Zionist's Bribe Truman |
I cannot help but feel that it is ever more urgent to answer the concerns of many Americans preoccupied with Mideast terrorism, which is referred to constantly in our U.S. media as a characteristic of Palestinian crimes only, while vicious Israeli crimes against Palestinians are dismissed as self-defense measures. In actuality, neither side—Israelis nor Palestinians—has come into court of world opinion with clean hands. If the Palestinians have been guilty of terrorism, and they have, let us not forget who first introduced this disease into the region. It was the likes of Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and Ariel Sharon, who later became Prime Ministers of Israel, and yet all had a long list of atrocities to answer to of their own.
It was in 1953, the same year that What Price Israel? was first published, that a young Sharon was the commander of killer Unit 101 that brutally massacred defenseless Arab civilians in the Palestinian village of Qibyah. Perhaps we cannot expect the less than scholarly George W. Bush to know about this lifelong criminal history of his Israeli “Man of Peace,” but many of Bush’s experienced advisors do indeed know they are dealing with a perpetrator of many inexcusable war crimes. Why then do these informed men and women go along with providing Israel with unbounded military, financial, and moral support when doing so is contrary to our own national interest and security? Tragically, when it comes to the Middle East, the old saying, “The more things change, the more they remain the same,” still reigns supreme. The same old lies and chicanery on the part of fanatical Zionists are going on now in the Bush administration just as they were in the Truman administration.
In the Summer of 2003, we have seen great shock and sorrow expressed about very angry and seemingly “anti-Semitic” remarks in a 1947 diary of then President Harry Truman that had remained dust-covered and unread for over half a century until the Truman Library found it and released it to the public. In a July 21, 2003 article, “Truman did it to save his own skin,” in the Jewish World Review, Sidney Zion laments with considerable rage that now the truth is out, and it shows that White House aide Clark Clifford told Truman he would lose the 1948 election unless he immediately recognized the Jewish state. Why the huge surprise that Truman’s much acclaimed love and concern for the Jews has turned out to be a bitterly disappointing fable! The American champion of the founding of Israel made his pro-Zionist decisions far less due to his Bible upbringing or humanitarian motives than because of his political concerns to have both the Jewish vote and campaign money from wealthy Jews. Readers of the original What Price Israel? have known this for 30 or 40 or 50 years since they first read it. The truth was known then but was denied and covered up to make the existence of the new “Jewish state” appear to be the outcome of both a religious and humanitarian miracle.
Several months after Roosevelt’s death and Truman’s succession to the presidency, a Reuters news service headline in December 1945 had declared: “Truman Clarifies Palestine Stand: Not in Favor of a ‘Judaic’ State.” The article went on to detail Truman’s outlook at the time, “As a true American, he did not feel that any Government should be based on religious or racial grounds, and he was therefore opposed to the creation of a ‘Judaic’ State in Palestine. For the same reason, he would oppose one based on the Moslem religion or a Baptist denomination. The Palestine Government, he felt, should be the Government of the people of Palestine, irrespective of race, creed or color.” The article goes on to describe the position of the American Council for Judaism as presented in person by Lessing Rosenwald to Truman—and Truman’s stated view was virtually identical to our own as anti-Zionist Jews! So, what happened to change Truman’s mind so dramatically?
The names in Truman’s time of Zionist American Jews who pressured, manipulated, or paid for the promotion of Israel include David Niles, Judge Sam Rosenman, Max Lowenthal, Abraham Feinberg, Eddie Jacobson, and A.J. Grandin. Secular or Christian Zionists close to Truman, such as Clark Clifford and Matthew Connelly, clearly made their decisions based on vote counting and campaign financing. Although What Price Israel? in 1953 dealt with many of these individuals, plus Silver, Wise, and others—there are resources today that were not available to me then or even later in 1978 and 1983. That is when I wrote the almost 1,000-page history, and its update, of the “special relationship”—facilitated by many influential American Jewish individuals and organizations—between Israel and the United States government: The Zionist Connection I & II.
Let’s take Abraham Feinberg as an example of this highly improper Zionist influence. By his own admission in the Oral History provided by him to the Truman Library archives in 1973, he planned (or rather, shall I say schemed?) his way to the top specifically to be able to influence presidential policy toward his people and the American stance toward the probability of a Jewish state in Palestine. His original goal was to get next to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he devised ways for an introduction.
However, he never got quite that close and had to settle for an acquaintanceship with the then vice president, Harry Truman. Soon Roosevelt died, and Feinberg’s new friend became president. Here we have the beginning of an ugly alliance between fanatical Zionism and the highest office in our land because of the power of Zionist money and the prospect of Jewish votes. Feinberg soon wormed his way into the inner circle of campaign finance advisors to Truman.
