Pernicious Zionism Revealed

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If Alison Weir has not driven a wooden stake through the heart of the modern grotesquerie know as Zionism, she has at least held a cross to its face with her short, tight, understated and heavily documented new book, Against Our Better Judgment, The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel. Did we say documented? The text of the book proper only runs to a power-packed 93 pages while the supporting endnotes continue for another 108. Anyone wanting to know how the American democratic system was infiltrated and abused to further the interests of what was initially, even within the Jewish community, only a relatively small group of extremists could hardly find a better starting place than this book.

Weir, in her brief overview of Zionism’s beginnings, conventionally credits the Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl as the founder of political Zionism in the late 19^th century, a movement that sought a homeland, or state, for Jews somewhere in the world. “While Zionists considered such places as Argentina, Uganda, the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, and Texas, they eventually settled on Palestine for the location of the proposed Jewish State, even though Palestine was already inhabited by a population that was 93-96 percent non-Jewish.”

In The Controversy of Zion the redoubtable British journalist, Douglas Reed, tells us that Herzl was little more than a front man for a group of Eastern European rabbis. Reed might still be a better source, but his book is almost 600 pages long, and it was published in 1978. Weir, with all her excellent references, doesn’t even find it necessary to refer to Reed, which, heretofore, this reviewer had considered to be the ultimate critique of Zionism. Weir has some important new revelations that, for all its brevity, push Against Our Better Judgment up to the head of the line of “must read” books on Zionism.

The Parushim and Its Secret Oath

No more important new revelation, to this reader, is of the powerful role played in advancing the Zionist cause in the United States by Supreme Court justices Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter and the existence of a secret society for that purpose called the Parushim.

A member swearing allegiance to the Parushim felt something of the spirit of commitment to a secret military fellowship. At the initiation ceremony the head of the Order informed him:

You are about to take a step which will bind you to a single cause for all your life. You will for one year be subject to an absolute duty whose call you will be impelled to heed at any time, in any place, and at any cost. And ever after, until our purpose shall be accomplished, you will be fellow of a brotherhood whose bond you will regard as greater than any other in your life-dearer than that of family, of school, of nation. (p. 12, emphasis added)

The source for the information is an Israeli professor, Sarah Schmidt. Justice Louis Brandeis was one of the most active members of the Parushim. Its primary purpose was the promotion of the Zionist cause, the creation of the ethnic-supremacist state of Israel on Arab land in Palestine, which it did all too effectively. Who all the members of the group were is not known, though Weir tells us that Brandeis was a key member and Frankfurter was likely a member as well. The organization was founded in 1913 by a University of Wisconsin philosophy professor by the name of Horace M. Kallen. It is of some interest that Kallen is also considered to be the father of cultural pluralism in the United States, concerning which we find this observation on Wikipedia:

He advanced the ideal that cultural diversity and national pride were compatible with each other and that ethnic and racial diversity strengthened America. His critics pointed out his disingenuousness since, as a Jewish intellectual and member of the Zionist Organization of America, his vision of multicultural America was quite the opposite of his vision of the Jewish state of Israel as a totally Jewish nation. Kallen is credited with coining the term cultural pluralism.

Weir speaks of the Parushim completely in the past tense, giving the general impression that it worked most effectively in the 1920s and 30s. One must wonder, though, why such an effective organization would have been disbanded. How would we know if it has continued to operate right up to the present day? It was/is a secret organization, after all. And doesn’t it, with its oath, confirm all of our worst suspicions? We suspected that many powerful Jewish leaders in the United States were not really loyal to the country of their residence. What we did not suspect was that many of them, including two of the most influential Supreme Court justices of the 20^th century, had actually taken a secret oath not to be loyal.

And if the organization, or something very much like it, continues to operate, would not the list of likely members be quite long? In politics, people like Joe Lieberman and Eric Cantor come readily to mind; in academia, Alan Dershowitz and Daniel Pipes; in the media Charles Krauthammer and Richard Cohen, and the whole neocon crowd in the think tanks and the national opinion molding community.

