How to Smear Your Critics (And Not Get Away with It) – The Radical Liberals of Counterpunch Hunt ‘Red-Brown’ Heretics – by C.J. Hopkins • 29 Sept 2018

Posted on October 1, 2018 by xenagoguevicene

The life of a professional political satirist is many things, but it is certainly never boring. Last week, for example, was particularly not boring. OK, I wasn’t called before a Senate committee to testify against a rapey nominee to the highest court in the United States, or smeared by the right-wing media for doing so, nothing that dramatic or consequential. No, while most Americans were parsing every “he said” and “she said” of the Kavanaugh hearings, I was embroiled in my own little sordid drama involving “going public,” and smears, and my colleagues attempting to assassinate my character, and so on.

(C. J. Hopkins)

What happened was, I got the kiss-off from CounterPunch (where I had been a contributor for over two years) by CounterPunch’s Red-Brown Putin-Nazi hunting squad. That, or the editors just overlooked my submissions, or they decided not to run them, or they were going to run them, after having overlooked them, but then decided not to run them, because I’d already run them, after they didn’t run them … or something. I can’t keep all their stories straight.

This kiss-off (or confusion, depending on who you believe) happened after I submitted a piece, Putin-Nazi Paranoia, responding to a featured essay in CounterPunch smearing a number of leftist writers (and me by extension) as “far-right shills.” Smearing leftist writers they do not approve of has become a standard feature of CounterPunch. As far as I recall, it began in earnest in the Summer of 2017, when they accused Caitlin Johnstone of Red-Brown activities, i.e, promoting an unholy union of ultra-far-right and ultra-far-left movements (or “neo-Strasserism,” for you Putin-Nazi scholars).

This was a extremely ignominious episode, as Johnstone documented at the time, and followed up on about a year later. Featured essays in CounterPunch by Yoav Litvin and CounterPunch editors Joshua Frank and Jeffrey St. Clair either openly claimed or insinuated that Johnstone was a Red-Brown infiltrator who was calling for an alliance with white supremacists, which, of course, was a load of paranoid nonsense. Diana Johnstone (no relation to Caitlin) also covered this brouhaha in her essay about the CounterPunch Red-Brown hunter squad (which, in addition to Litvin, St. Clair, and Frank, include other characters like Anthony DiMaggio, author of the above-mentioned “far right shill” piece, Eric Draitser, the official team cheerleader, and Alexander Reid Ross, who is a bull goose loony. Sadly, Diana left out Louis Proyect, the notorious “unrepentant Marxist” creep, who, although not technically a CounterPunch editor, appears to have quite a lot of influence at the magazine … I have never really understood why that is.

In any event, after I announced that CounterPunch had stopped running my pieces, and asked for help spreading them around on the Internet, they promptly began smearing me as an anti-Semite (or continued smearing me as an anti-Semite, because Louis Proyect had already been trying his best to smear me as an anti-Semite). They base their smears on the fact that my essays have been re-posted by The Unz Review, which the CounterPunch Red-Brown hunting squad have become increasingly obsessed with lately. (For the record, my essays have also been re-posted by outlets like ColdType, The Greanville Post, OffGuardian, Entelekheia, Le Grand Soir, ZeroHedge, Dissident Voice, Black Agenda Report, and other such outlets, and people’s personal blogs. 

I do not work for any of these outlets. 

They have simply been kind enough to re-post my essays, each of which originally appeared in CounterPunch, until the last two essays in question. Weirdly, the CounterPunch editors do not appear to be concerned about these other outlets, nor even, consistently, about The Unz Review, as they just featured this essay by Michael Hudson, which had been featured two days earlier by The Unz Review, where Hudson is listed as a columnist.)

But I’m not going to defend The Unz Review, or Michael Hudson, or any of the many other writers, whether left or right, that are posted, or re-posted, on that site. Nor am I going to defend myself against the smears leveled at me by the CounterPunch editors. Why, you probably want to know, am I not going to do that?

OK, I’ll tell you.

Because that is precisely how the smear game works. The way it works is, the smearers bait the smearee into defending himself against the defamatory content of the smears. Once the smearee has done that, the smearers have him. From then on, the focus of the debate becomes whether or not the smears are accurate, rather than why he’s being smeared, how he’s being smeared, and who is smearing him. This is the smearers’ primary objective, i.e., to establish the boundaries of the debate, and to trap the target of the smears within them. If you’ve followed the fake “Labour Anti-Semitism” scandal, you’ve witnessed this tactic deployed against Corbyn, who unfortunately fell right into the trap and gave the smearers the upper hand. No, the only way to effectively counter a smear campaign (whether large-scale or small-scale), is to resist the temptation to profess your innocence, and, instead, focus as much attention on the tactics and the motives of the smearers as possible. It is difficult to resist this temptation, especially when the people smearing you have significantly more power and influence than you do, and are calling you a racist and an anti-Semite, but, trust me, the moment you start defending yourself, the game is over, and the smearers have won.

With that in mind, and for those readers who are tempted to just take the word of an established leftist magazine like CounterPunch over that of minor author who they may not have ever even heard of, I am posting the following email exchange between Jeffrey St. Clair, Joshua Frank, and myself (and a journalist and a colleague, whose names I’ve redacted, who wrote to St. Clair for clarification after reading conflicting reports on the Internet), for the purposes of criticism and review. CounterPunch readers, my readers, and others who swim these rather rarefied waters can judge the facts, and the quality of everyone’s character (and our motives) for themselves.

I hope that readers will also take the time to peruse the links I’ve provided for reference, in particular my collegial exchange with Joshua Frank and Louis Proyect on the Facebook, and Diana Johnstone’s Consortium News piece. Smearing one’s critics is an ugly business, but it’s a widespread and often very effective business. It is not going out of style anytime soon. So it’s essential to understand how it works, and to maintain an attitude of healthy skepticism toward anything defamatory you hear about anyone … and to know how to respond if it happens to you.

Oh, and please feel free to share, tweet, re-post, re-blog, or otherwise disseminate this essay, regardless of your politics.

***

The following email exchanges took place on September 21, and 24 and 25, 2018. The emphasis (underlined) is mine. Otherwise, they are reproduced verbatim.

