestinian guerrillas, allegedly part of the Black September movement.

   Pierpoint on this CBS telecast declared that the shooting down of the Libyan airliner had drawn some official regrets, but not expressed publicly nor at the level of the White House. He continued:

Nor did any U.S. official ever indicate that the U.S might think twice before It dispatched more American-built Phantom jets to Israel of the type that had shot down the Libyan airliner. Indeed, the very next week, President Nixon let it be known after his talk in the Oval Office with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir that more such Phantoms would soon be on their way. Contrast these events with what happened after the Arab Black September's massacre of Israeli athletes at Munich. The U.S., from President Nixon on down, expressed outrage, and the President ordered steps taken to see that no such terrorism could strike at Israelis in this country.
  Senator Hugh Scott, after meeting with President Nixon to discuss domestic problems, standing at a White House podium, in response to a question on what should be done to the Arabs who had participated in the murders in Khartoum, responded, "I hope they shoot them all, and the sooner the better." No mention was made of a trial, or the possibility that if a fair trial were held, it might turn out that not all the terrorists were guilty of the murders.
  For so long Americans have become used to thinking of the Israelis as the good guys and the Arabs as the bad guys that many react emotionally along the lines of previous prejudices. The fact is that both sides have committed unforgivable acts of terror, both sides have killed innocents, both sides have legitimate grievances and illegitimate methods of expressing them. Perhaps the Arabs' action was more irrational-sheer terror. At least it was not backed by a relatively rational government which justifies its actions as necessary. The Israelis have and utilize a formidable political propaganda force in this country in the form of six million Jews. The Arabs have only slightly less than a million descendants in America just beginning to organize a nationwide counterforce. Perhaps this will help bring balance. In the meantime, the rest of us might apply more steady balance and fair play to the difficult problems of the Middle East " [Italics added.)

The broadcast was no sooner on the airwaves and reprinted in the Christian Science Monitor 45 than the usual hue and cry was raised. Pierpoint was, of course, charged with anti-Semitism, and his head was demanded. Telegrams and letters poured into the network. The CBS President and Vice President in charge of news were importuned to exercise some control over Pierpoint's judgment. The CBS correspondent had this to say about the smears and fears that were raised: "As you can imagine, some of the criticism was highly emotional if not downright hysterical. I was not surprised at this since the subject is a highly emotional one. I was mildly surprised at the manner in which the critics are so well organized that within hours people who had not heard the broadcast were protesting by phone or writing letters. In any case, the opposition to this kind of broadcast was and is formidable."46

   The treatment of the Ma'alot affair soon thereafter clearly indicated that the Pierpoint call for press fair play had fallen on deaf ears. On May 15, 1974, three fedayeen from the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP) stole across the Lebanese-Israel border (an Israeli nurse testified that one had been living nearby in Safad for a long time) and at six in the morning seized a Ma'alot school in which ninety teenage members of the semimilitary Nahal 47 had been spending the night after some training.

   Fifteen youngsters escaped through an open door at the time of the takeover, and two were allowed to leave because they were ill. The guerrillas sent two more youths out with a list of twenty-six prisoners held in Israeli jails whose release they demanded in exchange for the [382] [383] hostages. They asked that the French and Rumanian Ambassadors serve as mediators.

   The prisoners-twenty-three Palestinians, two Israelis, and one Japanese-were to be flown to Damascus, according to the guerrilla demand. As soon as the arrival of the released prisoners had been confirmed in the Syrian capital, the mediating Ambassadors would receive through Paris and Bucharest a code word with which to identify themselves before starting negotiations for the release of the hostages. But if no code word was received by 6:00 F.M., the guerrillas "would not be responsible for the consequences,' they warned.

   While negotiations were being carried on between the Palestinians, Israelis, Cairo (from where the plane to carry out the Palestinian prisoners was to come), and the Ambassadors, Israeli military forces attacked the school half an hour before the guerrilla deadline. In the ensuing battle the fedayeen were wiped out, but sixteen children were killed, victims of either exploding Palestinian grenades or Israeli bullets. And the Zionist-media alliance both in the U.S. and Britain (where I happened to be at the moment) went absolutely wild, even as the facts surrounding the tragedy's final moments became increasingly beclouded. While nothing could ever condone the brutal killing of innocent children, much evidence was adduced that the Israeli government had far from done everything in its power to avoid the tragic loss of life and that the military had overreacted. And it was the French Ambassador to Israel who cast the principal doubts on the oversimplified story disseminated by the Western press.

   Ambassador Jean Herly was waiting at the French Consulate in Haifa throughout the afternoon for the Israeli authorities to call him to Ma'alot. At 2:00 he had been informed by the Israelis that he was not to receive the code word permitting him to negotiate with the fedayeen until the prisoners held by Israel had been freed and had reached Damascus. At 3:22, according to Israeli Foreign Ministry documents, the Ambassador had requested permission to proceed to Ma'alot. The answer was delayed. Realizing at 4:45 that it was now impossible to organize the release of the Palestinian prisoners and get them to Damascus in time for the 6:00 deadline, the Ambassador had himself flown by helicopter to Ma'alot to plead with the Palestinians to extend their ultimatum.

   Upon his arrival, a high-ranking Israeli officer asked the French Ambassador if he had the code word. He replied in the negative, and then, as he told Agence France Presse, asked to meet the Minister of Defense or the Chief of Staff, "thinking that I could perhaps, even without the code word and through my diplomatic pass, get into contact with the fedayeen and try at least to postpone the expiration of the ultimatum." But he was informed it was "too dangerous." A few minutes later, at 5:30, in the words of the Ambassador to the press, he heard shots and explosions. "I was told that it was all over and asked to return to Tel Aviv." Acting on the direct orders of the Chief of Staff, forty minutes before the ultimatum's expiration at 5:20 P.M., the Israeli military forces stormed the building.

   Herly, a diplomat to the end, stated that he was certain that the authorities "had not willfully sought to prevent him from speaking to the terrorists, but I still ask myself and wonder: What could have been done that wasn't done between five o'clock and six o'clock?" He had been denied permission to talk to the Palestinians on the grounds that he had not received the code word from Palestinian headquarters in Damascus. But as the Ambassador later told the Jerusalem Post, there must have been a "grave misunderstanding" because he was, in fact, not supposed to receive the code word until the released prisoners had arrived safely in Damascus. Israeli Information Minister Shimon Peres insisted that Herly never could have talked to the Palestinians without having the code word in his possession.

   According to Ha'aretz of May 17, the government had decided early in the morning to reject the clearly understood Palestinian conditions. But to buy time, Moshe Dayan and General Mordechai Gur informed the fedayeen that they agreed to their terms, meanwhile formulating plans for the military rescue of the hostages. Fully aware of the overwhelming sympathy of the Western press, both the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense saw an opportunity to take a chance, even at the expense of children's lives, of making important favorable international propaganda at a time when Israel's public relations standing in the world had gravely plummeted. The die was cast, and French mediation efforts were not permitted to upset the carefully calculated Israeli planning.

   As at Munich, the Israelis justified the decision to storm the school on the conviction that the Palestinians intended, in any event, to kill their young hostages when their demands were rejected and the ultimatum ran out. Again, guerrilla action did not sustain this thesis. As PDFLP spokesman Yasser Abed Rubbuh later declared, the three terrorists had orders to prolong the original deadline by two hours in the event no agreement was reached. The Palestinians maintained that at no time did they plan to harm the hostages if their demands were met. Their plan had been to bargain the first half of the hostages for the [384] release of the prisoners on their list, and then the second half for the safe passage of the three Palestinians out of Israel.

   It was the Palestinian contention that the political decision to storm the school "whatever the consequences" had been made long before the 1600 GMT deadline was reached. According to the PDFLP version, "the Rumanian and French Ambassadors were (old by the Israelis they do not have any aircraft available to take the prisoners to Damascus." But the Rumanian government had been notified at 1530 GMT, half an hour before the deadline and the exact time the Israelis stormed the school, that the prisoners had actually taken off for Cyprus.

   The Popular Front openly admitted responsibility for Ma'alot, but at the same time, in a statement appearing in the London Times,48 PDFLP leader Nayef Hawatmeh challenged Israel to submit to a public postmortem to determine who, in fact, had been responsible for the bloodshed. This the Israeli government ignored, and the media declined to follow up the matter.

   Had there been a careful investigation, it would have been revealed that the border settlement of Ma'alot had been carefully chosen by Hawatmeh for this raid on the twenty-sixth anniversary of the establishment of the Israeli state. This village, once the Arab village of Tarchiha, as part of western Galilee, was to have been included under the 1948 U.N. partition plan in the Arab state, but was attacked and occupied before May 15, then annexed by the Israeli state. The Arab villagers fled during the fighting, and after the 1949 armistice their return was barred. The village was razed to the ground, and on its ruins the Israeli village of Ma'alot had been built.

   The U.S. media was totally uninterested in any exposition of Palestinian thinking. By the sheerest of coincidences, in the late evening of May 14 as the attack on Ma'alot was taking place, I was in Beirut taping a conversation with Palestinian Abu Nidal (a pseudonym), leader of a group that had split off from the PDFLP and is Iraq oriented. This twenty-five-year-old Palestinian expressed himself frankly and violently:

We believe that Palestine is ours, and the only way to get back what is ours is to fight.... I am not Mr. Sadat. I am a Palestinian, and I am not concerned with world opinion, including American, which has done nothing for our very fair cause through more than twenty-six years. The world can respect you only when you are strong enough to stand in the face of the world and fight for your cause.. .. We showed we were serious in our attack on Qiryat Shemona, and we will strike again. [385]

His reference was to the Palestinian attack six weeks earlier on an Israeli border village in which eighteen Israelis had been killed and sixteen injured, but three of his companions had lost their lives, the oldest of whom was just twenty years old.

   The following day when I reached London, this pertinent tape was used on BBC television and radio. But on arrival in New York, forty eight hours after Ma'alot, there was the accustomed total blackout from television-radio news and talk shows. No one dared put into question the Israeli-Zionist propaganda that the sole Palestinian aim was to murder the innocent and spread terror without cause.

   At Ma'alot little children had been involved, and hysteria ruled the American Jewish community. Brooklyn District Attorney Eugene Gold and companions chained themselves to a fence in front of the U.N. in protest. New York's Mayor Beame addressed a large emotional rally, urging the U.N. to adopt immediate sanctions against Arab countries to avert further acts of terrorism. New York Post columnists Max Lerner and Peter Hamill far outstripped in narrow, vindictive one-sidedness the efforts of other media pundits. Hamill screamed:

And now they were killing children, Israeli children.... People were dying in the deserts of the Middle East. Israel, which initially had allied itself with the U.S. on a moral basis, had discovered that it was just another colony, its fate in the hands of Henry Kissinger whose wife kept Arab swag in a wall safe in her bedroom.49

In Jerusalem Premier Golda Meir claimed her government had been prepared to submit to the commandos' demands to free the prisoners, but that they had not had enough time to act. In an angry television address she vowed that Israel "will do everything in its power to chop off the hands that intend to harm a child or an adult in any city or village." The Meir caretaker government, which was soon replaced by the Yitzhak Rabin Cabinet, came under increasingly angry attack from many quarters for its handling of the affair, as more and more of the facts began to leak out.

   One of the freed Ma'alot students, sixteen-year-old Rachel Lagziel, told reporters that the captives were allowed to listen to their transistors and to hear all the news broadcast in Hebrew. "We were allowed to drink our water and eat our provisions," eighteen-year-old Tamara Ben-Hamu later said. "Don't be afraid" one commando said. "If Israel gives us the prisoners, you will not be harmed." (This, of course, never appeared in the U.S. press~only in Israel.)

   Angry Israelis assailed Dayan. "You have made us the [386] [387] stepchildren of Israel," Ma'alot Council Chairman Eli Ben Yaacov screamed at him. "It's because most of us are from Morocco," he added.

   Before a day after the incident had passed, the Israelis had struck back against South Lebanon in a retaliatory raid. Air attacks against civilian targets brought death to fifty~two in an. impoverished refugee camp and in Lebanese villages. Am El Helweh and Bowry El Barajneh, refugee camps north and south of Beirut, were the targets of the Israeli air attacks carried out by thirty-six U.S.-supplied Phantoms. On the second successive day the "reprisal" for Ma'alot found the Nabitieh refugee camp in South Lebanon literally razed to the ground.

   The following is from a dispatch filed by Paul Martin, which appeared in the London Times on May 18:

  Rescue workers had just dug up the bodies of the young woman and her four small children from the rooms of their tiny house when I arrived in this Palestinian refugee camp today. The bodies were mutilated almost beyond recognition. Nobody knew the woman's name, but one refugee said he thought her husband had been killed during last night's Israeli bombing raids as well.
  The house was one of about 60, lining the camp's main street, which were flattened by three separate air strikes in two and a half hours. Half the camp, which holds 5,000 people, had been completely destroyed by direct hits on houses in no way connected with the Palestinian guerrillas. I counted more than 40 craters from 1,000-lb. bombs peppering an area of less than 400 square yards.
  Eight children, between the ages of 8 and 12 were killed when bombs showered down on the camp's school. Their bodies were taken to Sidon Hospital because their parents could not be found in the confusion. More bodies are expected to be recovered from the debris of twisted and crumbled buildings. The death toll so far in Nabatieh alone is 25 civilians killed and nearly 60 wounded.
  On the outskirts of the camp there was an endless string of pathetic processions to the sedate little cemetery. There were no demonstrations of overt grief or anger~just looks of shock and fear. Men, women and children, who died in Israel's reprisal, were taken at short intervals to hastily prepared graves. Their bodies were borne on open stretcher-like coffins, draped with a flower arrangement resembling the Palestinian flag.

  Nabatieh was the worst hit in Israel's wave of air strikes launched yesterday afternoon on Palestinian refugee camps and villages at 4 P.M. as the streets were filled with people. The bombing and strafing lasted 10 minutes. Then, as rescue workers began to drag the dead and wounded from the debris, they struck again at 5 P.M.; the final and most devastating strike came at 6:45 P.M.
  As I arrived in Nabatieh today, the last refugees were fleeing with mattresses and the bare essentials of survival: "This is the third time in the past three years that we have been driven out of here by Israeli air raids," an old villager said, "Each time we have had to build up all over again, but we will be back, perhaps in a week, perhaps in a month; but, God willing, we will be back."
  The presence of armed guerrillas in Palestinian refugee camps is no new phenomenon. However, at Nabatieh there clearly was no evidence in the camp itself of any guerrilla military bases. What is obvious from this latest Israeli blow against Lebanon is that civilians suffered the most. Little or no damage was done to the guerrillas and, if anything, they stand to gain much politically from what has happened.

  Such events tend to create militants. At one point a group of refugees who had lost a relative gathered around me when I was introduced as a British correspondent, a man of about 40 snapped angrily: "Curse you and your Balfour. Curse America. Curse you all."

A U.N. report on Nabatieh listed "60 percent destroyed, 20 percent badly damaged, 20 percent partly destroyed. Not one house had a roof left," the international organization noted. Yet such acts of terror against civilian populations were relegated to inconspicuous coverage, and the pretext for the merciless retaliation, that fedayeen were based in this area, was accepted as an extenuating circumstance for the killings in the retaliatory onslaughts on refugee camps.

   As planes brought death to 200 innocents in these latest May raids in South Lebanon, which had begun in 1968 and accelerated to almost daily attacks, the same politicians, ministers, rabbis, priests, and writers who had condemned the "cowardly methods" employed in the killings at Munich and Ma'alot found themselves acquiescing in the more sophisticated Israeli means of terror used in Lebanon. Exploding dolls dropped from planes "to entice" children to their deaths brought no outraged outcries. Lebanese villages such as Rashaya Fuqhar, once a prosperous town of 2,000 Christian Arabs and a handful of Palestinian refugee camps in the Arkoub region of Lebanon, were subjected to attacks by airplane, artillery, tanks, and gunboats. Israeli commandos invaded villages and camps alike, "forcibly checking identifications, blowing up houses, killing villagers, and taking prisoners."50 Still, certain American newspapers called this tragedy-the forerunner to the Lebanese civil war-a lesson that should serve as "an ultimatum to the Lebanese government to rid themselves of the Palestinians within their midst."

   It was very obvious that the "lords of the press" were not interested in striking an equal balance by reporting these as "atrocities" as they had so labeled Ma'alot. In the face of the Israeli aerial onslaught on innocent Lebanese and Palestinian refugees, all that the New York [388] [389] Times would do was to administer another mild slap to the Israel wrist and ask for "a determined show of restraint on both sides":

The fully justified anger and determination of Israel to resist terrorist assaults that have caused 49 deaths, mostly among children in ten weeks, nevertheless affords no sound basis for resort to counterterror from the air, especially when such indiscriminate tactics, also involving the death of many innocents, have repeatedly proved ineffective. In the present context, the Israeli response is especially unfortunate since it directly serves the Palestinian extremists' objectives.51 [Italics added.J

The principal concern of the Times was that the Israeli savagery was counterproductive.

