Perspectives

Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle's Lee Chottiner Goes Talmudic on Blacks

By the N.O.I. Historical Research Department | Last updated: Mar 8, 2011 - 1:05:23 PM

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(FinalCall.com) - In a recent article in the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, “editor” Lee Chottiner felt compelled to register his outrage at the wise and intelligent Black people at Pittsburgh's August Wilson Center for African American Culture who invited the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan to address a town hall program on March 11. Mr. Chottiner, a Caucasian, referred to our beloved Minister as having “two faces” and suggested by inference that the Black hosts of the event made a choice of speakers they would soon be made to regret. But in so doing, Mr. Chottiner reveals to the world the only Jewish face that Black people have ever known—the unkosher and irredeemably racist face of a plantation massa.

Before imparting a specific reprimand, Mr. Chottiner—having no other purpose than to make them afraid—runs down his “wanted list” of unacceptably audacious Black co-conspirators. He identifies several entities: the August Wilson Center, its leader, André Kimo Stone Guess, The Bev Smith Show, and its producer the American Urban Radio Networks, before leveling the open intimidation: “It is troubling that some mainstream leaders, including elected officials … provide him [The Hon. Min. Farrakhan] with the level of credibility that, A, he does not deserve, but, B, would not be afforded to any other known anti-Semite in this country.” The rest of Mr. Chottiner's racist noise is simply cut-and-pasted from the hate-site of J. Edgar Hoover's favorite son and protégé, the Anti-Defamation League's Abraham Foxman.

One can search one hundred years of Pittsburgh's Black press in vain for any mention or discussion or commentary or concern about any Jewish event in which Caucasian Jews invite other Caucasians to address their Caucasian selves over any of the issues they faced. You simply will never find it. As a rule Blacks consider Caucasian Jewish business dealt with and shared among Caucasian Jews none of their Black business.

Mr. Chottiner, though, clearly feels that his shvartses (Jewish word for niggers) should not meet and discuss anything without the express written consent of the Pittsburgh Jewish synagogue officials. Some negroes tremble under this kind of pressure—but many fewer today than yesterday. Mr. Chottiner's arrogance and belligerence have roots in a long, long history of racist Jewish exploitation, including:

• The extraordinary Jewish dominance of the African slave trade, including a Jewish monopoly over the notorious Gorée Island trade;

• Jewish control of the cotton plantations; in fact, one of the Jewish Lehman Bros. for a time controlled ALL of the cotton trade in Alabama;

• And the Jewish financing of neo-slavery—that is, the Black sharecropping system. Even W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that it was Jewish merchants that had re-enslaved the newly emancipated Blacks.

The new Black awakening in Pittsburgh and around the world has incited the slave-massa tendencies of Mr. Chottiner's people. His arrogance is stunning, but by no means surprising, and it is only outshone by his pitiable historical ignorance.

And though Black newspapers are respectful of communal boundaries, the Jewish newspapers of Pittsburgh have NEVER felt any such reluctance. Their penchant for management of Black affairs goes way back. Indeed, Mr. Chottner's whole approach to the August Wilson Center is simply a sequel to a heritage of such overlordship:

In 1895, Pittsburgh Rabbi Samuel Greenfield was editor of the Pittsburgh Jewish Criterion. On the one hand he wanted to see Blacks “educated,” because he thought, on the other, it would allow Blacks “to overcome the prejudice which he [the Black man] inspires either through his own actions or through his own ignorance.” Then the rabbi called us the “uneducated and unprincipled children of Ham.” The racist rabbi was, of course, referring to that odious teaching of the ancient Babylonian rabbis that inspired the slave traders—that Blacks are “cursed by God” and thus intended by Him to be servants of White people forevermore. And that is one Biblical teaching—though totally fabricated—that Jews have faithfully followed.

Mr. Chottiner then puts what he thinks is a zinger to Mr. Guess to let him know just how offended the Jews are. He asked Mr. Guess if the Wilson Center would ever permit a member of the Ku Klux Klan to speak there. Mr. Guess replied smartly: “Absolutely, if it were in the scope of what we were trying to do.” Brother Guess must have read The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Vol. 2, where he found an entire chapter dedicated to the ugly history of Jews as supporters, financiers, weapons suppliers, and members of the Ku Klux Klan. Jews loved the Klan because they were terrorizing Blacks into laboring on cotton plantations for the profit of the many hundreds of Southern-based Jews in the worldwide cotton business. Mr. Guess probably saw on page 421 the 1924 photograph of Fairfield, Illinois, businessman Emanuel Steiner receiving fifty roses from hooded Klansmen at a public ceremony. If the Wilson Center did ever invite the KKK, as Mr. Chottiner suggested, it might very well be one of his fellow Caucasian Jews who would show up!

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But there is more of this Pittsburgh history of Jewish press racism. When a group of Jews produced the most racist movie ever made, the 1915 Ku Klux Klan recruitment film called Birth of a Nation, the Pittsburgh Jewish Criterion's Jewish reviewer insisted that the Klan was “well-meaning.” Before Birth of a Nation was a movie, it was a play called The Clansman, and the Jewish Criterion newspaper was almost breathless in its endorsement when it rolled into town. It particularly liked the play's depiction of how the South “threw off the yoke of the negro” and “reasserted the rights of white manhood and the honor of white womanhood.” It was “sumptuously staged,” and “sensational” with “all the elements for enduring popularity.” It was “a vital, powerful and coherent drama,” and the newspaper advised Pittsburgh Jews to get their seats early.

One 1921 Pittsburgh Jewish newspaper told a Noah & the Ark story, saying the ark was provisioned with “popcorn and nigger babies.” Another relays a “funny story” to its Jewish readers, in which the characters refer to Blacks as “niggers”—twice. Indeed, for many years the Jewish press in Pittsburgh referred to Blacks as niggers without hesitation. One article prominently carried the opinion of a Caucasian Jew that the Biblical patriarchs may not have been “Nordic” white, but he “could not remain silent,” when Blacks claim the fathers of the bible were negroes! “[B]ringing Moses and David into the negro family…enters the whole Jewish people into the negro race and that is something we cannot stand.” Of course, recent Jewish scholarship, by Prof. Shlomo Sand and others, has definitively affirmed as fable the claims of Caucasian Jews that they have any genetic connection to the Jews of ancient Biblical times.

In 1912, a Jewish person quoted in the Pittsburgh Jewish newspaper commented on the racial make-up of the land that Jews eventually stole from the Palestinian owners who actually do have a genetic connection to the ancient Hebrews. They ranged, he thought, “from the blue-eyed blonde boy of the European Jew to the black, curley-headed nigger type …”

If Mr. Chottiner is now speaking for the Jews of Pittsburgh—and no responsible Jews have objected to his misrepresentation—he has some lengthy atoning to do before Blacks should be expected to consider his stupid and false claims against the good name of the Hon. Min. Louis Farrakhan. And those Blacks who continue to give credence to the ig'nant bluster of the Chottiners of the world ought to consider the Jews' resume of repression before they take them seriously.

(This article was written by the Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam. For more information visit http://WWW.NOI.ORG/HRD.)