From an “archaeological” point of view, there are several striking parallels between early 20th-century Austria (as exemplified by the case of Vienna) and early 21st-century America. The easiest ones to unearth are these: increasingly intense minority activism (encouraged by laissez faire policies), a gradual breakdown of the hegemony of the national language and traditional culture, accompanied by a demographic shift away from the country’s Traditionskern — its Germanic ethno-cultural core.

At the turn of the 20th century, Vienna — as the center of the multi-ethnic state of the Habsburg Empire — sheltered a hodgepodge of nationalities, language groups, religious confessions, avant-garde artists, renowned scientists, and rebellious intellectuals who “comingled to give rise to a unique cultural ambiance.”

The ethnic minorities most abundantly represented were the Czechs and the Jews, followed by the Poles and Hungarians. Jacques Le Rider points out that “the xenophobia aroused by the growth of the Czech colony, and the spread of anti-Semitism made Vienna an ethnic battlefield rather than a melting pot.”  The unresolved nationality conflicts “were sapping the foundations of the Monarchy”, according to Robert S. Wistrich.

Kaiser Franz Joseph of Austria

As Stefan Newerkla points out, the basically tolerant laws “provided for the right to have education in one’s native language and stated that no citizen should be forced to learn the language of any other ethnic group.”  Language became a prominent site for inter-ethnic conflicts.  Thomas Wallnig emphasizes the fatal consequences of “the massive struggle between the nationalities that marked the final decades of the Habsburg monarchy”; the state was “unable to establish ‘equal rights of all branches of the people’, since every change to the status quo was interpreted as a political advance by one group at the expense of another with state support.”

These tensions were also felt in the world of music – an art form that occupied a special place in the history and cultural identity of Vienna, as a major repository for some of the greatest composers in the history of Western music (Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, among others).

By the early 20th century, the Jewish impact on music and modernity had become so obvious that critics demanded to “stem Jewish music and Jewishness in music before they spread too far,” as Philip Bohlman points out.

Richard Wagner’s polemical writings — tracing Jewishness in melody and speech, body and race (“inner spaces”) — “unleashed a flood of responses to the presence of Jewishness in music, pro and contra.” The rhetoric shared by Wagner and his detractors stressed the ontological interority of music: das Judentum in der Musik (Judaism or Jewishness in music). As Philip Bohlman notes,

Rather than rejecting Wagner’s anti-Semitism as baseless prejudice, most Jewish responses mounted counterarguments affirming the possibility of Jewishness in music, using the same terms, if not case studies, as Wagner and often embracing the racialization of music.

Thus, Heinrich Berl in his essay Das Judentum in der abendländischen Musik (“Jewishness in Western Music,” later published as a monograph with Wagner’s exact title, Das Judentum in der Musik) not only accepted the charge that Jewishness in music inevitably embodied oriental traditions, but even rejoiced in “the richness of Eastern influences.”

Richard Wagner held that the capacity of Jewish composers only to reproduce enabled them to enter European music history at a moment of historical collapse, in the aftermath of Beethoven’s death in 1827. Bohlman points out that “Wagner’s claim that Jewishness allowed only for the reproduction of music [indirectly] opened the historical door, emancipating Jewish music from ritual and recalibrating it as Western.”  Since Wagner held that Jewish musicians were essentially bricoleurs –  i.e. ‘handy-men’ adopting relational rather than rational approaches to assemble and enchain their performances from bits and pieces – no Jewish innovations were to be expected.

On the other hand, as Thomas S. Grey points out, the Central European lingua franca of Yiddish was seen as “emblematic of a tendency to appropriate and distort all genuine cultural forms, from speech to writing to philosophical or political thought to singing, acting, and musical composition.”

The movement away from classical tonality was thus radicalized with Gustav Mahler’s “tonal irony”, and culminated with Schoenberg’s atonal revolution — the dissolution and abandonment of tonal structures as an organizing system in favor of the radical constructivism that emerged with twelve-tone serial music: “With the progressive fragmentation of musical material — its decomposition into its smallest elements — the hierarchically ordered tonal structures, together with the restrictions they placed upon possible relations and combinations among tones, were dissolved.”

The ‘emancipation of dissonance’, according to Carl Schorske, not only destroyed harmonic order and cadential certainty: “By establishing a democracy of tones … [the] tonal relations, clusters, and rhythms expand and contract ‘like a gas’, as Schoenberg said.”  Schoenberg, as Leon Botstein points out, “sought to transmute a German national heritage — the pre-Wagnerian German tradition, seen as the universal in music — adequately into the twentieth century. In this way Schoenberg sought to dominate the musical world the way Wagner had, but in a manner in which all Jews … could partake as equals. … Like the inter-war protagonists of Esperanto, Schoenberg sought to fashion a new, valid universal modernist art in which both reason and emotion could be communicated and to which no social class, religion or ethnic group had claims of priority or higher status.”

Arnold Schoenberg

Since the Renaissance, Western music  has been conceived on the basis of a hierarchical tonal order, the diatonic scale, whose central element was the tonic triad, the defined key. Musical events, thus, are not of equal importance: Some are structurally important, while others are primarily ornamental.  Music, like linguistic discourse,  has traditionally been a time-oriented structure that progresses from a beginning to an end.  As Carl Schorske emphasizes,

The task of the composer was to manipulate dissonance in the interests of consonance, just as a political leader in an institutional system manipulates movement, canalizing it to serve the purposes of established authority.  In fact, tonality in music belonged to the same socio-cultural system as the science of perspective in art, with its centralized focus; the Baroque status system in society, and legal absolutism in politics. It was part of the same culture that favored the geometric garden — the garden as the extension of rational architecture over nature. … The tonal system was a musical frame in which tones had unequal power to express, to validate, and to make bearable the life of man under a rationally organized, hierarchical culture. To make all movement fall in the end into order (the musical term is ‘cadence’) was, appropriately, the aim of classical harmony in theory and in practice.

Ethan Haimo points out that with Schoenberg’s atonal revolution, it simply becomes difficult or impossible to determine which of the tones in the chord is the unstable tone, and which are the stable ones:

When the dissonance cannot be identified, its resolution cannot be directed. And when that happens, the emancipation of the dissonance is at hand — not as the result of theoretical speculation about the more remote overtones of the harmonic series but as a consequence of the extension of the methods of chordal formation to include multiple altered and elaborative tones. … Schoenberg was not searching for stable intervals when he reached toward the more remote overtones of the harmonic system; instead, his principles of chord formation made it impossible to identify which tones needed resolution. The consequences of this are profound. If dissonance cannot be identified, it cannot be resolved. And if it cannot be resolved, then the very notion of consonance and dissonance becomes moot.

Consequently, some of the essential pillars of tonality were pulled down by Schoenberg: “The lack of directed harmonic progressions throws the existence of a tonic into doubt; the lack of hierarchy abolishes the diatonic scale as a referential collection; the inability to identify the dissonance erases the distinction between consonance and dissonance.”

Nicholas Cook points out the “thread of violent political imagery [that] runs through Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre,” as when he (Schoenberg) writes:

The tonality must be placed in danger of losing its sovereignty; the appetites for independence and the tendencies towards mutiny must be given opportunity to activate themselves; one must grant them their victories, not begrudging an occasional expansion of territory. For a ruler can only take pleasure in ruling live subjects; and live subjects will attack and plunder.

Schoenberg talks of vagrant chords bringing about the destruction of the tonal system.

Cook also points out that ”the overlapping of insider and outsider identities that coloured Viennese modernism is often seen as a specifically Jewish phenomenon,” and that there was “a longstanding Viennese, or Habsburg, tradition … of associating music and social structure.”  He draws attention to “the network of terms connected with harmonic rootedness, terms which have a technical musical meaning yet at the same time carry the imprint of the political and racial discourses of fin-de-siècle Vienna”:

These political and racial connotations tend to be spelt out more explicitly in Schoenberg’s theoretical writings than Schenker’s, and the term Schoenberg uses in his Harmonielehre to describe chords that lack rootedness immediately reveals what is at issue: they are ‘vagrant’ chords. … Circumstances can turn any chord into a vagrant, he says … perhaps he was thinking of the displaced Ostjuden (later he might have thought of himself). … [A]t all events he [Schoenberg] assigns a range of equally dubious attributes to his vagrants: they are ‘the issue of inbreeding’, their character ‘indefinite, hermaphroditic, immature’. It is possible for them to be assimilated (Schoenberg’s phrase is ‘fit into the environment’), but when they appear in large numbers they will ‘join forces’, and ‘through accumulation of such phenomena the solid structure of tonality could be demolished’; elsewhere Schoenberg says that vagrant chords have ‘led inexorably to the dissolution of tonality’.

