I wrote over the weekend that the blog Mondoweiss had published a fundraising pitch which falsely reported that the blog needed readers to contribute funds because it was "under Israeli attack". (Read here.) Since that fraudulent fundraising pitch was revealed here, the editors of Mondoweiss have deleted from their website pages documenting both the initial fraud and subsequent admissions by one of the editors that their attack report was false. Despite those apparent cover-up efforts, a cached version of one of the scrubbed webpages can still be read here; a text-only version is available here.
Below is a screen shot of an exchange of comments between a reader and Mondoweiss editor Adam Horowitz from a cached version recovered after Mondoweiss deleted the original earlier today.
The concerned reader, writing under the screen name "seafoid", asks for more information concerning the blog's June 27 report that it needed assistance because it was under "Israeli attack". Horowitz admits without explanation that the report was false, and that the fundraising pitch had been edited to reflect that fact. Since the time that exchanged was posted, the blog has offered no other comment on or explanation of the fraudulent fundraiser. In fact, instead of addressing the serious ethical questions raised by their use of a false news report in soliciting donations from readers, they seem instead to have chosen a more Nixonian approach, simply deleting, first, the initial false report and, subsequently, the editor's admission that the report was false. The blogs editors have failed to reveal who wrote the false report and how it came to be published on their blog.
To refresh your memory, below is a screen shot of the fraudulent fundraising pitch which I found in a cached version after Mondoweiss had deleted the original from their website.
That false report was signed by Mondoweiss editors Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz, and was posted by Mondoweiss blogger Alec Kinnear. While they have deleted the original version, that webpage is still available in cached version here. A subsequent version without the claim of Israeli attack is available in cached version here.
Rather than address the ethical questions raised by the revelation that they published a false news report in order to solicit funds, Mondoweiss has chosen instead to simply wipe clean the record of both the initial report and their subsequent admission that it was false. This pattern of repeatedly covering up the facts concerning this matter raises further, extremely serious, questions about Mondoweiss' ethical standards. Can journalists be considered journalists at all when they file false news reports to raise funds, then cover it up?
As reported here yesterday, the blog Mondoweiss first published, then rescinded without explanation, a fundraising plea falsely claiming the blog needed help because it was "under Israeli attack". When a regular reader who had seen the original version posted a sympathetic comment asking what form the Israeli attack on Mondoweiss had taken, an editor of the blog was forced to admit that the charge had been false, but failed to explain how it came to be published. The headline was changed to something innocuous and the fraud was forgotten. (Read here.)
At the suggestion of someone who read my initial post about this, I went back and found a cached version of the original post with the fraudulent headline. Here's a screen shot of it:
Mondoweiss fundraiser with fraudulent headline
That fundraising pitch, while signed by the blog's co-editors Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz, was posted by a Mondoweiss blogger by the name of Alec Kinnear (read here). The Vienna-based Kinnear not only blogs on Mondoweiss, he also maintains his own blogs. From one of them, we learn that Kinnear believes that 9/11 was "probably" done by the Mossad under the direction of Dick Cheney (read here), and that Rachel Corrie was murdered on the direct orders of Ariel Sharon in order to gauge the American reaction (read here). On another blog he maintains, we learn that Kinnear was an admirer of the late neo-fascist Austrian politician Jörg Haider (read here), although, oddly, he fails to mention Haider's troubling politics.
It is impossible to know for certain which of these three Mondoweiss bloggers, Weiss, Horowitz or Kinnear, wrote the fraudulent fundraising headline which falsely claimed that the blog needed help because it was "under Israeli attack". That question has not been addressed on the blog. We do know that Kinnear has made no secret of his bizarre political opinions -- in fact, he has expressed them on the Mondoweiss website, where he writes that he literally worries that Israel will stage a covert op to disrupt a benefit for the blog (read here). That a person with such views has unsupervised blogging privileges at Mondoweiss, and that the blog entrusts its fundraising to him and lets him post as true completely false reports which they then delete without explanation, raise serious questions about Mondoweiss and its editors -- questions about journalistic ethics and judgement which the blog should address.
If any readers of this post think these concerns inflated, consider the following. If a blog publishes a false report in order to raise funds, would you consider that an attempted fraud? At the very least, having been caught soliciting money from their readers based on a falsehood, wouldn't that blog owe their readers a full accounting of how this happened and an offer to return any funds raised via deception?
Moreover, doesn't Mondoweiss owe its readers an explanation of their lapse in judgement in granting Alec Kinnear unsupervised blogging privileges on their website? After all, his bizarre political views are on the public record.
Kinnear, in fairness, has written in his own defense that he can't be an anti-Semite because, he says, "I have many Jewish friends and colleagues". Yet, in the column that elicited that familiar defense (read here), he predicted the following for Jews:
Logically the quandary is thus posed:
--the state policies of Israel are totally unacceptable to civilised man
--it is our duty as a state to oppose these Israeli policies
--many Jews support these policies and other Jews support these policies clandestinely, indeed Jewish advisors led America into this preposterous war
--thus no Jew can be trusted in government any longer, as he may be working against his own state to support the inhuman policies in Palestine
In the Spanish Inquisition, many Jews would convert superficially to Catholicism but continue to practice their faith, until discovered. At that point, the unfortunate Jew (and others) would suffer persecution if not death, until finally the Jews were driven from that country. A similar unwelcome fate awaits Jews around the world if this madness cannot be stopped.
Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz recently published a column which used neo-Nazi leader David Duke's term to define Zionism and opposition to anti-Semitism: "Jewish supremacism". (Read here.) Now they have turned over some of their blog's fundraising to someone who admires Jörg Haider and predicts a reprise of the Spanish Inquisition. In spite of all this, they claim that their blog represents a "progressive Jewish" point of view. (Read here.) Can a legitimately progressive and Jewish point of view include common ground with the opinions of David Duke, Jörg Haider and Torquemada? At what point will Mondoweiss' sponsors and readership look at this madness and say "enough"?
[NOTE (7/11/11): In the hours since this was published, Mondoweiss editors have scrubbed some of the webpages discussed in this post from their website in an apparent attempt to cover up the fraud. A cached version of the revised fundraising pitch and the attached comment by an editor indicating that the initial report was false is available in cached version here. A report about Mondoweiss' cover-up featuring screen shots of the some of the deleted documents can be read here.]
The anti-Zionist blog Mondoweiss has attempted to raise funds by fraudulently claiming that they've been "under Israeli attack". When a sympathetic reader commented to ask specifically what form the Israeli attack took, Mondoweiss co-editor Adam Horowitz was forced to respond with the following:
Yeah, I’ve changed that, it was the wrong choice of words. We are not “under attack”, but we certainly need the support of our readers to keep the site going.
The headline on the donation pitch has since been changed to the innocuous "Help Mondoweiss stay afloat with a voluntary subscription", but the URL preserves the original header: "http://mondoweiss.net/2011/06/help-mondoweiss-stay-afloat-under-israeli-attack.html".
The blogs editors have failed to explain how this fraudulent fundraising pitch came to be posted on their blog.
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Readers (those who have been approved by the editors to post comments to the blog) have been suggesting ways for the blog can raise money other than by falsely claiming that they're victims of an Israeli black op. A Mondoweiss reader and frequent commenter named Alec Kinnear writes in response to a suggestion that a benefit be staged:
Throwing a Mondoweiss fundraising party would be a great idea (except that the Mossad would probably bomb it via the Dubai 11 and then try to pin it on Hamas) . . .
That odd fear isn't all that surprising considering that Kinnear has written on his blog that he believes that the Mossad "probably" did 9/11 (read here), and that he believes Rachel Corrie to have died in a murder plotted by the Israeli government as a "test to see how large the reaction to an American death would be" (read here). Kinnear wrote of the latter post
I have a feeling that the article sharon’s eastern front | next exile of the jews | Q & A will have me tarred as an antisemite. This is not a fair charge. I have many Jewish friends and colleagues. I both have employed Jews and have been employed by Jews.
That's convincing. In that post, Kinnear goes on to compare Israel to Nazi Germany and to praise the Naturei Karta as the good kind of Jew. Kinnear also seems to have been rather fond of the Austrian far-right politician Jörg Hader (read here).
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The post containing fraudulent, paranoid charges against Israel and the gratuitously bigoted comments posted to it are consistent with the overall tone of Mondoweiss. Phil Weiss and Adam Horowitz subtitle their blog "The War of Ideas in the Middle East", but it more often seems like an argument among Americans about the best reasons to hate Israel. The tactics they use in their "war of ideas" now include falsely reporting as true imaginary Israeli attacks on his blog to convince his readers to contribute money, then retreating when asked for specifics about those purported attacks. The troubled Middle East deserves better ideas than those provided by Mondoweiss.
The blog Mondoweiss has published a column defending Palestinian Islamist leader Raed Salah and blaming his arrest on excessive Jewish influence in the U.K. (Read here: The real preachers of hate: Britain arrests respected Palestinian leader.) Written by free-lance journalist Jonathan Cook, the column not only fails to mention Salah's extensive history of anti-Jewish hate speech, it turns the facts on their head in a manner reminiscent of U.S. neo-Nazi leader David Duke. Cook writes that the Israeli public "loathes" Salah not because of his bigotry and incitements of violence, but because his Islamic faith is "incompatible with the state ideology of Jewish supremacism". The phrase "Jewish supremacism" was coined by David Duke to counter his being labeled a white supremacist. Duke came up with the term in writing (with editorial assistance from David Irving) a book called "My Awakening", which described Duke's "Aryan vision for America". (Read here.)
Now Mondoweiss has deployed that term to defend an advocate for precisely the sort of religious "supremacism" they purport to oppose. In that, they are following the model of the originator of the term. From David Duke they have learned that, when an anti-Jewish bigot is called out for having an extensive and indefensible record of hate speech, the best defense is to call the charge a manifestation of the intrinsic bigotry of any expression of Jewish political opinion.
Here's a longer quote from the piece which puts Cook's argument in broader context:
Most in Israel’s Jewish majority would not have been aware of Sheikh Salah’s supposed reputation as a Jew hater either, despite their hyper-vigilance for anything resembling anti-Semitism. True, he is generally loathed by Israeli Jews, but chiefly because they regard his brand of Islamic dogma as incompatible with the state ideology of Jewish supremacism. (Israelis) fear (Salah) as the leader of a local Islam that refuses to be tamed. Those Israelis who conclude that this qualifies him as an anti-Semite do so only because they class all pious Muslims in the same category.
Israeli officials detest Sheikh Salah as well, but again not for any alleged racism. His long-running campaign to prevent what he regards as an attempted Israeli takeover of Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque compound – part of a wider “Judaisation” programme in the occupied areas of the city – has made him a thorn in their side.
Cook falsely claims that, in spite of Israeli "hyper-vigilance" concerning anti-Semitism, they have failed to detect any traces of that belief in Salah's utterances. Cook may regret basing his argument on such an easily refutable misstatement of the facts. It is one thing to reach an incorrect conclusion based on shoddy reasoning; it is another matter to ignore an extensive historic record of which at least some of his readers will be aware. That's what brings such arguments into the realm of unintentional self-parody. Such columns have a tendency to conveniently disappear after their distortions become evident even to those who want to believe them.
