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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
A Gem from The Fall of Jerusalem by Abdullah Schleifer
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)
Many have wondered why the anti-Iraq war movement found so little traction with the American public and media in comparison with the anti-Vietnam war movement.
Some speculations have referred to a lack of a military draft.
The Fall of Jerusalem by Abdullah Schleifer contains the following text on p. 76.
In the winter of 1966 the Left-Baathists advanced a fascinating argument against Abdul Nasser's constant counsel for patience in the struggle with Israel and his claim that, with the gradual strengthening of their regular armies, time was on the side of the Arabs.According to the Baasthist thesis, Israel was already at work developing an atomic bomb and within a few years would be capable of waging nuclear warfare. Within the same period the Aswan Dam would have been completed in Egypt. At such a time the Palestine cause would be lost, the Baathists argued, for none of the Arab armies -- however strong by then -- would even consider the idea of liberating Palestine at the risk of nuclear destruction of every capital in the Arab East and the flooding of the Nile Valley if the Aswan Dam were to be destroyed.The Baathist thesis also took into account the depth of American commitment in Vietnam and the growing unpopularity within America for further armed interventions, holding that the U.S.A. would not be in position to extend any but token support to the Israelis, assuming an Arab advance.
LBJ was always disappointed that the organized Jewish community and Jewish media pundits (even the conservative ones) never reciprocated his support for Israel in 1967 with backing for his Vietnam policy.
Reports of Baathist thinking were certainly available to Israeli and AIPAC policy analysts at that time period, and the organized Jewish community along with the Israel Lobby seems to have made the logical response by encouraging their stable of Jewish media facilitators, gatekeepers and pundits to take a cold or even hostile attitude toward the Vietnam war.
Diminishment or termination of US involvement in Vietnam guaranteed that US resources and assets would be immediately available if the State of Israel needed them as was the case during the October War.
In contrast, the Israel Lobby and the organized Jewish community strongly supports the expenditure of US assets in efforts directly benefiting the State of Israel strategically, and in response Zionist news facilitators, gatekeepers, and pundits have worked hard to stymie the anti-Iraq war movement and to spike coverage of it since before the invasion of Iraq.
Update
Norman Podhoretz' career as editor of the American Jewish Committee's Commentary Magazine* spans both anti-war movements. Not only has he been a leader within the organized Jewish community and the Israel Lobby, but he has also served as a media facilitator-gatekeeper and as a pundit during the whole time period. His behavior has been consistent with the theorized effort to direct coverage of the two anti-war movements in order to influence the level of traction that each could obtain from the American public.
The hypothesis of conscious media manipulation is hardly far-fetched. In Buried by the Times, the Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper, author Laura Leff argues cogently that NY Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger managed by example to influence the whole newspaper industry to keep Holocaust stories off the front and editorial pages and thereby prevented the development of general awareness of the ongoing extermination of European Jews even though practically all the information was available.
* The American Jewish Committee spun Commentary off as an independent publication in January 2007. Podhoretz was editor-in-chief of Commentary from 1960 through 1995 when he retired and assumed the position of editor-at-large. Today his title is editor emeritus.
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12 comments:
Schleifer is correct, but I'm skeptical about the rest.
As for the two wars, there was so little opposition to the Vietnam war that even the basic facts are unknown. Opposition did finally develop, about 5 years after the US attack, when there were 1/2 million troops rampaging in SVN and the country had been almost destroyed, and the US had attacked the rest of IC. At any comparable stage, protest against the Iraq war has been much greater.
I remember that initial opposition to the Vietnam war began to organize at Columbia in 1964 right after LBJ's election. By 1967 polls already showed a majority of the American public opposed the war and wanted it to end.
Because there was a lot of war coverage in mainstream media without the degree of close government control that we saw in Bush's Iraq war, the American public may have had more awareness of the reality of the Vietnam war than it has of the Iraq war.
The Internet today should have compensated for today's mainstream media servility and made organizing the anti-war movement easier. Yet six years later only one presidential candidate has vowed to remove troops upon assumption to office, and he has been blocked from coverage.
Then Laura Leff knows something that Raul Hilberg didn't. See his Political Memoirs.
I have not read Hilberg's Political Memoirs, but I am not surprised that a professional historian might differ with a journalist turned academic on this particular issue.
It's true that there was more coverage of the Vietnam war by the time that huge numbers of American soldiers were there. But if you check back to the time when there were 150,000 soldiers, coverage was slight, even though it was far easier than in Iraq. Lack of coverage in Iraq is not the result of government controls. Rather, because it is just too dangerous.
As late as October 1965, when the first international day of protest took place, we had a demonstration on the Boston Common, the traditional free speech meeting place. It was violently broken up by counterdemonstrators, many marching over from the colleges. The speakers (I was one) could not be heard, and were saved from violence only by a huge state police presence, who didn't want to see someone killed on the Common. The Boston Globe, the most liberal paper in the country, the next day bitterly denounced the protestors who dared to say mild things against the bombing of NVN, a sideshow. Even at the peak of the peace movement, the murderous attack on SVN was sidelined, and even today, the media and commentary is suppressing dramatic new documentary revelations on the bombing of Cambodia.
It's true that by 1967, five years after JKF's attack, and when a huge expeditionary force was devastating SVN (and the war had spread to the rest of IC), there was serious opposition to the war. But no calls for withdrawal. When Howard Zinn's Logic of Withdrawal appeared that year, even in the peace movement mostly thought it was crazy. He asked me to write an article in Ramparts about it so at least someone might know it exists (I did). The first editorial timidly calling for withdrawal was in the Globe, late 1969. In contrast, withdrawal is on everyone's lips, even candidates, with the Iraq war at a far lower (though horrendous) stage of violence. I think that's an effort of the activism of the 60s and its aftermath, which has profoundly changed consciousness. A lesson worth attending to, I think.