1.

Colleague: [sends St. Clair an image of my tweet to ask, “what’s going on?”]

Jeffrey St Clair: No idea. We didn’t stop running him. We missed one column, because I’d been out for most of the week attending to the new grandkid. God forbid, I take a week off in 5 years before some shithead begins slandering me online. In any event, he does publish his stuff on a site which just try to claim Alex as a “Holocaust denier,” so it’s not as if he’s going without an audience.

2.

Journalist: Has [CJ] really been kicked off CP? That’s what he seems to be saying.

Jeffrey St Clair: No. I know that’s what he’s saying, but it’s a lie and he knows it’s a lie. I told him as much and I had his piece for last week edited, loaded and scheduled to run when someone sent me his drama queen tweet. We didn’t publish a single piece, out of the dozens we’ve published, because it slipped past me while I was trying to take a little time off to enjoy the arrival of our first grandkid. It’s a simple as that.

John Ross used to get royally pissed at me for sometimes delaying running his pieces. He’d call Saul Landau from Mexico City and gripe and send me furious emails. But Ross never went public libeling CP editors for having overlooked one his essays. He’d never even consider it. But that’s because Ross was a real journalist, who’d been in the trenches for decades as Alex and I had, and was also on our side politically. The old notions of solidarity are, of course, withering away, while the state remains.

Alex used to say that we should reject every fourth or fifth submission from a writer just to keep them in their toes. I’ve never taken that position. It was an indulgence on my part to run Hopkins at all, since we’d had a fairly iron-clad rule against running satire since it always confuses the credulous readers of the site.

Even so, I think Hopkins’ public assault on us reveals something rather acidic about his character, almost as much as his preference to have his columns published by Ron Unz, the guy who funded the anti-immigrant and English-only ballot initiatives in California and who lately libeled Alex as a Holocaust denier–though, the coward that he is, Unz waited five years after Alex was in the ground to do so.

I don’t know what Hopkins’ real politics are and I don’t want to speculate. But I do know Unz’s politics and the circle that has coalesced around him, like Israel Shamir who publicly denounced me a couple of weeks ago for caring “more about blacks and Jews than white Christians.” I’ll cop to that smear, but not to CJ’s.

(Alex Cockburn and Jeffrey St Claire – 2000 )

CJ Hopkins: Hi [REDACTED], and Jeff. [REDACTED], I’m not sure whether you’re inquiring personally or professionally, so with that in mind, here are the facts … and some of my thoughts.

I sent Jeff my recent Putin-Nazi Paranoia piece, waited for it to run. It didn’t. For the first time in over two years. So I wrote Jeff asking about it, specifically asking whether I had gone too far in my response to DiMaggio’s piece, in which DiMaggio had smeared a bunch of writers as “far right shills,” and supported his smear with a blog piece by Louis Proyect along the same lines, but crazier.

As both DiMaggio’s and Proyect’s smear pieces were focused on writers who write for Unz, or allow Unz to cross-post their essays (as I have for two years), and as Proyect had written me a nasty email fishing for comments for his piece, I considered myself part of the smeared group, though I was not named in either piece.

In any event, Jeff wrote me back, said he hadn’t seen my submission, that it had been a busy week, and that he would rummage around for it. I re-sent it to him immediately in order to spare him the rummaging. I waited for it to run. It didn’t. No follow-up from Jeff.

A week later, I sent my most recent piece, Down with the Working Classes! Waited for it to run. It didn’t. In the meantime, no word from Jeff or anyone at CP about the earlier piece.

So I posted the Working Classes piece on my blog, tweeted that CP had apparently stopped running my work and returning my emails, which is true. I did not claim that I was banned.

The background to this, on my side, is that I have watched as key CP writers, namely Litvin, Frank, Draitser, and then DiMaggio (and Proyect on his blog and elsewhere) have posted a series of paranoid pieces accusing people of being “Red-Brown” agents, or whatever. (You probably recall the “Caitlin Johnstone-is-a-Nazi” episode.) Long story short, the DiMaggio piece was the last straw for me. I wrote my Putin-Nazi Paranoia piece as a response. It was tough. I was angry. Which shouldn’t have surprised anyone.

If CP had run that piece (i.e., my response), that would have sufficed. I think I was entitled to that, after two years of contributing to CP, and otherwise supporting it, and after having been smeared in CP’s pages, in a lead essay, as a “far right shill.” Or, if Jeff or Joshua or anyone at CP had simply returned my emails and informed me why they had stopped running my essays, or accusing me of being a crypto-Nazi because I have let Unz re-post my pieces, or just telling me directly to go fuck myself, that would have also sufficed.

But nothing.

This email is long enough, so I’ll spare you the details of my exchanges with Joshua and Louis on Facebook, and Jeff via email, other than to say they all seem to be obsessed with the Unz thing (which is surprising, since Unz has been reposting my stuff for two years) and suddenly very concerned about my “character.”

I think my character is pretty clear from my writing. I don’t appreciate the guilt-by-association game, or being smeared as a “far right shill,” and I simply don’t have any respect for folks who engage in that sort of thing. It appears to have become a standard tactic at CP, as you can see from Jeff’s reference to my “real politics” in his email.

As for my “public assaults” on CP, again, that could have been prevented with a simple email, which, where I come from, is just professional courtesy.

Anyway, [REDACTED], those are the facts and my thoughts. If you have further questions about what happened, or my “character” or my “real politics,” just ask. Despite the CP folks’ insinuations and smears, I’m really not a very sneaky guy.

Jeffrey St Clair: A favor: stop attacking Nat in your online self-promotions—“Read the article that Nat refused to run, blah blah blah.” He doesn’t make any editorial decisions. Train your pop-gun on me, instead. It will probably increase your hits with the Holocaust deniers and Pizzagaters you like to hang with, even as you demure that you ain’t one of them. The reason the “Unz thing” has became an issue is that he just smeared Cockburn as a Holocaust Denier—not so much “smeared,” I guess, as adopted & celebrated as one of the gang. Alex was my partner and best friend for 25 years. Maybe you think it’s funny. I don’t.

