Homeless anti-Semite was around long before Occupy
A man being used to tar Occupy Wall Street as anti-Semitic has long trolled the financial district -VIDEO Topics:Occupy Wall Street, Anti-Semitism
Right-wing pundits and Republican Party figures are continuing their attempt to smear the Occupy Wall Street movement as anti-Semitic, but we now have more evidence that the charge is profoundly dishonest.
To review: the Emergency Committee for Israel (which, it turns out, is funded by Wall Street) released an ad last week claiming that Occupy Wall Street is shot through with anti-Semitism, and demanding that Democrats condemn the protests. That attack has now been picked up by various pundits and GOP officials. The Republican National Committee started using the line against Democrats Wednesday. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin inevitably piled on. Fox News is all over the story.
Exhibit A in the ad (watch it below) is a sign-bearing man who yells that “Jews control Wall Street!” Now, as I’ve previously reported, Occupy protesters have taken to surrounding the man, who gave his name to me recently as David Smith, with rebuttal signs, including one that reads, “Asshole —>”. Smith has been hanging around Zuccotti Park nearly every day for a couple of weeks.
But as Josh Nathan-Kazis reports at the Forward, Smith started carrying anti-Semitic signs around the financial district long before Occupy Wall Street existed:
Occupy Wall Street’s most visible anti-Semite was picketing the Financial District long before Zuccotti Park was occupied. …
During a trip to Zuccotti Park to observe the early stages of the protest on September 19, two days after activists first set up camp there, the Forward’s Nate Lavey and I watched as Smith entered the plaza with his cardboard sign, was confronted by one vocal passerby, and then was chased out of the occupied plaza by a shouting mob of activists. Police eventually intervened to separate him from the crowd.
Smith is a familiar face to those of us who work downtown. The Forward office is a few blocks from Wall Street, and I saw him at least once earlier this summer, picketing silently near the New York Stock Exchange.
That account matches the widespread hostility I’ve observed among occupiers against Smith. Given that Occupy Wall Street is based in a public space, occupiers simply don’t have the power to permanently kick Smith out. Of course anti-Semitism needs to be confronted when it crops up. And that’s exactly what the true occupiers have been doing.
Smith, according to a recent interview, is homeless and going blind from glaucoma. He previously told me that he made a sign reading “Google: Zionists Control Wall St.” because God told him to. And yet, as Nathan-Kazis notes, Smith has been endlessly written about, photographed and filmed. He now represents Occupy’s “anti-Semitism problem.”
Another man featured in the Emergency Committee for Israel ad is Danny Cline, who appears to be an aspiring YouTube star with no involvement in Occupy Wall Street beyond showing up at the park to film his own rants.
The reality is that the Occupy Wall Street movement is filled with Jews. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently noted its distinctly “Jewish flavor.” Fifteen hundred people attended a Yom Kippur service outside Liberty Plaza earlier this month, in what participants described as one of the most powerful and moving events of Occupy to date.
Still, the “Occupy Wall Street is anti-Semitic” meme — a classic example of a tactic known as “nutpicking” — spreads. Don’t expect the fact that all this is largely based on two or three trolls to stop the right from continuing the attacks.
Here’s that Emergency Committee for Israel ad:
And here’s video from the park on Yom Kippur:
Continue Reading-
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/21/homeles ... re_occupy/===
10/20/2011
A Few Bits of Advice for National Public Radio:Hey, there, NPR. Rude Pundit here. First-time caller. In the Big Apple, WNYC, one of your flagship stations, is having a fund drive. The Rude Pundit's been a continuous contributor for a few years now, mainly due to his unrequited crush on Terry Gross. But he feels invested enough to offer you a couple of pieces of advice as you go along.
First off, can you please tell your on-air fundraisers to stop comparing the cost of supporting a single public radio station to the cost of cable TV. You know what the difference is? If Garrison Keillor appears on one's TV, one can change the channel.
Okay, that's a minor annoyance. Let's move on to something bigger, like:
Could you stop being such acquiescent little bitches to the fucking assholes of right-wing blogging blabbery? (You might wanna put your finger on the bleep button.) Seriously, allowing your corporate agenda to be set by Andrew Breitbart is like allowing your balls to be waxed by chimpanzee.
Because between Ron Schiller bullshit and now this firing of Lisa Simeone, you've pretty much put your nuts in Bonzo's paw. Simeone is the host of one program, World of Opera, and she used to also host Soundprint before NPR forced the station that produced it to shitcan her once it came out that Simeone was doing some speaking about the October 11 movement in DC (which is associated with Occupy Wall Street). Breitbart and Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller (motto: "Well, what the fuck else is Tucker Carlson gonna do?") called her a "spokesperson" for the movement, which is true if you mean she's a person who sometimes spoke about it. But not on NPR.