Let's take a look at Salah's views concerning Jews, the human rights of women and gays, 9/11 conspiracy theories, and on biblical history. As you read Salah's words, remember that, according to Mondoweiss, if you oppose Salah's views, you too are a "Jewish supremacist" or one of their dupes.
“You Jews are criminal bombers of mosques,
Slaughterers of pregnant women and babies.
Robbers and germs in all times,
The Creator sentenced you to be loser monkeys,
Victory belongs to Muslims, from the Nile to the Euphrates"
"We have never allowed ourselves to knead [the dough for] the bread that breaks the fast in the holy month of Ramadan with children's blood. Whoever wants a more thorough explanation, let him ask what used to happen to some children in Europe, whose blood was mixed in with the dough of the [Jewish] holy bread . . . Great God, is this a religion? Is this what God would want? God will deal with you yet for what you are doing."
[Speech at the February 16, 2007 protest in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi Joz. Source.]
On 9/11:
“(T)he manifests of the two airlines, American Airlines and United Airlines, whose planes crashed into the Pentagon and World Trade Center, included not a single Arab…. Yet three days later the FBI released the names of 19 Arab passengers, claiming that they were the hijackers of the four planes.”
“A suitable way was found to warn the 4,000 Jews who work every day at the Twin Towers to be absent from their work on September 11, 2001, and this is really what happened! Were 4,000 Jewish clerks absent [from their jobs] by chance, or was there another reason? At the same time, no such warning reached the 2,000 Muslims who worked every day in the Twin Towers, and therefore there were hundreds of Muslim victims.”
“Is it true that the American administration arrested five Israelis with European citizenship on suspicion of involvement in the incident[?] They worked for a Jew in a moving company, with forged visas, and were severely tortured during their interrogation so that they would give details about the incident…”
Interviewer: What is your opinion of homosexuality? Salah: It is a crime. A great crime. Such phenomena signal the start of the collapse of every society. Those who believe in Allah know that behavior of that kind brings his wrath and is liable to cause the worst things to happen. There is no solution for this, unless the individual’s faith is strengthened.
Interviewer: What is your opinion of the legislation now being discussed in the Knesset, which would grant Muslim women rights similar to those of Jewish women in matters of personal status? Salah: That bill is tantamount to a war on Islam. It is an attempt to dictate different, foreign values that are neither Muslim nor Palestinian values.
Interviewer: What do you think of murder to save the family honor?
Salah: "There is no such concept and we do not recognize this concept. There is no such thing as `losing the family honor' or of committing murder `for the sake of family honor.' These are contradictions. We have the family and the family has its honor, which has to be preserved. We have to ask those who talk about murder for the sake of the family honor - mainly feminist organizations - what they did to prevent the murder of family honor itself. Unfortunately, nothing at all has been done in this regard. On the contrary: Some of the people who invented this concept are encouraging anarchy in the society, because they don't know how to handle the matter.
"All those who claim that women have the right to do with their bodies as they please are implanting anarchy in the society. If we say that a woman's body is hers and that no one may harm it, that is correct. But the danger is that some people interpret this to mean that a woman can do whatever she likes with her body, without taking into consideration the Islamic and Arab values. As such, they are helping put the woman to death while she is still alive."
The Al-Buraq Wall [the Islamic name for the Western Wall] is not the western wall of the Temple. Unfortunately, Jewish extremists, in the name of religion, are exploiting feelings of Jews on this subject and trying to sell them lies.
According to Mondoweiss, opposition to Salah's hateful views reflects Jewish disdain for the rest of humanity. They've learned their lesson well. That's exactly what David Duke says about opposition to his "Aryan vision for America".
Not that we had any doubts, but Joseph Dana, in the headline of blog post he has published at Mondoweiss, reveals the true goal of the Gaza flotilla. It's not aid to Palestinians, or expressions of support for their cause. No.
Sometimes, when an expert makes a serious charge but has no evidence to back it up, it's still newsworthy by dint of the provenance of the charge. The reputation of a source can play a big role in determining when to believe unverifiable charges, or at least report them with a grain of salt.
Alan Sabrosky bills himself as the former Director of Studies at the U.S. Army War College. He has made quite a name for himself in recent months by first declaring himself a military expert with high-level connections in the U.S. military hierarchy, then by outrageously claiming that Israel was responsible for 9/11 and that the U.S. military knows this and is concealing it. While he offers no evidence for this, he claims that he should be trusted because of his expertise. The truth of the matter -- with respect to both his background and his claims -- is quite different, of course. Sabrosky has deliberately inflated his role in the military and has used that ruse to promote a hateful, fact-free conspiracy theory. In fact, while he did work as an administrator at the U.S. Army War College, he was not, as his job title seems to indicate, the director or dean of the college. Far from it. According to the Press Office of the Army War College, in the mid-1980s, Sabrosky served as a civilian administrator at a research department of the college, supervising the publication of papers written within that department. His job title was "Director of Studies" because he supervised publishing studies done within a department of the college. He was a mid-level civilian manager at a military college, without access to the sort of highly classified material of the sort he now fraudulently claims to have. Moreover, since his employment at that school was about 25 years ago, his employment there would provide him with no special insights with respect to 9/11. How on earth could someone who worked on the level of a college librarian in the 1980s be privy to top secret information revealing a vast hidden conspiracy? And how on earth could he be the only person to know about it or think it worth revealing?
An expert, privy to the highest levels of the military elite?
