[Peace-discuss] Demographics and more on Shanley

[C. G. Estabrook]

	An American Jew Laments Decline in Jewish Influence; Roe v. Wade:
	Nixon's Ultimate Dirty Trick? ... Shanley DA Aims Higher in
	Hate-filled Massachusetts
	By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Across the world the Jewish lobby in America is accorded extraordinary
power, almost to the mythic levels of guileful effectiveness once
attributed to the British Secret Service. And in truth, MI6, as the Secret
Service was also known, never approached the Jewish lobby in overall
clout. But these days, if you read analyses by American Jews of where
their power is headed, the tone is often dour and the forecast grim. They
say, in the words of the American anti-Arab fanatic Daniel Pipes, "the
golden age of the Jews" in America has passed its zenith.

This may seem strange when there is universal recognition that George Bush
may well be the most pro-Israel president in the nation's history, when
the role of the so-called "neocons", usually short-hand for the more
fanatical supporters of Israel in American public life, is identified as
crucial in pushing for the war on Iraq and now on Iran, when pro Israel
votes in the US Congress sweep through by margins of over 90 per cent.

But listen to a man like Illinois-based political analyst Richard Baehr,
writing in American Thinker. Baehr could fairly be described as a Zionist
ultra. He can also read numbers objectively. Recently he outlined in a
speech and then in his publication the reasons he sees for concern.

The indices of dismay for Baehr show most clearly in population
statistics. From 1990 to 2000, he points out, the Hispanic population grew
by 13 million. just over 50%. The black population grew by 4 million, or
11%. The Asian population grew by 4 million, or over 60%. The population
of non-Hispanic whites grew by 6 million or 3%. Non-Hispanic whites
accounted for 22% of the country's population growth during the ten year
period, Hispanics for half of it. Non-Hispanic whites are now 70% of the
population, headed for 50% by 2050.

Meanwhile, from a peak of 6 million American Jews, or 4% of the US
population in 1950, Jews are now just about 5.2 million in number,
according to the latest Jewish population surveys, or a bit less than 2%
of the US population, and the trend points down to maybe three million in
the next but one generation.

Baehr laments that "With an intermarriage rate around 50%, and a fertility
rate of 1.6 children per Jewish woman, Jews are committing population
suicide." He takes a swipe at liberal American Jews, most of them
supporters of legal abortion: "American Jews marry late and often never
marry, and have fewer children as a result. The commitment to abortion
rights as a pre-eminent political issue strikes me a particularly odd,
with Jewish numbers declining at an accelerating rate. Rather than being
aggressive advocates of abortion rights, Jews might more rationally be
advocates of carrying unwanted pregnancies to term, and then giving up the
babies for adoption. This is especially the case since many Jewish women
marry late and have difficulty conceiving."

Reading Baehr you might even conclude Planned Parenthood is not a
Malthusian plot sponsored by the Rockefellers, but Nixon's deftest dirty
trick, fixing the Supreme Court to pass Roe v Wade in 1973. Huh? Listen to
Baehr: "In fact, if no abortions had occurred in the last 30 years, and
the total number of abortions were added to the populations of each state
since Roe v Wade was adopted, Al Gore would have been running for
re-election in 2004, since the states he won in 2000, such as California,
and New York, would have had several more electoral votes in that year,
and Bush's states fewer. Gore would have been elected regardless of the
Florida outcome." Kevin Phillips, move over! This makes the southern
strategy look like chickenfeed. That's why Nixon needed the hundred grand
from Howard Hughes, to bribe Harry Blackmun. You don't think Nixon would
have figured this out? One of these days I bet we'll find Operation Herod
buried in Nixon's papers.

Back to Baehr's nightmare of Muslim breeders. As Jews decline in number,
he points with a quivering finger at the Arab and Muslim population in
America heading in the other direction. Baehr cites two academic studies
putting the US Muslim population at between 1.8 and 2.9 million, with the
total Arab/Muslim community "probably about 3.5 million, two thirds the
size of the Jewish community."

Turning to political influence in the form of financial contributions,
Baehr notes that in the 2004 campaign, four Jews - George Soros, Peter
Lewis, Steven Bing and Herbert Sandler - gave over $80 million to
Democratic political funds. While "this level of political giving by a few
individuals has never happened before in the history of the countryIsrael
is not the leading agenda item for any of them. They were Bush-haters,
pure and simple. This is true of much of the political money that comes
from Jews in Hollywood (from where Bing hails). Israel is not the
motivator for their contributions."

