This sort of analysis doesn't get us very far in understanding the alliance between the right wing and Israel. "Right wing pundits" in the mainstream media support Israel. At the end of the day, score another point for Jews as victims, and for de-contextualization of everything. Score another point for ignoring the roots of violence in our society--U.S. government policy. Score another point for sanctimonous liberalism, HuffPo style. The life of that security guard has the same value as the life snuffed out in a peaceful West Bank demonstration last week.

And some scapegoats are so thoroughly demonized that it doesn't matter that we slaughter hundreds of thousands--They are invisible, except when someone takes a picture and we scurry to hide the evidence of brutal reality we would rather not see.

So you see, it is well and good to set up a Holocaust museum to memorialize the accepted scapegoated victim but we must look away when the victim is politically powerless.

The Zionists are out in force today, conflating criticism of Israeli policy and anti-semitism and exploiting the Holocaust (Huff Post actually has an article titled, "Mommy, why do people want to kill Jews?")with their usual thug-like arrogance.

“Everybody is somebody’s Jew. And today
the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.”
– Primo Levi, cited in A Hard Case:
The Life and Death of Primo Levi;
The New Yorker, 17 Jun 2002.

Now they are dredging up some Rev Wright sensationalism about how the Jews control Obama.
Timely, huh?
Maybe they felt it was necessary to tamp down a growing threat? The truth must be obscured if it is strting to appear like a shift is on the horizon.

Antisemitic frothing is not the sole parvenu of the extreme right, as there are odd bedfellows in the extreme left as well for this sort of thing.
As for the rightward drift of Israeli society, that has occurred largely thanks to the forced immigration / expulsions of the Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin) after 1948.

Sioux Rose

Yeah, the "Jewish bankers are responsible for the world global fiscal crisis" is another meme gaining tread. Whenever the fiscal pie gets cut tighter, the various groups at the bottom of the economic pyramid are instructed to aim their venom at one another, rather than those who have engineered the pyramid. (Yes, I realize there are some influential Jewish bankers; but there are plenty of WASPS in the upper echelons of power and they happen to find war their most profitable "product." So long as these various dark agents find use for one another, they will work together for insidious ends. Blaming ONE element alone out of a sinister grouping does smack of a specific form of prejudice, old, but all too enduring.)

This guy was 89-years-old in what is probably a one-off crime of a single nutcase. Most of his compatriots have moved on to the global war on terror against Muslims.

The most important thing to remember is that hard right has largely replaced Jews with Muslims as their bugbear du jour. The frenzied hatred whipped up by right-wing commentators for the global Islamic menace is no different than the Goebbelsian propaganda of the 1930s. In fact, it might be even worse and more pervasive in our media culture than it was back then when it was identified for the threat it was. Today, right-wing politicians from Canada to Europe to the US are winning elections and being embraced for their fascist platform so long as it embraces Israel. While standing with Israel serves as a convenient and powerful smokescreen for their otherwise xenophobic ideologies, its position as a beachhead for Western Civilization dovetails with their Islamophobia.

However, if you were to do a simple find and replace of the terms Muslims and Islam with Jews and Judaism in right-wing American and European discourse, you would soon come to the realization that hate speech surrounds us and that Nazism is almost ascendant -- more so than these isolated crackpots who cling to the old fascism. The new fascism, with its powerful supporters and media outlets is far more of a threat. That's what groups like the SPLC and PRA don't get.

Zionists and their supporters are anti-Semitic. Who else demands the non-Jewish Semites be persecuted and evicted from their land? Palestinians are Semites. Zionists are amongst the most racist people in the world.

But we knew that already . . . . . . Just wanted to speak up on what appears to be Anti-Semitic Bullshit Day.

"Apocalyptic aggression is fueled by right-wing pundits" and left-wing pundits and every war-monger in between (Here's looking at you Clintons, Gore, Feinstein and Pelosi).

Here is what happens next. Following the push for Israel to stop new settlements, we will blindly fail to see that someone moved the goal posts as Israel makes the "big concession" by agreeing finally stop the new settlements. When Palestinians insist that they want Israelis out of the occupied territories they will be viewed as "unwilling to compromise." Israel will emerge as the good guys because they will have out manuevered the opposition once again. They keep all their stolen land and still smell like roses. Israelis are masters at manipulating public opinion and few of us know what hit us.