Over the past few years, Alan Sabrosky has become a fixture of anti-Israel media. In numerous, articles, interviews and blog postings, he literally does only two things: promotes conspiracy theories and compares Israel to Nazi Germany. As I mentioned above, most recently, he has taken this campaign to a new level of absurdity by claiming not only that Israel was responsible for carrying out the 9/11 attacks, but that most of the leadership of the U.S. military knows this and is keeping it secret in a vast conspiracy of silence. I don't know how many of thousands of officers Sabrosky includes in this conspiracy of silence, but, considering that not a single officer has broken it, it would certainly go down as the most successful such conspiracy in history if true. Only because of Sabrosky's impressive sounding resume, these reckless and baseless charges have been reposted and repeated countless times, albeit in biased and unreliable places.
Sabrosky originally published this conspiracy theory in a column called "Treason, Betrayal and Deceit: 9/11 and Beyond" which he published on the Information Clearinghouse website in September (read here). That column was reposted verbatim on a number of far-right, pro-Palestinian, 9/11 truth and conspiracy-oriented websites (read here), including, of course, the 9/11 Jewish-Mossad False-Flag Archive. In March, Sabrosky published his follow-up on Information Clearinghouse, featuring the audio of the interview embedded above. That he called "The Dark Face of Jewish Nationalism: 9/11 - The US Military Knows Israel Did It" (read here).
Based solely on Sabrosky's word, this absurd conspiracy theory has spread far and wide. Googling the terms sabrosky +9/11 +israel gets about 28,000 hits at the time I'm writing this, reflecting the fact that an ersatz Jewish-American military official's charge that Israel did 9/11 has really gone viral. (Read here.) Those Google results include Sabrosky's original column, those quoting or citing Sabrosky's claims, and links to interviews with him. Among the latter is the Ron Paul Forums website, which posts the above-embedded video here and here, and touts it here. The Ron Paul Forums also linked to a posting supporting Sabrosky on the anti-Semitic website TheInformationUnderground. (Read here.) More recently, anti-Zionist conspiracy nut Alan Hart and 9/11 conspiracy nut Kevin Barrett gave Sabrosky their seal of approval in a radio interview in which Hart made his own extreme and false charges concerning 9/11, as I wrote here. Both Hart and Barrett spoke solemnly of their deep respect for Sabrosky and his expertise on Israel and the U.S. military.
Wrapping themselves in the false-flag
A website purportedly devoted to vererens' issues, but which in fact is frequently devoted to promoting conspiracy theories, has been part of the mainstreaming of Sabrosky's views. Veterans Today (read here) describes Sabrosky's charges as accurate, (falsely) says of him that
What makes him unique is that we have a Jew who can hardly be called “self-hating” or “anti-Semitic” or against Israel.
then quotes Sabrosky that
Zionism is a real witches’ brew of xenophobia, racism, ultra-nationalism and militarism that places it way outside of a “mere” nationalist context... and goes far beyond the misery for others professed by the Nazis...
Zionism undermines civic loyalty among its adherents in other countries in a way that other nationalist movements (and even ultra-nationalist movements like Nazism) did not.
The column quotes Sabrosky as saying that Zionists regard all non-Jews as "potential enemies". That's the same column that claims Sabrosky can't be bigoted against Jews because he has some unspecified Jewish family members!
It turns out that Veterans Today isn't quite what it seems. It's actually edited by another person with an amazingly impressive sounding resume and a penchant for promoting anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. (Quite a coincidence!) That man is Gordon Duff, who writes of himself (read here) that he
is a Marine Vietnam veteran, grunt and 100% disabled vet. He has been a featured commentator on TV and radio including Al Jazeera and his articles have been carried by news services around the world. He has been a UN Diplomat, defense contractor and is a widely published expert on military and defense issues. He is active in the financial industry and is a specialist on global trade. Gordon Duff acts as political and economic advisor to a number of governments in Africa and the Middle East. Gordon Duff is currently working on economic development projects in Pakistan and Afghanistan to counter the effects of poverty and global extremism.
I don't know for certain, but excuse me for thinking that Duff's resume sounds more than a bit fishy.
The conspiracy widens...
In a recent radio interview, Sabrosky further widened the dimensions of his conspiracy theory by declaring that "the large majority of U.S. Jews" are "traitors". After introducing his subject by saying that it was the most important thing he could possibly talk about because loyalty to country is a paramount virtue, Sabrosky told his interviewer that
To my displeasure and my shame, because I have some Jewish relatives -- none of whom is Zionist -- a large majority of American Jews give their allegiance to a foreign country. They may have American citizenship, but their allegiance is to Israel. And as I said in the piece, this is a form of political bigamy that is every bit as dishonest as marital bigamy. And marital bigamy is -- you know -- I'm not married now, but when I was, loyalty to my spouse was absolute. It has to be there. I can look and say "Ah ha! There is Farah Fawcett." You know -- and I could admire someone out there, but I didn't give that person my allegiance. And there's a difference between admiring from a distance and giving allegiance to that thing, and it's the same with a country...
Some of my relatives are German, some are Irish. All of them have a measure of allegiance to those cultures, but it's not a political allegiance, it's a social allegiance. It's like - we're gonna stand up on St. Patty's Day or we're gonna stand up on Oktoberfest and we'll celebrate this, and we're proud of being German or Irish or whatever it happens to be. But none of us gives our allegiance to Ireland or Germany. Jews do.
I don't care if we're called anti-Semites or not. If we don't say "truth is truth -- their allegiance is to a foreign country -- they are traitors", then we're dishonest to ourselves...
