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The Associated Press’s Faustian Bargain with Hitler’s Germany

April 4 2016

In the 1930s, the Nazi government began forcing news agencies to close their offices in Germany; by the end of 1941, the Associated Press (AP) was the only one still reporting from inside the Third Reich, and it continued to do so for the rest of the war. Philip Oltermann describes how this came to be so:

The New York-based agency ceded control of its output by [agreeing] to the so-called Schriftleitergesetz (editor’s law), promising not to publish any material “calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home.”

This law required AP to hire reporters who also worked for the Nazi party’s propaganda division. One of the four photographers employed by the Associated Press in the 1930s, Franz Roth, was a member of the SS paramilitary unit’s propaganda division, whose photographs were personally chosen by Hitler. . . .

AP also allowed the Nazi regime to use its photo archives for its virulently anti-Semitic propaganda literature. Publications illustrated with AP photographs include the bestselling SS brochure Der Untermensch (“The Sub-Human”) and the booklet The Jews in the USA, which aimed to demonstrate the decadence of Jewish Americans with a picture of New York’s mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, eating from a buffet with his hands.

Read more at Guardian

More about: AP, Germany, History & Ideas, Media, Nazis

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic