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And most of our intellectuals are only too happy to participate in the propaganda, Chomsky argues.
"War is the health of the State," wrote social critic Randolph Bourne in a classic essay as America
entered World War I:
"It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for

2. passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and
individuals which lack the larger herd sense. ... Other values such as artistic creation, knowledge,
reason, beauty, the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed, and the
significant classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the State are engaged not
only in sacrificing these values for themselves but in coercing all other persons into sacrificing
them."
And at the service of society's "significant classes" were the intelligentsia, "trained up in the
pragmatic dispensation, immensely ready for the executive ordering of events, pitifully unprepared
for the intellectual interpretation or the idealistic focusing of ends."
They are "lined up in service of the war-technique. There seems to have been a peculiar congeniality
between the war and these men. It is as if the war and they had been waiting for each other."
The role of the technical intelligentsia in decision-making is predominant in those parts of the
economy that are "in the service of the war technique" and closely linked to the government, which
underwrites their security and growth.
It is little wonder, then, that the technical intelligentsia is, typically, committed to what sociologist
Barrington Moore in 1968 called "the predatory solution of token reform at home and
counterrevolutionary imperialism abroad."
Moore offers the following summary of the "predominant voice of America at home and abroad" - an
ideology that expresses the needs of the American socioeconomic elite, that is propounded with
various gradations of subtlety by many American intellectuals, and that gains substantial adherence
on the part of the majority that has obtained "some share in the affluent society":
"You may protest in words as much as you like. There is but one condition attached to the freedom
we would very much like to encourage: Your protests may be as loud as possible as long as they
remain ineffective. ... Any attempt by you to remove your oppressors by force is a threat to civilized
society and the democratic process. ... As you resort to force, we will, if need be, wipe you from the
face of the earth by the measured response that rains down flame from the skies."
A society in which this is the predominant voice can be maintained only through some form of
national mobilization, which may range in its extent from, at the minimum, a commitment of
substantial resources to a credible threat of force and violence.
Given the realities of international politics, this commitment can be maintained in the United States
only by a form of national psychosis - a war against an enemy who appears in many guises: Kremlin
bureaucrat, Asian peasant, Latin American student, and, no doubt, "urban guerrilla" at home.
The intellectual has, traditionally, been caught between the conflicting demands of truth and power.
He would like to see himself as the man who seeks to discern the truth, to tell the truth as he sees it,
to act - collectively where he can, alone where he must - to oppose injustice and oppression, to help
bring a better social order into being.
If he chooses this path, he can expect to be a lonely creature, disregarded or reviled. If, on the other
hand, he brings his talents to the service of power, he can achieve prestige and affluence.
He may also succeed in persuading himself - perhaps, on occasion, with justice - that he can
humanize the exercise of power by the "significant classes." He may hope to join with them or even

3. replace them in the role of social management, in the ultimate interest of efficiency and freedom.
The intellectual who aspires to this role may use the rhetoric of revolutionary socialism or of
welfare-state social engineering in pursuit of his vision of a "meritocracy" in which knowledge and
technical ability confer power.
He may represent himself as part of a "revolutionary vanguard" leading the way to a new society or
as a technical expert applying "piecemeal technology" to the management of a society that can meet
its problems without fundamental changes.
For some, the choice may depend on little more than an assessment of the relative strength of
competing social forces. It comes as no surprise, then, that quite commonly the roles shift; the
student radical becomes the counterinsurgency expert.
His claims must, in either case, be viewed with suspicion: He is propounding the self-serving
ideology of a "meritocratic elite" that, in Karl Marx's phrase (applied, in this case, to the
bourgeoisie), defines "the special conditions of its emancipation [as] the general conditions through
which alone modern society can be saved."
The role of intellectuals and radical activists, then, must be to assess and evaluate, to attempt to
persuade, to organize, but not to seize power and rule. In 1904, Rosa Luxemburg wrote,
"Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful
than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee."
These remarks are a useful guide for the radical intellectual. They also provide a refreshing antidote
to the dogmatism so typical of discourse on the left, with its arid certainties and religious fervor
regarding matters that are barely understood - the self-destructive left-wing counterpart to the smug
superficiality of the defenders of the status quo who can perceive their own ideological commitments
no more than a fish can perceive that it swims in the sea.
It has always been taken for granted by radical thinkers, and quite rightly so, that effective political
action that threatens entrenched social interests will lead to "confrontation" and repression. It is,
correspondingly, a sign of intellectual bankruptcy for the left to seek to construct "confrontations"; it
is a clear indication that the efforts to organize significant social action have failed.
Particularly objectionable is the idea of designing confrontations so as to manipulate the unwitting
participants into accepting a point of view that does not grow out of meaningful experience, out of
real understanding. This is not only a testimony to political irrelevance, but also, precisely because it
is manipulative and coercive, a proper tactic only for a movement that aims to maintain an elitist,
authoritarian form of organization.
The opportunities for intellectuals to take part in a genuine movement for social change are many
and varied, and I think that certain general principles are clear. Intellectuals must be willing to face
facts and refrain from erecting convenient fantasies.
They must be willing to undertake the hard and serious intellectual work that is required for a real
contribution to understanding. They must avoid the temptation to join a repressive elite and must
help create the mass politics that will counteract - and ultimately control and replace - the strong
tendencies toward centralization and authoritarianism that are deeply rooted but not inescapable.
They must be prepared to face repression and to act in defense of the values they profess. In an

4. advanced industrial society, many possibilities exist for active popular participation in the control of
major institutions and the reconstruction of social life.
To some extent, we can create the future rather than merely observing the flow of events. Given the
stakes, it would be criminal to let real opportunities pass unexplored.
This article is adapted from the essay, "Knowledge and Power: Intellectuals and the Welfare-Warfare
State," which appeared in the 1970 book The New Left, edited by Priscilla Long. The essay is
reprinted in Masters of Mankind: Essays and Lectures, 1969-2013 by Noam Chomsky.
© 2014 Noam Chomsky
Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate
]]>
Related Stories
]]>
Tue, 02 Dec 2014 14:21:00 -0800 Noam Chomsky, AlterNet 1028017 at http://www.alternet.org
World Visions World chomsky
And most of our intellectuals are only too happy to participate in the propaganda, Chomsky argues.
"War is the health of the State," wrote social critic Randolph Bourne in a classic essay as America
entered World War I:
"It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for
passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and
individuals which lack the larger herd sense. ... Other values such as artistic creation, knowledge,
reason, beauty, the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed, and the
significant classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the State are engaged not
only in sacrificing these values for themselves but in coercing all other persons into sacrificing
them."
And at the service of society's "significant classes" were the intelligentsia, "trained up in the
pragmatic dispensation, immensely ready for the executive ordering of events, pitifully unprepared
for the intellectual interpretation or the idealistic focusing of ends."
They are "lined up in service of the war-technique. There seems to have been a peculiar congeniality
between the war and these men. It is as if the war and they had been waiting for each other."
The role of the technical intelligentsia in decision-making is predominant in those parts of the
economy that are "in the service of the war technique" and closely linked to the government, which
underwrites their security and growth.
It is little wonder, then, that the technical intelligentsia is, typically, committed to what sociologist
Barrington Moore in 1968 called "the predatory solution of token reform at home and
counterrevolutionary imperialism abroad."

5. Moore offers the following summary of the "predominant voice of America at home and abroad" - an
ideology that expresses the needs of the American socioeconomic elite, that is propounded with
various gradations of subtlety by many American intellectuals, and that gains substantial adherence
on the part of the majority that has obtained "some share in the affluent society":
"You may protest in words as much as you like. There is but one condition attached to the freedom
we would very much like to encourage: Your protests may be as loud as possible as long as they
remain ineffective. ... Any attempt by you to remove your oppressors by force is a threat to civilized
society and the democratic process. ... As you resort to force, we will, if need be, wipe you from the
face of the earth by the measured response that rains down flame from the skies."
A society in which this is the predominant voice can be maintained only through some form of
national mobilization, which may range in its extent from, at the minimum, a commitment of
substantial resources to a credible threat of force and violence.
Given the realities of international politics, this commitment can be maintained in the United States
only by a form of national psychosis - a war against an enemy who appears in many guises: Kremlin
bureaucrat, Asian peasant, Latin American student, and, no doubt, "urban guerrilla" at home.
The intellectual has, traditionally, been caught between the conflicting demands of truth and power.
He would like to see himself as the man who seeks to discern the truth, to tell the truth as he sees it,
to act - collectively where he can, alone where he must - to oppose injustice and oppression, to help
bring a better social order into being.
If he chooses this path, he can expect to be a lonely creature, disregarded or reviled. If, on the other
hand, he brings his talents to the service of power, he can achieve prestige and affluence.
He may also succeed in persuading himself - perhaps, on occasion, with justice - that he can
humanize the exercise of power by the "significant classes." He may hope to join with them or even
replace them in the role of social management, in the ultimate interest of efficiency and freedom.
The intellectual who aspires to this role may use the rhetoric of revolutionary socialism or of
welfare-state social engineering in pursuit of his vision of a "meritocracy" in which knowledge and
technical ability confer power.
He may represent himself as part of a "revolutionary vanguard" leading the way to a new society or
as a technical expert applying "piecemeal technology" to the management of a society that can meet
its problems without fundamental changes.
For some, the choice may depend on little more than an assessment of the relative strength of
competing social forces. It comes as no surprise, then, that quite commonly the roles shift; the
student radical becomes the counterinsurgency expert.
His claims must, in either case, be viewed with suspicion: He is propounding the self-serving
ideology of a "meritocratic elite" that, in Karl Marx's phrase (applied, in this case, to the
bourgeoisie), defines "the special conditions of its emancipation [as] the general conditions through
which alone modern society can be saved."
The role of intellectuals and radical activists, then, must be to assess and evaluate, to attempt to
persuade, to organize, but not to seize power and rule. In 1904, Rosa Luxemburg wrote,
"Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful

6. than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee."
These remarks are a useful guide for the radical intellectual. They also provide a refreshing antidote
to the dogmatism so typical of discourse on the left, with its arid certainties and religious fervor
regarding matters that are barely understood - the self-destructive left-wing counterpart to the smug
superficiality of the defenders of the status quo who can perceive their own ideological commitments
no more than a fish can perceive that it swims in the sea.
It has always been taken for granted by radical thinkers, and quite rightly so, that effective political
action that threatens entrenched social interests will lead to "confrontation" and repression. It is,
correspondingly, a sign of intellectual bankruptcy for the left to seek to construct "confrontations"; it
is a clear indication that the efforts to organize significant social action have failed.
Particularly objectionable is the idea of designing confrontations so as to manipulate the unwitting
participants into accepting a point of view that does not grow out of meaningful experience, out of
real understanding. This is not only a testimony to political irrelevance, but also, precisely because it
is manipulative and coercive, a proper tactic only for a movement that aims to maintain an elitist,
authoritarian form of organization.
The opportunities for intellectuals to take part in a genuine movement for social change are many
and varied, and I think that certain general principles are clear. Intellectuals must be willing to face
facts and refrain from erecting convenient fantasies.
They must be willing to undertake the hard and serious intellectual work that is required for a real
contribution to understanding. They must avoid the temptation to join a repressive elite and must
help create the mass politics that will counteract - and ultimately control and replace - the strong
tendencies toward centralization and authoritarianism that are deeply rooted but not inescapable.
They must be prepared to face repression and to act in defense of the values they profess. In an
advanced industrial society, many possibilities exist for active popular participation in the control of
major institutions and the reconstruction of social life.
To some extent, we can create the future rather than merely observing the flow of events. Given the
stakes, it would be criminal to let real opportunities pass unexplored.
This article is adapted from the essay, "Knowledge and Power: Intellectuals and the Welfare-Warfare
State," which appeared in the 1970 book The New Left, edited by Priscilla Long. The essay is
reprinted in Masters of Mankind: Essays and Lectures, 1969-2013 by Noam Chomsky.
© 2014 Noam Chomsky
Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate
]]>
Related Stories
]]>
http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/shocking-expose-reveals-ebays-sha

7. meless-efforts-steal
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/80102849/0/alternet~Shocking-Expose-Reveals-eBays-Shameless-Efforts
-to-Steal-Craigslists-Secret-Sauce
Pando.com reports on another ugly Silicon Valley "success" story.
Silicon Valley likes to think of itself as inventing the future, but sometimes its fortunes are made the
old-fashioned way: through deceit, plunder, lying and outright theft.
That is the storyline in a detailed investigative report from Pando.com, a website covering the
valley, describing how eBay and its founder, Pierre Omidyar, hijacked a slew of trade secrets for the
giant online auction and retail website from Craigslist.com, the humble classified ads website. These
acts helped eBay launch its own online classified ads market, Craigslist said.
What makes the Pando.com report by Mark Ames so intriguing is that once upon a time when
Internet startups were more altruistic, Craigslist was a real Silicon Valley outlier. Its founders, Craig
Newmark and Jim Buckmaster, didn’t really want to make money with every online
transaction. They were more interested in building an online community that had shared values
where people helped each other out.
In contrast, eBay, according to the extensive trail of litigation spanning a decade, was more
concerned with making money. Sure, Omidyar was known in corporate circles as a benevolent
entrepreneur, creating and posting ethical codes of conduct on eBay and talking the same values-laden
talk as the Craiglisters. But somewhere along the line, according to Pando, eBay executives,
including Omidyar, concluded that their path to prosperity was through acquiring Craigslist.
Omidyar charmed his way into a seat on the Craigslist board, according to the documents, and eBay
eventually acquired about one-quarter of the company. Then, apparently unbeknownst to Craigslist,
Omidyar and eBay used that perch to literally datamine Craigslist’s operation, copying
thousands of pages of user information that could help eBay design its own
website—Kijiji.com—to compete with Craigslist.
What’s intriguing about this story is that the Craigslist founders believed Pierre Omidyar was
cut from the same counter-cultural cloth as they were, and this belief persisted long into the
charade. Omidyar, if the lawsuit documents are correct, behaved like a double agent, being friendly
to the Craiglisters in public, while plotting privately with eBay execs to steal Craigslist’s
business.
Silicon Valley is filled with lawyers who will draw up nondisclosure agreements, non-competitive
agreements and the like. But it is still an arena where personal contacts and relationships can
matter more than computer code. It’s almost painful to read how eBay execs derided the
Craigslisters as babes in the digital woods—innocent and easily duped. Similarly, it appears
the Craigslisters were naïve and wanted badly to believe that Omidyar and the other eBay
executives they were dealing with were honest and shared their values.
But now they know better. The Pando.com report is filled with backstabbing details: after Omidyar
was forced off the Craigslist board, he threatened the company’s founders that eBay would
“acquire 100 percent of Craigslist whether it took decades and, if necessary, over
Newmark’s and Buckmaster’s dead bodies.”
By then, this Silicon Valley fight had become a bad soap opera because eBay owned more than a

8. quarter of Craigslist's stock—and eBay wasn’t going to give any back. If anything, they
wanted to own all of the company and kept saying so. Meanwhile, Craigslist’s founders
didn’t want to admit they had a business partner who was like a treasonous family member
trying to steal the family jewels.
“Mr. Newmark and Mr. Buckmaster were taken aback by eBay’s behavior, and feared
that they had a wolf in sheep’s clothing in their midst. However, they still had tremendous
respect for the moral compass of Mr. Omidyar, and craigslist tried to review in good faith even
extreme proposals made by eBay, particularly since many of the proposals were couched in terms of
community service.” —Craigslist v. eBay, Fourth Amended Complaint
The litigation between Craigslist and eBay is ongoing. Both companies are great successes. Their
founders and executives are famous in business circles and beyond. Meg
Whitman, eBay’s former CEO, was a Republican candidate for governor in California in
2010, after much of the chicanery between eBay and Craigslist occurred. Whitman became Hewlett-
Packard’s CEO after losing to Democrat Jerry Brown.
But the lesson here is akin to a morality play about capitalism and ethics. As a Delaware judge
summarized in one of many rulings on this multifaceted dispute, “For most of its history,
Craigslist has not focused on ‘monetizing’ its site… It might be said that eBay is
a moniker for monetization, and that Craigslist is anything but.”
That’s the crux of it. If you want to do something in Silicon Valley that has some value outside
the capitalist cannon—such as creating a true community—then beware! Not only is
it apparently old-fashioned, naïve and simplistic to promote community values and digital tools
to create that culture, it’s also dangling red meat to circling sharks who pose as good guys
when they’re not.ÂÂ
]]>
Related Stories
]]>
Tue, 02 Dec 2014 15:12:00 -0800 Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet 1028021 at http://www.alternet.org
Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace Economy
Pando.com ebay craigslist stealing trade secrets
Pando.com reports on another ugly Silicon Valley "success" story.
Silicon Valley likes to think of itself as inventing the future, but sometimes its fortunes are made the
old-fashioned way: through deceit, plunder, lying and outright theft.
That is the storyline in a detailed investigative report from Pando.com, a website covering the
valley, describing how eBay and its founder, Pierre Omidyar, hijacked a slew of trade secrets for the
giant online auction and retail website from Craigslist.com, the humble classified ads website. These
acts helped eBay launch its own online classified ads market, Craigslist said.
What makes the Pando.com report by Mark Ames so intriguing is that once upon a time when
Internet startups were more altruistic, Craigslist was a real Silicon Valley outlier. Its founders, Craig
Newmark and Jim Buckmaster, didn’t really want to make money with every online

