Joe Schoffstall went to New York’s Zuccotti Park last week and
found a man holding aloft a hand-lettered sign with the slogan,
“Arrest the Bankers.” Schoffstall, a young reporter for Brent
Bozell’s Media Research Center, asked the man a simple question:
“What are your thoughts on Israel?”
The protester’s response,
captured by the MRC’s video camera, was memorable: “Israel is
white Europe — eastern Europeans — who has
[sic] usurped and occupied Arab land, and
they have displaced the indigenous Arab Palestinian people at
gunpoint. When Israel was founded in 1948… in 1949, Israel secretly
began working on a nuclear… atomic nuclear program to wipe out her
neighbors. So the hatred of the Arabs for Israel is
understandable.… And I’ll say that the Jews control Wall Street.
Google ‘Jewish billionaires.’ Google ‘Jews and the Federal Reserve
bank.’ Google ‘Jews and Wall Street.’ America’s finances is
[sic] controlled by the Jews. Wall Street, the media, the
legal profession — Jewish money is the engine in politics.… The
Jews commit more white-collar crime than any other ethnic group on
the earth and they go unprosecuted because they can buy their way
out of it.”
It would be unfair to conclude from this one demented
example that the “Occupy Wall Street” movement is significantly
motivated by, or deliberately tolerant of, paranoid anti-Semitic
conspiracy theories. But the rant recorded by Schoffstall’s camera
crew was not the only example of such kook-fringe beliefs among the
mobs that have descended on lower Manhattan and other urban spaces
across America in the weeks since these anti-capitalism protests
began. Documented examples of anti-Semitism among the “Occupy”
crowds were sufficiently numerous to prompt the Emergency Committee
for Israel to release an online ad questioning support for
the demonstrations voiced by Democratic Party leaders, including
President Obama, who said the movement “expresses the frustrations
that the American people feel.”
Obama’s invocation of “the American people” and their
“frustrations” might permit some other conspiracy theorists to
suggest — with far better evidence — that the protesters camped
in Zuccotti Park are part of a deliberate effort by the president
and his party to undermine the free enterprise system. Several
conservative commentators have interpreted “Occupy Wall Street” in
light of Saul Alinsky’s radical maxim: “Pick the target,
freeze it, personalize it,
polarize it.” Others see the anti-capitalist mobs in
the context of the “Cloward-Piven
Strategy” to foment a crisis that would bring about a socialist
revolution. This suggestion cannot be lightly dismissed. One of the
architects of that 1960s-era strategy, Professor Frances Fox Piven,
is an active supporter of the movement and
told a public-radio interviewer: “I think we
desperately need a popular uprising in the United States.” Piven
also denounced the financial industry at a Sept. 29 rally in New
York where, in a bizarre call-and-response speech, she
told the crowd: “You’ve heard people say they’re greedy, and they
are greedy. You’ve heard people say that they are thieves, and they
are thieves. But they’re also cannibals, because they are eating
their own.”
Any reasonably well-informed person who listens to Piven’s
counter-factual assertions (e.g., that we have budget deficits
“because big business and finance has stopped paying taxes”) need
not wonder why so many allegedly smart young people have joined the
“Occupy” movement. Piven is one of the nation’s most influential
academics, past president of the American Sociological Association
and a “Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Political Science”
at the graduate school of the City University of New York.
Professor Piven is not merely a teacher, but a teacher of teachers,
whose former pupils are now themselves influential professors at
many of the nation’s most prestigious institutions. And it is
perfectly plausible to say that Professor Piven’s most illustrious
student, dating back to the era when she taught at Columbia
University, is the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue.
Six decades after Bill Buckley warned of the academic
elite’s collectivist drift in
God and Man at Yale, we now behold the rotten fruit of
that tree: An Ivy League graduate in the White House praising the
inchoate rage of anti-capitalist mobs, a rage incited by the likes
of Professor Piven at rallies that draw heavily from among the
brightest students at our nation’s finest universities.
Whereas the anti-Semitic idiot interviewed by Schoffstall
could be dismissed as a marginal kook whose views are not
representative of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement as a whole, the
same cannot be said of Professor Piven and the young protesters who
enthusiastically echoed her words in Zuccotti Park. Those who
declare that capitalists are “thieves ” and “cannibals” are
proclaiming doctrines propagated by the academic left for more than
half a century. Students haven’t been taught to understand
capitalism, but rather to hate capitalism. Hating is
easier than understanding, after all, and elite students nowadays
are far more likely to be assigned the Marxist history of
Howard Zinn than to be schooled in the economics of Ludwig von
Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman.
Hostility toward the free market is one of those hateful
prejudices that, to borrow a phrase from Rodgers and Hammerstein,
“you’ve got to be carefully taught.” Idiots on the fringes of the
“Occupy” crowd who demonize Jews may ultimately be less dangerous
than the allegedly well-educated young people who form the core of
the mobs that vilify capitalism. And as Ronald Reagan once
observed, “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re
ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t
so.”