The oath also bespeaks a degree of fanaticism that is almost unfathomable to the average person. The mentality—or shall we say the psychological complex—is perhaps best explained by Eric Hoffer’s quote from Oliver Cromwell in The True Believer, “No one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going.” Certainly as the most powerful country in the world, the United States was key for the Zionists to get their wishes, but it has never made much sense for any American, Jewish or otherwise, to be a fanatic for the Zionist cause. The founding principle of the movement, after all, is that Jews can never be accepted in any country and, therefore, must have a country of their own. It is a foolish notion generally, but nowhere is it more foolish than in the United States. The United States from its beginning has been the land of opportunity for Jews as much or more than for any other people. It is truly a supreme irony that precisely those who benefitted most from the opportunity presented by the United States should use the fruits of that opportunity to further a cause that denies that such opportunity for them is possible.

Twin Monsters

The reader may be excused at this point for noticing a great similarity between Zionism and the attraction toward it of a certain privileged group of people and another misguided but powerful ideology, Communism. Those who fall for it fall heavily and have a tendency to subordinate all questions of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, and patriotism and disloyalty to the furtherance of this one “noble” cause. Not many people know it these days, but in the 1930s and early 1940s the Soviet Union itself got the sort of favorable coverage from America’s leading newspaper that Israel gets today across the board, and numerous Americans were lured into betting their lives that Joseph Stalin’s fiefdom really was a workers’ paradise.

The biggest victims of the Zionist zealotry have certainly been those non-Jewish residents of Palestine whose forbears had lived there for thousands of years, but the price that has been paid by others, particularly in the United States is of no small consequence. Weir makes a strong case that American entry into World War I was the quid pro quo of powerful Zionists close to President Woodrow Wilson for the British Balfour Declaration promising a home (though not a homeland) for the Jews in Palestine should Britain and its allies win the war. She supports her argument without relying once upon the Jewish apostate Benjamin Freedman so, taken together, Weir and Freedman support one another.

The importance of the Balfour Declaration in bringing the United States into WWI against the Germans might not have been widely known in this country, but, according to Weir, it was well known in Germany and it engendered the sort of antagonism toward their resident Jews that one might expect. Opportunity for Jewish advancement had been greater in Germany than in any other European country.

It is hard to say which was the greatest big break for the Zionist cause, the persecution suffered by Jews under the Nazis, the Second World War’s creation of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees ripe for the peopling of Palestine, or the death of President Franklin Roosevelt. FDR had been completely against the Zionist cause. Harry Truman was weak and unpopular and needed all the help from powerful Zionists that he could get to be reelected in 1948. Surprisingly, Weir makes no mention of the negative reinforcement that Truman received in 1947 in terms of the attempt on his life by the Stern Gang, which sent a letter bomb to the White House. She also fails to mention the fact that Truman’s long association with the Kansas City political machine of the gangster Tom Pendergast made him eminently blackmailable, and something of an archetype for U.S. presidents in the Zionist-dominated era in which we live.

There are heroes in Weir’s book. They are the patriotic Americans within the foreign policy establishment of the U.S. government who energetically opposed the superimposing of what was essentially a European country upon Palestine, an act that these officials saw as in conflict with U.S. national interests and ideals. Theirs was the better judgment that Truman went against. A few names worthy of mention are State Department officers Edwin Wright and Loy Henderson and their superiors, Under Secretary of State Robert A. Lovett and Secretary of State George C. Marshall. Foremost among the patriots, though, would have to be Truman’s Secretary of Defense, James V. Forrestal, and Weir gives the courageous Forrestal his due. He foresaw the Middle Eastern mess in which the United States has become entangled, and the cost in blood and treasure and moral capital that it would entail, and he paid dearly for his efforts to prevent it.

Another reason for beginning with the more recent Weir book than with Douglas Reed’s is that Reed, deceived by the American press coverage and without the discoveries that this reviewer would later make, wrote that Forrestal had committed suicide. Weir is aware of our findings, however, and refers her readers to our “Who Killed James Forrestal?” (With the same preference for brevity for introductory purposes with which I recommend her book over Reed’s, I suggest that newcomers to the subject start with “New Forrestal Document Exposes Cover-up.”) She also strongly recommends Chapter 12, “The Forrestal ‘Suicide’,” of Vol. 1 of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews by prominent British journalist Alan Hart. Volume 1 is titled, The False Messiah, and Hart quotes this writer’s work on Forrestal’s death extensively.