I've had a bitter argument with one of my cousins who moved to Israel and kept his American citizenship. If someone loves another country enough to go there, more power to them. They go, and they're gone. But they keep the U.S. citizenship so they can continue to participate in our elections, stand in our offices. Look at Rahm Emanuel! I mean, he served in the Israeli armed forces, not the American armed forces! And he is easily the second most powerful person in the country. Easily. That's treason!"
[The audio of this is available at 4:20 of the below-embedded video.]
Opposition from truthers, support from anti-Zionists
Some in the 9/11 Truth movement have quite sensibly pointed out that Sabrosky's conspiracy theory is not only factually false and illogical, but that's it's also bigoted. (Read here.) Amusingly, they deduce from this that Sabrosky must be an agent provocateur working with a conspiracy to discredit the other, more sensible, conspiracy theorists. They think that Sabrosky is a one-man false-flag operation!
But not everyone is as suspicious as the truthers. For example, the anti-Zionist blog Mondoweiss not only cites Sabrosky as an expert on Israel, it actually published a column he authored at Philip Weiss' request! In the column, which he wrote for Weiss in 2008 (read here), Sabrosky, after claiming some Jewish heritage by dint of having an unspecified Jewish family member and liking Jewish food, went on to call Benjamin Netanyahu a Nazi -- "Gauleiter in spirt" -- although he didn't bother to say why. Considering the gravity of that charge, one would think it worthwhile to spell out the crimes that elicited it. Then, citing those infamous drunken bigots in Max Blumenthal's "Feeling the Hate" video, Sabrosky went on to call Jewish Zionists "barabarians" and "evil", and to compare Zionism to Nazism. In spite of Blumenthal's claim that his "Feeling the Hate" video wasn't meant to be taken as a reflection of all Zionists, Alan Sabrosky and Mondoweiss certainly saw it that way . Mondoweiss' editors, while admitting in a column for Talking Points Memo (read here) that the interviews in the Blumenthal video were "cherry-picked", still somehow asserted that the video accurately showed that "Americans who are called to Israel ... don't especially believe in minority rights". In this way, they illogically argue that cherry-picked facts can support an accurate conclusion. That sort of logic appeals to those such as Sabrosky who generally operate in a fact-free environment. They have in that video at least a bit of tangible evidence to support their biases. Generally, Sabrosky doesn't have any.
Journalist Philip Weiss is touting an anti-Clinton conspiracy theory concerning the death of Clinton attorney Vince Foster which was widely promoted by the right during the Clinton administration. On his blog Mondoweiss: The War of Ideas in the Middle East (read here), Weiss promotes the idea that Foster was assassinated by a Clinton administration hit man to cover up the existence of a list of Clinton's past sexual peccadilloes which Foster purportedly had in his possession.
Those who are getting long of tooth will remember that this charge was among the many promulgated by the right during their Clinton era feeding frenzy. The allegations were thoroughly investigated by Special Prosecutor Ken Starr and found to be baseless; Vince Foster committed suicide. In spite of this finding, conservative media outlets such as Fox News, the Washington Times and American Spectator continued to promote the Foster assassination conspiracy theory. Sean Hannity continues to promote it on his Fox News program. (Read here.)
Weiss was motivated to dredge up this right-wing conspiracy theory having seen on television an interview of historian Taylor Branch concerning The Clinton Tapes, Branch's new book of Clinton interviews. Branch and his interviewer apparently mocked the Vince Foster conspiracy theories, thus getting on Weiss' fighting side.
This is not the first time Weiss has written about this subject, his having written an article concerning these conspiracy theories which was published in the New York Times Magazine back in 1997 (read here). Both that article and this new one deal with accusations by one Gary Parks, whose father, Jerry Parks, did security for the Clinton campaign's Little Rock headquarters during the 1992 presidential campaign.
Back in 1997, Weiss wrote of the senior Parks:
"He was a big man who is sometimes described as a bully, and in 1991 he contracted to provide private security for the Clinton campaign headquarters in Little Rock."
(Somehow, in the intervening years, Weiss has promoted Parks from security contractor to "Clinton aide".)
In 1993, Jerry Parks was gunned down gangland style as he drove in Little Rock. According to Weiss' Times article, Gary Parks was so upset by his fathers murder that he
"walked off his job as the ''go-to guy'' at a car dealership. Later, he told me, he ran a female escort service."
I'm not sure what a "go-to guy" is as a job title, but is Weiss saying that Gary Parks went from working as a used-car salesman to working as a pimp? (The euphemisms are flying fast and furious in Weiss' article, so my apologies to Mr. Parks if I'm reading the sentence incorrectly.) To shore up Parks' bona fides, however, Weiss informs us that Parks turned down big money from the National Enquirer for his story.
What is this story? In a nutshell, Gary Parks told Weiss, and Weiss believed, that Vince Foster was hired by Hilary Clinton to prepare for the Clintons' divorce. That divorce was planned by Hilary Clinton, Weiss writes, in her fury over Bill Clinton's decision not to seek the presidency in 1988. Weiss credulously reports Gary Parks' allegation that Foster's prep for the Clinton divorce included preparation of a Bill Clinton peccadilloes list, a job Parks claims his father was hired to do.
