How much is being broadcast about the various anti-Semitic episodes at various OWS and its offshoots in other cities?

The ADL made a timid response here.

The Wiesenthal Center published a better analysis:   Excerpts from an essay from Rabbi Abraham Cooper and historian Dr. Harold Brackman on anti- Semitism on the fringes of the Occupy Wall Streeters.

Excerpts:

The Tea Party, when it emerged in 2009, also attracted its own extremist fringe, as a hyper-vigilant national media was correct to quickly expose. Some of the Tea Party fringe equated Obama with Hitler and claimed that the first African American president was a Manchurian candidate with a phony birth certificate. Yet the Tea Party Movement eventually produced grassroots leaders who denounced such nonsense and repeatedly disavowed racism and racists. Though not everyone was convinced by the Tea Party’s disavowals of prejudice, millions of decent Americans who weren’t bigots voted in the 2010 elections to support the complaints and goals of the movement.

…If the Occupy Wall Streeters really want their movement to achieve mainstream credibility, they should begin by policing their own ranks… social and political civility must also prevail. The Occupy Movement’s leaders in LA as well as New York need to disown the purveyors of hate within their ranks. They must pull the plug on the bigots amongst them who view the slogan of fighting the detested “1 percent of fat cats” as their opportunity to mainstream the hatred of Jews.

HKO comments:

The Tea Party may have been less organized than OWS.  It was also larger, yet somehow they managed to marginalize the wingnuts that arose quickly.  Also note that Communist and Nazi organizations have supported the OWS movement.  In the absence of  any clear and reasonable objective OWS runs the risk of being defined by its extreme elements, even if they are in a minority.  In fact the OWS seems like a collection of several different extreme groups that are unable to coalesce into anything other than street theatre.  If Democratic leaders are supporting this mess they should  clarify exactly what they are supporting and clearly denounce the elements that are hijacking the opportunity.  Otherwise they will lose control of the message and their party will become the home to  the kind of extremist elements that will cost them dearly at the polls.

I discounted much of what was happening on the Occupy Wall Street rallies and its sister rallies in other cities.  The movement seemed shallow and unserious. Many of the marchers just sound like idiots: it was hard to find any intelligent comments from any of them.

Yes, it is easy to demonize rich people; it has been a fodder for politics and social movements for ages.  It is much easier to label a demon than to make a serious effort to understand the problem.  Large corporations are evil….. except of course large corporations like the New York Times which gives voice to such opposition. Perhaps Whole Foods is OK because they sell organic shoes and lots of lettuce. Speilberg is ok because he makes movies about evil rich people. I guess Apple, the world’s largest capitalized corporation,  is acceptable because they just have cool products.  Google, Facebook, Northface, Fender instruments and other corporation that make stuff we like are surely just the exceptions.

It should be no surprise that when Wall Street and the money industry is demonized that Anti-Semitism is not far away. Jews may be the only ethnic group that have been criticized for being both Communistic and Capitalistic.  When the mindless embrace conspiracy over substance anti-Semitism seems to thrive.

Pajama’s Media published  More Anti-Semitism at Occupy Los Angeles.  It includes episodes from rallies other than Los Angeles as well.  I recommend you view the videos at the end. The anti-Semitism is beyond blatant. Also note my recent post  Which Rich, which featured a placard of  Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein with his severed head on a pike.

This is not to conclude that all the protesters hold such views, but it does indicate that modern anti-Semitism has found a much larger welcome mat on the left side of the political spectrum. Noted leftist feminist Phyllis Chesler noted this years ago in her book, The New Anti-Semitism.   If a fraction of the these outrageous displays had been found at the Tea Party rallies (which were much larger) the airwaves would have been saturated with the images and  the movement would have never gotten off the ground.

George Will comments that the OWS movement is a gift to the GOP. Read his article, Conservatives Should Hope OWS Endures at Investor’s Business Daily. It provides a face for the left that the GOP can easily capitalize on.  Herman Cain’s direct and daring response to the OWS crowd may have been a major source that propelled his campaign in the last few weeks.

Jeff Jacoby writes A Palestinian state? Don’t count on it for the Boston Globe, 9/21/11.

Excerpts:

…the Arabs of Palestine have consistently said no when presented with the chance to build a state of their own. They said no in 1937, when the British government, which then ruled Palestine, proposed to divide the land into separate Arab and Jewish states. Arab leaders said no again in 1947, choosing to go to war rather than accept the UN’s decision to partition Palestine between its Jewish and Arab populations. When Israel in 1967 offered to relinquish the land it had acquired in exchange for peace with its neighbors, the Arab world’s response, issued at a summit in Khartoum, was not one no, but three: “No peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel.”

At Camp David in 2000, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians a sovereign state with shared control of Jerusalem and billions of dollars in compensation for Palestinian refugees. Yasser Arafat refused the offer, and returned to launch the deadly terror war known as the Second Intifada.

It is no mystery, however. The raison d’être of the Palestinian movement has never been the establishment and building-up of a sovereign Palestinian homeland. It has always been the negation of a sovereign Jewish homeland. That is why well-intended proposals for a “two-state solution” have never come to fruition, no matter how earnestly proposed by US presidents or UN secretaries-general. That is why the basic charter not just of Hamas but even of Abbas’s supposedly moderate Fatah vows to continue the “armed struggle” until “the Zionist state is demolished.” And that is why Abbas and other Palestinian leaders insist that a Palestinian state would be explicitly Arab and Muslim, but adamantly refuse to acknowledge that Israel is legitimately the Jewish state.

