Divide
and Rule
By Israel
Shamir
I
The Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, a member for
Georgia, was derailed by the Jewish Lobby, as
she did not want to pledge blind support to the
Jewish state. The blind
support of Israel is a modern fealty oath, a
promise given by a politician to obey the
instructions of the Jewish Lobby, not only about
marginal [for Americans] question of Palestine,
but about the central question of power in the
US. This power could not be sustained without
some Black support.
A top Jewish official,
Stephen Steinlight, Director of National Affairs
at the American Jewish Committee[1],
frankly called the Jews to maintain “our present
privilege, success and political power” by
undermining the meagre influence of Blacks,
Latinos and other non-whites, as “they harbour
no feelings of guilt and see the Jews only as
the most privileged and powerful of white
Americans”. He proposed to use “the Jewish power
disproportionally concentrated in Hollywood, TV
and news industry” in order to “divide and
conquer” various communities of Americans.
II
This drive of “divide and
conquer” was the motive of the long “special
relationship” between the Blacks and the Jews.
It began in 1950s and 60s, when the
American Jews were the most important and
powerful friends of the Blacks. Two-thirds of
Freedom Riders, the young men from the North,
who came down South to wake the Blacks up, were
Jews[2].
It sounds like a fairy tale, for nowadays, the
policies of the Jewish community are anything
but egalitarian, but before 1968, Jewish
activists inspired the Blacks of the South to
fight for their civil rights, and brought unrest
to the campuses. They were supported by very
unlikely allies, by the crème of the Jewish
community, New York bankers and newspaper
owners.
It was unexpected alliance,
for in the past, the Jews have been prominent
slave-traders In West Indies, the slave trade
was in the Jewish hands since Sixteenth century.
The Jews in the US utilised their connections in
West Indies and brought the Black slaves to the
plantations of the South. An important Jewish
leader, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, opposed Lincoln
and supported the right “to buy and sell black
savages”[3]
It is often said that the Jewish tradition
stands by human dignity and equality, but
Maimonides, the greatest Jewish religious
authority, denied humanity of Blacks and
approved of slavery[4].
The Jewish support of the
Blacks’ rights could be conceived as a tactical
move designed to promote the Jewish interests by
using the Blacks’ anger and energy. In
these days, the Jews were still a separate
social body, outside of the traditional elites,
‘pariah elite’ in words of witty Lenni Brenner.
Facing the assault of the Blacks led by Jewish
activists, the old elites were forced to open
the doors to the Jews. With integration of the
Jewish elite into the new elite of America, the
Jewish activism collapsed. The revolution of ’68
was betrayed. The previously liberal Jewish
newspapers like the NY Times began to preach a
new agenda: the bracing mix of neo-liberalism
and Jewish supremacy. The activists disappeared,
went into business, opened furniture shops, or
were marginalized, as if they were satisfied to
establish ‘meritocracy’, the foundation stone of
the New World Order.
The Black foot-soldiers of the revolution
remained without their partners, even worse:
they were attacked by yesterday’s allies.
Martin Luther King was
assassinated when his movement for equality and
integration of the Blacks went too far; as far
as wealthy Jewish suburbs. When the Blacks
started to move into the privileged areas in the
North, King was killed and the civil rights
movement was rolled back. The suburbs remained
Jewish; the Blacks remained in their ghetto; I
was told by a prominent Jewish American
participant of the events.
Lenni Brenner[5]
dates the Jewish volte-face by 1967, when the
predominantly Jewish teachers and lawyers of New
York went into action to stop Black children
from receiving proper education and competing
for jobs: ‘them niggers can’t even keep their
cotton pickin’ hands off our graft’, as he put
it.
III
An outsider would imagine that we Jews are
professional double-dealers; that we preached
the rights of the Blacks but planned just to use
them and promote our own agenda. But I am not an
outsider, and this sort of duplicity can not be
imagined outside of fiction. The young Jewish
activists of pre-68’ America were sincere
people, but their success was partly due to
support of their parents, of Jewish banking and
media elite. When the elite made a full turn
around, the revolutionaries were lost, as
soldiers forgotten by their commanders far
beyond enemy lines. It was a deep personal
tragedy for many of them. A small remainder of
the Jewish progressive forces survived the
shift, but it was not reinforced by younger
members of the community. After 1968, the young
and dynamic Jews were sent by their parents to
Israel, hitherto a far-away place of little
importance.
It is often said that the great and impressive
victory of Israeli forces in the Six Day War of
1967 caused this turn to Zionism. But this claim
(stated by Norman Finkelstein and others) does
not survive critical examination. In 1956,
Israel achieved no less of a spectacular
victory, but the American Jews were not
interested. In 1968, they turned to Israel for a
very different reason: Zionism was promoted as
an alternative cause for the young Jewish
activists to keep them off the revolutionary
cause.