PS—For the sake of accuracy, even though I realize that’s not the domain of satirists, Litvin hasn’t written for CounterPunch in more than year because he doesn’t like our politics or the fact that we regularly run writers whose point of view he disagrees with.

CJ Hopkins: Sure, Jeff. Send me an official Twitter handle for CounterPunch that isn’t Nat and I’ll switch to that one. Until then, I’ll use the official CounterPunch handle that exists.

Thanks for making my point by insinuating that I’m anti-Semite, again, and that I share the politics of every outlet that re-posts my essays and am responsible for their behavior. My essays have been reposted by numerous outlets, left and right, which I assume you know. There’s a list of them on my website. I don’t work for or represent any of them.

I don’t think any of this is funny, in case you didn’t get that. If you want to purge CP of writers you suddenly decide are “far right shills” and publish smears of them, that’s your prerogative. If you thought I was going to go quietly, you’re probably not as good a judge of “character” as you think.

Jeffrey St Clair: Why would I know who you write for, CJ? And how would I know this? Am I supposed to have tracked you across the web? I know you advertise yourself as “America’s greatest satirist,” but, even though I think I’m a fairly well-read person, I’d never heard of you before one of your submissions showed up in my inbox, which I gladly ran and continued to do so for many, many months, whether I agreed with your pieces or not.

Do you admit that is true or are you going concoct some contorted fabulation about that as well? If I had known that you’d been posting the same pieces we’d run on CP on Unz for two years (or other sites), we wouldn’t have run you on CounterPunch to begin with. Why the fuck would we? Putting aside the rancid nature of Unz’s site, we have too many writers—right, libertarian, left, green and anarchist—who want to write for us to run writers who are broadcasting the same piece across multiple venues. I’ve been libeled as an anti-Semite for 20 years at least and have been on the ADL and SPLC hit lists for nearly as long, so you’ll have to do better than that to get anyone who really knows the score to believe that we somehow gagged you because of your views on the Israel lobby or evicted you as part of some alleged purge of “rightwing” writers.

Who are these poor victims? What are their names? Where can we send flowers? Josh and I both grew up among conservatives and we’ve always run conservatives on CounterPunch and published many essay by them in our books, from Imperial Crusades to Red State Rebels. I do draw the line at publishing racists. You don’t draw the line—apparently– about being published by them. I’ll be honest, if I knew that you’d continued publishing on Unz’s after he wrote his defense of Holocaust denialism that libeled Alex (and me, since one of the pieces he cited as “evidence” we co-wrote), I’d’ve asked you to quit publishing with him out of solidarity. But I didn’t realize that until after you’d thrown your public tantrum. I don’t know you at all, so I can make no assessment of your character, other than from the public lie you told about us having stopped running your writing. You can continue to project whatever bile you want about us, I just asked you politely to direct them and not my son, who makes none of the editorial decisions here—not that we even made one your case. You’ve declined to do that. I’m no dramatist, but I think that says something about your “character”.

CJ Hopkins: Dear Jeff, please show us all where I have once advertised myself as “America’s greatest satirist.” When you can’t, admit that you’re just making shit up because you’re angry.

You knew that other outlets re-posted my stuff. I asked you about that a long time ago, and you said it was no probem, as long as they credited CP. I’ve specifically mentioned at least two of them to you at different times, ColdType and Greanville Post. I have tweeted many of those other outlets’ reposts, regularly. All of my essays ran on CounterPunch first.

I don’t “draw the line” at being re-posted by anyone. If I did, I’d spend half my time trying to force people to remove my essays from their sites and blogs. I realize you are trying to draw me into a debate about Unz. That’s how the smear game works. I’m not going to bite. I have nothing to do with Unz, except that they re-post my pieces, as do many other sites, which I also have nothing to do with.

Regarding the Twitter handle, please be honest. You are referring to CounterPunch’s official Twitter handle, not Nat’s personal Twitter handle, which I have never used. I’m not going to stop tagging CounterPunch’s official (and, as far as I know, only) Twitter handle just because you chose to put Nat’s name on it.

I understand that you are angry and want to insult and belittle me. If you could just insult and belittle me without making shit up that I have to refute, that would save us both a lot of time.

(C. J. Hopkins)

Josh Frank: CJ, nobody is shedding a tear for you here, we take this shit personal when writers go public with their petty shit. And yes your whining that we didn’t run your piece was petty. Personally I am happy to see you go. It had nothing to do with your grievance about some link in an article to another article that didn’t even name you – which of course is petty. It’s more to do with the obvious thin skin you have. You can’t be a left writer and have thin skin, you won’t last long. But I guess you are proving the point.

Don’t let the door…

Jeffrey St Clair: “In house satirist”, excuse me, my mistake. All apologies.

If you told me you were running your stuff on other sites, I’ve long forgotten it. It’s certainly not something I’ve ever encouraged in the 20 years we’ve been online.

I’m not trying to draw you into a debate about anything. What’s to debate?

The only thing I’m angry about is the lie you continue to tell for your own self-promotion, I guess, that we abruptly stopped running your pieces for some reason of political correctness.

As for Nat, I see that he just retweeted, as he usually does, your ad for Consent Factory. (As I have also done many times. As I did your book, even advertising it on CP, as I recall.) So I guess you can spit invective (“the latest smear by Nat@counterpunch) in his direction, but it will be hitting the wrong mark. I’m sure there’ll be no acknowledgment of this generosity from you, because it wouldn’t fit your narrative of victimization.

As for you having “nothing to do with Unz,” [cites my tweet] “Here’s my latest leftist heresy, in the @UnzReview, which posts both far-left and far-right views. Unz has been reposting my @NatCounterPunch essays for years, but according to CP, I’m suddenly a fascist “shill” because I let them do so. Am I? You decide.”

It’s a quaintly neutral way to describe Unz, but he’s your publisher. Enjoy the ride.

CJ Hopkins: Dear Jeff, I’m happy to acknowledge everything you and CP have done for me. You ran everything I sent you for over two years, plugged my book, and me, often featured my pieces, at least early on. You more or less put me on the map in this gig, and I have been proud to be included in CP’s pages.

