Toronto Raptors’ Trip to Israel

Unz Review – by Kevin Barrett

I recently received an email from Code Pink:

“Winning the NBA finals is a great achievement, but Raptors billionaire co-owner Larry Tennenbaum—an unapologetic Israel supporter—wants to reward them with a propaganda trip to Israel. Help us appeal to the Raptors to reject their coach’s offer: Tell them to dunk the ball for Palestinian rights by refusing to travel to Israel.”  

“Dunk the ball for Palestinian rights?” That is not exactly the world’s catchiest protest chant. No rhyme or alliteration, the meter doesn’t scan, and the image that comes to mind is…what, exactly? Kawhi Leonard stealing Larry Tennenbaum’s head right off his neck and slamming it through the hoop?

Regardless, the well-meaning lefties at Code Pink have their hearts in the right place. Like most well-meaning lefties these days, they feel bad about Israeli atrocities. Unlike most well-meaning lefties, they are trying to do something about them. And unlike just about everybody else in America, they have the guts to get loud and visible, risking arrest or worse. (I will never forget hearing about Medea Benjamin getting her arm broken by al-Sisi’s thugs.)

But Code Pink’s courage does not extend to telling the truth about Jewish power and its most egregious abuses and vulnerabilities. Medea Benjamin must know that 9/11 was a false flag operation—she essentially admitted her suspicions to me, and cheered on my 9/11 activism, during her 2007 interview on my Truth Jihad Radio show. Yet during a 2014 New Horizon Conference in Iran, she and Gareth Porter loudly complained about the Conference’s focus on 9/11 “conspiracy theories” and other forms of “anti-Semitism.” While everyone else at the conference accepted that 9/11 was a Zionist-driven false flag (the show of hands was unanimous except for Benjamin and Porter), the two holdouts raised a stink with the Conference organizers about supposed anti-Jewish sentiment at the event. The two were particularly appalled by a couple of attendees representing the the European New Right, who espoused Holocaust revisionism and ferociously condemned what they saw as grossly disproportionate Jewish power dominating the West.

Which brings us to Gilad Atzmon’s million-dollar question: Why can’t we talk about Jewish power? Some say Jewish power is the elephant in the living room: It is so overwhelmingly huge and obvious that we just don’t notice it. But why don’t we notice it? And why are we met with embarrassed cringes when we mention it? Could it be that the elephant in the living room is standing on its hind legs and displaying a massively oversized sex organ?

In our current cultural living room, Jewish power is a kind of obscenity: It performs unspeakably blasphemous and perverted acts—shooting Palestinian children for sport, putting targets on the bellies of pregnant Palestinian mothers in order to kill the “little snakes” as well as their moms, killing the Kennedies, blowing up the World Trade Center in broad daylight, and so on—and then uses its monopoly on mainstream media to gaslight us and tell us that such things cannot possibly exist. (I analyzed this obscene, “unspeakable” dimension of 9/11 in a 2007 essay.)

When I try to talk about these matters with well-meaning liberal Jews like Medea Benjamin or Rabbi Michael Lerner, I run into a brick wall of denial. Rabbi Lerner seems to think that Jewish power in America is roughly proportional to Jewish demographic status as 1.5% of the population:

Barrett: Is there an American politician who could do that, though, given the ever increasing power of the ever more radical Zionist lobby here in the US? …

Lerner: Well, I think you’re mistaken about the causation. The American Jews represent about 1.5% of the population of the United States. The major force that supports the Republican Party and pushes also forces in the Democratic Party are the Christian fundamentalists. They are at least some place between 30 and 40 million, essentially about 5 or 6 times as many of them as there are Jews…. I think it’s a mistake to exaggerate Jewish power. The United States would be taking the same stance if Israel had no Jews in it, if Israel was simply another country that was willing to play ball with the United States…

Lerner’s seeming obliviousness to the reality of Jewish power in America, and the monstrous crimes it has enabled, is not unlike the reaction of a deep-in-denial child or spouse of an extreme abuser or serial killer. Good-hearted Jews like Rabbi Lerner just can’t face the that their community is (a) obscenely disproportionate in its power, and (b) complicit in the obscene crimes of the worst, dominant element of its leadership.

