Ronald Radosh's Blog, page 14

The Worst Tribute Articles to Pete Seeger

A few years ago, on these very pages, I wrote a column titled: “My Final Words on Pete Seeger.” Alas, it was not to be. My final words will actually appear tomorrow, in the pages of the Weekly Standard. And since I wrote the PJM column in 2009, I think I ended up writing at least three, perhaps more, pieces about Seeger. Each time he opened his mouth to endorse yet another horrendous political cause, such as the BDS movement, I found I could not keep silent.

And now, The New Republic’s Paul Berman has laid out a challenge I simply could not ignore. Let me simply give you his own words:

Did he ever fully come to grips with the grotesqueries of his Communist past? I look forward to reading my friend Ron Radosh, the ex-Communist, currently right-wing Republican, ex-banjo-player on this question — Radosh, with whom I agree 10 percent of the time, but who remained, I know, somehow in contact with Seeger, even into recent times. I expect Ron to denounce Pete. I am sorry to remind Pete’s fans that denunciations by Ron Radosh are Pete’s fate.

Sorry, Paul, I’m a conservative — but definitely not a “right-wing Republican,” whatever that pejorative is supposed to mean.

I cannot disappoint Paul Berman. But what more could I do, without repeating anything appearing in the Standard article? One thing occurred to me. Each day brings perhaps at least ten new articles about Pete Seeger, from publications throughout the world, from Israel to Australia to numerous European countries. Anyone doubting his influence and impact should try to compile them all. By now, they can easily make up a new book all by themselves. There are so many I could not even hope to give you the links.

So I have decided to address those that deal with Pete Seeger and communism, and the question of how much impact should one give to that issue in assessing whether or not he was a great artist and musician. Reading all the Seeger tributes, I thought I could come up with what are perhaps the two worst ones written in tribute to Pete Seeger.

The prize for the second-worst article goes to writer David A. Graham.

Graham tries to square the circle in The Atlantic: he acknowledges all the moral obtuseness of Seeger’s Stalinism, and writes that Seeger took “distressing and dangerous positions,” and had some “horrifying ideas.” But, says Graham, despite all this … Seeger meant well!

That’s it — his Stalinism can be excused, because he had good intentions. As Graham sees things: “In Seeger’s eyes, the ideas the Communist Party stood for were quintessentially American.” Because Seeger supposedly thought that a Stalinist state in America would be good, that makes it excusable?

He cites Earl Browder’s war years slogan “Communism is 20th Century Americanism,” without realizing that the slogan was quickly abandoned because Stalin ordered it withdrawn as soon as he heard it.

I somehow don’t remember Pete Seeger coming to the defense of Hollywood writer Albert Maltz in 1945, when the comrades took him to task for saying maybe the slogan “art is a weapon” was misguided. Maltz was pilloried by the comrades and forced to grovel and beg forgiveness for his apostasy. Of course Seeger wouldn’t come to his defense — he often said he believed that was the very mission of his own art.

Indeed, Graham believes that the American Reds imbued a “patriotic leftism.” This shows, of course, how little Graham knows about the history of the American Communist Party. Maybe I should gift him the collected works of Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes; he might learn something from them.

Graham also seems to know little about the Spanish Civil War, since he tells us Pete had “friends who died fighting with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.” If Graham knew anything, he would first realize that it was a battalion, and not a brigade — a name purposefully inflated by the comrades to make them appear a bigger force than they actually were. Moreover, he does not realize that this Comintern army fought the battle not for liberty, but for Stalin’s foreign policy aims, as I once wrote about my own uncle who died in that battalion. The article, which appeared in the Washington Post, was called “My Uncle Died in Vain Fighting ‘the good fight.’” I suggest Graham look it up in LexisNexis, or get hold of the book I co-authored, Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War.

Graham even attributes to Seeger the authorship of “We Shall Overcome,” which any folklorist knows was an old gospel hymn transformed into a labor organizing song that Seeger later learned at the leftist Highlander Folk School. He and Guy Carawan wrote some new words, and yes, made it familiar, and transformed it into the civil rights anthem it became. But that phrase is something that Seeger can take no credit whatsoever for writing.

Graham’s article, however, is nothing compared to the single worst article about Seeger. That prize goes to … Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor of Jacobin and senior editor of socialist weekly In These Times. Sunkara’s column appears, perhaps appropriately, in the pages of Aljazeera America, a source I know everyone regularly reads. The title is — ready for this? — “In Defense of Pete Seeger: American Communist.”

What the Left has in Mind for the Media in their Communist Utopia: The Prescriptions of Comrade Jerome

About one week ago, the left-wing webzine Salon published an article by one Fred Jerome, titled “Let’s Nationalize Fox News.” Jerome’s article, it turns out, is excerpted from a new book published by Harper-Collins, Imagine:Living in a Socialist USA. It is important for what it reveals about the old Communist mentality, still alive in Jerome’s mind.

The Salon site does not provide any information about the author. The book says only that he is a journalist and author of a few books, who was subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 60’s.

So it’s left to me to provide a more accurate appraisal of Mr. Jerome. As readers of my memoir might recall,  I knew Freddy Jerome as one of the leaders of the NYC young Communist movement during my high school years. I recalled the last time I had contact with him. When I was in the city during vacation while in  college, Freddy met me to discuss putting together a trip to Cuba. He demanded that I first join the new Marxist-Leninist group he was forming. When I refused, he turned and said, as he went on his way, “I have nothing to do with enemies of the working class.”

Fred Jerome came from major Communist stock. He was the son of the late cultural commissar of the CPUSA, V.J. Jerome, the man most well known for trying to keep the Hollywood Reds in line. Fred Jerome broke with the CPUSA in the 60′s, and was one of the founders of the Maoist “Progressive Labor Party.” If ever the cliché “like father, like son” rings true, it is the case with Fred Jerome. In this brief excerpt, Jerome reveals how news organizations would function in a “socialist” America—except, it is indistinguishable from how they actually functioned in the old Soviet Union, or in Communist Cuba today.

Indeed, Jerome’s article could be taken as a model for the old Soviet Pravda [truth] or Izvestia. We all know the old joke , “There’s no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia.” That was an old Russians saying, a response to the masthead which actually said “Proletarians of the world, unite.” When one reads Jerome’s prescriptions for the press, one could put that on the masthead of his would-be newspaper before it is even written.

Jerome writes:

So news (and views) in a socialist society will be brought to you by a plethora of noncommercial sponsors. The government media will report on and discuss, for example, the major government plans for production, how to improve education, and more. But other media—newspapers, TV and radio stations, and Web sites sponsored by workers’ organizations, cultural organizations, youth groups, sports teams, and neighborhood groups will report on issues specific to their interests.

If you ever read one of those old commie papers- and I hope you never had the opportunity- it sounds most familiar. When Russians quipped the media never gave them news, that is precisely what they were referring to. Yet Jerome, so mired is he  obviously in what he thinks was the golden years of the USSR, that coincided with his own youth,  that he actually wants their concept of “news” to be a model for his dream of an American communist utopia. [I refuse to engage in the charade of Jerome’s use of the world “socialism,” since his use of the term is the old Leninist one of socialism as the first phase on the road to communism.]

Jerome thinks all those people’s organizations will have their own media, fully funded by the socialist government, because “money is allocated based on assessed social need and not on projected profits.” In Jerome’s mind, once government gives these groups money for their own newspapers, radio and TV outlets, there never would be any pressure from those in control of what in effect would be a party-state government to demand only one role from these outlets—-to reinforce the planned economic and political development instituted by the state’s planners. As he himself writes, local and national governments “set production-distribution quotas.” What if a worker quickly learns he is being forced to work without sufficient remuneration at a breakneck pace? I think deep down, Jerome knows the answer: the state will force him to fulfill the quota, or else.

As in his beloved old “socialist” countries of yesteryear, any independence or real exposure would quickly be condemned as counterrevolutionary pessimism, and those held responsible would find their papers or stations closed down, and the perpetrators arrested. Venezuela, anyone, or Cuba? Or China, where a dissident paper has recently been shut down? These are countries singled out as “progressive” by many of the other writers appearing in the same anthology.

Later, Jerome writes how union theater groups would be subsidized as they ran productions of Threepenny Opera, Waiting for Lefty, and West Side Story. What if a theater group decided to produce, let us say, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged?  Since that would never occur to Freddy Jerome, let me pretend we lived in his communist state, and someone indeed made just that suggestion. What would Comrade Jerome say, as he was sent by the party-state apparatus to lay down the line- as his father did in the 40’s- to the wayward comrades? I posit he would tell them something like the following: “Comrades, someone in your theater troupe is guilty of ‘false consciousness.’ The other comrades must demand quick re-education, and confession through public apologies and pleas for forgiveness.” If that is not coming, the wayward comrade would fully understand what lay next: public trial and a nice term in the new American gulag.

Finally, Jerome begins his article writing that “the major US media are run by and for big business, or …are themselves big businesses.” He continues to say that “it is a grand total of six mega-corporations—Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, CBS, and Comcast” that run the entire American media. And of course, these evil corporate conglomerates are simply “tools used by the 1 percent to rule and fool.”

So, it must come as a surprise to Comrade Jerome to see that the book in which his essay appears is published by Harper-Collins, a firm which, as Wikipedia tells us, is owned by—-you guessed it—none other than Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation- the very first conglomerate he lists as his example of corporate malfeasance! It does seem that where those evil corporate capitalists see a market through which to make some money for the bottom line, they’ll even fill the need by printing a communist book. It’s quite simple. Their owners add up those who participate in anarchist street action, the Occupy movement, and the membership of various sect groups, and see that they can make some more than it cost to publish the volume.