What you characterize as a “lie” is indeed my interpretation of events. I’ve detailed those events, and my interpretation of them, so I won’t waste our time doing it again.

The tweet you cited was sent after these events, and after Joshua and Proyect started smearing me on Facebook. I’m not going to sit idly by while CP’s Red-Brown hunters (or you for that matter) smear me, and insinuate that Unz is my publisher, or that I am somehow in cahoots with fascists and Holocaust deniers. Again, as I have stated several times already, I have nothing to do with Unz, nothing more than I do with ColdType, Greanville Post, Black Agenda Report, OffGuardian, ZeroHedge, Entelekheia, or any other outlet that has re-posted my stuff. The tweet was meant to spur readers to look at the facts and decide for themselves.

I am honestly sorry that you set up your official CP account with Nat’s name on the front of it. I have no wish to involve Nat in this. Unfortunately, that is CP’s official handle. So if I want to make reference to CP, that’s the one I have to use, until you change it.

I sense we’re coming to the end of this email exchange. I hope so. I won’t bother to reply to Joshua’s email, which was just spewing more bile, nothing substantive that requires a reply.

All best wishes for the future …

***

CJ Hopkins
September 29, 2018

 

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Patreon page (where you can contribute as little $1 per month), or send your contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our staff up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian novel, Zone 23, which we understand is pretty gosh darn funny, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, please feel free to contact him directly.

(Republished from Consent Factory by permission of author or representative)

The Catholic Saint Who Was a Muslim Slayer – Saint Louis King of France

Posted on September 30, 2018 by xenagoguevicene

(1243 – King Louis IX of France Ordered the Burning of 12,000 Jewish Talmuds)

Thirteenth Century Holy Warrior King Louis of France

In 1296 the deceased former head of the French state became a recognized saint of the Catholic Church. King Louis the Ninth said he was inspired in all of his actions as king by his Christian zeal.
He fought in wars against Islam, and he fought in France against blasphemy and Jewish people.  Blasphemy, doubting the teachings of the Catholic Church, was severely punished by Saint Louis government.  The punishments for those who thought differently from Saint Louis and the Church was mutilation of the tongue and lips.

Saint Louis opposed the payment of interest on money loans as something forbidden by the Bible.  He also outlawed gambling and prostitution.  He spent great sums of money for ‘relics’ of Christ and built a special church to hold them – the Sainte-Chapelle.

Saint Lois expanded the scope of the Religious Police, the Inquisition, to target Jewish people and ordered the burning of collections of Jewish books including The Talmud.

Saint Louis took up arms against Muslims to bring Christianity back to the Middle East and North Africa.  He died fighting against Islam in North Africa.

Much of what is known of Louis’s life comes from Jean de Joinville‘s famous Life of Saint Louis.  Joinville was a close friend, confidant, and counselor to the king, and also participated as a witness in the papal inquest into Louis’ life that ended with his canonization in 1297 by Pope Boniface VIII.  The popes in Rome had encouraged holy wars against the Islamic empire in the Middle East and North Africa and King Louis heeded the call.



Louis was born in 1214 to a Castilian mother and a Frankish father. Louis was 12 years old when his father died in 1226. He was crowned king within the month at Reims cathedral. Because of Louis’s youth, his mother, Blanche of Castile,  ruled France as regent during his minority.  His mother was a fanatical Christian.


(Blanche of Castile.)

Louis’ mother had him trained him to be a ruthless leader and a intolerant Christian. She used to say:

I love you, my dear son, as much as a mother can love her child; but I would rather see you dead at my feet than that you should ever commit a mortal sin.

No date is known for the beginning of Louis’s personal rule. His contemporaries viewed his reign as co-rule between the king and his mother, though historians generally view the year 1234 as the year in which Louis began ruling personally, with his mother assuming a more advisory role.  She continued to have a strong influence on the king until her death in 1252.



(Margaret of Provence)

In 1234, Louis married Margaret of Provence. The new queen’s religious zeal made her a well suited partner for the king. He enjoyed her company, and was pleased to show her the many public works he was making in Paris, both for its defense and for its health. They enjoyed riding together, reading, and listening to music. This attention raised a certain amount of jealousy in his mother, who tried to keep them apart as much as she could.  They had eleven children, five sons and six daughters. This line continued in power in France for five hundred years. In 1793, as the guillotine fell on King Louis XVI,  Abbe Edgeworth said: “Son of Saint Louis, ascend to Heaven!”

Saint Louis publicized his acts of charity.   Soldiers rounded up beggars who were fed from his table, he ate their leavings, washed their feet, ministered to the wants of the lepers, and daily fed over one hundred poor. He founded many hospitals and houses: the House of the Filles-Dieu for reformed prostitutes; the Quinze-Vingt for 300 blind men, hospitals at Pontoise, Vernon, Compiégne.^[25]

St. Louis installed a group of the Trinitarian Order of Catholic clergy in his château of Fontainebleau. He chose Trinitarians as his chaplains, and was accompanied by them on his crusades. In his spiritual testament he wrote: “My dearest son, you should permit yourself to be tormented by every kind of martyrdom before you would allow yourself to commit a mortal sin.” Basically saying “Follow church rules.”  At the time the clergy were like a second government.

Saint Louis bought “the Crown of Thorns” supposedly worn by Jesus and other holy relics from the Eastern Emperor at Constantinople. He sent two Dominican friars to bring these sacred objects to France, and, attended by an impressive train, he met them at Sens on their return. To house the relics, he built on the island in the Seine named for him, the shrine of Sainte-Chapelle, one of the most beautiful examples of Gothic architecture in existence. Since the French Revolution it stands empty of its treasure.