However, Weiss' article in the Times reveals several facts that indicate that this theory is far from bullet-proof. It says that Jerry Parks was no angel and that others had both motive and opportunity to kill him. It quotes the Little Rock homicide detective who investigated the case to the effect that Gary Parks had not one shred of evidence for his accusations. It also says of Gary Parks that he
"cooperated with the makers of a Clinton-bashing mail-order video. ''I feel that Bill Clinton had my father killed,'' Parks says on the tape, offering no evidence. Parks now feels he got carried away: ''I'm the first to admit some of the things I said on the video were wrong. I'd just come out of my trance. I don't think my head was completely back on straight.'' "
Weiss does not indicate whether Parks was paid for his appearance in the anti-Clinton video, and that gap in his reporting may get to the heart of the matter. He may not want to know. (He also doesn't identify the inaccurate statements Parks admitted to having made in that video, preferring to imply that there was a Clinton connection to Jerry Parks' killing, without actually saying what that connection might be.) However, he does admit that Parks made a career of sorts promoting this conspiracy theory for far-right, "militia types", who got Parks radio interviews around the country, set him up in a job at a Colorado ski resort, and arranged for a place for him to stay. All of this goes to a potential motive for Gary Parks to promote the conspiracy theory. Weiss' 1997 article goes on at great length about the radical far-right anti-government motivation of some of those who promoted this theory. We already know of the cynical, partisan motivation of mainstream Republicans who promoted it.
Somehow, all this seems to have slipped Philip Weiss' mind over the past 12 years. Now, not only is Gary Parks' version of Vince Foster's death plausible, the need to qualify Parks' claims with any facts which call his reliability into question has evaporated. Weiss cites anonymous sources in the passive voice to accuse Clinton -- like ghosts speaking through a medium's Ouija board -- and alludes to a cumulus cloud of vague charges.
"There have been suggestions that (Jerry) Parks was shaking people down with what he knew; and he came to a bad end. We are talking about a situation in which two Clinton aides [i.e. Parks and Foster] die of mysterious violent causes inside of 2 months. And the pattern is consistent with what Kathleen Willey experienced, Gennifer Flowers experienced, and Linda Tripp too: If you knew something about Bill Clinton’s sex life, that was dangerous information. No wonder there are guns in Primary Colors."
Philip Weiss is right. No wonder the entertaining, shallow, stereotype-laden novel by Joe Klein and the movie starring John Travolta had guns in them. The conspiracy theory must be true.
Weiss should refresh his memory a bit. He could start by remembering the title of his article about those whose theories he now touts. It was called "Clinton Crazies". He's become one of them.
Philip Weiss
Afterthought: Weiss has a longer, more involved history with the Vince Foster story than I was previously aware of. He not only wrote about it at the time , in the years since has blogged about it repeatedly. He's expressed some strong, sometimes contradictory emotions about the matter, showing that his motive may be based less on the facts of the case than on anti-Clinton bias. Strangely, he's also attacked Foster, the purported victim of the conspiracy, as "a rube ... with a huge superego". Weiss may not know much about Freudian psychoanalysis, but he knows what he doesn't like.
Check out what he wrote here about his confused personal feelings about this matter and tell me what on earth this guy can be thinking. He writes there of his motivation for believing in this conspiracy.
"I liked Gary Parks. I felt he was honest and smart. His assessment of Bill Clinton’s personality was the best I heard. He said if Bill Clinton had gone to bed with your sister and then screwed her over, and you were enraged with him, he could walk in the room and ten minutes later you’d have forgotten about it completely, he was that seductive."
By the way, maybe the question posed by this Daily Kos post provides a good subject for a Weiss follow-up: "Did Obama's Birth Certificate Kill Vince Foster?"
Jack Ross has posted a bizarre column at the blog Mondoweiss in which he argues in favor of McCarthyism, the Hollywood blacklist and the imprisonment of the Hollywood Ten. His reasons are a bit confused. He writes that
the Hollywood 10 got exactly what they had coming: the Communists made Hollywood into the most ruthless war propaganda machine in history. A lot of readers will give me grief for that, I know, but consider how militantly Zionist those Popular Front Hollywood Jews were. Among the more memorable examples was Yip Harburg, who wrote "Somewhere Over The Rainbow", and later wrote a song for the Stalinoid presidential campaign of Henry Wallaceabout "fixing things in Palestine and Greece", that is, kicking the Arabs out of Palestine and standing in the way of the Marshall Plan.
Is the "most ruthless war propaganda machine in history" to which he refers the one which opposed fascism, or communism, or the one which favored the creation of Israel? He doesn't say. Whatever it was, Ross thinks it worse than Hitler's or Stalin's propaganda machines.
Ross's historical hysteria is just getting started. He goes on the condemn Kirk Douglas (a "shameless Zionist") for his hiring Dalton Trumbo ("the arch-Stalinist") to write the script for "Spartacus", thereby breaking the McCarthy era blacklist. Ross is a bit confused about who Trumbo was, writing that
"the same Dalton Trumbo ... around that same time directed the execrable Exodus."
The fact is that Trumbo coauthored the script for Exodus with Leon Uris. Otto Preminger directed it. With respect to the artistic merits of that film, they're debatable, but a critic's thumbs down shouldn't bar an artist from working. Neither should the political opinions of ideologues, be they of the left or of the right.
In the case of Jack Ross, the line between left and right seems a bit hazy when they come out against freedom of speech and political beliefs, and in favor of anti-communist witch hunts. Mondoweiss and Joseph McCarthy are strange bedfellows indeed.
What brought about this odd coupling? Ross' historical revisionist rationalization occurs in a throwaway line in the middle of the post:
"(O)ne can reduce the entire longevity of the myth of progressive Israel to the bizarre and insular world of the Hollywood Popular Front."
Ross's extreme views are rooted in a belief that a Zionism committed to social justice was an invention of Jewish communist propagandists in Hollywood, Ross apparently being completely unaware of Zionism's connection to radical ideas of social justice, and of the role it played in saving Jews from czarist and fascist oppression. (To further confuse his already misguided views, Ross has illustrated his column with a photograph of Dalton Trumbo and made him the centerpiece of it. Does Ross mistakenly believe Trumbo to have been Jewish?)
