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Neal Gabler's Sneak Previews cohost Michael Medved recounts that Gabler felt obliged to give a thumbs up to the stinker film LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST simply because Christian fundamentalists opposed the film.

Gabler led a hysterical unthinking charge against British journalist William Cash's article on the Jews of Hollywood. Comparing the writing of Gabler to Cash exemplifies the widespread inferiority of Americans with the English language. Poor Neal, a nice enough though simple-minded chap, was simply outmatched, out-thought and out-written.

Neal Gabler wrote in the 11/13/94 Los Angeles Times:

The article might be dismissed as an anti-Semitic bleat from a reactionary crackpot if it didn't have a respectable platform in the Spectator and didn't play to a pre-existing prejudice-that Jews control the U.S. media. But here the canard is given new impetus in an environment of anti-political correctness, where hostility often passes for honesty.

Cash realizes his discovery will trigger the "inevitable shrieks of anti-Semitism"-and it has-though he seems willing to brave these attacks in the interest of social science. This New Establishment is a "culturally maladroit and culturally nihilist (sic)" band, Titans of Tripe, Cash calls them after Auberon Waugh, who wear, "nylon jogging anoraks, fluffy white socks, digital watches and faded jeans." You call this a power structure!

Once upon a glorious time, Cash laments, power was in the hands (or the feet) of a white-shoe aristocracy. These were well-born, well-educated, well-dressed men (at least when wearing wingtips)-culturally adroit and not at all nihilistic. They looked and acted the part of the Establishment-in fact, very much like the British Establishment. Nothing arriviste here. They ruled seigneurially and sartorially.

But now the big feet of the New Establishment wear white socks-and sneakers. These power brokers-including Rupert Murdoch of Fox Film and Television, Bill Gates of Microsoft computer-operating systems, John C. Malone of the Tele-Communications cable empire, not to mention the Jews among them-have not only nudged aside the Old Establishment. Their cabal practices, in Cash's analysis, are a "reverse form of class or racial discrimination," denying access to "Wasps, blacks and Brits." French, too?

Can it be that the godfather of the Jewish cabal that excludes Wasps, blacks and Brits pays obeisance to a higher authority? It can, because the studios and telecommunications empires that Cash identifies as predominantly Jewish are owned and controlled by non-Jews: MCA by Mashushita, Columbia and Tri-Star by Sony, Fox by Murdoch, Time-Warner by stockholders and a corporate board.

Ignoring the facts to suit his myth of Jewish control, Cash is in a long tradition of anti-Semites who began smiting Jewish movie executives almost from the moment the Jews entered the film industry in the 1910s.

One reform group demanded that movies be liberated "from the hands of the devil and 500 un-Christian Jews." Another religious zealot blasted Hollywood Jews for the "seduction of hundreds of thoughtless girls every day," which he ascribed, euphemistically, to a general "Europeanization" of the country. Henry Ford, in his Dearborn Independent, cited Jewish control of the film industry and said, "It is the genius of that race to create problems of a moral character in whatever business they achieve a majority."

The idea was that Jews were somehow different from the majority of Gentile Americans. Jews didn't subscribe to the same values. They had taken control of this powerful instrument of social control, but they couldn't use it responsibly.

Whether by design or sheer ignorance, they were said to be using the movies to subvert so-called traditional values, though anyone who studies film history knows, no group was more conscious of traditional values or more eagerly sought to purvey them than the Jewish movie pioneers-who regarded themselves as American first, Jewish second.

He obviously believes Hollywood and the world would be better places if the New Establishment and its nine Jews would hand culture back to the people who deserve it-people presumably like Cash. At the very least, they should share their power. He closes by citing the "white-sock mediocracy" as "another example of how driven Jews have always dealt with exclusion. Barred from one form of Establishment, they have ended up helping to create their own."

Similarly, an article like Cash's is another example of how powerless elitists have always dealt with exclusion. Barred from one form of Establishment, they end up spewing anti-Semitic bile.

WILLIAM CASH REPLIES: The attacks on me in the American media have been led by Neal Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. What is so galling is that all the historical data I present in my article about how Jews have always worked together in the movie business, along with the very words that have been objected to, came straight from his book, including the red-flag phrase 'Jewish cabal', which he employs almost with relish on page 263.

On the first page of his book he states how the industry was 'supervised' by Jews, goes on to detail the workings of the 'Jewish network', specifies how the studios 'preferred to deal with other Jews' (p.272) and admits precisely the firebrand question raised by my articlenamely, does Hollywood exclude outsiders?

Gabler asserts that the Hollywood Jews practiced 'reverse discrimination'' Those goyim!" Harry Warner would yell in derision, or "He's a nice fellow for a goy" a Jew might saybut only in their inner sanctums, when they were safe among fellow Jews, and only verbally' (p.280). Gabler's book was described as an 'enthralling book of social history' by the New York Times.

The subtext of this is that a double standard seems to exist. While it is acceptable for a Jewish writer, like Gabler, to use words like 'network' or 'reverse discrimination', when a Brit (the English are invariably cast as villains in Hollywood today) uses similar phrases he is barbecued.