   Unmatched continued Israeli and U.S. Zionist-induced media hysteria over the thirty-eight victims of the March 11, 1978, Palestinian raid served as a cover for Begin's retaliatory blitzkrieg into southern Lebanon. First reports two days later in the New York Post mentioned 250 deaths and 100,000 refugees.52 In Saturday's New York Times, Marvine Howe quoted "reports" of 100,000 refugees. In fact, there were some 260,000 refugees and approximately 2000 deaths. For noting that "apparently a dead woman in Lebanon is not worth as much as a dead woman in Israel, "Jimmy Breslin of the New York Daily News was bitterly assailed, and the next week an entire Sunday letters column was devoted to ten angry writers tearing him to pieces.

   Two Times editorials flayed "the senseless terror against Israel" and averred that, "beyond messages of condolence," the world "owes Israelis sympathy and partnership in measures to punish terrorism on every front,"53 and as late as May 7 correspondent William Farrell was writing about the "terrorist rampage in the March carnage. James Wechsler's front and editorial pages in the Post alternately spared no language in attacking the Palestinian raiders, bemoaned the "lost peace," and then gloried with across-the-page headlines: "Guerrillas Routed In All-Out Retaliation."54 As the air bombardment of fleeing innocent Lebanese and Palestinian civilians continued, the Times referred to the "justified Lebanese retaliation."55

   The Washington Post carried an AP picture of a machine-gunned car and reported the ambushing at Aadloun by Israeli commandos of two taxi-loads of Tibnine villagers. According to reporter Jonathan Randal, "one taxi was riddled with machine-gun bullets, the other hit by the fin of a rocket with Hebrew lettering on it. As many as 20 villagers-most of them women and children-were killed. "56 Marvine Howe of the Times simply reported that fifteen civilians had been killed and two wounded in circumstances that were "unclear,"57 while the Daily News briefly referred to an AP report of civilian deaths. The Time correspondent described the "ghastly" sight of the taxis, noting that fourteen in all had been slaughtered. Correspondent Dean Brelis referred to the "indiscriminate" bombing of the port city of Tyre, where, with the exception of one Palestinian anti-aircraft gun, "no military target had been hit. . . What had been hit, and hard, was the civilian dwellings. Was this deliberate counter-terrorism on the part of the Israelis? It certainly looked that way."58 Nothing of this was even hinted at in the Times or other U.S. dailies. And the State Department, which had quickly condemned what it called "a brutal act of terrorism against Israeli civilians," refused to issue any censure of Israel for its invasion of Lebanon.

   During an Israeli air bombardment of Lebanon the previous November in which more than 100 civilians were killed, a man in his sixties, as told by an American newsman, "lost everyone he had in the world at Hazziyeh - his wife, six children, his brother, his brother's wife, his brother's four children. Numbed by grief, he walked like a robot around a Palestinian Red Crescent hospital near Tyre. He knelt among the bodies of his family, crouched over the dirty mutilated face of his smallest son, kissed him and said, 'Darling, go. It doesn't matter, God is great.' "59

   This man, if possible, was perhaps more fortunate than other defenseless parents in unarmed Lebanese villages and Palestinian refugee camps upon whom, as Thomas Kiernan describes in the prologue of The Arabs, American-made Phantoms showered phosphorous bombs made of wax and acid-wax which stuck to the skin while the acid ate it away:

A human figure materialized out of the gloom, an eerie, unintelligible chant issuing from what was once its lips. Stumbling, weaving, then falling to its knees and crawling, it crept towards us. It was a child-boy or girl I couldn't tell-and its charred skin was literally melting, leaving a trail of viscous fluid in its wake. Its face had no recognizable features. The top of its skull shone through the last layer of scorched membrane on its head. Not more than ten yards from us it fell on its side, its kneecaps exposing like the yolks of poached eggs. It twitched once or twice in the dust, gave a final wheeze, then went still in the puddle of molten flesh that formed around it in the dust. . . . Later it was run over by a car. No one would ever know what had happened to that child.60

While the unparalleled destruction in Lebanon has since become a recognized fact, only the primary cause remaining in contention, the total devastation of Quneitra, the one-time capital of Syria's Golan [390] [391] Heights, remains one of the world's best-kept secrets.

   Under the terms of the Syrian-Israeli disengagement accord, the return of Quneitra to the Syrians was the principal quid pro quo for President Hafez al-Assad's reluctant acceptance of the fruits of Henry Kissinger's thirty~day shuttling. The southern quarter of the town, the hills surrounding it on three sides, and the rich cultivated land east, west, and south-still remained in Israeli hands, allegedly to protect Israeli settlements in the Hulah valley. Three Israeli settlements built since 1967, in defiance of U.N. resolutions, lay within four miles of the town. Without these Israeli settlers in the Golan, Kissinger might have been able to make a more satisfactory arrangement. But as one settler in Merom Golan boasted, "By our very presence we are proving once again the importance of settlement to Israel. Where we settle, there we shall remain."61

   The Syrian returnees in June 1967 were greeted by a Hebrew inscription on a demolished wall: "You wanted Quneitra. You will have it in ruins." This threat was carried out.

   Kurt Waldheim, Secretary-General of the U.N., after visiting the former capital of the Golan Heights, remarked: "I was very shocked by what I saw at Quneitra." For the Soviet Ambassador to Syria, Quneitra revived memories of Stalingrad at the end of the last war. And to Father George Muhassal, when he and his flock were finally permitted to reenter the city, it was Hiroshima all over again.

   In a statement released through the Near East Ecumenical Bureau in Beirut, this pastor of the Greek Orthodox Church in Quneitra charged the Israelis with bulldozing 80 percent of the city and with desecrating-looting Christian churches and the cemetery just prior to their withdrawal on June 26: "The concrete tombs were opened by machine~gun fire and, in some cases, hand grenades. The bodies were brought outside and systematically looted. Hands were broken off to get bracelets, teeth with gold were taken, and parts of the bodies were not put back in the proper coffins."

   Such accusations coming from a priest of a church in the city might be dismissed as exaggerations. But Irene Beeson, writing in the Guardian was most explicit in her description of the systematic Israeli destruction before leaving. These are the words, as recounted by Beeson, of one of the ten inhabitants who alone had remained under the Israeli occupation in 1967:

They had about eleven bulldozers stationed in the town, but they had to bring in reinforcements to cope with the huge task. The smaller houses collapsedunder a single thrust. For the larger two, three and four-story villas and buildings, they had to build earth ramps so that the bulldozers could reach the upper floors.

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  They worked from dawn to dusk for several days with grim determination and great expertise. It took them practically a whole day to finish off the three-story house down the street. Only the houses of the ten Arab inhabitants who had not fled were intact. Left standing, also, was the gutted, bullet-ridden 300-bed hospital which the Israelis used for target practice. One of the town's churches was destroyed. Others left standing and only slightly damaged structurally, but had been stripped of everything-marble facings on the walls, furnishings, precious 4th-century icons, statues, lamps.
  The shell of the Officers' Club is another landmark. What remains of this wall is riddled with bullet holes, decorated with sexy murals, insulting and pornographic graffiti. . . . Generators were removed and carted away by the Israelis, who made off with all the town's pumps for drinking and irrigation water. Into the water reserves and wells the Israelis had poured diesel oil, petrol and garbage, making good the inscription they had left behind.62

You can always read what others have to say, but that is not the same as viewing for yourself, as I did a year later, the utter emptiness and desolation of Quneitra, a city that had been bulldozed in its entirety. The tracks of the machines were still evident everywhere. Smaller houses had collapsed under a single thrust, while the larger villas and buildings had obviously been bulldozed in the manner described by Irene Beeson.

   Such dark devastation visited by man upon man has had few equals. The only signs of life were the stray, hungry-looking cat streaking across the road and a few wild red poppies that had sprung up beside the burnt-out framework of what once had been Quneitra's proud hospital. To me came a flashback to childhood:

In Flanders Field the poppies grow Between the crosses row on row
That mark their place.

My visit to Quneitra was on a cold May afternoon, but the temperature in no way could match the frigidity of the scene - dramatized by nearby snow-capped Mount Herman, where so many fierce aerial battles between the Syrians and the Israelis had occurred. The approaches to Quneitra were guarded by the Austrian U.N. peacekeeping force.

   This tragedy can best be seen through neutral eyes. However, despite continued widespread coverage of violence and terrorism in the U.S. media, there were no reports on Quneitra. In July 1974 an Australian delegation comprised of two members of Parliament, two [392] Labor leaders, two journalists, and the Federal Secretary of the Young Labor Association visited the Golan Heights. Leader of the delegation George Petersen wrote an article, "The Town That Used To Be," for the Australian publication, Nation Review:

The most striking feature of the Quneitra buildings is that, in most cases, there are no walls and the roofs are resting on the ground. How this was done is only too apparent by the caterpillar tracks on the ground near the destroyed buildings.63

After describing the conditions he found in the city, Petersen concluded:

Quneitra was destroyed for the same reasons that most of the original inhabitants were expelled from Palestine-because the Zionists intend to take over the land, expel the original inhabitants and use it for their own purposes. . . Looking across the cease-fire lines to Ain Zivan kibbutz in Israel, I know whom I would hate the most if I were a native of Quneitra. Not the soldiers, not even the bulldozer operators, but the men, women and children living on that kibbutz for the benefit of whom and of others like them the destruction of Quneitra was instituted at an enormous cost to the native inhabitants. And I know that I would want to cross the cease-fire line and kill those usurpers.

In the same publication, many letters from Zionists who knew nothing whatsoever about Quneitra emotionally reacted to the Petersen article. In a reply to one of the letters signed by five persons, Petersen struck back:

When I was at Quneitra on July 5, the bulldozer tracks were clearly visible. I am puzzled why the apologists for the Israeli government deny that Quneitra was destroyed by bulldozers and explosives! The Israeli practice of bulldozing Arab villages to the ground is well substantiated in past reports by such impartial parties as the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights. . . . Why should the Zionists have made an exception of Quneitra? I would particularly like your five correspondents to explain how they justify the forcible eviction to Syria of over 100,000 native inhabitants of the Golan Heights area. Does Israel's right to exist justify turning the civilian residents into homeless refugees? Or are your correspondents' concepts of humanity confined only to people who describe themselves as "Jews"?

Zionists contend that Quneitra had been destroyed during the 1967 and 1973 wars rather than methodically bulldozed at the time of the Israeli withdrawal. But a BBC documentary film showed Commentator Peter Snow some three or four days before the Israeli evacuation in a very alive city with many houses all intact-further proof that the [393] city had been calculatingly destroyed, house by house, church by church.

   Another eyewitness from the Australian delegation was Stewart West, President of the South Post Branch of the Waterside Workers Federation of Australia. Under the title "The Destruction of Quneitra," he wrote as follows:

In most war-damaged cities, you see heaps of rubble, bomb and shell craters, burned-out buildings, with walls still standing and sometimes whole streets left undamaged. But not in Quneitra. The city was completely destroyed in a couple of days immediately prior to the Israeli withdrawal on June 25, 1974. Most of the houses were demolished with explosives or pushed down with bulldozers. . . . The destruction of Quneitra must be in the same category as the destruction of ancient Carthage, as the destruction of European cities by the Huns, and the Mongols, and with Hiroshima and the Nazi destructions during World War II. 64 [Italics added.]

Australian trade union newspaper Scope in a special twenty-eight page supplement of August 1, 1974, devoted two of its pages to the Quneitra atrocities with a lead that read: "Syrian city of Quneitra used to be half-way between the Israeli border and Damascus. In June of this year, Israeli bulldozers destroyed the last of its houses, ripped down the last of its trees and orchards and pulled back up the hills of the Golan Heights." The main piece, presumably written by Scope's Editor, George Coote, added in part:

June 26 was days after the disengagement between Israeli and Syrian troops, and the last Arab house in Quneitra was destroyed minutes before UN peacekeeping forces moved in. . . . Quneitra was smashed with dynamite and bulldozers which made sure nobody would live there again.... This was a puzzle for the Australian delegation visiting the city. Did the Quneitra story hit the Australian media?

The answer to this question and to the query posed by British journalist Kathleen Evan's contribution to the same special issue, "Had You Really Heard About Israel's Genocide?" was identical. Next to nothing had appeared in Australia and Britain-and nothing in the U.S.-on the story of a gutted city where nearly 45,000 people once had happily lived.

   Zionist terror also reached the sidewalks of New York. One Sunday afternoon in January 1972, the relative stillness of Seventh Avenue was broken by the angry bellow of voices crying out in unison "Free Soviet Jews," alternating with "Six Million-Not One More." Carnegie Hall, where the Osipov Balalaika Orchestra was performing with stars [394] [395] of the Bolshoi Ballet and the Bolshoi Opera Company, was under siege. Two busloads of Mayor John Lindsay's police were keeping an angry threatening mob from ticket holders who had to pass the picket lines to enter the famed music hall.

   The ugly, tastelessly clad pickets who were alternately cursing, hissing, and spitting at other Americans, many of whom were themselves Jews, were members of Rabbi Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense League. Most of them were wearing buttons bearing their organizational emblem, "Never Again," while some had buttons reading "Free Syrian Jews." One woman in a fur coat had a cloth emblem with the flags of Israel and the U.S. joined together - symbolizing the duality of these rabid ultramilitants. And on that Sunday miscreants of the same ilk were picketing the Syrian Mission in another section of Manhattan. That evening the Egyptian Tourist Office at Rockefeller Center was bombed. And two days later a fire bombing of "unknown origin" erupted in the offices of impresario Sol Hurok and Columbia Artists, killing his secretary and injuring many. An anonymous caller to the Associated Press said: "Cultural bridges of friendship will not be built over the bodies of Soviet Jews. Never again." On this occasion the leaders of a few rival Israelist organizations in muffled voices related their disapproval to the press. But no action was taken, and history was being allowed to repeat itself.

   The case of Meir Kahane would require a long examination. All that may be noted here is the way he has benefited from the imposition of the double standard. The five-year suspended sentence given him in 1971 after his admitted manufacture of bombs, harassment of Soviet diplomats, and acts of violence against American and Arab citizens was scarcely believable. Only in a Brooklyn District Court presided over by Judge Jack Weinstein and in an America under Zionist domination could this have happened.

   In a news conference following the sentencing, the brazen Rabbi forthrightly disavowed the court's injunction against further breaches of the peace by stating that he would use violence if he determined it to be "necessary." He announced that he would divide his time between New York and Jerusalem, where he was opening an international center, and would "maintain dual citizenship as permitted under Israeli law."

   The militant Rabbi vacated the leadership of the group he founded after his defeat in the December 1973 Israeli parliamentary elections. The Israeli government deported him after he and other Israeli militants were arrested following a Gush Emunim demonstration during the summer of 1976 in an off-limits Hebron hospital on the West Bank. Kahane cried out to his followers living in the nearby Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba, which looks down on the Arab city from a promontory: "This is a Jewish city. Abraham lived here, and so will we. This is the building where Jews were murdered by Arabs." The six-columned New York Times report on page 2 showed a smiling, charismatic Kahane sitting in an Israeli army truck after his arrest.65

   Upon release from prison in his country of adoption, Kahane returned to the U.S. to face criminal charges. Convicted, he kept newly enthralled followers in line through his arrogant behavior from his "country club prison," as he used his demand for kosher food and religious observance to move freely in and out of confinement.

   His 1975 book, The Story of the Jewish Defense League,66 was reviewed in the Sunday Times book section by Herbert Gold 67 (on the same page as Elie Wiesel was reviewing The Blood of Israel. The Massacre of the Israeli Athletes), and the reputedly sensitive novelist referred to Kahane as a "lively rabbi with a baroque mind" whose "new book, ill-written, shrill and without nuance, nevertheless gets at a truth about contemporary Jewish experience which is generally missed by both the un-Jewish popular mind and the established Jewish organizations." The reviewer found Kahane at times "almost lovable," supporting the publisher's jacket blurb "that militance is and will be necessary to assure the future physical and spiritual existence of the Jewish people."

   Little wonder that Kahane and his breed in the JDL, despite an occasional rap on the knuckles, have been permitted to break the laws, shoot at the innocent, deface property, and attack with impunity. When Dr. Mohamed Mehdi of the Action Committee was attacked by JDL members with a lead pipe in May 1974 and sent to the hospital with a broken back,68 it took nearly a year for the police to make an arrest although a perpetrator appeared on television to boast of the deed. This same arrogant defiance of the law was manifested in an ugly attack on me when I lectured February 5, 1975 at William Patterson College at Wayne, New Jersey, in a rebuttal to an address made there by former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban.69 Neither of these incidents received any media attention. Shortly thereafter, Mehdi's offices on East 44th Street. in Manhattan were set afire and almost totally gutted. The New York Times relegated this obviously vicious arson to five short paragraphs on page 40, referring only to a "suspicious fire" resulting in "medium damage to office equipment."70 Yet this same newspaper had often given prominent coverage to the many Mehdi demonstrations and his often zany statements which did not put the [396] [397] Palestinian position in the best light.

