On March 4, Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corporation, received a human relations award from the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and gave a speech denouncing growing anti-Semitism. On March 24, however, a division of Murdoch’s company is scheduled to publish a book by a Weather Underground terrorist who believes that Israel is an imperialist lackey of the United States that must be destroyed.

Ironically, the book, Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen, is by Mark Rudd, who is himself Jewish. But as former Congressional investigator Herbert Romerstein points out in his report, “What Was the Weather Underground?,” the American Jewish community was a particular target of the Weather Underground when Rudd was a top official of the terrorist organization and its predecessor, the SDS.

He notes that one communiqué from the Weather Underground group in California that called itself the New World Liberation Front threatened, “These Zionist ruling class pigs will not butcher poor people fighting for a just life without suffering drastic repercussions. The Jewish-American ruling class cannot protect themselves well enough for a sufficient amount of time. They should consider this carefully! We will show the Jewish-American ruling class how extremely vulnerable they are, here in the belly of the beast. Their lives will be in grave jeopardy if mad-dog Rabin imposes this massacre on the Palestinian people… We call on all comrades to move directly against all Jewish-American ruling class bloodsuckers if Rabin moves to massacre freedom fighters! These ruling class dogs are influential both here and in Israel and are extremely vulnerable!”

The Weather Underground was still writing in 1982, “Zionism is White Supremacy. Zionism is an integral part of white supremacist movement in the U.S. It is rooted in the defense of white privilege over colonized people.”

Romerstein, who investigated and exposed extremists in organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and Rudd’s SDS, notes evidence that “Some Weather Underground activists were born into Jewish families, but they were as anti-Semitic as their gentile born colleagues.”

That is the case with Rudd, who has stated that he continues to see the U.S. as an “empire” which, along with its allies such as Israel, will eventually be defeated or collapse.

“My friends in SDS taught me, quite correctly, that the world was in revolt against U.S. domination,” Rudd said in November 2005. “That was why the Vietnamese were fighting so hard. I learned to admire the Vietnamese and the Cubans and the Chinese and the Russian peasants who had stood up to make a new society.”

His anti-Semitism apparently was an outgrowth of his anti-Americanism.

“The only way Israel has survived so far has been to ally with the sole remaining imperial power in the world,” is how Rudd sees it. “But all empires fall, as Jewish history so clearly tells us.” He then added, “Maybe they should have allied with China.”

He went on: “Israel is America’s future: militarized, racist, religio-nationalist, corporate, riven with so many internal splits and hatreds that only the existence of a perpetual enemy keeps the nation from exploding. If we don’t organize to stop the current direction in this country, thirty years from now we will be Israel.”

In the speech, which is available on the same website hawking his forthcoming book, Rudd also declares, “There is a well-documented continuity over the last almost forty years between the Labor Party and Likud in their policies toward the Palestinians and settlement in the Occupied Territories. I am heartbroken over the moral and spiritual costs of the Jewish State to the Jewish People. I challenge anyone who thinks of me as a traitor to my people or a self-hating Jew, both of which I’ve been called, to visit Palestinians in the West Bank or East Jerusalem for as little as one-half day. Every Jew needs to see the misery and humiliation which our Jewish nationalism and racism have wrought.”

It is apparent that Rudd has no regard for Israel’s own desire for peace and security for its people. That is because the Weather Underground regarded Israel as an entity that had to be destroyed, just like the United States.

According to Larry Grathwohl, the FBI informant inside the organization, the Weathermen started a newspaper called “The First Next Time,” which ran an article “on the Arab guerrillas’ fight against the Zionist Jews for Palestine.” The article described Israel as a “colonial-type creature imposed by forces outside the area” and the Jewish masses “being led by Zionism toward another disaster.”

Together with his comrades Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who specialized in bombing police stations, Rudd is now a prominent member of the Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS), where he continues to inflict damage on America and its allies in the world. A new report examines this dangerous development. Rudd, who says in his book that there are now 200 chapters of a “new SDS” on the colleges and universities, has already received favorable publicity from the “Campus Progress” arm of the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress.

In a pre-publication copy of the book, which is scheduled for release in conjunction with a massive Harper Collins publicity campaign targeting college students and young people, Rudd describes how he approved the planting of a bomb at Fort Dix, New Jersey, when a dance was going to take place for U.S. servicemen and their wives or girlfriends. Hundreds could have been maimed or killed. But that prospect didn’t bother Rudd. He says he wanted the U.S. Army to have a “taste” of what it was doing to the communists in Vietnam. The bomb prematurely exploded, killing three members of Rudd’s terrorist group. He dedicates his book to them.

Although Murdoch is the chairman and CEO of News Corporation, his board has a role in deciding whether publication of this book should go forward. That puts Viet D. Dinh, a key member of the board of Murdoch’s News Corporation, in a difficult position. Dinh is the Georgetown University Professor who served as U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy from 2001 to 2003 and played a prominent role in the war on terror. 

His bio at Bancroft Associates, a firm he runs, notes that “Dinh conducted a comprehensive review and revision of Department of Justice priorities, policies and practices to ensure that all available resources are dedicated to protecting America against terrorist acts.”

How will it look for that bio to now include information that he sits on the board of a corporation that published the terrorist “memoir” of a Communist terrorist who hates America and Israel?

Dinh has another reason of a more personal nature to be concerned. Born on February 22, 1968, in Saigon, Vietnam, Dinh came to America as a refugee from communism in 1978. He serves on the advisory board of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Center. He understands the sacrifices that were made by over 58,000 brave Americans who gave their lives to keep South Vietnam free.

Those U.S. military personnel and our Vietnam veterans tried to prevent the Communist takeover that Rudd promoted and was cheering for. Those men, and their wives and girlfriends, may have been among the intended targets of the Weather Underground anti-personnel bomb that Rudd’s comrades planned for Fort Dix.

For Murdoch, publishing this book tests his commitment to Israel’s survival, a subject of his AJC speech.

In his speech to the American Jewish Committee, Murdoch said that “In Europe, men and women who bear the tattoos of concentration camps today look out on a continent where Jewish lives and Jewish property are under attack—and public debate is poisoned by an anti-Semitism we thought had been dispatched to history’s dustbin.”

Ironically, his HarperCollins publishing arm is now threatening to unleash the writings and voice of an anti-American and anti-Israel activist on a nationwide U.S. audience of mostly young people. But there is still time for Murdoch. The book has been advertised but is not officially out. He can and should immediately order his underlings to stop publication of this poison and throw whatever copies of the book that have been printed into the dustbin of history.

Murdoch, who became a naturalized American citizen in order to own American television and radio stations, should put America above profit.

A decision to kill the Rudd book will cost money, and there will be those on the political left crying “censorship.” But there is no legal or moral requirement that News Corporation go through with the publication of this book. In addition, Murdoch, a billionaire, can afford to take the financial loss. Even if he couldn’t afford it, he should take the loss anyway. It is the right thing to do.   

If Murdoch goes ahead with publication of the book, he will have sown the seeds of more anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. His “human relations award” from the AJC will be viewed as a tragic joke.

•    Contact information for News Corporation executives can be found here.
•    Names of all News Corporation board members can be found here.  

Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and can be contacted at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

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