America Has Become Hostage to the Jews, as Benjamin Franklin PredictedIn an article in the Kuwaiti daily Al-Siyassa titled 'Satanic Spirits and American Documents,' Muhammad Yousef Al-Malifi recently cited the "Franklin Prophecy." This follows a November 2004 interview with Lebanese journalist Arafat Nizam Al-Din on Hizbullah's Al-Manar TV, recorded and translated by the MEMRI TV Project, in which he also claimed that Benjamin Franklin, as well as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, warned Americans against allowing Jews into the country.
The Franklin speech is a well-known Nazi propaganda forgery, which first appeared in the 1935 edition of the German antisemitic book 'A Handbook on the Jewish Question' and which has at times resurfaced in the Arab press. The forgery claims that during a speech at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1789 ( sic ; the actual date of the convention was 1787), Benjamin Franklin warned that unless the Jews were expelled from the fledgling nation by constitutional decree they would immigrate in great numbers, enslave the Christian population, and control the economy. There are several variations upon the story: sometimes Franklin is mistakenly referred to as the U.S. president, and sometimes he is said to have made the statements during a recess, and not as a speech. In addition, the forgery is sometimes attributed to Thomas Jefferson.