The Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report (Fall/09) is calling attention to Pacifica Radio network member station KPFK for airing the Spanish-English show La Causa's "naked anti-Semitism."

According to the SPLC, the weekly program's hosts, Augustín Cebada and Rafael Tlaloc, "are more than just passive enablers of anti-Semitic rhetoric:

They actively promote conspiracy theories about Jewish control of media and world governments, referring to Ponzi scheme crook Bernie Madoff as "that Jewish scam artist." Tlaloc said he felt no sympathy for Madoff's victims, many of whom were Jewish, because they were "shylocks and shysters."...

La Causa is tightly linked to La Voz de Aztlán, a rabidly anti-Semitic website based in Whittier, California. La Voz de Aztlán has been identified as a hate website by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

La Causa hosts and callers often reference La Voz de Aztlán as a credible source of information, and La Voz de Aztlán webmaster Hector Carreon has been interviewed on La Causa as a legitimate political analyst. Although a recording of that 2007 interview is no longer available in the KPFK online archives, Carreon boasts about an ongoing collaboration with La Causa on the La Voz de Aztlán website.

This would all be deplorable enough content from any outlet, but the SPLC tells us the 50-year-old KPFK not only is "the most powerful public radio station in the Western United States, according to its website," but also has a mission statement that aspires to "a lasting understanding between nations and between the individuals of all nations, races, creeds and colors."

In his latest "Dispatch from the Bolivarian Revolution", blogger Eric Wingerter (BoRev.net, 7/18/09) asks, "Man oh man, how bad does AP reporting have to get before a group of Latin American studies professors from top U.S. universities decides they need to take out a FULL-PAGE AD in the Columbia Journalism Review to respond?"

His answer is "Bad bad"--as illustrated in the ad's text:

The Associated Press has breached basic journalistic principles with these false reports:

[Hugo] Chávez initially suggested the synagogue attack might have been carried out by Jews eager to portray his government as anti-Semitic.

—AP February 8, 2009

Only five months after urging world leaders to back their armed struggle, he [Chávez] said that armed guerrilla movements are "history."

—AP June 10, 2008

THESE STATEMENTS ARE FALSE, and on both occasions, the AP has admitted that they are false.

Saying that Chávez "never called on anyone to support the armed struggle of the FARC—rather, he had called on the FARC to abandon armed struggle," the ad goes on to explain how, "far from blaming Jews from an attack on a synagogue, he denounced the attack as anti-Semitic and took prompt action to find and arrest the attackers."

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Corrupt Data: Taking On the Claim that Chávez Is On the Take" (11–12/06) by Gregory Wilpert.

Also listen to letter signatory NYU history professor Greg Grandin on FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Greg Grandin on Honduras Coup" (7/3/09).

Robin Varghese's 3 Quarks Daily link (6/30/09) to a Boston Review piece purporting that, "over the past four years, Venezuela has witnessed alarming signs of state-directed anti-Semitism, including a 2005 Christmas declaration by President Hugo Chávez himself," has engendered some homespun media criticism from a commenter logged-in as "Pepito," who argues that "this canard about Chávez and Chavismo being anti-Semitic has been debunked several times in the past, but it comes backs very often."

In response to the excerpt's lead example of "15 heavily armed men" who attacked a Caracas synagogue, "held down two guards, robbed the premises, and desecrated the temple" with swastika graffiti, Pepito illustrates exactly "how ridiculously inaccurate that article is" with "a couple of points":

Not mentioned in that article was that the attack on the synagogue was perpetrated by a band of thieves led by a night guard who had worked at the place for years and who used the anti-Semitic slogans so they could throw off the police investigation. They were captured a few days later with a hundred thousand dollars they had stolen from the synagogue's vault.

After the attack on the synagogue, Chávez himself talked live on TV to Elias Farache, president of one of Venezuela's main Jewish associations, and gave him his word that he was not going to tolerate anti-Semitic attacks in his country and that he was going to protect the Jewish community. Farache himself denied the government's supposed culpability in the attack....

