For at least 38 years the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan has been calling for dialogue with the ADL and the leadership of the Jewish community to address the issues that divide the Black and Jewish communities. After rejecting the offer from America’s premier Black leader to sit down and find viable solutions to this centuries-old problem, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League began a media blitz, a public relations campaign to distort history and avoid the opportunity to intelligently address the root of the problem that has caused such consternation between the Black and Jewish communities.
After the embarrassing exposure of the ADL’s lies from documentaries, books, radio and television programs, Mr. Greenblatt now claims there is an “uptick” in anti-Semitism in America, and he is on a national tour trying to do damage control on events that can no longer be swept under the carpet.
Greenblatt recently appeared on the popular Breakfast Club show and boldly stated that his method of dealing with the issue of anti-Semitism is to “call people in before he calls them out.” Nowhere in his more than one hour presentation did he mention that he has sought to call The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam “in” to respond to the 38 years-long effort to address the problems and resolve the issues facing Blacks and Jews in America. So that false statement helped set the tone that characterized the disingenuous presentation he made to the audience of millions.
Mr. Greenblatt is engaging in a propaganda campaign designed to downplay the negative publicity generated by the documentary “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America,” a movie that’s attracting a worldwide audience and exposing the fact that the white-skinned Ashkenazi Jews are not the Original Hebrew Israelites of the Bible but are instead pagan tribesmen who originally lived in the Caucasus mountains but converted to Judaism in the 12th century.
›Greenblatt recognizes that if the public accepts the proposition that those Whites who now claim to be Jews are not the descendants of Abraham, then their claim to be the “Chosen People,” the rightful owners of the “Promised Land” and the “Children of Israel” would be exposed as having been created out of whole cloth, an utter fabrication. The acceptance of such an interpretation threatens to expose their well-crafted image to have been built on deceptions, obfuscation and lies. Therefore, the stakes for Greenblatt and the ADL, and the broader Jewish community could not have been higher.
To address the growing distrust such exposure would render, a major campaign to use Black sports figures, rappers, entertainers, religious leaders, etc. as scapegoats and enemies of the “innocent” and “defenseless” Jewish people who suffered from the holocaust, is now in full bloom.
And this is why Jonathan Greenblatt chose one of the most popular Black radio talk shows in America to push his propaganda campaign.
Why the Breakfast Club?
He chose the Breakfast Club because it is in 90 radio markets, and, according to Nielson data, has an audience of eight million monthly listeners in the 18-34 age group. Its YouTube channel has nearly five million subscribers. In addition to a friendly audience, combined with hosts that were not prepared to ask hard historical questions, Greenblatt could mislead his audience without being challenged.
What did Greenblatt say?
The following are some of the key points he made and our response to each point.
• “After the Jews were expelled from Jerusalem by the Romans and torn from their land and they lived in diaspora as a small community in Europe, in the Middle East, in parts of Asia, and the Jews continued speaking Hebrew they didn’t assimilate into the mainstream population, they continued their own religion, they didn’t adopt Christianity or Islam.”
On this issue Mr. Greenblatt is grossly mistaken. The fourth-century Greek historian of Christianity, Eusebius of Caesara, makes no mention of a mass exile in his classic “Ecclesiastical History.” Surely such a momentous event would have been a major point of discussion for such a prominent Greek historian.
A.G. Horton, author of “East and West: A History of Canaan and the Land of the Hebrews” states emphatically that, “There is no truth to the claim that the ‘exile’ occurred mainly after the destruction, when Titus and Hadrian (Roman emperors) supposedly expelled the ‘Jews’ from Palestine. This idea, based on historical ignorance, derives from a hostile fabrication by the fathers of the Christian church, who wanted to show that God punished the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus.”
Even David Ben-Gurion, one of the founders of the State of Israel and the country’s first prime minister would disagree with the CEO of the ADL. In “Eretz Israel in the Past and in the Present,” Ben-Gurion acknowledges that the Muslims did not expel the Jews after they defeated the Christian Byzantines in Palestine in 636 CE. He writes, “The fellahin (direct descendants of the Jewish and Canaanite rural population) are not descendants of the Arab conquerors, who captured Eretz Israel and Syria in the seventh century CE.
