Is Anti-Semitic Hit on Bernie Sanders a Harbinger of Mud to Come?

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

18 June 15

 

Whether incompetent or intentional, NPR produces stunning WTF?! moment

residential elections usually bring out the worst in campaign tactics, such as the George Bush/Karl Rove whisper campaign in South Carolina in 2000 that played to the bigot vote by calumnizing John McCain with false rumors of his “black child.” The pattern is an American chestnut of the worst sort, since any effort to correct the record also spreads the defamation. 

A perhaps apocryphal story about Lyndon Johnson vividly illustrates the way it works. “We’ll put out the rumor that my opponent fornicates with pigs,” Johnson supposedly said in saltier language. When an aide said that his opponent didn’t fornicate with pigs, Johnson replied, “No, but it will be entertaining to watch him deny fornicating with pigs.” 

National Public Radio recently took part in what looks like a “fornicate with pigs” ploy, only instead of “fornicating with pigs,” the proposed slur was having dual American-Israeli citizenship. The moment caused some chatter on the internet, but little or no mainstream news coverage. At this point almost nothing is clear about how public radio came to be part of a “fornicates with pigs” dirty trick, but it deserves as much scrutiny as it can get. This is aWTF?! moment that should never have happened, and surely should not happen again (good luck with that). This WTF?! moment happened during a radio interview, with the parties in separate studios miles apart. In the 24th minute of the 50-minute interview, the program host made this statement:

Diane Rehm: “Senator, you have dual citizenship with Israel.”

This is a false statement for which, as Diane Rehm later admitted, she had no factual basis. She had only an unconfirmed listener comment on Facebook alleging the claim (more about that in a moment). Nevertheless, on the June 10 Diane Rehm Show on National Public Radio, Rehm asserted that easily-checked falsehood as fact in her interview with presidential candidate and Independent senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders. Sanders responded unhesitatingly, directly, and unambiguously:

Bernie Sanders: Well, no, I do not have dual citizenship with Israel. I’m an American…. I’m an American citizen, period. 

By any credible reckoning, Senator Bernie Sanders is NOT an Israeli citizen, he is only an American citizen. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Polish immigrant parents. He is Jewish. All this has been easy to confirm for more than 30 years. But Rehm, having asserted the falsehood once, chose to double down without a pause:     

Diane Rehm: I understand from a list we have gotten that you were on that list. Forgive me if that is — [Sanders interrupts] 

Rehm made no effort to offer any detail about the “list,” nothing about its authorship or its provenance or its reliability or how NPR researchers had confirmed and re-confirmed the accuracy of its substance, nothing like that. Rehm did not even mention who else was supposedly on the “list.” Sanders interrupted to say:

Bernie Sanders: Now that’s some of the nonsense that goes on in the Internet, but that is absolutely not true.

Rehm did not defend her “list,” she did not say it was not “nonsense,” she did not claim it was “true,” but she reacted as if she believed it was true. She tripled down on the falsehood. Her next response first implied suspicion of Sanders’ answer, then expanded the uninvestigated falsehood to the whole Congress:

Diane Rehm: Interesting. Are there members of Congress who do have dual citizenship, or is that part of the fable?

At that point Sanders figuratively threw up his hands and said of Congressional dual citizenship, “I honestly don’t know.” Then he returned to the original question about his own alleged dual citizenship, concluding: 

Bernie Sanders: … I get offended a little bit by that comment, and I know it’s been on the Internet. I am an American – obviously an American citizen, and I do not have any dual citizenship.

At that point, Rehm says, “All right,” and drops the citizenship question. Rehm, who is of Arabic Christian heritage, switched immediately to a question about Palestinian statehood, which Sanders supports. Rehm, having asked Sanders about the Middle East before launching the “dual citizenship” provocation, seemed to be at least tacitly accusing Sanders of having an improper loyalty to Israel. Earlier, Rehm had asked Sanders questions about Iraq, ISIS, and Syria. Sanders had called ISIS a “barbaric organization” that must be defeated and had called the war in Iraq “a disaster.” Sanders had gone on to outline his own approach to the Middle East generally:

I do not believe the United States can or should lead the effort in that part of the world. What is taking place now is a war for the soul of Islam.

Saudi Arabia, it turns out, has the third-largest military budget in the world. You got Turkey there, you got Jordan there, you got the UAE there. You have – countries are going to have to step up to the plate and lead the effort with the support of the United States and other Western countries.

But here is my nightmare, and I see it moving forward every day. You’ve got a lot of Republicans there who apparently did not learn anything from the never-ending war in Afghanistan, learned nothing from what happened in Iraq, and want us in a perpetual warfare in the Middle East.

I am strongly opposed to that.

I don’t have a magic solution. I’m not sure anybody does. But what has to happen is the Muslim countries in that area, there has got to be a strong coalition. They’re going to have to get their hands dirty. They can’t sit aside and wait for the United States of America, our soldiers, our taxpayers, to carry the ball for them. They’re going to have to lead the effort.