In the 1920s, the conservative musicologist and critic Alfred Heuss attacked the “specifically Jewish spirit” of Schoenberg’s music, which he saw as resulting from a “ruthless tendency to draw the very last consequences from a narrow premise.” Annegret Fauser points out that Schoenberg’s expansion of Wagnerian chromaticism pushed “quasi-polyphonic voice-leading to extremes.”

According to Arnold Whittall, Wagner’s use of “half-diminished” seventh chords to promote tonal ambiguity at moments of great dramatic tension and instability remained of absorbing interest in the writings of Arnold Schoenberg:

[T]he very “indefiniteness” of the Tristan chord has made it possible for theorists to regard it as a post-tonal or even atonal entity, thereby promoting that very breakdown of tonality of which Wagner’s own practice stopped short. … [T]he tonally disruptive potential of the chord, and of Wagner’s use of it, was well understood by those early twentieth-century theorists who were experiencing the consequences for composition of the breakdown of tonal order and, as they saw it, of the formal coherence that went with that order.

As Cook observes, Schoenberg ends up undermining the conservative discourses from which he borrows: The way Schoenberg turns a conservative argument against the archetypal ‘Other’ into an affirmation of the role of the ‘Other’ in the future of German culture, might be seen as “a deconstruction of the conservative discourse of hybridity”:

It works by taking a political stance, translating that into musical terms, developing the musical argument, and then translating (or leaving the reader to translate) the conclusion back into political terms.  In other words, it uses music to create an assertion about something other than music — in rather the same way … that television commercials use musical logic to make a point about hair dye or financial products (Cook, p. 310).

The birth of atonality was, according to Ethan Haimo, “the result of a single composer’s intellectual and artistic makeup.” Bryan Simms points out that Schoenberg “jealously defended his historical role as the first to break with tonality and as the discoverer of the twelve-tone system.”

Arnold Schoenberg’s abandonment of tonality in 1908 and the development of the Second Viennese School were both symptom and cause of an ever-widening gulf between composers using music to make discursive political and aesthetic statements (a product of analytical reason) and a public that still yearned for the psychological satisfaction that comes from formal coherence.

From this perspective, Schoenberg — at least in effect — can be regarded as Wagner’s opposite, as a Jewish “Anti-Wagner”. Wagner successfully claimed for art, according to Tim Blanning, “the function previously exercised by religion and arrogated in modern times by politics or economics.” Schoenberg dethroned that position, by composing “irrational”, atonalistic, “liquid,” “decentered” music, twelve tones “in free circulation, without any firm hierarchy or even distinction between the seven diatonic tones and the remaining chromatic tones.”

As he declared in a letter (1909) to his colleague Ferruccio Busoni: “I strive for complete liberation from all forms … from all symbols of cohesion and of logic.”

Part III: Transvestism in Music

Part I: Viennese Mutations

E. R. E. Knutsson (email him) is a freelance writer.



It is not often that one can, with pleasure, place on record that one was wrong in expressing a particular opinion. But I can do this in the case of a TV documentary film, Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby, by the journalist and political commentator Peter Oborne, broadcast on Monday 16th November by Britain’s Channel 4, an independent network, as part of its Dispatches series.

On the basis of the pro-Zionism of his regular employers The Spectator and the Daily Mail (extreme in the case of the former, moderate in the case of the latter), and what I perceived to be his involvement with the Zionist-inspired media puffing the British National Party (BNP) towards its present situation — a pro-Israel populist party whose opposition to multi-racialism has been replaced by an anti-Islam placebo — I had predicted that Oborne’s investigation of the Israel lobby would be a damp squib at best, or disinformation at worst.

But I was wrong about his film. It went to the heart of the exercise of Jewish power in Britain. It established that this power is now so substantial and pervasive that Jewry is able to manipulate key institutions of our nation, in particular the governing Labour Party, the official opposition Conservative Party, and the supposedly “independent and impartial by law” BBC for the benefit of a foreign power: Israel.

Nobody who saw the film could doubt that Zionist Jewry has been able to suborn many people holding key positions with sundry organs of the British nation who have a duty imposed by patriotism, honor and, in some cases, by law to uphold British national sovereignty, political independence and democratic freedoms.

In my view these creatures have become ‘Shabbas Goyim’ who, in return for career enhancement and/or cash, serve the interests of World Jewry in all its locations and apparitions and not just, as Oborne shows, the state of Israel.

I will leave to another article the information I have about a cohort of non-Jewish pro-Zionist journalists, mainly employed by Tory-supporting papers, which made me expect the worst from Dispatches film before I saw it. This information, considered in tandem with the film, provides us with a glimmer of hope that Oborne’s desertion from the cohort and his exposure of the Israel Lobby may be part of a wider revolt by journalists against the relentless effort by Zionist Jews to control their output in a way that puts Jewry and Israel above criticism.

The purpose of this article is to provide a taste of Oborne’s research and to comment on it. My review is based on seeing his film when broadcast, supported by the full text of Oborne’s Dispatches commentary. This was posted in the“Our Kingdom — power and liberty in Britain” section of the Open Democracy web site, where it appears to be a pamphlet by Oborne and one James Jones. No title, publisher, publication date or ISBN number is given so it may be awaiting publication in hard copy form. With Oborne’s text the site has also posted a Foreword by the Jewish anti-Zionist campaigner Antony Lerman explaining why he assisted Oborne with the Dispatches report. Any ambiguities may be resolved by those who have 50 minutes to spare by resort to the YouTube posting of the film. Unfortunately that posting has an embedded block against downloading.

I will, of course, intrude my own digressions into my review of Oborne’s work, but will take pains to separate my information and opinions from his. I may have knowledge of matters either unknown to him or which, due to constraints of time or a wish to avoid accusations “anti-Semitism,” he was unable to mention.

The Lobby and the Conservative Party

Despite two very recent public opinion polls which indicate that that the general election next Spring is likely to produce a “hung parliament”, the psephologicalwisdom prevailing for the past two years has it that the Conservative Party, led by David Cameron, is likely to subject the current Labour Party government, led by Gordon Brown, to a landslide defeat.

It was in this context, coupled with David Cameron’s cringing performance at this year’s annual luncheon staged by the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) —which Oborne believes to be the best-funded lobbying group at Westminster —that his commentary began by dealing with Zionist manipulation of the Tory Party:

Every year, in a central London hotel, a very grand lunch is thrown by the Conservative Friends of Israel. It is often addressed by the Conservative leader of the day. Many members of the shadow cabinet make it their business to be there along with a very large number of Tory peers and prospective candidates, while the Conservative MPs present amount to something close to a majority of the parliamentary party. It is a formidable turnout.

Oborne remarked that the dominant event of the previous twelve months had been the Israeli invasion of Gaza at the start of the year. He examined he text of Cameron’s speech to see how that event was handled.

I was shocked to see that Cameron made no reference at all to the invasion of Gaza, the massive destruction it caused, or the 1,370 deaths that had resulted. Indeed, Cameron went out of his way to praise Israel because it ‘strives to protect innocent life’. I found it impossible to reconcile the remarks made by the young Conservative leader with the numerous reports of human rights abuses in Gaza. Afterwards I said as much to some Tory MPs. They looked at me as if I was distressingly näive, drawing my attention to the very large number of Tory donors in the audience…..

It is impossible to imagine any British political leader showing such equanimity and tolerance if British troops had committed even a fraction of the human rights abuses and war crimes of which Israel has been accused.

The Saturday after that CFI luncheon Oborne criticized Cameron’s speech in hisDaily Mail column, drawing particular attention to his failure to mention Gaza and his speaking of “Israeli respect for the sanctity of human life” and the presence of Jewish big business donors to Conservative funds.

Immediately he received a letter from CFI director Stuart Polak which lamented that his “concentrating on the businessmen and David’s alleged comments was really unhelpful”. Hot on the heels of Polak’s letter was a missive from CFI political director Robert Halfon who described Oborne’s opinions as “astonishing” and berated him for suggesting a “moral equivalence” between Israel and Iran.