There is no doubt that since the 1970s the white working-class have been put severe under pressure by the convergence of corporate power and economic globalization precipitated by an economic system based solely on profit. They finally got a taste at what various minorities have experienced for even longer - and don't like it. And I don't blame them.

The white working-class since at least Nixon have very legitimate grievances concerning what has happened to their lifestyles and lives. (Why so many of the staunch party democrats became Reagan democrats and were conned to consistently vote against their own economic interests - which they still blindly do - largely distracted by non-issues like 'gay-marriage, abortion, and mindless nationalism/patriotism.)

Unfortunately 'straw-men' have been erected as scapegoats - largely blacks, mexicans, asians, and jews (long popular targets) to deflect the white working-class's rightful anger away from the true cause of their economic problems.

The reality is that few blacks, mexicans asians, and jews have controlled the major private entities - corporations and their hand-maiden 'think-tanks' and media propagandists - that are largely responsible for working-class woes (destroying unions to remove any worker participation in decision making, shipping jobs overseas to increase profits, demanding federal and state bailouts for privately made decisions, etc) that the working-class have to subsidize through higher taxes and commodity prices.

But the propaganda is very effective and demagogues very popular (See Germany, 1933) because they offer what appear to be 'simple' solutions. There are no simple solutions. Everything easy in the world has already been done. All we have left now are the hard things.

As long as the working class vents its legitimate anger against these largely blameless 'straw-men' and not the true cause of their disenfranchisement (the private corporate entities who actually run things by buying access to and controlling our national leadership for their own private ends - largely at public expense) the white working-class will remain relegated to second-class economic status and continued anger and will generate no end of righteous feeling individuals who feel they have nothing else to lose and irrationally take the law into their own hands to threaten us all. Not by their individual acts necessarily, but by the usually heavy-handed governmental response their individual acts may precipitate. Then you can kiss what few remaining constitutional protections we have goodbye.

The author know that no "conspiracy" resides with Mr. von Brunn's attacks.
The "conspiracy theory" he is actually hinting at is the 9/11 event which most certainly IS a conspiracy.
Mr. Berlet penned this piece as a subliminal message to attempt to cover-up the crimes of the bush adminstration.
Shame on you!

Please review this piece regarding Mr. Berlet and his questionable progressive support.
http://www.redshift.com/~damason/lhreport/flash/truthmatters.html

When a right-winger gets angry he turns to violence. And when a liberal gets angry he turns to therapy.

Is it just me, or does anyone else see this pattern?

Authors may rant against "conspiracy theories" all they wish but when we live in a country where the banks are looting our treasury by means of our corrupted Congress, when our Constitution, habeus corpus and posse comitatus have been effectively suspended because of three buildings that miraculously melted into their basements at the speed of gravity, you don't expect some people to speculate about what the hell is going on, in the absence of any rational government explanation other than "trust us"? Conspiracy theories, indeed!
Tony Vodvarka

#1: Why is this not being referred to as domestic terrorism?

#2: Was this lunatic (which might be a reason it's not terrorism) a veteran of the American army in WWII? Or, the German army?

#3: Where are the Christian right religious leaders? Why are we not hearing from them decrying these recent acts of terrorism? Why aren't they condemning the actions as sins worthy of instant entry to hell? Where is their moral outrage? Their silence is compelling testament that they in some way condone these actions. They don't wish it to stop.

Jews are being attacked from the right and left. THe right has the National States' Rights Party and American Nazi Party saying that the Holocaust is a Hoax.

THe Left, in middle East nations are attacking Jews, not Israelis but Jews, even those who acknowledge Israel's wrongs. Iran had a conference to show that the Holocaust is a hoax. David Duke attended.

Dear KeLeMi, Are "Jews" being attacked from left and right? You seem to conflate traditional unquestionable anti-semites with people like myself, who have no trouble distinguishing the average Jew from Likudnik pawns. It is not an "attack" to be totally tired of and repelled by the anti-intellectual, anti-democratic and anti-academic bulldozer antics of AIPAC and the Antidefamation League. These organizations are now receiving the disgusted public reaction that they richly deserve.
Tony Vodvarka

Most of the victims in the Holocaust were killed in the death camps, not concentration camps where people were "merely" worked to death.

www.deathcamps.org
www.holocaust-history.org
www.nizkor.org

are some good links.

