Jewish writer profits from white supremacist "threat"

[maz]

Leonard "Lenny" Zeskind

http://www.leonardzeskind.com/

Leonard Zeskind went on a flurry of media appearances starting just one day after the Holocaust shooting with his convenient book, "Blood and Politics" that he just happened to have already written and ready to go to capitalize on the recent  white supremacists shootings.

He is the president of an organization (Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights) which doesn't appear to exist anywhere but in news articles on the internet.

Here is Zeskind on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman to give us some perspective, the Jewish perspective of course, on the Holocaust shooting and to sell his book that was published just last month.

http://i4.democracynow.org/2009/6/11/shooting

Here is the LA Times promoting Zeskind's race baiting propaganda. Even the book reviewer seems to be amazed at the timing

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/ne ... 6688.story

What favorable timing, then, for Leonard Zeskind's "Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream," which addresses all of these issues, provides a context in which to assess them and offers an extended look inside a little-understood cultural zone that is really a panoply of small groups.

Unless you too resent ZOG (the Zionist Occupation Government), Zeskind's decades-long perspective will help explain why, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were 926 hate groups active in the United States last year -- a 4% increase from the previous year but representing a 50% increase since 2000. Demographically speaking, this involves a tiny slice of the populace: Zeskind estimates that 30,000 men and women constitute the white nationalist hard core, with an additional 250,000-plus forming a periphery of supporters. In a country of more than 300 million people, that is one-tenth of 1%.

Apparently, he is one of those Marxist revolutionary style change agents from the seventies and this one writer has him pegged for a fearmonger, race baiter and intellectual fraudster.

http://www.cashill.com/intellect_fraud/ ... tchdog.htm

Leonard Zeskind owes Kansas City an apology. A big, fat one. The mischievous Zeskind has bamboozled The Kansas City Star and The Jewish Chronicle into believing his prattle about the "abyss of mayhem and murder" America faces at the hands of its "white nationalists." And in the process, he has scared thousands of otherwise sane Kansas Citians half to death.

Zeskind is a so-called "watchdog," Kansas City's most celebrated, the winner of a $295,000 McArthur "genius grant," the preferred source on racial issues for papers like The Star and The Jewish Chronicle and political organizations like the Mainstream Coalition. Over the last decade, in fact, no fewer than ten different Star writers have gotten Zeskind's breathless take on everything from Pat Buchanan to the Ku Klux Klan. Star reporter Judy Thomas has herself gone to the well with Zeskind in at least eight articles. Even the otherwise savvy Bill Tammeus has praised Zeskind as an "expert on extremist groups."

Yet for all his expertise, the Amazing Zeskind has chosen to keep mum about certain hard-core extremist groups of his acquaintance. And with good reason. He himself has carried their banners.

In 1978, Zeskind penned an article for the journal, Urgent Tasks, titled "Workplace Struggles in Kansas City." In the article, Zeskind talks about the value of a grass roots "school of communism," one conceived "to destroy the marketplace, not sell at it." The journal, by the way, took its title from a quote by Lenin. Not John. Vladimir Ilyich. In a 1980 article for the same journal, Zeskind denounced the American military "as a tool of U.S. Imperialism."

In 1981 Bruce Rodgers, the current editor of The KC Pitch, profiled Zeskind in a City Magazine article on radical activism. He describes Zeskind as elusive, paranoid, "near hysterical." As to Zeskind's beloved STO, says Rodgers, "They surface on occasion to distract and intimidate non-violent groups working for social change."

How Zeskind would transform himself from a feckless neo-Stalinist into a lion of Kansas City society is one of those great, only-in-America kind of success stories. To understand it, however, we need to make a quick detour to Mother Russia.

The opening of the Soviet vaults and the release of the decrypted Venona files has revealed whole new bags of KGB dirty tricks. A favored Russki prank was to send racist threats to high profile groups and attribute those threats to the Jewish Defense League, the John Birch Society or other right wing organizations. As British author Mark Shields notes in his study of the Mitrohkin files, the Soviets hoped "to weaken the internal cohesion of the United States and undermine its international reputation by inciting race hatred."

Back home, our local Marxists were playing much the same game. In 1979 the game got out of hand when the Communist Worker's Party (CWP) provoked a lethal shoot-out with the increasingly absurd Ku Klux Klan. In its aftermath many of these groups, and others more innocuous, united to form the National Anti-Klan Network (NAKN). In 1982 the radical publication Workers Vanguard described the NAKN as a loose coaltion of Southern ministers and "the remnants of the pro-Peking Stalinists."

In 1986, as Laird Wilcox notes, "the NAKN changed its name to the Center for Democratic Renewal (CDR), perhaps in an attempt to blur its radical roots." At that time, Leonard Zeskind was listed as its "director of research." Despite his affection for totalitarian governments, Zeskind was now presenting himself to Kansas City's Jewish community as a fearless champion of civil rights, "the target of a number of anti-Semitic racist groups." In 1989, The Jewish Chronicle naively praised him as "one of America's leading Nazi hunters."

Apparently, Zeskind came to the task well armed. According to a 1991 issue of Details magazine, "Lenny" was the proud owner of a shotgun and a Mini .14, "the far right's weapon of choice," and was hoping for a 9mm handgun for his next birthday.