The betrayal of the
equality cause by the Jewish elite was a
rational step. Revolution is similar to a
marriage: people enter it for different reasons.
Whenever the traditional elites lose, it is the
big time for the next-in-line. Betrayal (Thermidor,
in terms of French Revolution) is a normal
bourgeois response to successful revolution
going too far. The Jewish elite did not care
about Blacks, about equality or about
flower-power, but just used it to undermine the
traditional structure of the society.
Incidentally, this
U-turn derailed the old anti-Semitism, as it had
strong right-wing roots. Anti-Semites used to
view Jews as crypto-Communists, but after 1970,
even Genghis Khan would not believe it. The
left-wing contained too many pre-68’ Jews and
did not understand why it was ditched by the
previously friendly Jewish community. Only now,
as generation changed, lamentations have been
replaced by anger[6].
“The fortunes of American Jewish population
changed from humble beginnings to the present
position of wealth, power and influence”, wrote
Anton Baumgarten[7]
and asked: “What were the turning points of this
development? When and how Jewish bourgeoisie
gained entrance into the largely anti-Semitic
Establishment and, especially, into its holy of
holies, the big finance capital, the Wall
Street? What role if any did the "civil rights
movement" of the 60s, with the NY Times as its
mouthpiece, have in promoting not only the
rights of black people but of Jewish bankers as
well ("the cunning of history")?”
The U-turn became evident
soon, as the Jews fought affirmative action,
besmirched independent Black activists and
suborned others. In 1978, National Security
Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinsky compiled a secret
confidential memo NSC-46, calling to fight the
Black movement in the US as the Afro-Americans
naturally oppose the Jewish supremacists. This
call was heard, and the armed gangs of the
Jewish community, the Jewish Defence League
targeted, assassinated and framed the Black
leaders, McKinney told her supporters.. FBI
connived with the JDL as it still does: though
this terrorist gang is outlawed, it freely
operates in the United States and in Israel.
The most promising black
diplomat Andy Young was dismissed from service
and his career was terminated when he dared to
show some independence of spirit. He was
followed by others, all the way to Cynthia, as
the Jewish minders kept the blacks under their
control. It is not strange that the positions of
the Afro-Americans went downhill, while the
positions of American Jews, their former allies,
constantly improved.
IV
Last year I visited Atlanta,
Cynthia McKinney’s home town. It is a modern
soulless megapolis of high rise office buildings
and the usual suburban spread of rather
segregated neighbourhoods. No spirit of Scarlet
O’Hara or her black companion haunted the place.
I was a guest of Emory University, supposedly
the best in the state. I came to preach the idea
of integration of Jews and Palestinians in the
Holy Land. The Jewish students’ organisation
objected to integration and called for boycott.
They offered to pay all expenses, just cancel
the lecture and kill my message. In the end, the
lecture went on, but I still did not receive
even my travel expenses back from the Emory.
In Atlanta, I saw the true
beneficiary of the great struggle for Blacks’
liberation. After bussing and fights with KKK,
after many Black casualties, now the Jewish
students constitute forty per cent of the elite
Emory, while the Blacks, the plurality of
Atlanta, retain a statutory 10 % presence. The
Jewish students do not come to university from
integrated schools their fathers and uncles
demanded: they go to superb private segregated
schools.
The blacks do not compete
with the Jews in the universities, as they are
preferred tenants of private-managed and
profit-making jails. While the percent of Jewish
students increased, “the number of black men in
jail has grown fivefold”, reported the New York
Times[8],
and there are “more black men behind bars than
are enrolled in colleges”. Twenty years ago,
there were one hundred fifty thousand black
prisoners and half a million black students. Now
eight hundred thousand blacks are in jail and
only six hundred thousand are enrolled in
colleges or universities.
The Blacks began to
understand they’ve got a raw deal. The Black
Commentator[9]
summed up the feelings of many Afro-Americans:
“The electoral defeat of Rep.
Cynthia McKinney signals the end of any "special
relationship" between African Americans and
mainstream organized American Jewry. The final
break has been a long time in the making, the
relentless attacks on affirmative action mounted
by mainstream Jewish groups beginning in the
Seventies sundered Black-Jewish connections. But
when the relationship is truly over, both
parties know it.
“Jewish American mainstream
organizations have fallen under the sway of
racist right-wingers in both Israel and the
United States. They have acted in concert with
the Christian and corporate Hard Right to
undermine Black political cohesion and
independence. They promote the careers of Black
surrogates to thwart the genuine aspirations of
the people. This is the conduct of an enemy.
