I.
Jonathan Schwarz points out how that bastion of the “secular-humanist liberal media,” CBS, edited the new release of Nixon tapes in order to protect the reputation of the national saint of Bible-believing conservatives, Billy Graham.
The latest release of White House conversations secretly taped by Richard Nixon shows the elite’s favorite evangelist spewing venomous invective about Jews. Responding to Nixon’s ostensible worry that America might be gripped by Nazi or Franco-style anti-semitism if Jews “don’t start behaving,” Graham replies with the time-honored wisdom that made him the confidant and confessor of presidents for generations:
Well, you know I told you one time that the bible talks about two kinds of Jews. One is called the Synagogue of Satan. They’re the ones putting out the pornographic literature. They’re the ones putting out these obscene films.
This is the bit that CBS snipped out of the conversation, leaving only an innocuous statement by Graham about Jews’ “usefulness” to God. Schwarz also notes that Nixon’s warning about Jewish behavior had nothing to do with Israeli militarism, as the CBS story claims; it was in fact a response to “Graham being angry about a rabbi criticizing a new attempt at widespread evangelism.” Schwarz concludes:
The whole thing is well worth listening to if you’re a connoisseur of the psychosis of the people who run this planet. My favorite part is the repeated tongue baths Graham bestows on Nixon, assuring him the country loves him and he may well be the greatest president in history.
II.
There is of course nothing really new in the latest tapes. Nixon and Graham’s fascinating dialogues about Jews have already entered the public record. I first wrote about this issue more than seven years ago, in The Moscow Times, showing also how Graham also helped sow the seeds of anti-semitism in yet another of his elite charges: George W. Bush.
Picture this: the skulking ruler of a corrupt and vicious regime, hunkered down in his palace, besieged by the forces of good as he plots to unleash weapons of mass destruction on his “satanic” foes across the sea. Accused of war crimes and military aggression, he cynically turns to religion, often calling in the leader of the country’s largest fundamentalist sect to lend “moral” support to the criminal regime. Together, the ruler and the holy man engage in frenzied diatribes against the enemies of the state, especially that sinister conspiratorial power lurking behind every eruption of evil in the world – the Jews.
A portrait of Saddam Hussein, raging desperately as he braces for the final reckoning at the hands of history’s avenging angel, George W. Bush? No, it’s just our ole pal Tricky Dick – Nixon, that is, not Cheney – back from the dead in White House tapes released this week: yet another star turn from the Founding Father of modern U.S. politics.
In the tapes, recorded in early 1972, we find Nixon hankering to hurl his nuclear thunderbolts at Vietnam – standard Cold War ranting for the apostate Quaker, who first suggested nuking ‘Nam back in 1954. More relevant to the current scene is the Jew-bashing duet Nixon shares with the American elite’s favorite fire-breathing evangelical, the Reverend (sic) Billy Graham.
Graham has – not to put too fine a point on it – sucked from the teat of American power for more than 50 years, lending his “moral authority” to various presidents (usually when they’re in political hot water) then leveraging the resultant publicity into boffo box office for his stadium harangues around the world. He is perhaps best known in recent years for a miracle that changed the course of human history – saving the soul of the aforementioned angel, G.W. Bush.
Bush credits Graham with “planting the seeds” of fundamentalist faith in his pre-presidential person during a family gathering in 1985. Graham was visiting the Bush clan’s luxurious compound in Maine, mooching free meals and sucking up to the sitting vice president, Daddy Bush. (Well, what else should a disciple of Christ be doing? Breaking bread with the poor or something? Get real.)
At that time, of course, young George was in wastrel mode, boozing it up and losing millions of dollars of other people’s money in the oil companies Daddy’s friends gave him to play with. But the meeting with Graham struck a chord in the lost soul, as Bush himself (or rather his ghostwriter) tells it, in properly hagiographic tones: “[Graham] sat by the fire and talked. And what he said sparked a change in my heart. I don’t remember the exact words. It was more the power of his example. The Lord was so clearly reflected in his gentle and loving demeanor.”
That divine emanation was somewhat occluded in the Nixon meeting, where Graham heatedly denounced “satanic Jews” and warned Nixon that the “Jewish stranglehold” on the national media “has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain.” The Lord-reflecting preacher then gently and lovingly described how he turned the Jews’ two-faced perfidy against them with wily Christian deception of his own.
“A lot of Jews are great friends of mine,” Graham begins with gentle, loving sarcasm. “They swarm around me and are friendly to me, because they know I am friendly to Israel and so forth. But they don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country, and I have no power and no way to handle them.”
Graham chortles heartily when Nixon’s toady and enforcer, H.R. Haldeman (the Karl Rove of his day) tells him to “wear a Jewish beanie” at an upcoming meeting with Time Magazine editors. And he yearns for a Nixon re-election later in the year: “Then we might be able to do something” about those nefarious Hebrews, says Graham.