Such letters from leading Zionist Lobby heavyweights usually have the effect of causing hacks and their editors to issue profuse apologies and retractions. But something in the deep background which we don’t know about — something more that just Israeli genocide in Gaza (which, disgusting though it was, can hardly be described as unprecedented Israeli behavior) — provided Oborne with additional backbone.

His reaction to Polak’s and Halfon’s attempt to pressure him was this:

I resolved then to ask the question: what led David Cameron to behave in the way he did at the CFI lunch at the Dorchester Hotel last June? What are the rules of British political behaviour which cause the Tory Party leader and his mass of MPs and parliamentary candidates to flock to the Friends of Israel lunch in the year of the Gaza invasion? And what are the rules of media discourse that ensure that such an event passes without notice?…..

Now I want to ask a question that has never been seriously addressed in the mainstream press: is there a Pro-Israel lobby in Britain, what does it do and what influence does it wield? [my emphasis]

That is not the kind of question that the organized Jewish community thought would ever again be posed in the mainstream media (albeit a channel whose mandate is to cater to minority groups) and it is the reason why Oborne’s film was subjected to the Silent Treatment by much of the print and broadcasting media even though Jewish web sites and discussion forums were crackling with traffic— but more of the media reaction anon.

Oborne’s pursuit of answers to his questions inevitably led him to examine not only how the Israel Lobby ensures that the Conservative Party pursues an Israel-friendly line by deployment of financial and media patronage (with the specter of character assassination, career destruction and financial ruin hovering in the background), but also how it secures similar compliance from the Labour Party and from national institutions such as the BBC, by application of precisely the same model of bribery and intimidation.

As to the Lobby’s influence over the Tory Party, Oborne mentions that he consulted the Lexis Nexis site to examine the way in which the CFI’s activities are largely ignored by the British media. His search revealed that since 1985 there have been only 154 mentions of the CFI. In contrast, over the same period, Michael Ashcroft, the (non-Jewish) billionaire donor to Tory Party funds attracted 2,239; the Tobacco Manufacturers Association had 1,083; the Scotch Whisky Association 2,895.

How the Lobby circumvents “transparency” law

Under revisions to the law implemented during the last decade with a view to providing the electorate with “transparency” concerning political parties’ sources of funds, parties are required to “record” in their internal accounts the sources of all donations of more than £200 but less than £5,000 and are required to“report” in their accounts lodged with the Electorate Commission (EC) the sources of all donations of £5,000 or more. These annual accounts are posted on the EC’s web site for public examination.

Oborne described how the Conservative Party is “bought-and-paid-for” by the CFI. This bribery is effected not just by big cash donations to Tory Central Office and to the party leader’s “private office,” but to the constituency organizations of individual MPs — or prospective parliamentary candidates.

The CFI — and also the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) — gets around these EC regulations by making in its own name comparatively puny donations. It then tips off its corporate and wealthy individual members to make donations either to Conservative Central Office and/or to the constituency organizations of favored MPs or candidates — without any on-the-record mention of the CFI, Israel, Jewry or whatever.

Oborne gave two anecdotes of the way the system works, provided by informants who were too afraid to go on record.

In one case a man who is now a Tory MP described how before the 2005 election he was lobbied by the CFI’s Stuart Polak at a social occasion. At the end of the meal, Polak asked the candidate if his campaign needed any money. A couple of weeks later two checks arrived at the constituency office. Both came from businessmen closely connected to the CFI whom the MP had never met and who had never, so far as he knew, ever stepped inside his constituency.

In the other case, a Tory parliamentary candidate contesting a marginal seat  had gone to see Stuart Polak, where he was tested on his views on Israel. Within a fortnight a check from a businessman he had never met arrived in his constituency office.

Study of donations to Conservative constituency offices before the 2005 election reveals a clear pattern according to Oborne. A group of donors linked to the Zionist cause, almost all of whom are on the board of the CFI and/or are prominently associated with the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) made donations of between £2,000 and £5,000 either personally or through their companies to the constituency offices of certain Conservative candidates.

Despite CFI and BICOM not formally merging, the two groups are closely coordinated. Many of BICOM’s key figures also play roles in the CFI: Trevor Pears, Michael Lewis and Poju Zabludowicz — all hugely wealthy — are driving forces behind both lobbies.

Oborne devoted special attention to Zabludowicz, a Finnish Jew whose father made multi-millions as an international arms dealer. That fortune has now been transferred to real estate investments, a portfolio that encompasses 40 per cent of downtown Las Vegas and a shopping mall built in an illegal settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank of Palestine.

Tory leader David Cameron owes Trevor Pears and Poju Zabludowicz a special debt of gratitude. When Cameron was campaigning to secure the party leadership he received a £20,000 donation from Pears and donations amounting to £15,000 from Tamares Real Estate Investments, a Zabludowicz subsidiary based in Britain.

According to Oborne, since 2005 (the year of the last Parliamentary general election) the total of the CFI’s donations to the Tory Party made in its own name, added to those made by CFI members, personal and corporate, in their own names but at the CFI’s recommendation, has been in excess of £10 million.

On 17th November, the day after Dispatches was broadcast, the Jewish Chronicle web site carried a  report entitled “Dispatches criticised by leading Jews” which included an interview with CFI director Stuart Polack. His remarks were coy, to say the least:

The programme’s claim that CFI donated £10m to the Conservatives over the last eight years was “deeply flawed.“

“Deeply flawed”?

Why not “untrue” or “wrong” or “a lie”? “Deeply flawed” is clearly one of those “non-denial denials” beloved by spin doctors who can also devise “non-apology apologies”. Do these flim-flam artists believe that all the goyim are completely brain-dead?

Polak then went on to say:

CFI as an organisation has donated only £30,000 since 2005. Each of these donations has been made transparently and publicly registered. In addition to this £30,000, it is undoubtedly the case that some of our supporters have also chosen, separately, to donate to the party as individuals.

Note the “as an organisation.” He ducks the crucial issue of donations made by individuals and companies at the CFI’s and BICOM’s instigation.

In order to yet further obscure the Zionist purchase of the Conservative and Labour parties, the CFI, the LFI and BICOM are constituted as “unincorporated associations” — not companies, registered charities, political parties or other formal entities which the law requires to maintain accounts for annual submission to the Inland Revenue or other relevant statutory authorities.

These are not the kind of arrangements we would expect from public spirited citizens willing to expend their largesse in an open and above-board way to promote what they see as good causes through political action.

These are arrangements employed by conspirators intent on corrupting public servants and anxious to hide the source of the bribes. One is put in mind of the criminal mastermind Meyer Lansky who created the financial structure of America’s modern Cosa Nostra. When faced with prosecution he fled not to Sicily but to Israel where he claimed admission under the “Law of The Return”which grants Israeli citizenship to all “authentic Jews.”

“Lord Cashpoint” and the Jewish Leadership Council

Turning to the Zionist influence over the Labour Party (and hence, the current Labour government), Oborne covered territory which is well known and notorious: the relationship between Tony Blair — Gordon Brown’s predecessor as Prime Minister — and Lord Michael Levy.

Levy was the principal fund-raiser for Blair’s “private office” through a so-called “blind fund.” £2 million was raised. Please note: Though they played tennis together at Levy’s mansion every week for several years, they never ever discussed the names of the contributors or how much they were giving.

Levy was also the principal fund raiser for the Labour Party itself (in excess of £15 million). His success was such that he became known as “Lord Cashpoint.” Blair wanted Levy to replace the trade unions as Labour’s principal source of income, and told Levy as much.

The saga of Levy’s fall from grace as a result of his central involvement in the “Cash for Honours” scandal — for which he was arrested but, after a long wait, not prosecuted — is well known and was concisely summarized by Oborne, so I need not repeat it here. The full story is but a Google search away.

What is not so well known — at least until Oborne’s film — is that Levy was rewarded for his services to the Zionist cause by being co-opted to the premier secular entity of British Jewry: the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC). Who set up this secretive oligarchy, which is never mentioned in the mass media, and how it was vested with supremacy, is not clear. Its existence excites “conspiracy theorists” to make comparisons with the fabulous “Learned Elders of Zion”.

The JLC’s current membership is understood (at least by me) to include: Poju Zabludowicz, Chairman of BICOM; Henry Grunwald, President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews (JBD); Gerald Ronson, Chairman of the Community Security Trust (CST); and Lord Greville Janner, President of the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) and of the LFI. All these Great Panjandrums of Jewry are, of course, multi-millionaires or billionaires.