Yes, I know Jerome’s response. It would be that attributed to his hero Lenin: “We’ll sell the capitalists the rope we’ll use to hang them with.”  For the rest of us, reading Jerome’s prescriptions of how wonderful news media would be in his communist utopia, his words give us grounds for fear. Perhaps the Murdoch folks will have the last laugh after all: Perhaps they fully understand that once one reads the bromides of Fred Jerome, that in itself provides good medicine for doing all possible to prevent the success of those working on behalf of Fred Jerome’s political agenda.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Evidence Emerges about Nelson Mandela and His Secret Communist Past

We’ve known for some time that Nelson Mandela was a member of the South African Communist Party. It was hard for fawning liberals to acknowledge the meaning of his membership, so they came up with a narrative explaining it. Their story went something like this: He only briefly joined to get the benefit of their organizational talent, and his membership was rather symbolic, and hardly meaningful. What is important is his steadfast commitment to non-violence, his adherence to political democracy, and the role he played after emerging from prison in the waning days of apartheid.

But with each passing day, more has come out to put Mandela’s allegiance to communism in more perspective. Writing in the British Spectator, the courageous South African journalist Rian Malan tells the entire story. Malan tells the tale of what Professor Stephen Ellis found in the online Mandela archives.

What Ellis found is none other than the lost Mandela manuscript – the original draft of what became his 1994 autobiography (and now a movie) Long Walk to Freedom. After reading the book, Malan writes the following:

Everyone thought Mandela was a known entity, but he turns out to have led a double life, at least for a time. By day, he was or pretended to be a moderate democrat, fighting to free his people in the name of values all humans held sacred. But by night he donned the cloak and dagger and became a leader of a fanatical sect known for its attachment to the totalitarian Soviet ideal.

Malan and Professor Ellis found new insights into how Mandela’s image has been manipulated for propaganda purposes through the decades. Having decided to use Mandela as what Malan calls “the anti-apartheid movement’s official poster boy,” since he was a “tall, clean-limbed tribal prince, luminously charismatic, and…reduced by cruel circumstance to living martyrdom on a prison island,” the ANC and its supporters knew they had to “cleanse him of the communist taint.”

So they got a ghost writer for his book, a New York journalist named Rick Stengel, who of course refused to return Malan’s calls for a comment. Stengel, working from the original, left out all of Mandela’s passages that revealed the way he thought, and actually changed the meaning of much of what Mandela wrote. Here are some passages that were expunged:

I hate all forms of imperialism, and I consider the US brand to be the most loathsome and contemptible.

To a nationalist fighting oppression, dialectical materialism is like a rifle, bomb or missile. Once I understood the principle of dialectical materialism, I embraced it without hesitation.

Unquestionably, my sympathies lay with Cuba [during the 1962 missile crisis]. The ability of a small state to defend its independence demonstrates in no uncertain terms the superiority of socialism over capitalism.

Malan asks a strange question, and giving him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps it is with tongue in cheek. He writes, citing Barack Obama’s words at the Mandela memorial service that Mandela fought for “your freedom, your democracy,” that “one wonders if Barack Obama would have said that if he’d known his hero batted for the opposition during the Cold War.” Obviously, Malan is quite familiar with Mandela’s past, but knows very little about Obama’s. He does not know about Obama’s childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, the Chicago/Hawaii Communist apparatchik, or about his own mother’s overt leftism and that of his acquaintances in the Chicago area who were close to the American Communist Party.

At any rate, the unauthorized complete autobiography was completely purged of the elements that Malan says are nothing more than a “pro-communist harangue.” What Stengel then did is clean up Mandela’s work in three major ways, as I’ll show on the next page.

John Judis’ New and Despicable Attack on the Existence of Israel as a Jewish State

Thursday’s New Republic features a major article by John B. Judis, “Seeds of Doubt: Harry Truman’s concerns about Israel and Palestinians were prescient-and forgotten,” which pulls together material from his new book. My review of his book will appear in a forthcoming issue of The Jewish Review of Books, so I will only briefly comment on this article.

Both in this essay and in his book, Judis joins writers like Max Blumenthal and the BDS movement in attacking Israel and questioning its right to exist. Nevertheless, Judis makes assertions in the TNR excerpt that deserve attention, because they show how he uses history not to learn from the past, but for current political purposes. In this case, he uses history to bolster his belief that U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East should tilt towards the Arabs rather than Israel, and that Israel itself was created “against the opposition of its neighbors” and hence plays a “destabilizing” role — and is “a threat to America’s standing in the region.”

Judis argues that Harry S. Truman, who recognized Israel upon its creation in May 1948, not only opposed the creation of a Jewish state, but even after he recognized it, privately expressed regret and blamed his actions on the Zionist lobby in the United States. Judis has disdain for the “Zionist lobby,” which he seems to equate with the vast majority of American Jews and non-Jewish Americans who overwhelmingly supported the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine at the end of World War II.

