The International Campaign for Real History

THE FAMOUS New York firm of St Martin's Press, which had previously published several books by David Irving and requested him to provide jacket-puffs to promote the works of their other authors, contracted to publish his biography Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich in April 1996. SMP came under savage assault from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) from February 1996, and their chairman Tom McCormack, who had visited Irving in London and dined with him over the previous years, suddenly became A Denier. SMP dumped the book, the product of eight years' research, in an unprecedented action of jibbering, craven, panic.

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"Jewish Methods..." 
Pages 191-191 from

Kevin MacDonald:

Separation and Its Discontents, Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism

(Praeger Publishers, Westport, Connecticut, 1998)

 

Professor Macdonald is professor of psychology at California State University, Long Beach.

 


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[For more items of the twenty year campaign of agitation by the ADL against David Irving, see the file on the Board of Deputies]
 
190 Separation and Its Discontents

Jews engaged in a very wide range of activities to combat anti-Semitism in Germany in the period from 1870 to 1914, including the formation of self-defense committees (e.g., the Zentralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens whose name -- Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith -- was meant to suggest that Jews constitute a community of religious faith), lobbying the government, utilizing and influencing the legal system (e.g. taking advantage of libel and slander Jaws to force anti-Jewish organizations into bankruptcy), writing apologias and tracts for distribution to the masses of gentile Germans, and funding organizations opposed to anti-Semitism that were not overtly Jewish (Ragins 1980, 23ff).

A major consequence of these activities was to make anti-Semitism a disreputable, unsavory enterprise. The Zentralverein successfully pursued legal actions against every major anti-Jewish leader, with the result that not only were there severe financial repercussions for the anti-Semitic movement, but, more impor-tantly, because of the high prestige of the legal system among Wilhelminian Germans, convicted individuals lost their status among large segments of the public and even within the anti-Semitic movement itself (Levy 1975, 158-159). Similarly the Zentralverein commissioned writings in opposition to "scientific anti-Semitism," as exemplified by academically respectable publications that portrayed Judaism in negative terms. The Zentralverein monitored academic works for such material and sometimes succeeded in banning offending books and getting publishers to alter offensive passages. The result was to render such ideas academically and intellectually disreputable.

Similar examples are provided in Chapter 2 where it was mentioned that a theme of anti-Semitism has been that Jewish organizations have used their power to make the discussion of Jewish interests off limits, and that individuals who had made remarks critical of Jews were forced to make public apologies and suffered professional difficulties as a result. In recent cases illustrating this theme, the ADL successfully pressured St. Martin's Press to rescind publication of David Irving's biography of Goebbels (Washington Post, April 4, 1996) after an article by editorial columnist Frank Rich condemning the book appeared in the New York Times (April 3, 1996).[10] The ADL also pressured the American Psychological Association to defer presenting a lifetime achievement award to Dr. Raymond B. Cattell because of Cattell's alleged "commitment to racial supremacy theories" (New York Times, August 15, 1997).[11]

The AJCommittee has also engaged in a wide range of activities to minimize anti-Semitism and pursue Jewish interests, including writing and distributing articles on the situation in czarist Russia, the fraudulent nature of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the benefits of immigration. Position papers were prepared on Jewish life in Eastern Europe prior to requesting intervention by the American government. Scholarly treatises were prepared in an effort to empha-size Jewish contributions to civilization and rebut the anti-Semitism of such intellectuals as Houston Stewart Chamberlain (Cohen 1972, 34).

Jewish Strategies for Combating Anti-Semitism 191

 

In recent times Jewish strategy has often included attempts to mold personal beliefs via the mass media. The Dreyfus Affair in fin de siècle France "saw the emergence, for the first time, of a distinct class of intellectuals . . . as a major power in European society and among whom emancipated Jews were an important, sometimes a dominant, element. A new issue was raised, not just for France: Who controls our culture?" (Johnson 1988, 387). "The young Jewish intellectuals, and their growing band of radical allies, began by asking for Justice and ended by seeking total victory and revenge. In doing so, they gave their enemies an awesome demonstration of Jewish and philosemitic intellectual power" (Johnson 1988, 388). While at the beginning of the affair the media was controlled by the anti-Semites, by the end of it, fully 90 percent of the literature on the subject was pro-Dreyfus. This campaign involved newspapers, photogra-phy, and cinema and gradually it tilted public opinion in favor of Dreyfus.[12]

Sachar (1992) provides several examples of the use of the mass media to promote Jewish causes, some of which were originally perceived as being opposed to majority interests. In the campaign against czarist Jewish policy in the 1890s, Oscar Straus and Jacob Schiff were able to secure highly sympathetic treatments in the New York Times, owned by their friend Adolph Ochs, also a law. The AJCommittee's Louis Marshall also persuaded Ochs to provide press coverage favorable to Leo Frank (Ivers 1995, 41). (Frank, the manager of a pencil factory, was convicted in the murder of a 14-year-old female employee in 1913). This attempt backfired; Southerners reacted negatively to attempts by a northern, Jewish-owned newspaper to influence events in the South. (It is also interesting that Marshall insisted that Ochs not mention that Frank was Jewish or that anti-Semitism was involved in the prosecution -- another instance in interests were perceived as best served by crypsis.)

Another example of media manipulation was the effort expended to abrogate the Russian trade agreement of 1832. Over a period of three years (1908-1911), the AJCommittee overcame complete apathy among the public and also widespread official concern about American commercial and foreign policy interests to achieve a complete victory (Cohen 1972, 54ff). Although the purpose of the campaign was to change Russian policy toward its Jews, the pretext was Russia's denial of visas to four American Jews and the inability of twenty-eight American Jews living in Russia to travel freely. Thousands of copies of speeches by the Jewish activist Louis Marshall (who never mentioned the plight of Russian Jewry) and Herbert Parsons (a non-Jewish congressman from New York) were distributed to national and state politicians, newspapers, magazines, judges and lawyers, clergy, educators, and fraternal organizations. The AJCommittee provided material for articles in the popular media and distributed rebuttals when opposing positions appeared in the media. Political bodies ranging from Congress to state legislatures were intensely lobbied to pass pro-abrogation resolutions. Rallies with prominent gentile speakers were held, including one in New York whose participants included Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey (who later, as president, endorsed the Balfour Declara-

Endnote 10:

"10: Jewish academics were also successful in getting the American Historical Association (AHA) to condemn the idea that the Holocaust never happened or has been greatly exaggerated, and recently the AHA rejected the thesis that Jews were disproportionately involved in the Atlantic slave trade or as exploiters of slaves, as maintained by the book The Secret relationship Between Blacks and Jews, published by the Nation of Islam (Los Angeles Times, B.12, February 18, 1995)."

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