Introduction

The Chosen People

As demonstrated by Yoav Shamir, in True Stories: Defamation, a 2010 documentary aired by Channel 4, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) tends to exaggerate or even fabricate the threat of anti-Semitism, with the purpose of generating support for Israel.[1] Foxman, the ADL’s head from 1987 to 2015, had a very close relationship with the Israeli government, and is sought after by Washington and governments and political leaders around the world. To Yoav Shamir, he explained his power and influence as exploiting the “fine line” of anti-Semitism. Jews, he explains, referring to the false notions put forward in the notorious Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, “are not as powerful as Jews think we are, nor as powerful as our enemies think we are. Somewheres [sic] in between. They do believe we can make a difference in Washington, and we are not going to convince them otherwise.” Foxman asks, “How do you fight this conspiratorial view of Jews without using it?” Yoav Shamir interprets Foxman’s explanation to mean, “It’s like a poker game, in which Foxman bluffs the other side into thinking the Jews have more influence and power in Washington than they really have. The downside is, that the idea of Jews being so powerful can result in envy, even hate.”[2]

Zionism depends on anti-Semitism. It’s its raison d’être. Where ant-Semitism doesn’t exist, it must be created. Contrary to popular assumptions, Zionism is not a religious movement. Zionist aspirations began to coalesce in the early part of the nineteenth century in a movement known as the Haskalah, which was influenced by the European Enlightenment, and growing tendencies that began to view cultural groups as nations, analogous to the German idea of volk, meaning “people” or “race.” But, early Zionists met with opposition from, either Jews who had assimilated into European societies, or on religious grounds, from the traditionally-minded rabbinical courts. Without a meaningful religious argument, the Zionists’ only recourse was to highlight the need to escape anti-Semitism. As they are not open to rational dialogue with a people they deem inferior, Zionists have resorted publicly to appeals to pity, and behind the scenes to coercion, even brazenly exploiting to their advantage the canard of “Jewish power.”

The pivotal moment in the history of the Zionist movement was when all its efforts were finally fulfilled on November 19, 1917, in the Balfour Declaration, when the British Zionist Federation was offered the land of Palestine for settlement. The Zionist Federation was established with the help of Moses Gaster (1856 – 1939) a central figure of the Hovevei Zion movement in Romania, and later Hakham, or Chief Rabbi, of the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London. The founding of the Bevis Marks, the oldest synagogue in the United Kingdom in continuous use, is linked to the mission of Menasseh ben Israel (1604 – 1657), leader of the Jewish community of Amsterdam, whose Rosicrucian followers were closely linked with the movement of the false-prophet Shabbetai Zevi (1626 – 1676), who, inspired by the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria (1534 – 1572), declared himself messiah in 1666. His followers then established the Bevis Marks synagogue in London, which was connected with the Royal Society, who ultimately founded Freemasonry and the Illuminati, laying the groundwork for the Occult Revival of the eighteenth century, which produced secret societies like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which, paradoxically, ultimately influenced the rise of the racist beliefs that inspired the Nazis.

The same network was also responsible for the production of the infamous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, outlining a Judeo-Masonic plot for world domination, that served, as Norman Cohn referred to them, as the Nazis’ “warrant for genocide.” The attraction of The Protocols of Zion is that they provide an easy answer for those who accurately perceive that global politics often operate according to objectives hidden from the public. Hollywood, where Jews hold a predominant place, produces an endless array of titillation that not only distracts from more important responsibilities, but, to use the cliché, corrupts morals. American wars are clearly not fought for the protection of “democracy,” but rather often by proxy to serve Israeli foreign policy objectives. The educational system encourages regurgitation of the same tired narratives. The news media, despite pretending to be “free,” act in unison to disguise the real motives, often under enormous pressure from the influential “Zionist lobby,” using the threat of public humiliation to intimidate critics into submission. And, ultimately, if these are involved in criticism of Israel, they are accused of “anti-Semitism.” How else to explain what appears to be a coordinated effort, than to cry “it’s the Jews!” The astonishing truth is that it appears to be part of a plot by Zionists to give exactly that impression, so as to not only provide the opportunity to denounce any who expose their nefarious deeds as “anti-Semites,” but even more deviously, to create the impression of rampant hatred of the Jewish people, which provides the necessary worldwide sympathy for support of their cause.

Curiously, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), founded in 1913 by the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith, is also linked to the history of the forgery of The Protocols. The B’nai B’rith (“Children of the Covenant”) was founded as a secret lodge by a group of twelve Jewish immigrants from Germany and Freemasons in 1843.”[3] The B’nai B’rith is the American arm of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, founded in France in 1860, by five French Jews and Adolphe Crémieux (1796 – 1880), Grand Master of the Masonic Rite of Misraïm and Grand Commander of the Supreme Council of France, responsible for managing the high degrees of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite within the Grand Orient of France.

