At this early stage mischievous to pillory Bannon

Nathan Cheiman, Johannesburg

While I hold no brief for Steve Bannon, he concedes in an interview with the Jewish Press (November 16) that during his tenure with Breitbart News, a platform for the alt-right, that there are “very bad elements in alt-right as there are on the progressive and hard left”. 

Bannon went on to say that the people who voted for Donald Trump are the middle class, the working men and women in the world “who are just tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos”.

He says, further that that the fringe haters will eventually disappear when the group becomes mainstream.

Because of history, Jews tend to be oversensitive and distrustful of utterances made by politicians. They dissect every word in an attempt to find an abstruse meaning. The speech authored by him, which Trump delivered at Palm Beach, Florida on October 13, that mentioned a covert clique of international financiers seeking world control with the support of a servile media is easily discernible with conspiracy theories that are propagated by anti-Semites, globally.

This particular proposition is deceptive, however. Consider the anti-Semites in many organisations supported by the Democrats and the intimate relationships Democrats have with the American banks (bailouts). 

Robert Mackey, writing in The Intercept, (November16), suggests that Bannon “strongly supports Israel and its far-right, nationalist government”. David Horowitz, who is a key figure in funding Islamophobic research in the US and Israel, says that Bannon’s critics “have lost all connection to reality and are now hyping their most ludicrously paranoid fantasies”.

More support for Bannon comes from Pamela Geller, an anti-Islamic blogger, who is supported and championed by Breitbart. Indeed, even the celebrated lawyer Alan Dershowitz and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach repudiated critics like Jonathan Greenblatt, the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO.

Remember that Andrew Breitbart, founder of Breitbart News, conceived it as a way to fight anti-Israel bias of the mainstream media and leftwing Jewish groups, that oppose Israel’s open-ended military occupation of Palestinian land.

The fact is that Breitbart was founded by Jews and is largely staffed by Jews (there is an entire section, Breitbart Jerusalem).

As a result of Israel’s nationalist ideology, the French National Front (Marine le Pen) and the Dutch Freedom Party ( Geerdt Wilders) are staunch supporters of Israel, seeing a mirror of their own quest to live in an ethnically pure nation.

Yossi Dagan, a member of Likud, wrote an open letter in support of Bannon, to Breitbart saying he was “saddened by the uncalled for smear campaign against you”.  

At this juncture, it is mischievous to pillory Bannon until he proves himself.