In her next breath, in a complete non sequitur, Rehm unleashed the canard that Sanders has “dual citizenship with Israel.” Coming after a call for Muslims to resolve their differences, Rehm’s slam played like an accusation, although exactly what the accusation really meant she failed to make clear. WTF?! 

The anti-Semitic source of the “list” is easy to discover

When Diane Rehm claimed to have a “list” of dual Israeli-American citizens, she reminded people of the red-baiting fearmonger of the 1950s, Wisconsin Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, who all too often claimed to have lists of “Communists” but never produced the lists or any other evidence. Despite this, in his heyday, McCarthy’s smears were taken seriously by some, and innocent people suffered from the national witch hunts inspired by McCarthyism. 

Diane Rehm’s response to Sanders – I understand from a list we have gotten that you were on that list. ­– is pure McCarthyism. She does not provide the list, she does not offer any credible reason to take the list seriously, and most slippery of all, she says she only “understands” that Sanders is on the list. In other words she is challenging him with baseless hearsay, which is about as far from professional journalism as it gets.

With little effort, as politifact.com demonstrated in a June 14 post, the reality is much uglier than a mere failure of professionalism. The supposed “list” is actually many lists in various forms going back to 2007, none of which appear to have any reliable basis in fact nor any checkable sources for their claims. 

One of the earlier versions of “List of Politicians with Israeli Dual Citizenship,” which reappears frequently, apparently dates from around 2007. Authorship is credited to “Dan Eden,” who may or may not be a staff writer/editor for a website called viewzone.com, self-described in part this way: “The topics on viewzone vary widely. The most popular deal with science, mysteries, conspiracies, spirituality and interesting or unusual phenomena.” The site has no easily-used search function. The Israeli Dual Citizenship story is not immediately apparent, but it’s there, accessible by a Google search for “Dan Eden dual Israeli citizenship.” Another, more prominently listed story by viewzone editor “Gary Vey” (aka “Dan Eden”) is titled “Why Yemen is the Next Warfront,” and explains:

In 2001 I was the guest of the Yemeni government because I had accidentally made a discovery that I had no right to make. I discovered strong evidence that the Ark of the Covenant is buried in an archaeological site in a desert outpost called Marib. I know how it sounds ... but keep reading.

Bush administration apparently filled with dual Israeli-Americans

That’s what Dan Eden claimed in his story, which also referred to events in 2009, when the Bush team was out of office. Never mind that. Eden’s long list of Israeli-American dual citizens includes Paul Wolfowitz, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Elliott Abrams, Michael Chertoff, Michael Mukasey, Douglas Feith and some 30 others. 

Had Diane Rehm or anyone on her staff done the most basic fact-checking, they might have thought to ask something like: how credible is it to assume that Bernie Sanders runs withthis crowd?  Then, if they’d looked, they would have found a partial answer near the top of the story, where Dan Eden explains his take on Israeli dual citizenship:

Before I begin I'd like to day something important. There is a new law -- the so-called "Hate Speech" law, that just passed the House and is expected to pass the Senate and become law very soon. It was originally designed to guard against discrimination of oppressed minorities but was soon recognized as a way for Israel to forever end any criticism of the state of Israel and Zionism. When it is law, this page, and many like it will be deleted from the internet as yet another mile marker of the infringement of truth and free speech by certain dual-nationals at the expense of true and patriotic Americans. Enough said.

But “this page” is still there, casting doubt on the actual power of the vast Zionist conspiracy. On Facebook there’s another version of Dan Eden’s story, dated 2011, which includes the same cast of Bush characters, but conveniently omits Eden’s Zionist conspiracy language. 

That language is back with intensity on the website Educate Yourself, which carries the Dan Eden dual citizenship story and a June 11, 2015, piece by Ken Adachi titled “Bernie Sanders and Israel’s Law of Return,” which speculates that by telling Bernie Sanders he was a dual citizen, rather than asking him if he was, Diane Rehm may have been conspiring with Sanders or others to minimize the story:

If she had asked him, he would have answered "no" and the moment would not have carried that much weight or interest, but telling him that he's an Israeli dual citizen gave him the perfect opportunity to get on his high horse soapbox and create an instant front page story that reduces the dual Israeli citizen allegation to the stuff of Wing Nuts & Tin Foil Hat cadets. It's only a speculation, granted, but I think it should be mentioned.

Israel’s Law of Return does not confer citizenship automatically

After offering an analysis of Israel’s Law of Return, arguing that the law provides an easy, simple, and automatic way for Jews around the world to obtain Israeli citizenship, Adachi writes:

And do you think that ardent, pro-Israel fifth columnists like Bernie Sanders, or Charles Shummer, or Dianne Feinstein, or Jane Harman, or Barbara Boxer, or Al Franken, or Joseph Lieberman, or Benjamin Cardin, or Michael Chertoff, or Richard Pearle, or Paul Wolfowitz, or any of the other former or current American government officials alleged to hold dual Israeli citizenship, are going to tell the government of Israel that they will not accept automatic citizenship status after their 90 day Oleh visa waiting period has run its course? What d'ya think?