I don't think we actually disagree. I just suspect opportunism on the part of the organized Jewish community with regard to the use of its ability to influence news coverage. I remember Jewish community public affairs discussions in the early 70s where "experts" explained the problems of the Vietnam war to attendees, among whom were a lot of reporters. This sort of education started in Commentary in the middle 60s.
From In Defense of an Offensive War .
From the middle 60's until the early 70's, during the very era in which, by Mr. Podhoretz's current standards, politicians and thinkers failed America by refusing to make the moral case for the war, such a case simply was not made in the pages of Commentary.
I am not trying to belittle the achievement of 1960s activists. I am just suggesting that they may have had help from an unexpected source acting in its own interest. Naomi Klein makes a case for this sort of opportunistic and manipulative behavior in The Shock Doctrine and proposes that Friedmanists have been planning the remaking of the economy for a long time. The Friedmanists are a subset of Neocons, which are just another face of the Israel Lobby as far as I am concerned. I know that we do not exactly agree in our analysis of the Israel Lobby, but I believe we both agree that it exists. There is no reason that other parts of the Israel Lobby could not engage in the same sort of opportunistic and manipulative behavior.
There's plenty of opportunism. In fact they're very similar to the old Communist Party. I'm not sure about this case, however. Could be researched, easily enough.
"...author Laura Leff argues cogently that NY Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger managed to influence the whole newspaper industry by example to keep Holocaust stories off the front and editorial pages and thereby prevented the development of general awareness of the ongoing extermination of European Jews even though practically all the information was available..."
why?
was he a self hating jew?
he enjoyed six million jews being gassed and/or burned?
and given other jewish sources arguing quite the opposite - some from before the war - , how was this general awareness kept so well covered up?
until many years later?
more self hating jewishness?
The Jewishly self-identifying American Jewish elite is not monolithic. Today, there are
1. Neocons/Jabotinskians,
2. Labor Zionism supporters like Martin Peretz, and
3. Kookians (occult nationalist Zionists like Jack Abramoff -- often followers Tzvi Yehudah Kook and the Lubovitchers, who are more anti-Goy/anti-Gentile than pro-Zionist).
In the 20s and 30s a large part of the NY German Jewish elite rejected any sort of specific Jewish ethnic identity. People sometimes associate this position with reform, but it was strong among German or Austrian Neo-Orthodox Judaism and even among Hungarian Neolog Judaism.
Arthur Sulzberger was a very committed non-ethnic Reform Jew and did not feature any article, editorial or opinion column that could support the concept of Jewish ethnicity. News reports that tended to support the idea of Jewish ethnicity were always buried in the last pages which those few articles that discussed the killing of Jews during WW2 usually only referred to citizenship of victims.
This sort of distortion applied to non-Holocaust stories as well.
In the NY Times no references to the role of Russian Jews in the Russian Revolution and the Soviet leadership were permitted although Europeans and American Jews for the most viewed Russian Communism as a Jewish movement.
Sulzberger featured Duranty's highly distorted reporting of the Soviet Union because Duranty never mentioned Jews and covered up the killings and suffering associated with Soviet Communism. Thus even those that equated Soviet Communism with Jews despite the NY Times cover-up would not be able to use NY Times news reports to criticize or to attack Jews..
NY Times distorted coverage continued with false reporting of the ethnic cleansing of native Palestinians by Central and Eastern European Jewish invaders.
Alison Weir can provide lots of statistics on current misreporting on Israel-Palestine issues, but today the Sulzbergers are not driven ideologically because they are no longer Jewish. To keep the Times profitable they have to pander Jewish readers and advertisers.
So much for the American Journal of Record!
so the anti-war movt in the 60s was facilitated because American Jews and thus eventually the media were behind it more or less, and the anti-war movt today is stifled because they aren't. So obvious, and yet I've never seen this argued. I wonder why?
I am glad you have posted the Baathist interpretation of the Israel Lobby's lack of support for the Vietnam War after 1967. I always felt the the media's turning against it was critical in mobilizing opposition. Likewise the media's steadfastness w/ the current war on terror has completely disempowered the anti-war movement. I marched in 2003 along w/ a million others and the NY Times ignored us.
When you get into an analysis of the different factions of Zionism and the distortions of Sulzberger, I noted w/ great interest the various slants he took seemingly as a Reformed, non-ethnically identified Jew. You paint a picture of him as impartial, neither pointing out Jews in triumph- the Russian Revolution or pointing out Jews in peril- the Holocaust. There could be another explanation for Sulzberger's position and another group of "Zionists" that you haven't touched upon.
If you are not familiar w/ the Sabbatian/Frankist heresy, I would urge you to become acquainted w/ it. Rabbi Marvin Antelman has 2 books on it. I would recommend Eliminate the Opiate Vol.2. There are a couple of other Jewish writers who expose this basically clandestine group lineage. Reading their material is difficult because they are rabid Zionists themselves and one has to often grit one's teeth to get to the expose and even then sometimes you feel the Sabbatians have got it right and the author is the problem. Nonetheless I would be very interested in your views on this phenomenon: a cult of rich and powerful "self-hating" Zionists who use and abuse the overt Zionists to further their own twisted Luciferic agenda.
The Sabbatian/Frankist material ties into the section entitled Concretization of the Spiritual in my document Judonia Rising: The Israel Lobby and American Society.
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