The Sainte Chapelle, a perfect example of the Rayonnant style of Gothic architecture, was erected as a shrine for the Crown of Thorns and a supposed fragment of the True Cross, phony relics of the time of Jesus.  Louis purchased these in 1239–41 from Emperor Baldwin II of the Latin Empire of Constantinople, for the exorbitant sum of 135,000 livres (the chapel, on the other hand, cost only 60,000 livres to build). This purchase should be understood in the context of the extreme religious fervor that existed in Europe in the 13th century. The purchase contributed greatly to reinforcing the central position of the king of France in western Christendom, as well as to increasing the renown of Paris, then the largest city of western Europe. During a time when cities and rulers vied for relics, trying to increase their reputation and fame, Louis IX had succeeded in securing the most prized of all relics in his capital. The purchase was thus not only an act of devotion, but also a political gesture: the French monarchy was trying to establish the kingdom of France as the “new Jerusalem.”
Saint Louis loved sermons, heard two Masses daily, and was surrounded, even while traveling, with priests chanting the hours. He was said to be most happy in the company of priests talking about the Christian religion and God.




His friend and biographer, the Sieur de Joinville,  who accompanied him on his first crusade to the Holy Land, relates an anecdote to illustrate how religious the king was.
“What is God?”King Louis once asked him.

Joinville replied, “Sire, it is that which is so good that there can be nothing better.”
“Well,” said the King, “now tell me, would You rather be a leper or commit a mortal sin?”
The spectacle of the wretched lepers who wandered along the highways of medieval Europe might well have prompted a sensitive conscience to ask such a question.

“I would rather commit thirty mortal sins,” answered Joinville, in all candor, “than be a leper.”
Louis expostulated with him earnestly for making such a reply.

“When a man dies,” he said, “he is healed of leprosy in his body; but when a man who has committed a mortal sin dies he cannot know of a certainty that he has in his lifetime repented in such sort that God has forgiven him; wherefore he must stand in great fear lest that leprosy of sin last as long as God is in Paradise.”[1]

The Saint Burned Jewish Books

In 1243, in Paris, at the urging of Pope Gregory IX, Saint Louis ordered the burning  of some 12,000 manuscript copies of the Talmud and other Jewish books. 

In the 1230s, Nicholas Donin, a Jewish convert to Christianity, translated the Talmud, the collection of Jewish writings on religion and the Jewish faith.

Donin then pressed 35 charges of anti-Christian hate speech in the Talmud to Pope Gregory IX by quoting a series of detailed anti-Christian passages about Jesus, Mary or Christianity.


(Pope Gregory IX )

There is a Talmudic passage, for example, where Jesus of Nazareth is sent to Hell to be boiled in excrement for eternity. Donin also pointed out passages of the Talmud that permits Jews to kill non-Jews, because non-Jews are not fully human in God’s eyes. Gentiles were put on Earth to serve Jewish people according to several sections of the Talmud.

The Catholic Church encouraged Jewish people to convert to Christianity and rewarded intellectuals who became Christians and helped campaign against Judaism.  Donin was very ambitious and had visions of rising high in the Church. Convincing the authorities that he could prove Christianity was God’s successor to the Old Testament and ancient Jewish beliefs through the most authoritative books unique to the Jews was a sure path up the ladder to success in the Church for a Jewish convert. By winning such an argument, all the Jews would convert it was believed.  Donin hoped to use a close reading of the Talmud to show the superiority of Christ and the Church.  Jesus was the Messiah the Torah had foretold, according to Donin.

This led to the Disputation of Paris, which took place in 1240 at the court of Saint Louis, where rabbi Yechiel of Paris defended the Talmud against the accusations of the Christian convert Nicholas Donin.  Rabbeinu Yechiel made such a skillful defense that the king agreed that it was true that one could not prove Christianity through the Talmud.  The Talmud is a confusing maze of commentary by many authors with no defining thread or consistent narrative.  Nevertheless, Donin said that the Talmud was an insult to the Christianity.  Sections of the Talmud denounced Jesus Christ as a false teacher and not the Messiah his followers believed he was.

Therefore, in 1243, King Louis IX ordered the burning of 24 cartloads of priceless Hebrew manuscripts.  In the Middle Ages each book to be hand-written. The Talmud alone is, in the modern printed format, about 2,300 pages.  Scribes of that time wrote using quill pens and manufactured ink on parchment (or vellum paper that then began to be produced). The pure physical labor of sitting and writing that volume of words alone boggles the mind. The 24 cartloads amounted to some 12,000 volumes. Louis had all the copies of the Talmud he could get his hand on collected and burned them publicly

Jewish people were targeted in other ways.  When Saint Louis wanted to finance holy wars against Islam he confiscated money from anyone who loaned money with interest payments – the Jewish money lenders had their assets  seized and Jewish money lenders were then expelled from the country.  Saint Louis also ordered that all Jewish people must wear a patch of cloth on their outer clothes so that everyone in public would know they were Jewish.  Louis IX, on the other hand, was single-minded in his efforts to induce the Jews to convert.   The Jewish community in France took long to recovered after the oppression of Saint Louis. France never again became the great seat of learning or even the great seat of Jewish tradition as it was in the 11^th through 13^th centuries.

“Even today, the majority of Jews in France are Sephardic Jews who came from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco within the last century. It is not a scholarly or a particularly strong Jewish community. It certainly never again looked like Rashi’s community, after Saint Louis religious police burned the Talmud.”

Many European Christian countries required Jewish people to wear particular hats, or particular pieces of clothing.  The Catholic Church wanted Jewish people to be identifiable.  The rules were varied from place to place and sometimes not strictly enforced.  But Saint Louis changed that in France.  On June 19, 1269 Louis IX issued a general edict for the whole of France that Jewish people must wear a cloth circular badge on the breast above the heart. 


(Medieval Jewish Clothing)

This edict was endorsed by the Church councils of Pont-Audemer (1279), and Nîmes (1284).  Some regulations also required that a second sign should be worn on the back. At times, it was placed on the Jewish person’s hat, or at the level of the belt. The badge was yellow in color, or of two shades, white and red. Wearing it was compulsory from the age of thirteen, according to some authorities.  Saint Louis ordered that any Jew found without the badge had to give his clothes to the person who had denounced the Jewish person.  In cases of a second offense a severe fine was imposed.  Saint Louis received government funds each year as his tax collectors went to Jewish communities to sell the state issued badges every adult Jewish person had to wear.
(The Jewish Badge Required by Saint Louis IX)

Holy Warrior Saint

In the south of France a religiously independent movement was crushed by a Crusade when Saint Louis was fifteen years old while his mother was the effective ruler of the country.



