Rupert Murdoch's Jewish origins:
a matter of controversy
A well placed correspondent with connections to the newspaper
world (who has asked to remain anonymous) reports to us:
"I shall quote exactly what Candour [a
rightwing British journal edited by A K Chesterton] said in
its June 1984 issue (vol. XXXV, no. 6):
BIOGRAPHICAL
details of [Rupert] Murdoch's past are sketchy and often
contradictory. One reads that his grandfather was an impoverished
Presbyterian minister who migrated to Australia from England, that
his father was a low-paid reporter for a British newspaper in
Australia, and yet, young Rupert divided his time between his
family's suburban home near Melbourne and the family's sheep ranch
in the country. He was educated first at the fashionable Geelong
private school, and went on to the elitist and aristocratic Oxford
University in England.
"Rupert's father Sir Keith Murdoch [see below]
attained his prominent position in Australian society through a
fortuitous marriage to the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family,
née Elisabeth Joy Greene. Through his wife's connections,
Keith Murdoch was subsequently promoted from reporter to chairman
of the British-owned newspaper where he worked. There was enough
money to buy himself a knighthood of the British realm, two
newspapers in Adelaide, South Australia, and a radio station in a
faraway mining town. For some reason, Murdoch has always tried to
hide the fact that his pious mother brought him up as a Jew...
And that, as I am sure you know, makes him a Jew according to the
law of the Talmud, and indeed according to the present laws of
Israel.
Spotlight [a rightwing Washington
weekly published by Willis Carto] in fact examined Murdoch in
considerable depth in no fewer than three issues, 30th January and
6th and 13th February [1984]. My friend Ivor Benson whom I
regarded as a very judicious observer and commentator, reckoned,
along with Spotlight, that his meteoric ascent was completely
artificial, and that he was a front for far more powerful super-rich
subversives, Michel Fribourg, Armand Hammer and Edgar
Bronfman, "all of them part of a super-rich 'Zionist Mafia'", to
quote Benson, who added: "By comparison with these three, Murdoch is
just an ambitious midget who has been given the job of drawing all
the public attention away from those who make the real decisions."
(Benson's Behind the News, March 1984)
Could well be. Certainly I can confirm that at least part of his
meteoric ascent was artificial. I remember my brother-in-law [a
former editor of The Times] telling me, at the time of
Murdoch's acquisition of The Times, that it was a strange
business. Murdoch was by no means the highest bidder.
For my part, I myself have always had good personal motives to
take a favourable view of Murdoch, because my brother-in-law was
easily his favourite editor of The Times, and, when my
brother-in-law died (in office), Murdoch treated my sister
completely fairly, from a financial point of view, without making
the slightest difficulty. But, despite that reason for some
prejudice in his favour, I have always been forced to the judgement
that he has been a force for unspeakable evil.
- His was the "breakthrough" which made the tabloids genuinely
pornographic.
- In my opinion at least, his policy with The Times
completed its collapse from its position as the most respected
newspaper in the world.
- And his republicanism makes me sick -- it is not for the
purpose of creating a better world, but quite obviously purely
destructive. And I could go on.
PS: QUITE recently, a Times correspondent actually resigned
because he was not allowed to report properly what was going on in
Israel, or even to use accurate words to describe facts which were
undisputed. He stated: "Murdoch's executives were so scared of
irritating him that, when I pulled off a little scoop by tracking,
interviewing and photographing the unit in the Israeli army which
killed Mohammed al-Durrah, the 12-year-old boy whose death
was captured on film and became the iconic image of the conflict, I
was asked to file the piece 'without mentioning the dead kid'. After
that conversation, I was left wordless, so I quit." Unusually
courageous for a modern journalist.
|