Some of the Holocaust Deniers act as if they are deliberate provocateurs, they certainly help discredit critics of Israeli militarism with their absurd nonsense.

www.oilempire.us/holocaust-denial.html

As for Mr. Berlet,

bad conspiracy theories are beloved - and often created - by conspirators as "straw men" to discredit investigation into crimes of state.

Putting Mr. Berlet on Democracy Now! against David Ray Griffin was a classic "fake debate" -- Berlet said there was not complicity in 9/11, and DRG pushed easily discredited nonsense like "no plane hit the Pentagon" (a conspiracy theory first created by Donald Rumsfeld on Oct. 12, 2001). Meanwhile, sober evidence about suppressed warnings from numerous US allies has yet to be covered by Democracy Now or most other "alternative" media even though the sources are mainstream media. See the Complete 9/11 Timeline by Paul Thompson for a good introduction to the evidence of foreknowledge by the Bush administration, and Crossing the Rubicon by Michael Ruppert for the best investigation into how the air defenses were suppressed on that fateful day.

Meanwhile, the Ford Foundation is a major donor to Mr. Berlet's think tank. I guess it is a coincidence that well moneyed interests are happy to fund left leaning efforts allegedly promoting social change and redistribution of wealth and power. Or is it that they want the "left" to merely be a pressure relief valve that ensures that dissent remains ineffective?

A sick old 'white supremacist' kills a blank man and the Jews cry anti-Semitism to justify the slaughter of their Arab neighbors. Anger can surely be a habit forming drug when taken to excess long after the need has passed. Political parties and religions have become the worlds greatest 'pushers' of this drug. A pox on both their houses!

Why have there been no "think tank" pieces castigating the American rabbi who called for killing arab men, women and children because that is the Jewish way though it is counter to the western way and to destroy their places of worship to show them that their god is powerless?

I have a hard time with the author generalizing "conspiracy theorists" so ridiculously. It's amazing he also didn't bring up the Elvis-still-alive connection.

And I'm sorry Mr. Berlet, but the American military-industrial complex is the most grandiose purveyor of 1) dualism 2) scapegoating 3) demonization and 4) apocalyptic aggression.

Hatred and violence directed at Jews qua Jews is offensive, immoral and unlawful--as are hatred and violence directed at any group based solely on its ethnic or religious characteristics. Many Jews in both Israel and the diaspora oppose Israeli aggression and war crimes, but for the author to pretend that vicious anti-Palestinian diatribes by Israeli politicians, gleeful slaughter of innocent civilians by the Israeli military, illegal occupation of Palestinian land and other atrocities have not contributed to the deplorable hatred leading to violence is disingenuous at best. Where was Mr Berlet when Palestinians were being slaughtered in Gaza and Lebanon?

Jews have contributed immensely to civilization in innumerable ways, and have suffered immensely from persecution. It's tragic that the activities of right-wing Jews are leading to a backlash.

Rabbi Hillel put it best: "Do not do to others what is hateful to you."

I understand that the museum was going to have a program based on an uplifting diary.
Do you suppose that it was: My Name is Rachel Corrie, a play based on the diaries and emails of Rachel Corrie?

Bring America Back !!!!.............This act is hardly a conspiracy since the same guy tried to kidnap an official of the Federal Reserve Bank, was found guilty, served years in prison. This time again he acted alone on his radical impulses and beliefs. no conspiracy.

***What probably prompted his acting out this time was the President's well publicized visit to a Nazi Prison Camp about a week ago with speeches and statements. Then Pope Benedict recently visited Israel and the Wailing Wall, giving once again sympathetic apologies for the holocaust.

***The right wingers and Neocons are jumping on the conspiracy wagon trying to make a vast network out of a
lone gunman.

What? There are maybe a hundred thousand hard core american skinheads....,

Not a problem. We deploy a Marine Engineering Brigade, and bleach, scrub, slice off those mean, offensive tattoos to start with.

Make them grow nice hair like boys that have jobs.