In case you have any doubt about just what Ross is saying, he makes clear in his last paragraph that he not only supports the blacklisting and imprisonment of those accused of supporting communism, he also idolizes figures from the primordial far-right who assisted in the witchhunt, such as John Birch Society member and friendly witness for HUAC Morrie Ryskind. Ross protests without any intentional irony that Ryskind, who testified about the purported subversiveness of his Hollywood associates, was thereafter "banished for his staunch anti-Communism". Apparently, Ross likes some blacklists better than others.
Jack Ross supports the silencing and even the imprisonment of Hollywood's Jewish leftists because some of them saw Zionism as a national liberation movement. As much as I oppose Ross's opinions, I support his right to express them. It seems that Ross, in his anti-Zionist zeal, does not believe very strongly in values such as freedom of speech and political association, or in the marketplace of ideas, or even in ideas themselves. He is happy to side with those who throw the innocent behind bars so long as it silences those who differ with him about Israel.
Dalton Trumbo with Wife Cleo at House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, 1947
Trumbo being removed from the HUAC witness table.
Trumbo in prison
(Speaking of strange bedfellows, Jack Ross might be interested to know that Commentary magazine agrees with him about Trumbo. You know, if both of them hate Trumbo so much, Trumbo must have been doing something right.)
UPDATE 9/15/2009 4:20 pm
The editor of Mondoweiss, Philip Weiss, has issued a statement distancing himself from Ross's column, but not for the reason you might expect. While acknowledging that his readers found that Ross's support for McCarthyism made them say "yech" (in their words), Weiss was more interested in the fact that one of the Hollywood 10, Alvah Bessie, was actually anti-Zionist. In fact, Weiss' post is called "Hey! Heroic Hollywood 10 included anti-Zionist" (read here).
Here's a news flash for both Weiss and Ross: the Hollywood 10 were not imprisoned for being Zionists. Zionism per se had nothing to do with McCarthyism. Your problem is that you view every event through the lens of anti-Zionism, hardly a recipe for historically accuracy.
Weiss, as the blog's editor, owes it to his readers to drop the special pleading against Israel and explain why he publishes such slanderous drivel.
Afterthought: What does it say about our time that a purportedly leftist blog like Mondoweiss feels comfortable publishing right wing conspiracy drivel of the sort broadcast by Glenn Beck?
Philip Weiss' blog Mondoweiss is not at the top of my reading list, but I read it occasionally when it shows up in search results. That's how I found this January 18 post consisting of purported quotes by Israeli officials past and present regarding the Palestinians (accompanied by disturbing images of casualties).
The first quote caught my eye. Here's how Weiss would have it:
Early 1970's: "We have no solution... You [Palestinians] shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads."– Moshe Dayan (1915-1981) served as Chief of Staff of the IDF, defense minister, and leader of the Labor party in Israel. He said these words in a talk with members of his Labor cabinet. Noam Chomsky cites as source of this quote: Yossi Beilin, Mehiro shel Ihud (Revivim, 1985), 42; an important review of cabinet records under the Labor Party. Books that cite these words (excluding Chomsky's).
Here, as demonstrated below, is a classic case of Chomsky citing an obscure, foreign-language source, distorting its meaning, and thereby distorting the debate. This is Chomsky's version of creating facts on the ground.
On some level Weiss must know this, because he makes a point of claiming that Chomsky is not the sole source. But if anyone bothers to click on the link Weiss provides, it leads to a Google Books search with the terms ["moshe dayan" "like dogs" -chomsky]. Weiss intends to demonstrate that Chomsky is not the sole source for the quote by adding that last term ("-chomsky") . But by doing this, he in fact draws attention to the fact that Chomsky is the sole source for these quotes. If you click on the link and look at the 11 books which the search yields, none provide a source other than Chomsky or any details other than those in the Chomsky version. Two of the purported non-Chomsky sources cited by Weiss merely repeat Chomsky's version in a conclusory manner without a direct quote and without attribution to either a primary or secondary source (i.e. they neither cite Chomsky or Beillin; read here and here.) One of Weiss' purported non-Chomsky sources is a collection of art works (read here). At least three of the eleven purported non-Chomsky sources cited by Weiss are chapters authored by Chomsky himself (in this book and this book and this book). One of the purported non-Chomsky sources cites an interview with Chomsky in Z Magazine as its source (read here) and another is the interview itself (read here). Another of Weiss' non-Chomsky sources, the newsletter of Americans for Justice in the Middle East, doesn't refer at all to this quote, but mentions the term "Moshe Dayan" in a poem cited in its index, and the term "like dogs" only in reference to Zionists. As best I can tell, Chomsky is the sole English language source for the quote which Weiss cites. (For future reference, Weiss should understand that merely including the term "-chomsky" doesn't eliminate texts which use Chomsky as a source or even pieces which he authored.)
So the sources Weiss cite as independent of Chomsky are in fact Chomsky. But Chomsky did not tell the whole story. In fact, Chomsky selectively quoted portions of Beillin's quote of Dayan, excluding the portion which did not support his conclusions. He also misstated where and when, according to Beillin, Dayan said these words, thereby changing their motivation and meaning. These distortions allowed Chomsky and those who subsequently quote him to claim that Dayan's long-term plan was to have Palestinians "live like dogs", when, in fact, he was saying that this would be the result of a lack of a comprehensive peace. Dayan, far from saying that he wanted this to happen, was considering raising the threat that this would end up happening as spur for peace negotiations: 'this is what's going to end up happening if you don't settle with us'.
