Talk:Mother Jones

Alternative appraisals

Comment (19 May 2006) by Jeffrey Blankfort

Mother Jones has long had a zionist slant, going so far in 1984 as to solicit a two-page ad from a right-wing zionist organization accusing Hafez al-Assad and Yasser Arafat of being happy with… US foreign policy! The occasion was the 1984 Democratic Convention in San Francisco and MoJo wanted to make sure the delegates attending the convention, the party being itself a subsidiary of the Israel Lobby, knew that the editors of Mother Jones, if not her shade, were by its side. The admission that the ad had been solicited came from one of its top editors when I asked him why the magazine had not run my letter criticizing the ad. A year earlier, the magazine had declined to run interviews that I had made with Israeli soldiers who opposed the war in Lebanon and only a few years back it did a hit piece on the International Solidarity Movement.

What is interesting is that after running a list of the top 400 donors to the political campaigns of 1996 and 2000, under the name the Mother Jones 400, the magazine did not pursue that feature for the 2004 race. May I immodestly suggest its decision was based on my having pointed out in my writing that 7 of the top 10, 12 out of the top 20, and at least 125 of the top 250 were Jewish (I didn't bother with the rest although by casual observation, the percentage appeared to be the same for the remaining 150). At least they haven't taken the names and numbers from the website.