From this day forward, Ms. Thomas will no longer be a part of the White House Press Corps. While I expect nothing less than than a fawning send off from her adoring colleagues in the media, to much of America she will be long remembered, not for her reporting and breaking of the glass ceiling for women in journalism, but for her irrepressible anger and hatred for Israel and the Jews. It’s a pathetic way to end a career, but in Helen Thomas’s case, a fitting one.
For me, Helen’s words brought back memories from my tour of the National Holocaust Museum in DC. It’s important to note that the Nazis didn’t just suddenly round up and gas the Jews out of nowhere. It was part of a long and effective strategy of government sanctioned anti-Jewish text books, children’s storybooks, public posters, and print and radio propaganda designed to generate enough public distrust of and anger toward the Jews that it caused the German people, unaware of the Nazi government’s ultimate goal, to marginalize them.
Priestap is so concerned for jews that she hasn’t noticed that today it is Whites who are targeted for marginalization by virtually all Western governments.
Helen Thomas’s comments that Jews should leave Israel and go back to Poland and Germany were especially weighty for me, as I’ve spent the last couple of weeks reading and watching documentaries about WWII and the Holocaust. I guess she forgot that Jews fled Poland and Germany to escape Nazi death camps, and suggesting they “go back” invoked Holocaust images.
I was sad and enraged when I saw a photo of naked Jewish women walking to a mass grave to be shot, and one carried a newborn. I’ve seen lots of Holocaust photos, but that one in particular brought the tragedy into focus. According to a book on the subject, Nazi’s sometimes buried the babies alive with their dead mothers, instead of shooting them.
The moral of this token’s little testimonial: jewish propaganda even works on blacks.
Priestap also links Leftists Cheerfully Defend Helen Thomas’ Anti-Semitism, which embeds a longer version of the Thomas interview, Helen Thomas Complete (original). Thomas uses the same argument as the jews who have accused her of being ignorant of history: “Why push people out of there who have lived there for centuries?” The leftist “defense” is that Thomas is offering friendly advice to young jewish journos – she probably thought it was safe to speak her mind because, “some of my best friends are jews” and “after all, some of them have said the same thing”.
In much the same way that some of us on the left are fond of calling out racism among conservatives, right-wing commentators love little more than lobbing the accusation of anti-Semitism back our way. Normally, they aim way too wide, and wing a bunch of people who are plainly just reasonable critics of Israel. (As someone who’s unmistakably Jewish in person, but lacks a particularly Jewish last name, I especially enjoy blogging about Israel and getting called a Jew-hater in the comments. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a Heeb.)
For once, though, conservatives are piling up on someone who really did cross some kind of line.
Oddly enough, when jews aren’t nervously trying to pass they’re shoving their jewishness in your face.
Helen Thomas: When An Icon Disappoints, by Irin Carmon at Jezebel, “an Israeli-born Jew, whose European grandparents and great-grandparents were among the few in their families to survive Nazi genocide because they were Zionists in what was then known as Palestine”:
There may be only one Helen Thomas — who refused to follow the script for a woman, who has pushed back at every single president since Eisenhower, and who has now disappointed a lot of us. But maybe we’ve moved to a point where she no longer has to stand in for all loudmouthed, fearless women. There have been plenty of firsts and seconds and thirds since then, so even though she is harder for me to admire now, I hope that we no longer need her as badly.
No longer need her as badly? I think we all know what that really means is Carmon wants to ship Thomas to a concentration camp.
I don’t condone in any way what she said about calling for the Jewish people to get out of Palestine or the way that she said it. It was a horrible and thoughtless comment and there should be consequences when someone who is supposed to be an objective journalist not only inserts themselves into a news story, but also does it in an offensive and inexcusable way.
But I have to ask — why does Helen have to “resign” but others who have done similar things get to keep their jobs?
If forced resignation is good enough for someone who’s actually contributed to real journalism, then it ought to be good enough for those who work for “news” organizations with an agenda when they cross that kind of not-so-fine line of offensiveness.
But I suppose in this day and age of opinion news, as long as the offenders are making money for their bosses, it will get excused. If Helen Thomas had been working for FOX News, she’d probably still have a job.
Sure, because in PunditMom’s fevered imagination Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, O’Reilly, and FOX are clearly “anti-semitic”. Why might she imagine that? Well here’s PunditMom on Surviving My Mixed Marriage:
My husband and I are very different in many ways.
He’s a city boy and I’m a farm girl. I’m Protestant and he’s Jewish.
It’s a rare person that actually came out and criticized Thomas without pretending that she made her remarks because she’s old or angry. The remarks are sheer Jew-hatred, nothing less. Jews’ millennia-old ties to the land of Israel are utterly discounted by Thomas, who chooses to use the fiction that Israel was a country created specifically by and for Holocaust survivors.
a former New Jerseyan who now resides in Virginia. She is a former liberal who now considers herself center-left, and has been the SNN token woman and token feminist since almost the beginning of the podcast.