The Albigensian Crusade taught Saint Louis that religious differences where settled by warfare.   Religious opponents of the king could be attacked and killed and their property taken.



Saint Louis took up arms against Islam during two crusades, in his mid-30s in 1248 (Seventh Crusade), and then again in his mid-50s in 1270 (Eighth Crusade).

In 1248 Louis assembled forces for an attack on the Islamic Middle East.  For six years he was in Egypt.  After crossing the Mediterranean the Christian invaders captured the port of Damietta, Egypt in 1249.  The Islamic defenders had simply retreated with out putting up a fight for the small port on one of the many outlets of the Nile to the Mediterranean.  The French invaders did not know much about Egypt or how to deal with the hot climate and local environment.  The upper class knights and lords and barons were used to pushing around unarmed peasants and had difficulty in the rough life of a military camp in a strange land.  The religiously trained leaders had no ideas about basic sanitation or what microorganisms might be in the local water.  Soldiers began to get sick with diseases that were not common in the colder climate of Europe.



Saint Louis IX thought that he could capture the Egyptian capital city of Cairo.  Egypt was a populous Islamic state and capturing the country for Christianity would provide an opening to taking Jerusalem and the Holy Land of Christ’s time.  The local Egyptian Muslim ruler was sick and dying and other Islamic powers were facing the Mongols coming from the east toward Baghdad.  The Egyptian ruler died and his wife became effective queen and organized effective defenses against the crusader army.  The Nile waters were rising and Louis forces simply did not know how to operate on the terrain.



The Battle of Al Mansurah was fought from February 8 to February 11, 1250, between Crusaders led by Louis IX, King of France against the local Muslim forces of Egypt.  The Crusaders advanced into a town that had emptied and found themselves trapped inside by Egyptian fighters.  Numerous soldiers died including leading knights.  The crusaders eventually made a retreat back towards their base on the shore.

Egyptians had transported light ships overland and blocked the Crusaders from reinforcements or effective retreat.  Egyptians employed the burning chemical weapon called ‘Greek fire’ to burn Crusader ships.  The invaders supply ships were captured. The Crusaders fought their way back toward their base with heavy losses.  The besieged Crusaders soon began suffering from famine and disease. Some Crusaders surrendered to the Muslim forces and faced a life of slavery.

Despite being overwhelmed and ultimately defeated, King Louis IX tried to negotiate with the Egyptians, offering the surrender of the Egyptian port of Damietta in exchange for Jerusalem and a few towns on the Syrian coast. The Egyptians rejected the offer, and the Crusaders retreated to Damietta under cover of darkness on April 5, followed closely by the Muslim forces. At the subsequent Battle of Fariskur, the last major battle of the Seventh Crusade, the Crusader forces were annihilated and King Louis IX was captured on April 6, 1250.

Meanwhile, the Crusaders were circulating false information in Europe, claiming that King Louis IX defeated the Sultan of Egypt in a great battle, and Cairo had been betrayed into Louis’s hands.^[23][24] Later, when the news of Louis IX’s capture and the French defeat reached France, the Shepherds’ Crusade movement occurred in France.^[25]

According to medieval Muslim historians, 15,000 to 30,000 French fell on the battlefield and thousands were taken prisoners.^[26] Louis IX of France was captured, chained and confined in the house of Ibrahim Ibn Lokman, the royal chancellor, and under the guard of a eunuch slave named Sobih al-Moazami.^[27] The king’s brothers, Charles d’Anjou and Alphonse de Poitiers, were taken prisoner at the same time, and were carried to the same house with other French nobles.  A camp was set up outside the town to shelter the rest of the prisoners. Louis IX was ransomed for 400,000 dinars, or livres (at the time France’s annual revenue was only about 1,250,000 livres tournois) . After pledging not to return to Egypt, Louis surrendered Damietta and left for Acre with his brothers and 12,000 war prisoners whom the Egyptians agreed to release.^[28]

The battle of Al Mansurah was a source of inspiration for Islamic writers and poets of that time. One of the satiric poems ended with the following verses: “If they (the Franks) decide to return to take revenge or to commit a wicked deed, tell them :The house of Ibn Lokman is intact, the chains still there as well as the eunuch Sobih“. —from stanza by Jamal ad-Din ibn Matruh. ^[29]

The name of Al Mansurah (Arabic: “the Victorious”) that dates from an earlier period^[30] was consolidated after this battle. The city still holds the name of Al Mansurah today, as the capital of the Egyptian governorate, Daqahlia. The National Day of Daqahlia Governorate (capital Al Mansurah) on February 8, marks the anniversary of the defeat of Saint Louis IX in 1250. The house of Ibn Lokman, which is now the only museum in Al Mansurah, is open to the public and houses articles that used to belong to the French monarch, including his personal thirteenth century grooming items.
For the next four years King Louis stayed in the Crusader States around Jerusalem.  Funds from France were used to build the Crusader states.  In 1254 King Louis and what was left of his crusader army returned to France.

Saint Louis’ Last Crusade

After ruling in France burning Jewish books and making Jewish people wear badges Saint Louis wanted to take the fight for a Christian supremacy to a Muslim ruled country right across the Mediterranean  Sea from France – Tunisia.

After landing a large force outside the city of Tunis the crusaders began to suffer from dysentery.  Great numbers became sick and the decision was made to retreat back across the sea.  A treaty that was favorable to the Christian ruler of Sicily was negotiated and Islamic rule was secured in North Africa and Tunisia.

The crusade is considered a failure after Saint Louis died shortly after arriving on the shores of Tunisia, with his disease-ridden army dispersing back to Europe shortly afterwards.  In order to create holy ‘relics’ Louis body was boiled so the bones could be retrieved and sent to various churches to venerate as a physical connection to the dead king and soon to be saint.  While ghoulish by today’s standards, the transportation of the body back to Europe would not have been healthy in 1270.