Judis dismisses evidence that Truman was a Christian Zionist influenced by his religious upbringing and study of the Bible. Not so, says Judis: Truman’s supposed love for the Bible was  “based on his flawed eyesight. The family Bible, with its extra large print, was one of the few books at home the young Truman could read.”

Even if this was the case, large print or not, Truman read the Bible many times, studied it profusely, and knew much of it by heart. From it, he developed a sympathetic view of Palestine as the eternal homeland of the Jews, to which they would someday return.   When he suddenly became president after FDR’s death, he assigned other areas of foreign policy to the State Department, but felt competent to handle the issue of Palestine from the White House. Visitors were amazed when he took out a well-worn map of the area and was familiar with its geography and history.

Judis, however, claims that Truman “had little knowledge of Palestine.”

Most importantly, Judis gives far too much importance to Truman’s supposed endorsement of the Morrison-Grady Plan. (I cover this in detail in my forthcoming review.) He attributes its defeat, once again, to the “Zionist lobby.” Judis barely acknowledges that the Arab League and its representatives were just as opposed to the plan as the Palestinian Jews in the Yishuv – and omits that its members refused to even sit down to discuss it in London if there were any Jews who would be participating.

Judis repeats the widely held charge that Truman eventually supported the creation of Israel because of the Democratic Party’s need to obtain Jewish votes. He ignores that public opinion polls at the time established that the American public overwhelmingly favored support for a Jewish state, including states in which no or hardly any Jews lived. British Ambassador to the U.S. Lord Inverchapel was amazed to hear a speech by Democratic Senator Edwin Johnson — the British supposed that support for the creation of a Jewish state was confined to areas of the U.S. where a lot of Jews lived, yet Johnson was from Colorado, which, as Inverchapel reported home to the prime minister, did not “contain any appreciable Jewish population.”

The Meaning of Putin’s Expulsion of Journalist David Satter

The expulsion of journalist-historian David Satter from Vladimir Putin’s Russia is indeed — as Satter himself puts it in today’s Wall Street Journal – “an admission that the system under President Vladimir Putin cannot tolerate free speech, even in the case of foreign correspondents.”

Satter was in Russia as an investigative reporter for Radio Liberty’s Russian service, the successor station of the old Soviet-era Radio Free Europe.

No one is better equipped to cover today’s Russia, over which Putin presides as a tin-horn replica of Joe Stalin. Satter’s book Age of Delirium, which he subsequently made into a documentary film, reveals in poignant interviews what it was really like to live in the Soviet Union in its post-Stalin days. His most recent book, It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past, explores how Russia’s failure to understand and investigate what the decades of the Soviet experiment meant for their people’s lives permitted another authoritarian regime to develop under Putin.

So when the Russian authorities learned that David Satter was now going to reside in Moscow as the base for his reporting gig, they could not have been happy. Satter’s months there coincided with the planning of the forthcoming Sochi Olympics and the renewal of terrorism said to be from Chechen Muslims. It is also a period for investigating what Satter calls “unanswered questions from the past,” such as who was responsible for the 2004 massacre at the Beslan school, who bore responsibility for the murder in London of major Putin political opponent Alexander Litvinenko, and who murdered crusading journalists Anna Politkovskaya and Natalya Estemirova.

Of course Putin’s Russia is not the old Stalinist Soviet Union, but there are great similarities. Putin and his cronies, as Satter says, hold total political power and also control the country’s most valuable economic assets. Rather than create socialism in one country, as Stalin would have it, Putin has created crony capitalism, in which one set of approved leaders gets it all for themselves. The country is on the verge of economic collapse, held aloft only by artificially high prices for oil and gas. (Satter covered all this in Darkness at Dawn:The Rise of the Russian Criminal State.)

Clearly, in this precarious time for Russia and as Putin stakes his reputation on an unsullied Olympics, his security forces do not want a man of character such as David Satter reporting. New terrorist attacks have been taking place, and Satter is the man who provided evidence that past terrorism acts, such as the 2007 apartment bombings which the Kremlin blamed on the Chechens, were really carried out by the FSB, the successor agency of the old KGB.

Satter provides more information about his expulsion on his own website. There is only one conclusion as to why he was expelled, not even given permission to gather his belongings from his Moscow apartment and to retrieve his journalistic notes: “The real reason for my refusal,” Satter writes, “was the one given by Alexei Gruby in Kiev. I was expelled from the country at the demand of the security services.”

This is indeed “an ominous precedent for all journalists,” as well as for free speech in Putin’s Russia.

How will the journalistic community respond? Will they take their credentials and just cover the Olympics — which would give much-welcome propaganda via publicity as determined by Putin’s controlled news apparatus — or will they protest Satter’s expulsion and threaten to report independently once in Russia?

The Race-Baiting Antisemite Amiri Baraka’s Death, and How the Obits Treat Him

The African-American poet Amiri Baraka (born Everett Leroi Jones) died yesterday. Already, the press is whitewashing — or should I say, in deference to the deranged late race hater, blackwashing — his real record of obscenity.

