Revenge of the "Waco Gene" (Update/correction, April 20)

The Regime has made it official that "right-wing extremism" is a threat to Homeland Security.


That genus is divided into two species -- "white supremacist and anti-government groups" -- with the latter further differentiated into various sub-species, including immigration reform activists, "disgruntled military veterans," gun rights advocates, members of citizen militia groups, anti-globalists, constitutionalists, "hate groups," and others deemed politically unsuitable by the Regime.


About two years ago, Congress was presented with a measure entitled the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act. Its first offspring was to be an official commission to examine potential content-based Internet restrictions.


Although this bill eventually dead-ended in the Senate, at some point the Regime swiped some of its genetic material and used it to create a specialized section within the Homeland Security Department called the Extremism and Radicalization Branch (which we'll call the ERB). [See update/correction below.]


This means that for the first time in American history, the federal government has a full-time intelligence organ devoted exclusively to scrutinizing the political opinions and affiliations of U.S. citizens. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this development as a milestone in our nation's apostasy from its founding as a constitutional republic.


Earlier this month, the ERB's "Homeland Environment Threat Analysis Division" issued a nine-page "Intelligence and Analysis Assessment" of "right-wing extremism" for the supposed benefit of state and local law enforcement agencies. That document consists of reheated leftovers from several previous "intelligence analyses" of the "radical right," including the FBI's notorious 1999 Project Megiddo broadside.



















Echoes of a decade ago: A "terrorist threat" assessment issued in 1999 by the Phoenix FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force identified "constitutionalists" as a potential threat -- but didn't mention the possibility of a backlash from Muslim radicals riled up by Washington's foreign policy.


The ERB report concludes with the observation that the Department of Homeland Security "will be working with its state and local partners over the next several months to ascertain with greater regional specificity the rise in rightwing extremist activity in the United States, with a particular emphasis on the political, economic, and social factors that drive rightwing extremist radicalization."


This is significant chiefly because it acknowledges that every "local" police agency in the United States is now a sensory organ, and enforcement appendage, of the Homeland Security State.


As partners with the Department of Homeland Security, your thoughtful and friendly "local" police and state police will be expected to gather intelligence on "extremists" within their jurisdictions and provide it to the Feds. And in the event that they're required to do so by their "partners" in Washington, those same state and "local" police will be expected to question, arrest, or detain those designated to be severe risks to "homeland security."


In this connection it's useful to remember that the Obama administration has taken care to preserve all of the necessary Bush-era precedents regarding the summary imprisonment of those designated "unlawful enemy combatants" by presidential decree, the suspension of habeas corpus, and even the practice of torture as a means of "enhanced interrogation."


The prospect of the exercise of those powers by the incumbent is causing a loss of bladder control among many of the same GOP-aligned polemicists who insisted that they were perfectly safe when placed at the disposal of his predecessor. This development was as predictable as the "plot" of a porno film. And as Salon's admirable civil libertarian columnist Glen Greenwald emphasizes, the report on the "radical right" was actually begun under the Bush administration.
























Putting a meme into play: This magazine cover, which appeared roughly a year ago, anticipated one of the themes of the recent Homeland Security Department assessment of the "right-wing threat" -- namely, that there may be a violent, racially motivated "backlash" against the Obama administration.


In the institutional memory of the American Right, the early Clinton years were characterized by two entirely unnecessary atrocities involving culturally isolated "extremists": The attack on the Randy Weaver family at Ruby Ridge, Idaho -- which led to the murder of Sammy and Vicki Weaver -- and the 51-day standoff at Mt. Carmel, Texas, which culminated in the holocaust of April 19, 1993.


The unbearable memory of those episodes, exacerbated by the "assault weapons" ban, did much to catalyze resistance to the Clinton administration. Prior to the Oklahoma City bombing, there was a widespread, and growing, appreciation for the lethal potential of what we could call the federal government's "Waco gene" -- its latent tendency to isolate, dehumanize, criminalize, and even annihilate those considered to be incorrigible internal enemies.


But although this early Clinton-era anti-government backlash was rooted in worthy and entirely justified sentiments, it was poorly focused in one fairly significant respect: Clinton and his properly maligned Attorney General Janet Reno had relatively little to do with the planning and execution of the ATF's assault on the Branch Davidians, and nothing at all to do with the criminal assault on the Weaver family. Those were anti-"extremist" initiatives planned and/or carried out by the administration of George Bush the Elder.