   Frustration and desperation breed desperation and frustration. The grim reaction to the devastation suffered by the Palestinians in Jordan in 1970 led to an increase in violence and in the arenas in which force was applied. There emerged more desperate and intransigent guerrillas, groups such as the Black September tied to the internationalist terrorist-revolutionary movement. The Japanese Red Army, the Bader-Meinhof and other groups cooperated with Palestinians on whose strong moral position they drew to achieve their own ends in Europe. terrorist acts served as a sad reminder that these Palestinians just would not disappear. As Dr. Elmer Berger, expressed it:

Right or wrong, the exploits of the Palestinians stir an Arab world which knows that if the president of the United States calls them "outlaws," no power has done more to put these people outside the "law" than the United States. For no power is as responsible as the United States for Israel's persistent defiance of the "law" as it has been inscribed in every international agreement ever written on the Palestine problem."71

The vilification of Palestinians goes forward without placing their terrorism in the tragic context of the struggle for their right of self determination. This refusal of Western communications media to relate cause to effect has made the growth of violence inevitable and the ensuing harrowing conflict in Lebanon unavoidable. The die was first cast for that lovely country with Israel's December 1968 reprisal attack on the Beirut Airport.

   For this double standard the New York Times must bear a heavy responsibility, riveting so much attention, as it has, on the subject of terrorism and refusing (even in a piece "Terrorism or Liberation Struggle? Violence Begets Many New Nations"72 in which the PLO was discussed but not a word said about Begin's Irgun) to place any blame on Israel for the use of violence from the onset of her successful struggle for "legitimacy," but on every occasion detailing the rise of the PLO through alleged stages of terrorism.73

   In a June 22, 1974, editorial following the Palestinian attack on the Israeli border villages of Kiryat Shemona, Ma'alot, and Shamir 74 in which fifty-one in all had been killed, the Times placed the responsibility for the "stepped-up Palestinian terrorist attacks and Israeli counterattacks" at the door of "die-hard Palestinian extremists, infuriated by the rapid erosion of the support for their intransigent stand among their own people as well as in Arab capitals... these frustrated fanatics have resorted to repeated acts of barbarism in a desperate effort to reverse the accelerating momentum toward accommodation." (Warned indeed they were, as were all Palestinians, that there might be a Middle East accommodation that did not take into consideration their 'inalienable rights.'')

   It is the saddest commentary on the decadence of the world in which we live, that the only way these people could be heard was to launch repeated terrorist attacks. Who knew about the Palestinians before Munich? Who cared one whit about the rights of Palestinians before Ma'alot? The answer is obvious-no one! There have been myriad stories about the poor Jewish refugees from everywhere coming into Israel and building up "the desert," but what humanitarian pieces broke into print about the Palestinians who had been thrown out from their ancient homes, until they struck and struck hard? And did not Winston Churchill in his History of the English Speaking Peoples once write, "It is in the primary right of man to fight and to kill for the land they live in."75

   Parade compounded the Times' felonies with its own piece: "Terrorists: How They Operate a World-wide Network" in which it was made to appear that most terrorism stems solely from the Arab Middle East where "a gusher of Arab oil money is available" and "President Qaddafi, an unpredictable Big Daddy, subsidizes terrorism to the tune of $90 million a year. 76 In an October 1976 interview, "Our Very Existence Depends on the U.S.," with Parade writer George Michaelson, Prime Minister Rabin complained that the media had blown up the West Bank demonstrations. The article contained the subhead, "An Exaggerated Picture," above reports of Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians, together with a photograph captioned: "Israeli Soldiers Grab West Bank Rioter."77 But four months later, an expansive, flattering Michaelson outpouring on President Sadat (the cover showed the Egyptian holding a rose) discussed every aspect of war and peace in the Middle East without the word "Palestine" appearing once.78 And in two other articles dealing with the West Bank problem, this writer further attached the terrorist label to the Palestinians and dismissed the PLO with an unsubstantiated blanket statement that "among older, wealthier and more traditional West Bankers, the PLO's militancy is suspect."79

   Few in the media cared to distinguish between terror as carried out by private groups or individuals and terror as executed as part of governmental policy. Neither the leaders of the Irgun nor of the Stern Gang had ever been prosecuted by the Israeli government after the establishment of the state. These terrorist groups were absorbed into [398] [399] the Israeli army intact as special units and their leaders elected to the Knesset. And shortly after he took over as chief of state, Begin issued a postage stamp honoring Abraham Stern, whose group had helped him in the assault on Deir Yassin and had masterminded the assassination of U.N. mediator Folke Bernadotte.

   As South Dakota Senator James Abourezk noted in a speech on the Senate floor prior to the Ma'alot incident, the village of Kfeir in South Lebanon where his parents had been born "was bombed by Israeli Phantoms, fueled by American bombs and American money." In that attack four civilians had been killed: a six-month-old baby, a five-year-old and an eight-year~old child, and the mother of one of the children. Coming two days prior to Ma'alot, the Israelis could not claim "retaliation." And if ever there were heartrending de~ails that lent themselves to dramatic rendition, here they were. But no NBC spectaculars, no New York Times Sunday magazine or Parade renditions ever sobbed out this tale.

   Senator Fulbright added his comments to those of his South Dakota colleague, noting that these persistent attacks cast doubt on Israeli's sincerity for peace, a capital reason for the U.S. media reticence to publicize Israeli raids on civilian sites in South Lebanon and on defenseless refugee camps. The standard Israeli justification for these raids had invariably been to bomb "terrorists" who had committed previous acts of violence against them. Yet the "terrorists" who committed the Ma'alot atrocity had died at Ma'alot.

   Nor had other Israeli "retaliations" scarcely ever been visited upon those Palestinians who had perpetrated the provocative raids. Rather, the Israeli alleged responses" were aimed at eradicating any chance of a peace settlement according recognition to the Palestinians. A spiraling sequence of violence and terrorism was hardly likely to muster the respect from the world the displaced Palestinians so desperately needed in order to win acceptance of their rights~rights which, if granted, might jeopardize the existing character of the Israeli state.

   What added insult to injury for the handful of protesting Senators was that these Israeli raids had been all carried out with armaments supplied by the U.S. through a vote of the very legislative body in which they served. As Senator Abourezk pointedly reminded his colleagues in the Senate (scarcely reported outside of the Congressional Record):

If we in the United States are to furnish Phantom jets, bombs, napalm, fire bombs and money to fuel the planes when they do the bombing and the killing in southern Lebanon, then we must be held accountable for the deaths that will result from what I consider to be official Israeli Government terrorist activities - no less terrorist in nature than an act of three of four individual Arabs who kill civilians in Israel.
  Mr. President, this raises one important question: "Where are the doves in the United States today who cried and who agonized over the killing in Vietnam - the killing that was carried out in the very same manner as it is being done now in souther Lebanon? Where are these people today who protested that same kind of killing in Indo-China?"
  The answer is obvious, Mr. President: They are deathly silent and in some cases, those very same doves are cheering on the Israelis in their bombing raids that result in the slaughter of so many innocent people. 80

The significance of the role played by the issue of terror in achieving the Middle East "cover-up" has been surpassed only by the contribution of the syndrome of anti-anti-Semitism to the "cover-over," which shall now be examined.

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·                     Exploiting Anti-Semitism

"In a democracy every group that affects public policy must be accountable to the entire citizenry. A democracy cannot survive if Iron Curtains are placed around groups, secular or religious, that Intervene in public affairs."

- Paul Blanchard

 
THROUGHOUT HISTORY, important civilizations have fallen due to reasons ranging from external overexpansion to internal corruption. Should the Western way of life, of which the U.S. is the chief progenitor, fall victim to the ravages of time, future historians might well ascribe the downfall to a scarcely known disease, "labelitis." The "label" has contributed to the paralysis of individual thinking and has led to the concomitant mass conformity which, together with fear, has helped transform America into a nation of sheep years before "1984."

   The influence of the label and slogan is infinite. The unadorned cliche' parades forth shamelessly and unchallenged, sweeping politicians everywhere in and out of office. Slap the word "liberal," "Fascist," "reactionary," or "Communist," as the case may dictate, on any point of view you do not like, and a sure, quick victory can be yours Immediately.

   Nothing has accounted more for the success of Zionism and Israelism in the Western world than the skillful attack on the soft underbelly of world opinion - "Mr. Decent Man's" total repugnance toward anti-Semitism. The charge of this bias, instantaneously bringing forth the specter of Nazi Germany, so totally pulverizes the average Christian that by contrast calling him a Communist is a pleasant epithet. It was the Christian revulsion toward anti-Semitism in the wake of Hitlerian genocide, not the superiority of Zionist over Arab rights, that first created and then firmly entrenched the Israeli state, even permitting [403] [404] the occupation of conquered territories in the face of the U.N. charter and international morality. So strong has become the general aversion to anti-Semitism that even the full-blooded Semite, the Arab, absurd as it may be, has difficulty defending himself against this charge. The Jerusalem peace talks in January 1978 were disrupted when Prime Minister Begin hurled accusations of "anti-Semitism" at both President Sadat and his Foreign Minister.

   The emotional reaction, engendered by Nazi genocide, has given rise to an eleventh commandment, "Thou shalt not be anti-Semitic," and to a corollary twelfth commandment, "Thou must be anti-anti-Semitic." No Christian wishes to run afoul of these supplements to the interdictions handed down by Moses from Mount Sinai. In their zeal to carry out the new commandments, the anti-anti-Semites, guided by Organized Jewry, have rejected the basic distinction between those who are against Zionism-Israelism because they deplore its political precepts and abhor the consequences wrought by its measure, and those who are against Jews because they simply dislike Jews. Christian anti-Zionists and even Jewish anti-Zionists are alike denounced as antiSemites- discussion, muted doubts, and debate on Middle East policy are crushed.

   As Harvard's Dr. David Riesman noted some years ago in the Jewish Newsletter : "The Zionists can muster not merely the threat of the Jewish vote and the no-less important Jewish financial and organizational skills, but also the blackmail of attacking anyone who opposes (heir political aims for Israel, as anti-Semitic."1 For writing that "it is a sign of mediocrity in people when they herd together," Boris Pasternak, the Russian author of Dr. Zhivago, was immediately stigmatized by responsible Zionists, including the then Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, as an anti-Semitic Jew.

   That there are bigots and haters, that there was a Nazi Germany whose unparalleled genocide still stings the conscience of Man, and that there still is anti-Semitism, no one but the most irrational would deny. It is one of an infinite number of prejudices that ought to be eradicated. However, the presence of this sociological phenomenon should not give inviolability to the ruthless suppression of even the most constructive criticism of the State of Israel and of the multifold Zionist organizations. Anti-Zionism can no more be equated with anti-Semitism, the racist ideology directed against Jews as Jews, than Zionism can be equated with Judaism.

   Leading the high-pressure, efficiently organized, continuous campaign to keep anti-Semitism in the limelight through the pursuit of [405] alleged anti-Semites, as well as to suppress all dissent with Washington's "Israel First" policy, is the well-financed offspring of the 130-year-old B'nai B'rith, the Anti-Defamation League, which was founded in 1913. Known as the ADL, this most powerful organ is supported on most occasions by other Jewish organizations. The ADL's earlier emphasis on stamping out genuine prejudice and bigotry gave way long ago to acts of defamation, spying, and publishing spurious literary productions, motivated by support of Israel and effected by eliminating critics of Zionist tactics.

   The ward of the oldest and most powerful Jewish organization in the world, the ADL backs up its New York City national headquarters with an annual budget of $7.4 million (1975); twenty-eight regional offices around the country and two in Canada; a professional staff of 300, including specialists in the fields of human relations, communications, education, urban affairs, social sciences, religion, and law. It has representatives in hundreds of communities from coast to coast, and has thousands of secret dossiers on citizens of Canada and of the U.S. According to its own pamphlet: "Each regional office has its own board drawn from leaders and prominent citizens in its areas. Thus, in hundreds of communities throughout the nation, the ADL is able to cooperate as a neighbor to solve important local problems. Through its multifold private and public reports, allegedly directed against prejudice and bigotry, the ADL exerts enormous prejudice, often bordering on blackmail.

    In a True magazine interview in February 1971, three top leaders of the ADL, Benjamin Epstein, Seymour Graubard, and Dore Schary, boasted of their use of undercover agents and entrapment through impersonation. "ADL must have a pretty extensive spy network to do all this," the interviewer commented. Newsweek, trying to be as inoffensive as possible, called the ADL's methodology "highly selective," and, "never a total portrait."2 A review of ADL "Reports," often issued in book form by outside publishing houses, revealed the organization "straining to fit the products of its own espionage into the procrustean bed of its own personal predilections," to use the words of Unitarian minister and author Dr. John Nicholls Booth, a victim and a critic of that same organization. While sounding plausible, many of the charges leveled by this group were full of half-truths, inaccurate and questionable. The secret and confidential reports of the ADL, widely distributed in liberal circles, often resorted to placing the stock apology "but some of my best friends are Jews" in the mouths of critics to impute an innuendo of anti-Semitism. Odious impressions were often [406][407]created by twisting a few words, distorting the original text.

   Increasingly, the B'nai B'rith and the ADL have directed their activities, allegedly against bigotry, toward assisting Israel. When Israel's Ministry of Tourism decided to offset adverse 1967 headlines in the American press about the constant aerial bombing of Arab lands by inviting 1,200 foreign newsmen to Israel for a visit, the B'nai B'rith not only recruited journalists but organized their subsidized tours.3 The ADL continuously employed its "nonprofit organization" postal permit to disseminate Israeli propaganda publications, as it did during the June 1967 war 4 and on an infinite number of occasions since. As former B'nai B'rith officer Saul E. Joftes brought out in his suit against the brotherhood, which he carried successfully to the Supreme Court despite efforts of attorneys to stall adjudication for almost four years, charitable, tax-deductible funds were diverted into Israel-related projects of a political or quasi-political nature.

   Americans who have recently shown how sensitive they are to threats to their privacy and liberties when CIA wiretapping and spying were revealed have never been told about the building of what might be called the Jewish Gestapo or the largest nongovemment spy system function mg in the Western hemisphere. In his book The Pledge,5 Leonard Slater, a staunch Zionist sympathizer, detailed the many illegal programs devised to assist in bringing Israel into being. Starting in 1945, Zionists enlisted key Jews and Gentiles in many countries around the world; connived with judges, custom officials, and politicians; and according to FBI reports, even smuggled weaponry and men out of the U.S. and Europe, past the British into Palestine for the day of reckoning with the Arabs. Washington economist Robert Nathan interceded with J. Edgar Hoover to help free Zionist agents arrested at the Canadian border for smuggling arms destined for Israel. 6 Cases of rifle barrels were stolen from the U.S. Naval Supply Depot in Hawaii.

   Under the lead of the "Sonneborn Institute," named after U.S. Haganah leader Rudolf Sonneborn, the quest for an armament industry was realized. Material was gathered for Palestine into depots from Zionist organizations across the U.S. From Wisconsin came 350,000 sandbags, from Ohio 92,000 flares, from New Jersey 25,000 helmets. Chicago supplied 100 tons of barbed wire and ten tons of khaki paint; while New Orleans sent salt tablets and penicillin. San Francisco offered mosquito netting, Minneapolis 600 mine detectors, and from the port city of Norfolk, Virginia, two corvettes, an ice cutter and, "to guide the naval strategists of the future Jewish state, the complete memoirs of Admiral von Tirpitz."7

   Under the guise of Talmudic studies in New York City, attorney Nahum Bernstein was teaching espionage and hand-to-hand fighting. This intelligence school met in an Orthodox religious tax-exempt institution which called itself the National Council of Young Israel.

   Through the B'nai B'rith, the ADL, the American Jewish Committee, and varied Zionist and pro-Israel groups, Israeli intelligence continued to penetrate into every part of the U.S. Temples, synagogues, and rabbis unabashedly cooperated. In fact, there was a cynical joke that is said to have circulated in the Pentagon: Every confidential military memo apparently was typed in triplicate, "one for the White House, one for the State Department, and one for Tel Aviv." At one point the Israeli navy was a photocopy of the U.S. Navy even as far as training from the Blue Jackets Manual.

   Outside of the U.S., too, secretive surveillance and purchased support for Israel went forward. The February 1970 hearings of the U.N. Non-Governmental Organization Committee heard a report that there was "a clandestine program of quasi-espionage in Eastern European countries, through American Jewish tourists, conducted by the Israeli government and paid for by the Israeli government, but run from inside B'nai B'rith, which was used as a cover-up."

