WorldNetDaily.com
Posted: March 8, 2002
5:35 p.m. Eastern
A prominent American rabbi insists the Anti-Defamation League has defamed Rev. Billy Graham in its criticism of remarks the Protestant evangelist made about Jews 30 years ago in the Oval Office.
Rabbi Daniel Lapin, president of the activist group Toward Tradition, maintains ADL director Abraham H. Foxman's characterization of Graham as a purveyor of "age-old classical anti-Semitic canards" is unfair.
The "canard" in question, notes Lapin, is that Jewish people are disproportionately represented among Hollywood and other media powerbrokers. In secretly recorded remarks to President Nixon that recently were released to the press, Graham spoke of a Jewish "stranglehold" on the media.
"The unfairness of this ADL attack was highlighted by the week's news that the producers of 'A Beautiful Mind' deliberately left out any references to the genuinely anti-Semitic beliefs and comments of their protagonist, mathematician John Nash, amply documented in Sylvia Nasar's biography on which the film is based," said Lapin, author of "America's Real War," a book that encourages a return to Judeo-Christian principles.
Lapin pointed out that according to published reports, the film's director, Ron Howard, did this at least partly because he hoped to garner Academy Award recognition.
"Given that the Hollywood establishment indeed includes a considerably greater proportion of people of Jewish ancestry than does the American populace as a whole, Mr. Howard was concerned that the Academy would justifiably spurn a film that lionized an anti-Semite," Lapin explained. "To call that a 'stranglehold' may not be polite, but it is no lie, either."
Lapin says he cannot understand why it is acceptable for Howard to "acknowledge this reality, however implicitly; but when Billy Graham did so, long ago and in private, it was somehow different – 'chilling and frightening,' in Mr. Foxman's words."
The ADL's statement "forced a heartfelt apology from the frail and elderly Rev. Graham," Lapin noted. In a statement released by his public relations firm March 1, Graham said: "Although I have no memory of the occasion, I deeply regret comments I apparently made in an Oval Office conversation with President Nixon ... some 30 years ago. They do not reflect my views and I sincerely apologize for any offense caused by the remarks."
Foxman has refused to accept Graham's apology, however, which he called "mealy-mouthed."
"Such insults are truly inappropriate," said Lapin. "Could it be that these attacks are directed at Billy Graham because he is a conservative evangelical Christian – whereas Ron Howard gets a pass because he is not a Christian in that mold?
Whats really frightening is someone like Abraham Foxman making a claim that Graham has "been playing a charade for all these years" based on one recorded conversation in 1972. Graham has already apoligized, we've beat this to death in other threads. Let it go, Foxman, unless your Christian bashing bigotry won't let you stop....
Mr. Graham's sterling reputation as a healer and bridge-builder was so at odds with Mr. Haldeman's account that Jewish groups paid little attention, especially because he denied the remarks so strongly.
"Those are not my words," Mr. Graham said in a public statement in May 1994. "I have never talked publicly or privately about the Jewish people, including conversations with President Nixon, except in the most positive terms."
That was the end of the story, it seemed, until two weeks ago, when the tape of that 1972 conversation in the Oval Office was made public by the National Archives. Three decades after it was recorded, the North Carolina preacher's famous drawl is tinny but unmistakable on the tape, denigrating Jews in terms far stronger than the diary accounts.
It is especially repugnant that he would bear false witness. There is no excuse for what he said nor how he lied about it. I wonder if his own past had anything to do with his defense of Bill Clinton. At least he is admitting the truth and repenting now.
B. Graham vs. B. Ginsberg
By Sam Francis
If anybody had a bad weekend last week, it was probably the Rev. Billy Graham, who at the ripe age of 83 finds himself slapped in the face by various private remarks he uttered 30 years ago. The comments were made to President Richard Nixon in what a more naive world once really considered "privacy." Little did the clergyman imagine he was being recorded.