Well, politifact.com thinks these people have misread the Law of Return and that it does NOT provide an easy, simple, automatic path to citizenship. According to PolitiFact:

Applying for citizenship under the Law of Return "is a formal procedure which you could expect normally to take a number of months except under emergency conditions," said Yoram Hazony, president of the the Herzl Institute, a Jerusalem think tank. "There is no such thing as receiving Israeli citizenship without submitting a formal request to the Israeli government."

Indeed, guidance from the Jewish Agency -- a nonprofit group that coordinates immigration into Israel -- lists a number of required steps, including an online application, the filing of documentation, and an interview. (The Israeli Embassy in Washington did not return emails for this article.)

Legitimate question is obscured by its anti-Zionist packaging

Unlikely as it is that Bernie Sanders has dual Israeli-American citizenship, the larger question is legitimate, at least in theory. In the abstract, it’s obvious that no coherent government should be populated by people with divided national loyalties. That division clearly constitutes at least the appearance of a conflict of interest, and more likely an actual conflict of interest. That makes it legitimate for any government to require that its members have citizenship only in the country they are expected to govern. That also makes it a legitimate inquiry, when there is evidence of dual citizenship, to ask if a given office holder has dual citizenship. But dual citizenship is not illegal or unconstitutional.  The US Constitution in Article II lays out very limited qualifications to be president:

No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States. 

A dual citizen is still “a citizen of the United States,” and a natural born citizen is still a citizen – that’s all that is required. In the past there were laws barring dual citizenship, but in 1967, the Supreme Court struck down most of them as unconstitutional in Afroyim v. Rusk (387 U.S. 253). In that case the question was not just holding dual citizenship, but exercising it by voting in another country’s election. 

While dual citizenship remains a limited legal issue, it’s clearly a relevant political question (as Republican senator Ted Cruz of Texas vividly illustrated recently, when he relinquished his relatively uncontroversial Canadian citizenship). But for dual citizenship to rise to legitimacy as an inquiry, there needs to be some jot of evidence that it might be true (Ted Cruz was born in Canada; his dual citizenship was a fact.). Lacking evidence, the inquiry becomes a smear. In Sanders’ case, Diane Rehm’s only “evidence” was an anonymous “list” of unproven veracity. 

Worse, as Diane Rehm could and should have known, her list was most popular with anti-Zionists, who show no apparent interest in substantiation. Sanders was not on earlier lists, but apparently started appearing on Congress lists of senators and representatives around 2012. The basic criterion for getting on such lists seems only to be that the official is Jewish. The Jewish Journal found Sanders in the Congressional list posted May 2 on a Facebook page replete with traditional anti-semitic tropes.

Diane Rehm made a non-apology “apology” to Sanders and the public

Diane Rehm’s two-paragraph apology centered on her having stated that Sanders had dual citizenship rather than having framed it at a question. She blamed the issue itself on a listener who posted on her show’s Facebook page. With regard to Sanders, she noted: “He does NOT have dual citizenship…. I should have explained to him and to you why I felt this was a relevant question and something he might like to address.”

Indeed, Diane Rehm should have explained why she thought the dual citizenship question was relevant, but she didn’t. She didn’t explain anything. She treated her audience with disrespect.

Diane Rehm did not explain her process, so we still can’t know if her motives were actually innocent, incompetent, or in some way malevolent.  She die not explain how much or how little examination she gave dual citizenship before making it an accusation (which her “apology” seems to justify as “an issue that has come up over the years”). She offered no evidence that the issue was relevant to Sanders. And she said nothing to acknowledge or disown the baggage of bigotry that burdens any honest consideration of dual citizenship with Israel. 

NPR ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen probed some of these issues. In response to Rehm claiming to being a part of putting the rumor to rest, Jensen wrote: “Far from putting anything to rest, Rehm has now taken a falsehood from the fringes of the Internet and moved it into the mainstream conversation.” But mostly Jensen wrote sympathetically of Rehm and seemed most interested in keeping NPR’s skirts clean: NPR only distributes the Diane Rehm Show, Washington radio station WAMU produces the show and employs Rehm, Jensen emphasized at the start. Jensen seemed as oblivious as Rehm claimed to be to the political reality that anything to do with Israel is a hot-button issue.

Given the Israeli context of the issue, it’s even more important that Diane Rehm (and Elizabeth Jensen) failed to mention, much less confront the possibility, that this was an orchestrated political dirty trick in which she could be seen as an all-too-willing participant. The Bernie Sanders campaign is emerging as a real and serious threat to established powers of all sorts, most obviously the Clintons. What could be better for Sanders’ opponents than to see him ensnared in a diversionary spat in which his Jewishness can be turned against him? 

Diane Rehm had a chance to come clean and chose not to. She continues to have that chance. But so far, her behavior has been slippery, incomplete, and only minimally honest. All in all, her performance is enough to make one think that perhaps “Diane Rehm fornicates with pigs.” 

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William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.