Control of the molders of public opinion has been crucial for Zionist success in the United States. I recall that in my formative years in North Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s it was almost impossible to turn on the radio without hearing the evangelist Oliver B. Green. Like PBS when they do their fund-raisers, Green offered goodies to people who would send him money. The first goodie on his list was a copy of the Scofield Reference Bible. We wouldn’t have learned it from the Reverend Green, but the Scofield Bible pushes “what was a previously somewhat fringe ‘dispensationalist’ theology calling for the Jewish ‘return’ to Palestine.” Cyrus Scofield, we learn from Weir, referencing primarily Joseph M. Canfield’s The Incredible Scofield and His Book, was something of a charlatan and a scoundrel who was heavily promoted by wealthy early Zionists. It explains a lot about America’s Christian Zionist movement and really makes one wonder who props up men like Green and Jerry Falwell and John Hagee. It also makes one wonder about the current pro-Zionist Pope, who is receiving such a glowing press in the United States.

In lieu of further characterizing of Zionist influence on American opinion molders, we have, with permission of the author, provided as an appendix her entire short penultimate chapter, “Zionist Influence in the Media.” Her concluding chapter, which is even shorter but just as powerful, is an example of that influence wielded in the nastiest sort of way. It is about the destruction of the career of the famous journalist Dorothy Thompson, one of the earliest critics of Nazi Germany. Thompson had also been an early supporter of Zionism until she went to Palestine and reported honestly on what she saw. That was it for her.

Thompson’s experience is quite reminiscent of what happened to Eugene Lyons. Lyons was a young Jewish-American reporter and Communist sympathizer who covered the Soviet Union for United Press in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He was among the few Western journalists to attempt to write honestly about what he saw and was forced to leave in 1934. His devastating exposé, Assignment in Utopia, was generally ignored and his 1941 revelations of Communist Party power and influence in the United States, The Red Decade, was greeted mainly with hostility. Lyons spent most of the rest of his career on the margins of American journalism.

Readers can learn about the planned documentary called The Silencing of Dorothy Thompson at http://thesilencing.org.

David Martin

May 17, 2014

Appendix: Chapter 15 of Against our Better Judgment:

ZIONIST influence in the media

As historian Richard Stevens notes, Zionists early on learned to exploit the essential nature of the American political system: that policies can be made and un-made through force of public opinion and pressure. Procuring influence in the media, both paid and unpaid, has been a key component of their success.[i]

From early on, the Zionist narrative largely dominated news coverage of the region. A study of four leading newspapers’ 1917 coverage showed that editorial opinion almost universally favored the Zionist position.[ii] Author Kathleen Christison notes that “editorials and news stories alike applauded Jewish enterprise, heralding a Jewish return to Palestine as ‘glorious news.’” Other studies showed the same situation for the 1920s. Christison writes:

“The relatively heavy press coverage is an indicator of the extent of Zionist influence even in this early period. One scholar has estimated that, as of the mid-1920s, approximately half of all New York Times articles were placed by press agents, suggesting that U.S. Zionist organizations may have placed many of the articles on Zionism’s Palestine endeavors.”[iii]

At one point when the State Department was trying to convince Israel to allow Palestinian refugees to return, Secretary of State George Marshall wrote:

“The leaders of Israel would make a grave miscalculation if they thought callous treatment of this tragic issue could pass unnoted by world opinion.”[iv]

Marshall underestimated the ability of Zionists to minimize the information on Palestinian refugees reaching Americans. A State Department study in March 1949 found the American public was “unaware of the Palestine refugee problem, since it has not been hammered away at by the press or radio.”[v]

As author Alfred Lilienthal explained in 1953:

“The capture of the American press by Jewish nationalism was, in fact, incredibly complete. Magazines as well as newspapers, in news stories as well as editorial columns, gave primarily the Zionist views of events before, during, and after partition.”[vi]

When the Saturday Evening Post published an article by Milton Mayer that criticized Jewish nationalism (and carried two other articles giving opposing views), Zionists organized what was probably the worst attack on the Post in its long history.

Zionists inundated the magazine with vitriolic mail, cancelled their subscriptions, and withdrew their advertising. The Post learned its lesson, later refusing to publish an article that would have again exposed it to such an onslaught, even though the editor acknowledged that the rejected piece was a “good and eloquent article.”[vii]

This was typical in a campaign in which Zionists exploited sympathy for victimized Jews, and when this did not sufficiently skew reporting about Palestine, used financial pressure. Lilienthal writes:

“If voluntary compliance was not ‘understanding’ enough, there was always the matter of Jewish advertising and circulation. The threat of economic recriminations from Jewish advertisers, combined with the fact that the fatal label of ‘Anti-Semite’ would be pinned on any editor stepping out of line, assured fullest press cooperation.”[viii]

Author Christison records that from the moment partition was voted by the UN, “the press played a critical role in building a framework for thinking that would endure for decades.” She writes that shortly before May 15, 1948, the scheduled beginning of the Jewish State, a total of 24 U.S., British, and Australian reporters converged on Palestine.