9. transaction. They were more interested in building an online community that had shared values
where people helped each other out.
In contrast, eBay, according to the extensive trail of litigation spanning a decade, was more
concerned with making money. Sure, Omidyar was known in corporate circles as a benevolent
entrepreneur, creating and posting ethical codes of conduct on eBay and talking the same values-laden
talk as the Craiglisters. But somewhere along the line, according to Pando, eBay executives,
including Omidyar, concluded that their path to prosperity was through acquiring Craigslist.
Omidyar charmed his way into a seat on the Craigslist board, according to the documents, and eBay
eventually acquired about one-quarter of the company. Then, apparently unbeknownst to Craigslist,
Omidyar and eBay used that perch to literally datamine Craigslist’s operation, copying
thousands of pages of user information that could help eBay design its own
website—Kijiji.com—to compete with Craigslist.
What’s intriguing about this story is that the Craigslist founders believed Pierre Omidyar was
cut from the same counter-cultural cloth as they were, and this belief persisted long into the
charade. Omidyar, if the lawsuit documents are correct, behaved like a double agent, being friendly
to the Craiglisters in public, while plotting privately with eBay execs to steal Craigslist’s
business.
Silicon Valley is filled with lawyers who will draw up nondisclosure agreements, non-competitive
agreements and the like. But it is still an arena where personal contacts and relationships can
matter more than computer code. It’s almost painful to read how eBay execs derided the
Craigslisters as babes in the digital woods—innocent and easily duped. Similarly, it appears
the Craigslisters were naïve and wanted badly to believe that Omidyar and the other eBay
executives they were dealing with were honest and shared their values.
But now they know better. The Pando.com report is filled with backstabbing details: after Omidyar
was forced off the Craigslist board, he threatened the company’s founders that eBay would
“acquire 100 percent of Craigslist whether it took decades and, if necessary, over
Newmark’s and Buckmaster’s dead bodies.”
By then, this Silicon Valley fight had become a bad soap opera because eBay owned more than a
quarter of Craigslist's stock—and eBay wasn’t going to give any back. If anything, they
wanted to own all of the company and kept saying so. Meanwhile, Craigslist’s founders
didn’t want to admit they had a business partner who was like a treasonous family member
trying to steal the family jewels.
“Mr. Newmark and Mr. Buckmaster were taken aback by eBay’s behavior, and feared
that they had a wolf in sheep’s clothing in their midst. However, they still had tremendous
respect for the moral compass of Mr. Omidyar, and craigslist tried to review in good faith even
extreme proposals made by eBay, particularly since many of the proposals were couched in terms of
community service.” —Craigslist v. eBay, Fourth Amended Complaint
The litigation between Craigslist and eBay is ongoing. Both companies are great successes. Their
founders and executives are famous in business circles and beyond. Meg
Whitman, eBay’s former CEO, was a Republican candidate for governor in California in
2010, after much of the chicanery between eBay and Craigslist occurred. Whitman became Hewlett-
Packard’s CEO after losing to Democrat Jerry Brown.

10. But the lesson here is akin to a morality play about capitalism and ethics. As a Delaware judge
summarized in one of many rulings on this multifaceted dispute, “For most of its history,
Craigslist has not focused on ‘monetizing’ its site… It might be said that eBay is
a moniker for monetization, and that Craigslist is anything but.”
That’s the crux of it. If you want to do something in Silicon Valley that has some value outside
the capitalist cannon—such as creating a true community—then beware! Not only is
it apparently old-fashioned, naïve and simplistic to promote community values and digital tools
to create that culture, it’s also dangling red meat to circling sharks who pose as good guys
when they’re not.ÂÂ
]]>
Related Stories
]]>
http://www.alternet.org/media/touching-hug-photo-ferguson-protests-blatant-lie
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/80068564/0/alternet~The-Touching-Hug-Photo-From-Ferguson-Protests-
Is-a-Blatant-Lie
The image instantly had a deep appeal to those looking for a soft focus view of race in America.
The camera is a superb liar. It only shows one moment, and has no obligation to explain the bigger
picture behind it. The selective use of photographs can therefore replace truth with whatever visual
detail we choose to fix on. Horror or schmaltz, the effect is the same, to simplify reality and turn a
story into a deceptively straightforward image.
In the 1930s and 1940s the dishonest manipulation of photographs was a speciality of state
propagandists. Backroom technicians in totalitarian darkrooms removed unwanted faces from
pictures and turned emotive images into posters. Today, we don’t need propaganda machines
to deceive us because we can make hypocritical and self-manipulating choices ourselves just by
“liking” the pictures that show us what we want to see and ignoring those that are
more awkward.
The protests in America against a grand jury’s decision not to indict white police officer
Darren Wilson for shooting dead unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri,
have thrown up a sickly sweet instance of this modern dishonesty.
Of all the disturbing images of streets on fire and crowds unappeased that have seethed since the
grand jury decision in Ferguson set off protests across America, one of the most popular online turns
out to be a touching moment of interracial togetherness. You heard me. Like a supermarket
Christmas ad, this photograph taken at a Ferguson protest in Portland, Oregon, feasts on a moment
of truce and peace amid the anger.
It shows 12-year-old protester Devonte Hart sobbing as he hugs a white police officer. The
officer’s face too is tenderly emotional. The cop appears to be comforting the boy. After all
the anger, all the divisions, here is a moment of human reconciliation.
What nonsense. It is one moment among many, and the choice to look at it and celebrate it is clearly

11. a choice to be lulled by cotton candy. It has got more than 400,000 Facebook shares. Each one of
those shares is a choice of what to see and what not to see. In the context of the completely
unresolved and immensely troubling situation, not just in Ferguson but across the United States,
where Ferguson has opened wounds that go back centuries, this picture is a blatant lie.
A picture does not have to be staged to be a lie. It just has to be massively unrepresentative of the
wider facts and enthusiastically promoted to iconic status in a way that obscures those facts. This
photograph, which first appeared in the Oregonian newspaper, was taken after Hart stood on the
protest line with a banner that said “Free Hugs”. Portland police sergeant Bret
Barnum got talking to the boy and asked if he could have a hug as well.
What a photo opportunity. In terms of straight news values, this tender moment offered a bit of
variety from glum scenes of protest. Yet it instantly had a deep appeal to those looking for a soft
focus view of race in America.
A woman in the background is taking her own picture of the warm scene. She can’t wait to
share it. What a heart-stopping, iconic, totally emotional photograph. Add a weeping emoticon or
whatever seems eloquent to you.
Sentimentality used to be the preserve of musicals and Hollywood: now it shapes the news.
Photographs are no longer carefully chosen by newspaper picture editors to craft the story. Of
course, the traditional media are no strangers to manipulating reality – consciously or
unconsciously – with photographs. But when news images are given life and meaning by the
number of times they are shared on Facebook, the only editorial control is sentiment. This picture is
cute, therefore popular, therefore true.
Has truth itself become a popularity contest now? Countless photographic images are produced
every day, recording multitudinous events. The process by which a few of those pictures become
“iconic” is not rational and does not have any responsible superego in charge of it. It
surely seems absurd – given the seriousness of what happened in Ferguson – that a
nation’s new, yet old, encounter with its most destructive division can be summed up by this
soppy picture of a tearful hug.
Liking this picture as a definitive image of America’s race crisis is the equivalent of locking
yourself in and turning up the volume to weep at Frozen while the streets are burning outside.
Which is exactly what white Americans apparently want to do. Truth is a flimsy thing. It can be
destroyed by a hug.
]]>
Related Stories
]]>
Tue, 02 Dec 2014 11:23:00 -0800 Jonathan Jones, The Guardian 1028005 at http://www.alternet.org
Media Media ferguson photograph hug protests
The image instantly had a deep appeal to those looking for a soft focus view of race in America.
The camera is a superb liar. It only shows one moment, and has no obligation to explain the bigger
picture behind it. The selective use of photographs can therefore replace truth with whatever visual

12. detail we choose to fix on. Horror or schmaltz, the effect is the same, to simplify reality and turn a
story into a deceptively straightforward image.
In the 1930s and 1940s the dishonest manipulation of photographs was a speciality of state
propagandists. Backroom technicians in totalitarian darkrooms removed unwanted faces from
pictures and turned emotive images into posters. Today, we don’t need propaganda machines
to deceive us because we can make hypocritical and self-manipulating choices ourselves just by
“liking” the pictures that show us what we want to see and ignoring those that are
more awkward.
The protests in America against a grand jury’s decision not to indict white police officer
Darren Wilson for shooting dead unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri,
have thrown up a sickly sweet instance of this modern dishonesty.
Of all the disturbing images of streets on fire and crowds unappeased that have seethed since the
grand jury decision in Ferguson set off protests across America, one of the most popular online turns
out to be a touching moment of interracial togetherness. You heard me. Like a supermarket
Christmas ad, this photograph taken at a Ferguson protest in Portland, Oregon, feasts on a moment
of truce and peace amid the anger.
It shows 12-year-old protester Devonte Hart sobbing as he hugs a white police officer. The
officer’s face too is tenderly emotional. The cop appears to be comforting the boy. After all
the anger, all the divisions, here is a moment of human reconciliation.
What nonsense. It is one moment among many, and the choice to look at it and celebrate it is clearly
a choice to be lulled by cotton candy. It has got more than 400,000 Facebook shares. Each one of
those shares is a choice of what to see and what not to see. In the context of the completely
unresolved and immensely troubling situation, not just in Ferguson but across the United States,
where Ferguson has opened wounds that go back centuries, this picture is a blatant lie.
A picture does not have to be staged to be a lie. It just has to be massively unrepresentative of the
wider facts and enthusiastically promoted to iconic status in a way that obscures those facts. This
photograph, which first appeared in the Oregonian newspaper, was taken after Hart stood on the
protest line with a banner that said “Free Hugs”. Portland police sergeant Bret
Barnum got talking to the boy and asked if he could have a hug as well.
What a photo opportunity. In terms of straight news values, this tender moment offered a bit of
variety from glum scenes of protest. Yet it instantly had a deep appeal to those looking for a soft
focus view of race in America.
A woman in the background is taking her own picture of the warm scene. She can’t wait to
share it. What a heart-stopping, iconic, totally emotional photograph. Add a weeping emoticon or
whatever seems eloquent to you.
Sentimentality used to be the preserve of musicals and Hollywood: now it shapes the news.
Photographs are no longer carefully chosen by newspaper picture editors to craft the story. Of
course, the traditional media are no strangers to manipulating reality – consciously or
unconsciously – with photographs. But when news images are given life and meaning by the
number of times they are shared on Facebook, the only editorial control is sentiment. This picture is
cute, therefore popular, therefore true.

