“In the year since we marked the historic election of the nation’s first African-American president we have seen a tremendous amount of anger and hostility,” Abraham H. Foxman, the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, recently remarked. “There is a toxic atmosphere of rage in America being witnessed at many levels, and it raises fundamental questions for our society. While not all of America has bought into these conspiracies, they seem to be seeping more and more into the mainstream. And since many of these expressions are interconnected in some significant ways, we wanted to try and connect the dots and ask the basic questions of why the anger, why now, and where might it lead.”
The ADL’s Rage Grows in America: Anti-Government Conspiracies report was released Monday; it can be found in its entirety here. It covers many of the same groups and people that I’ve written about on this blog, in my book CULTS, CONSPIRACIES, AND SECRET SOCIETIES, and elsewhere: Birthers, Tea parties, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, the militia movement, and the Bizarro-world notion that Obama is a modern-day Hitler. That last one is especially galling since a critical segment of the “patriot” constituency (not all of it by any means–birthers Orly Taitz and Philip Berg are Jewish, for example) denies that Hitler did anything particularly terrible to Europe’s Jews, or nothing, anyway, that they didn’t deserve.
It’s a relief to see the ADL expending its considerable resources on something other than knee-jerk apologetics for Israel or Armenian holocaust denialism; it’s nice too to see that they’ve pissed off Commentary, which scolded them for “choosing to frame its report…..in such a way as to associate all those who have opposed Obama’s policies in one way or another with the far Right.” I wish they’d been more explicit about the implicit, sub rosa Anti-Semitism that does characterize many of these groups, including Jones’, who stridently denies it. “Now that global anti-semitism is on the wane,” he declares in the characteristically self-aggrandizing rejoinder that is posted on his Propaganda Matrix website under the headline Purging the Undesirables: The ADL Attempts to Pin a Yellow Star on Grass Roots America, “the ADL has resolved to ceaselessly fearmonger about ‘conspiracy theorists’ and American taxpayers who merely express anger about how they have been financially raped by the multi-trillion dollar bailout and the continued looting of the economy by private central banks and offshore cartels.”
The ADL has launched a new purge against its political enemies in the form of a major report that equates skepticism and distrust of government with ‘a toxic atmosphere of rage,’ which is threatening to boil over in the form of violence, specifically targeting Alex Jones as ‘The Conspiracy King’ and inferring that people upset with Barack Obama’s policies are potential mass murderers. The tone of the ADL’s hit piece basically implies that Alex Jones and his ilk are such a threat to the establishment that they should be removed from society, which ironically is exactly how Hitler dealt with his political enemies in Nazi Germany. The ADL is allegorically pinning a yellow star on “conspiracy theorists,” Oath Keepers, Tea Party protesters, and anyone else who dares express dissent in response to the financial looting of the country or Barack Obama’s big government agenda.
The article goes on to assert that no American “grass roots” group has ever committed or threatened to commit violence–they have always “urged unity and discouraged division, while promoting a peaceful message of non-violence.” “All the major acts of violence in connection with the militia movement during the 1990’s were committed by the government and federal agents”–at Ruby Ridge, Waco, and in Oklahoma City (Timothy McVeigh, it explains, was trained and “steered” by the FBI when he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building).
“International bankers,” “global governance,” and “one world currency” are all memes that allude directly or indirectly to the Conspiracy of the Learned Elders of Zion–as does the notion of a New World Order. Sometimes you don’t have to dig very deep at all into conspiracist literature to find anti-Semitism: Here’s a little something about the origins of the ADL that I just stumbled on at the Conspiracy Planet website.
In Jewish Hate, the Media, and the ADL, Dr. William Pierce concisely explains why and how the ADL was formed: ‘The ADL was organized in 1913 by a group of rich Jews specifically as a response to a notorious child-rape and murder in Georgia. Leo Frank was a Jew who owned a pencil factory in Atlanta.In 1913, he raped and murdered one of his White female employees, 14-year-old Mary Phagan. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. The governor of Georgia, in response to Jewish lobbying — and, most believe, in response to a large Jewish bribe — almost immediately commuted the death sentence.’
Now for Something Completely Different: A Real Holocaust
So, what is the ADL covering up these days?
The Armenian Holocaust of 1915, in which more than 1.5 million Armenians were murdered. You’ve heard the term “young Turks?” Well, it was the “Young Turks” of last century’s Turkey who conducted that little piece of genocide.
What does this have to do with Abe Foxman? Lots. He’s related.
You see, the “Young Turks” almost exclusively were Jews who, as “Donmeh Muslims,” then controlled Turkey.
Dr. William Pierce, by the way, is the author of THE TURNER DIARIES, the novel about an American race war that inspired Tim McVeigh with its account of the destruction of the FBI building in Washington, DC by a fertilizer bomb in a parked truck. The “Donmeh Muslims” were desccended from followers of Sabbatai Zevi–who converted from Judaism to Islam in 1666–a full 250 years before the Armenian holocaust. Some of the Young Turks were indeed Donmeh; but there was no connection–institutional or sentimental–between them and Judaism or the nascent Zionist movement. This hasn’t stopped a number of fringe historians from developing a conspiracy theory in which the Donmeh, working with the Masons, exterminated the Armenians out of jealousy of their superior commercial skills and to clear the way for a future state of Israel (which the traditional Muslim Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II had been opposed to). Some go so far as to say that the Zionists then “created” the Shoah, mostly by propaganda, sometimes by collaborating with Nazis in fratricidal murders, as a means of peopling Palestine with Jewish survivors.
Of course the real reason the ADL–along with the American Jewish Committee, B’nai Brith International, and the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs–opposed Congressional recognition of the Armenian genocide as genocide back in 2007 was Realpolitik pure and simple. The Jews of Turkey supported their government’s denialist position out of fear of a Muslim backlash; there was concern that a challenge from foreign Jews might jeopardize Turkey’s relatively friendly relations with Israel. It was a shameful stance indeed and one that the ADL has since backed off on.