Leading the charge, naturally, is NPR, whose obituary tells us that he was “controversial,” and that he “co-founded the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. His literary legacy is as complicated as the times he lived through, from his childhood — where he recalled not being allowed to enter a segregated library — to the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. His poem about that attack, ‘Somebody Blew Up America,’ quickly became infamous.”

“Controversial” and “complicated” may be satisfactory to some of the network’s listeners, but even they could not ignore his most recent infamy — his poem after the attack on the United States on 9-11. NPR tells us Baraka “hurls indictments at forces of oppression throughout history,” and then prints some of the verses which indicate that what Baraka did was something else — indict the United States for being the real terrorist nation.

He was, in other words, a black Noam Chomsky who expressed in verse similar ideas as the noted radical linguist.

The following verse exemplified his belief that Jews knew in advance of the attack, and told their fellow religionists, and Israelis, to stay away:

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers To stay home that day

Why did Sharon stay away?

Who? Who? Who?

That was too much for the state of New Jersey, which quickly removed his title as poet laureate of New Jersey — which they gladly handed him when he wrote even more offensive verses throughout his career.

The plaudits and prizes he received, indeed, show something deeply sick about American culture, as well as the American academy. He was a full professor at Stony Brook — SUNY, and had grants from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as the Guggenheim Foundation. No wonder NPR’s obit tells us his work was “achingly beautiful.”

Turning to the New York Times obituary, we learn that his Black Arts movement “ought to duplicate in fiction, poetry, drama and other mediums the aims of the black power movement in the political arena.” We also learn that “critical opinion” about Baraka was “divided,” which is one way of putting it. We also find out that “Mr. Baraka spent his early career as a beatnik, his middle years as a black nationalist and his later ones as a Marxist. His shifting stance was seen as either an accurate mirror of the changing times or an accurate barometer of his own quicksilver mien.”

Whatever he called himself — and he certainly blended black nationalism with Marxism — one thing was constant. He was a bitter, vile and open anti-Semite, who hated Jews over and above anything else he believed. The Times, of course, says only that his works “were periodically accused of being anti-Semitic, misogynist, homophobic, racist, isolationist and dangerously militant.”

Note that slippery word “accused,” with the implication that of course conservative, white and deluded right-wingers would make such a spurious charge. So they tell us his was a “powerful voice” and that he was a “riveting orator.” I guess the obit writer does not remember Adolf Hitler, about whom the same things could well be said, and who anti-Semitism was admired and equaled by Baraka. At least the obit included the judgment of Stanley Crouch — a black man who, like Baraka, wrote about jazz and blues, but who is the polar opposite of Baraka. Crouch said that his writing was “an incoherent mix of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, black nationalism, anarchy and ad hominem attacks relying on comic book and horror film characters and images that he has used over and over and over.”

The Left and the Issue of Income Inequality: Why Their ‘Progressive’ Politics will Fail

The new domestic issue of choice for the Left in America is “income inequality.” When New York Mayor Bill de Blasio went to the White House to meet with President Obama, he told the press the topic they discussed was the great gap in income between the wealthy and the rest of America.

It is true that wages have been stagnant, and that the wages of the average worker have not risen as fast as the pay scale of corporation CEOs, and have not kept up with increasing inflation over the years. Yet, it is also true that even the poor are better off than their counterparts were decades ago, and that compared to the poor in other countries, the poor in America seem actually wealthy. We are way past the time period, still existing as LBJ began “the War on Poverty,” when those in rural poverty especially had no roads leading to where they lived, and had no indoor plumbing or electricity.

The question is how one should deal with the issue. The Left and self-proclaimed “progressives” — actually social-democrats, democratic socialists, Marxists, and leftover Communists — have one answer: redistribute the wealth and tax the rich. Of course, those who make that proposal always seem to favor redistributing everyone else’s wealth while not touching their own — especially if it’s private property they own, including their homes.

Every time the New York Times mentions Mayor Bill de Blasio’s home, two row houses worth over $1.1 million each, they refer to it as a modest dwelling. Ira Stoll, writing in Reason, quips that since many Americans can’t even afford one such home, “if de Blasio really wants to ‘put an end’ to economic inequality, he should sell both houses and distribute the proceeds to everyone else.” Or, perhaps he should invite 20 poor families to take over one of the units, properly collectivizing the units, as was the case in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s.

The truth is that the mayor and those like him would never consider such a step. After all, whatever they did to make a living allowed them to buy such a property, and they have no intention to let anyone, especially a politician, take it from them. That is why it becomes so important for leftist editors, like those at the Times, to describe the de Blasio units as “modest,” so that people will ignore the price tag and think that only a Donald Trump has truly immodest homes.