   There are many ways of using anti-Semitism as an instrument to compel agreement with the Zionist position and to still any criticism of the Israelis. Foreign Minister Abba Eban, on the occasion of one of the many Israeli reprisals against Lebanon, defended Israel's actions: "The attitude of foreign countries cannot be entirely divorced from 'he traditional attitude of the non-Jewish world to the Jewish world." According to this theme on which the eloquent Israeli spokesman elaborated in 1974 and 1975 after he had retired from his Cabinet post and was lecturing on American university campuses while teaching at Columbia University, any and all criticism of Israel could only be considered anti-Semitic.

   Dr. Willard Oxtoby, writing in Presbyterian Life,8 had this to say on 'he effect of the anti-Semitism labeling:

"Hopefully, anti-Semitism may soon become a sin of the past, but for the time being, it is still an emotionally potent word and nobody wants to be caught being anti-Semitic. . . . Like the news media, and for the same reasons, the Christian critic of Zionism is paralyzed. He cannot condemn Israeli armed conquest because he must pussyfoot in the delicate area of religious prejudice. As a result, Zionism is a subject on which in the United States there is more effective suppression of freedom of speech than any other." [408] [409]

   Since criticism of Jews by blacks automatically became labeled anti-Semitism; since censure of Israel by Christians ranging from President Charles de Gaulle to the General Assembly and Security Council of the U.N. was held by the world Jewish community to be but another "manifestation of perennial anti-Semitism," according to Abba Eban; since anti-Zionism was declared by the Rabbinical Council of America to be but a new guise for anti-Semitism, it was inevitable that freedom of expression in the U.S. became totally restricted. Veteran Zionist leader Dr. Nahum Goldmann alleged there was a new kind of anti-Semitism that had sprung up in Communist countries and elsewhere among those whom he chose to term "members of the left wing." This variety of anti-Semitism, he asserted in February 1969, was being propagated in the form of anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist positions.

   Exploitation of prejudice reached unheard of heights in the 1974 study of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), The New Anti-Semitism, written by its high priests of the cult of anti-anti-Semitism, General Counsel Arnold Forster and National Director Benjamin R. Epstein. According to the press release, headed "Searchlight on Hatred," widely distributed by publisher McGraw-Hill, the new anti-Semitism is based on the old, only it emanates from different and surprisingly respectable sources. "The hostility of the Radical Left, the Radical Right, pro-Arab groups, black extremists, and a malingering anti-Jewish hate-mongering that has plagued the United States since the early twenties" has allegedly now been augmented by "others within the government, the media, the clergy and the arts, who are insensitive to Jews and Jewish concerns, particularly to the needs and wants of the State of Israel."

   And as authors Forster and Epstein indicated in their two-hour, unopposed radio interview on New York's popular WMCA Barry Gray talk show, anyone who does not go along 100 percent with their views on Israel is deemed "insensitive" and therefore "anti-Semitic." The ADL leaders made it very clear that "any threat to the security of the State of Israel" must be considered a threat to the Jews of the U.S. and hence must be viewed as anti-Semitism. The reason given by them for this new bigotry: "The hard-won status of American Jewry."

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   The publication of this much ballyhooed study and book just happened to coincide with the growing feeling in many parts of the country that Zionist pressure, influence, and financial power had been responsible for the energy crisis that brought gas shortages and grave dangers. The cultists bitterly complained that Jews were no longer protected by the "moral indignation that followed the holocaust." Apparently, they wished to extend a protective curtain over the Zionist-imposed Middle East policy and other positions espoused by the Jewish Establishment.

   This was the seventh of the books on which these same authors had collaborated. 9 As usual, the book was released to the press first as a study one month before publication to lay the groundwork for a vast publicity follow-up. The New York Times obliged, as customary, with solid three-column coverage headed "Report by Anti-Defamation League Sees Example of New Kind of Anti-Semitism."10

   This latest ADL work contained no index, probably purposely because it would have quickly revealed an imposing roster of respectable people listed as "anti-Semites." The tightly woven volume, set in smaller than usual type, contained infinite words and multifold unproven charges based on innuendo and insinuation. The names of those who were vilified were interwoven with those of a few recognized bigots and were adroitly dropped among members of the Radical Left, the Radical Right, Arab, and black extremists - a perfect example of the deceptive method of affixing guilt by juxtaposition.

   While the Foreword of its latest "study" set forth the ADL's longterm goal to "fight against prejudice, bigotry and discrimination" with "the weapons [of] law, education and public persuasion . . . to seek justice and fair treatment for all citizens alike," this widely accepted image of the organization was destroyed by the repeated insistence of the authors that "American Jews regard attacks on the existence of Israel as the ultimate anti-Semitism." As stated in the last paragraph of the Epilogue, "the heart of the new anti-Semitism abroad in our land" lies in the "widespread incapacity or unwillingness to comprehend the necessity of the existence of Israel to Jewish safety and survival throughout the world." Therefore, the mildest criticism of Israel or of Zionist activities was viewed as offensive "insensitivity" or "callous indifference" and was equated to anti-Semitism, distinguishable from the traditional kind, the authors averred, in that "the new antiSemitism is not necessarily deliberate in character and is more often expressed by respected individuals and institutions here and abroad people who would be shocked to think of themselves or have others think them as anti-Semites."

   In this Foreword ADL National Chairman Seymour Graubard laid the groundwork for old, recognizable tactics:

"While the memory of the Nazi Holocaust was fresh in mind, anti-Semitism was silenced. As that memory fades, however, as Jews are more and more being [410] [411]considered a part of the Establishment, there are new growths of anti-Semitism. They are being nurtured in a climate of general insensitivity and deterioration of morality and ethics, the kind of climate, history reminds us, in which anti-Semitism grows best."

   Having recalled the past to build fear and to invent present hostile situations, the ADL was ready to apply the smear and vilification so as to censor and silence, thus building an iron curtain over America that would bar any criticism, however constructive, of Israel, Zionists, or Jews (Judaism is rarely, if ever, involved). Even the New York Post's James Wechsler, long an avid friend of Israel, was objective enough to write that the latest Forster-Epstein ADL work is "grievously flavored by an intolerance of their own in equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism." Calling the presentation "illegitimate and uncivil," the columnist described a standard

"..which requires a kind of political psychiatry to isolate hidden intent, by proceeding from a well-documented dissection of the frenzies of Gerald L. K. Smith to a loose indictment of Senator J. William Fulbright and columnists Evans and Novak. They do not explicitly apply the label anti-Semitic to the latter three. But the context in which the attack appears - indeed their inclusion in the volume carries, to borrow their words, 'an unmistakable message' and inescapable 'innuendo.' "11

   The assumption of the simultaneous role of judge, prosecutor, witness, and juror brought this sole protest from the "brave" band of liberals who are otherwise frothing at the mouth at such stifling of freedom. All of the ADL books, with the tremendous publicity given to them before, during, and after publication (they were widely promoted on radio and otherwise by among others, Walter Winchell, during his days of fame) and the extensive advertising, ought long ago to have earned for the organization its appropriate name, "The Defamation League."

   The growth of anti-Semitism, which the ADL and other Israelist groups allegedly feared, suited the needs of the Zionists who wished to make Jews more conscious of their Jewishness. The worship of ethical universal Judaism, in their eyes, was for the few skull-capped old men and Talmudic scholars. But for the masses, who were turned off by the tedium of synagogue worship, there was the new exciting Israelism and the worship of anti-anti-Semitism.

   From its outset the Zionist movement had clearly indicated the extent of its vested interest in prejudice. Herzl expressed the hope that any anti-Semitism would "act as a propelling force which, like the wave of the future, would bring the Jews into the promised land."12 At the same time he also wrote: "Anti-Semitism has grown and continues to grow-and so do I" 13 The father of Zionism predicted: "The governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want."

   The rabbinate had long employed anti-Semitism as a means of keeping the flock within the fold, and since the creation of Israel, support in the Diaspora has been continuously and easily enlisted by depicting the new Jewish state as a kind of insurance policy in case of a renaissance of anti-Semitism. Consequently, Zionist leadership has cared little about how much anti-Semitism their own separatist activities might generate.

   The late British Parliamentarian Richard H. S. Crossman, an ardent Anglo-Saxon proponent of Zionism, cited Dr. Chaim Weizmann's contention that "anti-Semitism is a bacillus which every Gentile carries with him wherever he goes and however often he denies it."14 At this first meeting Dr. Chaim Weizmann allegedly bluntly asked Crossman whether he was anti-Semitic, to which the Labourite frankly answered, "Of course." Their friendship was sealed, and Crossman's energetic crusade, partly expiation for that original prejudice, followed.

   Bigotry has only been so much grist for Zionist mills. Crossman expressed it thus: "Who achieved that majority vote for partition at Lake Success? Not the terrorists of the Irgun nor the soldiers of the Haganah, but the aged leader of international Jewry [Weizmann], who could still sham and magic the Gentile world into recognizing its debt to her people."15 It is this continued process of shaming the Christian world into accepting the guilt for the genocide of six million Jews that first brought Israel into being, and since then has been the means of rallying continued support for Israel's cause in the U.S. and in the Western world.

   Parliamentarian Ian Gilmour, writing in the British magazine The Spectator, noted the inevitable link between Zionism and anti-Semitism:

"Since the basis of Zionism is that Jewish assimilation in other countries is in the long run impossible and that anti-Semitism and persecution are bound to break out sooner or later, Zionism has almost a vested interest in racial discrimination. The Israelis mount 'rescue operations' to save allegedly threatened Jews in other countries. . . . In Arab countries, Jewish difficulties and emigration to Israel were the result not of anti-Semitism, but of Zionist activities and the existence of the State of Israel. Zionism aggravated the disease that it professed to cure." 16 [412] [413]

This was a reecho of the words voiced earlier by Dr. Judah Magnes, the first President of Hebrew University: "We had always thought that Zionism would diminish anti-Semitism in the world. We are witness to the opposite."17

   The separatist philosophy of Zionist dogma, staunchly supported by Organized Jewry after the holocaust, has been picked up alike by "retrogressive" conservatives and by liberal friends who would otherwise look askance at the mere mention of apartheid. And this overwhelming sentiment manifested itself, almost as if in answer to the blunt warning of Goldmann that a "current decline of overt anti-Semitism might constitute a new danger to Jewish survival. . . . The disappearance of 'anti-Semitism' in its classic meaning, while beneficial to the political and material situation of Jewish communities, has had a very negative effect on our internal life."18 Counsel Leo Pfeffer of the American-Jewish Congress voiced a similar statement: "Such discrimination may well be a blessing. It is possible that some anti-Semitism is necessary in order to insure Jewish survival."19 In Britain, too, an article in Blackfriars Magazine pointed to the danger of the extinction of the Jewish community because of the absence of anti-Semitism. 20

   The large-city media came to the rescue and prevented such a catastrophe from occurring by keeping the anti-anti-Semitic pot boiling. Through its virtual control of the media, the Zionist machinery had no problems orchestrating three important themes:

(1) Arab anti-Semitism: the hostility of the Arab world, and particularly of Gamal Abdel Nasser and later of Yasir Arafat and the PLO, allegedly stemming from the same kind of bigotry and hatred that was manifested in Hitlerian genocide.

(2) Russian anti-Semitism: the Jews in the Soviet Union and elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain were singular victims of Communist terror and must be permitted to go to Israel.

(3) Christian anti-Semitism: the bigotry that first persecuted Jews as followers of Judaism and then permitted six million Jews in Europe to be wiped out allegedly still manifested itself in continued acts of hostility toward Jews and particularly toward the State of Israel.

   An attempt was made to link alleged Fascist activities in Argentina with increasing anti-Semitic overtones in Egypt. In the spring of 1975 Argentine Ambassador in Washington Alejandro Orfila asked his good friend Egyptian Ambassador Ashraf Ghorbal to briefly see a visiting writer for a supernationalist publication called Marchar. In response, Ghorbal received the writer for just three minutes. Patricio Kelly, this particular writer, spoke no English whatsoever and the Egyptian Ambassador speaks but a few words of Spanish and Italian. The only other person present was a photographer whom Kelly brought along; most unfortunately, no effort was made to obtain an interpreter. Several weeks after the story of the interview appeared-and the paper went out of business not long after-the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in Buenos Aires fed a long section of the alleged interview, "Extermination of Judaism in the Mideast Is Point of Departure for Arab Liberation," through its main trunk wire extending worldwide to the specialized Jewish press, which immediately picked up the story.

    Jewish Week of Washington headlined its April 3 story: "Egyptian Ambassador Foresees Extermination of judaism." An additional commentary on the alleged interview was carried by the national chauvinistic Brooklyn Jewish Press (April 11) with the headline: "Extermination of Jews." Letters containing clips of this alleged interview poured into the Egyptian Embassy in Washington. Even the respected and fair Guardian in England published a large portion of the alleged interview, but later carried a full retraction apologizing "for running a piece of black propaganda," which the newspaper admitted was obtained from an Israeli source that was impeccable."

   The opposition Herut party demanded in the Knesset that the Israeli Foreign Ministry "reprint and distribute millions of copies of the interview by one of President Sadat's principal advisers," which they claimed proved what Israelis had always contended: "The conflict is not over territories, but over the very existence of Israel and the Jewish people."

    Executive Vice President of the Synagogue Council of America Rabbi Henry Siegman wrote Ghorbal: "Based on our association, I simply find it impossible to believe that you could have said the things attributed to you."21 Chairman of the Board of the World Jewish Congress Philip M. Klutznick forwarded to Ghorbal a similar message. Evans and Novak described the defamation of the Egyptian Ambassador as "cruel and tragic and without any effort to check the accuracy of the inflammatory report in a worthless publication . . . the understandable emotions and fears of thousands of Jews have been manipulated in the rising crescendo of the propaganda battle."22

   Every incident everywhere in the world in which a Jew or someone reputed to be of "Jewish ethnic background" was victimized was being incessantly presented by the Times as another example of Hitlerian anti-Semitism. (Managing editor A. M. Rosenthal early in his career wrote a sentimental piece as a correspondent in Europe following his visit to Auschwitz and admitted "that there is no news to report," but [414] "there is merely the compulsion to write something about it," which he did. 23) The campaign was led by Professor Seymour M. Lipset's New York Times Magazine article,24 "The Socialism of Fools-the New Left call it 'Anti-Zionism,' but it's no different from the anti-Semitism of the Old Right" and by Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz in an address before the American Jewish Committee warning that the "taboo on anti-Semitism is waning" and that a version of Nazism is the "in thing" today. When there were other victims in a mass tragedy, as in the Iraq hangings, the fate of Jews was singled out as evidence of persecution of Jews as Jews, rather than as a ruthless power play to tighten control.

   Every Times writer, correspondent, stringer, et al., with magnifying glass in hand, has undoubtedly been sworn to a Sherlock Holmeslike preoccupation with uncovering the most remote evidence of this prejudice and sending in his "find" to the news editor, who stands ever-prepared to build the remotest implication of bias into booming headlines of fact, to make atypical examples of prejudice appear typical. When Reverend George French Kempsell, Jr., of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Scarsdale, New York, condemned in a sermon the barring of Jewish escorts for debutantes going to a coming-out ball at the Scarsdale Golf Club, three lengthy stories appeared in the Times, two on the front page. 25

   When the winner of the Freshman First Honor prize in a letter to the Daily Princetonian 26 dared question the appropriateness of bringing the Warsaw Ghetto Exhibit to the university, and pointed to "the martyr image of 6 million dead" as the primary theme of the Jewish drive toward Gentile acceptance, a raging controversy took over this ivy college campus. Princeton President Dr. Robert F. Goheen stigmatized the letter as "blind prejudice." The New York Times promptly made national news by picking up the presidential letter from the campus paper and featuring it prominently. 27

   The Times continued to be the willing efficient transmittal belt in supplying the American public with constant alleged examples of Arab, Russian, and Christian "anti-Semitism" as a means of molding favorable sentiment for the Israeli state. And occasionally the trials and tribulations of a famed man of letters served the same purpose.

   The death in Venice on November 1, 1972, of poet Ezra Pound, who probably did as much for English literature in the 20th century as any single individual, brought wide press reportage on the stormy life of the famed expatriate. There was little reference, however, to the final turbulent event in the hectic eighty-seven years of Pound's life in [415] which the cult of anti-anti-Semitism gained another resounding victory, and Pound was the victim.

   While still living in Italy in 1972, the poet became the center of a swirling controversy when he was awarded the annual Emerson-Thoreau medal of Boston's American Academy of Arts and Sciences by a panel of distinguished writers and critics. The Academy's governing council vetoed the panel's recommendation on what they called "moral grounds, because of other aspects of his life." What this meant was that the council, with a large number of Jewish members, was penalizing Pound for his wartime Fascist leanings and alleged "anti-Semitism."28

   Like most incidents involving the cult, the affair was wrapped in secrecy and would have remained hush-hush had there not been a leak of the letter from Academy President Harvey Brooks (Harvard) to certain members, in which he noted that "with memories of the Holocaust so prominent, there was the unavoidable implication that the award carried special approval of life as well as work." An award to Pound, it was felt, would be "deeply offensive to many members of the Academy."