Since moving to Virginia she has voted twice for Republican presidential candidates, purchased a handgun and a rifle (and knows how to shoot them), and spends most Fourth of July holidays at Fort Lee in Petersburg. Zionism and finding media bias are Meryl’s two specialties, as well as delivering as much juvenile scorn as a subject will stand. Meryl blogs about Jewish and Israeli issues at yourish.com.
It’s not enough to have spent a lifetime being an awesome, trailblazing journalistic and feminist icon. Because longer still than the shadow cast by such a great career is the one cast by the Holocaust.
The verdict is in. People who love Israel and love jews hate Helen Thomas.
In an exchange with Joey Kurtzman at jewcy.com, Be Nice, or We’ll Crush You, subtitled “Criticizing Jews is professional suicide”, John Derbyshire writes:
Almost the first thing you hear from old hands when you go into opinion journalism in the U.S. is, to put it in the precise form I first heard it: “Don’t f*ck with the Jews.”
Joe Sobran expressed it with his usual hyperbole: “You must only ever write of us as a passive, powerless, historically oppressed minority, struggling to maintain our ancient identity in a world where all the odds are against us, poor helpless us, poor persecuted and beleaguered us! Otherwise we will smash you to pieces.”
Helen Thomas has been a fixture in the White House press corps since JFK was president. She must have understood Derbyshire’s little bit of journo wisdom. What little I know of her involves her supporting role in the left-right kabuki that passes for US politics. Based on opinion from the right, or “conservative” side of the theatre, all I could ever really be sure of was that Thomas was some kind of immortal wicked witch of the left. She was “a nasty piece of work” who could be impertinent and insolent, even to presidents, and yet she never had to fear for her job.
Now that portion of the kabuki lies in tatters.
The response from “the jews” of all stripes to Thomas’ heresy has been swift and merciless. For “liberal” jews, Thomas’ “anti-semitism” towers above personal friendships, her decades of reliable “liberal” service, and her being the first woman journalist to do this or that. For “conservative” jews, her “anti-semitism” totally eclipses her “liberalism”. Everyone could live with Thomas’ “liberalism”, but now she has vexed “the jews”, and this cannot be tolerated. With the flotilla flap making Israelis look like bullies there couldn’t be a better time to remind everyone that they had better not say as much out loud.
There are some people who believe that any criticism of Israel is Anti-Semitism. That belief is as ignorant as Anti-Semitism itself. There is however, a great deal of crossover between hatred of Israel and Hatred of the Jews. To find out what people really mean you need to examine the words they use.
Helen Thomas’ comparing of the IDF to Nazi Germany is nothing but an attempt to water-down the horror of the Holocaust, and to dehumanize Israel. And her advice to the Jews to get the hell out of Palestine, and go back to Poland and Germany is nothing short of anti-Semitism. If Thomas’ comments were directed toward any other group but the Jews, she would have been out of work a very long time ago. Maybe it’s time for Helen’s bosses to retire her to the “The Home For Old Crazy Anti-Semites.
Helen Thomas–who is a Christian Arab, not Muslim (plenty of Christian Arabs hate Israel and the Jews)–continues in her neo-Nazi ways. In this video, she preaches Judenrein, which is in line with her previous support for Hezbollah.
So, Helen, I’ll go “back” to Poland (even though I, myself, am not from there), if I can get back all of my family’s land, my maternal great-grandfather’s thriving hardware store, my great-grandfather’s spot as Mayor of his town, my great-grandmother’s diamonds, my paternal great-grandparents’ farm, etc., etc., etc. (But since I’m an American, just as many other Jews are Israeli, I love my country and will only stay a week.)
Look, this would never stand under any other administration. The fact that Palestinian Jews were in Israel (Transjordan, Palestine) thousands of years before and during and after the Palestinian Muslims began their Islamic anti-semitic genocidal massacres is ignored by the morally depraved Thomas and her ilk.
Has The White House thrown her out on her ugly Jew-hating keyster? Not a chance.
Helen Thomas is valuable because she provides a picture perfect example of the double standard most Left- leaning journos ( and believe me, the majority are Left- leaning) have when it comes to Jew hatred. While they might not personally endorse it, they’re prepared to accept it, just like Joe Lockhart, as a legitimate point of view that is subject to debate. That’s something virtually none of them would do if that hatred was directed anywhere else but at Jews.
So I think it’s better that Helen Thomas remains an honored part of the White House press corps, especially since few if any of them seem uncomfortable with her in their midst. It tells us a great deal about a large part of the membership of that august body. And who knows? It may actually serve as a wake up call about how commonplace and acceptable in public discourse this kind of obscene anti-Semitism has become.
“She should lose her job over this,” Fleischer said in an email. “As someone who is Jewish, and as someone who worked with her and used to like her, I find this appalling.”
“She is advocating religious cleansing. How can Hearst stand by her? If a journalist, or a columnist, said the same thing about blacks or Hispanics, they would already have lost their jobs.”
Lanny Davis, the former White House Counsel for President Bill Clinton, weighed in on the Helen Thomas controversy today, calling her an “an anti-Semitic bigot.”