(It's not my intention to demolish a straw man by mentioning Ruby Ridge in this connection; on many occasions I've heard that incident paired with Waco when people have recited the litany of the Clinton administration's crimes.)


During the reign of Bush the Dumber, the GOP-aligned punditocracy insisted that only "peace creeps" and people who perversely sympathize with suicide bombers were outraged over the executive branch's assault on the Bill of Rights.


When Bush put the chainsaw to due process guarantees running back to Runnymede and mowed them down like so much overgrowth on his postage-stamp "ranch," some principled voices -- with Ron Paul, as always, leading that tiny chorus -- took up a refrain similar to that put in the mouth of Sir Thomas More when his son-in-law William Roper urged a similar clear-cutting approach to the law.


After the contemptible opportunist Richard Rich* comes fishing for a bribe, baiting More with the implied threat of blackmail, More's family urges him to have Rich arrested. When More points out that Rich hadn't broken the law, and that even "the Devil himself" is entitled to the protection of the law, Roper angrily exclaims that he would "cut down every law in England" to get to the Devil.


"And when the last law was down and the devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?" More inquired. "This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast -- man's laws, and not God's -- and if you cut them down--and you are just the man to do it--do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes -- I'd give the Devil benefit of the law for my own safety's sake."



***

***

Transfixed by the demonic evil of Islamic terrorism, intoxicated by a sense of vindictive righteousness, the Republican Right eagerly collaborated in the effort to mow down legal protections for those designated enemies of the state. With the frustrated puzzlement of dimwitted children they now find themselves naked and shivering in the ill winds so memorably described by More.


For a long time, conservatives have extracted much undeserved pleasure from the aphorism that "A law-and-order conservative is a liberal who's been mugged." Now they're given an opportunity to learn the truth of its counterpart: "A civil libertarian is a law-and-order conservative who suffered an ass-beating at the hands of the police." Perhaps this lesson could be learned -- but, given the propensity of conservatives to miss the obvious and resist admissions of error, I'm not optimistic.


One aspect of the ERB's "Intelligence Assessment" that offers cause for unintended mirth is the concern it expresses over the possibility that the ongoing economic collapse is being "exploited" by "rightwing extremists." The unspoken corollary here, of course, is that our rulers us would never exploit economic or political upheavals in order to aggrandize their own power -- the well-documented eagerness of both the Bushi'ites and the Obamatrons not to "let a serious crisis go to waste" notwithstanding.


The all-gathering "ear": This grotto on Syracuse, known as "Dionysus's Ear," has unique acoustic properties that amplify even the softest whisper. According to legend, the tyrant Dionysus imprisoned political enemies in or near this cave and his secret police exploited its eavesdropping potential in their efforts to root out dissent.



You see, according to the Collectivist Lexicon, when those exercising the powers of government suspect the worst of the people they rule, it's called vigilance; when those on the receiving end of government power suspect the worst of their rulers, it's called paranoia.


In the interest of clarity, I should point out that, as the term is typically used today, a "paranoid" is someone who notices things without government permission. Similarly, a "conspiracy theorist" is anyone who draws unacceptable anti-government conclusions from politically inconvenient facts.


A "hate group" consists of any group of people who are hated by collectivists.


And a "terrorist" is anyone, anywhere, who is imprisoned, tortured, or killed by the state with extreme prejudice. In the near future we may see some interesting applications of that infinitely flexible definition.


When citizens are hyper-vigilant toward government, liberty is one possible result. Where government is hyper-vigilant toward is subjects, tyranny is the inevitable outcome.


Update/correction, April 20:

In the original version of this essay, I mistakenly reported that the "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Act of 2007" (VRHTA) was enacted by Congress and signed into law. A sharp-eyed and well-informed contributor to the comment thread caught this mistake. It does seem clear that the section of the Homeland Security Department responsible for the "assessment" of the supposed right-wing threat is a product of the same ferment within the police state apparatus that inspired the VRHTA. I sincerely regret my earlier error.


___
*A painful personal admission: Richard Rich, the despicable invertebrate who betrayed the heroic St. Thomas More, is a distant ancestor (by adoption, I hasten to point out).


On sale now.












Dum spiro, pugno!