   Three of this privately supported honorary society's 2,700 members resigned, protesting the relevance of social ideas in judging poetry. These were Professor Jerome Y. Lettvin of MIT; 0. D. Hardison, Director of the Folger-Shakespeare Library; and Professor W. Hugh Kenner of the University of California at Santa Barbara, who perceived an inconsistency in the membership honoring Pound for his book, The Pound Era, while Pound the poet was not acceptable.

   As Robert Reinhold's front-page article in the Times of July 5 1972, pointed out, many of the most distinguished creative writers, composers, and scientists down through the ages have embraced ideologies or led lives that most people would consider despicable: "Shakespeare was a usurer, Christopher Marlowe a blasphemer and probably a homosexual, Rimbaud ventured into slave trading and Baudelaire led a violent, depraved life, etc." In his letter of resignation Lettvin protested: "It is not art that concerns you but politics, not taste but special interest, not excellence but propriety." The MIT academician went on to note that to this day he himself was unable to bring himself to visit Germany, but he nevertheless felt strongly about the integrity of artistic intellectual expression.

   "We are witnessing the institutionalization of a very dangerous pathology in American intellectual life," stated Martin L. Kilson, a black professor of government at Harvard, the theme which he reiterated in a letter to the Times. 29 He attributed the decision to a "perverse ethnic defensiveness" on the part of Jewish intellectuals, whom he likened to "ethnically defensive blacks who want opposition to white racism established as a precondition for the recognition of an intellectual's work by intellectual institutions."

   Kilson went on to say that he was as outraged about anti-Negro intellectuals as a Jew is about anti-Semitic ones, but such outrage "is not a matter of intellect but of politics," and in evaluating an intellectual's work, he believed that "short of the intellectual himself committing criminal or atrocious acts against humanity under the influence of his politics, his intellectual works should stand on their own.

   Who is to judge what anti-Semitism is? Those who opposed the decision of the Boston Academy pointed to Pound's generous efforts not only to promote the careers of other writers, including James Joyce, Robert Frost, and T. S. Eliot, but also to his personal warmth toward many Jewish writers. Was he an anti-Semite? Eliot, a previous Emerson winner, was also alleged to have shared Pound's anti-Semitic outlook in his earlier works.

   What is this thing called anti-Semitism? Is any criticism of any Jew because he happens to be a Jew per se "anti-Semitism"? Even when Anna Pauker, a Rumanian Communist who had murdered thousands, was herself purged, certain quarters raised their inevitable hue and cry because she happened to be Jewish. If a Jewish politician is corrupt, is he to be given the protective cover of the label "anti-Semitism"?

   In his Canto 52, Pound had written: "Poor yitts paying for the Rothschilds/paying for a few big Jews' vendetta on goyim." From the earliest moments of his career, Pound had criticized the vulgarity of life and the international bankers, particularly those who were Jewish. His venom expressed itself in: "Usury is the cancer of the world." The Rothschilds have been assailed from the Right and the Left for their usurious practices in building their nearly inexplicable fortune. Is all such censure automatically verboten because the persons concerned are Jewish? Since the Nazi tragedy, Jews too often have managed to take shelter under the exemption: "Don't dare incriminate a Jew lest you be taking Hitler's side."

   But it took a 1973 column in the Boston Globe by Kevin Kelley to really expose the cult of anti-anti-Semitism. Strangely enough, this time the cultists were going after the movie industry, which has always been more than 100 percent subservient to Zionist nationalism. Certain Christians might well level the charge against Jesus Christ Superstar that it is irreverent (Catholics called it morally unobjectionable, but [416] [417] libertarian)-but that it is anti-Semitic carries this too far.

   The Boston columnist quite appropriately labeled as "hysteria" the outcry and the accompanying claim that producer Norman Jewison's name might fool people into thinking that he was Jewish, thereby somehow giving the movie, magically, a Jewish blessing despite its underlying bias. "That kind of suggestion, like the charge itself, is paranoid," wrote the columnist. 30

   Particularly objectionable to the film's Israelist critics was the Jewish role in the crucifixion and the condemnation of Jesus by the high priests, whom they alleged were "libelously depicted as contemptuous, sadistic and blood-thirsty." (Amos, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and other of the Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament had, of course, similarly described the priests of an earlier period.) These one-track-minded Jews also protested a surrealistic scene following Judas's betrayal of Jesus and the use of Israeli tanks and Phantoms (without markings). American Jews charged these damaged the Israeli image-again a case of acting "more Catholic than the Pope," as the Israelis had given their initial approval to the film.

   The prerelease publicity for Superstar was tremendous as controversy was continuously fanned. A discussion on "Midday Live," the Channel 5 program in New York City, featured Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum's view that the film was strengthening the misconception held by many Christians, if not most, that the Jews had killed Christ. He would have history entirely rewritten. Apparently the lyrics of the song sung by Pontius Pilate made him appear all too human and shifted the responsibility for the crucifixion to the pressures of a hysterical Jewish mob. Further, the Rabbi insisted, the casting of a black actor in the role of Judas was likely to encourage black anti-Semitism.

   The cultists did not cease their "anti-Semitic" branding campaign. They tried to influence reviewers. The American Jewish Committee called a press conference denouncing the musical as comparable to the "anti-Semitic" Passion Play of Oberammergau. Rabbi Tanenbaum, however, was refused a meeting by Universal Pictures President H. H. Martin to discuss the Committee's concern that Superstar might rouse new bigotry in West Germany and Austria, where "a strong residuum of both religious and ideological anti-Semitism continues."

   This latest effort at suppression appeared on the same page of the New York Times 31 as a story about a new musical based on Molly, the character created by Gertrude Berg on national radio and television. When would John Q. Jew stand up and protest the blind stupidity of [418] [419] attacking historical facts behind the crucifixion of Jesus while encouraging the dissemination of this kind of Jewish stereotype:

   Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Goldberg!

   Was that "yoo-hoo" for me, Mrs. Bloom?

   Who breeds the anti-Semitism these cultists allegedly are fighting? Humorous as the Molly Goldberg series was, it contributed to building the anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jew as someone with an accent, part of a group apart from the other people of the nation in which he lives. Pressure from these same groups was responsible for bringing to an end the very popular television series "Bridget Loves Bernie," because it showed that an Irish-Jewish intermarriage can work despite obstacles. But the attempt to pressure NBC out of its scheduled showing of Lawrence Olivier in "The Merchant of Venice" failed after the cultists,joined by the magazine Jewish Currents, had expressed a deep dread in permitting this production "to be beamed into the homes of the mass TV audience."32

   The anti-anti-Semitism cult is vital not only in the silencing of the Opposition to Zionism and Israelism, but it also supplies a principal raison d’etre for followers of the new modern kind of "Judaism." Many Jews insist they will remain in the faith so long as it is still unpopular to be a Jew, i.e., so long as anti-Semitism exists. This alone could account for the fact that the ADL and other "defense" organizations, with the powerful and wealthy Jewish-American community solidly behind them, have never attempted to launch one single objective scholarly study on the causes of anti-Semitism so as to make an honest effort to kill this bias.

   The reasoning is obvious. Neither the religious nor the lay leaders of the many Jewish organizations wished to lose their most potent weapon. If they removed prejudice they would lose adherents to the faith. If they made strides toward eliminating bigotry, funds for Jewish nationalist activities would dry up. Hence there must be no real attempt to solve the problem of anti-Semitism. Herein lies the conspiracy between the rabbinate, Jewish nationalists, and other leaders of Organized Jewry to keep the problems of prejudice alive, just as Goldmann and Herzl had advocated. The Christian has not interfered, particularly if he carried any prejudice in his heart-the endemic anti-Semitism to which Herzl and Crossman had alluded.

   No one understood these machinations better than famed journalist Dorothy Thompson. In 1938 she assumed the leadership of the country's moral mobilization against Nazism, after she risked life and limb in taking on the Nazi Bund in the famed Madison Square Garden incident. Her renowned wartime "Listen, Hans" broadcasts and espousal of the Zionist cause followed. She of course immediately became the darling of the Zionist movement.

   Upon her return from visiting newly created Israel, as her biographer noted, she began voicing "concern for the plight of the Arab refugees and dismay at the tactics of Jewish refugees."33 William Zuckerman, editor of the Jewish Newsletter, later wrote in a tribute to the great journalist, "Miss Thompson now saw that Zionism, which had started out as a liberal and humanitarian relief movement, was turning into a reactionary, aggressive, chauvinist movement of the same character as other European nationalisms, which she had been fighting throughout her journalistic career."

   A bitter campaign of character assassination was waged against her, even to the point of attributing her new viewpoint to the influence of her "anti-Semitic" third husband, highly respected Czech sculptor Maxim Kopf. As biographer Marion K. Sanders relates:

For Dorothy, the bitterest blow was the discovery that Zionists equated criticism of their policies with anti-Semitism. "I refuse to become an anti-Semite by designation," she said, recalling not only her long record of benevolence to Jewish refugees, her steadfast battle against Hitler, and, perhaps, the fact that she had once been ridiculed for walking out of a dinner party where an anti-Semitic joke was told, with the comment, "I will not remain in the same house with traitors to the United States."34

   The Zionist pressure directed against Thompson resulted in certain newspapers, including the New York Post from which she received a full quarter of her income, dropping her syndicated "On the Record" column. She was bitterly hurt: "I am crushed at the thought that this campaign has been instituted by 'liberals,' against a writer in a 'liberal newspaper' whose intolerance of an opposing or differing view leads them to character-assassination and career-assassination. It has been boundless, going into my personal life."35

   Meyer Weisgal, the intimate associate of David Ben-Gurion and her closest friend within the Zionist hierarchy, testified:

"The attacks upon her became outrageous. She was accused, among other things of having lined her pockets with the fees of Zionist organizations. This stung her deeply.... She had taken nothing for herself.... All monies accruing to her from public lectures to Zionist groups went into a trust fund, which I controlled for the German-Jewish refugees who came into her orbit." 36 [420]

   As the final word on this terrifying episode, this writer who had earlier been married to Sinclair Lewis wrote a memorable letter "On Creating Anti-Semites" for the Jewish Newsletter:

"Really, I think continual emphasis should be put upon the extreme damage to the Jewish community of branding people like myself as anti-Semitic. It is a little beneath the dignity of anyone with my record to deny such charges in public, so they just tend to make anti-Semitism more respectable than it otherwise might be, for, rightly or wrongly, a great many people in this country respect me highly, and if it is publicized that I am an anti-Semite, anti-Semitism becomes thereby a little bit more respectable.

   "... In the same way, the State of Israel has got to learn to live in the same atmosphere of free criticism which every other state in the world must endure. If the editors of this country's press are forced to suppress critical views because of organized pressure, both in the form of masses of letters to the editor and pressures on the business side of the paper's organization, the net effect - and I know what I'm talking about - is to foment a very ugly resentment, the worse because it finds no outlet. There are many subjects on which writers in this country are, because of these pressures, becoming craven and mealy-mouthed. But people don't like to be craven and mealy-mouthed; every time one yields to such pressure, one is filled with self-contempt and this self-contempt works itself out in resentment of those who caused it." [Italics added.]

   "I often think that race relations were actually much better in this country when we took good-natured flings at the characteristics of the various national groups in our midst. People actually don't like paragons, and any group that tries to arrogate to itself all the virtues and admit none of the vices of the common run of humanity does not thereby make itself more lovable. Therefore, I am sure that anti-anti-Semitism, like anti-anti-Negroism, can reach a point where it has exactly the opposite effect from the one which it has striven for. . ." 57

   Dorothy Thompson was unable to halt the Zionist juggernaut. Scornful of the long-term effects of its anti-anti-Semitic campaign, the cult has continued its war of suppression and repression, waging an unparalleled blitz on the great and near-great to win acquiescence to its views on Israel.

Top

·                     The Blitz

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

- Wendell Phillips

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   Minton, not so easily frightened, answered the ADL:

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

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

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

Dear Mr. Dorsey:

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

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

   And Mr. Dorsey's reply:

Dear Mr. Graubard:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top

·                     The Holocaust: Stoking the Fires

This--all this--was in the olden Time long ago.

- Edgar Allan Poe

 
 YAD VASHEM, A LARGE COMPOUND on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem, is a memorial to the Jewish martyrs and heroes of World War II. The Hall of Remembrance is a large rectangular building of basalt boulders and uneven concrete, purposely recreating the appearance of a Nazi gas chamber. Within, on a floor of inlaid tile, are inscribed the names of the twenty-one largest Nazi concentration camps. A shaft admitted through a skylight illuminates the eternal flame contained in the hollow of a colossal broken bronze urn.

   Next to the hall is a large square where thousands gather annually for the ceremonies on Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day in April, the date of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. To the left of the floor is a double-story museum, on the top floor of which are kept the names of those who perished in camps. A photographic recreation of the history of Nazi anti-Semitism is on the bottom floor.

   Guarding the museum is an anguished statue of Job by the sculptor Nathan Rappaport. Circling these buildings is a small forest called the Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles, which honors Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews. The archives contain records of rescue activities by Jewish organizations, and documents captured in Germany and satellite countries. Upon leaving Yad Vashem, one passes The Pillar of Heroism, a very modern, severe triangular shaft of stainless steel rising seventy feet on the Judean hill. Deeds of Jewish valor are carved into the surrounding stones.

   This sanctification of the holocaust,1together with the Masada monument commemorating the Zealots who killed themselves rather than surrender to the Romans, carries out the biblical command: Tell your children of it and let your children tell their children, and their children, another generation.

   Yad Vashem epitomizes the last trump of the professional anti-anti-Semite. The holocaust is the weapon that hovers behind the cover-up and supplies the principal prop to the cover-over. When all else fails, the six million Jews killed during the Nazi holocaust remain the ultimate silencer. These six million are quite literally pulled from the ovens, propped up, and pushed forward to confront any who might raise the slightest question or smallest voice of dissent. Even the mere threat of this suffices to silence most people. But on many occasions, the six million are ritually brought out. Silence ensues. The line is maintained. Hitler had made reluctant Zionists out of many guilt ridden Christians and assimilated Western Jews.

   As Hitler exploited the Jews, it is paradoxical that certain Jews should have exploited and up to this very moment are still very much intent upon exploiting Hitler for Zionist propaganda purposes. There has been an almost continuing conspiracy, fostered by an unholy alliance between the media and the Zionists, to keep us all in the era of 1940-45. Since there can be only one side to any issue where the alternative would be Hitler, the aim of the game is to keep Adolf and his gang alive.

   In 1952, 1967, early in 1972, and later again in November of that year, the hue and cry was raised: "He is alive." And there appeared in the world press still another widely distributed photo of someone alleged to be Martin Bormann, Nazi adjutant to Adolf Hitler. On further investigation, the stories have faded into nothingness. But this speculation, widely encouraged by the media and based on total rumor, brought on a new spate of articles and books about Nazism, further flavoring the atmosphere in which the Middle East conflict was being judged and additionally pinching the Christian conscience lest the already growing number of those disenchanted with Israel further increase.

   The latest Bormann episode was by far the most elaborate. It was built around a series of articles by the writer-historian Ladislas Farago, which appeared in a six-part account in both the London Daily Express 2 and the New York Daily News. 3 Sensational articles appeared in other newspapers concerning the series on Bormann and the Nazis, until New York Times correspondent Joseph Novitski printed an interview with one Jose Velasco of the Argentine Intelligence Service, who denied ever having questioned Bormann at an Argentine checkpoint, as alleged by Farago. Velasco stated that the photograph in question showed him not with Bormann, but with a high school teacher named Rudolpho Sira in downtown Buenos Aires.

   The Farago contention that Bormann, aided by the Vatican and Juan Peron, then dictator of Argentina, had escaped from Berlin and managed to smuggle out of Germany treasures in excess of $200 million in the last days of the Hitler regime, was debunked by writer Charles Dana Gibson. Putting finishing touches himself to a book dealing with German blockade-running during World War II, Gibson declared it was impossible to remove loot without the knowledge of Hitler and it was also most unlikely that Bormann "could have arranged such a cargo shipment on a U-boat." 4 

   As a reply to their own correspondent, the Times, in line with its usual "liberal tradition," permitted Farago a three-column rebuttal, in which he rehashed the whole Nazi bit and claimed his evidence regarding Bormann was 'authoritative, authentic, and accurate." He was then completing The Aftermath 5 for which Simon and Schuster had given him a $100,000-plus contract. The cult of anti-anti-Semitism apparently was about to be fattened anew.

