Jewish Hate Groups: NPR, SPLC

National Public Radio and its Boston affiliate WBUR are disproportionately Jewish organizations. A few years ago WBUR even tried to make its Jewishness a selling point during a fund-raiser, but quickly dropped that aspect of the campaign when the staff realized that it was creating animosity.

On Mondoweiss Henry Norr recently covered NPR distortions in its coverage of Jerusalem and the confliction over Palestine:

When it comes to E Jerusalem, ‘NPR’ misleads and misinforms

by Henry Norr on March 26, 2010

It’s been almost two weeks since I wrote to National Public Radio’s senior Washington editor, Ron Elving, and to the network’s ombudsman, Alicia Shepard, to ask why Elving used an Israeli formulation – "disputed" area – to characterize East Jerusalem, instead of calling it "occupied," the term used by the U.S. government, the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and virtually every other international body. So far, neither has replied.

While I wait, I’ve spent some time looking a little more deeply into NPR’s coverage of East Jerusalem since Israel’s announcement of plans to build 1,600 new housing units there put the area in the spotlight. The network posts transcripts of all its stories, interviews, and talk shows on the Middle East (and nowadays most other stories, too) on its website, and it has a pretty good search engine, so it wasn’t hard to review all 22 broadcasts that have discussed East Jerusalem since the controversy exploded. (NPR doesn’t transcribe its hourly headlines, so they’re not included. Neither are the Associated Press reports and Foreign Policy articles it posts on its website but doesn’t read over the air.)

Here’s some of what I found anyone depending on NPR for information about the issue would have gathered about East Jerusalem:

1. It’s part of Israel’s capital. Regular listeners have heard Jerusalem described that way in at least eight stories. In five of those cases the city was called Israel’s "undivided capital;" once the phrase was "unified capital."  When NPR’s reporters say it (as opposed to when they’re quoting Netanyahu or Michael Oren, for example), they scrupulously precede these phrases with something like "the Israelis have proclaimed" or "Israel considers" the whole city their capital.

But since NPR reporters hardly ever even hint that anyone except the Palestinians disputes this claim, these are essentially throw-away words. (The closest they come to questioning the Israel position is the statement, which I found in two stories, that "The international community believes that the final status of the city should only be determined through negotiations.")

 [To read the entire blog entry, click here.]

Ali Abunimah has also discussed Jewish bias at NPR (and the NYT) on Mondoweiss.

A few days ago Jewish interviewer Terry Gross continued NPR's disproportionately Jewish news coverage by interviewing  the Southern Poverty Law Center's Jewish information and publications director Mark Potok in When Right-Wing Extremism Moves Mainstream.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is like the ADL a Jewish hate group that cloaks itself with civil rights advocacy. Officials from these two organizations should only be hosted on news programs with a strong caveat about racist Jewish agendas.

The SPLC endorses an American Jewish Committee distributed book entitled Antisemitism Today, whose cover rather unsubtly informs potential readers that the face of modern anti-Semitism is Arab.

Karin Friedemann had an illuminating exchange with Potok after she discussed Fusion centers in a Khaleej Times op-ed:

• Khaleej Times: Americans Divided by Hate Crimes Bill
• Karin Friedemann Threatened by SPLC
• Karin Friedemann: Response to SPLC
• The Incredible Bulk Attacks Karin Friedemann

The WSJ also cites the SPLC in Nine Charged in Militia Plot:

Heidi Beirich, director of research for the Southern Poverty Law Center, Montgomery, Ala., said Hutaree [a Christian militia accused of plotting a violent anti-government offensive] has a MySpace page listing more than 300 "friends," some of which are members of other militia groups.

The association of the SPLC with this story is curious because another WSJ article entitled Militia Chief's Mistrust Festered, Friends Say refers to an undercover FBI agent within the Hutaree militia group just as FBI documents recently disclosed about the Oklahoma City bombing mention undercover surveillance in which the SPLC was involved.

In his NPR interview Potok associates the tea party movement with a resurgence of the extreme right because of Obama's race and because of passage of a national health care program. The NPR report on the whole argued that "extremism" is going mainstream among Republicans.

A resurgence is at least in part a matter of media definition, and over the past 15 years or so left-wing anti-Globalist demonstrations have often had violent incidents without similar claims that "extremism" is going mainstream among progressives.

In any case, one gets the impression that the SPLC has an interest in an increasing anger among disaffected groups and might even manipulate the FBI into making group members feel persecuted.  Then if violence breaks out, the SPLC works with disproportionately Jewish media gatekeepers to put out a call for a lot more contributions to deal with such violent outbreaks.

Yet this sort of fund-raising is probably only part of the story.

The Obama administration has been dealing with three potential major economic pitfalls:

• the financial meltdown,
• the alliance with Israel (total cost $6-8 trillion and growing, $60-100 billion yearly subsidy), and
• the national health care program.

The ultimate cost of the third is probably the least with more benefits for ordinary Americans.

Why has the tea party movement focused so much on "Obamacare"? Without a doubt the health care debate has distracted from the first two economic sink holes that have been disproportionately benefiting Jewish Zionists, but could there be more to the story like covert manipulation of tea party activists and groups?

Jewish Zionist networks of trust on Wall Street contribute a tremendous amount of money to the Israel lobby, which also benefits considerably from medical industry price-gouging. American media have completely failed to cover the Zionist aspect of opposition to a national health care program.

Health Care and the Israel Lobby

• [wvns] The Epoch Battle of Our Time 
• [Buffalo News] Mideast peace prospects dim 
• [wvns] US vs UK Healthcare 
• [wvns] Medical Fraud's Staggering Price Tag 

[Although Glenn Greenwald does not make the point directly, his article, The Right-Wing Need for Victimization and Israel, suggests another reason that the Zionism-susceptible segment of the extreme right focuses on health care and neither on corrupt Jewish Zionist social networks in the finance industry nor on the cost to the USA of the alliance with Israel.

As the right-wing becomes crazier and and more vicious, it needs even more to be able to fling accusations of anti-Semitism at its opponents to prove its own virtue to itself.

In addition, if tea party leaders criticized Jewish Zionist behavior that is the primary threat to the US economy, not only would the organized Jewish community target them with accusations of antisemitism, but powerful media Jews would starve them of any positive media coverage whatsoever.]

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