Why do I use such provocative words such as schemed, and devised, and plotted, and wormed his way in? Because, they are true to what happened. It is time we called a spade a spade and not allow anyone to be silenced by the false charge of anti-Semitism (or self-hating Jew) for our making verified charges such as these. I do not expect all of my American Jewish or Israeli co-religionists to ever agree with me about the negative essence of Zionism, but it remains the right of many of us of Jewish faith to insist that Judaism is not Zionism, Zionism is not Judaism, and to be anti-Zionist is in no way to be anti-Semitic.
At the same time that I and others in the U.S. State Department were being investigated and forced out of our careers due to vicious lies by anonymous informants, Feinberg was not investigated and purged out of his powerful unofficial capacity in the Truman administration. As a staunch conservative Republican and proven anti-Communist, you would think I would be one of the last persons to be targeted by the FBI at the time. Yet a questionable individual such as Feinberg could be designated as the one person to decide which other Jews had the right to speak with the president. This is acknowledged in the 1967 Oral History at the Truman Library of Matthew Connelly, Truman’s appointment secretary from 1945 to 1953: “After the death of David Niles, I selected Abe Feinberg myself as our point of contact, because we used to get requests from the heads of different Jewish groups and not having knowledge of who was who or what was what or what their angle was, I could call Abe Feinberg and ask him about this individual who was requesting an appointment. He would say, ‘He’s O.K.’ or ‘Don’t bother with him.’” No wonder that my anti-Zionist Jewish colleagues at the American Council for Judaism such as Lessing Rosenwald became far more limited in their contact with Truman!
Money talks, and Feinberg the Money Man was able to greatly influence Truman’s policies toward Israel. Historian David McCullough wrote a passage in his 1992 biography of Truman about Feinberg’s talent for throwing money around, in this case reportedly as bankrolls that fell on the floor as Feinberg was said to have delivered them in an umbrella in attempted exchange for favoritism toward Israel. The statement was a highly inaccurate anecdote similar to one that John F. Kennedy had told to Gore Vidal involving a purported 2 million dollar bribe in cash being brought in a suitcase to Truman aboard his whistle-stop campaign train in 1948. It was a case of a core of truth being turned in the retelling into a bit of clownishness. McCullough did not realize that Feinberg was still alive and soon found himself and his publisher being contacted by Feinberg’s lawyer. The offending passage was removed from the next edition under threat of a libel suit.
McCullough of course should have removed the distorted version of the story. Too bad that he may have been unaware of the real story from several vantage points in the Truman Library archives that are now available on the Internet. It is a far more powerful indictment of Feinberg than the clownish version. Feinberg’s own words from 1973 describe how there were not enough funds through the Democratic finance committee to afford a campaign trip by train throughout the country that Truman wished to be able to make to have a chance to retain the presidency. Truman was falling way behind Dewey in the polls, and he was being deserted literally and financially by many of the usual Democratic Party faithful. Abe Feinberg, whose wealth derived from hosiery manufacture and Ed Kaufmann of Kay Jewelers, provided a quick $100,000 to get the campaign trip started. Feinberg reveals further, “As that train went into towns where there were Jewish communities, I arranged that a Jewish delegation would ask to see the President and be received on the train and that, in as many cases as possible, they would bring him donations above these original commitments.” Feinberg comments about Truman, “He often said, ‘If not for my friend Abe, I couldn’t have made the trip and I wouldn’t have been elected.’”
Isn’t it “just politics” that Truman would naturally turn to anyone who could put up the funds to “save his skin” as the Jewish World Review article characterized the situation? Perhaps, unless the persons or interests the money is coming from are gravely questionable. In the Palestine Post, a Zionist-Jewish publication in the pre-Israel era, there was an announcement on July 4, 1947 of the founding in New York City of Americans for Haganah Incorporated. The President of this new organization—whose mission was to supply funds for unrestricted immigration of Jews to Palestine and to raise money for the Zionist militias to acquire more weaponry to subdue the Arabs who did not wish to be displaced from their own land—was none other than our schemer Abraham Feinberg. At the same time that he was cozying up to Truman, it was public knowledge in the news of the day that he was an ardent Zionist of the most extreme variety.
This was the same month in 1947 in which Truman was writing with clear hostility in his “lost” diary on the 27th: “The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the underdog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, or Baptist, he goes haywire.” Why then was Feinberg allowed to get so close to Truman when the American Council for Judaism’s anti-Zionist position of an “unselfish” solution for Palestine was Truman’s original position as well? It is obvious that now as then, we need total campaign finance reform and a halt to pandering for ethnic and religious votes in order to prevent this kind of corruption of our American political decision-making processes.
http://www.the7thfire.com/new_world_order/zionism/what_price_israel.htm