“Virtually all reporting was from the Jewish perspective,” reports Christison. “The journals the Nation and the New Republic both showed what one scholar calls ‘an overt emotional partiality’ toward the Jews. No item published in either journal was sympathetic to the Arabs, and no correspondent was stationed in Arab areas of Palestine, although some reporters lived with, and sometimes fought alongside, Jewish settlers.”[ix]

Bookstores were inundated with books espousing the Zionist point of view to enthusiastic press reviews. Conversely, the few books published that dared to provide a different perspective were given scathing reviews, when they were reviewed at all.[x]

When Professor Millar Burrows of the Yale School of Divinity, a distinguished scholar and archaeologist, wrote Palestine Is Our Business, the American Zionist Council distributed a publication labeling his book “an anti-Semitic opus.”

In fact, Professor Burrows‘ life history showed the opposite. He had been one of the organizers and Vice-President of the National Committee to Combat Anti-Semitism and had long been active in the interfaith movement in New Haven.[xi]

In his book Burrows wrote, “A terrible wrong has been done to the native people of [Palestine.] The blame for what has happened must be distributed among all concerned, including ourselves. Our own interests, both as Americans and as Christians, are endangered. The interests of the Jewish people also have suffered. And we can still do something about it.”[xii]

Burrows emphasized: “This is a question of the most immediate and vital concern to many hundreds of thousands of living people. It is an issue on which one concerned with right and wrong must take a position and try to do something.”[xiii]

Burrows wrote that imposing a Jewish state on Palestine violated the principle of self-determination, and noted that the “right of a majority of the people of a country to choose their own government would hardly be questioned in any other instance.”[xiv]

Burrows criticized what he termed “pro-Zionist” writing and pointed out that a “quite different view of the situation would emerge if the word ‘resistance‘ were used” when describing Palestinian and Arab fighting in 1948.[xv] He wrote that the “plan for Palestine advocated by the Arabs was a democracy with freedom of religion and complete separation of religion and the State, as in this country.”[xvi]

Burrows also discussed religious aspects, stating: “One thing is certain. Nothing that is essentially unjust or contrary to the Spirit of Christ can be the will of God. Let him who speaks of the fulfillment of prophecy remember Jer. 22:13: ‘Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness’...”[xvii]

In his conclusion, Burrows stated: “All the Arab refugees who want to return to their homes must be allowed and helped to do so, and must be restored to their own villages, houses, and farms or places of business, with adequate compensation from the Government of Israel for destruction and damage.”[xviii]

He also stated: “Homes must be found in this country or elsewhere for Jews desiring to become citizens of other countries than Israel, and their religious, civic, social, and economic rights must be guaranteed.”[xix]

In their onslaught against him, Zionists accused Burrows of “careless writing, disjointed reporting and extremely biased observation.”[xx]

Another author who described the misery of Palestinian refugees (as well as Jewish suffering in Israel), Willie Snow Ethridge, was similarly attacked by pro-Israel reviewers. When she was invited to address the Maryland Teachers Association and chose to speak on her book, Journey to Jerusalem, she was told she must speak on a different subject. The secretary of the association explained that so much pressure had been brought on him that he would lose his job if she didn’t change to another topic.[xxi]

Still another was the eminent dean of Barnard College, Virginia Gildersleeve, a highly distinguished personage with impeccable credentials as a humanitarian. When she wrote that Palestinian refugees should be allowed to return to their homes, a campaign was launched against her, labeling her a Christian “anti-Semite.”[xxii]

Gildersleeve, who had been instrumental in drafting the Preamble to the U.N. Charter and had taken a leading role in creating the U.N. Human Rights Commission, later devoted herself to working for human rights in the Middle East.[xxiii] She testified before Congressional committees and lobbied President Truman, to no avail.[xxiv] In her memoir, she attributed such failures to “the Zionist control of the media of communication.”[xxv]