Now
of course raven isn't
saying that the media doesn't care about anti-semitism when it comes from the left/democrats. He's only excreting that brainfart in the least discrete way possible.
However, what about the republican party itself (rather than some rogue candidate) using neo-nazis to get out the vote for George H.W. Bush? Here's what Jewish professor Chomsky had to say:
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There's this part of the Bush campaign called the "Ethnic Outreach Committee," which tries to organize ethnic minorities; obviously that doesn't mean blacks or Hispanics, it means Ukrainians, Poles, that sort of business. And it turned out that it was being run by a bunch of East European Nazis, Ukrainian Nazis, hysterical anti-Semites, Romanians who came out of the Iron Guard, and so on. Well, finally this got exposed; some of the people were reshuffled, some were put into other positions in the Republican Party-but it all just passed over very quietly. The Democrats never even raised the issue during the election campaign.
You might ask, why? How come the Democrats never even raised the issue? Well, I think there was a very good reason for that: I think the Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League basically called them off. The point is, these organizations don't ultimately care about anti-Semitism, what they care about is opposition to the policies of Israel-in fact, opposition to their own hawkish version of the policies of Israel. They're Israeli government lobbies, essentially, and they understood that these Nazis in the Bush campaign were quite pro-Israel, so what do they care? The New Republic, which is sort of an organ for these groups, had a very interesting editorial on it. It was about anti-Semitism, and it referred to the fact that this committee was being run by anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, Nazis and so on, and then it said: yes, that's all true, but this is just "antique and anemic" anti-Semitism. Nazism is just "antique and anemic" anti-Semitism, not terribly important, we shouldn't get too upset about it. And then it said: the real anti-Semitism that we ought to be worried about is in the Democratic Party, which is filled with "Jew-haters"-that was the phrase they used. And part of the proof is, the Democrats were actually willing to debate a resolution calling for Palestinian self-determination at their National Convention, so therefore they're "Jew-haters" and that's the "real" antiSemitism in America. (That was in fact the title of a book by the Director of the A.D.L., Nathan Perlmutter.)Well, the Democrats got the message that they weren't going to win any points with this, so they never raised a peep about it.
And here are the sources:
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On the Nazis in the 1988 Bush campaign, see for example, Russell C. Bellant, "Will Bush Purge Nazi Collaborators in the G.O.P.?," Op-Ed, New York Times, November 19, 1988, section 1, p. 27 (reporting that seven of the neo-Nazis and anti-Semites were discharged from the Bush campaign after the revelations, but four of them retained leadership positions in the Heritage Groups Council, the "Ethnic Outreach" arm of the Republican National Committee); John B. Judis, "Bush's teflon on anti-Semitic links," In These Times, September 28-October 4, 1988, pp. 6-7 (reviewing the "curiously blasé" reactions of the leading Jewish organizations "about both the revelations and Bush's response to them"); David Corn, "G.O.P. Anti-Semites," Nation, October 24, 1988, p. 369; Charles R. Allen, "The Real Nazis Behind Every Bush," Village Voice, November 1, 1988, p. 24; Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, "The G.O.P.-Nazi Connection," Extra!, September/October 1988, p. 5 (on the media's minimization of the episode).
See also, Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media, New York: Lyle Stuart, 1990. An excerpt (p. 161):
An exception [to the media's downplaying of the story] was the Philadelphia Inquirer, which featured a series of investigative pieces documenting the Nazi link. A front-page lead story detailed the sordid past of men like Florian Galdau, the national chairman of Romanians for Bush, who defended convicted war criminal Valerian Trifa; Radi Slavoff, co-chairman of Bulgarians for Bush, who arranged a 1983 event in Washington that honored Austin App, author of several texts denying the existence of the Nazi Holocaust; Phillip Guarino, chairman of the Italian-American National Republican Federation, who belonged to a neofascist masonic lodge implicated in terrorist attacks in Italy and Latin America; and Bohdan Fedorak, vice chairman of Ukrainians for Bush, who was also a leader of a Nazi collaborationist organization involved in anti-Polish and anti-Jewish wartime pogroms.
For the New Republic's editorial, see Editorial, "Anti-Semitism, Left and Right," New Republic, October 3, 1988, p. 9. An excerpt:
[There is a] comfortable haven for Jew-hatred on the left, including the left wing of the Democratic Party, [parts of the Jesse Jackson campaign, and] the ranks of increasingly well-organized Arab activists. . . .
Salient anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism with a program. One tenet of that program is the delegitimization of the Jewish national movement -- about the only national movement these people don't seem to thrill to. Another tenet -- sometimes disguised, sometimes not -- is that a just society would not have individuals from any group underrepresented or overrepresented in its positions of prestige and influence. This attack on talent was the central doctrine of the politics of resentment for which civilization (and the Jews) have already paid dearly. It's strange how some Democrats so alert to rather antique and anemic forms of anti-Semitism among the Republicans, haven't noticed far more virulent forms in their own contemporary habitat.
For the book by Anti-Defamation League's former National Director, see Nathan Perlmutter and Ruth Ann Perlmutter, The Real Anti-Semitism In America, New York: Arbor House, 1982. For discussion of the Perlmutters' thesis, see Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, Boston: South End, 1983 (updated edition 1999), pp. 14-16.
This post has been edited by hi_: 01 August 2010 - 06:38 AM
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Seriously? I guess I just don't get why it matters whether the money is "Jewish" or not, unless you're a racist douchecanoe or trying to pander to the segment of the population who is. Is he suggesting that Jewish community members of Staten Island aren't real somehow?