Put them into reeducation boot camps run by black drill seargents and CIA torturers until they are polite to all people. And courteous. Then beat them within a centimeter of their lives, whisper in their ears, tell them go, sin no more.

boys just need direction.

I haven't read any of the posts made, so far, in this page, so perhaps what I'll say will be somewhat repetition.

With that said, the author of the article, Chip Berlet, seems to be rather guilty of what he says needs to be stopped and with the force of law. He's committing all or a considerable enough of the use of "the same four "tools of fear." These are 1) dualism; 2) scapegoating; 3) demonization; and 4) apocalyptic aggression", that he says demagogues and conspiracy theorists employ.

How's that?

Before getting to answering that question, I'll add that he's also applying another feature of the types of character(s) he's condemning, bigotry. He's "conveniently" treating the topic as if it's only to be dealt with or considered in terms of what happens within the USA, which "conveniently" omits that the U.S. government is far more guilty of all of the characterists he's accusing "conspiracy theorists" of than these latter people are. And no, the GW Bush Administration was neither the first nor the last presidential administration that we concretely know or certainly can know to be guilty of this and on a far, far, far more extreme scale; far more apocalyptically than anything one or two or a few conspiracy theorists among the ordinary citizenry could ever be guilty of. After all, the government of the USA, with its hellbent politics, and its military and CIA (CIA ops), are guilty of murdering, massacring far more innocent people than any loose-cannon conspiracy among the many peace-abiding, law-respecting, ... conspiracy theorists are or could ever be.

Referring to everything he's condemning as if it's only important nationally is to be a bigot and worse! It's also to treat readers as if they're dumb animals, awfully ignorant, awfully incapable of critical thinking ... and caring!

Now, for answering the above question in a perhaps more specific sense, for the above already does answer it in a non-specific sense, given he only refers to the problem being of concern on a national basis; well, let's take the following scenario for example.

"Fear Rules
Who Spent All That Money For What?",

by Paul Craig Roberts, counterpunch.org, June 10, 2009

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13942

EXCERPT:

The power of irrational fear in the US is extraordinary. It ranks up there with the Israel Lobby, the military/security complex, and the financial gangsters. Indeed, fear might be the most powerful force in America.

...

Terrorists are everywhere. “They hate us for our freedom and democracy.” When I tell America’s alarmed citizens that the US has as many stolen elections as any country and that our civil liberties have been eroded by “the war on terror” they lump me into the terrorist category. They automatically conflate factual truth with anti-Americanism.

The same mentality prevails with regard to domestic crime. Most Americans, including, unfortunately, juries, assume that if the police make a case against a person and a prosecutor prosecutes it, the defendant is guilty. Most Americans are incapable of believing that police or a prosecutor would frame an innocent person for career or bureaucratic reasons or out of pure meanness.

Yet, it happens all the time. Indeed, it is routine.

Frame-ups are so routine that 96 per cent of the criminally accused will not risk a “jury of their peers,” preferring to negotiate a plea bargain agreement with the prosecutor. The jury of their peers are a brainwashed lot, fearful of crime, which they have never experienced but hear about all the time. Criminals are everywhere, doing their evil deeds.

Lawrence Stratton and I describe frame-up techniques in The Tyranny of Good Intentions. Police and prosecutors even frame the guilty, as it is easier than convicting them on the evidence.

One case that has been before us for years, but is resolutely neglected by the corporate media, whose function is to scare the people, is that of Troy Davis.

Troy Davis was convicted of killing a police officer. The only evidence connecting him to the crime is the testimony of “witnesses,” the vast majority of whom have withdrawn their testimony. The witnesses say they testified falsely against Troy Davis because of police intimidation and coercion.

END OF EXCERPT

Taking that truth for basis, let's say we have a new prosecution of some other person and people who are critically good at observing others and being able to "read" well what's going on with them might be sitting in a court room where a person's accused like Troy Davis was, listens to the witnesses on the stand and observes them when they're not on the stand. He or she observes what he or she believes to be clues that there's something distressing some or all of the witnesses and in a way that they're nervous about their testimonies. From this, one might deduce there's definitely something questionable about the testimonies themselves and then moves to the expanded theory that the prosecution is corrupt.

He or she would certainly have cause for such concern. Is he or she to be forbidden under force of law from being able to be his or her talented human self? Absolutely NOT!