The Arab victors did not destroy the agricultural population they found in the country.” Therefore, according to Ben-Gurion, Greenblatt was ignorant of the true historical experiences of the Jews in Israel and allegations of them being oppressed by the Muslim conquerors of Palestine after they expelled the Byzantine Christians is fake history.
• Greenblatt made the unfounded claim that the Jews did not proselytize seeking converts to Judaism, nor did they themselves convert to other religions, mainly Christianity or Islam. That assertion flies in the face of historical and biblical reality. In the Book of Ester (8:17) we find “And many of the people in the land became Jews; for fear of the Jews fell upon them.” Therefore, around the fifth century CE in Persia, out of fear, the local inhabitants were forcibly converted to Judaism.
Shlomo Sand, author of “The Invention of the Jewish People” and Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University, quotes from the 1965 doctoral thesis of Uriel Rapaport (p.154) who became a well-known historian of the Second Temple period, “given its great scale, the expansion of Judaism in the ancient world cannot be accounted for by natural increase, by migration from the homeland, or any other explanation that does not include others joining it.”
Speaking of Rapaport, Sand adds, “As he saw it, the reason for the great Jewish increase was mass conversion. The process was driven by a policy of proselytizing and dynamic religious propaganda, which achieved decisive results amid a weakening of the pagan worldview,” (p. 154). Theodore Mommsen in Romische Geschichte, adds, “Ancient Judaism was not exclusive at all; it was, rather, as keen to propagate itself as Christianity and Islam would be in the future.”
• Further, Greenblatt’s contention that the Jewish people “didn’t adopt Christianity or Islam” is also an untrue statement, and history is not on his side. In Medieval Spain during the period known as the Reconquista (reconquest of Spain in 1492) the Jews who converted to Christianity were known as Conversos, they were also known as crypto-Jews. One of the most famous Converso was Bartolome de Las Casas.
De Las Casas became famous because he appealed to the Pope to ease the burden of slavery on the Native Americans, who were dying in extraordinarily high numbers. His solution was to advocate for the importation of African slaves instead. Unknown to many was the fact that Jews in Arabia converted to Islam under Prophet Muhammad and helped to spread the new religion among their former coreligionists. The reader can learn more about the famous Jewish followers of Prophet Muhammad at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category: Converts_to_Islam_from_Judaism
• Also, unless we forget, one of the wives of the Prophet was a Jewess, Rayhana bint Zayd.
• Greenblatt falsely claimed that Israel does not control Congress. On this issue he is contravened by Ariel Sharon, Israel’s former Prime Minister and Defense Minister. On October 3, 2001, according to Kol Yisrael radio, Sharon said to Shimon Peres (Israel’s eighth prime minister) “Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and do that. … I want to tell you something very clear: Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.”
• Greenblatt said he is an observant Jew who goes to synagogue every Saturday. However, based on an August 20, 2012 Gallop Poll, the majority of Jews are not religious, and many are atheists. According to Haaretz Jewish World, “New Poll Shows Atheism on Rise, With Jews the Least Religious.” The same poll showed that 74 percent of Muslims consider themselves religious. The Palestinians, therefore, who are overwhelmingly religious, are ruled over by a people who are non-religious and have a growing disbelief in God.
• Finally, Mr. Greenblatt said, “Jewish people are the most victimized religious minority in the country.” Notice he never said the Jews are among the most privileged and wealthy people in America. But, let’s ask Mr. Greenblatt the following questions. A) Do Jews face unemployment discrimination? B) Do Jews face being victimized for driving while being Jewish?
C) Do Jews face banking redlining, particularly when they control most of the banking systems? D) Do Jews face housing discrimination? E) Do Jewish athletes have to go to “sensitivity training” to learn how to be more sensitive to Black people because they lack a knowledge of the plight of Black people in America? F) Do Jews have to live paycheck to paycheck even after working two-three jobs?
To say that Greenblatt’s performance on the Breakfast Club was insulting, self-serving and duplicitous is an understatement. The question is what are we going to do about it?
Brother Jackie Muhammad is a member of the Nation of Islam Research Group.
›