Posted on 03/16/2002 8:03:22 PM PST by churchillbuff
March 17, 2002
Billy Graham Responds to Lingering Anger Over 1972 Remarks on Jews
By DAVID FIRESTONE
The Associated Press The Rev. Billy Graham, left, with President Richard M. Nixon at an evangelistic crusade in Pittsburgh in 1968. A tape of a 1972 White House conversation between them has angered Jewish organizations.
It seemed impossible, when H. R. Haldeman's White House diaries came out in 1994, that the Rev. Billy Graham could once have joined with President Richard M. Nixon in discussing the "total Jewish domination of the media." Could Mr. Graham, the great American evangelist, really have said the nation's problem lies with "satanic Jews," as Mr. Nixon's aide recorded?
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.
"They're the ones putting out the pornographic stuff," Mr. Graham said on the tape, after agreeing with Mr. Nixon that left-wing Jews dominate the news media. The Jewish "stranglehold has got to be broken or the country's going down the drain," he continued, suggesting that if Mr. Nixon were re-elected, "then we might be able to do something."
Finally, Mr. Graham said that Jews did not know his true feelings about them.
"I go and I keep friends with Mr. Rosenthal at The New York Times and people of that sort, you know," he told Mr. Nixon, referring to A. M. Rosenthal, then the newspaper's executive editor. "And all — I mean, not all the Jews, but a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine, they swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I'm friendly with Israel. But they don't know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country. And I have no power, no way to handle them, but I would stand up if under proper circumstances."
Mr. Graham, who is now 83 and in poor health, quickly issued a four- sentence apology, but he did not acknowledge making the statements and said he had no memory of the conversation, which took place after a prayer breakfast on Feb. 1, 1972.
The brevity of the apology and Mr. Graham's refusal to discuss the matter further have angered many of the same Jewish organizations that for so long counted Mr. Graham as their best friend among evangelical Christians. The taped remarks have become the subject of synagogue sermons and columns in Jewish newspapers, with some Jewish leaders suggesting that Mr. Graham had hidden anti-Semitic views for decades.
"Here we have an American icon, the closest we have to a spiritual leader of America, who has been playing a charade for all these years," Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in an interview last week. "What's frightening is that he has been so close to so many presidents, and who knows what else he has been saying privately."
Mr. Foxman urged Mr. Graham to return the award he won in 1971 from the National Conference of Christians and Jews — one of many such awards presented to him.
Yesterday, Mr. Graham's organization issued a longer apology, in which Mr. Graham acknowledged making the statements, but repudiated them.
"I don't ever recall having those feelings about any group, especially the Jews, and I certainly do not have them now," he said. "My remarks did not reflect my love for the Jewish people. I humbly ask the Jewish community to reflect on my actions on behalf of Jews over the years that contradict my words in the Oval Office that day."
Mr. Foxman subsequently issued a statement accepting the new apology, but for many Jews the damage had already been done. In a recent column in several Jewish newspapers, the Washington journalist James D. Besser said the remarks should awaken Jews to the intense dislike for them among many evangelical Christians, except insofar as Jews are useful to the fulfillment of Christian apocalyptic prophecies.
The tapes have been particularly disturbing to people and groups who have worked to find common ground between Jews and evangelical Christians, many of whom say that their progress has now been significantly set back. For years, Mr. Graham stood apart from other evangelicals in his refusal to proselytize Jews directly, sharply disagreeing on the issue with his own denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention. Because of that stance, the American Jewish Committee presented Mr. Graham with its National Interreligious Award in 1977, calling him one of the century's greatest Christian friends of Jews.
The taped remarks, however, will only help perpetuate the stereotypes that Jews and evangelicals hold about each other, said Rabbi Yechiel Z. Eckstein, president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, based in Chicago.
"Jewish friends are coming up to me now and saying, `See, we told you so — they're all frauds,' " said Rabbi Eckstein, an Orthodox Jew who has become a liaison between Israel and evangelical Christians.
Mr. Graham's friends and biographers have tried to come up with some explanation for an act that so sharply diverges from five decades of almost universally admired public behavior. Lewis Drummond, the Billy Graham Professor of Evangelism and Church Growth at Samford University, a Southern Baptist institution in Birmingham, Ala., said he believed that Mr. Graham was referring throughout his conversation only to those few Jews he considered unethical for distributing pornography.
"There's not an anti-Semitic bone in his body," said Dr. Drummond, a longtime friend of Mr. Graham's who has written a book about him. Dr. Drummond recalled that Mr. Graham had always preached against intolerance, refusing — in the South of the 1950's and 60's — to hold his crusades in segregated auditoriums and inviting the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to join him in the pulpit.
Another biographer, William Martin of Rice University, suggested that Mr. Graham was thinking only of liberal Jews with whom he disagreed politically. Mr. Martin said that just as Mr. Graham grew up in a culture of segregation and moved beyond it, he had also evolved beyond what his thoughts were in 1972.
Mr. Graham's statement yesterday expressed hope that he had grown past his words that day in the Oval Office. Describing himself as "an old man of 83 suffering from several ailments," he said his life had been a pilgrimage of growth and change.
"Every year during their High Holy Days, the Jewish community reminds us all of our need for repentance and forgiveness," he wrote. "God's mercy and grace give me hope — for myself, and for our world."
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
I have no problem with you posting a transcript of the tape so we can debate the remarks he has repudiated. This should be interesting and reveal the intents of many hearts.
In the media, Graham's been a victim of a bigotted liberal press many times, and this article is no exception, with the nonsensical quote of Foxman's. Grahams apologized for his 1972 comments, I don't expect to see Foxman apologize for his outrageous 2002 comments anytime soon.
Could it possibly be because he repented and is a genuine believer and you are not ?
Ya think ?
Comparing someone to Clinton is pretty heavy criticism, but I have to agree he was wrong to lie -- (and stupid, considering that it was known, when he lied, that the rat Nixon had taped his offices, so all conversations would eventually come out.
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.
It seemed impossible, when H. R. Haldeman's White House diaries came out in 1994, that the Rev. Billy Graham could once have joined with President Richard M. Nixon in discussing the "total Jewish domination of the media." Could Mr. Graham, the great American evangelist, really have said the nation's problem lies with "satanic Jews," as Mr. Nixon's aide recorded?
..... "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.
The fact is, what Haldeman's diaries quoted Nixon as saying isn't an accurate rendition of what Billy said on the Nixon tapes. So Firestone uses a journalist slight of hands by saying "Far stronger than the diary accounts. " Yeah, Firestone, slick move, but intellectually dishonest. From http://chnm.gmu.edu/chnm/clio.html:
The great triumph of the CD-ROM is that it highlights and deepens (if such a thing is possible) that Nixonian shallowness. Who can resist typing "Jews" and "Jewish" into the search window? Within seconds, we have a list of the 64 relevant entries and are reading Nixon telling Haldeman that the Rev. Billy Graham "has the strong feeling that the Bible says that there are satanic Jews and that's where our problem arises."3434 Graham has denied the quote, saying "These are not my words and this does not reflect the high view I hold for the nation of Israel and for Jewish people, many of whom are my close friends." Quoted in James M. Perry, "Book-CD Pairing is Sure to Start a Trend," San Diego Union-Tribune, June 7, 1994, p. 10.
One might acuse Graham of bias in his 1972 conversations, but don't pretend that the tapes have him saying what Haldeman quoted, I haven't heard it, and it isn't even in the article. If its in the tapes somewhere, fine, bring it on, and give it to us, and we can say Graham lied in his denial. But don't call the man a liar about one quote and then show as evidence totally different quotes. That too is lying.
A final note. If we had YOUR private conversations on tape, and picked out just one conversation, could we "prove" you were a bigot? Or have you never, ever, made a bigoted comment in your life? Yeah, right, lol....
Unlike some famous evangelists, Mr Graham has consistantly proven his integrity,loyalty to his faith, and although he has associated with the powerfull, he has not coveted that power for himself.He would be the first to deny sainthood.I'd call it a real close call.
I want to know what faction of the Jewish faith feels the need to attack this man,of all potential targets.Are they lunatics?Are they indeed Jewish?If so, it appears I have another anti-American religion to investigate more fully.
I find it extremely hard to believe anyone of the various Judeo-Christian faiths would denigrate this particular man.I now require links to full texts and not "snippets" of conversations.Do not say "check it out for yourself".
If Billy Graham, of all people, is labelled as anti-semite,than I will start declaring myself the same.
Also, I want proof from those leveling these slanderous accusations that they are in fact,practising Jews.Sounds and smells mightily of radical Islamic lies and propoganda to me.
//angry rant in support of true christians off//
That's not quite true. Foxman sees enemies of the Jewish people everywhere.....on the right. He's so good at it, he sees them even if they're not there. But there are no left-wing anti-Semites...isn't that amazing?
At worst, Billy's lying and attitudes toward Jews are vices and, as with all vices, he is paying the price for this behavior--which doesn't directly violate the rights of his neighbors--right now in this life here on earth.
But soon, at the Judgement, Billy will learn a lesson about the price he must pay for the crimes that he and Tricky planned in these tape recorded meetings and commited against their neighbors. Soon Billy will learn that God knows the difference between vice and crime.
Soon Billy will learn that, unlike his vices, his crimes injured his neighbors and he is personally responsible for their losses until he repents and his debts are forgiven.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.