   A last word was had by English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Oxford Professor of Modern History and the author of The Last Days of Hitler, in a piece in the magazine section of the Sunday New York Times. 6 The whole past controversy was reviewed and an elaborate history of Bormann as well as some of his Nazi colleagues was added. But not one shred of new evidence had been provided to prove that Bormann was alive, even as the Hitler era was relived all over again.

   All this was brought to the attention of the Sunday readers with this caption in black, bold type: "The world has never had any difficulty remembering his name, but has almost forgotten who he was." There were very few, indeed, who would bet that this would ever be allowed to happen.

   Off the presses has come an unbelievable, endless spate of books pricking the world's conscience, as if there was still a Nazi peril today. Scarcely a week passes without an addition to the already imposing list of gory tomes. It would seem that writers of fiction and nonfiction, for television, the movies, and the stage alike, had no other theme than the holocaust. We should have thought Arthur Morse's While Six Million Died, 7 Lucy S. Dawidowicz's The War Against the Jews, 1933 - 1945, 8 Myron S. Kaufmann's The Coming Destruction of Israel-Will the U.S. Tolerate Russian Intervention in the Middle East, 9 Richard Chernoff, Edward Klein, and Robert Littel's If Israel Lost the War 10 would have been more than enough. But then along came an imposing advertisement to tell the readers of the Times of Eli Wiesel's One Generation After. 11 Wiesel's Night 12 and then a new spate of books in the wake of the October war and the latest "threat" of genocide to Jews followed in 1974.

   Other aspects of the holocaust were set forth in Open the Gates, 13 The Destruction of European Jews, 14 and They Fought Back, 15 all which with the Dawidowicz book "were reviewed together by Libertarian magazine. 16 The latter, referred to by the cultists as a "classic," was supplemented in 1977 by a new work by the same authoress, The Jewish Presence, 17 in which she assailed Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem for placing some of the blame for Jewish extermination on the leaders of the Jewish Community Councils, the Judenrat, who "cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another with the Nazis."

   After a lengthy Times review of this new Dawidowicz collection of essays on a Sunday, 18 Times chief reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt gave the book another forward push in his daily "Book of the Times" column the next day. 19 What should have appeared in the first or second paragraph of the critique, where the reviewer praised the authoress for her other writings and her habitual "do not forget the six million" thesis, was kept to the very last three lines of the two columns: "The Jewish Presence simply lacks what would have made it as fresh and surprising as a good collection of essays ought to be." And, of all people, the readers of the Times scarcely had to be told by Lehmann-Haupt: "Nor do we need to be reminded that the struggle of Israel to remain alive, particularly during the Six-Day and Yom Kippur wars, has served to raise the consciousness of Jews and non-Jews all over the world."

   Thirty-two years after Hitler died in a Berlin bunker, and hundreds of volumes later, no book on the German Führer, no matter how trivial its contribution or how ineptly it is written, still failed to win big, bold headlines on the "Books of the Times" page. Lehmann-Haupt even apologized-- "Why read yet another book about Hitler?" 20 And then he proceeded to dissect John Toland's Adolf Hitler 21 at length, using the gathering of "tidbits of new information" as his excuse. The real reason, of course, must be the endless compulsion that this chief Times book reviewer feels to lend a hand to "little Israel" by propagating the syndrome of anti-anti-Semitism

   Nor did this end it. The Times of July 12, 1977 carried a half-page advertisement of a "gripping, powerful portrait," the new book, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, 22 which was given the benefit of prepublication features in major New York Times and Time magazine stories and rave notices in Harriet Van Home's syndicated column and in Publishers Weekly for putting "the lie to the view that Hitler may not have known about the crimes committed against the Jews."

   And Hitler himself was not the only theme pursued. A few months earlier the Howard Blum book, Wanted: The Search for Nazis in America, 23 had been released and was synthesized in a New York Post 24 series illustrated by more horror pictures of Nazi deeds. The takeover of G. P. Putnam's Sons publishing house by Music Corporation of America (whose chairman, Lew Wasserman, was described in the Robert Scheer Los Angeles Times 1978 controversial series as "the most powerful Jew in Los Angeles as well as the most powerful leader of the entertainment industry") was reflected in the publication and promotion of such books as 17 Ben-Gurion. 25 According to an advertisement in the Times, the book concerned "the terrorist-ridden Middle East in this big, exciting novel of a ruthless Palestinian terrorist organization plotting to destroy Israel and Israeli Intelligence agents racing against time to trace the conspiracy to its source and smash it forever." 26 Within three weeks came the companion novel, The Plot to Destroy Israel, "documenting how the Arab nations intend to wipe Israel off the face of the earth." 27 

   The emerging power of the PLO, the threat of OPEC, the growing recession, and the open speculation about U.S. armed intervention in the Middle East caused consternation in Jewish-American circles. Gerald S. Strober, a former staff member of the American Jewish Committee, in his book American Jews. Community in Crisis predicted that current trends will make "life rather unpleasant for the individual Jew" in America, and that U.S. Jews are now entering "the most perilous period" in their history. 28 Eli Wiesel claimed in the New York Times 29 that for the first time he could "foresee the possibility of Jews being massacred in the cities of America or in the foresteps of Europe" because of "a certain climate, a certain mood in the making." According to Cynthia Ozick in her Esquire piece "All the World Wants the Jews Dead," Israel's survival was in grave doubt, and with it Zionism and thus all Jews. She proclaimed "The Jews are one people You cannot separate parent from child, the Jews from Zion." 30 

   The rash of hysterical articles continued: Alfred Kazin's piece in the Atlantic Monthly; 31 Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz's January 1975 article in the New York Times 32 and his 1976 editorial article in his own magazine; 33 Richard Reeves' New York magazine article, "If Jews Will Not Be for Themselves, Who Will Be for Them?" 34 All were aimed at creating panic among Jews, at linking anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, and at crushing any stillborn opposition to the maintenance of the Middle East status quo.

   The lead article in the New York Times Magazine of June 19, 1977 was the Helen Epstein emotional outpouring, "The Heirs of the Holocaust," in which controversy was built over whether children and grand-children should or should not feel guilty for having survived their parents and grandparents. Speculation was kept alive by the publication of eight letters the following month, which generally expressed a "deep feeling of guilt for having survived our parents and for being an heir of the holocaust. Because I am a Jew and because the suffering was so great, I can carry only an infinitesimal part of this sorrow." 35 Even obituary page headlines in the Times, "Rudolf Weiss, 77, Actor Who Fled Austria After Nazi Invasion, Dead," are used to fasten attention on the holocaust. 36 

   The Sunday New York Times' Travel Section is not immune. On September 3, 1972, it carried one article on anti-Semitism in Germany and another on concentration camps in Poland over a three-page spread including a tremendous picture of a skull-capped Jew baring his Nazi tattoo. Rarely has writing as contrived, platitudinous and banal as Stephen Birnbaum's "Germany: The End of Assimilation" appeared anywhere, let alone in the promotion of tourism. A visitor dropped from another planet would have believed that the Third Reich was still ruling Germany and threatening the world.

   This writer, calling himself an assimilationist but referring to "Rosh Hashonah, 5372," feels forced in 1972 to make excuses for making a trip to West Germany. By his own confession he has avoided attending a synagogue for eighteen years. On this first visit to Germany, while enjoying his first meal in a German home on the North Sea coast, his eyes happen to fall upon an oil painting of the Nazi SS father of his host. He can scarcely keep down his food, and the next day he rushes to a "spiritual reunion" in a Regensburg synagogue.

   Television likewise continued to keep viewers back in the unforgettable 1940s. In late 1974, for instance, a two-part documentary study of Adolf Hitler had been cunningly timed by WNET Educational Television to fall as Jews celebrated Hanukkah. According to the New York Times, it was "a devastating reminder and somber warning of a madness that was able to grip a large part of the world in this century." This was followed in January on Channel 9 by "In Our Time," a 1944 drama of Nazi-shadowed Poland, starring Ida Lupino and Paul Henried; then a Sunday evening "Report on World War II" depicting the concentration camps of Belsen and Auschwitz; and then a revival of the de Sica film, The Garden of the Finzi- Continis, the story of Jewish persecution under Italian Fascism. This, even as the Odessa File with its blatant propaganda about a fictitious Nazi-Egyptian spy ring in Frankfurt, was drawing tears from thousands, who had stood in long cues to view the new hit purporting to show Egyptians and resurgent Nazis building a rocket assembly line to threaten the very existence of Israel. In short order this was followed by (he appearance of Rosebud, the Otto Preminger film about a hijacking by Black September Palestinians of a yacht on which there are five wealthy girls, one of whom is Jewish. Among the propaganda ploys used by the film was an Israeli intelligence officer uttering, "They'll never get us in gas chambers again," as he shows off his skillful "know-how" of American equipment locating the guerrillas' Corsica hideout. 37 

   This outpouring came in the wake of the PLO's appearance before the bar of international opinion and was endless. Nearly two full pages of the Sunday Arts and Leisure Section of the New York Times was covered by an Alfred Kazin piece, "Can Today's Movies Tell the Truth about Fascism?" The article started off with the admission, "World War II is by now the longest running movie of all time," an assessment with which no objective observer could quarrel, only hoping the writer would not further prolong it. Two tremendous pictures, each 9 X 6-1/2 inches, evoked the immediate sympathy of the reader. One showed "a Jewish girl in occupied Paris seeking a priest's aid in the movie Black Thursday,"and the other was a pretty shot of a Jewish mother and her little son escaping the Nazis in the movie Les Villons du Bal. But the author decried the happy ending in which mother and son "manage to slip under the barbed wire and a benevolent Swiss guard looks down on them and croons 'Now you are free.' " History, he claimed, was not so kind. "For the Swiss were as gentle to 'illegal immigrants' as one of their bank tellers would be to a pauper.

   French filmmakers, stimulated by Marcel Ophuls' The Sorrow and the Pity in 1972, began to portray their countrymen in less than Resistance-hero terms, with an alleged anti-Semitism that even at times exceeded that of the Nazis. Their products were greeted with great popularity in the U.S., as in France, with the help of Zionist stimulation. But Kazin still was far from satisfied. Even when a movie did give a picture of Jews being tormented, the persecution was often not vivid or horrible enough for Kazin's taste, as was the case of Louis Malle's exceptionally interesting and intelligent film Lacombe, Lucien. The producer was held to be "not altogether well-informed because he was only thirteen when the war ended."

   Hollywood continued to advance the cult, although not always successfully. The Voyage of the Damned, the film based on the story of the 1939 attempt by 937 Jews aboard the St. Louis to find a refuge from Hitler in Cuba, was reviewed by Vincent Canby as "clumsy, tasteless and self-righteous," another attempt to "wildly fictionalize and exploit the tragedies of real people." 38 The 1977 Alain Delon's Mr. Klein brought to the screen a novel aspect of anti-Semitism--an exposure of someone from the haute monde, who though "not an active Nazi supporter, found anti-Semitic sketches in a cabaret revue amusing and brought objects d'art at rock-bottom prices from Jews fleeing the country. 39 

   Again, after the emergence of Menachem Begin in power in Israel, amidst the subsequent soul-searching by American Jews and the emerging debate over the Geneva Conference, the holocaust burst anew on the television screens of New York viewers. "The World at War: The Final Solution" was given seven hours August 1-4, 1977, on Mutual's outlet, Channel 9 (WOR-TV). On the night this series ended, an old third-rate movie, Operation Eichmann, was dug up out of the morgue and shown.

   Later that month smatterings of the persecution theme were woven into the first of three "Jewish Tradition" series of ten Sunday half-hour shows and in "Jerusalem Lives" over Channel 13 (WNET). That station had earlier shown, as part of a network program, L 'Chaim, the story of the Jewish people in Europe from the mid-l9th century through the Nazi period to the present.

   In the 1977 series Israel: A Family Portrait, which was unveiled as a special four-part series September 7-9, 1977, over WABC (Channel 7) "Eyewitness News" at prime 6:00 P.M. time, correspondent Joel Siegel was shown visiting relatives in the Zionist state. Here a cousin who survived "the concentration camp where 300,000 Jews were massacred" described the holocaust and his heightened feelings about Israel. In addition to such "news" outlets, a special half-hour feature picked up Siegel's narration for the September 17 season premiere of Mort Fleischer's WABC's award-winning public affairs series, "People, Places, Things."

   Many television stations in all parts of the country on all networks repeatedly through 1976 and 1977 showed the half-hour United Jewish Appeal-produced film, The Commitment, which depicted Jewish persecution under the Nazis and closed with an appeal for funds. Israeli-American singer of note, Theodore Bikel, did the narrating. This propaganda-laden presentation was shown as a public service, at no charge whatsoever to the UJA.

   In addition to keeping alive the Hitler days and the holocaust there has been the related phenomenon of bringing to life the fear of imminent revivals of Nazism and Fascism 40 both abroad and at home. The Nazi shadow and peril were kept aglow by a plethora of New York Times stories and the competition between the networks in trying to magnify the importance of the U.S. Nazi party.

   An NBC "Tomorrow" show interviewed American Nazi leader Frank Collin who defended his vehement anti-Jewish, anti-black position. The New Rochelle shooting spree of crazed Fred Cowan provided the excuse for focusing national attention on a fascist movement whose membership numbered little more than 1,000. Not to be outdone, a CBS "Sixty Minutes" on February 20, 1977 presented another view of the U.S. Nazis. These fanatics were pictured against a background of swastikas as a growing force of hate. When asked by their Nazi parents, little children six to seven years of age responded correctly before the cameras with a quick "Kill the Jews."

   The American Nazi Party claimed less than 1,000 total membership, forty-one of whose members turned up at its 1978 national convention in St. Louis to reelect Collin as successor to the notorious deceased George Lincoln Rockwell. Although this conclave had already received prominent reportage, the Times accorded two full columns on April 18, 1978 to the "Nazis in the U.S.," with pictures of a swastika-armed Rockwell and of swastika-dominated "Nazis on parade in St. Louis last month" (all of twenty-five had marched). The article admitted bringing "American Nazis a notoriety that seems to be really disproportionate to their numbers."

   The scheduled July 4, 1977 Nazi march through Skokie, the Chicago suburb with its fifty-seven percent Jewish population of 40,000, including 7,000 former concentration camp inmates, opened up new ears for propaganda. Through the long court fight to halt the parade, the Anti-Defamation League and other Zionist groups had a field day picturing a "grave new threat" to America. This was heightened by media attention to the "growing" Ku Klux Klan with its 7,000 members, split into three principal vying groups, the most articulate leader of which was David Duke.

   Both Collin and Duke appeared with leaders of the black community on most of the stations of National Educational Television's Black Perspective" 41 on which the danger from these fascist groups was grossly exaggerated. The Ku Klux Klanner was given ample time to attack Jews and Zionists alike for "forcing" a pro-Israel Middle East policy on the United States.

   On December 14, 1977 WNET Channel 13 avid Israelist Seymour Lipset, Anti-Defamation League representative Irwin Suall, and American Civil Liberties Union executive Bruce Ennis engaged in the pros and cons on how to cope with the threat of the Rockaway (Long Island) Klan chapter of fifty members (admittedly already reduced to twenty through an ADL campaign). Suall argued: "They are capable Of perpetrating violence and constitute a real danger. It is a real obligation to point out what they stand for and what they did in our times."

   To help achieve this goal, the American/Jewish Committee, closely allied with the ADL, published and widely distributed a specially prepared three-article series "Nazi Groups Flourishing Throughout the U.S.A." The fearsters were determined to justify the large tax-deductible gifts given to their tax-free treasuries to fight the dangers of anti-Semitism and at the same time to spread propaganda which could only improve Israel's position in the U.S. This is why the Jewish groups rejected Collin's offer in late May 1978 to cancel the Nazi march through Skokie if the legislation barring the June 25 parade were withdrawn. The sponsors of the bill replied: "He is not the kind of person you make a deal with." And the New York organization, Survivors of Nazi Camps and Resistance Fighters, pointing to the Skokie march as "evidence that Nazi activities were not terminated with the demise of Hitler," sent out a broad mail appeal for more information on victims of the holocaust to be added to the central archives-of Yad Vashem.