I add to Oborne’s information by mentioning that Levy is not the only member of the JLC who has had his collar felt by the police.

In the late 1980s Gerald Ronson was jailed for his part in a massive Guinness brewery share-trading fraud. On his release he, along with other of his partners in crime, were “guests of honour” [sic] at a Welcome Home banquet presided over by the Chief Rabbi, Dr. Jonathan Sacks, who has since been ennobled and is now Lord Sacks.

Sad to say, because of his criminal record, the Queen is unlikely to raise Ronson to the peerage so that he can sit with Sacks in the House of Lords, but he has been given a consolation prize by the King of Spain, Juan Carlos, who appointed him as a member of the “Order of Civil Merit.” This entitles him to be addressed as: “Illustrísimo Señor Don Gerald Ronson”. (You couldn’t make it up, could you?)

Top cops drawn in to the spider’s web

Ronson’s appointment as Chairman of the CST, Jewry’s private security and “spook” organization, was another Jewish one-finger salute to Britain’s law enforcement authorities. Here’s why:

When the CST was established in 1995/6 the London Metropolitan Police and the Greater Manchester Police were prevailed upon by the then Conservative government to provide the CST’s personnel with training and intelligence sharing. It is likely that the arrangement was devised by Neville Nagler, for years the senior Home Office civil servant in charge of race relations matters who, immediately upon retirement, was appointed Executive Director of the JBD.

This was a quite unprecedented and, I believe, extra-legal arrangement between the British police and a private political security formation with close and admitted connections with a foreign power. The arrangement has continued under a Labour government despite the appointment of Ronson, a convicted criminal, as the CST chairman.

So senior police officers continue to be obliged — some may be more than willing — to attend annual CST banquets at swanky West End hotels presided over by a convicted fraudster and jail-bird, and exchange polite conversation with Zionist fanatics, some of whom are doubtless Mossad Sayanim….. and all “in the interests of good community relations.”

At the last CST dinner held early this year at the Grosvenor House Hotel in Mayfair, Lord Levy made a beeline for Assistant-Commissioner John Yates, deputy head of the Met at Scotland Yard. Yates headed the investigation into the “Cash for Honours” scam and it fell to him to arrest Levy in connection with that matter.

Before the gaze of all present, Levy enjoyed administering ostentatious and patronizing “no hard feelings” back-slaps on the hapless Yates. This officer’s feelings, and the corrosive effect news of it has had on wider police morale, political independence and integrity, may be imagined.

I conclude this digression on a lighter note. The central figure in the Guinness/Distillers shares-fraud was prominent Jewish businessman Ernest Saunders. He had part of his jail term remitted on the grounds that he had Alzheimers disease. This incurable and fatal degenerative brain condition went into an unprecedented remission upon his release. Indeed, he was able to start a new career on the business studies lecture circuit, to the continuing amazement of the medical profession — and the admiration of us all.

“Shabbas goyim” grovel in House of Commons Fiascos

Returning to Oborne’s Dispatches thread: The sickly farce enacted between leading officials of the CFI and the LFI on the floor of the House of Commons (as they engage in what the general public is told is “the Labour v. Conservative ding-dong battle”) was well covered.

He cited a recent Commons question from senior Tory MP David Amess “to enquire what the British government was doing to improve British relations with Israel.”

The government’s answer came from Ivan Lewis MP, the Foreign Office Minister with special responsibility for the Middle East. He replied: “Israel is a close ally of the United Kingdom and we have regular warm and productive exchanges at all levels….. We shall continue to foster a close relationship with Israel.”

Many honorable members on both sides of the House, their constituency bank balances gagging for more Zionist donations, just as were given before the last general election — and the election before that, and before that, ad nauseam — nodded sagely and called “Hear hear!”

The House of Commons order paper, the subsequent report in Hansard and media coverage of these proceedings failed to mentioned that David Amess is the secretary of the CFI while Ivan Lewis is a former vice-chairman of the LFI. So much for “transparency” at Westminster.

The Jewish Lobby is not only able to stage-manage question sessions involving relatively junior members of the government, it is able to set the agenda for the well-known weekly Prime Minister’s Questions.

In these time-limited sessions, it is very hard for ordinary members to “catch the Speaker’s eye” — i.e., be given the opportunity to put a question and thereby gain massive publicity for a topic. (The recently-appointed Speaker is John Bercow, a Jew co-opted to the ancient and prestigious post from the Tory benches. His wife is a non-Jewish Labour Party prospective parliamentary candidate. What’s the betting he’s a member of the CFI and she’s a members of the LFI?)

During Prime Minister’s Questions at the end of November — too late for Oborne to include in his Dispatches report — Tory leader Cameron asked Prime Minister Brown about £130,000 of public funds said to have been made available to two Muslim schools run by the Shakhsiyah Foundation in Slough and Haringey which Cameron alleged had “links” to the “Islamic extremist” group Hizb-ut-Tahrir. Brown replied that he would investigate Cameron’s concerns “very, very carefully.”

The obvious purpose of the question was to suggest that the current Labour administration was soft on “Islamic extremists” (sub-text: “terrorists”!). But another unstated item on the  Jewish agenda was at work as well, namely:

Why was the government making grants to militant Islamic schools while the Jewish Free School (JFS) is shortly to appear at the Supreme Court to appeal against a High Court ruling that the school’s admissions policy is “discriminatory on the grounds of race or ethnic origin” and, hence, illegal under the Race Relations Act?

Jewry contests Race Relations Act litigation — The BNP does not

Background: The JFS refused to admit a boy whose father is Jewish according to the Orthodox interpretation of the Halacha, but whose mother was born into a non-Jewish family but converted to Judaism via the Liberal-Reform route. Liberal-Reform conversions are not recognized as valid by the majority United Synagogue congregation, from among whose rabbinate the Chief Rabbi of the UK is always appointed. (Liberal-Reform conversions are likewise not recognised by the Orthodox rabbinical authorities in Israel who adjudicate on claims for citizenship under the Law of The Return).

I understand that the litigation against the JFS, though launched by the boy’s parents is — or eventually became — “legally-aided,” that is, supported by grants of public funds via the Legal Aid Fund.

I surmise that the almost coincidentally similar litigation launched against the BNP by the government’s equality quango, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), to persuade the party to change its constitution so as to open its membership to all applicants regardless of their ethnic origin (a demand that BNP chairman Nick Griffin says he is willing to accept without testing its legality before the courts!) was only instigated to provide “proof” that the government and its agencies are even-handed in the enforcement of anti-discriminatory legislation.

Having explored the background to Cameron’s question to the Prime Minister, we must ask: Who provided the information on which the question was based? Step forward Michael Gove, shadow Conservative education secretary. We know this because it emerged that two weeks before Cameron put his question to Brown in public to a blaze of publicity the same facts were rehearsed by Gove in a private letter he sent to the government’s education secretary Ed Balls.

But we must dig deeper. Who provided Gove with the information about the obscure alleged “links” between Islamic schools’  owners, the Shakhsiyah Foundation, and the alleged “Islamic extremists” of Hizb-ut-Tahrir? We have two good clues.

Firstly, last year Gove was appointed as an honorary patron of the Zionist Federation (ZF). The very discreet announcement in the 28th March 2008 Jewish Chronicle which recorded this appointment also mentioned that the previous month he had been awarded the ZF’s Jerusalem Prize “in honour of his support for Israel’s security and well-being.” (No mention was made of the amount of money which comes with this prize. Perhaps no hard cash as granted by the Nobel Foundation, but the the certainty of a golden career path.)

Michael Gove, Jonathan Turner and the Zionist Federation

Among Gove’s senior associates in the ZF is the lawyer Jonathan Turner. He was the person who fronted the Jewish Lobby’s voluminous complaint against the BBC’s Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen, which was part of the Zionist campaign to bring the BBC to heel. Turner’s vendetta against Bowen and the BBC was discussed at some length by Oborne. I cover the topic at a later stage. It is enough to remark here that Turner and his researchers obviously see themselves as avenging career-destroyers in the Zionist war against any critical reporting of Israel.

Secondly, the Daily Telegraph of 3rd July 2007, reporting Gove’s promotion as shadow Education Secretary, ended by recording that Gove’s wife is one Sarah Vine, who I understand is Jewish and who was at the time of the report — and may still be — a leader writer with The Times. Gove was assistant editor and chief leader writer of The Times before his election to the House of Commons in 2005.

