Was Fr. Coughlin an Anti-Semite?

The Protocols of the Defenders of Zion
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

After reading my previous blog entry entitled Stephen Walt: New Father Coughlin??, Maurice Pinay challenged my accusation of anti-Semitism against Father Charles E. Coughlin, who was the famous Radio Priest of the 1930s.

Because the attacks on Professor Walt during the Chas Freeman affair demonstrate that skepticism is required when Jews fling the epithet anti-Semite, I listened to more recordings of Fr. Coughlin and read more of his writings in order to determine whether I could justify my position. (See Social Security Online History Pages for a sample.)

There is no doubt that Couglin has a rather supercilious style when he talks about or at Jews, but Irish Roman Catholic priests of his generation dealt with Sicilian Roman Catholics in almost identical fashion. Coughlin is also extremely hostile to atheism and tends to equate atheist with malefactor, but I found no reason to believe he was aware that E. European ethnic Ashkenazim of the 1930s were more likely to be atheists than members of other ethnic groups.

Coughlin might have been more effective or at least better able to defend himself from charges of anti-Semitism if he had known more about modern Jews, but at that time period there were even fewer useful studies of Jewish political economy in languages he could probably have read than there are now.

Publishing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (see here for more discussion ) has the appearance of a racist or anti-Semitic act, but I used to lecture occasionally on conspiracy theories and was always careful to make the point that they are phenomenologies, which develop in the absence of sufficient information for observers to educe legitimate understandings or theories of connections among events and participants.

I assumed in my original blog entry that it was clear and convincing evidence of prejudice that could form the basis of anti-Semitism to accept both the Protocols' thesis of implausible collaboration between mutually hostile Jewish groups and also its simultaneous obliviousness to the real Jewish conspiracies of the late 19th and early 20th century, but Couglin like many others may simply have resorted to the Protocols as the only available means to understand observable political phenomena and some genuinely malicious Jewish group behaviors, for which the organized Jewish community of that time period like its counterpart today was neither providing adequate explanation nor attempting to redress.

While The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a fabrication with little connection to reality, treating it as fact is approximately as evil as holding any of the following beliefs.

• The State of Israel and Zionism are expressions of liberal democratic ideals.
• The Zionist state and Zionists share American anti-racist, pro-democratic, pro-human-rights values.
• The main impediment to peace in the ME is Arab obstinance.

Columbia Professor Joseph Massad wrote an excellent article entitled The legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre that should be read by anyone who like me has blithely made a simplistic connection between The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and anti-Semitism. Not only should Massad probably have called his article The Protocols of the Defenders of Zion, but no one enmeshed in the above three manifestly false and delusional beliefs even has the right to knock Hamas for a minor reference to the Protocols in its Charter.

[For those that have not read the Charter, here is my analysis of Hamas' alleged anti-Semitism.

Article 32 of the Charter states:

The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.

The Charter probably cites the Protocols under the assumption that it must contain information about Zionist goals.

Article 32 in fact is evidence of the insignificance of the Protocols and European anti-Semitism as sources of Palestinian, Arab or Muslim animosity towards the State of Israel.

In fact, I have never met a Palestinian or Muslim that has actually read it. I once gave a copy to a Palestinian friend, but she confessed that she found it too boring to read.

I have scoured several versions of the Protocols in English, Russian, Polish, and German. None include a discussion of the borders of the Jewish settlement in Palestine, but the Introduction to the 1922 edition entitled WORLD CONQUEST THROUGH WORLD GOVERNMENT, PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION, tries to fit Zionism into the conspiratorial framework described by the Protocols without any discussion of the ultimate or intended borders of the Zionist State.

The Hamas Charter is really referring to the Borders of Destiny (Gvulot Ye`ud/Yi`ud), which were clearly defined in standard Zionist geography textbooks of the Mandatory period. (See The Borders of Destiny.)]
Sphere: Related Content