Monday, February 20, 2012

Why Are These Jewish Foundations Funding Antisemitism?

Yid With Lid

What do Barbara Streisand, Pritzker Family, Jewish Communal Fund and the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston have in common? Along with other Jewish related charitable foundations they are all helping to fund the Antisemitism of Media Matters for America (MMFA).

The Daily Caller recently published internal MMFA documents exposing the group’s coordination with the White House and liberal media outlets such as MSNBC and Politico to control the story line American’s see every day as news. Founded by [David] Brock in 2004 as a liberal counterweight to “conservative misinformation” in the press, Media Matters has in less than a decade become a powerful player in Democratic politics. The group operates in regular coordination with the highest levels of the Obama White House, as well as with members of Congress and progressive groups around the country. Brock, who collected over $250,000 in salary from Media Matters in 2010, has himself become a major fundraiser on the left. According to an internal memo obtained by TheDC, Media Matters intends to spend nearly $20 million in 2012 to influence news coverage.
Donors have every reason to expect success, as the group’s effect on many news organizations has already been profound. “We were pretty much writing their prime time,” a former Media Matters employee said of the cable channel MSNBC. “But then virtually all the mainstream media was using our stuff.”

One surprising element of the Daily Caller report was the list of foundations helping to fund Media Matters. Closer examinations of the list the Daily Caller list reveals a number of foundations with Jewish goals, who donate to Jewish causes or had Jewish founders, who help fund the Anti-Semitic Media Matters.


Donation

Jewish Foundation Donors To MMFA
$2,225,000

Stephen M Silberstein Foundation
$400,000

Pritzker Family Foundation
$400,000

Sandler Foundation
$362,500

Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, Inc.
$275,000

Bernard & Audre Rapoport Foundation
$250,000

Joseph H and Barbara I Ellis Foundation
$150,000

Community Foundation of the United Jewish Federation of San Diego
$85,000

Barbra Streisand Foundation
$55,000

Lear Family Foundation
$50,000

Rebecca and Nathan Milikowsky Family Foundation
$50,000

Scott A. Nathan Charitable Trust
$43,500

Jewish Communal Fund
$35,000

Beatrice Snyder Foundation
$35,000

Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland
$30,000

Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund
$25,000

Leonard and Sophie Davis Fund
$20,000

Peter and Linda Solomon Foundation
$12,500

Engelberg Foundation
$5,180

Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties
$5,000

Glickenhaus Foundation
$5,000

Joseph & Florence Mandel Foundation


The MMFA attacks on American Jews are led by M.J. Rosenberg the former AIPAC employee, who served as editor of the Near East report but was forced out because AIPAC wanted the magazine to be more clearly aligned to their pro-Israel agenda.
Even before he was hired by Media Matters to blunt criticism of Obama’s Israel policies, Rosenberg regularly questioned the patriotism of American Jews who support Israel (calling them Israel firsters), claimed those same Jews (he calls them the Israel lobby) controls the media and America’s foreign policy.
Many Conservative bloggers including myself have been pointing out Rosenberg’s Antisemitism for years. But his constant attacks on the Jewish people did not receive attention from the mainstream media until December when Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center fought back. Rabbi Cooper spoke out against the Antisemitism of MMFA and that of Center for American Progress (run by Obama buddy John Podesta) who helped to form MMFA.

"Unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly difficult in this country to take a position sympathetic to the Jewish state and in favor of the continuation of America’s historic strong alliance with Israel without being called “an Israel Firster” and charged with “dual loyalties.…. CAP blogger Eli Clifton joined Media Matters Senior Foreign Policy Fellow MJ Rosenberg in using Twitter to promote an article accusing the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance of pushing “Western groupthink that has for centuries justified wars and countless atrocities against the Arab world . . .[that’s] representative of the way many Americans feel toward Muslims and Arabs — that they are all terrorists.” Rosenberg himself has repeatedly smeared Jewish groups such the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as “Israel Firsters.”

Not many people were surprised when the Simon Wiesenthal Center denounced the use of the dual loyalty term, but when the very progressive magazine, The Tablet condemned CAP and MMFA for its use, eyebrows were raised.

The root of this problem is not a twenty-something blogger writing something stupid on the Internet. Rather, it is that anti-Semitic rhetoric and logic are being protected and justified by those who are supposed to be gatekeepers. These people, often in the service of their larger political aims, are willing to apologize for or ignore what is obviously Jew-baiting and Jew-hatred.....This isn’t how the world works. Americans’ sensitivity to racist language directed at African-Americans has not made Americans insensitive to “real” anti-black racism. Rather it has made us scrupulous about our language, and subsequently our beliefs and practices have come to reflect, if not wholly fulfill, the promises embodied in this country’s founding documents.

What makes people insensitive to racism is when American political and intellectual elites refuse to confront racist language. The use of phrases like “Israel Firster” and “dual loyalist” that are based on anti-Semitic tropes is anti-Semitic. So is the belief that Jews fan the flames of hatred for discussing the opinions of those who hate them
Sometimes Jews tend to be our own worst enemies. As Ze'ev Jabotinsky said Jews shut their eyes to one of the most elementary rules of life, that you must not "meet halfway" those who do not want to meet you.

Media Matters for America didn’t just start spreading anti-Semitic stereotypes and neither is it a new exercise for their hired hit-man M.J. Rosenberg. It is incredible that some Jewish foundations care so desperately about pushing the liberal agenda, that they don’t bother (or don’t care) to understand that those same liberal organizations are pushing an anti-Semitic agenda.

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