Recorded Octo­ber 7, 2007
MP3: Side 1 | Side 2
REALAUDIO

Sup­ple­ment­ing FTR#567, this pro­gram high­lights the resur­gence of anti-Semitism in the United States and else­where. [The title of the pro­gram refers to a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of anti-Semitism by a 20th cen­tury social critic as “the social­ism of fools.”] Of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance in the pro­gram is the scape­goat­ing of “Jews” or “the Israel lobby” for the sins of oth­ers, the petro­leum indus­try and its related con­stituen­cies in par­tic­u­lar. Begin­ning with dis­cus­sion of the eco­nomic util­ity of geno­cide, the pro­gram notes that such slaugh­ter is usu­ally covered-up when the blood­let­ting serves the inter­ests of pow­er­ful eco­nomic forces. After set­ting forth a num­ber of stri­dently anti-Semitic state­ments by promi­nent per­son­ages around the world, the broad­cast tack­les two sig­nif­i­cant fea­tures of the re-emergence of “the social­ism of fools.” The first is the use of the term “neo-conservatives” to mean “Jews”—the sup­posed archi­tects of the Iraqi inva­sion. Another key point con­cerns the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing Har­vard University’s pre­sen­ta­tion of a paper blam­ing the Iraq war and other events on the “Israel Lobby.” The broad­cast under­scores that Harvard’s pre­sen­ta­tion of the paper fol­lowed the appoint­ment of a Mus­lim to head Harvard’s endow­ment fund and Saudi Prince Alwaleed’s dona­tion of $20 mil­lion to the Uni­ver­sity to fund Mid­dle East­ern stud­ies. TheEl-Erian, the head of Harvard’s endow­ment fund, had pre­vi­ously worked for Ger­man finan­cial firm Allianz and recently returned to work for that com­pany after leav­ing Har­vard. In addi­tion to a steady infu­sion of funds from Saudi Ara­bia into Amer­i­can media and aca­d­e­mic insti­tu­tions, the growth in anti-Semitism is being fuelled by slanted jour­nal­is­tic cov­er­age of the Mid­dle East. Of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance in this regard is the fak­ing or exag­ger­a­tion of sup­posed Israeli atroc­i­ties. (For more about this, see—among other programs—FTR#564.) Per­haps the most sig­nif­i­cant of these is the death of Mohammed al-Dura, a boy sup­pos­edly killed by Israeli troops in the early days of the Sec­ond Intifada. Recent lit­i­ga­tion in France spot­lights the seri­ous dis­crep­an­cies in the offi­cial ver­sion of the case—discrepancies that sug­gest that the inci­dent may have been mis­rep­re­sented or even faked alto­gether. Con­clud­ing with more dis­cus­sion of the anti-Semitic bent tak­ing hold on Amer­i­can cam­puses, the pro­gram high­lights the Uni­ver­sity of California’s delib­er­ate exclu­sion of Israelis from a pro­gram that trains res­i­dents of Mid­dle East­ern coun­tries for careers in business.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Har­vard endow­ment fund head Mohamed El-Erian’s employ­ment with Pimco, a sub­sidiary of Ger­man insur­ance giant Allianz both before and after his employ­ment with Har­vard; Pimco’s move to take advan­tage of the sub­prime mort­gage cri­sis; review of the con­trol of major Ger­man cor­po­ra­tions by the Bor­mann cap­i­tal net­work and the Under­ground Reich; review of James Baker’s Rice Uni­ver­sity think tank in gen­er­at­ing the impe­tus to invade Iraq.

1. The pro­gram begins with author Christo­pher Simpson’s rumi­na­tions on the social sig­nif­i­cance of geno­cide and the denial of it by the power elites who per­pe­trate it. This is, of course, to be seen in the con­text of the exon­er­a­tion of the per­pe­tra­tors of the Nazi geno­cide against the Jews and the re-emergence of vir­u­lent anti-Semitism in the West. (FTR#614 dis­cusses the exon­er­a­tion of the Nazi killers in the con­text of the return to power of the busi­ness elite who aided in, and prof­ited from, the geno­cide against the Jews.) “Who then, or what, is the splen­did blond beast? It is the destruc­tion inher­ent in any sys­tem or order, the insti­tu­tion­al­ized bru­tal­ity whose exis­tence is denied by cheer­lead­ers of the sta­tus quo at the very moment they feed its appetite for blood. The present world order sup­plies sta­bil­ity and ratio­nal­ity of a sort for human soci­ety while its day-to-day oper­a­tions chew up the weak, the scape­goats, and almost any­one else in its way. This is not nec­es­sar­ily an evil con­spir­acy of insid­ers; it is a struc­tural dilemma that gen­er­ates itself more or less con­sis­tently from place to place and from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion. Much of mod­ern soci­ety has been built upon geno­cide. This crime was inte­gral to the emer­gence of the United States, of czarist Rus­sia and later the USSR, of Euro­pean empires, and of many other states. Today, mod­ern gov­ern­ments con­tinue exter­mi­na­tion of indige­nous peo­ples through­out Asia Africa, and Latin Amer­ica. Equally per­ni­cious, though often less obvi­ous, the present world order has insti­tu­tion­al­ized per­se­cu­tion and depri­va­tion of hun­dreds of mil­lions of chil­dren, par­tic­u­larly in the Third World, and in this way kills count­less inno­cents each year. These sys­temic atroc­i­ties are for the most part not even regarded as crimes, but instead are writ­ten off by most of the world’s media and intel­lec­tual lead­er­ship as acts of God or of nature whose ori­gin remains a mys­tery. It is indi­vid­ual human beings who make the day-to-day deci­sions that cre­ate geno­cide, reward mass mur­der, and ease the escape of the guilty. But social sys­tems usu­ally pro­tect these indi­vid­u­als from respon­si­bil­ity for ‘autho­rized’ acts, in part by pro­vid­ing ratio­nal­iza­tions that present sys­temic bru­tal­ity as a nec­es­sary evil. Some observers may claim that men such as Allen Dulles, Robert Mur­phy, et al. were gripped by an ideal of a higher good when they pre­served the Ger­man busi­ness elite as a hedge against rev­o­lu­tion in Europe. But in the long run, their inten­tions have lit­tle to do with the real issue, which is the char­ac­ter to take on the appear­ance of wis­dom, rea­son, or even jus­tice among the men and women who lead soci­ety. Progress in the con­trol of geno­cide depends in part on con­fronting those who would legit­imize and legal­ize the act. The cycle of geno­cide can be bro­ken through rel­a­tively simple—but polit­i­cally difficult—reforms in the inter­na­tional legal sys­tem. It is essen­tial to iden­tify and con­demn the deeds that con­tribute to geno­cide, par­tic­u­larly when such deeds have assumed a man­tle of respectabil­ity, and to ensure just and even­handed pun­ish­ment for those respon­si­ble. But the temp­ta­tion will be to accept the induce­ments and ratio­nal­iza­tions soci­ety offers in exchange for keep­ing one’s mouth shut. The choice is in our hands.”
(The Splen­did Blond Beast: Money, Law and Geno­cide in the 20th Cen­tury; Christo­pher Simp­son; Com­mon Courage Press [SC]; Copy­right 1995 by Christo­pher Simp­son; ISBN 1–56751-062–0; pp. 286–7.)

2. Turn­ing to the sub­ject of “the social­ism of fools”—anti-Semitism—the pro­gram sets forth an elo­quent col­umn that sum­ma­rizes the prob­lem. Of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance is author Hanson’s fin­ger­ing of the term “neo-conservatives” as a term used by the so-called pro­gres­sive sec­tor to mean “Jews.” “Who recently said: ‘These Jews started 19 Cru­sades. The 19th was World War I. Why? Only to build Israel.’ Some holdover Nazi? Hardly. It was for­mer Prime Min­is­ter Necmet­tin Erbakan of Turkey, a NATO ally. He went on to claim that the Jews — whom he refers to as ‘bac­te­ria’ — con­trolled China, India and Japan, and ran the United States. . . . A new vir­u­lent strain of the old anti-Semitism is spread­ing world­wide. This hate—of a mag­ni­tude not seen in over 70 years—is not just espoused by Iran’s loony pres­i­dent, Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad, or rad­i­cal jihadists. . . Here at home, ‘neo-conservative’ has become syn­ony­mous with a sup­posed Jew­ish cabal of Wash­ing­ton insid­ers who hijacked U.S. pol­icy to take us to war for Israel’s inter­est. That our State Depart­ment is at the mercy of a Jew­ish lobby is the theme of a recent high-profile book by pro­fes­sors at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity and the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago. . . .”
(“Look­ing for a Scape­goat: by Vic­tor Davis Han­son; San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle; 9/13/07; p. B7.)

3. Before turn­ing to the political/economic cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of the Israel Lobby paper at Har­vard, it should be noted that the “Israel Lobby” is being scape­goated for the Bush administration’s dis­as­trous deci­sion to invade Iraq, despite the rather obvi­ous fact that the inva­sion was moti­vated by—surprise, surprise—oil. In this con­text, note that the Pres­i­dent and Vice-President of the United States are for­mer petro­leum indus­try CEO’s from the state of Texas. Note also that the impe­tus to invade Iraq was first dis­closed in a paper gen­er­ated for the admin­is­tra­tion by a Rice Uni­ver­sity think tank headed up by fel­low Texan (and Bush I admin­is­tra­tion vet­eran) James Baker. (For more about this report and its con­nec­tions to the “Cal­i­for­nia energy cri­sis” of 2000–2001, see FTR#420.) Inter­est­ingly and sig­nif­i­cantly, that same James Baker co-chaired (with for­mer rep­re­sen­ta­tive Lee Hamil­ton) a com­mis­sion on how to dis­en­gage from Iraq. The rec­om­men­da­tion was that, for the Iraqi mess to be resolved, Israel must make some con­ces­sions in its per­pet­ual war against the Pales­tini­ans and other Arabs, a stance that tends to rein­force the illu­sion that “the Jews” were respon­si­ble for the invasion.

4. The above col­umn alludes to the recent pub­li­ca­tion of a book by two pro­fes­sors alleg­ing that a Jew­ish cabal con­trols the State Depart­ment and U.S. for­eign pol­icy. That book derives from a paper pre­sented by Har­vard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Gov­ern­ment. The pub­li­ca­tion of that paper fol­lowed shortly after Prince Alwaleed of Saudi Ara­bia donated $20 mil­lion to Har­vard to pro­mote Mid­dle East­ern stud­ies and Christian/Muslim under­stand­ing. “No Jews Allowed!” [Note that the paper was orig­i­nally com­mis­sioned by the Atlantic mag­a­zine, which declined to pub­lish it because of its lack of schol­arly integrity!] “ . . . The Saudis and their allies have not been shy about sup­ple­ment­ing their con­sid­er­able lever­age in the U.S. by tar­get­ing expen­di­tures to affect the debate over Mid­dle East pol­icy by fund­ing think tanks, Mid­dle East stud­ies pro­grams, advo­cacy groups, com­mu­nity cen­ters and other insti­tu­tions. To take one obvi­ous exam­ple, just last year Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal donated $20 mil­lion each to Har­vard and George­town Uni­ver­si­ties for pro­grams in Islamic stud­ies. Prince Alwaleed, chair­man of a Riyadh-based con­glom­er­ate, is the fel­low whose $10 mil­lion dona­tion to the Twin Tow­ers Fund fol­low­ing the Sept. 11 attacks was rejected by then-Mayor Rudolph Giu­liani after the Saudi Prince sug­gested that the U.S. ‘re-examine its poli­cies in the Mid­dle East and adopt a more bal­ance stance toward the Pales­tini­ans.’ George­town and Har­vard had no appar­ent qualms about accept­ing Prince Alwaleed’s money. The direc­tor of Georgetown’s newly-renamed Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Cen­ter rejected any sug­ges­tion that the Saudi mag­nate was attempt­ing to use Saudi oil wealth to influ­ence Amer­i­can pol­icy in the Mid­dle East. . . . Although the aggres­sive deploy­ment of petrodol­lars and oil-based influ­ence from for­eign sources aimed at advanc­ing a pro-Arab line con­sti­tutes ‘noth­ing wrong’ as far as Israel’s crit­ics are con­cerned, a new polit­i­cal fash­ion holds that there is some­thing very wrong indeed about Amer­i­can Jews and other Amer­i­can back­ers of Israel express­ing their sup­port for Israel and urg­ing their polit­i­cal lead­ers to join them in that sup­port. Our major news­pa­pers and net­works, with cor­re­spon­dents in Israel polit­i­cal sys­tem that is a free-for-all and an aston­ish­ingly vibrant and self-critical Israeli press, report daily on every twist and turn of the con­flict and are very fre­quently crit­i­cal of Israel. As for Amer­i­can cam­puses, most objec­tive observers would have lit­tle dif­fi­culty con­clud­ing that far from being criticism-free, they are in fact dom­i­nated by crit­ics of Israel. Clearly, as stran­gle­holds on crit­i­cism go, what­ever stran­gle­hold the pro-Israel com­mu­nity has on debate in the U.S. is a very loose one indeed. . . .”
(“Anti-Semitism and the Anti-Israel Lobby” by Jeff Rob­bins; The Wall Street Jour­nal; 9/7/2007; p. A15.)

