Jews Order City of Charlotte To Remove Monument of Jewish Confederate Slaveowner

[maz]

I bet they wanted to get rid of it before the blacks found out about it. I also suspect that they vandalized the statue with BLM spray paint too, considering how they always like to draw swastikas on the sides of the synagogues and headstones.

A national push to dismantle memorials that glorify racism might help the Jewish community of Charlotte, N.C. achieve a long-sought goal: the permanent removal of a monument to Judah Benjamin, the most prominent Jewish figure in the Confederate government.

Erected in 1948 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the memorial to Benjamin is a short granite stone set in the sidewalk on South Tryon Street, across from a FedEx printing and shipping center, in downtown Charlotte. The monument is supposedly erected near where Benjamin stayed at the home of a local Jewish merchant while on the run from the Union army.

The Jews of Charlotte, despite paying for the stone at the time it was raised, were never enthusiastic about it, and many have grown up without knowing it was there. Now a new generation of community leaders want it gone.

"The monument has never been celebrated in the Jewish community here," said Rabbi Asher Knight, the leader of Temple Beth El, a Reform community in Charlotte.

The monument is one of only a handful of memorials or monuments to Judah Benjamin, considered by some historians to have been "the brains of the Confederacy." As a U.S. Senator representing Louisiana, Benjamin used his famous oratorical skills to defend slavery and the Confederate cause. He owned 140 slaves on his 300-acre sugarcane plantation outside New Orleans.

In 2017, following a wave of Confederate monument razings and topplings across the South, Beth El's board voted unanimously to push Charlotte's city council to remove the Benjamin marker to a different location or find another use for it.

It's a subtle piece — less than a statue, more than a plaque — in a subdued black stone. Earlier in June, a group of local artists "discovered" it as they painted a massive mural reading "Black Lives Matter" along the street right in front of it. The monument now looks over the M in "Matter."

"I knew something was there, but I never actually stopped to read and digest the information until we were all on the block painting it," said Jimi Thomson, an artist who goes by the moniker Dammit Wesley, and who helped curate the mural. "It was hidden in plain sight."

Since then, the long-ignored monument has become a subject of discussion in Charlotte — and has been subject to vandalism: Someone spray painted "BLM" across the inscription, which reads "In memory of Judah P. Benjamin, Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State of the Confederate Government."

A crowbar, or a jackhammer, or some other metal object has been used to bash hunks of granite off the stone.
On Tuesday morning, Mike Wirth, a local Jewish artist who is planning to create a cover to go over the monument, arrived at its location to take measurements and found a crew of workers from the Charlotte Department of Transportation removing the stones that cover its concrete setting.

'The most objectionable of their race'

The monument occupies a strange place in the annals of Jewish Charlotte.

It was created at the behest of the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which held its national convention in Charlotte in 1948. The Daughters reached out to the local Jewish community, then made up of Temple Israel, its synagogue built in 1915, and a fledgling community in Temple Beth El, then with only about 30 families. The two communities agreed to provide the funds to raise the monument, as a "gift" to the chapter.

"You have to remember that this was 1948 — this was the whitest of white Charlottean Christian groups you can have, approaching the two Jewish synagogues about honoring an important Confederate Jew, just post-Holocaust," said Knight.

But then a banker from New York intervened: He wrote a letter to the Charlotte chapter of the Daughters, demanding that they not partner with the local Jewish community. The Daughters, the letter read, were under the impression that Charlotte's Jews were "good Jews."
"But be not deceived – the so called 'good Jews' are 'good' only because they are as yet unrevealed, and even the 'good' ones work hand in hand with the most objectionable of their race," the letter continued, according to an account of the incident written by Harry Golden, a Jewish journalist and essayist, and recounted in his 1958 book "For 2¢ Plain."

The banker's letter led the local chapter to rescind their offer to the Charlotte Jewish community, which was upset by the incident.
"Innocent bystanders, they now found themselves with a major controversy and an unwanted slab of stone," Golden wrote. "Many were all for dropping the granite into the Catawba River and forgetting the whole thing as quickly as possible."

In a twist, the national and state Daughters organizations decided to go against the local chapter, and push the city to install the monument. At a dramatic city council meeting, the Daughters of the local chapter tried to argue that the marker would interfere with people getting on and off city buses — but they were overruled.

But by then, the Jewish community had essentially washed its hands of the monument — and tried to forget about it, Knight said.
It remained in the community's consciousness, however. Knight's predecessor at Beth El, Rabbi Judith Schindler, organized classes with the synagogue's teenagers around the monument, to learn about Benjamin's history and the role Jews played in the Confederacy. When Knight took over as senior rabbi, he said, Schindler told him that it would be his responsibility to see the monument taken down.