According to his biographer Peter Grose, Allen Dulles, the future head of the CIA, who was in Constantinople at the time, discovered “the source” of the forgery which he then provided to The Times, owned by a member of the Round Table.[4] In the first article of Peter Graves’ series, titled “A Literary Forgery,” the editors of The Times claimed to have proven that the Protocols were plagiarized from the work of Maurice Joly (1829 – 1878), The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. What was not reported, however, was that Joly, also a Jew, was a protégé of Crémieux and also a member of Rite of Misraïm.[5] In 1884, according to Victor Marsden, who produced the first English translation, a woman named Yuliana Glinka, a disciple of the occultists H.P. Blavatsky, who inspired the strange racial theories of the Nazis, hired Joseph Schorst-Shapiro, a member of Joly’s Misraïm Lodge, to obtain sensitive information, and purchased from him a copy of the Protocols, and subsequently gave them to a friend who passed them on to Sergei Nilus, who first published them in 1905, as reportedly the product of a secret meeting of leaders at the First Zionist Congress, the inaugural congress of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), held in Basel on August 29–31, 1897, and convened by Herzl.[6]

As stated by Herzl in his diaries, “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”[7] In 1912, Chaim Weizmann (1874 – 1952)—the author of the Balfour Declaration who served as president of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) and who would become the first president of Israel—told a Berlin audience that “each country can absorb only a limited number of Jews, if she doesn’t want disorders in her stomach. Germany already has too many Jews.”[8] In his discussion with Balfour in 1914, Weizmann added that “we too are in agreement with the cultural anti-Semites, in so far as we believed that Germans of the Mosaic faith are an undesirable, demoralizing phenomena.”[9]

As pointed out by Edwin Black, in The Transfer Agreement, the Sabbatean Rabbi Stephen Wise himself struggled with the choice of opposing the Nazis and support Jewish settlement in Palestine. On September 6, 1933, Wise said in a speech two days before the Second World Jewish Conference:

 

Once again the Jewish people seems called upon to play a great role in history, perhaps the greatest role in all the ages of its tragic history. Once again the Jewish people are called upon to suffer, for we are the suffering servants of humanity. We are called upon to suffer that humanity and civilization may survive and may endure. We have suffered before. We are the eternal suffering servants of God, of that world history which is world judgment.

We do not rebel against the tragic role we must play if only the nations of the earth may achieve some gain, may profit as a result of our sufferings, and may realize in time the enormity of the danger they face in that common enemy of mankind which has no other aim than to conquer and destroy. We are ready if only the precious and the beautiful things of life may survive. This is once again the mission of the Jews.[10]

 

In 1933, when the Jewish War Veterans began to plan a boycott of German goods, Samuel Untermyer, the famous Jewish American lawyer, picked up the idea and began to attempt to transform it into an international Jewish plan. The movement gained momentum and by 1935, large department stores and labor unions had joined in. However, Morris Waldman, executive secretary to the American Jewish Committee (AJC), labeled the boycott as “futile [and] possibly dangerous.” Waldman believed the collaboration against Hitler would confirm the anti-Semitic notions of Jewish power in the world. Additionally, it was believed that a ban on German goods would do more bad than good for America, as Germany was a net importer of America. If Germany were to counter and ban US goods within their borders, it would be worse for the US than for Germany.[11]

Weizmann reported to the Zionist Congress of 1937 on his testimony before the Peel Commission, a British Royal Commission of Inquiry, appointed in 1936 to investigate the causes of unrest in Mandatory Palestine, which was administered by Great Britain:

 

The hopes of Europe’s six million Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked: “Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?” I replied, “No.” …From the depths of the tragedy I want to save… young people [for Palestine]. The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They are dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world… Only the branch of the young shall survive. They have to accept it.[12]

 

The problems of the Evian conference in July 1938, at which representatives from thirty-two nations had addressed the plight of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and Austria, were exacerbated by disunity among the twenty-one private Jewish delegations attending, which the weekly Congress Bulletin of the American Jewish Congress described as a ‘‘spectacle of Jewish discord and disruption.’’[13] American policy had received much negative attention and criticism from it severely limited quota of refugees admitted to the country. In 1938, in his capacity as leader of the American Jewish Congress, Rabbi Stephen Wise had written a letter in which he opposed any change in US immigration laws which would enable Jews to find refuge: “It may interest you to know that some weeks ago the representatives of all the leading Jewish organizations met in conference. It was decided that no Jewish organization would, at this time, sponsor a bill which would in any way alter the immigration laws.”[14] American representatives at the conference refused to take any substantial number of Jews suffering under the Nazis or unwanted by Romania and Poland. Other nations followed suit. The Soviet Union refused to accept refugees and a year later ordered its border guards to treat all refugees attempting to cross into Soviet territory as spies.[15]

Religious and political differences between Reform, Orthodox, Zionist and anti-Zionists left many American Jewish groups conflicted as to how best to assist persecuted Jews. Some of the Jewish leaders, especially those of German background in the United States and Great Britain, deliberately avoided an open stance against Jewish persecution out of “fear of stirring up an anti-Semitic backlash” within Germany and preferred to negotiate out of the limelight.[16]  Golda Meir, the attendee from British Mandate Palestine, was not permitted to speak or to participate in the proceedings except as an observer.

Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion (1886 – 1973) of the Jewish Agency were both firmly opposed to Jews being allowed entry into Western countries, hoping that the pressure of hundreds of thousands of refugees having nowhere to go would force Britain to open Palestine to Jewish immigration.[17] WZO president Weizmann believed that behind the scenes action, performed “privately and separately” with the various delegations in their respective capitals, would more likely lead to positive results. The exclusion of Palestine from the agenda convinced him as well that he would not be granted a “serious hearing,” and would therefore be “a waste of time.”[18] Concerned that Jewish organizations would be seen trying to promote greater immigration into the United States, the AJC’s Morris Waldman acted again, and privately warned against Jewish representatives highlighting the problems Jewish refugees faced.[19] Samuel Rosenman sent President Franklin D. Roosevelt a memorandum stating that an “increase of quotas is wholly inadvisable as it would merely produce a ‘Jewish problem’ in the countries increasing the quota.”[20] Abba Hillel Silver of the United Jewish Appeal said he saw “no particular good” in what the conference was trying to achieve.[21]

The failure of the conference meant that many Jews had no escape and would ultimately become victims of Hitler’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” Two months after Evian, Britain and France granted Hitler the right to occupy the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. In November, on Kristallnacht, a massive pogrom across the Third Reich was accompanied by the destruction of over 1,000 synagogues, massacres and the mass arrests of tens of thousands of Jews. In March 1939, Hitler occupied more of Czechoslovakia, causing a further 180,000 Jews to fall under Axis control, while in May 1939 the British issued the White Paper which barred Jews from entering Palestine or buying land there.

Before Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, there was one twelve-month period shortly when more Jews decided to leave Palestine than decided to immigrate to it.[22] By 1938, some 450,000 of about 900,000 German Jews were expelled or fled Germany, mostly to France and British Mandate Palestine, where the large wave of migrants led to an Arab uprising.[23] In 1939, in response, the British Government, led by Neville Chamberlain, issued the White Paper, which paper called for the establishment of a Jewish national home in an independent Palestinian state within ten years, rejecting the Peel Commission’s idea of partitioning Palestine. However, it also limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 for five years and ruled that further immigration would then be determined by the Arab majority. After he pleaded in vain at a conference in London in January 1939, Ben-Gurion returned to Palestine convinced that Britain would now never agree to a Jewish majority in Palestine. Immediately after his return he told a secret meeting of Labor Zionists: “If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.

 


[1] Defamation. Yoav Shamir Films. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTAjc1OSrmY&t=4818s.

[2] Defamation. Yoav Shamir Films. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTAjc1OSrmY&t=4818s.

[3] Edward E. Grusd. B’nai B’rith: the story of a covenant (New York: Appleton-Century, 1966) xix, 315 p. 21 cm. Retrieved from https://freemasonry.bcy.ca/texts/bnaibrith.html

[4] Peter Grose. Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Houghton Mifflin, 1994).

[5] Lord Alfred Douglas. Plain English (1921); Kerry Bolton, The Protocols of Zion in Context, 1st Edition, (Renaissance Press: Paraparaumu Beach, 2013).

[6] Victor Marsden. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (Chicago: Patriotic Pub. Co., 1934), p. 100.

[7] The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl. Vol. 1, edited by Raphael Patai, translated by Harry Zohn, p. 83-84

[8] Benyamin Matuvo. “The Zionist Wish and the Nazi Deed.” Issues (Winter 1966/7), p. 9; cited in Lenni Brenner. Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (London: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 37.

[9] Chaim Weizmann to Ahad Ha’am, in Leonard Stein (ed.), The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, Letters, vol. VII, p. 81; cited in Lenni Brenner. Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (London: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 37.

[10] Edwin Black. The Transfer Agreement (Dialog Press, 1983), p. 359–360.

[11] Henry L. Feingold. The Jewish People in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

[12] Cited in Faris Yahya. Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany (Beirut, Lebanon: Palestine Research Center, January 1978), p. 53.

[13] “David S. Wyman. Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis 1938-1941 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968), 49.

[14] Lenni Brenner. Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1983), p.149.

[15] Michael Burleigh. Moral Combat Good and Evil in World War (HarperCollins, 2011), p. 148.

[16] Naomi Shepherd. Wilfrid Israel: German Jewry’s Secret Ambassador (London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1984), pp. 133-34.

[17] John Quigley. Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice (Duke University Press, 1990).

[18] David Vital: The Jews in Europe, 1789-1939 A People Apart (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 894.

[19] Gulie Ne’eman Arad. America, Its Jews, and the Rise of Nazism (Indiana University Press, 2000). p. 197.

[20] Michael Laitman. The Jewish Choice: Unity or Anti-Semitism: Historical facts on anti-Semitism as a reflection of Jewish social discord (Laitman Kabbalah Publishers, 2019), pp. 156–157.

[21] John Quigley. The International Diplomacy of Israel’s Founders (Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 40–41.

[22] Martin Gilbert. “Israel was Everything.” New York Times (June 21, 1987).

[23] Michael Blakeney. “Proposals for a Jewish Colony in Australia: 1938-1948.” Jewish Social Studies 46:3/4 (1984), pp. 277-292.

Zionism