"Mo' Money," Less Wealth (Second update 4/14)

You get mo' money from the Gub-MINT! Whiz and Ice, key economic advisers to the Obama regime (as well as its predecessor).


In comoedia veritas est.

In comedy, the truth is found.



As a 23-year-old "social organizer" in Chicago, Barrack Obama had an encounter that should have changed the way he looked at politics, were he in the habit of serious reflective thought.


Deployed as an Alinskyite "change agent" to Chicago's South Side, Obama made the acquaintance of a redoubtable woman identified as "Sadie" in his first memoir, Dreams of My Father. Sadie is described as one of Obama's "staunchest supporters" during his street-level work in pursuing what he calls "redistributive change."


Sadie, like many other poor residents of Chicago's inner city, wanted to believe in the gospel of statist wealth redistribution, but was somewhat weary of the way her grievances were being leveraged by those in charge of Chicago's political spoils system.


So it likely was with a mixture of affection and despair that Sadie informed the eager and youthful future president: "Ain't nothing gonna change, Mr. Obama. We just gonna concentrate on saving our money so we can move outta here as fast as we can."


Now, if Obama had been blessed with an insightful older mentor -- say, the equivalent of Sean Connery's wizened Chicago beat cop Jimmy Malone from The Untouchables -- that stern but kindly sage would have italicized the meaning of that moment (in a voice flavored with an endearing, albeit ethnically dubious, Caledonian brogue, of course):


"Barry, my boy, the key to real change and upward mobility is not to seize the earnings of the industrious and thrifty and lavish them on the corrupt and profligate. It's to let people keep what they earn and use it to make life better for themselves and their children. That's not The Chicago Way -- but it is what we used to call The American Way. Here endeth the lesson."


But, as Charles Glass documents in a terrific overview of Obama's gestational years in the womb of the Chicago Machine, the would-be world-saver was both ideologically tone-deaf to the significance of such moments, and too beholden to the crass political establishment in the Big Onion, to change his trajectory.


And now that he's president, Obama -- acting on behalf of the entrenched kleptocratic clique in control of our economy -- is seeking to consummate "redistributive change" on a national basis by making it impossible for "Sadies" anywhere in the country to save what they earn and improve their circumstances.


To understand how this works, it's useful to turn to the oeuvre of the Wayans Brothers, producers of the early 1990s sketch comedy program In Living Color -- a program entirely uninhibited by politically correct etiquette.


Perhaps by virtue of their status as fully accredited minorities, they had what Seinfeld referred to as "total joke immunity"; this permitted them to examine, often in terms that would have made Rabelais blush, the comic-rich foibles of inner-city personality types. (Granted, the Wayans Brothers also inflicted Jim Carrey on the rest of us, and there are some things that simply cannot be forgiven.)


Not all of the Wayans Brothers' targets were treated scornfully. One recurring sketch featured the Hedleys, the "hardest-working West Indian family" in the country. In this small but very energetic Jamaican household it is considered a stain on the family honor for someone to be working for fewer than a half-dozen employers. A man is judged by the number of jobs he can juggle simultaneously. Even toddlers are required to seek paying work as soon as they develop marketable motor skills.


The Hedleys' catchphrase -- which is the defining feature of recurring sketch comedy -- is: "Hey, mon'-- I gotta go to work!"


One installment find the older daughter aglow over the prospect of her date with a new beau, a wonderful man who makes more than $100,000 a year. That radiance quickly disappears however, when her prospects are occluded by parental disapproval; you see, her boyfriend is a doctor, which means that he only has one job.


At the other end of the spectrum from the eccentric but admirable Hedleys we find "Whiz" and "Ice," a pair of petty crooks from the Hip-Hop anti-culture who consider themselves entrepreneurs and wealth-building consultants.


Where the immigrant Hedleys speak with a pronounced accent but precise, intelligible diction, the native-born Whiz and Ice converse in a patois -- sub-Ebonics-level English punctuated with spastic hand gestures -- that is perhaps a step above primal grunts and simian territorial antics. And while the Hedleys are busy earning money, Whiz and Ice are constantly exploring new ways to steal it. Their catchphrase will become quite obvious anon.


In the classic sketch depicting the "Homeboy Financial Seminar," Whiz and Ice peddle their new booklet, "How to Make MO' Money, Without Using YO' Money."


