There’s a piquant contrast in the press coverage across the decades of Billy Graham’s various private dealings with Nixon, as displayed on the tapes gradually released from the National Archive or disclosed from Nixon’s papers. I’ll come shortly to the recent flap over Graham and Nixon’s closet palaverings about the Jews, but first let’s visit another interaction between the great evangelist and his commander in chief.
Back in April, 1989 a Graham memo to Nixon was made public. It took the form of a secret letter from Graham, dated April 15, 1969, drafted after Graham met in Bangkok with missionaries from Vietnam. These men of God said that if the peace talks in Paris were to fail, Nixon should step up the war and bomb the dikes. Such an act, Graham wrote excitedly, “could overnight destroy the economy of North Vietnam.”
Graham lent his imprimatur to this recommendation. Thus Graham was advocating a policy to the US Commander in Chief that on Nixon’s own estimate would have killed a million people. The German high commissioner in occupied Holland, Seyss-Inquart, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg for breaching dikes in Holland in World War Two. (His execution did not deter the USAF from destroying the Toksan dam in North Korea, in 1953, thus deliberately wrecking the system that irrigated 75 per cent of North Korea’s rice farms.)
This disclosure of Graham as an aspirant war criminal did not excite any commotion when it became public in 1989, twenty years after it was written. I recall finding a small story in the Syracuse Herald-Journal. No one thought to chide Graham or even question him on the matter. Very different has been the reception of a new tape revealing Graham, Nixon and Haldeman palavering about Jewish domination of the media and Graham invoking the “stranglehold” Jews have on the media.
On the account of James Warren in the Chicago Tribune, who has filed excellent stories down the years on Nixon’s tapes, and the media, in this 1972 Oval Office session between Nixon, Haldeman and Graham, the President raises a topic about which “we can't talk about it publicly” — namely Jewish influence in Hollywood and the media.
Nixon cites Paul Keyes, a political conservative who is executive producer of the NBC hit, “Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In,” as telling him that “11 of the 12 writers are Jewish.” “That right?” says Graham, prompting Nixon to claim that Life magazine, Newsweek, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others, are “totally dominated by the Jews.” Nixon says network TV anchors Howard K. Smith, David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite are “front men who may not be of that persuasion,” but that their writers are “95 percent Jewish.”
“This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country's going down the drain,” the nation's best-known preacher declares. “You believe that?” Nixon says. “Yes, sir,” Graham says. “Oh, boy,” replies Nixon. “So do I. I can't ever say that, but I believe it.” “No, but if you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do something,” Graham replies.
Magnanimously Nixon concedes that this does not mean “that all the Jews are bad” but that most are left-wing radicals who want “peace at any price except where support for Israel is concerned. The best Jews are actually the Israeli Jews.” “That's right,” agrees Graham, who later concurs with a Nixon assertion that a “powerful bloc” of Jews confronts Nixon in the media. “And they're the ones putting out the pornographic stuff,” Graham adds.
Later Graham says that “a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine. They swarm around me and are friendly to me. Because they know I am friendly to Israel and so forth. They don't know how I really feel about what they're doing to this country.” After Graham’s departure Nixon says to Haldeman, “You know it was good we got this point about the Jews across.” “It's a shocking point,” Haldeman replies, “Well,” says Nixon, “it's also, the Jews are an irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards.”
Within days of these exchanges becoming public the 83-year old Graham was hauled from his semi-dotage, and impelled to express public contrition. “Experts” on Graham were duly cited as expressing their “shock” at Graham’s White House table talk.
Why the shock? Don’t they know that this sort of stuff is consonant with the standard conversational bill of fare at 75 per cent of the country clubs in America, not to mention many a Baptist soiree? Nixon thought American Jews were lefty peaceniks who dominated the Democratic Party and were behind the attacks on him. Graham reckoned it was Hollywood Jews who had sunk the nation in porn. Haldeman agreed with both of them. At whatever level of fantasy, they were all acknowledging power. But they didn’t say they wanted to kill a million Jews. That’s what Graham said about the Vietnamese and no one raised a bleat.
It’s supposedly the third rail in journalism even to have a discussion of how much the Jews do control the media. Since three of the prime founders of Hollywood, were Polish Jews who grew up within fifty miles of each other in Galicia, it’s reckoned as not so utterly beyond the bounds of propriety to talk about Jewish power in Hollywood, though people still stir uneasily. The economic and political commentator Jude Wanniski remarked last week in his web newsletter that even if the Jews don’t control the media overall, it is certainly true to say that they control discussion of Israel in the media here.
Certainly, there are a number of stories sloshing around the news now that have raised discussion of Israel and of the posture of American Jews to an acrid level. The purveyor of anthrax may have been a former government scientist, Jewish, with a record of baiting a colleague of Arab origins, and with the intent to blame the anthrax on Muslim terrorists.
