What’s gotten into Rush Limbaugh?

The ADL reports that Rush Limbaugh “raised the possibility that liberal Jews were having ‘buyer’s remorse’ with President Obama in light of the outcome of the Senate election in Massachusetts.” Limbaugh:

To some people, banker is a code word for Jewish; and guess who Obama is assaulting?  He’s assaulting bankers.  He’s assaulting money people.  And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there’s – if there’s starting to be some buyer’s remorse there.

Abe Foxman responded as follows:

Rush Limbaugh reached a new low with his borderline anti-Semitic comments about Jews as bankers, their supposed influence on Wall Street, and how they vote. 

Limbaugh’s references to Jews and money in a discussion of Massachusetts politics were offensive and inappropriate.  While the age-old stereotype about Jews and money has a long and sordid history, it also remains one of the main pillars of anti-Semitism and is widely accepted by many Americans.  His notion that Jews vote based on their religion, rather than on their interests as Americans, plays into the hands of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.           

This is classic ADL-talk. Anything said about Jews as Jews is anathema. No need to actually look at the evidence that indeed Jews are vastly overrepresented in the Wall Street elite and that they gave vastly disproportionate amounts to Obama.

What’s surprising is that Limbaugh would go there, given the long track record of the ADL in condemning any mention of Jews as influencing anything at all. Unless he’s living under a rock (and he isn’t), Limbaugh must have known of the consequences and did it anyway. Perhaps things really are changing for the better.

This is from a previous article reacting to ADL angst about anti-Jewish comments that were appearing in a great many of the comment sections of news articles on the internet in the wake of financial meltdown in 2008:

The problem is that we all know that there is more than a grain of truth to the claim that Jews run Wall Street, just as there is more than a grain of truth to the claim that Jews run Hollywood. In fact, as we previously pointed out, Benjamin Ginsberg, a prominent social scientist, noted during the 1990s that 50% of Wall Street executives were Jewish.

Nevertheless, the immediate reaction of the ADL is to attempt to stifle any such comments and simply label them as “anti-Semitism.” …

Such heavy-handed attempts to squelch discussion of Jewish influence can be seen on a wide range of issues, most notably the role of the Israel Lobby in influencing US foreign policy in the Middle East. When John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt published their work on the Israel Lobby, organizations like the ADL were quick to condemn them as anti-Semites and compared their writing to classic anti-Jewish themes in writings like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

But the bottom line is that there is no attempt to soberly and rationally determine the real extent of Jewish involvement in this disaster. The  entire topic of Jewish involvement in the financial system is taboo. It is not surprising that the police-state tactics favored by the ADL fuel the flames of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories when all attempts to raise the issue of Jewish influence in the financial system or other areas of American life are met with powerful efforts to enforce silence.

The situation is similar to a previous financial scandal — the one involving Michael Milken, the notorious 1980s junk bond king. As a 1989 National Review article noted, Milken “is Jewish, as were many of his partners and peers. (Indeed, about the only sympathy he has gotten is from those who see his prosecution as an instance of anti-Semitism.)”

Much of the discussion of the Jewish role in this financial scandal centered around the book Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart. Jewish activist Alan Dershowitz called Den of Thieves an “anti-Semitic screed” and attacked a review by Michael M. Thomas  in the New York Times Book Review because of his “gratuitous descriptions by religious stereotypes.”  Thomas’s review contained the following passage:

“James B. Stewart . . . charts the way through a virtual solar system of peculation, past planets large and small, from a metaphorical Mercury representing the penny-ante takings of Dennis B. Levine’s small fry, past the middling ($10 million in inside-trading profits) Mars of Mr. Levine himself, along the multiple rings of Saturn — Ivan F. Boesky, his confederate Martin A. Siegel of Kidder, Peabody, and Mr. Siegel’s confederate Robert Freeman of Goldman, Sachs — and finally back to great Jupiter: Michael R. Milken, the greedy billion-dollar junk-bond kingdom in which some of the nation’s greatest names in industry and finance would find themselves entrapped and corrupted.”

Sounds like a Jewish cabal to me. Thomas later noted that “If I point out that nine out of 10 people involved in street crimes are black, that’s an interesting sociological observation. If I point out that nine out of 10 people involved in securities indictments are Jewish, that is an anti-Semitic slur. I cannot sort out the difference. . . .”  …

The difference between the current  crisis and the Den of Thieves debacle is that the consequences to the financial system of the current Wall Street disaster are far greater and they are far more likely to have a negative effect on pretty much everyone. When a new version of Den of Thieves describes in detail the Jewish involvement in the current catastrophe, perhaps not even Alan Dershowitz or the ADL will be able to keep the lid on the bottle.