This is disgusting, but the person causing the outrage and nausea isn’t, or shouldn’t be, Sam Seder.
Sam Seder’s Majority Report is one of the American alternative news shows, whose clips I watch regularly. He’s a genuine liberal, supporting single-payer healthcare and a very trenchant critic of American Conservatism and Fascism. He’s also very critical of Israel and its abuse and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. And like others, who have spoken out about this issue, he’s also suffered the smears and accusations of being ‘anti-Semitic’. Despite the fact that Seder is, by his own admission, very Jewish ‘the most Jewish person you know’. This is almost par for the course. In my posts about the Israel lobby and the anti-Semitism smears, I’ve pointed out again and again how those accused of anti-Semitism because of their principled stance against the massacre and brutalisation of the Palestinians are very frequently self-respecting Jews, both secular and Torah-observant. Indeed, Tony Greenstein and other Jewish activists have stated that the Israel lobby particularly attacks Jews. It wouldn’t surprise me the least if this were true. It’s because Netanyahu and the Likudniks and other racists in the ruling coalition claim to speak for the Jewish people as a whole. And so independent Jews critical of Israel are a threat, because they show this to be a lie.
Apart from his own show, Seder was also a contributor to MSNBC. He has now lost that job, thanks to a Tweet he made back in 2009 sarcastically commenting on others’ defence of Roman Polanski. Polanski has been in exile in Europe ever since he raped a 13 year old girl at a party sometime in the late 1960s. Back in 2009 there were moves to have him extradited and tried for his crime in the US. Seder was annoyed by the attitude of other liberals, who tried to defend Polanski on the grounds of his stature as a great film director. So he sent out a Tweet with the sarcastic comment that he hoped that if his daughter got raped, it would be by someone with a great mise-en-scene. Seder has made it very clear that this was sarcasm, and has previously read out a statement on his show, complete with the other Tweets he posted in that sequence, that make it very clear that he certainly does not approve of rape or the sexual abuse of children.
However, this has not stopped Mike Cernovich, a right-wing troll, claiming that this Tweet shows that Seder does, and so he’s been sacked from MSNBC. There are a number of posts about this from other members of the American alternative news media, like The Young Turks, the David Pakman Show, and so on. In this clip, Seder describes just who Cernovich is. He states that the only person, who agrees with Cernovich’s view is David Duke, and that isn’t an accident. Of course not. Duke was the leader of the Klan in Louisiana, and those who’ve interviewed him, like Cenk Uygur, have described him as the most anti-Semitic person you could meet. Cernovich himself also seems to be very well-disposed to the Nazi right, retweeting all the nonsense about how diversity equals White genocide and so on.
In this clip below, Seder states that Cernovich may actually have done him a favour, as before he got the job with MSNBC he was more angry in his presentation, and rather more entertaining. He also states that he intends to make a documentary about Cernovich, so that the next time Cernovich goes after someone, they can put it up to show what kind of a person he is.
Here’s an earlier video put up by Seder, which explains the Tweet and the circumstances around it, placing it in its proper context.
I’m disgusted by this, as it shows how the right is using the public’s horror of child sexual abuse to smear and close down their critics. Looking at the second video, in which Seder responds to the smear by Cernovich and Sebastian Gorka, it seems to me that this is an attempt by the Republicans to divert attention away from Roy Moore. Moore’s the Republican Senator for Alabama, who has been very credibly accused of a series of sexual assaults, tantamount to attempted rape, on underage girls. So has Cernovich. As Seder points out in the first video, Cernovich was accused of attempting to rape a girl, but managed to bargain it down to battery. So Cernovich has got absolutely no business accusing anyone of sexual abuse.
It also appears that Sebastian Gorka is also involved in this sordid campaign. Gorka was briefly a member of Trump’s cabinet, and likes to style himself as an expert on terrorism. He’s also another individual with extreme right-wing views. He wears the medal of the Vitezi Rend, a right-wing chivalric order founded by the Hungarian dictator, Admiral Horthy, who was responsible for the country’s collusion with the Nazis during World War II and the deportation of its Jewish citizens. Gorka himself has been very active in extreme right-wing Hungarian politics, and was one of the founders of various Fascist, ultra-nationalist and anti-Semitic groups and networks. Not that this has stopped him from being welcomed by Netanyahu. He turned up the other year at the Herzliya Conference in Israel, the annual jamboree for the country’s military. As Tony Greenstein pointed out, this was another example of the way Zionists will ally themselves very easily with genuine racists and anti-Semites, when its convenient.
Seder and his co-host, Michael Brooks, who is also Jewish, have had a great time spoofing Gorka and his pretensions. Much of this has been very silly imitations of Gorka’s accent. Gorka spent several years in Britain, and so has a weird accent that’s a mixture of upper-class educated American, BBC British and Hungarian. All mixed in with his own weird diction. This smear by Cernovich and Gorka shows that Seder has drawn blood with his satire and commentary on Conservative political and moral corruption. Especially with those two clowns.
And I hope that this smear won’t deter him or his supporters around the world, and he’ll continue skewering the Republicans, Corporatist Democrats and the neoliberal elites, who are plunging the working people of America and the rest of the world into poverty for a long, long time to come.
The fact that Cernovich and Gorka have gone this low shows that the alternative news media is having an effect. So support them. And make the mainstream media and the racist right afraid. Very afraid.
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