Rocketing around the web and spilling into the press are many stories about Israeli spies in America at the time of 9/11. On various accounts, they were trailing Atta and his associates, knew what was going to happen but did nothing about it, or were simply spying on US facilities. Some, posing as art students have been expelled, according to AP. Finally, there’s Sharon’s bloody repression of the Palestinians, and Israel’s apparently powerful role in Bush’s foreign policy, urging him into action against at least two of the Axes of evil, Iraq and Iran.
A subject in need of treatment without prejudice. That Israel intentionally influences US media and US govt, requires strain to dispute. That Jews are the main or original cause of evil in the world, or even more evil on average, than most other people, is beyond fair dispute. We have lots of good examples who treat everyone with the golden rule. In what broad perspective is any people more evil or less kind, than others in general?
The prejudiced run screaming from such tests.
But to deny the fascistic right wing in Israel, the yeshiva student who shot Menachem Begin, blotting the Hymn to Peace with his blood as he died, that their fascists practically crushed the Israeli peace movement, well i hope someone can dispute it, but i think their fascists are as bad as ours in America, neither admitting what they are.
I don’t believe Trump about Arabs in Atlantic City, NJ, cheering the WTC towers falling. Where are the photos?
I believe this:
https://www.haaretz.com/1.5396918
MY! More photos of the “5 Dancing Israelis” than i knew of! I had seen them on the Israeli talk show, when one said he knew the attack was coming and they were there to document it. So why did they not warn us?
Their American co-conspirators, including POTUS must have also known.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x31fq5k
But i, one of many, who nazis tried to kill off my People at Auschwitz, so efficiently and ruthlessly, i do not believe in making scapegoats of Jews, Mexicans, Moslems or anyone else, to shrug off responsibility for my own faults.
Trying to inflict guilt, being a crybully, branding me a “self-hating Jew”, i do not deserve. I am just starting to be responsible for My People, for those of us, who treat Arabs so much like nazis treated us, with genocidal policies. Not exactly. Not rushing to wipe them out, but a slow genocide. Raining white phosphorous down on schools and family neighborhoods, igniting children in their UN school, so little bodies had to be peeled off the floor leaving the backs of their clothes, skin, blood and fat sticking there, burning big holes through little girl’s brains in their homes is genocide. targeting 9-year old boys with a little dum dum to the midbrain is genocide, the word created to describe the nazi’s intentions for us Jews. Unexusably now, “genocide” is what some Jews do, in an organized way.
And it is high time to confront the conscience of my People.
I’m an American before being a Jew. That’s how it must be or the national interest of the USA gets dragged away to whatever a fascistic State of Israel sees as their own benefit, the USA’s being prejudiced and secondary to Israel’s
That IDF tried to sink the USS Liberty, with all hands in 1967, is documented history.
No foreign alliance can be allowed to dominate the USA, except by treaties, but Israel is the tail that wags our dog, both sides of the aisle, even longer and moreso than Russia wags our republicans.
And it is not anti-semitic to tell the truth. If it were, every one of our prophets hunted and persecuted for accusing Israel of mortal sins and warning us of the national karma. No more than repeating Thomas Jefferson to Americans: “…indeed i tremble for my country when i consider God is just”
Both nations should tremble, and Saudi Arabia too, for embarking on military adventures together after attacking the WTC and Pentagon to justify them. Especially since we started WWIII with micronukes and other genetic weapons like DU, white phosphorous and persistent, toxic, metal spreading, thermobaric weapons. America’s subversive warlords give us the karma of teeming birth defects to come in the USA, immanently. How long could you stand seeing the hospital full of freaks American troops were ordered to create at Falluja, if you were God? Every country the USA makes war on now suffers from permanent epidemics of mutagenic and carcinogenic warfare from persistent toxins in their environments that could outlast human history. Now the unholy trinity of the USA, Israel and Saudi Arabia, allied for wars of genocide, annexation, resource seizure and hegemony, the CIA using islamic terrorists to launch sarin attacks to blame them on Bashar Al Assad, even using ISIS, what karma has the CIA made for America? What karma for that unholy trinity, that can be called the main cause of evil in the world now, although we might have been the world’s main good, formerly. We Americans must not lie to ourselves, that our role in history is so excellent and innocent we can do no wrong. Israel must be no less self-honest. I know SA less well, but surely they should put themselves under the same caution, under a just God. Being in on the start of WWIII, by 2003 or before, is complicity in the worst war crime, especially since millions marched for nuclear disarmament in the 1980s, national majorities, including American, got arms control treaties, even with Ronald Reagan, the most fascist American president before Donald trump, we got major arms control treaties, but our “crazies” (pro-nuke use generals) betrayed the Will of the People and broke nearly every arms control treaty we had. And now they get their wargasms, with allied govts and mass media to help them cover up existence and use of micronukes, now they get to use nukes like they always wanted, they get warm fuzzies all over to imagine killing so many at once and leaving survivors who will have deformed, cancer-ridden children, if any. Don’t support the govt that gives your family such karmas. Prepare to save them from our faithless, constitution flaunting, freedom-robbing, world destroying US govt and it’s allies. Out Military Industrial Complex has wagged our dog at least since JFK was killed. More so after 911. The only thing worse than when WWIII comes home, would be our fascists taking over. Our democracy still works to serve most Americans sometimes. Until America is physically destroyed, we should cherish and support the democracy that still works here sometimes. It’s better than letting nazis and confederates lynch and rule us. The are essentially against democracy, except with whom they agree.
