"An Empire of Their Own"

Even though it is hard to imagine now, Gentiles originated America’s film industry. Thomas Edison patented many of the early cameras and projection techniques and launched the first major studio. The man who pioneered the modern movie was D. W. Griffith, a brilliant director whose techniques and films are still studied by film classes around the world. His silent classic Birth of a Nation¹ held the title of most-watched movie in the world until Gone with the Wind.²

Birth of a Nation is a film version of The Clansman, a novel by Southern writer Thomas Dixon.³ The film depicted the fratricidal conflict of the War Between the States and the oppression of the White people during the "Reconstruction" era. It portrays the Klan as a heroic organization that freed the South from the violence and tyranny of Black and carpetbagger rule and paved the way for reuniting the American nation.

When Birth of a Nation appeared, Jewish organizations actually went into the courts attempting to ban the film in a number of major cities, and they applied financial pressure on theaters to keep it from playing. A special showing of the film in the White House garnered an enthusiastic review by President Woodrow Wilson and initiated an irrepressible groundswell of support. The Jewish forces in the fledgling film industry realized that it was far more effective to control the film industry from the inside than to have to fight rearguard actions to suppress films that they did not want the American people to see.

The attempted Jewish banning of Birth of a Nation was not the first or the last attempt at Jewish censorship in America. Many people are surprised when they learn that Jewish groups actually were able to ban a play by the greatest writer of English literature: William Shakespeare. Performing Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice⁴ became forbidden in New York City in the early years of the 20th century at the behest of the Jewish community, which claimed that it was anti-Semitic.

In the 1990s, the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) did a running series of all Shakespeare’s plays that included Merchant of Venice. A long editorial introduction attempted to condition the audience into interpreting the play as sympathetic to Shylock, the central Jewish character who demanded the Gentile’s "pound of flesh." The lines in which Shylock defends himself in court, pleading "If you prick a Jew doth he not bleed," were emphasized to encourage the viewer to interpret the play as favorable to Jews. Interestingly, the Jews made no such interpretation of the play when they intolerantly argued for making performance of the play illegal. Recently, the Canadian Jewish News reported an attempt by Jews to suppress the play in a Canadian school district.⁵

As they have gone from outsiders to now thoroughly dominating the Western governmental and media establishment, many Jews have shifted from strong defenders of free speech to some of its most willful suppressers.

The Jewish students who dominated the "free-speech" movement at Berkeley in the mid-’60s sang the praises of free speech for the purpose of inviting to campus the likes of the filthy-mouthed and repugnant Allen Ginsberg and the violent, openly Communist, black revolutionary Angela Davis. Today they attempt to silence anyone who dares to speak before a student audience on the issues raised in this book.

In some cases they have reverted to similar tactics to their campaign against Merchant of Venice. In 1976 a national Black talk show broadcast on PBS, Black Perspectives on the News, invited me to Philadelphia for an appearance. After the taping, but before the show aired, the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish organizations discovered that I mentioned the historically well-documented Jewish role in the Colonial slave trade. Jewish activists Sol Rosen, Harry Bass, and Peter Minchuck sought an injunction in the Common Pleas Court in Philadelphia, asking the judge to censor the program. The Jewish judge, Stanley Greenberg, issued an order demanding that the program not be aired until the tape was delivered to him and "approved." Luckily, the First Amendment Coalition and attorney David Marion appealed the decision to the State Supreme Court and won. However, the Jewish methods of censorship were by no means exhausted.