"Now, you might ask, `Whose money should I use?'" says Ice as he winds up for the sales pitch. "Well, who got mo' money than they know what to do wid'?"


"Da gub-MENT!" chimes in Whiz on cue.


With the practiced confidence of people who have lived their own advice, Ice and Whiz then give step-by-step instructions on how to use the Food Stamp program to leverage a six-pack of beer that costs $3.99 ("or even less, dependin' on the security system!" Whiz points out) into a $25 profit.


"Mo' money, mo' money, MO' MONEY!" they exclaim.


They then present a few videotaped testimonials from people who have worked their program successfully -- such as Anton "Boom-Boom" Geno, who made $45,000 in three weeks (before being locked away for 5-8 years); or Luther "Bighead" Jones, who scooped up $123,000 in six months (before being shot resisting arrest).


Whiz and Ice are creatures of pure consumption; they merely take and spend. The Hedleys are a caricature of upwardly mobile immigrants; all they do is work and save.


There is nothing new in this contrast; it's as old as Aesop's parable of the grasshopper and the ants. And, as the Wayans Brothers almost certainly understood as they created the characters, the allotment of such disparate character traits has nothing to do with melanin content or ethnicity (although culture undoubtedly plays a significant role).


Where industry and time preference are concerned, the Hedleys could have been immigrants from Korea, Latin America, India, the Pale of Settlement; they could have been 19th-Century sodbusters or 21st-century information entrepreneurs.


As for Whiz and Ice -- well, they could be considered creatures from the collective Id of post-Bubble Wall Street.


The difference between the small-scale scam described in the "Homeboy Financial Seminar" and the more exotic species of fraud that prospered during the most recent Federal Reserve-engineered boom is entirely a matter of scale.


The securitized debts peddled by the likes of Goldman Sachs were a bit like a street hustler's "flash roll" -- an apparently impressive wad of cash that turns out to be a single large-denomination bill wrapped around a handful of fives and ones with a large core of blank paper sheets. The chief difference between a "flash roll" and a Collateralized Debt Obligation, for example, is that the latter is trash all the way through.


In a larger and more uncomfortable sense, however, Whiz and Ice symbolize our entire debt-based consumer economy since August 1971, when the dollar became a pure fiat currency.


America's Empire of Debt, wrote William Bonner and Addison Wiggin in the indispensable book of that title (published on the eve of the unfolding financial melt-down) is "a vainglorious system of conceit, deceit, debt, and delusion.... Americans believe they can get rich by spending someone else's money.... They believe that foreign countries actually want to be invaded and taken over. They believe they can run up debt forever, and that their debt-laden houses are as good as money in the bank."


Or, to summarize the matter in a single pithy phrase, the entire system is based on the idea of "gettin' MO' money, wid-out usin' YO money."


One would think that the bloody debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq would disabuse Americans of the notion that other countries are simply aching to be invaded and occupied by the U.S. military. In similar fashion, one would think that the deepening horrors of our debt-based financial system would cause people to repent of the delusion that one can borrow his way to prosperity.


One would think this is the case. One would be wrong.















I'm tempted to say that the third eye is for "Inflation." (Sorry.)


Witness the unedifying spectacle of Barrack Obama peddling his administration's new subsidized mortgage refinancing program (no equity required, as long as your mortgage is backed by one of those twin exemplars of fiscal rectitude, Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac) with the unctuous pseudo-sincerity of a late-night infomercial pitchman.


But this is just one relatively small example of the Obama regime's grand design for recovery, which is to "rescue" the economy by confiscating -- through taxation or inflation -- all the wealth earned by the Hedleys and delivering it into the hands of the Whizzes and Ices of Wall Street.


How is this to be accomplished?


Simple:


Mo' money, mo' money, MO' MONEY! -- that is, the Federal Reserve's officially sanctioned counterfeit of the same.

How is the Zimbabwean dollar superior to our own official fiat scrip? It's a multi-colored currency, which means that it can at least serve a decorative purpose.

Since last September, the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve have spent, lent, or issued loan guarantees totaling $12.98 trillion. Last year’s Gross Domestic Product was $14.2 trillion.

This means that the Treasury and Fed, in order to service their Wall Street seraglio, have siphoned away the equivalent of nearly the entire U.S. economy.

In terms individualized impact, this exercise in corporate communism will cost $42,105 for every living American. (Of course, that computation doesn't take into account the disparate impact those costs will have on the productive "Hedleys" versus the parasitical "Whizzes" and "Ices.")

