Jew York Times still kvetching about The Protocols
When talk turns to worldwide conspiracies, the long shadow of the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” purportedly a blueprint for Jewish world domination, can never be far away.
On Oct. 13, Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, said his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers.”
In The New York Times, Jonathan Martin said Mr. Trump veered “dangerously close to the territory of ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ ”
The “Protocols” holds a tenacious grip on the popular conspiratorial imagination.
But The Times has never portrayed it as anything other than a fraudulent work of anti-Semitic propaganda. (Though that fact might only further persuade believers of the document’s authenticity. After all, “Protocol No. XII” says a Jewish-controlled press will subjugate Gentiles’ minds “to such an extent that almost all of them see world events through colored glasses which we put over their eyes.”)
Having originated in czarist Russia, the “Protocols” gained wide currency in America in 1920. It was published as “The Protocols and World Revolution” by Small, Maynard & Company of Boston. Also, the anti-Semitic Dearborn Independent, a weekly newspaper in Michigan owned by Henry Ford, introduced its readers to the “Protocols” as part of its “International Jew” series.
The first big article about the “Protocols” in The Times, on Dec. 1, 1920, carried news that it had been denounced by a conference of leading Jewish organizations as a “base forgery” and as a “recrudescence of medieval bigotry and stupidity.”
Mr. Ford, the conference resolved, was a publisher of “puerile and venomous drivel.” And a “dupe.” (He eventually retracted the anti-Semitic articles, but it took him seven years.)
Editorially, The Times added its voice to the “Protocols” pile-on, calling it “about the strangest jumble of crazy ideas that ever found its way into print.”
“Outside of his business affairs,” the editorial added, “Mr. Ford is now nowhere seriously considered except as a cause of merriment.”
The American Jewish Committee organized the conference. A leading member, Cyrus L. Sulzberger, was the father of Arthur Hays Sulzberger and the father-in-law of Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, whose own father, Adolph S. Ochs, published The Times. Did this connection help ensure that the conference would get a generous half-page of coverage? Probably. But Mr. Sulzberger’s participation was made clear to readers. Hardly the stuff of secret conspiracy.
Nine months later came a definitive scholarly debunking of the “Protocols.” Philip Graves, a correspondent of The Times of London, exposed it as having largely been plagiarized from an 1864 book attacking the regime of Emperor Napoleon III of France. The original book took the form of an imagined dialogue between the philosophers Machiavelli and Montesquieu.
The New York Times devoted an entire page to the Graves exposé on the cover of its Special Features section of Sept. 4, 1921. “Proof That the ‘Jewish Protocols’ Were Forged,” the banner headline declared.
Not everyone has accepted the proof, however, even today. So there is still currency to the words of former President William Howard Taft, a Republican, who attacked the “Protocols” in 1920.
“One of the chief causes of suffering and evil in the world today is race hatred, and any man who stimulates that hatred has much to answer for,” Mr. Taft was quoted as saying in The Times. “When he does this by the circulation of unfounded and unjust charges and the arousing of mean and groundless fears, his fault is more to be condemned.”
Daily reminder to read and study The Protocols of Zion – no document scares the traditional enemy more