13. Has truth itself become a popularity contest now? Countless photographic images are produced
every day, recording multitudinous events. The process by which a few of those pictures become
“iconic” is not rational and does not have any responsible superego in charge of it. It
surely seems absurd – given the seriousness of what happened in Ferguson – that a
nation’s new, yet old, encounter with its most destructive division can be summed up by this
soppy picture of a tearful hug.
Liking this picture as a definitive image of America’s race crisis is the equivalent of locking
yourself in and turning up the volume to weep at Frozen while the streets are burning outside.
Which is exactly what white Americans apparently want to do. Truth is a flimsy thing. It can be
destroyed by a hug.
]]>
Related Stories
]]>
http://www.alternet.org/world/why-i-was-censored-talking-about-israel-germany
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/80103498/0/alternet~Why-I-Was-Censored-from-Talking-About-Israel-In-
Germany
Lefty Germans, blinded by collective guilt, have become intolerant and close minded.
I arrived in Germany formally invited by members of a political party to speak about my reporting
during the Gaza war. I left the country branded an anti-Semite and an insane scofflaw. With
machine-like efficiency, German media cast me and my Jewish Israeli journalist colleague, David
Sheen, as violent Jew haters, never veering from the script written for them by a strange American
neoconservative working for an organization subsidized by far-right-wing casino mogul Sheldon
Adelson, nor bothering to ask either of us for comment. Slandered as anti-Semites, we sought to
meet with the left-wing politician who felt compelled to engineer the campaign to suppress our
speech: Die Linke party chairman Gregor Gysi.
When Gysi refused to speak to us, we followed him as he ran from his office. The videotaped incident
ended at a door outside what turned out to be a bathroom, sparking a scandal known as
“Toilettengate.” We had violated the unwritten rules of a dour political culture where
conflict normally takes the form of carefully composed pronouncements delivered through proper
bureaucratic channels. Thus we aroused the outrage of Deutschland, from left to right nimbly
manipulated through a neoconservative ploy.
According to the right-wing Die Bild tabloid, Sheen and I were “lunatic Israel haters”
who had “hunted Gysi.” Various pundits on German public broadcasting declared that I
was “known for [my] anti-Semitic way of thinking.” And the president of the Bundestag
introduced a motion to ban us for life from the premises. As the freak-out escalated, the three Die
Linke MPs who guided us to Gysi’s office— Inge Hoger, Annette Groth and Heike
Hansel — delivered Gysi an abject public apology.
Our hosts’ whimpering only served to incite their enemies. More than 1,000 Die Linke
members from the party’s “reformist” faction have signed a letter calling for
the three MPs to be sacked. Titled “You Don’t Speak For Us,” the manifesto

14. opened with an excerpt from a 2008 speech to the Bundestag by former Israeli president Shimon
Peres in which he compared Iran to Nazi Germany and ended with an affirmation of
Germany’s special relationship with Israel, as the cleansing of the Holocaust.
A Der Spiegel columnist named Sibylle Berg joined the pile-on with a crude piece of sexist
psychobabble accusing Groth and Hoger of sublimating sexual lust for Palestinian militants into anti-
Zionist activity. In Taggespiel, Die Linke MP Michael Leutert referred to us as an “anti-
Semitic mob.” And in Die Zeit, another mainstream outlet, Elisabeth Niejahr cast Groth
and Hoger as “Holocaust down players.” She had no evidence, but in German political
culture, none was necessary. Either you are all-in with Israel’s policies, or you are an all-out
anti-Semite.
The storm of controversy triggered by our presence in Berlin was the culmination of the Die Linke
party’s long-running internecine conflict on Israel-Palestine. Since emerging as
Germany’s main left-wing opposition party, Die Linke leaders have presided over a full-scale
assault on the few party members who rejected Germany’s uncritical special relationship
with Israel. Behind the attack is a group of putatively left-wing intellectuals allied with heavily
funded neoconservative operatives. The most effective weapon of this left-right alliance in a society
consumed with Holocaust guilt is what some Germans have begun to refer to as the Antisemitismus-keule,
or the anti-Semitism club.
Smears and Suppression
The story of my and David Sheen's adventure as “anti-Semites” began even before our
arrival to Berlin. I had covered the Gaza war and spoke about my reporting across Europe, often as
the invited guest of members of parliaments—in London at the House of Commons, in Brussels
before the European Parliament, in Oslo at the invitation of the Socialist Left Party, and in
Copenhagen, where I was introduced by a member of the Danish parliament. Sheen has earned
acclaim for his reporting on state-sponsored discrimination within Israel against Palestinians and
African migrants and the right-wing attacks on them. Together, we produced an original
documentary on racism against non-Jewish African refugees in Israel that has received over a million
views on YouTube.
As we prepared for our flights, we were greeted with a November 6 article in the Berliner
Morgenpost by a neoconservative writer named Benjamin Weinthal, announcing the cancellation of
our planned discussion in the Bundestag. Die Linke party chairman Gregor Gysi claimed
responsibility for terminating the talk, while Volker Beck of the Green Party and chair of the
Germany-Israel Committee contributed his opinion to the writer that my work was
“consistently anti-Semitic.” Weinthal, for his part, accused me of the “public
abuse of Jews.”
The next day, Beck published a letter signed by Bundestag vice president Petra Pau (a key Israel
lobby supporter in the Die Linke party) and German-Israeli Friendship Society president Reinhold
Robbe demanding the cancelation of our event at the Berlin theater known as the Volksbuehne. The
letter claimed our event would serve “to promote anti-Semitic prejudice by comparing the
terror of the Nazis with Israeli policies.” Within hours, Volksbuehne officials pulled the plug.
Weinthal took to his regular roost at the Jerusalem Post to announce the cancellation of an event
that would “spread anti-Semitism.”
On November 9, the morning our Volkesbuehne discussion was scheduled to take place, we wound
up speaking through a loudspeaker to 100 supporters gathered outside the shuttered doors of the

15. theater. It was the 76th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom and the 25th anniversary of the fall
of the Berlin Wall. To our adversaries, it was a date that somehow rendered any criticism of the state
of Israel and its policies verboten — along with Hitler’s birthday and every other date
remotely associated with the Holocaust. For us, it was the perfect time to explain how the legacy of
the European genocide had inspired our work, to emphasize that “never again” meant
never again to anyone.
In my address, I lamented that the most basic universal lessons of the Holocaust had been rejected
by the German government in favor of a cheap absolution that took the form of discounted weapons
sales to an army of occupation. Indeed, the German government recently sold Israel a fleet of
Corvette attack boats at a 30 percent reduction to reinforce the siege of Gaza and enable further
attacks on the coastal enclave’s beleaguered fishing industry. Next year, 250 German
soldiers will drill at Israel’s Urban Warfare Training Center in counter-insurgency tactics, an
unprecedented step in military collaboration. As a mere visitor to Germany, I was spared the long-term
personal consequences of questioning how military aid to Israel honored the millions turned to
ashes. When the famed German author Gunther Grass challenged the weapons sales in a polemical
and arguably clumsy poem, he faced a tidal wave of character assassination attempts and the
immediate loss of prestige. (Then-Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai declared Grass persona non
grata, issuing a standing order to deny him entry to Israeli-controlled territory.)
After the protest, we marched to a cramped anti-war cafe a few blocks away to carry out our
discussion on Gaza and state-sponsored Israeli racism as originally conceived. As we spoke to an
overflow crowd in a catacomb-like basement, 500 neo-Nazi football hooligans marched nearby
against the supposed threat of “Salafism.” Police dispatched by the city protected the
marchers, dispersing a small counter-demonstration.
Meanwhile, Gysi stood by for instructions in the event that we were able to find a venue for our talk
inside the Bundestag the following day. Though he was hardly a cheerleader for Netanyahu, he had
proven himself an essential ally of his country’s Israel lobby, presiding over Die
Linke’s transition from anti-Zionism into a full embrace of the country’s post-reunification
consensus on Israel.
“Jewish Anti-Zionism As a Total Illusion”
Once the leader of the reformist wing of Erich Honecker's Socialist Unity Party (SED) in East
Germany, Gysi supported the dismantling of his party even as he opposed reunification with West
Germany. He has since emerged as one of the most charismatic figures of the current opposition in
the German parliament, earning attention for his sharp oratory while waging an aggressive legal
battle to suppress public discussion of his alleged role as a Stasi agent.
When Merkel’s right-of-center Christian Democratic Union (CDU) rose to power, Gysi began
his efforts to reposition Die Linke as a potential coalition partner capable of allying with the Green
Party and the Social Democrats. This meant adapting right-leaning elements inside Die Linke like
the Forum Demokratischer Sozialismus that aimed to crush the party’s anti-war vestiges.
(Most of the figures who signed the letter denouncing me, Sheen and our Die Linke hosts were
affiliated with FDS.)
During an address before the Rosa Luxemburg Institute on the occasion of Israel’s 60th
birthday in 2008, Gysi made his most public bid for mainstream respectability. Proclaiming that anti-imperialism
could no longer "be placed in a meaningful way" within leftist discourse, Gysi railed
against expressions of Palestine solidarity within his party. "Anti-Zionism can no longer be an