Also, the article does not mention that Fred Pressner, president of [the Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela, a group] representative of Venezuela's Jewish community, repeatedly complained to the Wiesenthal Center, asking them to consult with the Venezuelan Jewish community before accusing Chávez of anti-Semitism.

Pepito's parting shot at 3 Quarks Daily and the Boston Review: "Pointing the finger at Chávez's government for some isolated anti-Semitic events in the street while ignoring the fact that for many years (and before Chávez was elected) there have been small groups with anti-Semitic leanings (usually formed by conservative ultra-Catholics) is disingenuous, to say the least." See the FAIR Media Advisory: "Editing Chavez to Manufacture a Slur: Some Outlets Spread Spurious Charges of Anti-Semitism" (1/23/06).

Blogger Jonathan Schwarz (A Tiny Revolution, 6/24/09) has noted that when "CBS ran a story about the latest batch of Nixon tapes made public... they included a section of a February 21, 1973 conversation with Billy Graham that showed Nixon at his psycho best," addressing anti-Semitism thus: "This has happened to the Jews, happened in Spain, it happened in Germany, it's happening, and now it's gonna happen in America if these people don't start behaving. It may be they have a death wish."

But the real problem comes in CBS's quote of the Graham response: "Well, they've always been through the Bible at least, God's timepiece. He has judged them from generation to generation and yet used them and they've kept their identity." Schwarz asks us,

What do you think about Graham's response there? True, he didn't stand up to Nixon's rambling insanity, but at least he deflected it. He comes out looking pretty good!

Too bad this is how the conversation actually went (mp3):

Graham: Well, you know I told you one time that the Bible talks about two kinds of Jews. One is called the Synagogue of Satan. They're the ones putting out the pornographic literature. They're the ones putting out these obscene films.

[three minutes of talking]

Nixon: It may be they have a death wish, that's been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries.

Graham: Well, they've always been through the Bible at least, God's timepiece. He has judged them from generation to generation and yet used them and they've kept their identity.

Schwarz closes with a further "P.S.": "CBS is also wrong that Nixon was talking about anti-Semitism being generated by the shooting down of the Libyan plane. Nixon was actually responded to Graham being angry about a rabbi criticizing a new attempt at widespread evangelism." But this is all part of a great tradition in the U.S. press: Corporate media have diligently worked to clean up the good reverend's image for just about as long as he's been around.

Taking down "Michael Wolff's fat masterpiece of sycophancy about Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News," Murdoch Archipelago co-author Bruce Page (CounterPunch, 5/15/09) counters Wolff's "astigmatic lens of gossip" with "a true outline" of Fox/Wall Street Journal mogul Murdoch's roots:

Rupert's father, Sir Keith, founded the dynasty during World War I as a dirty-tricks minion for "Billy" Hughes, probably Australia's nastiest prime minister. His cover myth as a heroic war reporter has been so thoroughly dismantled that now it impresses none but family retainers and--of course--Mr. Wolff.

At Versailles, Keith was Billy's ever-present aide in striving to make the Peace Conference into a vicious cock-up, rich in racist and imperialist content. Curiously, the pair would have had zero leverage but for the failure of a plot of Keith's, which sought in 1918 to remove Australia's battlefield commander on the Western Front, John Monash, for being an unheroic Jew.... Monash's divisions led the British breakthrough...which...put Germany--suddenly, unexpectedly--at the Allies' mercy.

[Australian] soldiers hoped there might be space for a decent peace. But politicians of various brands thought otherwise, and none outdid Keith's boss in vengeful demagoguery, destroying at last all the credit Monash had gained for Australia. Billy and Keith weren't prime authors of the Versailles debacle in 1919. But none toiled harder in its cause.

Page sees "two items of present relevance" in "this ironic history" of the treaty that precipitated the rise of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich: "We see the core of the Murdoch business: offering political propaganda services, disguised thinly as journalism," and then "there's the stunning Murdoch talent for seizing the wrong end of any available political or military stick," calling "Keith's estimate of Monash and Rupert's of the pseudo-warrior Bush Jr... reciprocals, to be sure, but identically crass."