“Helen Thomas, who I used to consider a close friend and who I used to respect, has showed herself to be an anti-Semitic bigot. This is not about her disagreement about her criticisms of Israel. She has a right to criticize Israel and that is not the same as being an anti-Semite,” Davis said in a statement.
In a written statement issued Friday, Thomas apologized for the comment to Rabbi David Nessenoff, saying, she deeply regretted her comments and they “do not reflect” her “heartfelt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance.”
But Thomas’ apology did not go far enough, Davis said.
“In my opinion, her apology was not direct and didn’t address the merits of her belief in the stereotype that Jews are aliens in Israel and don’t belong there. She should be at the least suspended from all privileges in the White House press room since bigots don’t merit such privileges. And I believe Hearst should consider a similar suspension of her position as a nationally-syndicated columnist until she owns up to her bigotry and aplogizes (sic) for it,” he said.
Helen Thomas, who I used to consider a close friend and who I used to respect, has showed herself to be an anti-Semitic bigot. This not about her disagreement about her criticisms of Israel. She has a right to criticize Israel and that is not the same as being an anti-Semite.
However, her statement that Jews in Israel should leave Israel and go back to Poland or Germany is an ancient and well-known anti-Semitic stereotype of the Alien Jew not belonging in the “land of Israel” — one that began 2,600 years with the first tragic and violent diaspora of the Jews at the hands of the Romans.
If she had asked all Blacks to go back to Africa, what would White House Correspondents Association position be as to whether she deserved White House press room credentials — much less a privileged honorary seat?
Rubin adds that she has already used her hotline to the White House:
See, that wasn’t so hard. Where is the rest of the media, the White House Correspondents Association, and the White House? As to the latter, no response to my inquiry has been forthcoming.
For starters, this is a classic gaffe because Helen Thomas accidentally told the truth. She’s wrong on the substance, obviously. But of course she believes the Israelis should go away. I sincerely doubt there is anyone familiar with Thomas who really doubts for a moment that she was being less than honest when she made her “back to Poland” comments or that she is lying now when she says she didn’t mean it.
But beyond that, can we do away with all of the shock and dismay at Thomas’ statement? Spare me Lanny Davis’s wounded outrage. Everyone knows she is a nasty piece of work and has been a nasty piece of work for decades.
And when I say a nasty piece of work, I don’t simply mean her opinions on Israel. She’s been full-spectrum awful. I’ve known a few people who knew her 40 years ago, and she was slimy then too.
Organized jewry had some monotonously repetitive and hate-filled things to say about ignorance.
Helen Thomas’s statement of regret does not go far enough. Her remarks were outrageous, offensive and inappropriate, especially since she uttered them on a day the White House had set aside to celebrate the extraordinary accomplishments of American Jews during Jewish American Heritage Month.
The B’nai B’rith International organization says that the YouTube video showing long-time White House correspondent Helen Thomas saying that “Jews should go back to Poland…back to Germany…and America, and everywhere else” demonstrates an outrageous and complete lack of understanding of history.
“Thomas’ comments are contemptible,” said B’nai B’rith International President Dennis W. Glick. “Her distortion of historical reality is astonishing. Her call for Jews to return to Poland and Germany—site of the Nazi genocide, the worst genocide in modern history—is beyond offensive.”
“These vile comments, unfortunately, are the culmination of Thomas’ ongoing anti-Israel sentiments that she kept thinly veiled over the years,” said B’nai B’rith International Executive Vice President Daniel S. Mariaschin. “There should be no place for her in a news organization. Her comments go beyond commentary and land well in the camp that will stop at nothing to delegitimize Israel.”
B’nai B’rith called on the Hearst Corporation to dismiss Thomas, its current columnist, immediately.
“Her comment revealed unbridled hostility to Israel’s very existence, if not to the Jewish people,” said Harris. “It also showed profound ignorance, as half of Israel’s Jews come not from Germany or Poland but from the Arab world, itself a telling point.
Ms. Thomas’s statement is astonishing both in its ignorance and insensitivity. It ignores entirely the enduring historical link of more than 2,000 years between the Jewish people and the land. It ignores the painful history of the Jewish people in Germany and Poland. And, it ignores the fact that half of Israel’s Jewish population today has roots in Arab countries, from which they were expelled or driven out by persecution.
While Ms. Thomas has issued an apology, it is unconvincing. It seemed designed to do nothing more than attempt to put out a fire of her own making. She has demonstrated blatant antipathy for Israel, and for the Jewish people.
Despite the impotence and fears of partisanship feigned by “conservative” jews, Thomas has indeed lost her job, or as the Drudge headline put it: “Helen Sent to Poland”. In the fullness of time we’ll see if her career-ending statement has made her notorious enough to join the bipartisan pantheon of infamous “jew-haters”, like Harry Truman and Richard Nixon, or if she will simply be flushed down the memory hole.
