Rick Sanchez and the Jews

By all accounts, Rick Sanchez is as ass. I can't corroborate this because, so far as I can remember, I have never actually seen or heard Rick Sanchez. I am sure I have never watched his show. I gather he had a show on CNN because CNN fired him.

Sanchez was, apparently, a frequent target of Jon Stewart. I wouldn't know, because I don't watch Stewart regularly either. I do watch a lot of his routines on YouTube, and I find them extremely funny. I would be very cautious about crossing swords with Stewart. He has carved out a virtually unassailable position in media culture. He goes after serious people (like the President) and assaults them in ways that (if hilarious) seriously undermine them. If you take issue with anything on one of his shows, he retorts "we're just a comedy show!" as if that absolves him from any criticism. Which it does.

Sanchez has the bad judgment to unburden himself in an interview with Pete Dominick. He called Stewart a bigot. Maybe a case could be made for that, though I don't know what it would be. That wouldn't have been a story. But Dominick saw his opportunity and pounced. From the Politico:

When Dominick pointed out that Stewart, as a Jew, was also part of a minority, Sanchez, who is Cuban-American, retorted: "Yeah. Yeah. Very powerless people. Please. What, are you kidding?"

"I'm telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart. And to imply that they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority. Yeah."

Okay. Now I think we can safely say that Sanchez is an idiot. He said something that sounds like a well-worn ethnic slur. We all know that the Jews control the banks, right? We all know that they control the motion picture industry and the media, right? That's the way anti-Semites talk, right?

Right. The view that the Jews are conspirators controlling American society from behind the scenes is indeed a favorite fantasy indulged by the weak minded. That's why his remark was so inflammatory. Sanchez may have been expressing such a prejudice.

But all he said was that Jews are very well represented in his industry and that therefore Jon Stewart isn't immune to a charge of bigotry. I suspect that his comment might reveal some prejudice, but is it so unreasonable?

Christopher Hitchens defends Sanchez this way:

I ask myself if the world in which I have worked for so many decades—the intersecting and overlapping world of the news media, publishing, the academy, and the think-tank industry—is even imaginable without the presence of liberal American Jews. The answer is plainly no. Moreover, I can't think of any other "minority" of which this is remotely true, unless it were to be the other minority from which I can claim descent: people of British or Anglophile provenance.

American Jews do have a disproportionate presence in American culture. They have it because they earned it by industry, imagination, and genius. Whether or to what extent this is true of the news industry, I will let people who know more about it comment. We should be offended by anti-Semitism, but does that mean that Jon Stewart is immune to a charge of bigotry? No, and that was Sanchez's point.

Sanchez should have been taken to task for his comments. He should have been given a chance to explain himself. To fire him for a few sentences does not advance the cause of liberalism. It just makes all of us more afraid to speak our minds.

Comments

[Michael Santomauro]

What happened to Oliver Stone is a good case study. The Wall Street Journal reported this past summer that Stone said that “public opinion was focused on the Holocaust because of ‘Jewish domination of the media.’” Stone also said that the Jews “stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has f—– up United States foreign policy for years.”

Like so many others before him, Stone groveled: “In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret. Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry.”

How Jewish is Hollywood? That’s the question Los Angeles Times columnist Joel Stein asked two years ago just before Christmas. In answer, he wrote:

“When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish). If either of the Weinstein brothers had signed, this group would have not only the power to shut down all film production but to form a minyan with enough Fiji water on hand to fill a mikvah.”

Needless to say, Stein was not fired for writing this, nor was he rebuked in the least. As we have seen time and again, there is a glaring double standard about alluding to Jewish power in the media. Jews are free to reference it, but woe unto the non-Jew who wades into those shark-infested waters.

Joe Sobran who died this past week had this to say about Jewish media power:

“Jewish control of the major media in the media age makes the enforced silence both paradoxical and paralyzing. Survival in public life requires that you know all about it, but never refer to it. A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims; and if you don’t respect their victimhood, they’ll destroy you. It’s a phenomenal display not of wickedness, really, but of fierce ethnocentrism, a sort of furtive racial superpatriotism.”

In 1996, reprinted in the May 27th issue of the New York Times, by Ari Shavit, an Israeli columnist describing his feelings on the killings of a hundred civilians in a military skirmish in southern Lebanon. Shavit wrote, “We killed them out of a certain naive hubris. Believing with absolute certitude that now, with the White House, the Senate, and much of the American media in our hands, the lives of others do not count as much as our own.”

Peace.
Michael Santomauro
[email protected]

[Omar]

Why ia racial slurs to be sarcastic about a true, where in the hell is the jewish community oppressed minority in the US?, totally the opposite is the minority with most influence on politics, media and economics in the us and is the minority that holds "out of proportion" benefits for a minority, none minority, except for the minority the Sadam Hussein represented ever had such level of benefits in another country.