The total amount diverted into the rescue effort is fourteen times the $900 billion in U.S. currency presently in circulation. Monetizing that full amount -- a likely outcome, now that the Fed is buying T-bills -- would have some, ah, interesting social consequences. As the pitiful inhabitants of Zimbabwe can testify, "mo' money" is hardly a blessing when a corrupt government simply emits an endless gusher of value-free paper scrip.

A quick note --

Versions of this document, a purported "Assessment" of "Rightwing Extremism" prepared by the "Extremism and Radicalization Branch" of the Department of Homeland Security," have been circulating in the blogosphere for the past couple of days.

I've been trying to determine whether it is an official document or a decent forgery composed by someone with a perverse sense of humor. Presently, I'm waiting -- most likely in vain -- for some people to respond to telephone inquiries regarding the document and the mysterious DHS "Extremism and Radicalization Branch."

Right now I'm inclined to treat this supposed report as a plausible fiction -- perhaps a sharply written satire.

As soon as I learn anything substantial, I'll certainly pass it along. Keep watching this space.

Second update: It Appears to be Authentic

The Washington Times this morning (April 14), in an article about the same "assessment" document, cited Homeland Security spokeswoman Sara Kuban by way of verifying its authenticity. Kuban describes it as "one in an ongoing series of assessments by the department to `facilitate a greater understanding of the phenomenon of violent radicalization in the U.S."

Ah, the advantages that still accrue to the "old media": I tried at least a half-dozen different ways to solicit a comment from the Homeland Security bureaucracy, and I'm still waiting for my most recent promised call-back.

On sale now.












Dum spiro, pugno!

The Pogrom That Wasn't

[By way of preface: I'm tired, and by that I mean I am weary at the molecular level. I have no fewer than three partially completed essays -- and what promises to be a fairly huge investigative piece -- in the works, but domestic concerns have made it impossible for me to finish any of them, at least to my satisfaction.

So, for only the second time in the history of this blog -- that's 404 essays so far -- I'm going to republish a piece previously run elsewhere. By tomorrow evening -- I promise! -- this space will
be filled with a new, first-run essay. I'm also working on some YouTube projects; hopefully, we'll see the first of those in a couple of weeks.

On the subject of video -- I'm also including below a two-part video produced by a very industrious fellow named Rick, whose YouTube channel you folks really should check out. That video is an illustrated version of a commentary I did on the subject below for the old Review of the News Online program.


Five years ago the air was thick with dire warnings that the film "The Passion of the Christ" would ignite America's ambient anti-Semitism into a firestorm of persecution. The lead voice in that ensemble was, predictably, the criminally misnamed Anti-Defamation League, which performed its familiar cadenzas of outrage and alarm.


Oddly enough, however, the anticipated persecution never materialized. There were even a couple of well-publicized episodes in which skinhead-type Nazi-wannabes, after seeing the film, repudiated their lifestyles, which would mean that The Passion's impact translated into a net loss for the cause of Jew-hating.


Predictably, the ADL and its allies, after defaming more or less the entire American Christian population, never acknowledged that they were wrong.


In all candor, I've not seen The Passion. I don't agree with much of Mr. Gibson's theology, although I respect his formidable gifts as a filmmaker. From my perspective the key issue here wasn't the film itself, but rather the fashion in which cynical opportunists like Foxman exploited it as an opportunity to engender inter-communal distrust and hostility, and the role played by people of his ilk in promoting "The Fatal Embrace" -- a dependency on the "protective" power of the state, which is the true enemy of liberty, peace, prosperity, and tolerance. -- WNG]

The Pogrom That Wasn't: The Passion of The Christ, Five Years Later

"For almost 2,000 years in Western civilization, four words legitimized, rationalized, and fueled anti-Semitism: 'The Jews killed Christ,'" claimed Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), in a February 6 [2004] speech in Palm Beach concerning the new film The Passion of the Christ.


The unmistakable thrust of Foxman's address was that because Christianity is innately anti-Semitic, Mel Gibson's film could activate the latent anti-Semitism the ADL insists can be found everywhere--including the United States.