The irony is that Helen Thomas could have said something quite the opposite and she would just as likely have ended up vilified and fired. She could have suggested that all the zionist diaspora jews advocating so diligently for Israeli interests from afar should get the hell out and move to Israel. With only slight modifications to the portions of rhetoric about “unbridled hostility to Israel’s very existence” the jewish denouncements would be much the same and from the same people. The crime is the “insensitivity” to jewish sensibilities.
The strange thing about jewish sensibilities is that so many of them have such a preference for insensitively bossing people around, telling us what is or isn’t moral, dictating what we can or can’t say, judging whether our grovelling is good enough or not. And yet, it doesn’t really matter what you command them to do, the reaction is best characterized as unbridled hostility to your very existence.
Jewish moralizing about expulsion is as ignorant of history as it is brazenly hypocritical. Current events, such as the flotilla flap, provide constant reminders that many zionists would like the Palestinians to get the hell out. The Israelis have actually killed people to encourage as much. The Israeli government has a long history of ethnically cleansing Palestinians:
Benny Morris is a leftist Israeli historian who attained notoriety some years ago by uncovering Israel Defense Forces documents showing Israel’s deliberate policy of expelling Arabs from Israel during the 1948-49 War of Independence. Morris then startled the world by turning around and declaring that such expulsions were essential for Israel’s survival against enemies seeking to destroy it, and were therefore moral. He then went further and said that Ben Gurion’s great error was that he got cold feet and did not expel all the Arabs from Israel in 1948. He then went further and said that Israel in the near future will face an existential crisis in which it will, as a matter of necessity, complete the job that Ben Gurion failed to complete.
[Effi] Eitam, a charismatic ex–cabinet minister and war hero, has proposed ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the West Bank. “We’ll have to expel the overwhelming majority of West Bank Arabs from here and remove Israeli Arabs from [the] political system,” he declared in 2006. In 2008, Eitam merged his small Ahi Party into Netanyahu’s Likud. And for the 2009–2010 academic year, he is Netanyahu’s special emissary for overseas “campus engagement.” In that capacity, he visited a dozen American high schools and colleges last fall on the Israeli government’s behalf. The group that organized his tour was called “Caravan for Democracy.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman once shared Eitam’s views. In his youth, he briefly joined Meir Kahane’s now banned Kach Party, which also advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Israeli soil. Now Lieberman’s position might be called “pre-expulsion.” He wants to revoke the citizenship of Israeli Arabs who won’t swear a loyalty oath to the Jewish state. He tried to prevent two Arab parties that opposed Israel’s 2008–2009 Gaza war from running candidates for the Knesset. He said Arab Knesset members who met with representatives of Hamas should be executed. He wants to jail Arabs who publicly mourn on Israeli Independence Day, and he hopes to permanently deny citizenship to Arabs from other countries who marry Arab citizens of Israel.
In 2009, a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 53 percent of Jewish Israelis (and 77 percent of recent immigrants from the former USSR) support encouraging Arabs to leave the country. Attitudes are worst among Israel’s young. When Israeli high schools held mock elections last year, Lieberman won. This March, a poll found that 56 percent of Jewish Israeli high school students—and more than 80 percent of religious Jewish high school students—would deny Israeli Arabs the right to be elected to the Knesset.
Has anybody of any consequence tried to defend Thomas? Why would they? They’d lose their job too. Whatever their political differences, jews agree: one set of rules for “the jews”, another for everyone else. If you have a problem with this then they will work to make sure you will indeed have a problem.
An instinct for duty, honor, law and order, liberty, a government loyal to its citizens; like the Tea Party, Oath Keepers is a White thing. Thus the suspicious and hostile reaction from the usual anti-White suspects, projecting their own sneaky, malevolent tactics and motives onto their “wingnut” boogeymen.
This Mother Jones hitpiece, this series of cynical articles, is all about manufacturing fear and aiming it at their self-proclaimed adversaries. They want to wake up their “progressive” fellow travellers and right-thinking useful idiots. The “liberal” mask slips as they ridicule, insinuate, and fret about the motives and intentions of a growing movement of mostly confused Whites who cling as desperately to their deracinated, pro-Civil Rights, anti-Nazi liberalism as they cling to their guns and religion.
The fear MoJo stokes is that Oath Keeper rhetoric about Rosa Parks and the Warsaw Ghetto is insincere. MoJo sees through it. Likewise all that nonsense about opposing tyranny. Why? Because their own “liberal”, anti-racist rhetoric is insincere. They don’t trust White people. They don’t share our beliefs or values. They don’t like us. When Oath Keepers talk about upholding their oath to oppose threats to the republic and its constitution, MoJo and friends realize, “hey, that means us!”
Oath Keepers, which recruits soldiers and police to resist federal “tyranny,” has become a hub in the sprawling anti-Obama movement.