16. acceptable position for the left in general, and the Die Linke party in particular,” he declared.
He went on to describe “solidarity with Israel” as an essential component of
Germany’s “reason of state.”
Following a stem-winding survey of the Zionist movement’s history and its criticism from
within the left, Gysi concluded, “If we choose a position of enlightened Jewish anti-
Zionism...we still have the problem of ignoring the worst experiences of the 20th century, which
expose enlightened Jewish anti-Zionism as a total illusion.”
The Die Linke leader’s speech echoed an address delivered in Israel’s Knesset just a
few months prior by Chancellor Angela Merkel in which she declared that preserving
“Israel’s security…is part of my country’s raison d’être.”
In a sardonic assessment of Gysi’s foreign policy pivot, left-wing columnist Werner Pirker
wrote, “Gysi admires the Israeli democracy not in spite of, but because of its
exclusiveness… With his anniversary speech for Israel Gregor Gysi passed his foreign policy
test.”
In June 2011, Gysi imposed a de facto gag rule on his party’s left wing called the
“Three Point Catalog.” It read as follows: "We will neither take part in [political]
initiatives on the Middle East which (1) call for a one-state-solution for Palestine and Israel, nor (2)
call for boycotts against Israeli products, nor (3) will we take part in this year's 'Gaza-flotilla'. We
expect from our personal employees and our fraction employees that they champion these
positions.”
A month later, Die Linke’s executive board voted for the first time to recognize Israel’s
“right to exist.” Among those who took credit for the vote, and for sustaining pressure
on Gysi, was a recently formed pro-Israel organization called BAK Shalom.
The Anti-Germans
BAK Shalom drew its membership from adherents of the bizarre movement known as “die
antideutsch Linke”—in short, the Anti-Germans. Born after reunification against the
phantom threat of a second Holocaust and in supposed opposition to German nationalism, the Anti-
German movement aimed to infiltrate leftist anti-fascist circles in order to promote unwavering
support for the Israeli government and undermine traditional networks of leftist organizing. BAK
Shalom’s manifesto pledges “solidarity with defense measures of any kind”
against the Palestinians and backs American foreign policy on the basis of purely reactionary
impulses: The US is Israel’s most aggressive patron and the ultimate target of Israel’s
enemies, therefore opponents of “anti-Semitism” must lend it their total support.
Though many top Antideutsch ideologues emerged from Marxist and anarchist intellectual circles,
they are united in their opposition to what they call “regressive anti-capitalism.”
According to BAK Shalom’s manifesto, because “complex and abstract capitalist
relations are personified and identified as Jews,” anti-capitalism is a subtle but dangerous
form of Jew hatred. In 2012, Anti-German activists mobilized in opposition to the Blockupy
movement that occupied the European Central Bank and the Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt, casting it
as an inherently anti-Semitic movement simply because of its opposition to globalized capitalism.
Incapable of viewing Jews as individuals or normal people with differing viewpoints, the Anti-
Germans inadvertently advanced the anti-Semitic trope of Jewish control over world finance.

17. In 2003, hardcore Anti-German activists took to the streets in 2003 to support George W.
Bush’s invasion of Iraq. At rallies in support of Israel’s assaults on Southern Lebanon
and Gaza, Anti-German forces belted out chants alongside far-right Jewish Defense League militants
and flew Israeli flags beside the red and black banners familiar to anti-fascist forces. One of the
movement’s top ideologues, the Austrian political scientist Stephan Grigat, oversees an
ironically named astroturf group, Stop The Bomb, that advocates unilateral bombing campaigns
against Iran. Grigat collaborates closely with right-wing outfits like the Simon Weisenthal Center as
well as ultra-Zionist BAK Shalom allies like Die Linke’s Petra Pau.
There might only be about several thousand Germans who identify with the Anti-German sensibility.
The movement’s intellectual avant-garde, a collection of dour critical theorists and political
scientists gathered around obscure journals like Bahamas, numbers at most in the low hundreds.
According to BAK Shalom spokesman and Die Linke member Benjamin Kruger, his organization
contains only 140 members. But thanks to the Holocaust guilt that consumes German society, these
elements operate on fertile territory. As the translator and anti-racist activist Maciej Zurowski
explained, by infiltrating Die Linke and the Social Democratic Party’s youth groups, along
with key left-wing institutions like the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, “[Anti-German elements]
are strategically well placed to promote ‘young talent’, while cutting off their
opponents’ money supply.”
Previously limited to the top-heavy realms of the country’s political and financial
establishment, it is through such sectarian groups that the pro-Israel lobby finally secured a base
within the German left.
Good Jew, Bad Jew
In 2009, two years after the foundation of BAK Shalom, a witch-hunt forced a Die Linke member
named Hermann Dierkes to quit his campaign for the mayor of Duisburg. He was accused of
“pure anti-Semitism” by the Central Jewish Council for supporting the Palestinian-led
BDS (boycott, divest, sanctions) campaign — a human rights campaign German supporters of
Israel routinely equate with the Nazi-era boycott of Jews. The same year, Israeli lobby pressure
forced Munich city authorities to cancel a talk by Ilan Pappe, the dissident Israeli historian. Pappe
protested afterward that his father “was silenced in a similar way as a German Jew in the
early 1930s.”
By 2010, BAK Shalom demanded the cancellation of a speech by Norman Finkelstein, a well-known
political scientist highly critical of Israel’s policies, organized by a few anti-imperialist Die
Linke MPs. BAK Shalom leaders accused Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, of
“historical revisionism” and for being “internationally popular among anti-
Semites”—guilt by association with unnamed villains. Weinthal amplified the attacks by
claiming in the Jerusalem Post that Finkelstein was “pandering to subtle anti-
Semitism.” With his events canceled by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and defunded by the
Green Party-affiliated Heinrich Boll Foundation, Finkelstein canceled his plane ticket and stayed
home in Brooklyn.
The same year, BAK Shalom stepped up pressure on its allies inside Die Linke to purge MPs Groth
and Hoger. The two MPs had traveled on the Free Gaza Flotilla and spent time in an Israeli prison
after Israeli naval commandos massacred nine passengers aboard the Mavi Marmara ship. After
their return to Berlin, the two politicians were branded as Hamas allies and anti-Semites for their
participation in the humanitarian mission. The attacks set the stage for the storm that would erupt
when Groth and Hoger decided to invite me and Sheen to meet with them and speak at the

18. Bundestag.
When the renowned Jewish-American scholar and outspoken Israel critic Judith Butler was awarded
the city of Frankfurt’s prestigious Theodore Adorno Prize in 2012, Germany’s Israel
lobby escalated its campaign to suppress free speech on the subject of Israel. At a protest outside
the Frankfurt church where Butler was to receive her prize, the Anti-German academic and former
Green Party advisor Matthias Kuntzel conjured the terrifying specter of a second Holocaust on
German soil. He cast Butler as the key progenitor of a “new anti-Jewish discourse.” As
the demonstrations were whipped up outside, Butler felt compelled to enter the ceremony in her
honor through a back door.
With ruthless efficiency, Germany’s Israel lobby established a new code for Jewish behavior:
Jews who supported Israel without reservation were necessarily “good,” while those
who agitated for Palestinian human rights or expressed a universalist perspective on the Holocaust
were absolutely “bad.” The good Jews would be showered with adulation and publicly
fetishized while the Bad Jews (Finkelstein, Pappe, Butler et al.) could be boycotted and battered with
the Antisemitismus-keule — the anti-Semitism club. Even the gentile grandchildren of Nazis
were welcome to raise this blunt weapon against the Bad Jews. By suppressing critical discussion of
Israel, they were purified of the taint of the Holocaust and able to play the role of judges in the old
question: Who is a Jew?
Last year, I was labeled a Bad Jew on a blacklist that would serve as a singular guide to my work for
Germany’s Israel lobby.
Adelson’s Man in Berlin
In December 2013, my name wound up on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s 2013 list of the
year’s top “Anti-Semitic/Anti-Israel slurs.” I was number nine, tied with the
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker and eight slots behind Ayatollah Khomeini. It was a
ludicrous document of neo-McCarthyism filled with distortions, hyperbole and bizarre non-sequiturs.
In the U.S., it was ignored when it was not mocked.
The listing was prompted by my recent book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, but
did not dispute a single fact in the 450-page work. Instead of addressing the substance of my book,
the Wiesenthal Center took issue with the titles of many of its chapters, claiming that I had drawn
direct comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany, though those chapter titles were taken from
quotations of people describing actual incidents in Israel. In fact, nothing I had written or said
approached the stridency of recent comments by famed Israeli author Amos Oz, who called violent
Jewish settlers “Hebrew neo-Nazis.”
While Oz was presented with the Siegfried Lenz Literary Prize this month by German Foreign
Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, I was condemned as an anti-Semite by leaders of putatively left-wing
German parties informed exclusively by the Wiesenthal list furnished to them by a
neoconservative publicist, Benjamin Weinthal.
A former labor journalist who bounced around at marginal leftist journals, the unsuccessful Weinthal
drifted until he found his calling as one of the Israel lobby’s most dedicated operatives in
Berlin. His career has since been sustained by a neoconservative Washington DC-based think tank
called the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Funded in part by the casino mogul Sheldon
Adelson, a top donor to the Republican Party and Israel’s right-wing Likud Party, who
recently grumbled that he has no use for “democracy” in Israel and

