The New Republic

Alexander Cockburn isn't a big fan of Israel. The Irish expat's

column for The Nation, "Beat the Devil," regularly trashes the

Zionist entity. Among his typical criticisms: Israel's American

supporters are "the spiritual soul-mates of those fanatical Cuban

exiles"; Ariel Sharon's "credentials as a war criminal are robust";the occupation of the Palestinians amounts to genocide. You'd have
to

read deep into the pages of The Final Call or Arabic-language papers

to find writers who can match Cockburn's level of anti-Israel

virulence.

But Cockburn's home, The Nation, has always considered itself a

bastion of cosmopolitanism. Even if it's not exactly the

Anti-Defamation League's house publication, it has long chastised

anti-Semites on the left--proponents of what it calls the "socialism

of fools." (In recent years, for example, it published an attack on

Louis Farrakhan and condemnations of ccny Professor Leonard

Jeffries.) And Cockburn has had his moments too. In the 1980s he

discovered that the conservative writer Joseph Sobran had a history

of publishing boorish pieces about Jews. A few years later he
trashed

Lech Walesa for indulging in crude stereotyping of Jews. "Vile

sentiments," he called them.

Anyone who visits Cockburn's left-wing newsletter, CounterPunch,

however, will learn that Cockburn isn't immune from spreading--if
not

quite explicitly endorsing--such vile sentiments himself. Take his

March 12 piece (partially reprinted in The Seattle Times) on the

newly released tapes of conversations between Richard Nixon and the

Reverend Billy Graham in which the good reverend gripes about Jewish

control of the media.

At first, Cockburn seems critical of Graham's sentiment, sneering

that it is prevalent at "75 percent of the country clubs in America,

not to mention many a Baptist soiree." But just sentences later,

Cockburn seems to affirm the view himself:

It's supposedly the third rail in journalism even to have a

discussion of how much the Jews do control the media. Since three of

the prime founders of Hollywood, were Polish Jews who grew up within

fifty miles of each other in Galicia, it's reckoned as not so
utterly

beyond the bounds of propriety to talk about Jewish power in

Hollywood, though people still stir uneasily. The economic and

political commentator Jude Wanniski remarked last week in his web

newsletter that even if the Jews don't control the media overall, it

is certainly true to say that they control discussion of Israel in

the media here.

Cockburn follows with this:

Certainly, there are a number of stories sloshing around the news
now

that have raised discussions of Israel and of the posture of
American

Jews to an acrid level. The purveyor of anthrax may have been a

former government scientist, Jewish, with a record of baiting a

colleague of Arab origins, and with the intent to blame the anthrax

on Muslim terrorists. Rocketing around the web and spilling into the

press are many stories about Israeli spies in America at the time of

9/11. On various accounts, they were trailing [Mohammed] Atta and
his

associates, knew what was going to happen but did nothing about it,

or were simply spying on US facilities. Some, posing as art students

have been expelled, according to AP.

To be fair, Cockburn doesn't exactly endorse these theories. Rather,

by noting that all of these Jewish conspiracy stories are "sloshing

around the news," Cockburn seems merely to be pointing out that,
hey,

anti-Semitic ideas are still out there today--so why the shock that

Graham endorsed them 30 years ago? Indeed, when I reached Cockburn
to

ask him about these conspiracies, he insisted he was just reporting

what was already in circulation. "I don't think I said they are
true.

I don't know there's enough exterior evidence to determine whether

they are true or not."

But, of course, that last sentence is the giveaway. There most

certainly is enough exterior evidence to determine whether the

stories are true or not. The answer is that they are not. They are

wild rumors circulating, if at all, in some of the least credible

corners of the Internet. No respectable media outlet has given these

stories credence. Merely by stating that these ideas are in

circulation, merely by saying it's impossible to judge their

veracity, Cockburn confers these ideas with legitimacy.

Consider, for example, the story about the mad Jew scientists out to

ruin the Muslims. I searched for it on the Lexis-Nexis news database

but came up with nothing--not one single mention of the story in a

mainstream news outlet. And I only found it on the Web at an
obscure,

far-far left site that refers to the United States as "gringoland"

and accuses Daniel Pearl of working for Mossad. (Note the similarity

of the Jewish anthrax rumor to the Nation of Islam creation myth

about the wicked chemist Yacub.)

Then there's Cockburn's talk about Mossad's complicity in 9/11. Of

course, this version of events can also be found in the

self-exculpatory pages of the Arab press. But to my knowledge,

Cockburn is the only prominent Western journalist to give these

slanderous stories any credence.

And what about the Associated Press (AP) story he cites? It quotes

from a 61-page Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) report

suggesting the Israeli art students' travels through the United

States "may well be an organized intelligence-gathering." But the AP

also quotes the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as saying "the

bureau also has investigated and is satisfied that the young people

were not involved in espionage or intelligence gathering." The FBI

insists that the Israelis were deported merely for selling

over-priced paintings door-to-door in violation of their visas. And

even if you accepted the DEA's vague intimations of espionage,

there's nothing to suggest the Israeli connection to 9/11 that

Cockburn posits. The linkage is the product of Cockburn's
imagination.

Cockburn's column goes way beyond legitimate criticism of Israel.

It's akin to the rantings of pitchfork Pat Buchanan, whose

anti-Semitism The Nation has condemned. So you would expect the

magazine to take a tough stance on the anti-Semitism in its own

backyard. But when I asked The Nation's editor, Katrina vanden

Heuvel, about Cockburn, she could only lamely distance herself from

the piece: "This didn't appear in The Nation. I don't read

CounterPunch.... It's been our experience that we've had differences

with our writers. It's a strength of the magazine that it

accommodates a range of perspectives." True enough. But there are

some perspectives that shouldn't be accommodated.

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