No matter, that trump gave his ex-lover, Ivanka to a Jew. No matter, that he went to Israel and said things they always wanted to hear. Trump was always a nazi sympathizer. He read Hitler’s speeches, and lied to cover it up. He incited swastikas and stars and bars to run amok through the halls of the People’s legislature, which Adolf Hitler Jefferson Davis never succeeded doing. He slaps the wrists of nazi supporters sometimes. His users in Israel surely know his hypocrisy but use him anyway, like so many who abhor Trump.
Prep everybody! Save children. Save the future.
Yet, what’s holy in Judaism and every religion remains so eternally. What is holy in the hearts of those loving the Almighty, does not die, even when nations die from our karmas.
All the lies told about Jews, the blood libels, they are lies. All the evils Jews do are true. We are hated half from envy and half from the clannishness of many Jews. We are a very great and talented people, who contribute much to the knowledge and benefit of the whole human race. There is only one race, the human race, that is essential to preserve, or God will start life over with microbes and insects. Let’s earn the future for human children while we may. Let’s try to earn His favor. We cannot take it for granted. Human extinction is now likely. The poor and middle class deserve to be saved as much as rich people. Too bad we got a bigger bigot in Franklin than in Billy. Good thing the Founder’s separation of Church and State still resists our Christian bigot’s attempts to conform us all to their morals, that as our founders made clear, would lead to a religious kind of tyranny, known to their historic experience. They designed the constitution to prevent all kinds of tyrannies, but our bigots still want the religious kind. They confuse the USA with the parochial Crown Colony of Massachusetts Bay, as if the USA were meant to be Christian. In fact, it was meant to allow any and all religions or none, respecting the liberty of each person to choose our own beliefs. Any less freedom and it wouldn’t be as great as the USA was designed to be by the savants who wrote our federal constitution. Our Christian conservatives now claim the American way of life and government is all derived from the Bible. That is a lie. The American way of life is a compromise of religion and humanism, or two European, philosophic movements. When desperately pressed in war by Britain, the world’s superpower then, our right and left wings had to agree to disagree so we could all be free. There never was a USA w/o our left wing. Both of our right and left movements are much older than the USA. They are both perennial. To tear our either is like tearing out the USA’s great heart. Our moral fanatics are crazy to try, as the Catholic church that EvangelicaL Protestants decry had a moral tyranny like those Protestants want. Most of our Evangelical Protestants are such lying hypocrites even before they destroy religious freedom for everyone else, their moral regime cannot be other than hypocritical. Yet i have known excellent Evangelical Protestants. Not my choice of religion, but we are all fortunate to have the good ones. Likewise Catholics. Evangelical Protestants may never give Francis the
credit he deserves for being the impossible Pope, a real saint where perhaps none was ever elected. No pope can fully reform the Vatican, where old powers stubbornly persist, but Francis deserves credit for really cracking down on molesting priests. A group of rabbis asked his advice about molesting rabbis. He said children are too important to let them get away with it, give them no breaks. They danced and wished him long life. What’s wrong with their fellow Christians who don’t respect a saint?
But what is wrong with an ally that dances for joy when thousands of Americans die? Not their religion, but their clannish twisting of it.
We Americans and we Jews must face reality because we must face God and our karma. The state of Israel is a traitorous and manipulative ally. Three countries are going to hell together. The people must save children because they are innocent. Everyone needs a Geiger counter and a fallout shelter. And not to be surprised when America suffers our karma for poisoning Viet Nam with agent orange. It’s not as bad as what we do now, but that is all the more reason to save children. Yes, the USA uses tactical nukes on people in West Asia since 17 years or so. Our psychopath govt did start WWIII and it must come home. It will to our bad allies too, as God is just. Save the future now!
https://www.google.com/search?q=5+dancing+israelis&sxsrf=ALeKk01iPbBFXncgtHjHcgPx_b09vds2JA:1622903281710&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiBpfHs2YDxAhWLtp4KHRppCZcQ_AUoAnoECAEQBA&biw=912&bih=548