As with Bush, Graham’s potent spiritual seed found fertile ground in Nixon. “It’s good we got this point about the Jews across,” the president says after the meeting. “The Jews are an irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards.”
This week Graham issued a most Nixonian reply to the taped revelations, saying he had “no memory” of the occasion, but even so, he “deeply regretted” comments he “apparently made” during the meeting. “Apparently?” Perhaps those “satanic Jews” doctored the tape, eh, Billy? As it says in the Gospels: “When the sins of thy past confront thee, always use a weasel-word to squirm thy way out.”
These days, the elderly Graham is too frail to whack the Bible leather on the road anymore. His place has been taken by his son, Franklin, who runs the racket along the same old lines: hell-fire for the common folk, political cover for the high and mighty. Indeed, Franklin was called upon by the skulking ruler of yet another corrupt and vicious regime in January 2001, when he showered the Lord’s blessing on the illicit inauguration of the unelected wastrel whom Daddy Graham put on the road to glory all those years ago.
Meanwhile, Bush is still faithful to his Imam’s teaching. He believes Jews are damned to eternal torment unless they adopt his own pinched and primitive fundamentalist faith — an opinion that once landed him in hot water with his less jihadic mother. Alarmed at her son’s ignorant intolerance, she called – who else? – Graham to set Junior straight. Graham’s response? “I happen to agree with what George says.”
Well, he would, wouldn’t he?
III.
Graham’s janus-faced enmity — supporting Israeli militarism while hiding what he “really feels” about Jews — is still very much alive among the American elite. (And not just among the elite, of course.) The marriage of convenience — or rather, the three-way orgy — between Likudnik Jews and America’s imperial militarists and Christian nationalists — has obscured the fundamental hatred and distrust of Jews that underlies much of the nation’s political discourse. For example, veteran cognoscenti have long known that “liberal media” is a code word for “the Jews” — cast as wily, relentless corruptors of America’s pure soul, with their promotion of immoral movies, jungle be-bop music, investigative journalism and what all. Indeed, in the subterranean American lexicon, the term “liberal” itself has long denoted a) Jews; b) uppity darkies duped by Jews, and c) white commies and race traitors in league with Jews to destroy America.
And if you think this template doesn’t lie buried but percolating in the amygdala of America’s cultural brain, then brother, you don’t know these here United States at all. Of course, as with almost every anti-semitic elite down through the ages, there are also many “good Jews” around — as Graham himself noted. In our day, these are the Jews who support America’s imperial agenda and help keep down the “recalcitrant tribes” of the Middle East, in much the same manner as the American elite’s illustrious forbears cleaned out those pesky redskins. In fact, with Israeli society now hurtling headlong into a quasi-fascist fortress state, there are probably more “good Jews” of this stripe than there have been in a long time — perhaps ever.
But of course, most Jews are not imperial stooges or ethnic cleansers — and these clearly belong to the “Synagogue of Satan” (with Noam Chomsky as High Priest, perhaps.) The American amygdala still pulses with a primitive fear response at the thought of these impure Others: Nixon’s “irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards,” still potently evoked by the masking term “liberal.”
NOTE: One should not be fooled by the manufactured “tussle” between the Obama and Netanyahu administrations over Israeli “settlements,” by the way. The bipartisan foreign policy elite of the United States do not give a rat’s damn about how many Palestinian Indians are forced from their land, or how many Warsaw Ghettos the Israelis construct for their captives. If they did, they would not have sat idly by and watched the “settlements” grow like topsy throughout the so-called “peace process.” Such rote displays of displeasure are just part of the game. Israeli nationalists get to look tough for their domestic political audiences; the Americans get to appear “even-handed,” which in turn provides some cover for the brutal dictatorships they support in the region. Israel can then make “concessions” (insincerely offered, never carried out), which makes the American president look effective — and casts Israel in a better light for the American audience. (“See, they listen to reason, they want to work things out.”) It’s a game that everybody wins — except ordinary Palestinians.
If the Americans were serious about influencing Israeli policy on the “settlements” — or anything else — then they would move to cut off the nearly $3 billion a year the United States provides to fund Israel’s war machine — and its settlements. In politics, as in so much else, you must follow the money. And in American-Israeli relations — as in so much else — the money is not where the mouth is.
P.S. If you want to hear what the “Synagogue of Satan” really sounds like in full flow, then attend the words of Sir Gerald Kaufman, standing up in Britain’s House of Commons during Israel’s brutal decimation of Gaza earlier this year. As the UK magazine Lobster notes, Kaufman “described the murder of his Polish grandmother by a German soldier and then said:
“My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli Government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as their justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count.”
Compare that to the overwhelming pro-massacre majority in the U.S. Congress, which voted its “vigorous and unwavering commitment” to Israel during the slaughter. Or indeed, compare it to the eloquent response then-President-Elect Barack Obama made to the attack, which Israel conveniently ended just before his inauguration: