Focus on Issues the Need to Look Homeward

Hardly a week goes by without some anti-Semitic incident taking place in some “civilized” traditional liberal Western country, let alone the Soviet Union and Arab countries. Rarely do these incidents merit more than one-column headlines on the inside pages of major newspapers in this country and abroad Rarely, if ever, do newspapers bother to report anti-Semitic incidents in this country.

The major headlines and news reports in the media deal with social upheavals in Poland; Iran, Afghanistan and Latin America; the Presidential race; urban tensions; racial violence, individual violence; military budgets; and economic afflictions in industrialized notions.

The gangs of ruthless and evil men who commit anti-Semitic deeds would just as soon have it this way. Their nefarious acts can thus go un-noticed and unchallenged. Fortunately, American Jewish leaders keep abreast of anti-Semitic incidents taking place abroad and duly make their protestations to the ambassadors or consulate officials of the countries where these incidents occur. Unfortunately, however, too many Jewish leaders sit on their bonds and do little to mobilise public opinion against the growth of anti-Semitism especially neo-Nazism in this country.

To be sure some do get off their hands long enough to issue vapid press releases expressing “dismay” or “concern,” presumably on the theory that the anti-Semites can be crushed by the sheer weight of the numerous press releases. Presumably too, they feel that American Jews are too well ensconced in the metabolism of the American solid economic system for anti-Semites to ever develop into on effective mass movement.

ERRONEOUS VIEW OF INCIDENTS

Too many American Jewish leaders appear to view anti-Semitic incidents as sporadic, ephemeral and incidental to the American way of life. They appear to work on the hypothesis that America is immune to concentrated anti-Semitism in the form of neo-Nazism and that America is an exception to the social lows which govern the for motion and growth of Nazism.

They seem to ignore the fact that anti-Semitism is spawned, encouraged; reinforced and nurtured by economic instability, mass dissatisfaction with the prevailing socio-economic-juridical system, a disoriented and leaderless government, a feeling of helplessness on the part of large masses of people to bring the system into line with their needs, and social tensions between ethnic and racial groups.

Too many Jewish leaders ignore the fact that Nazism, pernicious anti-Semitism, will not come to power in this country under the leadership of goose-stepping, swastika-dangling, siege heil-shouting neo-Nazis who would be laughed out of court as “kooks” and “sickies.” Nazism will not be introduced in this country by Hitler-like clones but by men attired in sartorial splendor carrying attache cases bulging with “scientific” theories about the Jewish bonkers and Jewish publicists who control or seek to control the economy and the media of this country.

AN ANTI-SEMITIC FRONT

Far too many Jewish leaders expend precious energy trying to determine which group is most dangerous to American Jewry: the KKK, the ultra-conservative evangelicals, the New Right or the neo-Nazis. The fact is that all these groups, organized along the lines of giant conglomerate, are equally dangerous. They cross-pollenate their views, their resources and their organizational staffs, constituting in effect an anti-Semitic front.

Many of these groups are for more subtle and restrained in their anti-Semitic propaganda than their counterparts during the 1930s, and many of them disguise their anti-Semitism by referring to the “menace of Zionism.” The many faces of the anti-Semitic front constitute a division of labor to attract different segments of the population to their genocidal goal. And all this is taking place precisely as the United States tends toward more conservative outlooks in its domestic and foreign policies.

The growth of the anti-Semitic front has a broader base and wider appeal today in this country than did groups like the Black Legion, the German-American Bund and the Liberty Lobby of the 1930s. Then, these groups and others like them could incite and reinforce racial and ethnic tensions and hatred but could not sustain them because of their strident propaganda and their identification with Nazi Germany.

The anti-Semitic front of today, with its sophisticated, almost subliminal approach to anti-Semitism for the most part identifies itself with “American tradition.” At the same time, more Americans express greater tolerance of groups ,” Nazi Germany is largely a blue in the memories of most people, Nazi appear to have the only coherent, cohesive and consistent analysis of the cause of America’s social malaise and its solution.

A HOST OF DEVELOPMENTS

The fact that the anti-Semitic front, including neo-Nazism, can take hold in this country can be charted by a host of developments, including:

*KKK leader David Duke has appeared on more than 600 television and radio talk shows in the past two years.

*So-called sociologists like William Shockely, Arthur Jensen and Edward Williams, among others, are reviving racial theories and getting their works published in prestigious journals.

*Historical revisionists are flooding the market with books that contend the Holocaust was a myth.