5. Although Har­vard has gone to great lengths to under­score that the paper is not an offi­cial stance taken by the Uni­ver­sity, it is dif­fi­cult not to assume that the paper is a “Har­vard” paper. Indeed, note the Inter­net page on which the paper’s title appears—how would one not con­clude that the paper was pub­lished by Har­vard? The paper can be viewed here:
(“The Israel Lobby and U.S. For­eign Pol­icy” by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt; 3/13/2006.)

6. Again, although the Uni­ver­sity removed its logo from the paper, it is Mr. Emory’s view that Harvard’s dis­claimer is some­what disin­gen­u­ous. Check out the page above—what would you con­clude when view­ing this? “The Kennedy School of Gov­ern­ment (KSG) removed its logo from a con­tro­ver­sial paper pub­lished last week by Aca­d­e­mic Dean Stephen M. Walt and the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago’s John J. Mearsheimer. A dis­claimer stat­ing that the views expressed belong only to the authors was also made more promi­nent on the work­ing paper’s cover. . . .”
(“KSG Seeks Dis­tance from Paper” by Paras D. Bhayani; Har­vard Crim­son; 3/24/2006.)

7. Sup­ple­ment­ing dis­cus­sion of the Walt/Mearsheimer paper, Mr. Emory notes that Harvard’s “pre­sen­ta­tion” of the work fol­lows shortly on the appoint­ment of a Muslim—Mohamed El-Erian–as head of the Har­vard endow­ment fund. Mr. Emory’s point is that money often deter­mines pop­u­lar ide­ol­ogy and the forms that it takes. With the enor­mous amounts of cap­i­tal flow­ing into the cof­fers of the petro­leum indus­try and the nations and indi­vid­u­als asso­ci­ated with it, we should not, per­haps, be sur­prised at the upsurge in anti-Semitism. Of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance is the fact that Pimco is a sub­sidiary of key Ger­man insurer Allianz, one of the Ger­man core cor­po­ra­tions and—as such—a key com­po­nent of the Bor­mann cap­i­tal net­work and the Under­ground Reich. Note, also, that Allianz has been a tar­get of lit­i­ga­tion by the fam­i­lies of Holo­caust sur­vivors, who charge that the com­pany held onto assets due to them. (For more about cor­po­rate Ger­many and its links to the Under­ground Reich, see—among other programs—FTR#305. Seri­ous researchers should down­load and read the book Mar­tin Bor­mann: Nazi in Exile, avail­able on the Spit­fire web­site. For more about Allianz, search the Spit­fire web­site. For more about Allianz and the Holo­caust lit­i­ga­tion, do a key word search on your favorite search engine.) “Har­vard University’s endow­ment, known for its strong invest­ment gains, is now suf­fer­ing a sig­nif­i­cant loss. Mohamed El-Erian, head of Har­vard Man­age­ment Co., is head­ing back to the West Coast, posi­tion­ing him­self to be heir appar­ent at Pacific Invest­ment Man­age­ment Co., the money-management titan. . . . Mr. El-Erian, 49 years old, will start in Jan­u­ary at Pimco, a unit of Ger­man Insurer Allianz SE, as the New­port Beach, Calif., firm’s first co-chief invest­ment offi­cer and co-chief exec­u­tive offi­cer. . . .[Ital­ics are Mr. Emory’s.] ”
(“Harvard’s Loss: El-Erian” by Craig Karmin and Ian McDon­ald; The Wall Street Jour­nal; 9/12/2007; p. C1.)

8. El-Erian’s return to Pimco occurred as Pimco is prepar­ing to take advan­tage of the sub­prime cri­sis. “Another vul­ture is cir­cling over the subprime-related mar­ket. Pacific Invest­ment Man­age­ment Co., a unit of Germany’s Allianz SE, is plan­ning to launch a $2 bil­lion distressed-debt fund, join­ing a list of money-management firms hop­ing to buy beaten-down mort­gage secu­ri­ties on the cheap. . .”
(“Pimco Starts Distressed-Debt Fund” by Craig Karmin; The Wall Street Jour­nal; 9/13/2007; p. C2.)

9. One of the fac­tors dri­ving the resur­gence in anti-Semitism is a clever psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare cam­paign waged by the Arabs to gain sym­pa­thy for their side by cre­at­ing phony atroc­i­ties sup­pos­edly com­mit­ted by the Israeli armed forces. (Mr. Emory dis­cussed this at some length in FTR#’s 564, 565, 566.) One of the most dra­matic, highly pub­li­cized and emblem­atic of these was the death of a boy named Mohammed al-Dura, allegedly killed by Israeli Defense Forces in a cross-fire with Pales­tin­ian com­bat­ants. That case is once again in the news as lit­i­ga­tion in France is gen­er­at­ing a call to review the raw footage pro­duced by the French tele­vi­sion sta­tion that filmed the inci­dent. There is seri­ous evi­dence that the inci­dent may have received dis­torted cov­er­age or may even have been fab­ri­cated alto­gether. Mr. Emory rec­om­mends that peo­ple view an online video about some of the fal­si­fied Israeli atroc­i­ties, titled “Pallywood.”