   Earlier attention had been directed to incidents in Germany and Italy, building upon occasional rumors and unconfirmed reports of rising anti-Semitism to create an atmosphere of constant fear. After a small German extreme rightist group gained a victory in local elections in one West German state, the drums began to roll "The Nazis are coming." Old scare stories and exaggerated figures were dragged out. When the election came, this "big" threat polled less than one percent in the federal elections and won no seats. 42 

    The continued spate of stories on the apprehension, release, extension of statute of limitations, conviction, and even escape of former Nazi and alleged Nazi criminals used up valuable newsprint inches. The Times was ever digging up Nazi terror stories, as they did in pointing the finger at the German Catholic Bishop of Munich for the alleged execution twenty-five years earlier of twenty-seven Italians in the small village of Filetto Di Camarda, running the accusation under and across the page heading: "Priest and Red in Italian Village Battle Over Role of German, Now a Bishop, in Wartime Reprisal Killing." 43 

   In one single issue of the monthly Jewish Currents, 44 which is more broadminded in its view toward the Palestinians, there were articles on "Holocaust and Jewish Resistance," "Flight from Hitler, 1939," and "Obstacles to Nazi Hunting." When this periodical was not calling some people anti-Semitic, they were clearing others of a similar charge spread by other Jewish groups. Certain remarks had been adduced by the Yiddish and Jewish student press to prove that even Benjamin Franklin had been a pronounced bigot. And not too many days were allowed to pass without some human interest Times story bringing back the holocaust--a reunion of survivors of Buchenwald, Dachau or of the Cracow Ghetto which was accorded large coverage and a four-column head. 45 

   The extent to which the Masada complex in Israel and its U.S. counterpart, the holocaust saga, had taken hold was illustrated in 1971, during one of the alleged Bormann "sightings." When questioned on a David Frost television show, Foreign Minister Abba Eban carelessly exclaimed that he was "hardly interested" in whether "some wretched man in Paraguay or Brazil is brought to justice." Front-page headlines in Israeli papers, from the English-language Jerusalem Post to Israel's Hebrew newspapers, resounded with group as well as individual castigation of Israel's most eloquent voice. Someone was threatening to put a yawning hole in the reservoir from which the anti-anti-Semitic syndrome must draw its publicity, and this was not to be tolerated. The concentration camp commemoration groups shrieked loudly and called for Eban's resignation. Golda Meir, neither publicly disavowing nor supporting her minister, refused to become involved at that critical moment in the post-Nasser period on yet another front, and as quoted, "swept the matter under the rug."

   It did not end with this. An opposition party motion in the Knesset, brought by Menachem Begin's Gahal alignment and calling for Eban's resignation, failed only by a 27-22 margin. Such was the power of the syndrome that an unusually large number of Labor party coalition members abstained from voting in the face of the charge that their Foreign Minister's indifference was providing the Germans with the excuse to discontinue other planned Nazi war trials. And this was practically on the eve of a vital U.N. debate in which Eban was to assume the leading role in presenting the Israeli position.

   Because it sought to link Nazi war criminals with Nasser's Egypt, The Champagne Spy, 46 the colorful story of the espionage work of top Israeli agent Wolfgang Lotz, found ready publishers and received favorable reviews. Operating within Cairo's haut monde under the cover of a wealthy German horsebreeder, Lotz was apprehended in February 1965 by Egyptian security officers after three years of sending back to Israeli intelligence such invaluable information as the disposition of Egyptian troops, which facilitated the 1967 attack. Lotz and his attractive wife, Waltrand, were arrested in February 1965 and became the center of a sensational public-show trial involving certain leading personalities in Egypt.

   According to Lotz's interesting recital, he had encouraged the rumor that he was an ex-SS officer hiding from arrest for war crimes, which allegedly forthrightly opened doors for him in the Egyptian capital, particularly among the influential circle of German businessmen and scientists there who were working on the development of rockets and other lethal instruments. Described as nonfiction, it was most difficult to know where the anecdote ended and the fiction began. An Egyptian-Nazi conspiracy against "little" Israel was continuously depicted.

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   When the Lotzes were apprehended after they made their way into a top-secret post off the Cairo-Alexandria desert road where important secret missiles were being tested and manufactured, a phone call to an influential military friend freed them. The base commandant was quoted apologizing as follows:

"Of course, Sir, if you say so, I will not pry into your affairs. Yours is a secret to be proud of. The SS, they tell me, was the crème de Ia crème of the German Reich. I have read a great deal about it. We, too, will have a great Arab Reich one day. Installations like our missile base here will help to destroy Israel soon. Now you understand why we guard it so carefully." 47 

Lotz's artificial and stilted wording failed to bring to life an Egyptian speaking this language. Whatever this book had to say in depicting inefficient, corrupt, venal, and nepotistic Egyptians, no amount of cliched language could convincingly convey a portrait of Egyptians as Nazi-loving bigots. This was just not in line with their character. But to give his book the right flavor, the Egyptian prosecutor was alleged to have quoted from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his summation against spy Lotz, and every German introduced to the readers was insinuated to be a Nazi or neo-Nazi. Apparently the author was not acquainted with the large number of German non-Nazi scientists whose talents the U.S. had most advantageously used. 48 

   Undeniably, one special objective of the persistent raking up of the Nazi past has been Germany itself. Through constant harassment Germans were not allowed to forget the Hitler days, and at all levels of society they were placed under continued pressure to redeem themselves. The ritual visits of German leaders to Israel for the purpose of unloading guilt, and the return visits of Israeli leaders to Germany for purposes of piling on more guilt, have kept the pot boiling.

   On an important trip to West Germany in 1970, lengthy articles prominently placed with a photograph revealed that Foreign Minister Abba Eban had proceeded directly from the airport to the site of the Nazi Dachau crematory even before calling on his host, German Chancellor Willi Brandt. Likewise, the energetic Chancellor, when he went to Warsaw to sign the German-Polish treaty finalizing agreement on the Oder-Niesse boundary, was shown by the press of the world kneeling in front of the memorial to Jewish insurgents killed by the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

   In 1973 the state visit of Brandt to Israel overflowed with emotion and national significance from the moment the Israeli army band struck up "Deutschland Über Alles" through his departure four days later. Wearing a dark blue suit and black homburg and accompanied by Gideon Hausner, prosecutor at the Eichmann trial and Chairman of the memorial complex, the Chancellor's first official act was to visit Yad Vashem, where he donned a yarmulke and laid a wreath. Brandt climaxed his stay with the statement that "what was done cannot be undone" but accepted the moral responsibility for Nazi genocide and declared all-out support of Israel's demand for direct negotiations and her insistence there be no substantial changes in the border of the Zionist state.

   The enormous German sense of guilt, deeply felt by its postwar leadership of Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard, and Willy Brandt found expression in the words of West German editor Axel Springer: "Since the German Jewish Community no longer exists for any practical purposes, I believe it is our duty to make all possible efforts to support Israel." 49 With the payment of $3.9 billions in reparations and in restitution, Germany was second only to the U.S. in keeping Israel economically afloat.

   In July 1975 Yitzhak Rabin became the first Israeli head of state to visit Germany (the 1973 October war had spared a reluctant Golda Meir this visit). 50 Scarcely had he touched down at Frankfurt Airport amidst tightest security, when he was whisked away by army helicopter to visit the former death camp of Bergen-Belsen (The same treatment was accorded Moshe Dayan on his first visit to Germany in the fall of 1977.) A New York Times news story July 9, 1975, described his feelings: "Israel's first native-born premier, Mr. Rabin did not suffer directly from the Nazis. But he has described himself as 'an heir to the holocaust', and his aides say that he felt strongly that the first official visit by an Israeli chief of government should begin with some recognition of the past."

   Mrs. Rabin, who accompanied her husband, had been born in Germany and had learned German as her first language. While Bergen-Belsen today resembles more a park than "an apocalyptic vision of a vast death camp" (language of the Times), the reality of what happened among its green fields confronted the Rabins as they stepped into the modern museum at the entrance. The Times related, "On all the walls hung huge pictures of the faces and twisted bodies of the camp's thousands of victims, the faces standing out of the pictures with eyes hollowed out by anguish."

   The 1976 visit to his German birthplace of Fürth by Secretary Kissinger, on which he was accompanied by his parents, his wife, his brother, and his sister-in-law, provided the Times with a new opportunity to spotlight attention on one of their favorite topics. Its account seemed to go far out of its way to note that "the only synagogue which the Nazis had not burned to the ground" was that which the Kissinger family had attended, and to quote the wording of a plaque in Hebrew and German inside the house of worship (which incidentally the Secretary and his family did not visit) reading: "On the 22nd of March, 1942, the last occupants of this building, 33 orphaned children, were sent to their deaths in Izbica with their teacher and director, Dr. Isaak Hallemann." 51 

   In West Germany today there are more than twenty-six million men and women who were born after 1945, nearly half of the population alive today. And most of these, according to Der Spiegel and other Sources, are beginning to question the awkward, special relationship that their parents' generation built with Israel. "After all," said a twenty-three-year-old student from Munich, "Why should I feel guilty. I was not born then. I had nothing to do with it." Most of that age group feel that Germany's present relationship should be replaced by more normal balanced ties taking into account the Arab states. Virtually all Germans now insist that Germany has already paid sufficient moral and financial reparations.

   It is for these in Germany and the new generations all over the world that the Zionist ploy must be advanced with gusto. "Hitler..." "the Nazis...,""the six million..." One by one these icons have been and are today continuously invoked at any moment, into any present-day question of Jewish or Israeli affairs.

   Under the impact of the holocaust, even those like sixty-nine-year-old French novelist Simone de Beauvoir, who moved in left-wing circles and would normally be alienated from Israel, assailed France's attitude toward Israel in an angry Jerusalem interview:

  "One of my reasons for coming here is to demonstrate the fact that some leftists have a positive attitude towards Israel and support its right to exist like any other nation. I was a witness to the Holocaust and its horrors and felt the lack of a Jewish homeland. I saw this not merely as a Jewish problem, but as something very personal."

    As the one weapon that will never let "them" forget how "we" suffered, the holocaust continues to be immemorialized whenever Jews will it, and their multifold actions, exacted as many pounds of flesh, are never questioned. In 1976 the Endowment for the Humanities in Washington announced a $76,544 grant for writing a ninety-minute historical film to examine the experiences of the victims of the Nazi occupation of Poland; in 1978 a youth grant was awarded to three children of holocaust survivors to produce a documentary film on the story of their own families.

   To ingrain the State of Israel more deeply into the Jewish consciousness, the International Association of Conservative Rabbis incorporated the events of the last 2,000 years in prayer. The death of the six million as well as the establishment of Israel, the June war, and the reunification of Jerusalem were all woven into the revised liturgy.

   The greater the need for Israel to defend itself against pressure to yield the occupied territories, the more the holocaust was pushed before the American public. Two days before Begin's March talks with President Carter, the Times Op-Ed piece, "Ein Volk, Ein Reich " 52 illustrated with a swastika, described the takeover of a suburb of Vienna, the burning of the synagogue, and other Nazi criminal actions. At a time the Middle East was in flames over the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the recital of this forty-year outdated, newsless, and unrelated incident could have had no other purpose than to prick the world conscience anew.

   Nothing, not even Begin's first visit to the U.S. in the summer of 1977, was as widely heralded as the NBC TV 2-hour, four-episode series, "Holocaust." For thirteen months the Brodkin-Green series filmed in Vienna and funded by NBC and World Vision Enterprises 53 had been promoted as a rival to "Roots." The story spanned 1933-45 and followed a Jewish doctor from his secure social and financial position in Berlin to the Warsaw ghetto. The Mauthausen concentration camp and Reinhold Heydrich's office were used as locations to inject the appropriate Nazi flavor.

   Spread over three pages of TV Guide of April 15 was the article "A Wreath on the Graves of the Six Million" to kick off the NBC telecast April 17-20 of its series. The showings, originally scheduled for the fall, were moved up to coincide with the start of Passover and, more importantly, when disaffection with Begin was increasing in the U.S. following his most unsympathetic visit with Carter in Washington and the invasion of Lebanon. NBC's publicity department grinded out release after release during the series, claiming that 120 million had seen one or more installments, outdrawing "Roots."

   The New York Times carried a full-page advertisement, "Six Million Jews Who Were Not Intransigent," drawing attention to the programs and paid for by Americans for a Safe Israel. 54 Taking up a good portion of the page was the ever-familiar photo of the pitiful youngster with his hands raised in the face of Nazi guns, and an awe-inspiring illustration of a burning crematorium. This page left no doubt as to the purpose of the spotlight on the holocaust. While NBC and the Anti-Defamation League were claiming merely to be imparting a history lesson, the ad sponsors were laying down guidelines for the present and the future: Support "Israel's promise to the future, send this ad to the President and Congress . . . post this in your synagogue or church . . . place this ad in your local newspaper."

   The Nielsen ratings revealed that the viewing audience of "Holocaust" did not nearly match "Roots"; on the first night "Laverne and Shirley," "Three's Company," and "M.A.S.H." outdrew the televised dramatization of Jewish extermination. 55 But network officials expressed satisfaction when Part Two outdrew ABC's offbeat Western, "A Man Called Horse." The 370 phoned complaints (390 calls praised the telecasts) "appeared to be part of an organized campaign," said NBC to the Times. 56 

   Viewers' reaction could be summed up in the words of a fifty-year-old Roman Catholic: "As I watched the show, I wanted to turn it off but couldn't. I was drawn to the story even though I am not sure if it was a true enough portrayal." At Columbia University's Furnald Dormitory some students watched "Holocaust," while in one room they waited for "Rhoda" to end before tuning in, and in another "Holocaust" was tuned out at 9:00 P.M. in favor of the James Bond film on ABC. Most metropolitan papers in New York and Washington interviewed Jewish viewers, but some Jews as well as Christians complained that the commercials--for cars, toothpaste, bandage strips, and soft drinks--proved an absurd complement to the drama. For example, immediately following a brutal rape scene involving a teenage girl, an elated Bill Cosby came on to expound the benefits of driving a Ford.

   This should not have upset any intelligent viewer. The whole performance, after all, was nothing but one big commercial: "Let's support Israel or this will happen again." As Near East Report phrased it: "Anyone who watched NBC's 'Holocaust' this week should have a better understanding of Israel's intense preoccupation with security. The television drama and book by Gerald Green furnished six million reasons why the Jewish state's leaders insist upon defensible borders." 57 

   The ensuing raging controversy among critics and viewers over the artistic merits of "Holocaust" only served to spread the propaganda message further. In the first of his two reviews, New York Times columnist John J. O'Connor accused writer Green of "transforming events and attitudes into a stereotypical collection of wooden characters and impossible coincidences." He called the series "less of a noble failure than a presumptuous venture." 58 

   The Times reviewer, generally sympathetic to Zionist propaganda, added: "In a master stroke of public relations, many religious groups; Jewish and non-Jewish, were recruited to participate in related 'educational' projects effectively endorsing a program they hadn't seen and thus reducing the possibilities for their being critical. The program's content is indeed raising questions of an 'educational' nature. In searching for an upbeat angle on the story of harrowing devastation, the writer and producer settled on the Zionist cause and the founding of Israel." 59 

   Elie Wiesel joined O'Connor in assailing "the trivializing of the holocaust" in his article spread over two pages of the Sunday New York Times the day the miniseries commenced. In calling the film "untrue, offensive, cheap--an insult to those who perished," 60 Wiesel brought the dramatization to the attention of the 1.4 million readers, some of whom by chance might have missed the enormous, continuous publicity buildup. And the two pages of letters, pro and con, that the Times published two Sundays later helped realize Wiesel's final words: "The holocaust must be remembered. But not as a show."

   To capture the attention of its more plebeian readership, the New York Daily News carried that same Sunday the first of a serialization of the Green novel and a full-page story in the Leisure Section by its long-time Zionist-oriented television editor, Kay Gardella, 61 who called the film "harrowing and riveting." In her zeal to give the dramatization a boost, she let the cat out of the bag by unwittingly but pointedly linking the television program to growing Palestinian sympathy. And the more subtle Washington Post carried an historical piece, "Prelude to Holocaust," on 1-1/2 pages with pictures that Sunday in its "Outlook" section.

   After querying why television viewers should have been "experiencing the pain of extensive treatment of the degradation, torture, and killing of the Jews," columnist William Buckley answered his own question by noting that there "was no way of undoing retroactively what the Nazis did." He then courageously made the point that "innocent Lebanese were killed by the survivors of the holocaust in the recent operations against Lebanon. So why interest oneself in the wholesale massacres of the past?" 62 

   This writer and other critics were also bothered by the "Holocaust" denigration of the Christian church and total indifference to the sufferings of others. Dr. Norbert Capek, minister of the world's largest Unitarian church, and 1,000 Catholic priests were shot at Dachau. Eastern Rite Bishop Thomas V. Dolinay boldly labeled the series "clever propaganda" in the June 8 Wanderer.

   Following an initial 450,000 printing, Bantam sent the Green book back to the presses eight times, the ninth printing just before the series opened; the imprint total was just over 1-1/2 million. Copies were even widely used in lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill to help congressmen who were wavering on the question of death planes for Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.

   Rival networks picked up on NBC's theme. For a full week of afternoon movies ABC-TV Channel 7 showed Leon Uris's "QB VII" and "Exodus" so that the spirit of the holocaust would not be entirely lost. To CBS's "Sixty Minutes" Mike Wallace brought on April 16 the "Annual Reunion of Auschwitz Survivors," featuring actress-author Fania Fenelon, to whom the Times also gave a half-page story. (There Is even a World Federation of the Bergen-Belsen Associations.)