(The Death of King Louis IX during the siege of Tunis)

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A portrait of St. Louis hangs in the chamber of the United States House of Representatives.
Saint Louis is also portrayed on a frieze depicting a timeline of important lawgivers throughout world history in the Courtroom at the Supreme Court of the United States.
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Archive
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Links
https://www.jewishhistory.org/the-burning-of-the-talmud/
http://www.ewtn.com/library/mary/louis.htm

The French Monarchy and the Jews
From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians

William Chester Jordan – http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/13748.html

http://crusades.wikia.com/wiki/Louis_IX_of_France
http://crusades.wikia.com/wiki/Louis_IX_of_France
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1455330?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

The CIA Democrats and the US midterm elections - Pro-War - Pro-Police State - 24 Sept 2018

24 September 2018

Two major polls made public Sunday project a sizeable Democratic Party victory in the US midterm elections set for November 6. A Fox News poll found a seven-point Democratic Party lead in the generic congressional ballot, while an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found a 12-point Democratic lead among registered voters, and an eight-point lead among likely voters. Both polls found that opposition to President Trump is the driving force in the election, with particular hostility to his persecution of immigrants and his tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.

The likely swing to the Democrats comes as the two-party system as a whole faces mounting popular opposition. According to another recent poll, nearly two-thirds of voters want an alternative to the two existing parties, whose candidates are reviled as corrupt representatives of the rich who lie shamelessly and have nothing but contempt for ordinary working people. Other polls show a rising interest in and support for socialism, particularly among young people.

The Democratic Party is now expected to make the gain of 23 seats needed to win control of the House of Representatives, and perhaps much more than that, while a Democratic takeover of the US Senate, previously thought unlikely because only nine Republican-held seats were up for election, is now considered a significant possibility. The Democrats are also projected to win a large number of Republican-held governorships, including nearly every state in the industrial Midwest. What would such a political shift mean?

While working people are looking for an alternative to the reactionary policies of the Trump administration, they will not find it in the Democratic Party, a political alliance of Wall Street, the military-intelligence apparatus, and privileged sections of the upper middle class. Congressional Democratic leaders have chosen to focus their efforts first on promoting the Russia investigation, based on bogus claims of massive Russian intervention in the 2016 elections. More recently, they sought to link Republican candidates to the Supreme Court nomination of reactionary jurist Brett Kavanaugh, who is under attack due to allegations of sexual misconduct in high school, invoking the themes of the #MeToo campaign.

Neither campaign has evoked any popular enthusiasm. Only 38 percent in Sunday’s polls said that it was important that a congressional candidate share their views on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. An even lower number, 34 percent, said that a candidate should share their views on the Russia investigation. Large majorities said that healthcare and the economy—issues of class, not race or gender—were the most important.

The clearest demonstration of the political trajectory of the Democratic Party is the array of former CIA agents, military commanders and State Department officials who are its candidates in the congressional districts that the Democrats aim to capture from the Republicans. In the 115 seats which the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has designated as competitive, 30 are national-security operatives, the largest single group.

With only two exceptions, the CIA Democrats are not drawn from among the rank-and-file soldiers who comprised the bulk of those sent as cannon fodder to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and came back, in many cases, damaged in mind and body, and hostile to the wars in which they fought. Thirteen had roles as intelligence agents, war planners or diplomatic apologists for war. Fifteen were officers in the Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines—commanders, captains, majors, a lieutenant-colonel.

Not a single one is running as an opponent of the wars in which they fought/led, or of new wars against Iran, Russia, or China. One actually demands as part of his program, “an uncompromising victory over Russia and its tyrannical regime.”

While leftist critics have consistently called attention to the CIA Democrats, the corporate-controlled media has been largely silent about the friendly takeover of the Democratic Party by the military-intelligence apparatus. In its lone reference, the New York Times referred last month, in a gross underestimate, to “more than a dozen Democratic candidates this year with strong background in national security through service in the military or at the intelligence agencies.”

In another exception to the media blackout, NBC News noted, under the suggestive headline, “Their New Mission?” that “an unusually large number of former intelligence officers and operatives are campaigning for office as Democrats in this fall’s midterm elections.” This is the only time that the corporate media has even raised the most urgent question: whether the influx of state agents into the Democratic Party is itself an operation by the national-security apparatus.

The rise of the military-intelligence candidates in the Democratic Party shows the false and cynical character of the claims by “left” politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of the Democratic Socialists of America that the Democratic Party can be reformed and turned into an instrument for social justice and peace.

The handful of “lefts” like Ocasio-Cortez will be dwarfed by the dozens of military-intelligence Democrats in the new Congress, to say nothing of the millionaires and political hacks who constitute the bulk of the Democratic caucus. More fundamentally, the role of the DSA and the other political appendages of the Democratic Party is to justify and provide a left cover for this fundamentally reactionary party of imperialism.

Asked how she could square her ostensibly “antiwar” politics with so many running mates from the CIA and Pentagon, Ocasio-Cortez replied that she did not believe “a person’s life experience in one way or another necessarily precludes them from running for office.” Even if that “experience” includes, like Elissa Slotkin, the Democratic candidate in Michigan’s Eighth Congressional District, three CIA tours of duty in Baghdad where she was a top aide to Ambassador John Negroponte, a war criminal many times over.

There is nothing socialist about a campaign that is waged shoulder-to-shoulder with CIA agents, war planners and military commanders—and with multimillionaire capitalist politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Debbie Dingell.

https://archive.fo/oBsh324 September 2018

Sex Hysteria: Kavanaugh, Cosby - News Media Pornography and the Enraged Middle Class - 27 Sept 2018

Kavanaugh’s nomination, Cosby’s sentencing: News media pornography and the enraged middle class

27 September 2018

Following the press and television news in the US on Wednesday might lead one to believe that a kind of madness has seized hold of the American media, along with sections of the affluent petty-bourgeoisie.

The media generated new geysers of filth in regard to the controversy surrounding the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s candidate for the US Supreme Court. On the same day, the degrading impact of its #MeToo campaign could be seen in the hysterical, semi-fascistic tone of the response to the sentencing of comedian Bill Cosby.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hear Thursday from Christine Blasey Ford, who says Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when both were high school students. But newer allegations against Kavanaugh bumped up against one another on Wednesday. Before the population had time to digest the claim by Deborah Ramirez (reported by the New Yorker magazine September 23) that Kavanaugh had exposed himself to her at a Yale University party 35 years ago, a third woman came forward with even more sensational charges.