"For hundreds of years those four words--acted out, spoken out, sermonized out--inspired and legitimized pogroms, inquisitions and expulsions," continued Foxman. "Many during the Holocaust who killed Jews from Monday to Friday went to church on Sunday and there was no disconnect for them, because, after all, all they were doing was killing 'Christ killers.' So for us, the possible impact of a Passion Play on the global scene with a global producer, with an icon, is not a fantasy, it's a serious anxiety. For us, it is a flashback into history."


Foxman elsewhere asserted that "Holocaust survivors ... can vividly recall their families having to hide in the basement in order to avoid the wrath of Christians emerging from Easter Sunday services."


Here Foxman ignores the well-documented fact that thousands of European Jews survived the Holocaust because Christians hid them in their basements or otherwise protected them from the Nazis. Among those thus sheltered was Foxman himself--who now besmirches pious Christians, rather than collectivist pagans, for the slaughter of millions of innocent Jews.



Foxman's complaint was echoed by countless voices in the punditocracy.


"Since medieval times, passion plays--which, like Gibson's movie, depict the last 12 hours of Christ's life--have often been openly anti-Semitic and used to justify persecution of Jews," opined the Baltimore Sun. "The Passion is hopelessly mired in anti-Semitic stereotypes," declared Entertainment Weekly. "The mere choice of title is dangerously loaded: Passion plays, a centuries-old art form, are often so liable to incite anti-Semitic anger that Catholic theologians crafted guidelines in the '80s for tonal appropriateness."


According to Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, "the crucifixion is not just a story; it is a story with its own story--a history of centuries of relentless, and at times savage, persecution of Jews in Christian lands." Krauthammer's colleague Richard Cohen denounced Gibson's film--which is drawn largely from the Gospels--as "fascistic."


In similar fashion, the New York Daily News ranted: "Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is the most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II." Newsweek expanded the indictment from passion plays and Gibson's film to include the New Testament itself. Posing the question of whether "the Gospels themselves [are] anti-Semitic," the February 16 cover story replies: "Not in the sense the term has come to mean in the early 21st century...."



The magazine goes so far as to imply that the New Testament should carry the spiritual equivalent of the Surgeon General's warning affixed to cigarette packages: "The tragic history of the persecution of the Jewish people ... clearly shows what can go wrong when the Gospels are not read with care."


Boston Globe columnist James Carroll dispenses with such subtlety altogether, suggesting that the New Testament itself is a crime against tolerance: "Even a faithful repetition of the Gospel stories of the death of Jesus can do damage exactly because those sacred texts themselves carry the virus of Jew hatred." New York Times film critic Frank Rich, who execrates Gibson's film as a "porn movie" of the "homoerotic" variety (a description which Rich would generally offer as a compliment, judging from previous reviews), insists that "the fracas over The Passion has made me feel less secure as a Jew in America than ever before."


Strange as it may seem, Rich has it exactly right. It is not the film itself, or the Christian faith that the film reflects, but rather the orchestrated outrage over that film that may undermine relations between Christians and Jews and ultimately imperil the rights and personal security of all Americans.

ADL Smear Campaign

For roughly a year prior to the release of Gibson's film, the Anti-Defamation League waged a campaign traducing both the director and his movie as anti-Semitic. In the course of that campaign, an ADL operative purloined an early draft of the script.


On the basis of a few isolated elements of the stolen script, the ADL condemned the work in progress for displaying "numerous anti-Semitic elements" and demanded that Gibson rework his film to its satisfaction. Failing in its effort to exercise editorial control over the film's content, the ADL urged the director to add a postscript to the film that would constitute, in essence, the metaphorical "Surgeon General's warning" about the supposedly toxic effects of Christianity.[...]


Corrie ten Boom, rescuer of Jews: According to the ADL, she and the rest of her heroic Dutch family just didn't understand the "real" meaning of the New Testament.



Rather than leaving audiences to ponder the essential Christian message of redemption, the ADL's suggested coda would leave audiences pondering the supposed collective guilt of Christians for the historic persecution of Jews, up to and including the hideous crimes committed by the anti-Christian pagan Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist regime.


Gibson, to his credit, essentially ignored the ADL, which--in collaboration with the major media and other self-appointed "watchdog" groups--escalated its defamation campaign.


Numerous Jewish religious leaders and scholars who previewed the film--including Rabbi Daniel Lapin and film critic Michael Medved--hailed it as an artistic masterpiece devoid of any anti-Semitic content.