In 1998 Gove was the first senior journalist of a prestigious mass-circulation newspaper to give substantial and helpful coverage to Nick Griffin when he was seeking to displace John Tyndall as the leader of the BNP. That article set a trend throughout the British media, but especially among papers who support the Tory party and maintain a pro-Israel line.

(I give more information about The Times and its disproportionate number of Jewish senior staff later in this article.)

Turning from the corruption of Conservative and Labour MPs, and, hence, of successive Labour and Conservative governments, so that the war-mongering and genocidal state of Israel might be protected and assisted, Oborne’s other main theme was the relentless campaign by the Israel Lobby to regulate the output of the British media on the subject of Israel and Zionist influence at home and abroad. Its principal target of this campaign for years has been the BBC.

Here I must again intrude a personal digression which I feel provides essential background:

It is true that “the Beeb” (as the BBC is popularly known) is full of Lefties of various stripes who promote all manner of “politically correct” agendas, including, of course “anti-racism.” While I was prominently associated for more than a decade with the now long-dead National Front, I was continuously a target for their attacks. (NB: the organization currently masquerading under that name is not a continuance of the original party)

So while I have no personal motive for coming to the defense of these people, I have to allow that for some of them their “anti-racist” beliefs are sincere and applied without exception.

It is a pity that this principled approach does not allow them to realize that “racism” and “racialism” are different. The latter does not represent a desire to persecute, let alone exterminate, other races but a wish to protect one’s own folk and ancient culture from the creeping genocide which is the inevitable and intended outcome of enforced race-mixing.

Zionists fret as some leftists wake up

Be all this as it may, some of the principled anti-racist Lefties of the BBC (including a few Jews) hold that Jewish “racism” is just as objectionable as any other kind. They have seen with their own eyes as reporters on the ground that Israel, supported by Zionist-Jewry throughout the Diaspora, is engaged in a genocidal ethnic-cleansing onslaught against the Palestinians perpetrated by application of terrorism, massacres, besiegement, wanton destruction of property, imprisonment, theft, torture and other varieties of wickedness.

Despite the Zionists’ massive exploitation of the “Holocaust” narrative —designed to impair the eyesight  and deaden the consciences of the peoples of “the West” —  an increasing element of the Left, including some of those in the BBC, has been forced to confront the reality of the genocide being perpetrated right now by the Jews against the Palestinians.

The attitude, traditional among Lefties until about 25 years ago, that philo-Semitism (and, hence, pro-Zionism) was part-and-parcel of what it means to be Left Wing and “progressive” has withered in the face of what Israel has been doing.

Principled anti-racist journalists in the BBC (and elsewhere, such as The Guardian and The Independent) have increasingly felt compelled to expose Israel as a “racist'” state pursuing policies closely resembling those of Apartheid South Africa and even —  gasp! —  the German National Socialists.

It is because the Zionists, especially the “far Right” element —  who constitute the political mainstream in Israel and increasingly among Jews elsewhere —  have been waking up to their loss of a growing portion of gentile Left Wing opinion that they have been taking an interest in the emergent “far Right” in Europe, providing it can be induced to abandon its traditional “anti-semitism”, support Israel and campaign against the “Islamification of Europe” rather than against Afro-Asian immigration and multi-racialism per se.

“Opinions are like arse-holes — Everybody’s got one.”

I return now to Oborne’s film and his description of the way in which the Israel Lobby has sought to place a leash on the BBC and The Guardian. (The Independent is obviously considered to be such small fry that it seems to have escaped Zionism’s big guns, despite the wonderfully courageous reports from its Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk.)

Oborne begins by recounting the eruption of Zionist fury when in 2006 Guardianjournalist Chris McGreal produced an article which compared Israel’s policies to South African Apartheid. An emergency meeting was called at the Israeli ambassador’s residence with BICOM chairman Poju Zabludowicz, JBD president Henry Grunwald, CST chairman Gerald Ronson and LFI & HET president ‘Lord’ Janner  — all, so far as I know, members of the JLC.

Ronson and Grunwald were deputed to visit Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger at his office. Without even taking off his coat, Ronson launched into a foul-mouthed attack (“…opinions are like arse holes — everybody’s got one!…”) which concluded with the allegation that McGreal’s article had prompted violent physical assaults on Jews in London.

That is a very serious allegation which, had there been the slightest evidence to support it, could have prompted an “Incitement to Racial Hatred” prosecution which, if successful, might have landed Rusbridger in jail. Even without a prosecution such an allegation constitutes a potentially damaging smear.

Oborne reported that Rusbridger kept his nerve and replied coolly:

I’d be interested in the evidence, I’m not sure how you make that causal connection between someone reading an article that is critical of the foreign policy of Israel and then thinking why don’t I go out and mug Jews on the streets of London. I just can’t believe that happens.

We are left with the impression that the discussion fizzled out quite soon after that response. Later the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), a pro-Israel media “watchdog,” was put up to stray far from its territory to lodge a complaint with the UK’s Press Complaints Commission. This asserted that McGreal’s article was “based on materially false accusations.” The complaint was not upheld.

Rusbridger went on to tell Oborne that The Guardian was not the only paper to come under such pressure, which often works. “There are a lot of newspaper and broadcasting editors who have told me that they just don’t think it’s worth the hassle to challenge the Israeli line. They’ve had enough.”

The Lobby’s onslaught on the BBC

But nothing experienced by The Guardian can match the viciousness of the campaign waged by the Israel Lobby against the BBC. Here it involved not merely lobbying the senior management of the corporation but waging personal campaigns against individual journalists designed to ruin their reputations and terminate their careers.

Oborne substantiated his claims about these Zionist vendettas against individual BBC journalists by recounting the experiences of Middle East correspondent Orla Guerin, Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen and multi-program presenter Jonathan Dimbleby (currently chairman of Any Questions, Britain’s best-known and longest-running radio political forum.

He prefaced his coverage of campaigns of persecution against particular BBC journalists with these general observations about the British media:

Making criticisms of Israel can give rise to accusations of anti-semitism — a charge which any decent or reasonable person would assiduously seek to avoid. Furthermore most British newspaper groups — for example News International…..[owned by Rupert Murdoch, owner of Sky TV, The Sun [a tabloid], and The Times, whose editor James Harding, assistant editor Danny Finkelstein and chief political columnist David Aaronovitch are all Zionist Jews], Telegraph newspapers…..[owned by the reclusive Barclay brothers, gentile Scotsmen, who seem to favor the strongly pro-Tory, pro-Israel line of the senior editorial staff of their papers, a mixture of Roman Catholic philo-Semites and Jews], and the Express Group….. [owned by Richard Desmond, a Jew, who made himself a billionaire publishing pornographic magazines, but who then went upmarket and bought out the Daily andSunday Express which are now vehicles for pro-Israel and anti-Muslim/Islam sentiment, and which increasingly carry articles helpful to the BNP as that party has aligned itself with far-right Zionism] — have tended to take a pro-Israel line and have not always been an hospitable environment for those taking a critical look at Israeli foreign policy and influence. Finally, media critics of Israeli foreign policy — as we will vividly demonstrate in this pamphlet — can open themselves up to coordinated campaigns and denunciation.

This is what Oborne reported about BBC correspondent Orla Guerin:

Some journalists we spoke to had been accused of anti-semitism, and felt inevitably it had done some damage to their careers. Others, like the BBC’s Orla Guerin, against whom this very serious and damaging charge has repeatedly been made by the Israeli government, wouldn’t even talk to us off the record. It is easy enough to see why. Guerin is a brave, honest and compassionate reporter. Yet the Israeli government has repeatedly complained to the BBC that Guerin is “antisemitic” and showed “total identification with the goals and methods of Palestinian terror groups.”

On one occasion, in an appalling charge, they linked her reporting from the Middle East to the rise of antisemitic incidents in Britain. When Guerin was based in the Middle East in 2004, she filed a report about a sixteen year-old Palestinian would-be suicide bomber. Guerin said in the report that “this is a picture that Israel wants the world to see,” implying the Israelis were exploiting the boy for propaganda purposes.

Natan Sharansky, a cabinet minister at the time, wrote a formal letter to the BBC accusing her of “such a gross double standards to the Jewish state, it is difficult to see Ms Guerin’s report as anything but antisemitic.”