*A new publication, institute for Historical Review, published in Torrance, California, advertises in a flyer soliciting subscriptions that armed with this journal “patriotic Americans can now see through the war-mongers’ hyperbole. We can spot the same interventionist formulas being dusted off and wheeled out yet again. We can learn to identify the ‘planting’ of stories in daily newspapers.” It then calls attention to such “in-depth investigations” by contributors to the journal as: “The fictitious ‘Holocaust’ and its role as a Zionist propaganda weapon. The absurdity of ‘gas chambers’. Anne Frank’s diary — a fake.”

*The January 12, 1979 Waxman poll found that 51.1 percent of the people it polled were not opposed to Nazi groups being given permits to march.

NEO NAZIS AND THE. NEW RIGHT

The National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) and its electoral front, the U.S. Labor-Party (USLP), has on estimated membership of 2500, cells in 33 cities, election machinery in more than 12 states, a national press and an estimated budget of over $2 million. In the 1978 elections the USLP, which has declared war on the “Jewish lobby,” international bankers, Jews in the U.S. government and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, fielded 72 candidates in 17 states, more than any other minority party and polled 8-30 percent of the votes in local and national elections.

Lyndon LaRouche, who heads the USLP and is running as a Presidential candidate, ran in the Democratic Party primaries in a number of states. In the California primary he received 50,000 votes or 2 percent. He has received $327,864 in federal matching grants for his 1980 presidential campaign. The USLP has a corporate-style headquarters in Washington, intelligence and political operations in 26 foreign cities, newspapers in several languages, and an international telex system. The NCLC and the USLP are financed by LaRouche’s multi-million dollar Computer Technologies Corporation with an estimated revenue of $3.5 to $5 million. A 1979 Computer soles brochure listed among its clients AT*T, Mobile Oil, Colgate-Palmolive and Bristol-Meyers.

*Gerald Carlson of Dearborn, Michigan, a former member of the local Nazi Party and a self-proclaimed white supremacist leader, won the Republic on nomination for the U.S. Congress to represent Michigan’s 15th District. Carlson, who won 55 percent of the vote, reportedly had been a member of the KKK, the National States Rights Party, the John Birch Society and the American Independent Party before joining the Nazis.

*The New Right, a loose coalition of old line extremist groups like the KKK and the John Birch Society together with political fund-raising groups like the National Conservative Political Action Committee, think-tank outfits like the Heritage Foundation and fundamentalist religious political groups like the Moral Majority. From only a handful of groups that, according to the Congressional Quarterly, raised some $250,000 in the 1972 campaigns, the New Right is now an ultra-sophisticated network of 60 organizations that may directly and indirectly pour some $30 million into the 1980 campaign.

*Reports from around the country indicate a steady increase in the number of synagogue and cemetery desecrations and swastika and Nazi slogan daubings on public buildings.

*American Nazi leader Harold Covington received 43 percent of the vote in the North Carolina Republican primary for Attorney General last May.

*KKK leader Tom Metzger won the Democratic nomination for Congress in California’s 43rd District.

*More people reportedly are indifferent to the Justice Department’s efforts to locate and deport former Nazis now living in this country and contend that these people should be left alone and in peace.

SCANT ATTENTION TO DEVELOPMENTS IN THE U.S.

Too many Jewish leaders take note of these developments but brush them aside as “flukes,” “troublesome,” and “a passing phenomenon.” Like Hitler’s aborted Munich beer hall putsch in 19233 Many of the Jewish leaders are more involved with developments that take place abroad than with those that take place at home. Certainly. it is imperative to address oneself to the plight of Jews in Iran, in Syria, in the Soviet Union, in Argentina, in Brazil, in Turkey, in Central America.

It is good to have a long-range view of anti-Semitism and to urge Jews in those countries to make aliya. It is also good to have a broad view of international developments as they might affect the well-being of Jews around the world. it is also necessary to deal with assimilation, intermarriage, federal aid to parochial schools, quotas; prayers in public schools, aiding victims of floods and other natural disasters.

But the most dangerous of all developments taking place in this country is getting scant attention from Jewish leaders The ask of developing policies that can quarantine all the anti-Semitic elements is imperative. And this requires more than an occasional statement of rebuke; it requires a massive and concerted campaign to mobilize public opinion against these groups and insistent demands that the law enforcement agencies ferret out and prosecute all those responsible for anti-Semitic actions and programs that lead to these actions, irregardless of the imbecilic liberalism practiced by the American Civil Liberties Union regarding these racists and neo-Nazis.

If legal suits can be instituted against individuals for stander and libel, then certainly legal steps can be taken to curtail the slander and libel practiced by neo-Nazis and their ilk against Jews. Far too long a time, American Jewish leaders have focussed their sights abroad to see how they can help Jews there. It is perhaps time for them to look here.