Earlier this month, Knight and Rabbi Howard Siegel, of Temple Israel, along with the presidents of each temple, wrote a letter, reprinted in the Charlotte Observer, urging Jewish Charlotteans to demand the monument be removed.

"We have been putting tons of pressure on the city council and on the mayor to have the thing removed," Knight said.

Wirth, the artist, said that he still plans to make the planned monument cover, and keep it on the monument as long as it remains on Tryon Street, so it will no longer be a visible sign of Confederate nostalgia. The cover will feature a quote from the Jewish poet Emma Lazarus ("Until we are all free, we are none of us free") as well as Jewish-inflected Black Lives Matter slogans: No tzedek, no shalom (No justice no peace), and "Jews for Black lives."

Wirth said that he and others involved in the monument's removal were planning to continue their pressure campaign on city hall. "But that was gonna be a long road," he said. "So we thought, instead of letting it show its message, let's make it show our message."
Update, 6/24/2020, 2:20 p.m. — This article has been updated to reflect that the statue was removed Wednesday.

I think that Jews are lying about objecting to the legacy to one of their fellow Jews.

Judah P. Benjamin has another memorial, on a plantation no less, in Florida.

Judah P. Benjamin Confederate Memorial at Gamble Plantation Historic State Park


A stately antebellum plantation home preserved and restored

Welcome to Judah P. Benjamin Confederate Memorial at Gamble Plantation Historic State Park

This antebellum mansion was home to Major Robert Gamble and headquarters of an extensive sugar plantation.

It is the only surviving plantation house in South Florida. It is believed that Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin took refuge here after the fall of the Confederacy until his safe passage to England could be secured.

In 1925, the house and 16 acres were saved by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and donated to the state. Today, the mansion is furnished in the style of a successful mid-19th century plantation. Guided tours of the house are given six times a day, Thursday through Monday, and there are picnic tables on the grounds.

The visitor center is open from 9 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. and 12:45 p.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday through Monday; it is closed on Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day and New Year's Day.

The park is located in Ellenton on U.S. 301 South.

[yankeedoodle]

Found a few articles about Benjamin a few days ago.

"Non-Jews didn't make statues of him because he was a Jew, and Jews didn't make statues of him because he was intermarried and not really associated with the Jewish community," said Jonathan Sarna, the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University and author of "Lincoln and the Jews." ...

Because of his less-than-revered status, Benjamin has not become a focus of the current movement to remove statues of Confederate figures that has roiled the nation and shaken President Trump's administration. ...

Some historians say Jews should be more aware of how their history was deeply intertwined with the Confederacy — and slavery.

In general, Jews were more welcomed in the South than in the North because Southern WASP elites saw themselves as an agrarian aristocracy and thus viewed Jews as valued mercantile complements. For example, Birmingham, Alabama had both a German Jewish country club and a Russian Jewish country club.
In contrast, post-Puritan Northern elites saw Jews as commercial competitors.
Judah P. Benjamin: The Gay Jewish Confederate Leader Without a Statue to Tear Down
https://vdare.com/posts/judah-p-benjamin-the-gay-jewish-confederate-leader-without-a-statue-to-tear-down

Also, there are a few more memorials to Benjamin found in this link: 
Has Judah P. Benjamin Been Canceled or Memory-Holed?
https://vdare.com/posts/has-judah-p-benjamin-been-canceled-or-memory-holed

Benjamin was not canceled, he has instead been largely memory-holed as part of Jews' desire to not reckon with the sizable and popular role that Jews played the South in the time of slavery, the Confederacy, and the Jim Crow Era.

Here's a memorial in Fayetteville, North Carolina:


Here's the Judah P. Benjamin monument in Louisiana:


That's him on the Confederate $2 bill.

[maz]

Good find! I didn't know about the other monuments.

I need to read Vdare more often.

This article came out right after the Charlottesville event.

Why Has Judah Benjamin's Monument Not Been Removed?[/url

Rather than the typical slurs such as "racist," "bigot," and "supremacist," used to describe his Confederate counterparts, Benjamin is instead remembered as an extraordinary figure, brilliant, competent, remarkable, the only genius in Davis' cabinet, and a man among men. Here we have a man with all the same qualifications anti-Whites use to condemn Whites Southerners, save for one apparently redeeming fact; he was Jewish.