The following year, when Guerin was awarded with an MBE for her reporting, Sharansky said: “It is very sad that something as important as anti-semitism is not taken into consideration when issuing this award, especially in Britain where the incidents of anti-semitism are on the rise.” Officially sanctioned smears like this show why so many people shy away from confronting the influence of the Israel lobby.

This is what Oborne reported about Jeremy Bowen:

In April this year, in an important success for the pro-Israel lobby, the BBC’s Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, was criticized by the BBC Trust for breaching their rules of accuracy and impartiality in an online piece, and their rules of accuracy in a radio piece. Bowen’s critics have seized on his humiliation, demanding that he be sacked and insisting that the episode proved the BBC’s “chronically biased reporting.” The real story behind the BBC Trust’s criticism of Bowen reports is rather different: it demonstrates the pusillanimity of the BBC Trust and the energy and opportunism of the pro-Israel lobby.

The story begins with an essay written by Bowen to mark the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War for the BBC website. Though many people viewed Bowen’s essay as a fair and balanced account, erring if anything on the side of conventional wisdom, this was not the reaction of two passionate members of the Pro-Israel lobby, Jonathan Turner of the Zionist Federation and Gilead Ini, who lobbies for CAMERA, an American pro-Israel media watchdog organization.

Turner and Ini subjected Bowen’s article to line by line scrutiny, alleging some 24 instances of bias in his online article and a further four in a later report by Bowen from a controversial Israeli settlement called Har Homa.

Turner and Ini’s complaints were rejected by the BBC’s editorial complaints unit, so they duly appealed to the BBC Trust. The meeting was chaired by David Liddiment who, to quote Jonathan Dimbleby, “is admired as a TV entertainment wizard and former director of programmes at ITV but whose experience of the dilemmas posed by news and current affairs, especially in relation to the bitterly contested complexities of the Middle East is, perforce, limited.”

The BBC Trust found that Bowen had breached three accuracy and one impartiality guideline in his online report, and one accuracy guideline in his radio piece. This was a massive boost for the organizations to which Turner and Ini were attached. The Zionist Federation at once called for Bowen to be sacked, calling his position “untenable,” while adding that what they called his “biased coverage of Israel” had been a “significant contributor to the recent rise in antisemitic incidents in the UK to record levels.” Meanwhile, CAMERA claimed that the BBC Trust had exposed Bowen’s “unethical” approach to his work and insisted the BBC must now take “concrete steps” to combat its “chronically biased reporting” of the Middle East.

These powerful attacks might have been justified if the BBC Trust had found Bowen guilty of egregious bias. In fact he was condemned for what were at best matters of opinion. In a majority of the cases, the complaints were found to have no merit, and where changes were made they changed the meaning very little. … The Trust’s ruling was met with dismay in BBC newsrooms. A former BBC News editor, Charlie Beckett, told us “the BBC investigated Jeremy Bowen because they were under such extraordinary pressure. … It struck a chill through the actual BBC newsroom because it signaled to them that they were under assault.”

This is what Oborne reported about Jonathan Dimbleby:

Jonathan Dimbleby had boldly expressed criticism in a powerfully argued article for Index on Censorship of the pressure from pro-Israel groups on the BBC, which led to the BBC Trust’s report on Jeremy Bowen, and had initially been keen to be involved. Suddenly his interest evaporated. There simply wasn’t the time, he said. At first we felt baffled and let down. But in due course we discovered that his comments had brought a complaint from the very same lawyer, Jonathan Turner of the Zionist Federation, that had complained about Jeremy Bowen.

Dimbleby is now going through the exact same complaints process that he criticized. Turner is arguing that Dimbleby’s comments make him unfit to host the BBC’s Any Questions. The Dimbleby experience serves as a cautionary tale for anyone approaching this subject. Others, such as Sir John Tusa, who had opposed the BBC’s refusal to broadcast the Disasters Emergency Committee Gaza appeal, were overcome with modesty, feeling that they simply didn’t have the expertise to tackle the subject.

This now brings us to one of the most disgraceful decisions ever taken by the BBC’s senior management, a decision which indicates the extent to which they are now receptive to Zionist pressure. This receptivity may in part be due to intimidation of the kind revealed by Oborne, but there is another factor which he has not mentioned, which he must have known about, but which did not feature in his otherwise excellent report. That factor will emerge shortly, but let us deal first with the disgraceful decision.

The BBC prides itself on its tradition of mounting at short notice major appeals for funds from the viewing and listening public to bring aid to innocent civilian people anywhere in the world afflicted by disasters and catastrophes.

BBC refused to join fund-raiser for Gaza victims

The Israeli attack on the Gaza strip in December 2008/January 2009, “Operation Cast Lead,” involving massive slaughter and wanton destruction at a level which the report  (250 pages in Pdf format) of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, headed by the South African Jewish Judge Richard Goldstone was obliged to characterize as “actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity” was just the kind of event which would prompt the BBC, along with all other broadcasting networks, to support such an appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee.

But that did not happen. In Oborne’s words:

In January 2009, Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, took the unprecedented decision of breaking away from other broadcasters and refusing to broadcast the Disasters Emergency Appeal for Gaza, claiming it would compromise the BBC’s impartiality. ITV and Channel 4 screened the Gaza appeal, but Sky [a satellite TV network owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International] joined the BBC in refusing.

The BBC’s decision had an undeniable impact. Brendan Gormley, Chief Executive of the DEC, told us that the appeal raised about half of the expected total: £7.5 million. In the first 48 hours of the appeal phone calls were down by 17,000 on the average.

Thompson also cast doubt on the charities’ ability to deliver aid on the ground despite assurances from the DEC and his own charitable appeals advisers that this was not the case.

We asked Charlie Beckett why the BBC had refused. He replied: “If there was no pro-Israeli lobby in this country then I don’t think[screening the appeal] would have been seen as politically problematic. I don’t think it would be a serious political issue and concern for them if they didn’t have that pressure from an extraordinarily active, sophisticated, and persuasive lobby sticking up for the Israeli viewpoint.”

It would be easy to conclude, as Oborne seems to have done, that this wicked decision to deny aid to a wretched civilian population whose environment resembled Hiroshima after the atomic bomb blast, was the product  — solely the product — of the intimidation campaign against the BBC by the Israel Lobby.

Thompson’s trip to Jerusalem and his Jewish wife

But there is another explanation. It was given in a small item that appeared  inGuy Adams’  Pandora gossip column, published in The Independent on November 29, 2005. Under the heading “BBC chief holds peace talks in Jerusalem with Ariel Sharon”, Adams wrote [with emphases added by me]:

The BBC is often accused of an anti-Israeli bias in its coverage of the Middle East, and recently censured reporter Barbara Plett for saying she “started to cry” when Yasser Arafat left Palestine shortly before his death.

Fascinating, then, to learn that its director general, Mark Thompson, has recently returned from Jerusalem, where he held a face-to-face meeting with the hard line Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Although the diplomatic visit was not publicised on these shores, it has been seized upon in Israel as evidence that Thompson, who took office in 2004, intends to build bridges with the country’s political class.

Sources at the Beeb also suspect that it heralds a “softening” to the corporation’s unofficial editorial line on the Middle East.

This was the first visit of its kind by any serving director general, so it’s clearly a significant development, I’m told.

Not many people know this, but Mark is actually a deeply religious man. He’s a Catholic, but his wife is Jewish, and he has a far greater regard for the Israeli cause than some of his predecessors.

Understandably, an official BBC spokesman was anxious to downplay talk of an exclusively pro-Israeli charm offensive.

Apopros this month’s previously undocumented trip, he stressed that Thompson had also held talks with the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas.

Ariel Sharon, of course, achieved Major War Criminal status when he was still serving with the Israeli “Defense” Force. Sharon added to his reputation when he became Israeli Prime Minister when he wallowed exultantly in Palestinian and Lebanese blood. What is the head of our Beeb doing even being in the same room, let lone holding meetings hidden from the British public, with such a man?

Has there been any other occasion when the premier of a foreign state has been able to summon into his presence, on his territory, the Director-General of the British Broadcasting Corporation for a harangue about the editorial policy of the corporation via-à-vis that foreign state? No, there has not.

According to the statute which established the corporation, not even a British prime minister has the power to do any such thing. Any attempt to do so, were it to be established, would provoke an uproar which would likely lead to the resignation of the prime minister, if not the fall of the government.