19. “doesn’t like journalism,” FDD has promoted the preemptive US invasion of
Iraq and preemptive bombing of Iran along with Netanyahu’s expansionist policies in
occupied Palestinian territory. Described on FDD’s website as “our eyes and ears on
the ground in Central Europe,” Weinthal publishes regularly at the right-wing English
language daily, the Jerusalem Post. (Its editor, Caroline Glick, is simultaneously affiliated with the
far right U.S. Center for Security Policy, and author of a recent book, The Israeli Solution: A One-
State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, advocating the complete obliteration of Palestinian rights.)
In the days before our arrival, Weinthal phoned Gysi, Beck and a host of local Israel lobbyists to
solicit statements condemning me and David Sheen and our hosts. Unable to speak or read English,
Gysi had to rely on Weinthal, and by extension, his recitation of the Wiesenthal Center, as his
translators. Gysi was obviously terrified and intimidated. When he falsely accused me in a press
conference of referring to Israeli soldiers as “Judeo-Nazis,” it was clear he had never
bothered to investigate the claims against me, never read my work and never sought to contact me.
In fact, the phrase “Judeo-Nazis” was coined by the widely revered anti-establishment
Israeli philosopher, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who was ranked by Israelis as one of the country’s
most influential Jewish leaders of all time, and whom I profiled in my book. In his jeremiads against
racism and militarization, Leibowitz warned Israelis against turning into their own worst nightmare.
A frantic puppet dancing on the string of a neoconservative dirty trick, Gysi also revealed himself to
be an ignoramus about Israel.
As soon as the Volksbuehne caved to Israel lobby pressure to cancel my talk with Sheen, Weinthal
was on the phone with Simon Wiesenthal Center dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper. “Germans
should be grateful that some key leaders of the Left [Party] have acted to forestall this desecration
and perversion of memory,” Cooper proclaimed.
Then, when “Toilettengate” erupted, the German media reached for the Wiesenthal
file, neatly provided by Weinthal, as its sole dossier on my work. Like Gysi, Der Spiegel falsely
accused me of calling Israeli soldiers “Judeo-Nazis,” refusing to reply when I solicited a
correction. None of the major outlets that reported on the incident made the slightest effort to call
Sheen or me for comment. Instead, the German press was played, too, hammering away at our
supposed “anti-Semitism,” never pausing to seek me out for reply or engage in a
moment of skepticism about what any seasoned journalist could see was a transparent case of
McCarthyism. ÂÂ
The most aggressive attacks appeared in papers associated with Axel Springer, Germany’s
version of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. A bastion of yellow journalism, Springer compels all
of its employees to take an oath of loyalty to Germany’s special relationship with Israel. When
the Springer-owned tabloid Die Bild described me and Sheen as “lunatic Israel haters,”
a friend gave me the phone number of the paper’s political editor, Ralf Schuler.ÂÂ
“Why didn’t you reach out to me for a comment?” I asked him.
“Because I don’t have to. I don’t want to talk to you or hear what you have to
say,” Schuler said.
“So you were out to smear us?”
“Yes!” he declared emphatically. “And that’s how it is.”
Schuler asked in an accusing tone if I was, in fact, “an anti-Semite." Then he abruptly hung

20. up.
The Exiles
My final talk in Berlin took place in an antiseptic classroom inside the cavernous main building of
the city’s Technical University. During my presentation, I recounted the case of Ibrahim
Kilani, a German citizen who was killed along with most of his family in Israel’s assault on the
Gaza Strip this summer. The German government did not condemn the massacre, nor did it bother to
offer condolences to members of the Kilani family living in Germany. Instead, it merely asked Israel
to clarify the circumstances of the family members’ deaths.
The government’s silence on the Kilanis roiled Germany’s 80,000-strong community of
Palestinian immigrants. As soon as my talk ended, Nadia Samour, the young Palestinian-German
lawyer who co-organized the event, commented that she no longer felt at home in Germany after
witnessing her government’s handling of the killings. Her sense of alienation was almost
omnipresent among the many educated and worldly Arab immigrants I encountered during my stay
in Germany. And it was hardly surprising.
Under the Hessen citizenship tests adopted in 2006, immigrants are expected to affirm support for
Israel’s “right to exist.” The country’s past chancellor, Gerhard
Schroeder of the Social Democratic Party, openly pondered imposing loyalty oaths on immigrants,
while the current leader, Merkel, declared that multiculturalism “has utterly failed.” In
a 2010 poll, 55% of Germans agreed with the opinion that Arabs are “unpleasant
people.” In recent years, the country’s media has filled with commentaries painting
the Muslim and Arab immigrant community as a hotbed of potential recruits for groups like al-Qaeda
and ISIS.
At every stop, immigrants to Germany are forced to pay heed to the Leitkultur, the national narrative
that demands expressions of guilt for a Holocaust none of them participated in. For Palestinian-
Germans, the Leitkultur serves to silence their own narrative of dispossession. As Ibrahim
Kilani’s only surviving son, Ramsis, told journalist Emran Feroz, “In Germany, I get
called an anti-Semite just for saying I’m Palestinian.”
While Palestinians are shut out of German public discourse, an unlikely immigrant group has
asserted itself against the national consensus. Some 20,000 Israeli Jews have sought refuge in
Berlin, fleeing a state overrun with militarism and religious fervor for life in a stable social
democracy. Most are young, cosmopolitan and deeply opposed to the Netanyahu government. When
Merkel and a cast of German political figures including Gysi organized a demonstration this summer
against “anti-Semitism” that doubled as a rally in support of Israel’s war on
Gaza, a group of Israeli exiles organized a counter-demonstration. They held up a large
banner reading, “Merkel, give us passports, not weapons!”
Following my talk at the Technical University, one of those Israelis rose to speak. He introduced
himself as a writer who had come to the depressing conclusion that he had no future in Israel. He
said he feared raising his newborn son in an environment that Israel’s right-wing rulers had
rendered “uninhabitable.” Relations between Israeli Jews and Palestinians were
damaged beyond repair, he continued, leaving a two-state solution that permanently separated the
two groups as the only option.
A middle-aged Palestinian refugee rose from his seat. “With your two-state solution, I can
never go home,” he interrupted. “You have to understand that we Palestinians have no

21. problem living with Jews. That’s not the issue. The issue is we have no right to live on our
land.”
The Israeli writer did not object or recoil. Instead, he listened patiently as the next speaker, Abir
Kopty, a Palestinian-Israeli activist from Nazareth pursuing an advanced degree in Berlin, made the
case for a binational state. Several German activists joined in, articulating a vision of equality that
Gysi's gag rule forbade Die Linke members from promoting.
As the discussion poured out into the hallway, whatever differences might have surfaced inside the
lecture hall dissolved into the kind of camaraderie that always exists among outcasts. The Israeli
exile and the Palestinian refugee had arrived in Germany as casualties of Western foreign policy,
each victimized in his own way. Now they were struggling together for a free and open debate. And
along with the rest of us, they reeled from the force of the national antisemitismus-keule.
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Mon, 01 Dec 2014 12:40:00 -0800 Max Blumenthal, AlterNet 1027949 at http://www.alternet.org
World World germany max blumenthal middle east gaza Gregor Gysi David Sheen anti-semitism
Lefty Germans, blinded by collective guilt, have become intolerant and close minded.
I arrived in Germany formally invited by members of a political party to speak about my reporting
during the Gaza war. I left the country branded an anti-Semite and an insane scofflaw. With
machine-like efficiency, German media cast me and my Jewish Israeli journalist colleague, David
Sheen, as violent Jew haters, never veering from the script written for them by a strange American
neoconservative working for an organization subsidized by far-right-wing casino mogul Sheldon
Adelson, nor bothering to ask either of us for comment. Slandered as anti-Semites, we sought to
meet with the left-wing politician who felt compelled to engineer the campaign to suppress our
speech: Die Linke party chairman Gregor Gysi.
When Gysi refused to speak to us, we followed him as he ran from his office. The videotaped incident
ended at a door outside what turned out to be a bathroom, sparking a scandal known as
“Toilettengate.” We had violated the unwritten rules of a dour political culture where
conflict normally takes the form of carefully composed pronouncements delivered through proper
bureaucratic channels. Thus we aroused the outrage of Deutschland, from left to right nimbly
manipulated through a neoconservative ploy.
According to the right-wing Die Bild tabloid, Sheen and I were “lunatic Israel haters”
who had “hunted Gysi.” Various pundits on German public broadcasting declared that I
was “known for [my] anti-Semitic way of thinking.” And the president of the Bundestag
introduced a motion to ban us for life from the premises. As the freak-out escalated, the three Die
Linke MPs who guided us to Gysi’s office— Inge Hoger, Annette Groth and Heike
Hansel — delivered Gysi an abject public apology.
Our hosts’ whimpering only served to incite their enemies. More than 1,000 Die Linke
members from the party’s “reformist” faction have signed a letter calling for
the three MPs to be sacked. Titled “You Don’t Speak For Us,” the manifesto