“Palestinian nationalism,” Edward Said told an interviewer in 1999, “was based on driving all Israelis out.” Sadly, it still is.

It is this grotesque and bloody culture that Palestinian leaders want the UN to affirm as worthy of statehood. The wonder is not they make the request, but that anyone thinks it should be granted.

HKO Comment:

Could we have conceived of a state like Israel, or any other,  asking for admittance to the UN, WHILE denying the right of an member  state to exist?  It is not unusual for a new state to come about in the midst of blood shed, but it is unheard of to deny another of their right to exist as the major mission of their sovereign existence.  The Palestinians have inculcated a program of anti-Semitism that would have made the Hitler youth blush.  Israel is the only state in the UN facing a continuous existential crisis.  Any serious consideration of a Palestinian state at this juncture will prove that the current UN is as effective at preserving world peace as the League of Nations was at preventing WW II.

The special election in New York to replace Twitter pervert Anthony Weiner is proving interesting.  It is not surprising that in a heavily Democratic district in New York that the Jewish vote would come to play.  It may be surprising how much the Jewish vote there has turned against Obama.  In the Wall Street Journal,  9/13/11, Dan Senor writes Why Obama Is Losing the Jewish Vote.

The quick summary is that an accumulation of bad anti-Israel policies is having its effect:

Read the article to see a long list of public affronts to Israel.  Republican Robert Turner,  aided by a strong endorsement from Ed Koch,  is leading substantially in a district covering Queens and Brooklyn that Weiner easily carried,

This Rebel Yid was surprised that Obama got the strong Jewish support that he did, given his associations, but that is history.

Why is the Jewish vote so important to Obama? The Jewish influence in politics is not the result of sinister conspiracies, as many anti-Semitic theories contend.  There are three clear reasons.

1. Jews vote at twice the rate of most citizens.
2. Jews are concentrated in states with large  numbers of electoral votes.
3. Jews are engaged in politics and are more willing to work and fund their favorite candidates.

While Jews are only 2.2% of the population they are 8.4% of New York.  If they are twice as likely to vote than their fellow citizens then their impact in this state with substantial electoral votes is effectively 16%, quite a substantial block.  Jews also have above average representation in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Florida and California; all heavily blue states.  Florida may be the largest swing state. For Jewish voters by state see The Jewish Virtual Library.

Jews in red states tend to be less monolithic Democrats but are still less likely to vote GOP than the rest of the population.

While the Christian evangelists are also sensitive to Israel they largely vote Republican anyway.  A large swing of Jewish support away from key Democratic candidates, including the president, can have a serious impact on an election.

Leo Frank

Today is the anniversary of the lynching of Leo Frank in Marietta in 1915.   This is a fascinating and tragic piece of history. It was the  OJ Simpson trial of its day and was followed by newspapers all over the country.

Leo Frank was a Jew who ran a pencil factory in Atlanta for his uncle.  A young 13 year old girl, Mary Phagan, who worked in his plant was brutally murdered and Frank was charged, although many suspected the black maintenance worker Jim Conley of the crime.  The trial was a spectacle and culminated from much of the cultural conflicts of the old south and the new urban factories.  As much as some of the litigators tried to avoid prejudice, to many at the time Leo was convicted because he was a Jew. Anti-Semitic comments surrounded the trial though they were largely absent from the court room.

Governor Slaton who was soon to leave office and run for Senate, courageously commuted Frank’s sentence because he thought justice had not been served in spite of the unsuccessful appeals.  Slaton knew this decision would end his political career.

From Wikipedia:

On June 21—six days before Nathaniel Edwin Harris, the new governor, was to take office and one day before Frank was scheduled to hang—Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence to life in prison. “I can endure misconstruction, abuse and condemnation,” Slaton said, “but I cannot stand the constant companionship of an accusing conscience which would remind me that I, as governor of Georgia, failed to do what I thought to be right…. [F]eeling as I do about this case I would be a murderer if I allowed this man to hang. It may mean that I must live in obscurity the rest of my days, but I would rather be plowing in a field for the rest of my life than to feel that I had that blood on my hands.”

Celebration in the streets when Frank was convicted turned to riots when Slaton commuted the sentence. The army had to protect the governor’s mansion. The Governor moved Frank to a prison in Milledgeville for his safety, but after one unsuccessful attempt to cut his throat he was kidnapped, driven to Marietta and lynched.

It was a rare instance of the lynching of a white man. It was even more unusual that in the prejudiced climate of Atlanta in 1915 that a white man could be convicted largely on the scripted testimony of a  black man.

There were many lessons learned from the trail and new procedures that are important to our criminal legal proceeding were implemented as a result of the injustices from that trial.  To this day many white supremacist and anti-Semitic sites still insist that not only was Frank guilty, but that his behavior was not uncommon among Jews.

The best read on the trial is And the Dead Shall Rise by Steve Oney.  If you are less inclined, then read the Wikipedia.  But do be aware that many sites on the web are partially concealed anti-Semitic sites.  Another legitimate summary is in the Jewish Virtual Library. There are also several movies and documentaries.   The tragedy of both Mary Phagan and Leo Frank was a stain on Georgia’s history, but one that heralded significant changes and improvements.