Quite obviously it would be naive to assert that successive British governments have never exerted — or attempted to exert — behind-the-scenes pressures on the BBC with regard to its domestic output (I exclude the BBC World Service, which broadcasts to foreigners and which is subsidized by the Foreign Office), but that cannot be viewed as a license for the Israeli prime minister to do the same thing and, what is more, flaunt the fact.

I am surprised that Oborne did not use in his film the information published in The Independent in 2005 and which is still available via a Google search. As I say, he must have known about it.

Perhaps the fact about Thompson’s wife being Jewish might have been viewed as too “personal” and open to allegations of “anti-Semitism”. But if the slightest bit of research were to be done on philo-Semitic Gentiles active on Israel’s behalf in the media and in major political parties and the number of these who have Jewish wives, then eyebrows would be raised beyond the level of coincidence.

Certainly the information about Thompson going to Jerusalem to discuss BBC editorial policy towards Israel with the Israeli prime minister was a political fact apposite to the central theme of the Oborne’s program: The influence of Zionist Jews over leading officials of British state and national institutions to direct their policies for the benefit of Israel, even if it harms British national interests.

Such influence cannot be described as mere “lobbying.” It constitutes treasonous subversion, and it must be rooted out.

Postscript on the media aftermath

The information which Oborne produced in his Dispatches report deserved massive coverage by the entire print and broadcasting media, but especially the BBC, which was so strongly featured.

But the BBC did not carry, so far as I can find, a single mention on any of its multiple TV, radio and web platforms, not even in any of it programs or sites which specialize in reporting what other media are reporting.

The Guardian and The Independent allowed some small-scale print coverage and debate in their web site discussion forums but these are relatively small-circulation publications.

The Times, which proclaims itself as “The Paper of Record”, and all other entities in Rupert Murdoch’s News International group (including The Sun and Sky TV; Independent Television, ITV1 and Channel 5; The Daily Telegraph and all other entities in the Telegraph Group; the Daily Mail; the Daily Mirror) all were completely silent about the film.

The Jewish Chronicle carried smallish, dismissive, low-key print reports and comment, but these did not reflect the quantity and angst of contributions on its website and on a variety of other Jewish community sites.

The almost universal and clearly coordinated application of the “Silent Treatment” of this film is both an illustration of the oppressive power of the Zionist Lobby over the ‘news’ media (and therefore over the public’s “right to know”) — which was one of the main points of the film — but also an indication that no comprehensive rebuttal of Oborne’s litany of damning facts could be found.

Martin Webster (email him) has been a racial-nationalist activist in Britain since he was an 18 year old in 1961. From 1969 until 1983 he was National Activities Organiser of the National Front and a member of its National Directorate. In 1973 he was the first nationalist in Britain (pre- or post-WW2) to “save a deposit” (then set at 12.5%) in a parliamentary election when he won 16.02% of the poll at West Bromwich in 1973. Since 1983 he has not associated with any political organization. He issues occasional e-bulletins to a world-wide circle of friends (and some enemies) who subscribe to his Electronic Loose Cannon newsletter, which comments on nationalist issues and parties, and his Electronic Watch on Zion whose title explains its purpose.

Karlskirche, Vienna

The long-term destiny of the Western world has been a movement from pre-modern ‘Providence’ via modern ‘Progress’ to postmodern ‘Nihilism’. Providentialism’s linear future-oriented focus — emphasizing the role of reason to the detriment of divine intervention — easily merged with the Enlightenment idea of Progress, paving the way for the rise of modern science. The Enlightenment project — designed to eliminate uncertainty and ambivalence — was gradually undermined by postmodern inversion, implosion, relativism and nihilism.

The resulting “postmodern condition” calls for an investigation into the archaeology of post-modernity. Excavations of this kind are likely to encounter layers of 19th and 20th-century answers to 21st-century questions. A privileged site to start looking for answers is Vienna — “the capital of the 20th century.”

Metropolises such as Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, Prague, St. Petersburg and New York – 19th and early 20th-century cityscapes with significant Jewish Diasporas and epicenters of a widely felt civilizational crisis — were scenes or “laboratories” for intense, sub-counter-cultural “experiments” and avant-garde strategies designing prototypes of a future hybridized, postmodern world.Viennese modernism represents, according to Jacques Le Rider, “the appearance of a post-modern moment in the history of European culture.”  The Jewish satirist Karl Kraus damned Vienna  as a “research laboratory for world destruction.”

The revolution of (proto-post-)modernism entailed an increasing separation of representation from “the real.” In this context, the pseudo-assimilated Jew has been seen as “the prototype of the post-modern self.”  Major themes of theKulturkritik of the 1970s and 1980s, Jacques Le Rider points out, were prefigured in the Viennese modernism of 1900.

Vienna Court Opera, 1902

Vienna: “The Capital of the 20th Century”

At the turn of the 20th century Vienna was one of Europe’s largest urban centers, with a population of more than two million by 1910. By then, Vienna had been a major centre of political power and cultural patronage for centuries. Vienna was a place of tensions and paradox: Its mayor, Karl Lueger, had  anti-Semitic inclinations. Vienna sheltered both Theodor Herzl — the founder of Zionism — as well as Adolf Hitler, the founder of National Socialism. The city’s numerous innovative cultural and intellectual movements and figures radically changed Western culture and thought, according to Steven Beller:

Leading a very long list are two intellectual giants: Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential philosophers of the modern era. … Hans Kelsen revolutionized the theory of law; the Austrian School of Economics had a large influence on liberal economic thought; the Vienna Circle of philosophers developed logical positivism, and Karl Popper acted as that movement’s leading critic; Alfred Adler developed individual psychology, the first of many rebels from Freudian orthodoxy who established their own movements; Austro-Marxism brought innovative reinterpretations of socialist theory. Vienna also became a powerhouse of literary innovation: Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Karl Kraus, Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Stefan Zweig and Franz Werfel, later Elias Canetti, were but the most prominent among a vast array of writers. It is the depth of intellectuality and talent that is perhaps the most impressive part of Vienna 1900.

Viennese ‘critical modernism’ had its roots in French decadence, the positivism of the physicist Ernst Mach and the “Dionysian” influence of Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche had, in the words of Joan Peyser, “repudiated nineteenth-century ideology and demanded the reorganization of human society under the guidance of exceptional leaders. Richard Wagner answered the call,” and became “the German superhero, the embodiment of the Dionysian ideal for which Nietzsche yearned.”

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Vienna circa1900 was, as Steven Beller points out, “a vibrant centre of radical cultural and intellectual innovation, with consequences that reverberated through the twentieth century.”  Its culture was heavily influenced by the largest Jewish community in Western Europe:

In Vienna especially the Jewish role was predominant.  Some of the major figures of Viennese modern culture … such as Adolf Loos and Georg Trakl, Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann, were not Jewish, but the vast majority were. The Jewish presence among creative figures in the plastic arts was not that large, although Jews were prominent as patrons, art critics and propagandists, and eventually as art historians. In most other modern cultural fields … such as psychoanalysis, the Vienna Circle, Austro-Marxism and literary Young Vienna, the people involved were in a large majority Jewish or of Jewish descent.  The liberal professions — lawyers, physicians and journalists — also had a majority Jewish presence, and it has often been claimed that the public for Viennese modern culture was also heavily Jewish.  This Jewish predominance was based on solid socio-economic grounds, for the social reservoir of Viennese modern culture, the educated part of the liberal wing of the city’s bourgeoisie, was largely Jewish.

Jews comprised 10 per cent or so of Vienna’s population, and even less, about 3 per cent, of the population of the lands of the later Austrian Republic. Yet Jews had a large presence in Vienna’s liberal socio-economic sectors, being 30 per cent of Vienna’s commercial self-employed. According to Beller, the Jewish emphasis on education was also much greater than normal: “Approximately two-thirds of all boys with a liberal bourgeois background who graduated from Vienna’s central Gymnasien [the elite secondary schools] between 1870 and 1910 were Jewish. (The equivalent proportion among girls was higher still.)”

As Louis Breger notes,

The new religious freedom that followed the German revolution of 1848 was accompanied by the lifting of restrictions and special taxes that Jews had suffered for many years. Now, they enjoyed the rights of full citizens; the professions were open to them, they could employ Christian servants, own real estate, and live outside the ghettos. These new opportunities had stimulated a flood of Jewish immigrants from the provinces during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1860, there were 6000 Jews in Vienna; by 1900, the number was 147.000, the largest Jewish community of any country in Western Europe. In the capital, they found expanding economic, educational, and cultural avenues; by the turn of the century, they were a powerful presence in banking and industry, in medicine, law, journalism, literature, and music.