22. opened with an excerpt from a 2008 speech to the Bundestag by former Israeli president Shimon
Peres in which he compared Iran to Nazi Germany and ended with an affirmation of
Germany’s special relationship with Israel, as the cleansing of the Holocaust.
A Der Spiegel columnist named Sibylle Berg joined the pile-on with a crude piece of sexist
psychobabble accusing Groth and Hoger of sublimating sexual lust for Palestinian militants into anti-
Zionist activity. In Taggespiel, Die Linke MP Michael Leutert referred to us as an “anti-
Semitic mob.” And in Die Zeit, another mainstream outlet, Elisabeth Niejahr cast Groth
and Hoger as “Holocaust down players.” She had no evidence, but in German political
culture, none was necessary. Either you are all-in with Israel’s policies, or you are an all-out
anti-Semite.
The storm of controversy triggered by our presence in Berlin was the culmination of the Die Linke
party’s long-running internecine conflict on Israel-Palestine. Since emerging as
Germany’s main left-wing opposition party, Die Linke leaders have presided over a full-scale
assault on the few party members who rejected Germany’s uncritical special relationship
with Israel. Behind the attack is a group of putatively left-wing intellectuals allied with heavily
funded neoconservative operatives. The most effective weapon of this left-right alliance in a society
consumed with Holocaust guilt is what some Germans have begun to refer to as the Antisemitismus-keule,
or the anti-Semitism club.
Smears and Suppression
The story of my and David Sheen's adventure as “anti-Semites” began even before our
arrival to Berlin. I had covered the Gaza war and spoke about my reporting across Europe, often as
the invited guest of members of parliaments—in London at the House of Commons, in Brussels
before the European Parliament, in Oslo at the invitation of the Socialist Left Party, and in
Copenhagen, where I was introduced by a member of the Danish parliament. Sheen has earned
acclaim for his reporting on state-sponsored discrimination within Israel against Palestinians and
African migrants and the right-wing attacks on them. Together, we produced an original
documentary on racism against non-Jewish African refugees in Israel that has received over a million
views on YouTube.
As we prepared for our flights, we were greeted with a November 6 article in the Berliner
Morgenpost by a neoconservative writer named Benjamin Weinthal, announcing the cancellation of
our planned discussion in the Bundestag. Die Linke party chairman Gregor Gysi claimed
responsibility for terminating the talk, while Volker Beck of the Green Party and chair of the
Germany-Israel Committee contributed his opinion to the writer that my work was
“consistently anti-Semitic.” Weinthal, for his part, accused me of the “public
abuse of Jews.”
The next day, Beck published a letter signed by Bundestag vice president Petra Pau (a key Israel
lobby supporter in the Die Linke party) and German-Israeli Friendship Society president Reinhold
Robbe demanding the cancelation of our event at the Berlin theater known as the Volksbuehne. The
letter claimed our event would serve “to promote anti-Semitic prejudice by comparing the
terror of the Nazis with Israeli policies.” Within hours, Volksbuehne officials pulled the plug.
Weinthal took to his regular roost at the Jerusalem Post to announce the cancellation of an event
that would “spread anti-Semitism.”
On November 9, the morning our Volkesbuehne discussion was scheduled to take place, we wound
up speaking through a loudspeaker to 100 supporters gathered outside the shuttered doors of the

23. theater. It was the 76th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom and the 25th anniversary of the fall
of the Berlin Wall. To our adversaries, it was a date that somehow rendered any criticism of the state
of Israel and its policies verboten — along with Hitler’s birthday and every other date
remotely associated with the Holocaust. For us, it was the perfect time to explain how the legacy of
the European genocide had inspired our work, to emphasize that “never again” meant
never again to anyone.
In my address, I lamented that the most basic universal lessons of the Holocaust had been rejected
by the German government in favor of a cheap absolution that took the form of discounted weapons
sales to an army of occupation. Indeed, the German government recently sold Israel a fleet of
Corvette attack boats at a 30 percent reduction to reinforce the siege of Gaza and enable further
attacks on the coastal enclave’s beleaguered fishing industry. Next year, 250 German
soldiers will drill at Israel’s Urban Warfare Training Center in counter-insurgency tactics, an
unprecedented step in military collaboration. As a mere visitor to Germany, I was spared the long-term
personal consequences of questioning how military aid to Israel honored the millions turned to
ashes. When the famed German author Gunther Grass challenged the weapons sales in a polemical
and arguably clumsy poem, he faced a tidal wave of character assassination attempts and the
immediate loss of prestige. (Then-Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai declared Grass persona non
grata, issuing a standing order to deny him entry to Israeli-controlled territory.)
After the protest, we marched to a cramped anti-war cafe a few blocks away to carry out our
discussion on Gaza and state-sponsored Israeli racism as originally conceived. As we spoke to an
overflow crowd in a catacomb-like basement, 500 neo-Nazi football hooligans marched nearby
against the supposed threat of “Salafism.” Police dispatched by the city protected the
marchers, dispersing a small counter-demonstration.
Meanwhile, Gysi stood by for instructions in the event that we were able to find a venue for our talk
inside the Bundestag the following day. Though he was hardly a cheerleader for Netanyahu, he had
proven himself an essential ally of his country’s Israel lobby, presiding over Die
Linke’s transition from anti-Zionism into a full embrace of the country’s post-reunification
consensus on Israel.
“Jewish Anti-Zionism As a Total Illusion”
Once the leader of the reformist wing of Erich Honecker's Socialist Unity Party (SED) in East
Germany, Gysi supported the dismantling of his party even as he opposed reunification with West
Germany. He has since emerged as one of the most charismatic figures of the current opposition in
the German parliament, earning attention for his sharp oratory while waging an aggressive legal
battle to suppress public discussion of his alleged role as a Stasi agent.
When Merkel’s right-of-center Christian Democratic Union (CDU) rose to power, Gysi began
his efforts to reposition Die Linke as a potential coalition partner capable of allying with the Green
Party and the Social Democrats. This meant adapting right-leaning elements inside Die Linke like
the Forum Demokratischer Sozialismus that aimed to crush the party’s anti-war vestiges.
(Most of the figures who signed the letter denouncing me, Sheen and our Die Linke hosts were
affiliated with FDS.)
During an address before the Rosa Luxemburg Institute on the occasion of Israel’s 60th
birthday in 2008, Gysi made his most public bid for mainstream respectability. Proclaiming that anti-imperialism
could no longer "be placed in a meaningful way" within leftist discourse, Gysi railed
against expressions of Palestine solidarity within his party. "Anti-Zionism can no longer be an

24. acceptable position for the left in general, and the Die Linke party in particular,” he declared.
He went on to describe “solidarity with Israel” as an essential component of
Germany’s “reason of state.”
Following a stem-winding survey of the Zionist movement’s history and its criticism from
within the left, Gysi concluded, “If we choose a position of enlightened Jewish anti-
Zionism...we still have the problem of ignoring the worst experiences of the 20th century, which
expose enlightened Jewish anti-Zionism as a total illusion.”
The Die Linke leader’s speech echoed an address delivered in Israel’s Knesset just a
few months prior by Chancellor Angela Merkel in which she declared that preserving
“Israel’s security…is part of my country’s raison d’être.”
In a sardonic assessment of Gysi’s foreign policy pivot, left-wing columnist Werner Pirker
wrote, “Gysi admires the Israeli democracy not in spite of, but because of its
exclusiveness… With his anniversary speech for Israel Gregor Gysi passed his foreign policy
test.”
In June 2011, Gysi imposed a de facto gag rule on his party’s left wing called the
“Three Point Catalog.” It read as follows: "We will neither take part in [political]
initiatives on the Middle East which (1) call for a one-state-solution for Palestine and Israel, nor (2)
call for boycotts against Israeli products, nor (3) will we take part in this year's 'Gaza-flotilla'. We
expect from our personal employees and our fraction employees that they champion these
positions.”
A month later, Die Linke’s executive board voted for the first time to recognize Israel’s
“right to exist.” Among those who took credit for the vote, and for sustaining pressure
on Gysi, was a recently formed pro-Israel organization called BAK Shalom.
The Anti-Germans
BAK Shalom drew its membership from adherents of the bizarre movement known as “die
antideutsch Linke”—in short, the Anti-Germans. Born after reunification against the
phantom threat of a second Holocaust and in supposed opposition to German nationalism, the Anti-
German movement aimed to infiltrate leftist anti-fascist circles in order to promote unwavering
support for the Israeli government and undermine traditional networks of leftist organizing. BAK
Shalom’s manifesto pledges “solidarity with defense measures of any kind”
against the Palestinians and backs American foreign policy on the basis of purely reactionary
impulses: The US is Israel’s most aggressive patron and the ultimate target of Israel’s
enemies, therefore opponents of “anti-Semitism” must lend it their total support.
Though many top Antideutsch ideologues emerged from Marxist and anarchist intellectual circles,
they are united in their opposition to what they call “regressive anti-capitalism.”
According to BAK Shalom’s manifesto, because “complex and abstract capitalist
relations are personified and identified as Jews,” anti-capitalism is a subtle but dangerous
form of Jew hatred. In 2012, Anti-German activists mobilized in opposition to the Blockupy
movement that occupied the European Central Bank and the Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt, casting it
as an inherently anti-Semitic movement simply because of its opposition to globalized capitalism.
Incapable of viewing Jews as individuals or normal people with differing viewpoints, the Anti-
Germans inadvertently advanced the anti-Semitic trope of Jewish control over world finance.