   To thrust the ultimate weapon, "You are either for the Jews and Israel or you are for Hitler" at every possible American, the Anti-Defamation League's sixteen-page "The Record: The Holocaust in History, 1933-1945" was distributed to some twenty million readers as an advertising supplement across the country. The National Council for the Social Studies in Washington and a staff of ten cooperated in assembling the detailed highlights of Nazi genocide and whole kit of the holocaust saga. Articles included were Otto Tolschus's "The Pogrom: Kristallnacht" (night of broken glass), Wiesel's "Teaching the Holocaust," author and scriptwriter Green's comments on his NBC series, and such "current" news pieces as "Eichmann Directs Jewish Extermination," "Hitler Hints at New Attacks on Jews," and "Goebbels Warning to the Jews." Among the photographs were those of Anne Frank, the famed Life magazine Margaret Bourke-White's "The Living Dead at Buchenwald," and the Nuremberg war criminals in the docket. The myth of Albert Einstein's support of Zionist nationalism was portrayed in a piece on the "Physicist at Sixty," with a picture of the doctor, his wife, and daughter swearing allegiance receiving their American citizenship papers.

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   The most complete listing of source materials closed this "educational guide," which had been inserted into the regular sections of leading dailies and weeklies through the generosity of leading Zionists; and advertisers-with Uncle Sam's tax-free dollars. In some cities a full-page advertisement explained that it was "being brought as a public service of this newspaper in conjunction with the Anti-Defamation League," but included three pages of ads to cover the cost of the paper's "generosity."

   The week of the "Holocaust" series Christians were enlisted to wear the Nazi yellow badges. Sunday services expressing solidarity with Jews were held in many churches, and the New York Post of April 18 showed Michael Moriarty, who played the role of Nazi SS officer Eric Dorf in the miniseries, leaving Riverside Church with the Reverend Dr. William Sloane Coffin.

   With the help of glowing press releases from the National Education Association in praise of the NBC series and the "educational follow-up," the entire American public school system was reached. In March NEA Executive Director Terry Herndon had participated with religious leaders and educators on a national televised symposium, "Man's Inhumanity to Man," which was fed by closed circuit to NBC affiliates for broadcast at their convenience as promotion for the miniseries. Nearly one million study guides prepared by the Anti-Defamation League, the National Council of Churches, the American Federation of Teachers, and NBC were distributed to schools and religious groups to aid the students as they watched "Holocaust." Schools were also sent an NEA Rozanne Weissman feature declaring the holocaust to be "an ideal ninth grade unit for teaching persecution and prejudice." To boot, Health, Education and Welfare Deputy Commissioner of the Bureau of Elementary and Secondary Education Thomas Minter pledged more coordinated federal funding for teaching about the holocaust.

   Europe was not neglected either. International distribution rights for "Holocaust" were sold to ten countries including West Germany, where the two national channels competed for the purchase. But in Israel where ever financially alert Knesset Member Shmuel Flatto Sharon had bought the rights, a debate over the sensitivity of the subject held up production.

   To keep the spirit of the holocaust ablaze, the 35th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising was commemorated on April 30 with Collective Remembrance Day, marked by front-page coverage and large newspaper advertisements. Guest speakers at Temple Emanu-El included Elie Wiesel, the Israeli Ambassador, the Governor of New York, and the Mayor. As New York's Fifth Avenue synagogue was filling up, the New York Times' good music FM radio station WCXR shifted from the classical music of Verdi to a program of "holocaust music," including the rendition by Jan Peerce and others of such songs as "Our Town Is Burning." 63 

   The public school system in the U.S. has been gradually penetrated by the holocaust. The front page of the second section of the New York Times on January 12, 1976, carried a six-column story headed "Students at Teaneck High Agonize Over the Holocaust." Reprinted once again was Bourke-White's famed Buchenwald photo, which had first appeared in Life magazine and Time some thirty-one years previously and innumerable times since. The article, replete with many references to the "six million," indicated that the ADL, in cooperation with the New Jersey Education Association, was sponsoring pilot projects to raise more than $1 million to make available books, clippings, films, and other teaching materials to high schools and junior high schools in many parts of the country to emphasize the holocaust and its meaning. The inspiration for this program had come from a Great Barrington, Massachusetts, high school where the holocaust was being studied in the classroom.

   In an unprecedented step the New York City Board of Education designated the week of April 18-22, 1977, as the first annual "Jewish Heritage Week" for all students,Jews and non-Jews, which was kicked off with celebration in the districts, schools, departments, and classrooms and highlighted "Solidarity for Soviet Jewry," "Israeli Independence Day," and the "Warsaw Ghetto Uprising." Included in material prepared by the Jewish Labor Committee and distributed in "instructor kits" at a teachers' workshop promoting the week on the previous Tuesday were pamphlets, including a bibliography of Zionist books and a catalog of audiovisual materials, both of which were saturated with the story of the holocaust, the history of Masada, 64 and the film Anti-Semitism in America. 65 

   Teachers were advised to promote appearances of concentration. camp survivors at classroom meetings. The students were told that the three major concerns of American Jews were "the holocaust, Soviet Jewry, and the security of Israel."

   The following October a course of study on the holocaust was introduced by the New York Board of Education with the hope it would be made mandatory in all of the city high schools the following year. 66 The 461-page curriculum, "The Holocaust, a Study of Genocide," included extracts from Hitler's Mein Kampf pictures and descriptions of the death camps, poems, plays, maps, and programs for class discussion. The course was to supplant, said Board President Steven R. Aiello, the brief discussion of Nazi genocide taken up in history and other social studies courses. His goal was "at least two weeks of mandatory Holocaust Study" after the initial year's experimentation (70 percent of the students in New York City schools are black or Hispanic).

   In a three-column Times Letter to the Editor, 67  given the bold heading "Holocaust Study: The Intent Is to Inform, Not Inflame.," Board of Education Chancellor Irving Anker defended the course as "part of history" from which an understanding of "prejudice and racism" will help "young people to know and respect one another's differences." The Chancellor stated that it was "never the intention to. pass over the sufferings of other groups," but no plans were announced for parallel courses.

   The Philadelphia secondary public schools went one step further than New York. Over the rigorous protest of the city's largest German-American organization, the school system announced in September 1977 "plans to require virtually all students in secondary public schools to study the Holocaust of the Jews in Nazi Germany." 68 The, program, begun in some schools the year before, was to be expanded and introduced as part of a required world history course in the ninth grade in the city's twenty-six senior high schools and forty junior high. schools.

   The Chairman of the German-American Committee of Greater Philadelphia protested that the 127-page curriculum guide gave the impression "that the Jews were the only ones who suffered to any great extent and that the Nazis were the only ones who committed crimes against humanity." But this made little impact on Dr. Franklin H. Littell, Chairman of the religion department at Temple University, who developed the program after he had directed and participated in national conferences on the holocaust.

   For the benefit of high school history textbooks and college texts, whose treatment of Nazism was found to be "brief, bland, superficial, and misleading," ADL pamphleteer Henry Friedlander wrote a lengthy tome, and ADL subsidized author Milton Meltzer's 217-page book Never to Forget: The Jews of the Holocaust, 69 published by Harper & Row and reviewed by the Times Sunday Book Review. 70 Widely distributed in all schools and colleges was the six-page ADL bulletin listing the publications and audiovisual material available on the holocaust. In addition to making it possible for major publishing houses to put out new tomes, the organization made available books already published. The cultists prepared new anthologies--studies on Auschwitz, the Eichmann Trial, The Third Reich in Perspective, and The Anatomy of Nazism. Their selected Reading List on the holocaust contained seventeen well-known titles.

   Whenever all else failed and the Zionist juggernaut seemed to be stalled, Nazi pursuer Simon Wiesenthal was brought into the limelight. Although Israel has proclaimed a new relationship with West Germany, she has not been adverse to accepting any propaganda gains that might be reaped from the James Bond "007"-like efforts of manhunter Wiesenthal, whose continuing search for Nazis spasmodically erupts into healthy media coverage. "The Nazi Hunter" was the subject of a June 19, 1977, interview on CBS's "Who's Who" on "Sixty Minutes," and a vast field was opened by introducing Dan Rather to the notorious anti-Nazi.

   With the announcement of a new series of children's books to be written by Wiesenthal for Raintree Publishers in Milwaukee, the very young were not to be given fairy tales--or were they?--but recitals of the Wiesenthal adventures in tracking down war criminals. The first was to deal with his search for the Gestapo police officer in occupied Holland who arrested Anne Frank, the overpublicized teenager whose diary (in twenty-six editions) told of Jewish persecution in Holland under the Nazis, but the veracity of whose saga has since come under serious question. 71 

   Another Wiesenthal horror book was to describe the hunt for Adolf Eichmann, who was executed by Israel in 1961 for his war crimes. "I want to make this story alive so a young man will read and understand it," said author Wiesenthal. "It is something for society--for the new generation." Who but the Zionists would try to emulate the Nazis by capturing the minds of the young. Happily, the project was dropped. 72 

   Wiesenthal's books were scarcely the first on the holocaust for the young. On one Sunday in November 1972 73 Elie Wiesel, then recently appointed Professor of Jewish Studies at City University of New York, reviewed seven books intended to add to the traumas and complexes of young readers by acquainting them with one aspect or another of the Hitler period. The books were described as "valuable, moving, and perceptible" to one degree or another. The review was illustrated with the oft-repeated 1943 photo of women and children being arrested in Warsaw.

   Congress joined the act, too. Spearheaded by Representatives Joshua Eilberg, Chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, and Elizabeth Holtzman of Brooklyn, both Israel-Firsters, the publicity war against Hitler continued thirty-one years after the fact. The front page of the October 3, 1976, New York Times carried the story: "Nazi War Criminal Suspects in US Face Deportation as Drive Widens." Some of the "alleged" criminals had been brought to the country by U.S. intelligence agents to assist in the development of such scientific ventures as the space capsule.

   But with the cooperation of the anti-anti-Semitic cult, Wiesenthal and Tuviah Friedman, Director of the Nazi war-crimes documentation center in Haifa, Israel, helped inspire a "New US Nazi Hunt," as the Times 74 announced in a half-page Sunday "Week in Review" spread featured by the well-known, oft-reprinted photo of the Nazi defendants in the dock, at the 1946 Nuremberg war-crimes trial. By 1976 there were pending investigations by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service of some eighty-five naturalized American citizens and resident aliens for alleged atrocities in Nazi-occupied Europe and illegal entrance into the U.S. after the war. Cases involving three elderly men, two Latvians and a Lithuanian, and Rumanian Orthodox Bishop of America Valerian D. Trifa, received widespread publicity. The television programs "Sixty Minutes," "A.M. America," and the David Suskind show devoted extensive time to the war-crimes issue despite the fact that as the cameras showed, there was a definite lack of public enthusiasm for this theme. Neighbors of one of the Nazis being "pursued," Boleslaus Maikovskis, felt he should be left alone at this stage of his life. (The 73-year-old Latvian was shot, but not fatally, on August 4, 1978, ostensibly by the JDL.) But such opinions were, of course, totally ignored by the media's compulsive attraction to this subject, and nothing could halt the Nazi hunter's successful quest for funds for the new Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies in California. 75 

   On one occasion when hard-pressed in diplomatic jousting, Prime Minister Meir audaciously declared: "You did nothing to save Jews in the holocaust. You shall not preach to us now." 76 This kind of emotional blackmail is apt to be used by anyone and to appear any place. The New York Review of Books, for instance, has been recognized as one of the few influential publications that has given some small space to dissenting views on the Middle East--albeit from the Left. I. F. Stone and Noam Chomsky, in particular, have been allowed in recent years to present most controversial positions on the Palestinians. Yet even in this magazine, a long piece, "Among the Israelis," 77 by Stephen Spender, the noted British poet and critic, was climaxed with a moving but emotional account of his visit to Yad Vashem. Coming at the end of Spender's article, this served to wipe away the pros and cons that he had evidently been trying to balance in the course of his writing. All that was left was the black slate of the concentration camps. Against such atrocities, what chance had the Palestinians or the arguments of "the Arabists" 78 with whom Spender passed much of his time in the Holy Land.

   No one disputes that the Nazi era was one of the lowest points, if not the lowest, in human civilization. It must not be overlooked, however, that millions of people other than Jews perished, and for these the bell does not seem to have been tolling. And it is not out of line to inquire of the cultists, these people so intent on keeping this issue of the "six million" alive, whether they have ever given any consideration to the Zionist role in the deaths of these "six million" victims? In discussing alleged Vatican indifference to the holocaust, the Jewish Observer, the organ of the Orthodox Agadath Israel of America, pointed out a Jewish parallel:

  "We are forced to realize with deep pain that this passivity had its echo on the Jewish scene, too..... There was not only the intrusion of politics into various aspects of the rescue efforts that were made. The writings . . . clearly prove that actual rescue opportunities were neglected or even blocked because they did not fit in with the plans of the Zionist leadership to force a showdown over the Israel state in the making. 79 

    Ben Hecht's fully documented Perfidy 80 blatantly exposed the extent to which Zionists cooperated in the annihilation of their fellow Jews. This early supporter of Jewish statehood in Palestine described the criminal libel suit brought against Malkiel Greenwald for charging high-ranking Israeli official Rudolf Kastner of collaboration in the responsibility for the slaughter of Hungary's one million Jews. "Timorous Jewish lodge members in Zion, London and America... these Zionist leaders who let their six million kinsmen burn, choke, hang without protest, with indifference" is Hecht's description of the reaction of Jewish leaders who, he insisted, "knew in advance the timing, method, and place of the impending annihilation, but refused to warn the victims out of greater concern for the creation of a political state than for saving Jewish lives." 81 

   Many of the Hungarian Jews, according to Hecht, were but three miles from the Rumanian border and were guarded by a very small Nazi military contingent as they were fed reassurances by Zionist leader Kastner up to the very moment they were shipped to the crematoria. He had intimate ties with such Nazis as Eichmann, Himmler, and their aide Lieutenant General Kurt Becher, in whose behalf Kastner later intervened to save from conviction at Nuremberg. But when Joel Kastner was permitted to come out of the Hungarian hell as an intermediary from the Nazis with a barter deal of trucks for human lives, President-to-be of Israel Chaim Weizmann refused to see him for weeks, and Kastner then permitted the deal to fall through.

   Sixteen years later, The Holocaust Victims 82 by Rabbi Moshe Schonfeld corroborated Hecht's evidence that the Zionist leadership was concerned only in the creation of a state, "not the saving of Jewish lives," and had permitted thousands of their own people to go to their death so that they might advance political goals. Photostated documents and copies of letters, written by some of those accused by Rabbi Schonfeld, supported the charge of betrayal against Weizmann, Rabbi Stephen Wise, and Jewish Agency Chairman Yitzhak Greenbaum, to whom the Jewish slaughter only meant further emphasis on their insistence that the creation of a Zionist state in Israel was the only hope for surviving Jews.

   Greenbaum was quoted as having said, "One cow in Palestine is worth more than all the Jews in Poland." Wise was alleged to have lobbied to make sure that relief packages of food were denied to starving Jews in Europe so that they would be forced to seek Zionist goals. At a time when money was needed to save Eastern European Jews, Greenbaum wrote, "When they asked me, couldn't you give money out of the United Jewish Appeal funds for the rescue of Jews in Europe, I said 'No,' and I say again 'No!' One should resist this wave which pushes Zionist activities, i.e. the creation of a state, to secondary importance."

   In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 83 Hannah Arendt verified the intimate connection, Lucy Dawidowicz notwithstanding, between the Nazis and Zionist leaders, who were the only Jews in the early months of the Hitler regime to associate with the German authorities and who used their position to discredit anti- and non-Zionist Jews. According to Arendt, they urged the adoption of the slogan, "Wear the yellow star with pride" to end Jewish assimilation and to encourage the Nazis to send the Jews to Palestine. A secret agreement was reached between the Jewish Agency for Palestine and Nazi authorities to assist in Zionist plans for illegal immigration into the Holy Land, toward which end even the Gestapo and the SS were willing to cooperate, for this was another method of ridding Europe of the "hated Jews."

   The cumulative effect of keeping the holocaust in the forefront of the entertainment, cultural, and political worlds can only be understood when one tries to speak on the Middle East conflict before even as impartial an audience as the American Humanist Society and emotional, near-crazed partisans wildly interrupt: "What about the six million?" To Israelis and their nationalist-minded American followers, the deaths of no one else counted. 84 Hemingway's advice to F. Scott Fitzgerald meant absolutely nothing: "We are all tragic figures. . . . when you receive a damned hurt use it. . . . don't cheat with it." Yad Vashem and the holocaust keep remembrance of the tragic past aglow, blot out the growing Palestinian shadow and help hold Christians in bondage.

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