Michael Avenatti, best known as the attorney for porn star Stormy Daniels in her legal case against Trump, tweeted a sworn statement by Julie Swetnick, 55, claiming that Kavanaugh and others, while in high school, spiked the drinks of girls at house parties so that they might more easily “gang-rape” them.

Swetnick went on to allege that she herself became the victim of one of these “gang rapes… where [Kavanaugh’s friend] Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh were present.”

Avenatti’s tweet became the occasion, in the bland phrase of the New York Times, for “immediate, blanket coverage across social media and cable news.” The cable news channels did indeed bombard their viewers non-stop with the story—if they weren’t reporting on Cosby’s being sent to jail.

MSNBC correspondent Kate Snow, for instance, read the most graphic portions of Swetnick’s statement. The other cable channels followed suit, along with the Times, the Washington Post and the rest. CNN anchor John King asked correspondent Sara Sidner to “walk us through” the allegations, which she obliged by providing every salacious detail. Afterward, King expressed appreciation for the “live reporting” on “a very sensitive and dramatic issue.”

The Times set the stage for the day’s torrent of media smut in its morning edition, which plastered across its front page two lead articles on the Kavanaugh sexual assault allegations and a third on the Cosby sentencing. The report on Trump’s fascistic and war-mongering rant at the United Nations was relegated to a subordinate spot. The opinion pages featured a lengthy editorial (“Questions Mr. Kavanaugh Needs to Answer”) listing detailed questions for senators to ask about his sexual activities.

The American media lowers and demeans itself further with every new scandal.
It is impossible for us to determine the truth of the claims against Kavanaugh. It is certain, however, that the Democratic Party campaign against Trump’s nominee is a reactionary diversion and an effort to bury the most pressing issues. Kavanaugh is a zealous right-winger and enemy of democratic rights. But no Democrat on the Judiciary Committee will ask him, “What was your role in the attempted coup d’état, known as the Starr investigation, against Bill Clinton?” or “Why did you support torture and illegal detention as part of the Bush administration?”

None of the Democrats, the supposed defenders of women, will even forthrightly denounce him for his attacks on abortion rights. They’ve all but dropped the issue.

Speaking on CNN, the Times ’ Michael Shear inadvertently alluded to the anti-democratic character of the campaign against Kavanaugh: “One of the dynamics that we’ve seen throughout this entire #MeToo movement is that accusations that start out as a single, a solitary accusation against… a man in power, often don’t pick up the kind of steam that ultimately forces action until there’s a second allegation, and a third allegation, and beyond. And that’s what creates often the kind of pressure—overwhelming pressure that forces some action.”

Five, ten or twenty accusations do not amount to proof. Kavanaugh may have been guilty of sexual misconduct, but Shear and the rest apparently need to be reminded that every witch-hunt in history has also operated on the principle of “numbers.”

The repressive, right-wing character of the middle-class outrage over sexual misconduct, whipped up by the #MeToo campaign, is on view in the frothing reaction to Cosby’s sentencing. The comedian was convicted of sexually assaulting a Temple University employee at his home in 2004 while she was under the influence of a sedative.

The comments on the outcome of the Cosby case in the Times from readers of its article “Bill Cosby, Once a Model of Fatherhood, Is Sentenced to Prison,” are overwhelmingly vengeful and vindictive:
“I’d rather my taxes don’t go toward paying for his 3-10 year confinement. Just put him in with the general population and don’t have the guards intervene to protect him. He would be dead within minutes, but at least his last moments on earth would be filled with terror.”

“He is a beast no matter his physical condition.”

“We can only hope he dies in jail. Such a shame. Good riddance.”

“I really don’t care that he is old and has lost his sight. He should have been in prison decades ago. Let him serve his time in the dark in a cold cell.”

“Only 10 years? He deserved 100!”

Neither the Times nor the majority of its middle-class readership has ever expressed this degree of outrage about the past quarter-century of bloody, neo-colonial wars and occupations pursued by American imperialism, which has led to more than one million deaths and the displacement of tens of millions more. The destruction of societies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen and beyond does not keep this social element awake at night. Drone strikes, “kill lists,” NSA spying, the persecution of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange—none of this merits more than hand-wringing or the occasional tsk-tsk, if not outright assent.

Of no concern either is the industrial slaughterhouse in America: the 5,190 workers (90 percent of them male) who died on the job in 2016, and the 3.7 million workers across all industries who had work-related injuries and illnesses.

The hysteria over the Cosby case and the Kavanaugh nomination has a logic, despite its unhinged character.

On the part of the Democratic Party and the Times, the incitement of a frenzy over sexual abuse is a conscious political operation.

For the American ruling elite, it is a pressing matter to “change the subject” from economic inequality; to weaken, dissipate and divide popular anger toward the wealthy and capitalist rule by pointing to other guilty parties—men or white people. The aim is to reduce and blunt class hatred and feeling, divide along gender lines, prevent as far as possible and for as long as possible independent political and social action by the working class, slow down and ideologically cripple such a movement, and build up a reactionary constituency within the upper-middle class.
This was the response of the Clinton campaign in 2016 to the mass support for Bernie Sanders: the manipulation of the case of Stanford student Brock Turner and the focus on Trump’s alleged sexual carryings-on.

The current furor is a repetition along even more reactionary lines. It is a reaction to the growth of popular hostility to Trump and anti-capitalist sentiment generally, to the movement of masses of the population to the left and to the increase in strike activity. The sex hysteria is meant to poison the atmosphere, pollute political consciousness, stop people in their tracks, numb and confuse them. It has the effect of completely discrediting the entire political system.

The Times and the Democrats are appealing to a well-to-do social layer that has already moved far to the right. These elements oppose Trump on a right-wing, anti-democratic basis, including the #MeToo sexual witch hunt’s explicit renunciation of due process and the presumption of innocence. All of this is entirely compatible with war, dictatorship and savage attacks on the mass of working people.