25. In 2003, hardcore Anti-German activists took to the streets in 2003 to support George W.
Bush’s invasion of Iraq. At rallies in support of Israel’s assaults on Southern Lebanon
and Gaza, Anti-German forces belted out chants alongside far-right Jewish Defense League militants
and flew Israeli flags beside the red and black banners familiar to anti-fascist forces. One of the
movement’s top ideologues, the Austrian political scientist Stephan Grigat, oversees an
ironically named astroturf group, Stop The Bomb, that advocates unilateral bombing campaigns
against Iran. Grigat collaborates closely with right-wing outfits like the Simon Weisenthal Center as
well as ultra-Zionist BAK Shalom allies like Die Linke’s Petra Pau.
There might only be about several thousand Germans who identify with the Anti-German sensibility.
The movement’s intellectual avant-garde, a collection of dour critical theorists and political
scientists gathered around obscure journals like Bahamas, numbers at most in the low hundreds.
According to BAK Shalom spokesman and Die Linke member Benjamin Kruger, his organization
contains only 140 members. But thanks to the Holocaust guilt that consumes German society, these
elements operate on fertile territory. As the translator and anti-racist activist Maciej Zurowski
explained, by infiltrating Die Linke and the Social Democratic Party’s youth groups, along
with key left-wing institutions like the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, “[Anti-German elements]
are strategically well placed to promote ‘young talent’, while cutting off their
opponents’ money supply.”
Previously limited to the top-heavy realms of the country’s political and financial
establishment, it is through such sectarian groups that the pro-Israel lobby finally secured a base
within the German left.
Good Jew, Bad Jew
In 2009, two years after the foundation of BAK Shalom, a witch-hunt forced a Die Linke member
named Hermann Dierkes to quit his campaign for the mayor of Duisburg. He was accused of
“pure anti-Semitism” by the Central Jewish Council for supporting the Palestinian-led
BDS (boycott, divest, sanctions) campaign — a human rights campaign German supporters of
Israel routinely equate with the Nazi-era boycott of Jews. The same year, Israeli lobby pressure
forced Munich city authorities to cancel a talk by Ilan Pappe, the dissident Israeli historian. Pappe
protested afterward that his father “was silenced in a similar way as a German Jew in the
early 1930s.”
By 2010, BAK Shalom demanded the cancellation of a speech by Norman Finkelstein, a well-known
political scientist highly critical of Israel’s policies, organized by a few anti-imperialist Die
Linke MPs. BAK Shalom leaders accused Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, of
“historical revisionism” and for being “internationally popular among anti-
Semites”—guilt by association with unnamed villains. Weinthal amplified the attacks by
claiming in the Jerusalem Post that Finkelstein was “pandering to subtle anti-
Semitism.” With his events canceled by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and defunded by the
Green Party-affiliated Heinrich Boll Foundation, Finkelstein canceled his plane ticket and stayed
home in Brooklyn.
The same year, BAK Shalom stepped up pressure on its allies inside Die Linke to purge MPs Groth
and Hoger. The two MPs had traveled on the Free Gaza Flotilla and spent time in an Israeli prison
after Israeli naval commandos massacred nine passengers aboard the Mavi Marmara ship. After
their return to Berlin, the two politicians were branded as Hamas allies and anti-Semites for their
participation in the humanitarian mission. The attacks set the stage for the storm that would erupt
when Groth and Hoger decided to invite me and Sheen to meet with them and speak at the

26. Bundestag.
When the renowned Jewish-American scholar and outspoken Israel critic Judith Butler was awarded
the city of Frankfurt’s prestigious Theodore Adorno Prize in 2012, Germany’s Israel
lobby escalated its campaign to suppress free speech on the subject of Israel. At a protest outside
the Frankfurt church where Butler was to receive her prize, the Anti-German academic and former
Green Party advisor Matthias Kuntzel conjured the terrifying specter of a second Holocaust on
German soil. He cast Butler as the key progenitor of a “new anti-Jewish discourse.” As
the demonstrations were whipped up outside, Butler felt compelled to enter the ceremony in her
honor through a back door.
With ruthless efficiency, Germany’s Israel lobby established a new code for Jewish behavior:
Jews who supported Israel without reservation were necessarily “good,” while those
who agitated for Palestinian human rights or expressed a universalist perspective on the Holocaust
were absolutely “bad.” The good Jews would be showered with adulation and publicly
fetishized while the Bad Jews (Finkelstein, Pappe, Butler et al.) could be boycotted and battered with
the Antisemitismus-keule — the anti-Semitism club. Even the gentile grandchildren of Nazis
were welcome to raise this blunt weapon against the Bad Jews. By suppressing critical discussion of
Israel, they were purified of the taint of the Holocaust and able to play the role of judges in the old
question: Who is a Jew?
Last year, I was labeled a Bad Jew on a blacklist that would serve as a singular guide to my work for
Germany’s Israel lobby.
Adelson’s Man in Berlin
In December 2013, my name wound up on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s 2013 list of the
year’s top “Anti-Semitic/Anti-Israel slurs.” I was number nine, tied with the
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker and eight slots behind Ayatollah Khomeini. It was a
ludicrous document of neo-McCarthyism filled with distortions, hyperbole and bizarre non-sequiturs.
In the U.S., it was ignored when it was not mocked.
The listing was prompted by my recent book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, but
did not dispute a single fact in the 450-page work. Instead of addressing the substance of my book,
the Wiesenthal Center took issue with the titles of many of its chapters, claiming that I had drawn
direct comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany, though those chapter titles were taken from
quotations of people describing actual incidents in Israel. In fact, nothing I had written or said
approached the stridency of recent comments by famed Israeli author Amos Oz, who called violent
Jewish settlers “Hebrew neo-Nazis.”
While Oz was presented with the Siegfried Lenz Literary Prize this month by German Foreign
Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, I was condemned as an anti-Semite by leaders of putatively left-wing
German parties informed exclusively by the Wiesenthal list furnished to them by a
neoconservative publicist, Benjamin Weinthal.
A former labor journalist who bounced around at marginal leftist journals, the unsuccessful Weinthal
drifted until he found his calling as one of the Israel lobby’s most dedicated operatives in
Berlin. His career has since been sustained by a neoconservative Washington DC-based think tank
called the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Funded in part by the casino mogul Sheldon
Adelson, a top donor to the Republican Party and Israel’s right-wing Likud Party, who
recently grumbled that he has no use for “democracy” in Israel and

27. “doesn’t like journalism,” FDD has promoted the preemptive US invasion of
Iraq and preemptive bombing of Iran along with Netanyahu’s expansionist policies in
occupied Palestinian territory. Described on FDD’s website as “our eyes and ears on
the ground in Central Europe,” Weinthal publishes regularly at the right-wing English
language daily, the Jerusalem Post. (Its editor, Caroline Glick, is simultaneously affiliated with the
far right U.S. Center for Security Policy, and author of a recent book, The Israeli Solution: A One-
State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, advocating the complete obliteration of Palestinian rights.)
In the days before our arrival, Weinthal phoned Gysi, Beck and a host of local Israel lobbyists to
solicit statements condemning me and David Sheen and our hosts. Unable to speak or read English,
Gysi had to rely on Weinthal, and by extension, his recitation of the Wiesenthal Center, as his
translators. Gysi was obviously terrified and intimidated. When he falsely accused me in a press
conference of referring to Israeli soldiers as “Judeo-Nazis,” it was clear he had never
bothered to investigate the claims against me, never read my work and never sought to contact me.
In fact, the phrase “Judeo-Nazis” was coined by the widely revered anti-establishment
Israeli philosopher, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who was ranked by Israelis as one of the country’s
most influential Jewish leaders of all time, and whom I profiled in my book. In his jeremiads against
racism and militarization, Leibowitz warned Israelis against turning into their own worst nightmare.
A frantic puppet dancing on the string of a neoconservative dirty trick, Gysi also revealed himself to
be an ignoramus about Israel.
As soon as the Volksbuehne caved to Israel lobby pressure to cancel my talk with Sheen, Weinthal
was on the phone with Simon Wiesenthal Center dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper. “Germans
should be grateful that some key leaders of the Left [Party] have acted to forestall this desecration
and perversion of memory,” Cooper proclaimed.
Then, when “Toilettengate” erupted, the German media reached for the Wiesenthal
file, neatly provided by Weinthal, as its sole dossier on my work. Like Gysi, Der Spiegel falsely
accused me of calling Israeli soldiers “Judeo-Nazis,” refusing to reply when I solicited a
correction. None of the major outlets that reported on the incident made the slightest effort to call
Sheen or me for comment. Instead, the German press was played, too, hammering away at our
supposed “anti-Semitism,” never pausing to seek me out for reply or engage in a
moment of skepticism about what any seasoned journalist could see was a transparent case of
McCarthyism. ÂÂ
The most aggressive attacks appeared in papers associated with Axel Springer, Germany’s
version of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. A bastion of yellow journalism, Springer compels all
of its employees to take an oath of loyalty to Germany’s special relationship with Israel. When
the Springer-owned tabloid Die Bild described me and Sheen as “lunatic Israel haters,”
a friend gave me the phone number of the paper’s political editor, Ralf Schuler.ÂÂ
“Why didn’t you reach out to me for a comment?” I asked him.
“Because I don’t have to. I don’t want to talk to you or hear what you have to
say,” Schuler said.
“So you were out to smear us?”
“Yes!” he declared emphatically. “And that’s how it is.”
Schuler asked in an accusing tone if I was, in fact, “an anti-Semite." Then he abruptly hung