Actually, in the old “really-existing socialist regimes” of the past, or ones like Cuba today, the apparatchiks all lived in either newly built or old mansions confiscated from the wealthy. When the Sandinistas beloved by Comrade de Blasio took over Nicaragua in the 1970s, one of the first things Commandante Daniel Ortega did was confiscate a home of a wealthy Managua businessman and move in to the compound with his wife and family and assorted bodyguards. That move alone tells you about the great “option for the poor” the Nicaraguan Marxists believed in. How could you guarantee that the movement’s leaders would stay on course with the revolution unless they got something for their effort, while their countrymen remained steeped in poverty?

Comrade De Blasio Takes the Helm

Image via Wikipedia

In the 1940s, the New York City subways and buses were represented — as they still are now — by the Transport Workers Union, whose chief at the time was “Red” Mike Quill. A fiery Communist who left the Party in 1948 but remained firmly on the political Left, Red was famous for his quip: “I’d rather be called a Red by the rats than a rat by the Reds.”

I’m certain that New York City’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, wishes Quill were still alive. He would then have a major ally to work with when the time came for the MTA to negotiate a new union contract with the city. Judging from his inauguration, a parody of a left-wing gala dreamed up at the U.S. desk of the Castro brothers’ Foreign Ministry, de Blasio has taken his big win as a mandate to create social-democracy in one city.

De Blasio has pledged to make his term as mayor the time for implementation of a war against inequality. My colleague Roger L. Simon thinks he and those with him do not believe a word of what they say, that it is all “high comedy” and they “can’t be serious.” I disagree. The rhetoric may be old-fashioned and seem corny, but de Blasio is a certified red diaper baby, he was born and bred in an ideological cocoon of Marxism, and later, by his own word, was inspired by the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and Castro in Cuba.

He chose whom to appoint and who would speak at his inauguration, and if the talk was inflammatory and ideological, it was de Blasio’s intention. He would take the high road and let the words of his apparatchiks and celebrities like Harry Belafonte talk the talk for the true believers who would provide the inspiration. As Slate writer Matt Yglesias quipped on Twitter as he watched the speeches: “Daring of de Blasio to appear on stage with the embalmed corpses of Lenin, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh at his inauguration.”

How Peter Beinart Defends the Repulsive Views of the Antisemitic Jew Max Blumethal

The Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles this week presented its year-end list of the top 10 antisemitic and anti-Israel slurs. It is an ecumenical list, containing the usual suspects, led by Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and including Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, UN Special Rapporteur Richard Falk, and Pink Floyd front man Roger Waters, among others.

The ninth listing was reserved for writers and is titled “The Power of the Poison Pen.” Sharing the Wiesenthal award is the novelist Alice Walker, who was awarded it for comparing Israelis to Nazis, and for writing that Israelis engage in “despicable and lawless sadistic behavior” and seek to “erase” Palestinians “from their own land.” Jews, she said, “know how to hate and how to severely punish others.”

Sharing the listing with Walker is none other than “journalist” Max Blumenthal, and the Wiesenthal Center makes it quite clear that a Jew can indeed be an antisemite, and that Blumenthal is one. Equating Israelis with Nazis, Blumenthal mentions the Holocaust “only to ask [is it right] to have the Jewish victims of the Nazis impose their independence on another people’s tragedy.” Blumenthal uses the term “Judeo-Nazis” and explains the Israeli-Arab conflict as the result of Israeli politicians “outdoing one another in a competition for the most convincing exaltation of violence against the Arab evildoers.” According to Blumenthal, it notes, Israelis incite “unprovoked violence against the Arab outclass.” They also “indoctrinate schoolchildren into the culture of militarism.”

Rabbi Marvin Hier, co-founder of the Wiesenthal Center, told the Jerusalem Post that he considers Blumenthal to be a “Jewish anti-Semite.” We “judge him by what he writes,” Hier added. “He crossed the line into outright anti-Semitism.”

As I have pointed out in earlier columns, Blumenthal had two appearances in Washington, D.C., one at the National Press Club and the other at the liberal New America Foundation, whose director, Anne-Marie Slaughter, approved his appearance.  Atlantic editor Steve Clemons promoted the first appearance. Writing in his announcement for the event,  he said:

Max Blumenthal’s new book on Israel has received a torrent of attention — some caustic and some effusive.  I think his book is important and revelatory of many untouched, taboo subjects both inside Israel and in its neighborhood

A group called the “Committee for the Republic” sponsored the event. According to Source Watch, it is an ad hoc group that includes C. Boyden Gray, Charles Freeman, Stephen P. Cohen, and William A. Nitze. All are self-proclaimed realists and conservatives who are opponents of both Israel and those they call neoconservatives, whom they attack as supporters of the American empire.

The Anti-Semitic Jew Max Blumenthal, and How Peter Beinart Views His Repulsive Views.

The Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles today presented it’s year-end list of the top 10 Anti-Semitic and Anti-Israel slurs. It is an ecumenical list, including the usual suspects- led by Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei- and including Turkish Prime Minister Recip Erdogan, UN Special Rapporteur Richard Falk, Pink Floyd’s front man Roger Waters,  among others.