Rabbi Lerner’s assertion that the (organized) Jewish community’s power in America is proportional to its numbers, and has nothing to do with US support for Israel, is absurdly, laughably false. Yet ask average Americans “is Jewish power in America disproportionate, and if so, how disproportionate?” and you’ll probably get a lot of blank, embarrassed stares. We have been trained by the Jewish-dominated mainstream media to imagine that the only people who ask such questions are paranoid Nazi nutcases who fantasize about Jews secretly running the world from Elders of Zion headquarters beneath the South Pole, no doubt in cahoots with a still-living Elvis.

So let’s leave the “how disproportionate is Jewish power” question aside for a moment, and ask a parallel question: “Are African-Americans dominant, i.e. disproportionately represented, in professional basketball?” The answer, as we all know, is “yes.” How disproportionate are they? Rather than bothering to confirm with redundant research what we all know thanks to our own eyes, I confidently opine that the average pro basketball game features ten players, roughly eight of whom appear to be African-Americans. So African-Americans, who make up about 12% of the US population, constitute about 80% of NBA players. In other words, there are between six and seven times as many black NBA players as there would be if their presence was proportional to the black population. That’s a 600% to 700% overrepresentation. One could summarize this all-too-obvious reality by saying that “black people are massivelyoverrepresented on the pro basketball court. They dominate!”

So how about NBA owners? One list claims that 17 out of 39 NBA owners (43.6%) are Jewish. The same list erroneously states that Jews constitute 3% of the population; the reality is less than 1.5%. It seems that Jews are overrepresented in NBA ownership positions by a factor of 2900%—four times more overrepresentation than black players enjoy on the pro basketball court! So if we say that blacks are massively overrepresented and dominate the NBA courts, what words could possibly describe the overrepresentation of Jews as NBA owners?!

If you’re a Code Pink supporting liberal, it’s OK to protest Larry Tennenbaum dragging his basketball team to Israel to “sportswash” Zionist crimes. But it’s not OK to remark upon the fact that “Tennenbaum” is an obviously Jewish name. It’s even less OK to point out that Jews are absurdly overrepresented in NBA ownership positions. And it is the penultimate in non-OK-ness to point out that this is because Jews are similarly overrepresented among American billionaires, millionaires, people who make at least $100k per year—you name the metric of wealth, Jews pretty much own it. Finally, if you want to really make yourself unpopular by uttering the worst possible obscenity, just point out that this extreme overrepresentation of Jewish wealth, along with even more extreme and disproportionate Jewish dominance of mainstream media, is OBVIOUSLY (sorry Rabbi Lerner) the main reason the US has been bled by the state of Israel to the tune of trillions of dollars while squandering its power, reputation, and freedoms in an endless series of Middle Eastern wars.

Former ADL chief Abe Foxman, upon reading the above words, will no doubt be thrashing around in his plush retirement home bed with rage, screaming: “THE ‘RICH JEW’ IS A PERNICIOUS ANTI-SEMITIC TROPE!” More honest Jewish Americans, like the irrepressible Joel Stein, might reply that like Ilhan Omar’s “anti-Semitic tropes,” this one happens to be true. Joel might even wisecrack that he doesn’t care if Americans think Jews are obscenely rich and powerful, he just wants to keep them that way.

The Jewish community reacted to Stein’s legendary article “Who Runs Hollywood? C’mon!” in much the same way a classroom full of fourth graders might react to an especially loud and stinky fart: Half turned away and held their nose, while the other half giggled. There could be no better illustration of the parallel between the way people naturally react to obscenity, and typical polite middle class liberal reactions to the mention of Jewish power.

http://www.unz.com/kbarrett/toronto-raptors-trip-to-israel/