[nader paul kucinich gravel mckinney]

support the federal reserve
follow your AIPAC orders
trust the government
trust that 9/11 story
trust the media
censorship

[free speech]

Sanchez was right and the quickness with which they fired him just proves it. You can't even express an opinion they don't like? So what if Sanchez called Stewart a bigot? Somebody like Jon Stewart is now untouchable? Sanchez hit back and they don't like that. We're turning into the Soviet Union.

[andrea yum]

You can say what you want about anyone but once you say something negative against Israel or jews it becomes a problem ...Jon Stewart is often out of line but he' not reporting the news its always a joke so lol He's a bad joke don't watch his show anymore.

[ActaNonVerba]

American Jews make up only 2% of the population of America. Yet: 46% make over $100,000 per year, they make up 15% of the U.S. Senate, 13% of the U.S. House of Representatives, 67% of members of the Board of the Federal reserve, 33% of the U.S. Supreme Court. Media: Just taking CNN only, 55% of corporate officers for TBS, which owns CNN, are Jewish. On air, Larry King, John King, Howard Kurtz, Eliot Slpitzer, Jeffrey Toobin, Paula Zahn, etc.. Rick Sanchez has nothing to apologize

[KB]

When my post went up last night, I got about 85 visitors in the first five minutes. If the above comments are representative, a lot of my visitors are textbook anti-Semites. ActaNonVerba, whom I hope confines himself/herself to verba rather than acta, is typical of the genre. Some ethnic groups are more prosperous than others. Many ethnic groups concentrate in certain lines of business. So?

Rick Sanchez's point, if I read him correctly, was Jon Stewart's ethnic identity confers no immunity to a charge of bigotry. There is a lot wrong with that point. For one thing, it implies that minorities that are legitimately oppressed would in fact enjoy some immunity from the charge. I find that altogether wrong. Anyone can be a bigot. Victim status makes no difference.

I just don't think that Sanchez should have been fired for making a debatable point. It would have been reasonable to ask him to explain himself. Then we could debate the point.

Ethnic groups that subject to severe prejudice (regardless of their overall economic, cultural, and political achievements) do enjoy special protection in contemporary culture. That's a good thing. It is how we combat prejudice in the public realms. It just shouldn't be used to cut off debate.

[Bill Fleming]

KB, I think Sanchez was confusing a class struggle argument with an ethnic one. This is not uncommon.
Especially since class struggle arguments are decidedly unfashionable these days, whereas the ethnicity
memes have recently permeated the contemporary zeitgeist. The reason for this of course is obvious if
viewed from a "class struggle" perspective. But I won't go into that. Like I said, it's just not fashionable
these days. And lord knows, I've always been a slave to fashion. ;^)

[Brendan]

Ignoring the real anti-Semites commenting on your blog posts, you and Hitchens make an excellent point, which I think can be made even stronger:

They way Sanchez defined "minority" in his diatribe was a group that is not influential or succesful in terms of economics, culture or political influence (regardless of the fact that Cuban Americans, one of the wealthiest and most influential groups in this country, would not be defined as a minority by this definition anyway...so Sanchez by his own logic should put a sock in it.) I'd say that definition is a. wrong (Jews in Germany were economically and culturally influential, yet when the government came to kill them they faced that onslaught alone as a minority) and b. insulting (that somehow blacks, hispanics ect. who are economically succesful are no longer minorities, you are only one if you suck at life)

[Brendan]

Ignoring the real anti-Semites commenting on your blog posts, you and Hitchens make an excellent point, which I think can be made even stronger:

They way Sanchez defined "minority" in his diatribe was a group that is not influential or succesful in terms of economics, culture or political influence (regardless of the fact that Cuban Americans, one of the wealthiest and most influential groups in this country, would not be defined as a minority by this definition anyway...so Sanchez by his own logic should put a sock in it.) I'd say that definition is a. wrong (Jews in Germany were economically and culturally influential, yet when the government came to kill them they faced that onslaught alone as a minority) and b. insulting (that somehow blacks, hispanics ect. who are economically succesful are no longer minorities, you are only one if you suck at life)

[Bill Fleming]

Brendan, exactly. He was confusing race with social class. So are a lot of Tea Party People.

[zio-nazi's suck]

go to youtube. type in alan sabroskyand 911. youll see who realy carried out 911 - and it wasn't 19 cave dwellers with boxcutters, but the jewish mossad! mossad motto: to do war by deception -0r 911 if you will...

then look up danny jowenko and the ussliberty...when isreal killed 34 americans and wounded 174 during 1967's 3 day war.

[Ken Blanchard]

ZN: you are an idiot.