For our March/April 2010 issue, reporter Justine Sharrock got up close and personal with Oath Keepers, a fast-growing “patriot” group that recruits active-duty soldiers, police, and veterans to resist what its members consider an increasingly tyrannical government. Members reaffirm their service oath to uphold the Constitution and further vow to disobey any orders they deem illegal or unconstitutional. Unveiled last April, the group has already established itself as a hub within the larger anti-Obama movement, attracting a wide range of followers from politicians to Tea Partiers to militia enthusiasts—not to mention alienated soldiers like Private 1st Class Lee Pray, above. The group has also drawn praise from a who’s who of right-wing cable hosts including Glenn Beck.
Wing nuts no longer: Right-wing celebs are helping anti-Obama militias go mainstream.
— By Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery
IN THE FALL of 1964, not long after Barry Goldwater had clinched the Republican nomination for president, historian Richard Hofstadter penned penned an essay for Harper’s called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” It was an instant classic—not because it was so elegantly written, but because in just a few pages it described with deadly accuracy one of the major strains of our national dialogue.
“The paranoid spokesman,” Hofstadter wrote, “is always manning the barricades of civilization…Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse…He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised…Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.”
Oath Keepers, the group featured in our cover story, would seem the classic case in point. Its members are cops, sheriffs, and military men and women determined to resist the tyrannical orders they believe are imminent from the Obama administration. The fantasies they spin—a “globalist” leadership intent on declaring martial law, putting God-fearing Americans in detention camps, and asking UN blue helmets to keep order while it imposes health care reform and who knows what else—replicate almost exactly the fears far-right cranks have peddled for generations. Replace “socialism” with “communism” and you are pretty much back to 1964 (or 1934 or 1884, for that matter).
But what was true then is true now: Dismissing one’s adversaries as wing nuts is myopic, both intellectually and politically. Like it or not, the Oath Keepers, and the myriad other “patriot” groups now emerging around the edges of the Tea Party movement, are tapping into a real strain of popular anger. And who wouldn’t be angry? Unemployment for millions, bailouts and bonuses for a few. A health care reform plan supremely undersold by a Democratic establishment unconcerned with the battle for hearts and minds (see: Martha Coakley). A GOP controlled by pro-corporate nihilists.
But righteous anger is one thing. Manufacturing fear, dare we say terror, is another—and over the past year, we have seen cynical politicians and talk-show demagogues increasingly willing to traffic in it. It’s no longer just handfuls of militia types trading overheated conspiracy theories; it’s America’s most popular cable news network giving gobs of airtime to people who all but advocate armed insurrection.
When people in positions of great power play footsie with those who advocate treason—or claim that the elected commander in chief is a bastard foreigner with no claim to the office—they are not just engaging in a lively debate. They are actively negating a fundamental principle of American politics: that the government, no matter how much you might disagree with its representatives, is of, by, and for the people.
Glenn Beck loves them. Tea Partiers court them. Congressmen listen to them. Meet the fast-growing “patriot” group that’s recruiting soldiers to resist the Obama administration.
— By Justine Sharrock
His belief that that day [when the US government declares martial law] is imminent has led [Pvt. 1st Class Lee] Pray to a group called Oath Keepers, one of the fastest-growing “patriot” organizations on the right. Founded last April by Yale-educated lawyer and ex-Ron Paul aide Stewart Rhodes, the group has established itself as a hub in the sprawling anti-Obama movement that includes Tea Partiers, Birthers, and 912ers. Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, and Pat Buchanan have all sung its praises, and in December, a grassroots summit it helped organize drew such prominent guests as representatives Phil Gingrey and Paul Broun, both Georgia Republicans.
There are scores of patriot groups, but what makes Oath Keepers unique is that its core membership consists of men and women in uniform, including soldiers, police, and veterans. At regular ceremonies in every state, members reaffirm their official oaths of service, pledging to protect the Constitution—but then they go a step further, vowing to disobey “unconstitutional” orders from what they view as an increasingly tyrannical government.
Most of the men’s gripes revolve around policies that began under President Bush but didn’t scare them so much at the time. “Too many conservatives relied on Bush’s character and didn’t pay attention,” founder Rhodes told me. “Only now, with Obama, do they worry and see what has been done. Maybe you said, I trusted Bush to only go after the terrorists.* But what do you think can happen down the road when they say, ‘I think you are a threat to the nation?'”
In Pray’s estimate, it might not be long (months, perhaps a year) before President Obama finds some pretext—a pandemic, a natural disaster, a terror attack—to impose martial law, ban interstate travel, and begin detaining citizens en masse. One of his fellow Oath Keepers, a former infantryman, advised me to prepare a “bug out” bag with 39 items including gas masks, ammo, and water purification tablets, so that I’d be ready to go “when the shit hits the fan.”
When it does, Pray and his buddies plan to go AWOL and make their way to their “fortified bunker”—the home of one comrade’s parents in rural Idaho—where they’ve stocked survival gear, generators, food, and weapons. If it becomes necessary, they say, they will turn those guns against their fellow soldiers.
Rhodes stood on the common that day before a crowd of about 400 die-hard patriot types. He spoke their language. “You need to be alert and aware to the reality of how close we are to having our constitutional republic destroyed,” he said. “Every dictatorship in the history of mankind, whether it is fascist, communist, or whatever, has always set aside normal procedures of due process under times of emergency…We can’t let that happen here. We need to wake up!”
