Obama and the Freedom Riders

Conviction or Opportunism
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

Momentous Barack Obama speech supporting Israel sweeps AIPAC off its feet describes Obama's allusion to tikkun olam and his invocation of the freedom riders toward the end of his speech before AIPAC:

"There is a commitment," Obama reminded, "embedded in the Jewish faith and tradition: to freedom and fairness; to social justice and equal opportunity. To tikkun olam – the obligation to repair this world."

Making it personal, Obama continued, "I will never forget that I would not be standing here today if it weren't for that commitment. In the great social movements in our country's history, Jewish and African Americans have stood shoulder to shoulder. They took buses down south together. They marched together. They bled together. And Jewish Americans like Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were willing to die alongside a black man – James Chaney – on behalf of freedom and equality."

Obama was referring to two young Jewish civil rights workers, Goodman and Schwerner, as well as Black civil rights worker Chaney, all brutally murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi during the legendary Freedom Summer of 1964.

In the original cabbalistic sense, tikkun olam has no connection to social justice or to equal opportunity. (See Tikkun Olam and Progress.) 

In addition the three strata of American Judaism related very differently to issues of slavery and civil rights.

Historically, Spanish American Jews were heavily involved with slavery and the Confederacy.

The great German Jewish investment banks were to a large extent founded on the profits of slavery. Yet, in the twentieth century, German Jewish philanthropists were deeply involved in self-improvement of colored people as was the terminology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but such concerns did not mean support for equal civil rights, and several important Jewish philanthropists associated with the NAACP did nothing to stop Southern practices that amounted to slavery by another name and which provided profits to investment banks with which the philanthropists were associated.

In general support for equal civil rights was associated with Yiddish American radicals and not with German American Jews or with the remnants of Spanish American Jews. The wealthy donors to Jewish communal organizations generally opposed equal civil rights while the rest of the American Jewish community tended to take all sorts of positions.

Labor Zionists tended to indifference while Jabontinskian Zionists following Herzl's lead always supported black civil rights as a sort of distraction from the crimes planned or ongoing in Palestine.

The primary and secondary literature on Jews and civil rights suggests

• that an intellectual element within the staff of the organized Jewish community concluded that improving the status of American blacks would raise the status of American Jews commensurately and
• that this element manipulated young radically inclined Jews to take part in the freedom rides in the hope of creating an incident that could be used to create a pro-civil rights reaction among American Jews, among Jewish communal organizations, and especially among the wealthy contributors.

Eventually several incidents took place including the murders of the freedom riders and a synagogue bombing, which is discussed in the following section from The Israel Lobby and American Society:

Defending Judonia Outside the Legal System

Because working strictly via the legal system is in general too limited for the needs of empire, Judonia also uses forms of grass roots mobilization and conspiratorial politics.

Early indoctrination in communal cohesiveness and control of deviant thought may have made it possible for the elite members of the Jewish community to mobilize a conspiracy against the interests of the majority of the Jews of Lemberg in Austrian Galicia to murder Reform Rabbi Abraham Kohn as Michael Stanislawski describes in A Murder in Lemberg: Politics, Religion, and Violence in Modern Jewish History.[272] Such mobilization (generally but not always without murder) by (often self-defined) elite groups among Jews is fairly common in the nineteenth century even before nascent Judonia to mobilize Central and Eastern European Jews via extremist organic nationalist ideology associated with the political Zionism of Theodor Herzl and his colleagues. 

The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-1881[273] by Steven J. Zipperstein p. 115, provides some interesting information difficult to find in English about pre-Zionist conspiratorial Jewish behavior in Belarus (see The Origins of the Zionist Lobby[274]):

The faith of Russian Jewish intellectuals in the prospect of improvement in the political and civic standing of the Jews had already been challenged in the first part of Alexander II's reign, when in 1863 Polish rebellion led to increased hostility toward all non-Russian nationalities. To the surprise of his Jewish admirers, even the eminent liberal journalist, M. N. Katkov now began to air chauvinist sentiments. Suspicions of the patriotism of Russia's Jews grew common in this tense atmosphere. Therefore, when in 1868 the Christian convert Jacob Brafman charged that Jews constituted a distinct state within a state, he struck a particularly sensitive nerve in Jews and non-Jews alike.