Now, you can say, NPR, that you have an ethics policy that applies to everyone. It reads in one part, "NPR journalists may not participate in marches and rallies involving causes or issues that NPR covers." Except since when the fuck is the opera chick a journalist? And, you know, does that mean no NPR on-air personnel could attend, say, Jon Stewart's rally last October? And her other show, Soundprint? This week, it's about Edmund Hillary. Unless his skull is occupying DC, then who the fuck cares what Simeone's involved in in her free time?
And if the opera chick's a journalist, does that mean that NPR personnel cannot attend the opera because it's being covered by one of your journalists? Your code also says, "NPR journalists may sit on community advisory boards, educational institution trustee boards, boards of religious organizations or boards of nonprofit organizations so long as NPR does not normally cover them." So if Diane Rehm is on the board of an opera company, is she in violation? And let's not even get into the ethical dilemma of Mara Liasson appearing regularly on Fox "news." That's like a fucking in-kind donation to the Republican Party.
Mostly, though, what's it say about you, NPR, that the moment the slightest bit of controversy is voiced about anything, you immediately back down? From back during the Bush II administration, when you decided you needed more conservative commentary in order to appease those who said you were the liberalest of the liberal media (which led to some of the most embarrassing sputum ever aired on All Things Considered), to the Juan Williams nonsense to this, it just seems like the path of least resistance is also the path of least self-respect.
// posted by Rude One @ 4:15 PM
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/===
In Sign Of Global Influence, Chinese Officials Cracking Down On Occupy Wall Street Coverage | When the Occupy Wall Street protests started last month, Chinese state media blasted the U.S. media for its poor coverage of the events. Yet as the Financial Times reports, now that the protests are spreading and igniting global unrest, Chinese censors are cracking down on coverage. “A magazine to which I am a contributor has received a notice from regulators saying that it must not carry any content regarding Occupy Wall Street,” said journalism professor Hu Jong. A handful of occupation-style protests have popped up in China, and it’s possible that Chinese government officials fear that their own citizens will soon begin protests like those in Zuccotti Park.
http://thinkprogress.org/special/2011/1 ... -coverage/---
China: Occupy Wall St gets too closeOctober 21, 2011 11:25 am by Kathrin Hille.
When Occupy Wall Street was no more than an obscure little protest in New York, the Chinese state media were really intrigued by the movement. China Daily, the country’s largest English-language daily newspaper, blasted the Western media for allegedly hushing up the news. Over the past month, Communist party mouthpieces and nationalist tabloids have relished the chance to bash the West and lecture America.
But now that the protests have spread around the world and appear to be morphing into a movements against many things including ruthless capitalism, corruption, inequality and the arrogance of power, China’s rulers have apparently decided that this is getting too close to home.
Media outlets have received a gag order on the topic, according to a prominent media expert. “A magazine to which I am a contributor has received a notice from regulators saying that it must not carry any content regarding Occupy Wall Street,” said Hu Yong, a journalism professor at Peking University and one of the foremost experts on social media in China, on Twitter.
Although reports and discussion of the topic can still be easily found online, print media and television have indeed noticeably reduced reporting and commentary since the beginning of the week, and apparently completely stopped covering the topic on Thursday.
The concern among party propaganda officials is not surprising. Defining a ‘correct’ ideological message is often difficult given that the country’s messy economic and social reality, with its aggressive entrepreneurs, greed, weak social security network and labour standards and huge income gap often resembles a caricature of capitalism more closely than communism.
It is therefore almost unthinkable for China’s media to thunder like North Korea’s state news agency did on Thursday, praising the protests as the “stern judgment of millions of people” of a capitalist system where the “popular masses” suffer from “exploitation, oppression, unemployment and poverty.”
In China, there had already been some small-scale expressions of solidarity with the anti-Wall Street movement with a sit-in of elderly people in the Central Chinese city of Zhengzhou, and widespread debate online making the connection to corrupt officials and greedy state enterprises.
Reporting bans are an everyday affair in China, as is mockery of them online. It’s no different with the latest one. “At this time, where is Chen Weihua, the deputy editor of the US edition of China Daily who wrote ‘The US media blackout of protest is shameful’? asked Hu on Twitter. “Where are Zhen Yan and Xiao Gang, the editorial writers of Beijing Daily who wrote ‘Here we can’t find ‘press freedom’, we can’t find ‘objectivity and fairness’’?
http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2011/1 ... z1bPueBU5t
