You have commented 358 times on Rantburg.

Your Name
Your e-mail (optional)
Website (optional)
My Original Nic        Pic-a-Nic        Sorry. Comments have been closed on this article.
Bold Italic Underline Strike Bullet Blockquote Small Big Link Squish Foto Photo
Submit your comments on this article
-Great Cultural Revolution
My Mother’s Secret
2024-02-28
A taste.
[TabletMag] My mother was a top Middle East analyst for the CIA. On her deathbed, she begged me not to raise my children Jewish. To find out why, I asked her former colleagues. I’m still reeling from their answers.

When I spoke to my mother’s former colleagues, I consistently encountered a tendency to attribute every event in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the conflict itself. It’s not that Palestinian textbooks have, since the 1990s, contained material that is “openly antisemitic and encourages violence, jihad and martyrdom,” or that “peace itself is not taught as preferable or even possible.” Nor is it, as a 2019 review discovered, the “complete removal of all pre-existing content discussing peace agreements, summits, negotiations, and proposals supporting a two-state solution, acknowledgment of historical Jewish presence in the land of Israel and labeling the name ‘Israel’ on a map” from those textbooks. To retired intelligence officers with long and distinguished careers, these facts are incidental. If children were actually set on fire on Oct. 7, that was a guerrilla tactic, not the result of a culture of murderous hatred. Some expressed these views with dispassion and others, with a disturbing degree of passion, but they all expressed them.
Posted by:trailing wife

#16  It's an anti religious ideology but not antisemitic."

No reason they can’t be anti-religious in general as well as ladle on an extra dose of Jew-hate.

a great miracle for the 3,000,000 Jews in the Soviet Union.

Nes gadol hayah sham. I keep forgetting about that one, Huputle Cherelet4131 — thank you for reminding me.
Posted by: trailing wife   2024-02-28 18:58  

#15  #13 My father, who lived through this, used to refer (only half-jocking) to St. Lavrentiy Beria.
Posted by: Grom the Reflective   2024-02-28 18:20  

#14  All that actually matters about marxism in particular and leftism in general is that it is at its foundation totalitarian and anti-individual.

Be anti-totalitarian. Celebrate individuality.
Posted by: M. Murcek   2024-02-28 17:35  

#13  Behind the Headlines: How Stalin’s Plan to Annihilate USSR Jews Was Thwarted
January 8, 1974
For centuries Jews throughout the world have been celebrating Purim as the day when the Jewish population in ancient Persia miraculously escaped a general massacre prepared for them by Haman, the grand vizier of the Persian King Ahasuerus. Purim became a day of merriment in Jewish history. The day of March 5–when Stalin died in 1953 from a stroke–should similarly be marked by Jews as a miraculous day to remember. His sudden death came as a great miracle for the 3,000,000 Jews in the Soviet Union. It thwarted his plans, scheduled to be started the next day, to annihilate the Jews in Russia through mass-pogroms and deportation of all surviving Jews to slave labor camps in remote Arctic regions to die there a slow and tortuous death. The signal to this brutal plan was to be given March 6 at the opening of the notorious “Doctors’ Trial” at which six prominent Jewish and three non-Jewish physicians were accused by Stalin falsely of having plotted to poison him and other Soviet leaders in the Kremlin. The trial was cancelled immediately upon Stalin’s death, the physicians were released and rehabilitated. Soviet Jews–who lived in mortal fear during weeks of intensified anti-Jewish propaganda in the Soviet press preparing the climate Stalin wanted for the trial–breathed freely.
Posted by: Huputle Cherelet4131   2024-02-28 17:34  

#12  #6 You say: "Marx, a plurality of the Bolshevik leadership..., in in 30's, 40's and 50's were jews. It's an anti religious ideology but not antisemitic." I think Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, scores of Russian Jewish doctors, and the large number of Jews who accompanied Lenin from exile on his train to Russia during WWI would disagree with you.
Posted by: Huputle Cherelet4131   2024-02-28 17:21  

#11  QFT: Every intelligence officer I spoke with performed this sleight of hand. Yes, antisemitism exists, and is serious—but only as a right-wing problem, and as a Western phenomenon. The Hamas-loving kids on American college campuses? Overblown, irrelevant. The Palestinian children being given military training by terrorists? Not the issue.
#Experts
Posted by: mossomo   2024-02-28 13:56  

#10  Neo's take on it
Posted by: Frank G   2024-02-28 06:45  

#9  Chinese immigrant running for Congress fears Marxism followed her to US, witnessing youth indoctrination
Posted by: Skidmark   2024-02-28 05:47  

#8  Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Posted by: DooDahMan   2024-02-28 04:44  

#7  ^So nice to hear from an intelligent, well informed person.
Posted by: Grom the Reflective   2024-02-28 04:38  

#6  Marxism is not an elaborate form of antisemitism. Marx, a plurality of the Bolshevik leadership, a significant number of American communists and communist spies in in 30's, 40's and 50's were jews. It's an anti religious ideology but not antisemitic
Posted by: Cromorong Slamble2634   2024-02-28 04:18  

#5  Never heard of Limpieza de sangre

My take was that it was Dad who was Jewish, not Mom, so quite possibly she did not know about Limoieza, nor think much about Nazi laws, considering the latter to be a special case not to be repeated.
Posted by: trailing wife   2024-02-28 02:28  

#4  CIA changed from being operationally driven to being driven by the analysts. Spies who cultivated terrorist assets no longer set the tone. The baton had passed to the wonks in Langley.

Returned to the above in a second reading.

"Cultivating" or recruiting foreign sources 'be hard' and very time consuming. Recruiting domestic political assets is much easier and safer.

Why serve the master when you can become the master. He did not graduate from St. Andrews, you did. The phenomena did not originate here, it was imported from perfidious Albion.

Posted by: Besoeker   2024-02-28 02:13  

#3  Never heard of Limpieza de sangre or Nazi Race laws, her mother?
Posted by: Grom the Reflective   2024-02-28 01:59  

#2  I thought so, Besoeker. I hope our Langley lurkers find it useful as well. It is as much for them as us that I posted this.
Posted by: trailing wife   2024-02-28 01:46  

#1  But why would these crazy ideas take hold in America? Because Marxism has slowly but surely crept inward from the far left in this country, most recently in the form of the social justice movement, and Marxism is an elaborate form of Jew-hatred.

Fascinating article and Brennan insights.
Posted by: Besoeker   2024-02-28 01:38  

00:00