The ninth listing was reserved for writers, and is titled “The Power of the Poison Pen.” Sharing the Wiesenthal award are the novelist Alice Walker, given to her for comparing Israelis to Nazis, and for writing that Israelis engage in “despicable and lawless sadistic behavior,” and for seeking to “erase” Palestinians “from their own land.” Jews, she said, “know how to hate and how to severely punish others.”

Sharing the listing with Walker is none other than “journalist” Max Blumenthal, and the Wiesenthal Center makes it quite clear that a Jew can indeed be an anti-Semite, and that Blumenthal is one. Equating Israelis with Nazis, Blumenthal mentions the Holocaust “only to ask [is it right] to have the Jewish victims of the Nazis impose their independence on another people’s tragedy?” Blumenthal uses the term “Judeo-Nazis” and explains the Israeli-Arab conflict as the result of Israeli politicians “outdoing one another in a competition for the most convincing exaltation of violence against the Arab evildoers.” According to Blumenthal, it notes, Israelis incite “unprovoked violence against the Arab outclass.” They also “indoctrinate schoolchildren into the culture of militarism.”

Rabbi Marvin Hier, co-founder of the Wiesenthal Center, told The Jerusalem Post that he considers Blumenthal to be a “Jewish anti-Semite.” We “judge him by what he writes,” Hier added. “He crossed the line into outright anti-Semitism.”

As I have pointed out in earlier columns, Blumenthal had two appearances in Washington, D.C., one at the National Press Club and the other at the liberal New America Foundation, whose director Ann-Marie Slaughter approved his appearance.  Atlantic editor Steve Clemons promoted the first. Writing in his announcement for the event,  he said:

Max Blumenthal’s new book on Israel has received a torrent of attention — some caustic and some effusive.  I think his book is important and revelatory of many untouched, taboo subjects both inside Israel and in its neighborhood

A group called “The Committee for the Republic” sponsored the event. According to Source Watch, it is an ad hoc group that includes C. Boyden Gray, Charles Freeman, Stephen P. Cohen, and William A. Nitze. All are self-proclaimed realists and conservatives who are opponents of both Israel and those they call neo-conservatives, whom they attack as supporters of the American Empire.

Clemons’ comment is particularly inane. How “untouched” and “taboo” is the long held anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist slander of Islamists and the far Left, that Israelis are the new Nazis? Anyone familiar with the decades of slander against Israel has heard the kind of tripe now emanating from Blumenthal since way before his own birth.

As to Blumenthal, Josh Block, CEO of The Israel Project, which publishers The Tower,  told the JP:

I am sure his colleagues at the Hezbollah newspaper where he was a writer for years are pleased and not at all surprised to see their guy on this list… Turns out the anti-Semites of Al-Akhbar and Iran’s Press TV discovered this modern- day Jewish Father Coughlin before anyone else.

What, I wondered, would Peter Beinart think about the characterization of Blumenthal as an anti-Semite? Beinart, of course, is the much heralded journalist who created “Open Zion” at The Daily Beast and for the past few years, has dedicated himself to a campaign that in his eyes is meant to save Israel from itself and rescue what he calls “liberal Zionism” from the catastrophe he thinks awaits the Jewish state, unless it abandons the settlements and adopts a new policy to promote peace with the Palestinians. Beinart is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, a publication not particularly known for having any fondness for Israel. Indeed, most recently, Beinart was subject to a rather savage critique by Shany Mor in the journal he once edited, The New Republic.

Mor says the following about how he thinks Beinart sees the issues:

Beinart’s discussion of suicide bombings is a good place as any to acquaint ourselves with the second theme of his writing. Any outcome or effect or result, however small or large, of the Israeli-Arab conflict is always and forever portrayed as an Israeli policy or the action of an Israeli subject on its Palestinian object. Where such a portrayal can’t credibly be made, Beinart will trace back an Israeli original cause….

No amount of self-criticism on the part of Israelis or Jews or their supporters is ever enough is for Beinart, while at the same time there is absolutely no expectation for any self-criticism or reflection by Palestinians or Arabs or their supporters.

I was interested in Beinart because I had been told by a source that Ann Marie Slaughter, head of the New America Foundation, had asked Beinart whether or not she should go ahead with the scheduled appearance at the Foundation after it was widely criticized for hosting him. Beinart had evidently told her to go ahead with NAF hosting his book talk.

