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PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.
There's been a lot of media attention recently since the Citizens United decision of the
Supreme Court that allows virtually unlimited spending by corporations and billionaires
on elections, a lot of attention on activist billionaires funding their various candidates
and helping shape the character of the 2012 presidential election campaign. But there's
really nothing new about activist billionaires either shaping public opinion or quite directly
shaping public policy.
And now joining us to talk about some of that activity is Max Blumenthal. He's an award-winning
journalist and best-selling author of the book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement
That Shattered the Party. Thanks very much for joining us, Max.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Good to be on with you.
JAY: So you have a recent piece in The Nation. I think it's called "The sugar mama that funds
Islamophobia". Tell us that story.
BLUMENTHAL: Well, this is one of a series of pieces I've done on the multimillionaires
who are funding the Islamophobia industry. And they're not funding election campaigns,
necessarily. They've decided that their money can be used more effectively to fund a small
coterie of talking heads and think tanks that advance anti-Muslim views and seek to delegitimize
the citizenship of American Muslims. And they've had an enormous, disproportionate effect with
what's actually very little money.
The person I profiled in my piece, Nina Rosenwald, (she's the heir to the Sears-Roebuck fortune)
has spent about $2.8 million specifically on funding anti-Muslim figures and groups
in the last ten years. But this money has gone a long way. And this is similar to a
piece I did about another millionaire, named Aubrey Chernick, who spent around the same
amount of money funding many of the same figures. And through this coordinated campaign of funding,
they have been able to drive the Islamophobia industry and put the anti-Muslim agenda on
the front of the American political radar.
JAY: And you talk in your article about a visit of the far-right Dutch political leader
to New York. Tell us what happened.
BLUMENTHAL: Geert Wilders, who is--until recently, really held the key to the Dutch governing
coalition, until he pulled out in protest of austerity measures being imposed on the
Netherlands by the European Union, which made him sort of populist hero, and who is really
the leading Islamophobia in the world--I mean, this is a guy who went on trial for hate speech
in his own country for calling Muhammad a ***, for calling for burning the--for
calling for banning--an unofficial ban on the Quran--was brought to New York City not
once but twice by Nina Rosenwald, through her think tank Hudson NYC, which grew out
of the Hudson Institute, a major neoconservative think tank which is no longer affiliated with
it. And she hosted a fundraiser. According to her website, it cost $10,000 per person
to get in. I don't know if this money went to Geert Wilders' legal fees, for his battle
against hate speech, if it went into his campaign chest or what, but this is really remarkable.
And she's apparently hosting these fundraisers at her apartment in New York City.
She's a major socialite. She's very close to Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative godfather
who is the publisher of Commentary magazine. And she's also close to people like former
NSA chief Michael Hayden, who sits on the board of MEMRI with her, a think tank, another
anti-Muslim think tank. She's close to a whole host of national security figures.
And so she's really riding the axis (and this is what I tried to illustrate in my piece;
this is sort of an underlying theme) between the mainstream Israel lobby and the far fringes
of Islamophobia, and sort of bringing those fringes, those people from the far shores
of the right, like Geert Wilders, into the pro-Israel mainstream. She's funding Wilders
or she's raising money for Wilders. She's funding people like Daniel Pipes, extremist
anti-Muslim who said that--anti-Muslim figure who said that Muslims are brown-skinned peoples
cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene.
And at the same time, she's sitting on the board of JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs, which is sort of a right-of-center, very major pro-Israel think tank. She's sitting
on the board of MEMRI, which is responsible for translating supposedly, you know, anti-Semitic
diatribes by Muslim sheikhs in the Middle East. She's sitting on the board--she has
sat on the board of AIPAC, which is the mainstream arm of the American-Israel lobby. And she
has supported WINEP, which is a AIPAC-related think tank. So she's really, like--she is
the lobby. And at the same time, she's doling out money to extremist bigots.
JAY: Now, New York sort of has the reputation of being, you know, northeastern liberals
and all of this. But a lot of this neoconservative activity's going on in New York in these salons
and that. People like John Bolton are speaking. Tell us a bit more about that.
BLUMENTHAL: Yeah. I mean, she's hosted at her salons John Bolton. She's even hosted
Henry Kissinger. She hosted the conservative martyr Andrew Breitbart in her living room.
And, you know, through her money she's been able to emerge as a major sort of socialite
and political doyenne of the neoconservative movement. And people who know her describe
her to me not exactly as someone who's a sophisticated Machiavellian political operator, but more
of a babe in the woods, in the words of one associate, who holds extremist anti-Arab and
anti-Muslim views that really reflect her friendship with Norman Podhoretz and his daughter,
Ruthie Blum, who is a columnist for Israel HaYom, which is the pro-Netanyahu Israeli
newspaper owned by Sheldon Adelson, the American billionaire who just, I think, donated $10
billion to the Mitt Romney campaign, 'cause she's mixing with all these neoconservative
figures, but she also has an enormous amount of influence and connections with people who
are closer to the mainstream, and with the mainstream Israel lobby.