He laid out 10 orders an Oath Keeper should not obey, including conducting warrantless searches, holding American citizens as enemy combatants or subjecting them to military tribunals (a true Oath Keeper would have refused to hold José Padilla in a military brig), imposing martial law, blockading US cities, forcing citizens into detention camps (“tyrannical governments eventually and invariably put people in camps”), and cooperating with foreign troops should the government ask them to intervene on US soil. In Rhodes’ view, each individual Oath Keeper must determine where to draw the line.
The crowd was full of familiar faces from patriot rallies and town hall meetings, with an impressive showing by luminaries of the rising patriot movement. There was Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff who had refused to enforce the Brady Law in the mid-’90s. Also present was Mike Vanderboegh, whose Three Percenter movement styles itself after the legendary 3 percent of American colonists who took up arms against the British. Rhodes singled out Marine Charles Dyer, a.k.a. July4Patriot—whose YouTube videos advocate armed resistance—as a “man of like minds.” When Rhodes finished, Captain Larry Bailey, a retired Navy SEAL, Swift Boater, and founder of the anti-antiwar group Gathering of Eagles, asked the crowd to raise their right hands and retake their oath—not to the president, but to the Constitution.
Rhodes has become a darling of right-wing pundits. In a column last October, Pat Buchanan predicted that “Brother Rhodes is headed for cable stardom.” Glenn Beck has cited the group as a “phenomenal” example of the “patriot revival movement,” while Lou Dobbs declared that its platform “should give solace and comfort to the left in this country.” Conspiracy-radio king Alex Jones even put an Oath Keepers segment, including footage of the Lexington speech, on his hit DVD Fall of the Republic. “I can’t stress enough how much your organization is scaring the globalists,” he told Rhodes on his show.
All this attention has put Oath Keepers on the radar of anti-hate groups. Last year, the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center both name-checked the group in their reports on rising anti-government extremism. “They think the word ‘patriot’ is a smear,” Rhodes countered during his Dobbs segment. SPLC’s Mark Potok “wants to lump us in with white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and of course make the insinuation that we’re the next McVeigh.” But such attacks have only raised Oath Keepers’ profile. After a combative Hardball interview in October—host Chris Matthews asked Rhodes whether Oath Keepers had the “firepower to stand up against the federal government”—the group says it gained 2,000 members in three days.
IT IS EASY ENOUGH to dismiss the Oath Keepers as (in the words of Britain’s Independent) “right-wing crackpots” or “extremist nimrods” (Huffington Post). CNN stressed the group’s conspiracy theories in its series on militias. But beyond the predictable stereotypes, “the reality is a lot of them are fairly intelligent, well-educated people who have complex worldviews that are thoroughly thought out,” says author David Neiwert, who has been following the patriot movement closely since the ’90s.
Rhodes’ vision is simple—”It’s the Constitution, stupid.” He views the founding blueprint the way fundamentalist Christians view the Bible. In Rhodes’ America, sovereign states—”like little labs of freedom”—would have their own militias and zero gun restrictions. He would limit federal power to what’s stated explicitly in the Constitution and Bill of Rights; any new federal law affecting the states would require a constitutional amendment. “If your state goes retarded,” he says, “you can move to another state and vote with your feet.” The president would be stripped of emergency powers that allow him to seize property, restrict travel, institute martial law, and otherwise (as the Congressional Research Service has put it) “control the lives of United States citizens.” The Constitution, Rhodes explains, “was created to check us in times of emergency when we are freaking out.”
Much of this is familiar rhetoric, part of a continuous strain in American politics that reemerged most recently during the 1990s. Back then, a similar combination of recession and Democratic rule led to the rise of citizen militias, the Posse Comitatus movement, and Oath Keepers-type groups like Police & Military Against the New World Order. But those groups had little reach. Nowadays, through the power of YouTube and social networking, and with a boost from the cable punditry, Oath Keepers can reach millions and make its message part of the national conversation—furthering the notion that citizens can simply disregard a government they loathe. “The underlying sentiment is an attack on government dating back to the New Deal and before,” says author Neiwert. “Ron Paul has been a significant conduit in recent years, but nothing like Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin—all of whom share that innate animus.”
Oath Keepers’ strength derives from what Rhodes calls “a very powerful common bond” (the vow of service) as well as the uniform—”a powerful source of credibility and respect” that allows members to “throw their weight into any movement…and tip any election.” Rhodes is wary of “old-party asshole RINOs” (Republicans in name only)—he mentions Dick Armey, the former House majority leader turned Tea Party sponsor—who in his view are merely out to hijack the grassroots.
In the months I’ve spent getting to know the Oath Keepers, I’ve toggled between viewing them either as potentially dangerous conspiracy theorists or as crafty intellectuals with the savvy to rally politicians to their side. The answer, I came to realize, is that they cover the whole spectrum.
Oath Keepers is officially nonpartisan, in part to make it easier for active-duty soldiers to participate, but its rightward bent is undeniable, and liberals are viewed with suspicion. At lunch, when I questioned my tablemates about the Obama-Hitler comparisons I’d heard at the conference, I got a step-by-step tutorial on how the president’s socialized medicine agenda would beget a Nazi-style regime.
From the podium, ex-sheriff Mack told the crowd that he wished he’d been the officer ordered to escort Rosa Parks off the bus, because not only would he have refused, he would have helped her home and stood guard there. These days, he said, it’s not African Americans who are under attack, but Christians, constitutionalists, and people who uphold family values: This time “it’s going to be Rosa Parks the gun owner, Rosa Parks the tax evader, or Rosa Parks the home-schooler.”
After an Oath Keeper who is also a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War touted IVAW repeatedly on Oath Keepers’ Web forum, Rhodes deleted the guy’s online testimonial. “The IVAW have their own totalitarian mindset,” he told me. “I don’t like communists any more than I like Nazis.”
There may also be serious downsides for a soldier who follows through on his Oath Keepers pledge. Disobeying orders can mean discharge or imprisonment. “You have every right to disobey an order if you think it is illegal,” says Army spokesman Nathan Banks. “But you will face court-martial, and so help you God if you are wrong. Saying something isn’t constitutional isn’t going to fly.”
A soldier like Charles Dyer, who in his July4Patriot persona advocated armed resistance against the government, could risk charges of treason. As a Marine sergeant based out of Camp Pendleton, Dyer posted videos to YouTube last year, his face half-covered with a skull bandana. “With the DHS blatantly calling patriots, veterans, and constitutionalists a threat, all that I have to say is, you’re damn right we’re a threat,” he said in one. “We’re a threat to anyone that endangers our rights and the Constitution of this republic…We’re gathering in defense of our way of life.” For a while, he ran a training compound in San Diego, teaching civilians his Marine combat skills.
Dyer, who with Rhodes’ blessing represented Oath Keepers at an Oklahoma Tea Party rally on July 4, was charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice with uttering “disloyal” statements. He ultimately beat the charge, left the Marines, and reappeared unmasked on YouTube encouraging viewers to join him at his makeshift training area in Duncan, Oklahoma—”I’m sure the DHS will call it a terrorist training camp.” In January, Dyer was arrested on charges of raping a seven-year-old girl. When sheriff’s deputies raided his home, they found a Colt M-203 grenade launcher believed to have been stolen from a California military base. He now faces federal weapons charges and is being hailed by fringe militia groups like the American Resistance Movement as “the first POW of the second American Revolution.”
Shortly after I asked Rhodes about Dyer—before his arrest hit the news—his testimonial vanished from the group’s website. Rhodes once endorsed Dyer in glowing terms, but now claims he was never a member because he hasn’t paid dues. Yet Dyer publicly referred to himself as an Oath Keeper, and Rhodes had previously insisted—to Lou Dobbs and anyone else who would listen—that you didn’t need to pay dues to be a member.
In an interview prior to Dyer’s arrest, Andrew Sexton, another uniformed YouTube star who argues the need for armed resistance, criticized Dyer for making himself a target. Sexton, an Army reservist who served in Afghanistan with US Special Operations Command, also keeps his Oath Keepers ties under the radar. Most soldiers, he told me, don’t talk openly about such things, but it’s easy enough to tell which ones have been woken up. The Department of Defense, Sexton added, will be shocked by the number of service members willing to turn against their commanders when the time comes. “It’s an absolute reality,” he says. He views last April’s DHS report on right-wing extremists as a “preemptive attack because they know it’s coming.”
Rhodes isn’t calling for violence—indeed, he insists that his group is about laying down arms rather than turning them on citizens. Yet when he writes that “the oath is like kryptonite to tyrants, as the Founders intended. The time has come for us to use it to its full effect,” some followers take that as a call for drastic action.
Chip Berlet, of the watchdog group Political Research Associates, who has studied right-wing populist movements for 25 years, equates Rhodes’ rhetoric to yelling fire in a crowded theater. “Promoting these conspiracy theories is very dangerous right now because there are people who will assume that a hero will stop at nothing.” What will happen, he adds, “is not just disobeying orders but harming and killing.”
LEE PRAY thinks Rhodes downplays the threat Oath Keepers represents to a rogue administration. “They have to be careful because otherwise they will be labeled as terrorists,” he says. “You have to read between the lines, but I wish they were more up-front with their members.”
It’s not hard to see the appeal of Oath Keepers for guys like Pray and Brandon, frustrated young men nervous about their future prospects. They signed up to defend the greatest country in the world, only to be cast aside. Even their injuries were suffered ingloriously. Brandon can’t sit for long after being flung from a pickup truck; Pray now walks with a cane, possibly for good. The men sincerely believe their country is headed for disaster, but as broken warriors they are powerless to do anything about it. They have tried writing to Congress, signing petitions, and voting, all to no avail. Oath Keepers offers a new sense of pride and comradeship—of being part of something momentous.