Note: Mr. Emory does not con­sider all of the infor­ma­tion in the video to be compelling—some is open to inter­pre­ta­tion dif­fer­ent from that of the nar­ra­tor. How­ever some of the footage, such as Mohammed al-Dura calmly rais­ing his head to peek at the cam­era and then calmly lay­ing back down again are very damn­ing to the offi­cial ver­sion of the case. Al-Dura is not behav­ing like some­one with a fatal abdom­i­nal wound from an M-16. By the same token, the footage of an allegedly “dead” or gravely wounded Pales­tin­ian lift­ing his head to check his cell phone mes­sages and then calmly play­ing “dead” again is reveal­ing. Most alarm­ing of all is the fact that “60 Min­utes” pre­sented some of this mate­r­ial alto­gether uncrit­i­cally. The film is avail­able at: http://www.seconddraft.org/cur_invest.php. Two other sites to be exam­ined in this con­text are: http://www.seconddraft.org/movies.php and an ana­lyt­i­cal treat­ment of the “Pal­ly­wood” doc­u­men­tary: http://www.theaugeanstables.com/category/pallywood/ .

“Mohammed al-Dura’s gut-wrenching death is run­ning again on tele­vi­sion screens across the world, seven years after the 12-year-old boy died in his father’s arms in a hail of bul­lets. An appeals court in Paris has demanded to see the exclu­sive footage shot by state-owned France 2 tele­vi­sion to resolve a libel case brought by the chan­nel and its vet­eran Jerusalem bureau chief Charles Ender­lin against a com­men­ta­tor who accused them of fab­ri­cat­ing the Sept. 30, 2000, inci­dent on the sec­ond day of the intifada upris­ing. The images of Mohammed’s death after he was caught in cross fire between Pales­tin­ian gun­men and Israeli sol­diers at the Net­zarim junc­tion out­side Gaza City became the most potent icon of the Pales­tin­ian upris­ing and per­haps the most fre­quently broad­cast image of the Palestinian-Israeli strug­gle in the Arab world. The boy has been men­tioned by Osama bin Laden, and his pho­to­graph could be seen on a wall where the Amer­i­can jour­nal­ist Daniel Pearl was mur­dered in Pak­istan in 2002. Streets, parks, youth camps and pub­lic build­ings have been named in Mohammed’s honor by the Pales­tin­ian Author­ity, and some sui­cide bombers said they mar­tyred them­selves in trib­ute to his mem­ory. . . .”
(“Boy Killed at Start of Intifada Back in News” by Matthew Kalman; San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle; 10/4/2007; p. A8.)

10. Indica­tive of the grow­ing insti­tu­tion­al­ized anti-Semitism in Amer­i­can acad­e­mia is the for­mal exclusion—recently rescinded—of Israelis from a pro­gram run by the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia that gives busi­ness train­ing to res­i­dents of coun­tries of the Mid­dle East. “A U.S. State Department-funded Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia pro­gram which pro­vides busi­ness train­ing for res­i­dents of the Mid­dle East specif­i­cally excluded Israeli Jews — until Jew­ish jour­nal­ists protested. The Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia has now altered the program’s eli­gi­bil­ity require­ment that ini­tially barred Israeli Jews. The turn­around in pol­icy also may have saved the State Depart­ment, whose Mid­dle East Part­ner­ship Ini­tia­tive (MEPI) finances the pro­gram, from hav­ing to pro­vide an embar­rass­ing expla­na­tion. MEPI also selects the par­tic­i­pants. . . .”
(“Univ. of Cal. Backs Down from ‘No Jews Allowed’ Pro­gram” by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu; IsraeNationalNews.com; 10/03/07.)

11. Two video pro­duc­tions are being gen­er­ated by a cou­ple of doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ers. One is a DVD of a three-lecture series called “The First Refuge of a Scoundrel: The Rela­tion­ship Between Fas­cism and Reli­gion.” In addi­tion, there will soon be a doc­u­men­tary about Mr. Emory, titled “The Anti-Fascist.” For more about this project, visit TheAntiFascist.com.