One of Noam Chomsky's favorite debating points regarding Israel is to allege that Israel has had a longstanding policy of intentionally destroying Palestinian society rather than attempting to make peace. He backs this up with a quote attributed to Moshe Dayan. Here, for example, is Chomsky in a 2005 debate with Alan Dershowitz:
One choice is to support Washington’s continued dedication to the road to catastrophe that's outlined by Israel's four former security chiefs, namely watching in silence as Washington funds the cantonization of the West Bank, the breaking of its organic links to Jerusalem, and the disintegration of the remnants of Palestinian society. That choice adopts the advice of Moshe Dayan to his cabinet colleagues in the early 1970s. Dayan was in charge of the occupation. He advised them that "we must tell the Palestinians, that we have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes, may leave." That's the solution that is now being implemented. Don't take my word for it. Go check the sources I cited, very easy, all English.
A while back, a VC reader asked me whether I could confirm the accuracy of the quote attributed to Chomsky. The answer is, yes, but.
First, I've located the original source cited by Chomsky. It's Yossi Beilin, Mehiro shel Ihud 42-43 (Revivim, 1985), a Hebrew book, never translated to English, written by Israeli dove Beilin. It's a secondary source that provides only the barest context for Dayan's remark--all the book tells us is that Dayan's comment illustrates an extreme attitude toward Palestinian refugees, and was made during a meeting with other leaders of the small RAFI party, which was composed of hawkish defectors from the dominant Labor Party. Apparently, Chomsky couldn't be bothered to look up the original transcripts, which are footnoted by Beilin.
Second, Dayan didn't make this remark in the "early 1970s," he made it in September 1967, just three months after the Six Day War.
Third, he didn't say it to his "cabinet colleagues," or in any official government capacity, but at meeting of the leaders of his small party, and his statement on that particular day may or may not have reflected his more general, or his longer-term, views regarding the Palestinians.
Fourth, according the book, Dayan was addressing the situation of Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, not all Palestinians, or even all Palestinians in the West Bank.
Fifth, and by far most significant, Chomsky leaves out the next few sentences uttered by Dayan: "For now, it works out. Let's say the truth. We want peace. If there is no peace, we will maintain military rule and we will have four to five military compounds on the hills, and they will sit ten years under the Israeli military regime." Thus, rather than this quote reflecting a long-term "plan" by Israel, it reflected Dayan's view of the alternative if a peace deal with Jordan (Beilin notes on the same page that Dayan was willing "to divide authority on the West Bank with Jordan"), could not be reached. Moreover, even in the absence of an immediate peace deal, Dayan was not speaking of a permanent occupation, but of a ten-year Israeli presence.
Nevertheless, the quotes in the book don't make Dayan look good. Shimon Peres objects that the occupation proposed by Dayan would make Israel act immorally like Rhodesia, and Dayan responds that moral considerations should be irrelevant.
So, if you want to claim, as Beilin does, that Dayan was prone to adopting extreme views regarding the Palestinian refugees in September 1967, this certainly provides strong supporting evidence. You could argue, moreover, that this suggests a moral blind spot on Dayan's part, as Shimon Peres (whom Chomsky also despises, and also claims was not interested in peace) did at the time. But if you want to argue, as Chomsky does, that the relevant quotation shows that in the early 1970s the man in charge of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank was lecturing his cabinet colleagues (without apparent dissent) that they should reject peace, and mistreat the Palestinian population so badly that they will all want to leave, you are stretching the truth beyond recognition.
For those who are interested, I've posted a translation of the relevant part of the book in the comments.
UPDATE: Commenter "Stu" makes a very salient point:
Assuming the statement was made to someone, I find it interesting that the statement was most likely made after the Khartoum Arab summit. After the June '67 war, representatives of eight Arab states met in Khartoum, Sudan and announced a resolution on September 1, 1967 calling for a continued struggle against Israel and reportedly adopting the position of infamous "Three NOs" with respect to Israel: 1. NO peace with Israel; 2. NO recognition of Israel; 3. NO negotiations with Israel. If Israel had no Arab state with which to negotiate, presumably including Jordan, which had previously occupied the West Bank until the '67 war, Israel had only a newly occupied population with which to deal. I don't recall ever reading that that population had any kind of any kind of representative government with which to negotiate or to whom to turn over possession of that territory.
I think that it gives some context to Dayan's alleged remark. Jordan won't negotiate peace and now Israel's stuck as an occupying power. If anything, it was probably said out of exasperation over the situation.
Putting aside speculation as to Dayan's motives, the fact that the relevant RAFI meeting occurred very soon after the Khartoum summit does provide some very important context.
Chomsky, and therefor Weiss, excluded the following from the quote: "For now, it works out. Let's say the truth. We want peace. If there is no peace, we will maintain military rule and we will have four to five military compounds on the hills, and they will sit ten years under the Israeli military regime." This is what Dayan proposed saying in response to a refusal to negotiate a peace.
Dayan may not come off particularly well in Beillin's account, but he comes off as more pragmatic than immoral. The threat he informally proposed and Beillin condemned was not an objective in itself but the means to an end. Dayan's problem was a practical one: how to achieve a settlement with the Arabs which would produce both peace and security. It certainly was not factually wrong for Dayan to point out that, without a peace settlement, the Palestinians would suffer. If Dayan's planned threat had been spoken, and by doing so, the Israelis had been able to convince the Palestinians to negotiate a peace settlement and create a state, the Palestinians would now be celebrating the 40th anniversary of that state.