Vienna: Ringstrasse “The whole Ringstrasse had a magic effect upon me, as if it were a scene from theThousand-and-one-Nights.” (Adolf Hitler)

Members of the Austrian nobility considered it beneath their station to engage in trade, finance, and the professions, leaving these fields open to enterprising and educated Jews who were able to achieve positions of wealth and prominence. By the latter half of the 19th century, they dominated a number of fields. As Louis Breger observes:

By the 1880s, 12 percent of the population of Vienna was Jewish, yet they made up one-third of the student body of the university, with even higher numbers in certain fields: 50 percent in medicine and almost 60 percent in law. All the liberal newspapers were owned by Jews and a large proportion of the journalists were Jewish. As the turn of the century approached, the majority of the liberal, educated, intellectual elite of Vienna was Jewish. The politiciansVictor Adler — brother-in-law of Freud’s school friend Heinrich Braun — and Otto Bauer — older brother of the woman who became his famous case, ‘Dora’; the journalist Karl Kraus; the writers Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Stefan Zweig; the composers Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, and Alban Berg — all came from Jewish families. Even that most Viennese of musicians, Johann Strauss, was, it is now believed, part Jewish.

Leon Botstein points out that the Jewish presence in Vienna “increased from less than half of 1 per cent in the Vienna of Schubert’s day, to around 5 per cent in 1862 when Brahms settled in the city, to over 10 per cent when Mahler left for Kassel in 1883. The Vienna in which Mahler died comprised over 175,000 Jews; the city he first encountered in 1875 comprised only about 55,000.”

Modernity attracted Jews from the periphery toward the center — as Philip V. Bohlman observes — “to the metropole, to the cosmopolitan culture of modernism, to the arts and sciences fostered by great universities, to the monumental synagogues, and to the concert halls and cabarets.” Jewish modernism took shape as a counter-history to the rise of European modernism, and Jewish music in the modern era inscribed its otherness “in such ways that it would circulate in a modern public sphere.” During the modern era, Bohlman points out, “the otherness of the [European] periphery increasingly shifted towards the center”:

Europe and the Enlightenment, and its Jewish form, the Haskala … are keys to understanding a revolutionary transition in Jewish music and Jewish music history. … Before the modernity articulated by Moses Mendelssohn and other … Jewish Enlightenment thinkers, “music” was largely vague as an aesthetically autonomous object in Jewish society.  In a strict sense everything in the synagogue was music — prayer, Torah and Haftorah, cantillation, ritual and liturgical interjection — therefore it was impossible to limit it to any single category.  … The cyclical nature of liturgical practices bounded music within ritual and prevented it from flowing over into the temporal world outside the synagogue.

As Jews from the eastern parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire “flooded the metropole” (i.e. Vienna), a new Jewish popular music took shape, trading in stories that “chronicled a new city culture in the liminal space between tradition and modernity.” The musical traditions these new immigrants brought with them gradually spread through the public sphere. As Bohlman points out,

One of the most important conditions for the complex new popular music was language. Each stream of immigration from a different part of the empire brought with it different dialects, which in turn were distinct from the other dialects found in Vienna. … Speech and language played a further role in the historical transformation of Jewish music, not least because of the partial supplanting of Hebrew with German in the synagogue. … The proliferation of Jewish dialects of German and different dialects of Yiddish in Vienna had a profound impact on the city’s popular culture. … TheWiener Mundart (Viennese dialect) that contributed to the formation of the genre known as Wienerlied (literally, Viennese song, but referring to an extensive repertory of popular song in Viennese dialect) bears direct witness to the specific influences of Jewish dialects.

Jewish composers in early 20th-century Europe formulated a vocabulary of melodic patterns and motivic meaning that allowed some of them — Ernest Bloch, Arnold Schoenberg, among others — to create repertories that contained specifically Jewish symbolism. Max Brod (1884 – 1968) — the Jewish music critic, composer, philosopher, and future champion of Franz Kafka — established in an essay (“Jewish Folk Melodies”, 1916) the conditions for the Jewishness in Gustav Mahler’s music and by extension in modern Jewish music. As Bohlman observes,

Brod’s essay … turned the Jewish question many were posing inside out by claiming that what was presumably the most German trait of Mahler’s style, the march, was an expression of Jewishness. … The march style Brod ascribed to Mahler was religious and hassidic, even further removed from the firsthand experiences of Mahler’s lifetime. Mahler’s musical connection was possible, therefore, because of his “Jewish soul,” which was internal and thus contrasted with his merely “external consciousness” of German music.

Theodor Adorno also searched for Mahler’s “inner identities” by reflecting on his “musical physiognomy.” This search for Jewishness that preoccupied Brod and other 20th-century Jewish observers produced a constellation of themes orbiting Mahler’s music, claiming that it included — in Bohlman’s words — “specifically Jewish gestures, presumably absorbed from growing up in the Jewish soundscape of provincial Moravia.”

Mahler’s hometown Iglau contained one of the oldest Jewish communities in Moravia — a region well-known as the home to influential Talmudic scholars and famous rabbinical dynasties. Like many Moravian and Bohemian towns, Iglau was a German-speaking enclave within a larger Czech-speaking rural society. Czech was the language of farmers and peasants; German was the language of success and social advancement, the language of the educated, urban elites and the imperial bureaucracy.

Café Central, a key meeting place for intellectuals in late-19th-century Vienna

Mahler famously remarked that he was “thrice homeless: as a Czech among Austrians, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world.” But Mahler was in “good company” as a prominent cultural figure of fin-de-siècle Vienna descended from the Crown Lands of Bohemia and Moravia: His fellow Bohemian Jews included Victor Adler, Otto Bauer, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Hermann Broch, Egon Friedell, Karl Kraus, Stefan Zweig, Sigmund Freud, Guido Adler, Otto Neurath, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Max Reinhardt, Arnold Schoenberg, and Otto Weininger.

It has been argued that Mahler’s music has links back to the Hasidic music of Eastern European ghettos of the eighteenth century in which dance music is deployed as a remedy to misery: “Mahler’s lifelong juxtaposition of funeral march and dance music, dating back to his earliest childhood composition (a polka with funeral march introduction), is thus related to a specifically Jewish tradition. The Trio of the third movement of the First Symphony, with its interpolation of street music into the funeral march, is heard by many as an example of klezmer music as Mahler would have heard as a child and would have been heard on the streets of Vienna during his time there.”  As Philip Bohlman points out,

Mahler’s music revealed the afflictions experienced by a victim of anti-Semitism, to which he responded in particularly personal ways. Mahler’s marginality as a Jew, so his late twentieth-century champions claimed, exposed him to cultural contexts distinguished by jarring juxtapositions and pieces that failed to cohere as wholes. Mahler therefore employed the musical language of bricolage, somehow characteristic of a Jewish preference for hybridity over unity.

Rudolf Louis, one of Mahler’s anti-Semitic critics, summarized it thus in 1909: “What I find so utterly repellent about Mahler’s music is the pronounced Jewishness of its underlying character. … It is abhorrent to me because it speaks Yiddish. In other words it speaks the language of German music but with an accent, with the intonation and above all with the gestures of the Easterner, the all-too-Eastern Jew.” Louis’s choice of words, according to Julian Johnson, “underlines something true about Mahler’s music: it speaks the language of the Austro-German tradition but with a different tone, accent, and voice. It remains contested whether this difference is explained by Mahler’s Jewish origins … or whether it results from a modernist attitude toward language (marked by irony, parody, exaggeration) that exceeds the specific category of Jewish identity.”

Despite his conversion, there was never any doubt in Vienna that Mahler was Jewish.  As Leon Botstein points out, “Jewish identity was no mere matter of an individual’s theological practices or convictions. In the eyes of Jews and anti-Semites alike, it was a matter of birth, race, and nation, as well as faith.”

It has been suggested, that Mahler’s music reflects the tragic Weltgefühl of his era. Julian Johnson points out that Mahler’s music is like “an acoustic prism placed at the end of one century and the beginning of another, refracting musical voices from both historical directions, from Viennese classicism and early romanticism to the stylistic eclecticism and polyvocality of the twentieth century.”

Part II: The Emancipation of Dissonance

E. R. E. Knutsson (email him) is a freelance writer.