Given this single attribute, is it a coincidence that Judah Benjamin's memorial still stands? Is it sheer luck that his name and reputation as a slave-owning Confederate cabinet member hasn't crossed the lips of the vocal, anti-White left? Is it by fluke that his monument remains unmolested by vandals while the names of our Southern forefathers are slandered, and the monuments dedicated to their memory have been dismantled?

Or could it be that a certain globalist coterie, with a vested interest in dismantling White Identity via erasure and denigration of their history, would rather Benjamin's reputation not be brought to light for fear that they, too, might suffer the same fate reserved for White people?

[yankeedoodle]

From Phil Giraldi:
The Memorials to Judah Benjamin: Jewish Slave-Owners Exempt from Attacks by BLM?
https://ahtribune.com/us/4264-judah-benjamin.html

The current wrath directed against anything or anyone having had anything to do with slavery or even racial discrimination includes destroying historical memorials and monuments as well as changing names that have stood for more than a century. Much of it has been focused on white nominally Christian males, mostly of Anglo-Saxon stock, understandable as the United States was a child of Great Britain and a majority of the country's leaders for nearly two centuries came from families descended from the British Isles.

Slavery in the United States version is, of course, seen in black and white terms but slavery in a broader historical context is much more complicated. There have been slaves since ancient times through the eighteenth century in many countries and most of them have been white. Sometimes they were called something different. Indentured servants were de facto slaves, as were the serfs in Russia, who were tied to the land and were not liberated until 1861.

The very word slave comes from Slav, as many of the slaves in the Middle Ages were from the Slavic parts of the Balkans bordering on the Adriatic, where mostly Muslim seagoing raiders would attack coastal villages and carry off the inhabitants. Italy was likewise afflicted and the numerous small castles and improvised forts along the Italian and Croatian coastlines were intended to providing a refuge for villagers against the corsair slavers.

In the United States currently progressives of all types and colors are flocking to the revolutionary banner hoisted by Black Lives Matter (BLM) and other associated groups. Not surprisingly, given the liberal leanings of American Jews as well as their historical connections, Jewish groups have been actively engaged in the ongoing movement for racial justice. American Jews have played major roles historically in the founding and financial support of some of the most important civil rights organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1909, Henry Moscowitz was a co-founder the NAACP. Photos of the boards of directors of the various organizations well into the 1970s frequently reveal a majority of white Jews seated together with minority blacks. Kivie Kaplan was, for example, the national president of the NAACP between 1966 and 1975.

But this characterization of Jews as benefactors for the civil rights movement has also produced some curious omissions in the accepted historical narrative of who did what to whom in the slavery trade. It is well established, though never taught in schools, that Jews from Britain and Holland were involved in the African slave trade that prevailed after the European discovery of the Americas. In the United States, concentrations of Jews in the American south were in slave trading centers, notably in Charleston South Carolina, Savannah Georgia, Richmond Virginia and in New Orleans Louisiana. Many of the Jews themselves owned slaves.

The debate over Jewish involvement in both the business side of the slave trade as well as in actually possessing slaves comes down to "proportionality." As the historical record makes clear that Jews in the south were engaged in both the importing and selling slaves as well as exploiting slave labor, the question becomes whether they were central to the process or just one of many identifiable groups that were peripherally involved in what was a major segment of the southern economy. The issue became extremely heated in the 1990s when mostly black academics argued that the Jewish role was pivotal while mostly Jewish professors responded that it was insignificant. In March 1995 the American Historical Association (AHA) got involved by issuing its first ever , coming strongly down on the Jewish side of the argument, which should surprise no one. AHA argued that it was wrong to use historical analysis to vilify one group before citing a memo by two Jewish professors which asserted that the role of their co-religionists had been marginal.

For those who are interested in more on the discussion, the following article might be helpful, though it is on a Jewish website, cites only Jewish sources for it debunking of the idea that Jews might have been heavily engaged in the slave trade, and also brings in the most disreputable sources that say the contrary. It nevertheless concedes that Jews were involved in the slave trade and also possessed slaves, though it seeks to minimize the extent to which that was true. Much more interesting is a short book by a distinguished Wellesley History Professor Tony Martin "The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront." https://www.amazon.com/Jewish-Onslaught-Despatches-Wellesley-Battlefront/dp/0912469307/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1SWLHKW0FBBN4&dchild=1&keywords=the+jewish+onslaught&qid=1593262227&s=books&sprefix=the+jewish+onslaught%2Caps%2C137&sr=1-1 Martin describes in some detail how he was subjected to a "hysterical campaign" by Jewish organizations and fellow academics to have him discredited and fired after he assigned to his class on African-American history a short reading on the Jewish role in antebellum slavery.

