By Brian Carnell

Thursday, March 28, 2002

Sometimes people on the Left write such bizarre things it is hard to know what to think, especially when they come from a normally level-headed source like Alexander Cockburn. But Cockburn's comments about the flap over anti-Semitic comments made in recently released tapes of Richard Nixon and The Rev. Billy Graham leave even me speechless. Cockburn notes that commentators have said they were shocked at hearing such rank anti-Semitism from Nixon and Graham. Cockburn then continues,

Why the shock? Don't they know that this sort of stuff is consonant with the standard conversational bill of fare at 75 per cent of the country clubs in America, not to mention many a Baptist soiree. Nixon thought American Jews were lefty peaceniks who dominated the Democratic Party and were behind the attacks on him. Graham reckoned it was Hollywood Jews who had sunk the nation in porn. Haldeman agreed with both of them. At whatever level of fantasy they were all acknowledging power. But they didn't say they wanted to kill a million Jews. That's what Graham said about the Vietnamese [because Graham urged Nixon to destroy dikes in North Vietnam] and no one raised a bleat.

It's supposedly the third rail in journalism even to have a discussion of how much the Jews do control the media. Since three of the prime founders of Hollywood, were Polish Jews who grew up within fifty miles of each other in Galicia, it's reckoned as not so utterly beyond the bounds of propriety to talk about Jewish power in Hollywood, though people still stir uneasily. The economic and political commentator Jude Wanniski remarked last week in his web newsletter that even if the Jews don't control the media overall, it is certainly true to say that they control discussion of Israel in the media here.

Certainly, there are a number of stories sloshing around the news now that have raised discussion of Israel and of the posture of American Jews to an acrid level. The purveyor of anthrax may have been a former government scientist, Jewish, with a record of baiting a colleague of Arab origins, and with the intent to blame the anthrax on Muslim terrorists. Rocketing around the web and spilling into the press are many stories about Israeli spies in America at the time of 9/11. On various accounts, they were trailing Atta and his associates, knew what was going to happen but did nothing about it, or were simply spying on US facilities. Some, posing as art students have been expelled, according to AP. Finally, there's Sharon's bloody repression of the Palestinians, and Israel's apparently powerful role in Bush's foreign policy, urging him into action against at least two of the axes of evil, Iraq and Iran.

Wow. Notice it is not whether or not Jews control the media that cannot be discussed, according to Cockburn, but rather the extent to which they control it which is the "third rail in journalism." The claim that "Jews do control the media" is simply assumed to be true by Cockburn, which gets repeated in the form that "it is certainly true to say that they [Jews] control discussion of Israel in the media here."

Cockburn follows this with paragraph filled with a litany of rumors, conjectures, and conspiracy related to "Israel and of the posture of American Jews." And then the essay just stops.

Cockburn's apparent approval of Jude Wanniski's nonsensical article is also troubling. According to Wanniski, the fact that publisher Mortimer Zuckerman refused to have a face-to-face meeting with Louis Farrakhan proves that Jews control the media coverage of Israel (Wanniski, in fact, asserts that if Zuckerman had met with Farrakhan, "9-11 might not have happened.")

Source:

When Billy Graham Planned To Kill One Million People. Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch.Org, March 12, 2002.

Do Jews Control the Media?. Jude Wanniski, Polynomics.Com, March 6, 2002.

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