Beinart chose not to directly answer my question as to whether or it was true that he gave such advice to Slaughter. Instead, he answered my query as to what he thought of The Wiesenthal Center labeling him an anti-Semite. He asked that I use his answer in full. It appears below:

Speaking for myself, as a Zionist who believes in the legitimacy of a democratic Jewish state, I disagree strongly with Max Blumenthal. I also disagree strongly with Naftali Bennett, who supports permanent Israeli control over millions of West Bank Palestinians who live under military law and lack the right to vote for the government that controls their lives.  And yet I think it was legitimate for Blumenthal to speak at New America, just as it was legitimate for Bennett to speak recently at the Brookings Institution. I believe that the correct answer to views about Israel with which one disagrees is to allow them to be expressed, and challenged. Indeed, that was the principle behind Open Zion, where I commissioned countless articles with which I strongly disagreed. If it were true that Max Blumenthal (who is Jewish himself) were an anti-Semite, as opposed to anti-Zionist, then I would make an exception to this general rule, as I don’t support offering a platform to bigots. But I have seen no evidence of that. Being anti-Zionist does not make you an anti-Semite: Ask the Satmar Rebbe. And groups like the Simon Wiesenthal Center that promiscuously throw about the term “anti-Semite” in order to discredit people whose Israel views they dislike do a disservice to the fight against genuine anti-Semitism.

Beinart’s equivocating remark reveals how accurate Shany Mor is in his analysis of Beinart’s methodology. First, Beinart simply states his disagreement with Blumenthal. One should not be surprised. Blumenthal attacked Beinart’s own recent book for defending Israel’s right to exist.  After just one sentence about Blumenthal, Beinart immediately goes into an attack on Israeli settlers for their “control” over Palestinians in the West Bank. He cannot simply condemn the reprehensible Blumenthal without having to use the occasion to launch yet another blast at Israel.

Second, he defends Blumenthal’s talk as “legitimate.” The issue, however, was not whether talking anywhere is legitimate. The issue is whether a major self-avowed center/liberal think tank, The New America Foundation, that is allied with the Obama administration, should be a venue for an anti-Semite who in this case, happens to be Jewish?  Beinart believes that, according to the logic of his answer, that anyone who has a view should have it expressed, and then challenged. As I argued earlier, as did Jonathan S. Tobin in Commentary, Blumenthal has plenty of venues to express his views. His book has been published, and The Nation featured an excerpt as a cover story. The issue is whether NAF should legitimize his out of the mainstream and anti-Semitic rants with its venue, thereby making his views appear to be important to be heard, rather than isolated to the fringe where it belongs. Moreover, no one at the event challenged him. Instead, writer Peter Bergen gave him a hearty welcome.

Next, Beinart says he does not believe in giving a bigot a space. In other words- and let me be clear about this- Beinart is saying in effect that Max Blumenthal is not a bigot. Really? The man whose incendiary chapter titles such as “How to Kill Goyim and Influence People” and “Night of the Broken Glass” are all meant to portray Jews as Nazis? Indeed, Beinart- who in fact has given Palestinian extremists a platform on “Open Zion,”- defends Blumenthal from the charge that he is an anti-Semite. Evidently, Beinart thinks Blumenthal is only “anti-Zionist.

As we all know- and Peter Beinart fails to comprehend- the new anti-Semitism comes in the form of anti-Zionism,  and virulent anti-Zionism is always accompanied by the refrains of classic old style anti-Semitism. Max Blumenthal is not only anti-Zionist, he believes in the total elimination of Israel as a Jewish state, and supports its demise. In his eyes, there is little difference between a conservative Israeli and a liberal one such as Beinart; to Blumenthal they are indistinguishable, and both are his enemies. If only Beinart was as tough with Blumenthal as Blumenthal is with him. Why else would Blumenthal be welcome, as Josh Block asks, in the pages of Hezbollah’s paper? Does Beinart really think someone with such extremist views deserves to be presented in a liberal American venue? If so, I would argue that says a great deal about the collapse of a principled liberalism such as Beinart himself used to stand for, at the time he wrote his first book.

Beinart ends his answer by arguing that the Wiesenthal Center is “promiscuously” throwing around the term anti-Semite in order to smear those whose views on Israel they disagree with. This, he says, is a disservice to those who want to fight the real anti-Semitism.

I have news for Beinart. The real anti-Semites are the Islamists and Arab extremists and terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah and the likes of those supported by Max Blumenthal, Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk and their brethren among old style Western anti-Semites, that now include the American left, all of whom collectively hate and despise Israel. The Wiesenthal Center hit its targets head on, and identified them all accurately. Their opposition to Israel is not that of the Satmar Rebbe, or any Jews who believe that Judaism is only a religion and who on religious grounds always opposed a Jewish state. Theirs is a modern style anti-Semitism, that stems from the kind of Marxist anti-Semitism that began with Marx himself, and that was the staple of the Communists in the 1920’s and the other Marxist sects, that supported the destruction of Israel in the name of anti-imperialism.

It is Peter Beinart who in fact gives comfort to the new and old anti-Semites alike, not the Wiesenthal Center. That he does so in the name of both liberalism and liberal Zionism is itself both a farce and a tragedy.  I ask one question of Peter Beinart: Do you really want to be known as a supporter of Max Blumenthal, and as one who really thinks he and his repulsive views deserve a hearing in our country?