Be that as it may, everyone should be aware that delving around in the past can be a messy business with no easy answers and little in the way of lines drawn between right and wrong. But in this case, the current unrest brings one around to a chap named Judah Benjamin. Judah was born in the West Indies to a British-Jewish family before winding up in Charleston and eventually New Orleans, where he became a lawyer and made a fortune. He was elected to the U.S. Senate from Louisiana. Among other investments, he owned a sugar cane plantation that included 140 slaves.

In March of 1861, Benjamin was named Attorney General of the Confederacy by President Jefferson Davis, whom Benjamin knew from the Senate. Davis would sometimes say that Benjamin was "the brains of the Confederacy." That same year, Benjamin was also named Confederate Secretary of War, a post that he later resigned to become Secretary of State, a position that he held for the remainder of the conflict. It was the second most powerful position in Richmond's Confederate bureaucracy.

When the Confederacy fell, Benjamin fled to London and eventually to Paris, where he rebuilt his fortune by again practicing law. Benjamin died in Paris in 1884 at the age of 72. He was buried in the Paris Père Lachaise cemetery with a simple headstone inscribed "Phillipe Benjamin." In 1936, the United Daughters of the Confederacy paid for a monument to be placed over his grave.

So, the question becomes, with BLM and other wreckers trying to destroy America's historical monuments, to include those commemorating the Founding Fathers, Union Commander Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, Christopher Columbus, Catholic saint Junipero Serra and even abolitionist Hans Christian Heg, why is it that Judah Benjamin has somehow been missed? He was a slave owner and worked as a lawyer in New Orleans where there was a thriving slave market as well as an economy built around cotton exports, which were driven by slave labor. He eventually became the number two man in the southern Confederacy, which is being regularly denounced as fighting a war to maintain slavery.

Well, of course the answer is quite simple. No politician or journalist who wants to stay employed would dare to publicly link Jews and slavery. BLM is also extravagantly funded by various guilt ridden foundations and other folks who are no doubt sensitive to the fact that there are certain issues that cannot be raised, and the people with their hands out know perfectly well what they can and cannot do or say to keep the money flowing.

For what it's worth, there are a few monuments to Judah Benjamin sitting around just waiting to be trashed. https://religionunplugged.com/news/2020/6/23/jewish-confederate-leader-judah-benjamin-overlooked-as-statues-topple-across-the-south  In 1948, Charlotte, North Carolina's two Jewish congregations, Temple Israel and Temple Bethel, erected a marker on South Tyron Street at the site of the demolished house of merchant Abraham Weil where Judah Benjamin and Jefferson Davis found shelter in April 1865 as they fled the northern army. To their credit, the congregations are now seeking to have the memorial removed.

Also of note is the 5-foot-high pink marble column topped by a sundial located in Sarasota, Florida at the point where Benjamin escaped from the United States. The monument is inscribed "Near this spot on June 23, 1865, Judah P. Benjamin, Secretary of State of the United Confederacy, set sail for a foreign shore."

Yet another stone marker is located at 9 West Main Street in Richmond, Virginia, identifying the location of Benjamin's residence during the Civil War. Another stone marker can be found in Fayetteville, North Carolina. It recalls how Benjamin "attended Fayetteville Academy on this site." There is still another stone monument in Bradenton Florida erected by the Judah P. Benjamin chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy and in North Carolina there is a Highway Historical Marker Program plaque that marks the site of Benjamin's no longer existing boyhood home.

But the most impressive historic site commemorating Benjamin's legacy is the Judah P. Benjamin Confederate Memorial at Gamble Plantation in the town of Ellenton, Florida, south of St. Petersburg. The historic site is maintained as a state park by the Florida Department of Natural Resources and also by the Judah P. Benjamin Chapter No. 1545 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. It is the only surviving antebellum plantation in central and south Florida and includes the mansion and gardens as well as a visitors' center. A large bronze memorial plaque commemorates Benjamin. Nevertheless, the connection with Benjamin is admittedly tenuous as he only sought refuge there briefly in 1865 during his flight to England.

[maz]

I know you hate Jones, but he had on a guest who came on and claimed that Jehuda Benjamin was the founder of the KKK. He made this claim around the 13:47 mark, if you can stand even that much. Who knows if it is true, but this guy sounds a hell of a lot more versed in this topic than me!

BISHOP LARRY GAITERS: THE COMING DESTRUCTION OF BLACK LIVES MATTER