Basing his observations on the minutes of the Kehillah of Minsk, Brafman argued that the Kehillot, though officially disbanded by the Russian authorities in 1844, still functioned as an invisible Jewish government. This invisible yet pervasive body affiliated with the ORPME [The Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among Jews, Russian acronym] based in St. Petersburg, the English Brotherhood for the Assistance of Jewish Emigrants, and the Alliance Israelite Universelle -- collected taxes, imposed its own court system, and through seemingly innocuous fraternal organizations, made its powerful will known in the everyday lives of Jews. Even rules about clothing and food were determined by the ubiquitous and omnipotent organization. Brafman argued that Jewish isolationism arose from the "Talmudic municipal republic," or the Kehillah, rather than from the teachings of the Talmud, as Russian antisemites had previously assumed. Brafman thereby redirected Russian concerns about the integration of the Jews from the religious to the political sphere. The book's impact was profound. Within two years of its publication, the governor-general of Kiev warned in his annual report to St. Petersburg that the "cause of every last Jew is also the cause of the worldwide Jewish Kahal ... that powerful yet elusive association."

Gessen, Istoriia, 2:200-201; John D. Klier, "Iakov Brafman's Book of the Kahal and Its Enemies," paper presented at the Midwest Slavic Conference, May 4, 1980; Hans Rogger, "Government, Jews, Peasants," p. 17.

While the official disbanding makes it hard to know for sure, Stanislawski's research indicates that despite Brafman's claims the traditional communal mechanisms of control of social deviance were considerably weakened by the 1860s even if they did persist in secret. Over the next 100 years the power of such "grass roots" local organization probably waxed and waned in power according to circumstances.

American (and Russian) Jewish communities to this day will put a tremendous amount of energy into suppressing critical views of Zionism and often organize through entities within the Jewish Federation, which is at least partially a descendant of the traditional Kahal.  

[See Lobby activities: It's just a fr*ggin' novel!,[275] Seva Brodsky of Somerville comments on Steve Grossman's letter,[276] Ghada Karmi's Boston College Talk,[277] and The Battle for Divestment from Israeli Securities in Somerville ....[278]]

Even Jewish political activism, organizing and fundraising unassociated with Israel or Zionism has become a tool for Judonia. Because "progressive" Jews have become indispensable for left of center politics in the USA,[xliii] AIPAC and other Israel advocacy and mainstream groups within the organized Jewish community (really Judonia) paralyzed anti-War activism by tainting anti-war efforts with accusations of anti-Semitism or anti-Israelism.  

[See Confronting War and Discussing Peace on Campus,[279]^{, [xliv]} The Banning of Rabbi Lerner,[280] Anti-War: 1960s versus 2000s[281] and How Anti-Iraq-War Jews Licensed Neoconservatism.[282]]

Jack Nelson proposes in Terror in the Night: The Klan's Campaign Against the Jews[283] that a conspiracy between the leaders of the Meridian Mississippi Jewish community and representatives of ADL to manipulate the FBI in committing extra-judicial murder.  He writes on p. 264: 

Maria Knowles, the secretary who typed up Scarbrough's reports of meeting with the informants and worried that she had participated in a murder plot, lives in Meridian, where she serves as secretary of the Seventh-Day Adventist church and as a teachers' assistant at the church's school.

Maria Knowles, the secretary who typed up Scarbrough's reports of meeting with the informants and worried that she had participated in a murder plot, lives in Meridian, where she serves as secretary of the Seventh-Day Adventist church and as a teachers' assistant at the church's school.

He adds on p. 265: 

Jim Ingram retired from the FBI at age fifty in 1982 and succeeded Moore at the Deposit Guaranty National Bank. He lives in Jackson. In 1992 he was appointed Mississippi's commissioner of public safety, the state's top law enforcement post.

Ingram disagrees with his close friend Moore about what happened at Meridian. "It was an ambush, that's what they meant to do," Ingram told me. "No question about that. They meant to kill them out there that night."

The techniques that the ADL learned in manipulating the US government into violating the law may have later proved useful in manipulating US government officials into facilitating conspiracy against the rights of Arab and Muslim Americans. Agents of Judonia within the US government almost certainly have aided this ongoing project.

 

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