The Useless Jewish Organization
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
After the Iran deal, American Jews turned to the
“Establishment” of liberal Jewish organizations to
whom they had written out so many checks over the
years expecting them to do something about it.
And the organizations did what they do best. They
expressed concern.
The
ADL was “deeply concerned” about the Iran nuclear
deal two years ago. It announced that it now has
“cause for concern”. It’s unknown whether the next
ADL boss, Obama crony Jonathan A. Greenblatt, it
also concerned, but it doesn’t matter since the
ADL’s concern and five bucks can get you an Iced
Cinnamon Dolce Latte at Starbucks.
AIPAC is also “deeply concerned” about the deal. So
is John Boehner. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
was also “deeply concerned” about Iran’s nuclear
program eight years ago. The IAEA was “deeply
concerned” about it four years ago. And Obama, he’s
now “deeply concerned” about the Americans held in
Iran. The last time he was “deeply concerned” about
the subject was two years ago.
Expressing concern, deep or otherwise, is a
meaningless formula that reassures the people
actually upset about an issue that they are being
taken seriously, by the organizations otherwise
ignoring them.
After four years, conservatives have learned that
Boehner’s concern doesn’t amount to much. American
Jews are baffled to realize that the organizations
they expected to help them are just as worthless.
American Jewish liberalism is based on a comforting
myth that in times of crisis, its organizations step
up to the challenge, rescuing Jews from the
Holocaust, saving Soviet Jewry and fighting for
Israel. In real life, the establishment has a long
history of fighting the “radical” and “extremist”
groups that actually did these things, before
eventually climbing on the bandwagon and then
claiming all the credit.
Before it was fundraising off Israel, the
establishment was militantly anti-Zionist.
In the 20s, the establishment was directing money
away from Israel to the USSR’s “Jewish” farming
colonies. At a time when the future of Israel hung
in the balance, the American Jewish Congress had
sponsored a report by Louis Fischer, a Communist
sympathizer and propagandist (and a future
anti-Communist), who was denying that there was a
famine and urging millions be spent on Soviet
colonies.
The JDC’s Agro-Joint project committed more
resources to developing agriculture in the USSR than
in Israel. Fortunes that could have been used to
save countless Jews from the Holocaust and build a
stronger Israel were instead funneled into the USSR.
When the Communists had gotten what they wanted from
their useful idiots, many of the Joint’s employees
ended up colonizing gulags.
This was one of the earliest splits between Zionists
and anti-Zionists in American Jewish life, with the
anti-Zionists being Communist sympathizers or their
useful idiots. As Stephen Wise pointed out, "The
protagonists of this colonization were more
concerned about Russia than about Jews."
A $16 million fundraiser (more than twice what the
JDC had spent on Israel) was accompanied by
propaganda claiming that the Jews of the Soviet
settlements had found a “new life” and a “happy
future”. David A. Brown, the anti-Zionist head of
the United Jewish Campaign, claimed that it would
get rid of anti-Semitism. Before long, most of the
Joint’s employees had been shot or imprisoned by
Stalin.
But by then over a decade and a fortune had been
lost. By the time the Soviet colonization project
had been thoroughly discredited, the British
limitations on Jewish immigration had closed another
door.
In 1943, James N. Rosenberg, the JDC boss, stated
that the world ought to learn a lesson from
“Russia’s treatment of minorities.” Meanwhile the
USSR had begun its struggle against “rootless
cosmopolitans”; a coded reference to Jews. The two
Russian Jews he was welcoming, Solomon Mikhoels and
Itzik Feffer, would soon be killed by Stalin as part
of a larger purge of Soviet Jews.
Having learned nothing from the butchery of his own
Joint people by Stalin, the anti-Zionist Rosenberg
then suggested that European Jews after the war
should move to the USSR.
Eventually
in 1950, Rosenberg, whose “On the Steppes” was a key
piece of establishment propaganda for the Soviet
colonies, belatedly admitted that his project had,
“ended in dust, ashes and death.”
Israel does not exist because of the establishment,
but in spite of it. It exists because while the
establishment bosses in New York were swallowing
Soviet lies, young Jewish farmers worked the soil in
Israel. If Israel survives, it will be because of
its farmers, not because of New York’s corrupt
bosses.