Referring primarily to the ADL, Rabbi Lapin offered the following commentary shortly after Gibson's film was released: "Those Jewish organizations that have squandered both time and money futilely protesting The Passion, ostensibly in order to prevent pogroms in Pittsburgh, can hardly be proud of their performance. They failed at everything they attempted. They were hoping to ruin Gibson rather than enrich him. They were hoping to suppress The Passion rather than promote it. Finally, they were hoping to help Jews rather than harm them. In this, they have failed miserably. By selectively unleashing their fury only on wholesome entertainment that depicts Christianity in a positive light, these critics have triggered anger, hurt, and resentment."


Rabbi Lapin, like countless other devout Jews, is a man of faith and goodwill. Thus it's not surprising that he is insufficiently cynical to understand how staining Christianity with the tar brush of anti-Semitism benefits the ADL and its agenda. In fact, sowing, "anger, hurt, and resentment" through the use of dishonest--and occasionally illegal--tactics is the ADL's stock in trade, and it has been for decades.

The ADL's Rap Sheet

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, an individual named James Mitchell Rosenberg, described by political analyst Laird Wilcox as "a career infiltrator for the Anti-Defamation League," was a fixture at Ku Klux Klan rallies in the Midwest.


For the benefit of television reporters, Rosenberg also posed as a leader of a paramilitary group called the "Christian Patriot's Defense League," which was the subject of a breathless expose entitled "Armies of the Right." He was eventually arraigned on criminal charges, which were dismissed after the intervention of Irwin Suall, his ADL supervisor.


A little more than a decade later, Roy Bullock, described by Wilcox as "a paid ADL operative and well-known figure in the San Francisco homosexual community," engaged in similar undercover work in the Bay Area, attempting to forge spurious links between ADL-designated "hate groups" and actual terrorist organizations. Bullock worked closely with Tom Gerard, an intelligence officer with the San Francisco Police Department.


According to Wilcox, Gerard "regularly took information from police files for transmittal to the ADL and in some cases to Israeli intelligence agencies, with whom the ADL works closely." Gerard avoided criminal charges by fleeing the country.


The ADL bribed its way out of trouble by offering a $75,000 donation to a San Francisco hate crimes investigation fund.


[Fifteen] years ago, the ADL released a 193-page screed entitled The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America, purporting to document that Christian conservatives pose a menace to Jews and other minorities.


Outraged by this libel, 75 prominent American Jews signed a full-page ad in the New York Times to condemn the ADL. Since Jews have often been victimized by religious bigotry, the ad pointed out, "we have a special obligation to guard against it, and all the more so, when in the case of the ADL attack on our Christian fellow citizens, it emanates from our own community."


Additionally, continued the ad, "Judaism teaches ... that we have the duty to acknowledge the good done to us. In issuing The Religious Right study, the ADL has among other things seriously violated that principle."


On March 1, just shortly after The Passion's debut, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a $10.5 million defamation judgment against the ADL arising out of a Colorado lawsuit.


William and Dorothy Quigley had filed the suit in the mid-1990s after ADL regional director Saul Rosenthal, speaking in a press conference, accused the couple of being anti-Semites.


In 1994, the ADL intervened in a pointless quarrel between the Quigleys and their Jewish neighbors, the Aronsons. Seeking to prove that the Quigleys were motivated by anti-Semitic prejudice, the ADL suggested that the Aronsons conduct an illegal wiretap of the Quigleys' phone conversations.

Another Christian who just didn't "get it," from the ADL's perspective: Father Bruno (born Henri Reynders) a Belgian Benedictine Monk, led a large and sophisticated rescue operation -- at considerable personal peril -- after being released from a POW camp in 1941. With him in the photo above are five of the hundreds of Jewish children Father Bruno and his associates protected from the Nazis.


The league then went public with its accusations against the Quigleys, who found themselves formally accused of hate crimes (a charge subsequently dropped). As a result of the ADL's actions, the Quigleys were battered with death threats and hate mail (including a package containing dog feces), and were denounced from the pulpit by their priest. The family was driven to hire bodyguards, and William Quigley--who worked in the motion-picture industry--found that his career was effectively destroyed. (This underscores the commercial and career risks encountered by Mel Gibson and his colleagues after they were targeted by the ADL.)