And when the time comes, Pray insists he is battle ready. “If the government continues to ignore us, and forces us to engage,” Pray says, “I’m willing to fight to the death.” Brandon, for his part, is resigned about their odds fighting the US military. “If we take up arms, realistically we would lose, and they would label us as terrorists,” he says. Pray nods sadly in agreement. But they’ll take their chances. They consider it their duty.
MoJo talks about treason. Consider who and what MoJo thinks Oath Keepers are betraying.
Mother Jones is a nonprofit news organization that specializes in investigative, political, and social justice reporting.
What’s with the name?
Mary Harris “Mother” Jones was a very cool woman who fought for the underdog and made herself up to look way older than she was so that when she got beat down by Pinkerton agents, she’d gain public sympathy. Brilliant! That said, it’s an odd name for a magazine. Our founders had originally wanted to call it New Dimensions (no comment), but when that name was taken, they pegged their ID to the radical reformer who’d been dubbed “the most dangerous woman in America.” Too bad not many people actually know who she was.
My brother says you’re a lefty pinko rag. True?
Here’s where we’re coming from: We believe all people should have equal opportunity in life, that all children should be able to go to good schools, and that everyone should have health care. Call that what you will–we’re not insulted by being called left, liberal, progressive, whatever. (We’ve noticed, though, that the people who resort to name-calling are often just trying to distract the public from their own misdeeds.)
We know that the establishment of Israel was just and necessary, rooted in centuries of struggle, and decades of patient work. But sixty years later we know that we cannot relent, we cannot yield, and as president I will never compromise when it comes to Israel’s security.
Now let me be clear. Israel’s security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable.
Any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel’s identity as a jewish state, with secure, recognized, defensible borders.
WASHINGTON (AP) – Barack Obama says the decision to boycott Arizona over its tough new law cracking down on immigration is for private citizens to decide, not the president of the United States.
Speaking at a White House news conference, Obama said he doesn’t approve or oppose the boycotts that some cities and groups have called for in response to the Arizona law, which makes it a crime under state law to be in the country illegally.
Obama reaffirmed his oppposition to the law, saying it’s the wrong approach. He has asked the Justice Department to review the law to determine whether it violates civil liberties.
Obama would make a great president of Israel, but he’s a terrible president for my people. I want a president who serves my people and defends our states the way Obama talks about serving jews and Israel.
I have published perhaps a million words on the Internet, yet the only book to appear in print so far based on my material is Defeating Eurabia, part of which is available online in German. For Scandinavian readers, I have contributed a long chapter in Norwegian to the book Selvmordsparadigmet (“The Suicide Paradigm”), published in May 2010 by the writer Ole J. Anfindsen who runs the website Honest Thinking.
Anfindsen believes that the Western world is in the process of committing suicide and that the ruling ideology after the Second World War, especially from the 1960s on, has been suicidal. I agree with him. The main emphasis of his book is not on Islam, but on Politically Correct censorship and the Multiculturalism of the Western oligarchs. The same goes for my contribution to it. No, I haven’t lost my focus, but I admit that I have changed it somewhat.
The ruling ideology after the Second World War, especially from the 1960s on, is increasingly genocidally anti-White. The ideology demands self-abnegation from Whites for the purpose of protecting jews and other non-Whites. Under this regime Whites are pathologized and attacked for any attempt to organize or pursue our interests. Meanwhile non-White groups, both independently and collectively as “people of color”, are encouraged to organize and pursue their interests.
The ruling ideology is fundamentally dishonest. It was sold initially as a righteous step toward “non-discrimination” and “anti-racism” and has only gradually revealed itself as overtly discriminatory and anti-White.
I’m glad for Fjordman’s shift. Something is wrong, but it isn’t suicide. I left the following comment at GoV.
the act or an instance of taking one’s own life voluntarily and intentionally especially by a person of years of discretion and of sound mind
I have not decided to take my own life, not voluntarily, and not intentionally. Likewise for the vast majority of Whites, most of whom are afraid to have more than the vaguest thoughts about what has gone wrong. This situation is imposed – it is not voluntary.
We are betrayed by leaders who lie to us about what is happening and why. They are in a position to know the truth, and they have a duty to tell it, but they do not. Instead they tell us nothing is wrong, or that the symptoms of our “suicide” – genocidal levels of immigration and anti-White discrimination – are “strengths” to be “celebrated”! Only irrational, psychopathic “racists” think something is wrong.
If you’re going to talk about this honestly instead of denying or lying about it like they do, then call it genocide. Don’t add insult to our injury by slandering us as suicidal.
To call what’s happening “suicide” flies in the face of the reality that many Whites are either ignorant of what’s happening or continue to labor under the “non-discrimination” deception, and that others are subjected to punishment for speaking out in opposition. When a group of people is deliberately guided toward extinction by deception and coercion that’s genocide, not suicide.
Politics + Technology = Nonsense at the Speed of Light
Semitism trumps feminism. Imagine that.