Whatever Mr. Graham had to tell Nixon about God was quickly forgotten; what made the headlines last week and led him to issue an immediate?and cringing?apology was what he had to say about Jews. "Although I have no memory of the occasion," he sniveled, "I deeply regret comments I apparently made in an Oval Office conversation with President Nixon." The comments "do not reflect my views, and I sincerely apologize for any offense caused" by them.
But why does Mr. Graham feel the need, obviously overpowering because issued so quickly, to apologize? The factual core of what he said 30 years ago was essentially true?and worth thinking about.
Aside from various offensive wisecracks about Jews from Nixon, chief of staff Bob Haldeman and Mr. Graham, coupled with asseverations that all three really liked Jews and had Jewish friends, the main brunt of the conversation was that "Jews dominate the media." As a matter of fact, that's more or less true?and significant.
As Jewish historian Benjamin Ginsberg notes in his ?The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State? (University of Chicago, 1993), "The chief executive officers of the three major television networks and the four largest film studios are Jews, as are the owners of the nation's largest newspaper chain and most influential single newspaper, the New York Times." He later notes the "elite newspapers?in which, as it happened, Jews also had significant influence, most significantly the New York Times and the Washington Post.?
Professor Ginsberg isn't the only one to say what the most powerful man in the world in his conversation with Mr. Graham said, "I can't ever say." In 1996, Michael Medved, an Orthodox Jewish film critic, wrote in the Jewish magazine Moment,
"It makes no sense at all to try to deny the reality of Jewish power and prominence in popular culture. Any list of the most influential production executives at each of the major movie studios will produce a heavy majority of recognizably Jewish names."
Hollywood isn't the same as the news media, of course, but it's probably far more influential.
Well, what difference does it make that Jews "control the media"-- or, more accurately, have disproportionate influence in it? Nixon's and Haldeman's complaints in 1972 were that Jews are liberals or leftists and were trying to wreck the administration. They cited by name the White House correspondents employed by the major papers and NBC News, all of whom were Jewish.
This brings us back to Professor Ginsberg.
"With their special stake in domestic programs and spending," he writes,
"?a number of Jews played important roles in mobilizing opposition against the Nixon administration.... In their battles with the Nixon administration, forces defending the domestic state were able to rely upon the support of another major institution in which Jews played key roles?the mass media."
You can approve of this little factoid, or you can rant and whine about it like Nixon and his pals, but facts remain facts.
The larger truth to which such facts point is that a great deal of the dominance of liberalism in the news and entertainment media?not to mention culture and politics generally?is, quite simply, due to Jewish influence. It's well known that American Jews vote Democratic (70 percent or more every four years) and have been prominent in liberal or left-wing causes (e.g., the ACLU, the NAACP, not to mention the New Left and the Communist Party?check out Professor Ginsberg on that too).
Neo-conservative Irving Kristol once cracked that Jews are the only ethnic group with the income of Episcopalians and the voting behavior of Puerto Ricans. The blunt truth is that American liberalism, in the days of Nixon as today, is powerful in large part because Jews are powerful.
There are strong historical reasons for that, of course, and there are many exceptions (not all Jews are on the left; most on the left are not Jews), but the fact remains that liberalism would be nowhere near as powerful and as well-entrenched in the United States today if it were not for the Jewish power that entrenches it.
Mr. Graham called it a "stranglehold," and neither he nor the president of the United States was willing or able to say it out loud. Now that it has been said, we need to know they were right-- and to think, rather than rant and whine, about what it means.
2001 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
March 07, 2002
There ARE a few of them. Many of them work in Hollywood. Is this really a surprise to anyone here?
What Graham said was very truthful. Too bad he doesn't have the guts to stand up for what he said back then.
There is a very small group of Jews who hold a great deal of power in the media. They do not represent Jews as a whole. They are not religious, but are Jews based on their birth.
Those are the ones Graham was talking about, it is very clear from the context. And they have done a great deal of harm to this nation.
Sounds like a lie to me.
There are, in fact, a lot of Jews who believe it to be at least partly true.