These organizations have acted with cruel,
gratuitous arrogance. They brag and strut,
revelling in their power to intervene in the
politics of the Black community. They have lied
and smeared and, yes, conspired to foist their
own candidates upon Black people. On the Jewish
Left, the near-silence is appalling. To us, that
signifies either cowardice or capitulation to
the racists of the congregation”.
These words wouldn’t mean
much: the Black-Jewish “special relationship”
was declared[10]
dead long ago, but the rumours of its death were
premature. However, now the Jewish leadership,
in a new sharp turn of policies, decided to
support racist agenda. I wrote about this shift
in Poisoning Wells[11]:
“They steal our money and
rape our daughters”, - this concept is promoted
by the Jewish propaganda network, this
globe-embracing conglomerate of media moguls,
obedient journalists, deferential university
professors. Hitler or Stalin never had had such
a network in their disposal. The mighty machine
rolled out the Ku Klux Klan scaremongering image
of a crouching dark-skinned rapist, lusting the
white skin and golden hair of Aryan maidens of
Denmark. Imported from the great KKK-worshipping
silent movie by Griffith, The Nation Is Born,
the racist image opens a new film of Men in
Black II: big Negro with big knife and big teeth
attacks a White woman in the park. The film was
produced by the creator of Schindler’s List,
Stephen Spielberg”.
V
The Afro-Americans should
think of a new mode of action, look for new
allies and prove their ability to act
independently. The debacle of Cynthia shows that
two official established parties offer no way
out. They take the blacks for granted.
Mercifully, people are increasingly tired of the
two-party system trap. It is time to change
patterns, to form new alliances, and to reject
the old rivalries and hatred.
The people of the South,
blacks, whites, Native Americans, immigrants
have to live together and decide the future of
the South. Much of inter-communal hostility was
imported from New York for ‘Divide and Rule’
purposes.[12]
The most extreme groups, from KKK to Black
Panthers, had connections in the same circles.
A few days ago, the NY Times[13]
made an unusual promotion campaign for a racist
Rev. Matt Hale, “America's scariest hatemonger”.
Francis Boyle, the well-known lawyer and a
friend of Palestine, responded to this write-up:
“Hale was nothing more than a small time Central
Illinois bigot and racist until Dershowitz came
along, and deliberately gave Hale tens of
millions of dollars of free publicity on the
world's news media in order to promote his
violent racial hatred against Blacks, Jews,
Asians and now Latinos and Native Americans. The
[Jewish] ADL also supported Hale”.
The people of the South
should understand who promoted the divisions of
the past and reject it. Confrontational approach
leads nowhere, and it is good that there is
readiness to proceed from disunity to
cooperation. The legacy of slavery does not have
to mean an eternal confrontation. The Russian
peasants were freed from their serfdom in 1861,
almost simultaneously with the Blacks’
liberation. However, now a descendant of a
Russian serf feels no animosity to a descendant
of Russian squire, and vice versa.
The War Party media and
opinion-making bodies stand on the way of
peaceful coexistence, as they actively demonise
all parts of the Southern population. They
present the white folks as white supremacists,
racists, lynching mob. They present blacks as
criminals, lazy, layabouts. They present
immigrants as nasty Usama fanatics. However in
Atlanta, the local folks who cherish the
heritage of Confederacy understood their true
interests, and actively supported Cynthia.
Memory of Confederacy does
not have to divide; it could be uniting glue, as
there were many blacks and Native Americans in
the defeated army as well. It is not a secret
that so-called whites and blacks of the South
are often brothers or cousins. This division
could become as irrelevant, as the division of
Yaman and Kais among the Arabs. The Civil War
had ruined the South for many years; it brought
no happiness to blacks or local whites. Its
memories had kept the South divided, while the
power eluded the people. However, the
Southerners of all shades of skin can live
together in mutual respect, rejecting the Divide
and Rule goading.
[1]
http://www.cis.org/articles/2001/back1301.html
[2]
Arthur Liebman, Jews and the
Left, quoted by Lenni Brenner, Jews in
America Today, p. 227
[3]
Hertzberg, Jews in America
[4]
You will not find these words of
Maimonides in the English translation,
as they were suppressed by the American
Jewish publishers, but remained intact
in the Hebrew version. Noted by Israel
Shahak in his 3000 Years of Jewish
Religion.
[5]
Lenni Brenner, the Jews in
America, Saki Books, London
[6]
See Love’s Labours Lost, on my
site www.israelshamir.net
[8]
NY Times August 28, 2002 Study Finds Big
Increase in Black Men as Inmates Since
1980 By FOX BUTTERFIELD
[10]
Jonathan Kaufmann, BROKEN ALLIANCE: THE
TURBULENT TIMES BETWEEN
BLACKS AND JEWS IN AMERICA (Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1988);
[12]
see my Divide and Rule
[13]
NYT August 30, 2002 By NICHOLAS D.
KRISTOF
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