"We're all disappointed," commented ADL Mountain States Region director Bruce DeBoskey to the March 2 Rocky Mountain News. Pointing out that more than a dozen other "human rights" organizations had filed legal briefs in support of the ADL, DeBoskey insisted--apparently with a straight face--that "we do remain committed to our fight against hatred and racism and bigotry and extremism and anti-Semitism."

A Place of Refuge

As the Quigley case illustrates, in contemporary America it's much more dangerous to be labeled an anti-Semite than to be identified as a Jew. This certainly doesn't sound like the sort of thing that would happen in a culture primed for mass pogroms against Jews.


Nevertheless, notes historian Paul Gottfried (a Conservative Jew), the ADL and similar organizations "appeal successfully to their donor base by evoking the specter of Christian traditionalists. This is happening not in Czarist Russia but in a country founded by Protestant sectarians, who have never persecuted Jews, and the campaign of fear and loathing is being directed against enthusiastically philo-Semitic Christians."


In fact, America is unquestionably the most philo-Semitic society in the world. As Orthodox Jewish author David Klinghoffer points out: "You've heard the phrase 'anti-Semitism without Jews,' to describe the hostility to Jews felt in countries ... that don't have any Jews. In the American Jewish community, we've got anti-Semitism without anti-Semites."



In a July 15, 1994 interview with the Jerusalem Post, historian Leonard Dinnerstein, author of the book Anti-Semitism in America, observed that "anti-Semitism in the U.S. has clearly declined to an unimagined degree.... [I]t's become so minuscule as to be virtually irrelevant.... Jews are incredibly secure in the United States, and I see no reason whatsoever why that should change.... The fact is, a lot of American Jews just aren't ready to accept just how well-accepted they are in America."


Citing the ADL's own annual audits of anti-Semitic acts, Dinnerstein concluded that "anti-Semitism is just a tiny blip on the American consciousness." Yet to judge matters from the frenzied reaction The Passion provoked from many pundits, one would assume that America abounds in crypto-anti-Semites willing to stage pogroms on the smallest pretext. Such scapegoating of Christianity is not merely libelous; it is literally demented.


As Professor Benjamin Ginsberg of Johns Hopkins University pointed out in his 1993 study The Fatal Embrace, it is statism--not Christianity--that lies at the root of historic anti-Semitism. In previous eras, Ginsberg explains, Jews were socially marginalized people whose status led them "to seek the protection of the state.... Over the past several centuries ... Jews have played a major role in the strengthening of existing states and in efforts to supplant established regimes with new ones."


In many states, he continues, "Jews were crucial in building and staffing institutions of extraction, coercion, administration, and mobilization.... [T]hese relationships between Jews and the state have been the chief catalysts for organized anti-Semitism."


Digested into simple terms, Ginsberg's compelling thesis is that time and again, Jews have sought to build state power in order to protect themselves from persecution--only to engender the hostility of those whose prosperity and liberties suffer at the hands of the state. And time and again, the state turned its wrath on the same Jewish advisers and agents who had worked so diligently to expand its powers--often with lethal consequences for them and many innocent Jews.


Despite this utterly predictable outcome, Ginsberg observes, "Jews often continued to look to the state for protection even when it was the state itself that was the source of their problems." He cites one particularly tragic example of this "fatal embrace" at work: "[T]o the very end many German Jews could not believe that the German state would fail to protect them from the excesses of Nazi fanatics."

Avoiding the "Fatal Embrace"

As Rabbi Lapin and many other Jewish leaders have pointed out, America's Christian heritage is the single most important reason why Jews have enjoyed unparalleled acceptance and security in this country. A closely related reason is our constitutional system of limited government under law, which was designed to limit state power in a way that would prevent the dreadful consequences of the "fatal embrace" described by Ginsberg.


The ADL's campaign to execrate Mel Gibson and his film by libeling the Gospels and Christianity as being anti-Semitic is a calculated effort to undermine the goodwill of American Christians and to incite inter-communal hostility. Both Jews and non-Jews are hurt by this smear tactic. The only obvious beneficiary (besides the ADL itself, which profits handsomely from such needless rancor) will be the state--which will leave not only Jews, but all of us, in much greater peril.

"Inventing an Enemy," Pt. 1

***

"Inventing an Enemy," Pt. 2

[The foregoing essay originally appeared in the April 5, 2004 issue of The New American; Copyright 2009 by William Norman Grigg]



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