And what this really is--this is another theme in my piece--it's a story of one of the most
famous Jewish-American families. Her grandfather was Julius Rosenwald, who worked his way up
to the ownership of Sears-Roebuck company after coming to the United States from Eastern
Europe. Julius Rosenwald was not a Zionist. He was a non-Zionist. The only thing he backed
in mandate Palestine--this is before Israel was founded--was Hebrew University, funded
by Judah Magnes, who actually was--could have been considered an anti-Zionist, who backed
a binational state in what is now Israel-Palestine.
Her father, William Rosenwald, turned Zionist after the experience of the Holocaust, which
he witnessed by helping to help Jews escape and then relocate from the displaced persons
camps in Europe. This had an enormous effect on him. And then, after the '67 war, you know,
Nina Rosenwald's generation turned extremely Zionist. And through her embrace of Zionism,
she somehow found her way into the world of Islamophobia, where radical Islam is presented
as the greatest threat to the Jewish state and Muslims are presented not just as a threat
to Israel, which is sort of the advance-forward Fort Apache on the front lines of Western
civilization in the minds of Islamophobes like Nina Rosenwald and Geert Wilders, but
also who are presented as a threat to American Jewish life. I mean, if you listen to the
words of Daniel Pipes, who's received $2.3 million from Nina Rosenwald over the last
ten years, this is what he said: I worry very much from the Jewish point of view that the
presence and increased stature and affluence and enfranchisement of American Muslims, because
they are so much led by an Islamist leadership, that this will present true dangers to American
Jews. So this is really one of the things motivating the Islamophobia industry is the
fear that American Muslims, not that they won't assimilate and that they will form these
jihadi cells, like, in, you know, dark caverns, but that they will assimilate and work their
way into positions of influence and demand their rights as Americans, and that they will
threaten the Zionist cause, which is, obviously, advanced in large part through Washington
and through Jewish-American lobbying there.
JAY: And to what extent are we seeing these kinds of campaigns out of sort of more mainstream
organizations, either--like, something like a StandWithUs or even AIPAC?
BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, good question. I mean, StandWithUs, which you mentioned, is one of the major PR
arms of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. It's sort of, you know, this astroturf
organization that does lots of grassroots-seeming events on campuses and in cities around the
country. And according to the deputy foreign minister of Israel, Danny Ayalon, the Israeli
government uses StandWithUs to increase our power in the United States. Those are his
words. And StandWithUs has been sending people like Zuhdi Jasser, who is sort of a self-described
Muslim, who advances the Islamophobia industry's aims and has been backed by Nina Rosenwald
to the hilt, they send him around college campuses, as well as Nonie Darwish, who is
a self-described ex-Muslim who converted to evangelical Christianity, is now a hardcore
Republican based in Orange County, who says that Islam is a poison to our society. And
StandWithUs sent her recently to speak at the University of New Mexico. So, you know,
this is an organization that exists to promote Israel, and specifically to promote Israel
as a progressive idea, a country that, you know, liberals should wish they lived in,
and meanwhile they're sending hardcore anti-Muslim bigots to college campuses around the country.
And these speakers are being protested by students at the University of New Mexico.
Students who protested Nonie Darwish were physically attacked by people who had come
to see her speak, who then, after physically attacking young women and pushing them out
of the auditorium, broke into chants of "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" which I find incredibly ironic, because
Darwish was there to advance the cause of Israel.
JAY: I mean, what exactly do they hope to achieve here? Because, I mean, one of the
things one would think they might be achieving inadvertently is alienating a whole generation
of younger Jewish-Americans, Jewish-Canadians who are in touch with this content, who--I
would think most of whom would find this kind of stuff repugnant.
BLUMENTHAL: Yeah. And you can see groups like StandWithUs or the Israel Project, another
pro-Israel PR organization, pushing the concept that Israel is a haven for gays and that it
has a great record on gay rights, and at the same time, they're hanging out with anti-gay
bigots in the Christian right. The Israel Project ran a panel recently at the Faith
and Freedom Conference in Washington, which was a gathering of all the major Christian
right, anti-gay, anti-abortion groups in Washington. So they're speaking with two mouths. They're
speaking to--they're attempting to project one message to liberals and one message to
the Christian right and to their right-wing backers.
And it's really the right wing that is most receptive to the pro-Israel message at this
point. You look at any poll of Democrats and the Democratic grassroots, and the opinion
of Israel is declining. Any poll. Look at any poll, the opinion of Israel, approval
rating of Israel, conduct of Israel, among grassroots Republicans, and it's skyrocketing.
I mean, Israel is not a foreign-policy issue in Republican circles; it's a culture war
issue, it's a domestic political issue. And so that's what the neocons have achieved by
forging this alliance between the pro-Israel mainstream and the Islamophobic fringe. It's
turning off the Democratic grassroots, especially the young, and especially young progressive
Jews, while exciting and energizing and electrifying the right-wing Republican grassroots, which
is hostile to immigrants, hostile to foreigners, and hostile to, in my opinion, the concept
of a multicultural democracy. And so that's what Israel is coming to represent in the
United States, thanks to these people. And I think--you know, I don't totally agree with
Peter Beinart, but this is part of his message is that the pro-Israeli establishment, the
Jewish establishment in America, is self-destructive and is on a suicide mission.
JAY: Thanks for joining us, Max.
BLUMENTHAL: Thanks for having me.
JAY: And thanks for joining us on The Real News Network.