Mondoweiss & the Far Right?

This is a guest blog by Professor William D. Rubinstein.

He writes:

Mondoweiss, the fanatically anti-Zionist website run by Jews, has many open and demonstrable links (unsurprisingly) with the extreme Left, especially with the Center for Economic Research and Social Change (CERSC), which publishes the International Socialist Review and sponsored the “Socialism 2012” conference.

Significantly, Mondoweiss now appears to be developing links with the extreme Right.  A blog posted by Philip Weiss (co-editor of the site, for whom it is named) on 9 March this year, headed “Conservatives for Palestine” , gave an account of the “National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel Special Relationship”, which he attended and addressed.

The Conference was apparently wholly the work of extreme conservatives, ranging from neo-isolationists and old line “Foreign Office Arabists” to out-and-out ultra-right antisemites and Holocaust deniers.

After conceding that “the conference had its share of lunacy” Weiss asked in his blog:

"Does anyone really think that we can build a freedom coalition [sic] without these folks? Certainly we won’t unpack the special relationship with Israel without reexamining the human cost to the United States. That includes the attack on the USS Liberty ..., the 9/11 attacks, the murder of Robert Kennedy.'

I will return to these points below, but it would be useful first to consider the organisers of this conference.

Weiss notes that Grant Smith and Alison Weir “did a fabulous job of organizing the conference”. When I first read this, I feared that the latter might be the Alison Weir who is a well-known British author of popular histories, including such works as The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Traitors of the Tower, who had unaccountably developed a side interest in Israel/Palestine.

(Re the Balfour Declaration)

Thankfully, this is someone else entirely, an American of the same name, who has long had a fanatically anti-Israel blog and who has recently become head of the so-called Council for the National Interest.

Despite its neutral-sounding title, this Council has been described by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as “an anti-Israel organisation that opposes U.S. aid to Israel and disseminates demonizing propaganda about Israel to academics, politicians, and other audiences”.

The flavour of Alison Weir’s stance on Israel (readily available on her blog) may be seen in her posting “Israel Organ Trafficking and Theft: from Moldova to Palestine”, which gained international notoriety when it first appeared. (It is still there.)

 It quotes Nancy Scheper-Hughes (Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley) as saying, about the international trade in allegedly stolen or bought organs: "Israel is at the top.  It has tentacles reaching worldwide."  Israel's motives, Weir quotes Scheper-Hughes as explaining, are “Revenge, restitution – reparation for the Holocaust. ...We’re going to get every single kidney and liver and heart that we can. The world owes it to us.’”

(The Jews have certainly diversified from the old days, when all they did was poison the wells.  And it is refreshing to know that all the Jews do now is to steal donor organs; in years gone by they kidnapped and murdered gentile boys at Passover, using their blood to make matzoh.)

So much for one of the principal organisers of the Conference.

Although his remarks are somewhat cryptic, Mr Weiss has apparently bought into the gutter conspiracy theories about the assassination of Robert Kennedy and about 9/11.  I frankly don’t know what precisely he has in mind regarding Kennedy.  I assume he is referring to the fact that assassin Sirhan Sirhan (who is still in prison, 46 years later), a Palestinian, is said to have acted because Kennedy, in a televised debate, promised to supply arms to Israel. And I assume that Weiss thinks there were dark forces (i.e., the Zionists) behind this claim.  What prompts the “9/11 attacks” remark I leave to your imagination.

Everyone knows that antisemitic conspiracy theorists claim that Jews were somehow behind the attacks (or the US government) – not Al Quaeda.  The “USS Liberty” reference is to an American naval ship which was accidentally attacked by Israeli forces during the 1967 Six Day War, in the mistaken belief it was an Egyptian vessel.  Thirty-four Americans were killed.  Israel immediately apologised and paid compensation.

Extreme rightwing and antisemitic sources (like this one) have brought up this tragic incident time and again, even after nearly half a century.  (They apparently can’t think of anything more recent, and of course need something to weigh against the countless Arab and Muslim terrorist attacks on American targets.

Mondoweiss now appears to be buying into this cesspool of madness and crackpot dementia.

It will be interesting to see how the site’s core supporters – of whom it is safe to say that 95 percent are on the extreme Left – react.

They say that the extremes meet.  This will be a test case.