Baehr goes on to portray, somewhat fancifully, the Democratic Party as
increasingly falling into the clutches of what he sees as the ultra,
Israel-hating left, headed by Michael Moore, the movie director. I seem to
remember Moore taking enormous pains last year to absolve Israel from any
unpleasing role in Fahrenheit 911, by the simple tactic of not mentioning
that troublesome nation. By "Israel hating" Baehr appears to mean anyone
who speaks up in any way for justice for Palestinians or criticizes Ariel
Sharon. Seeing the Democratic Party as a lost cause for Israel over the
long term, and on the decline as a political force in America, he extols
the alliance between Christian Evangelicals and Orthodox Jews and the
Republican Party.

To anyone used to lamenting the overwhelming tilt towards Israel in
intellectual circles and the media it is bizarre to find Baehr writing
that he sees a "Distancing of media, academic and intellectual elites from
Israel" and to hear him citing Frank Luntz, a pollster, as saying "there
is great danger ahead, because American elite opinion is not sympathetic
to Israel, and it is getting worse. Elites view Israel as aggressive and
warlike and Palestinians as victims. Academia is the community that is the
least sympathetic to Israel, since lefty radicals from the 60s run the
faculty at most schools."

Happily for the blood pressure of his audience, Baehr did open his often
gloomy survey with these words: "There is good news and bad news. The good
news is that the reports of the decline of Jewish and pro-Israel
influence, and the rise of Arab/Muslim influence in the American political
system are at the moment greatly exaggerated. The bad news is that change
is underway, and the relative shift described above is occurring."

...

Here Comes Martha Coakley, an HRC Look-Alike

Paul Shanley, 72, now sits in prison, in the first days of his twelve to
fifteen year sentence. By all accounts he's bearing up well, even though
shamefully convicted by a jury solely on the basis of the "recovered
memory" of one accuser, whose supposed recollections were not
corroborated, indeed were contradicted by all witnesses. Meanwhile the
triumphant DA, the ghastly Coakley, readies herself for higher things.

    Dear Alex,

    You were quite right in your piece on the conviction of Paul Shanley
("Back to Salem", www.counterpunch.org/cockburn02192005.html) to name
Martha Coakley, current Middlesex county DA, as the lead villain in the
terrible legal travesty that was visited upon the Amirault family in
Massachusetts. I had nothing to do with the case, do not even live in
Massachusetts anymore, but I graduated from the same college, in 1983,
that the criminal prosecutor graduated from in 1975, Williams College.

    Martha Coakley's unwavering role in prosecuting Gerald Amirault,
despite the waves of revelations about child abuse prosecutorial fraud,
marks her as one of the most shameful examples of the immorality of
elite-tax-bracket American higher education. And yet, as any attentive
Boston Globe reader may surmise, Coakley  ­ a DLC Democrat ­ has copied
all of Hillary Rodham Clinton's moves, down to same hairstyle, same public
waxiness, same upward-career trajectory, and is poised to become a major
candidate for governor of the commonwealth of Massachusetts. Williams
styles itself the greatest college in the world, and invited Coakley in
2003 to be its convocation speaker. She's on all manner of boards and
conferences on "Protecting our Youth" and other soccer-mom drivel. Should
she answer for the decades Gerald Amirault lost to be inside prison
because of her uneducated zeal to witch-hunt? Of course. Will she? Not
given our track record of protecting scheming "elite" college maniacs.

    Martin White

"Perhaps the Shanley affair is part of some very long-term trend", writes
another CounterPuncher:

    "I grew up in Brookline, and remember reading about local murder cases
in the Globe. It struck me, forcefully at the time that there never seemed
to be much evidence against those convicted. I don't know if this was a
local phenomenon, even whether my perceptions were correct, but over the
years I have come to feel that people just don't have any conception of
evidence any more. The WMD scandal is just the political manifestation of
a trend already recognizable in the criminal justice system, most
prominently with the recovered memory nonsense. Indeed even the growth of
Christian fundamentalism pretty well requires such a trend."

By coincidence, just before I read this note, I had been reading a posting
by Jude Wanniski on his Polyconomics site about the origins of
anti-Semitism where he mostly quotes some racy stuff about the 13th
century by Will Durant and was brooding on how the accusations of ritual
murder by Jews of Christian kids echo in the frenzies about ritual
penetration of children in day care centers in the US in the 1980s and
1990s, with consequent life sentences for many including the Amiraults.

So there's the historical conjuncture, and in the case of Massachusetts a
long term local conjuncture going back to the Salem trials. In many
criminal matters, our courts are definitely swinging towards some new
form, in which emotional factors are being given pride of place, and
sentencing is placed in the hands of the victim, most egregiously in the
case of Shepard's father in Wyoming in 1998 who told the accused in the
courtroom that he held power of life or death over them, a claim that had
some validity. "I am going to grant you life," Matthew's father declared
in court, and as JoAnn Wypijewski pointed out here last November this was
the ultimate expression of privatized justice.

...