The Jewish establishment has always been
anti-Zionist. It was anti-Zionist before the State
of Israel was founded. It is anti-Zionist today.
Then and now, it disguises that anti-Zionism behind
excuses while redirecting money to its pet political
causes. Once Israel had won, history was rewritten
and the anti-Zionist Jewish establishment became
Zionist; even if it was a Zionism in name only.
During the 20s, the establishment directed aid away
from Israel and toward the USSR. In the 30s, there
was a more progressive cause than saving Jews from
Nazi Germany and his name was FDR.
Once again the establishment was “deeply concerned”
about the mass murder of Jews and it was willing to
hold as many meetings as it took to issue statements
of deep concern. The one thing it could not and
would not do was actually challenge a liberal
president who had emerged as a progressive hero.
That fell to Jewish radicals and extremists in the
Bergson Group who took out angry ads in newspapers
with immoderate titles like “Guaranteed Human Beings
at $50 a piece.”
FDR was far more concerned with Muslim feelings than
Jewish lives. At the end of the war, Roosevelt would
say that he had learned more about the Jewish
problem by talking to the Saudi king for five
minutes than he could have learned from numerous
letters. At Yalta, FDR had told Stalin that he would
be happy to give the Saudi king “the six million
Jews in the United States.”
The Saudi king had stated, “The word of Allah
teaches us, and we implicitly believe this… that for
a Muslim to kill a Jew, or for him to be killed by a
Jew ensures him an immediate entry into Paradise and
into the august presence of Allah. What more then
can a Muslim want in this hard world.”
Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, who
would cunningly block Jewish rescue efforts, wrote
in his diary that “The whole Mohamedan world is
tending to flare up at the indications that the
Allied forces are trying to locate Jewish people
under their protection in Moslem territory.”
Long before Obama or Carter, a liberal president was
sacrificing Jews to Muslim anti-Semitism with the
complicity of the major Jewish organizations that
promised their constituents that their diplomacy on
the inside would succeed. And after six million were
dead, the organizations that let them die spent the
rest of the century fundraising off their ashes to
create tolerance programs and big buildings.
In the 60s, it was finally time for the USSR. For
decades the Jewish establishment had expressed “deep
concern” over the organized persecution of Jews in
the USSR. While the establishment focused on keeping
lines of communication to the USSR open, young
Jewish activists in America staged protests. They
didn’t just march; they disrupted the very dialogue
that the establishment wanted so badly.
Like the Bergson Group, these activists were young
and edgy. They were not impressed by meetings with
officials. Instead they realized that they had to
make themselves a nuisance to succeed.
They were not “deeply concerned”. Instead they
acted.
If
Obama’s nuclear deal is to be defeated, it won’t be
done by the establishment insiders. The
establishment is invested in its own credibility and
its politics. It will make a show of fighting the
Iran deal before fundraising off its miserable
failure. And the money will go to fund its
progressive causes.
The establishment will not stand up to Obama, just
like it didn’t stand up to FDR. The real action will
come from ad-hoc coalitions, like the one behind the
Stop Iran Rally, that throw things together. And it
will come from a handful of kids somewhat that do
what the adults aren’t doing.
Bergson was in his early twenties when he began his
activism. Dennis Prager was in his early twenties
when he began working as the national spokesman for
Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry. Where the
establishment failed, they succeeded in bringing
national attention to an urgent crisis.
Creative solutions will not come from the
establishment, but from outside it. The
establishment has been 0 for 3 when it came to
building Israel, the Holocaust and Soviet Jewry.
Expecting it to do any more about Iran than be
“deeply concerned” is a formula for disappointment.
This is not a time for more internal diplomacy in
which establishment bosses chat with politicians and
come away with four pounds of nothing in a torn
sack. It’s time for forceful activism that wakes up
everyone to the reality that we are facing a future
in which terrorists have nuclear weapons.
While the ADL spends money on lesson plans about
Bruce Jenner and social justice poetry, while the
UJA winks and funds BDS, a new generation will once
again be called on to stand against Armageddon.