Why does Ralph 'the Red' Nader support Arafat's terrorism?

James Henry
BrookesNews.Com
Friday 27 June 2003

"I'm shocked! Shocked!", exclaimed the cynical Captain Louis Renault, but only after the gallant Major Heinrich Strasser alerted him to the depraved goings on in the backroom of Rick's Café. Nader's public support for Arafat's terrorism elicited a very Renault-like response from some members of the mainstream-media. But anyone who has examined, if only briefly, St Ralph’s history will know just how extreme his leftwing politics really are: and the extreme left is deeply hostile to Israel's existence.

Once you have grasped that fact, it becomes plain why, despite the evidence, he blames Israel for terrorist outrages while ignoring the generous concessions it made to the Palestinians. The picture becomes even clearer once one realises that Nader is closely linked to the Washington-based IPS (Institute for Policy Studies), a Marxist think tank that strongly supported the PLO. Come to think of it, I doubt if there is not one leftwing terrorist organisation that the IPS has not supported morally and intellectually since its establishment in 1963. Still surprised that freedom-loving Ralph came out batting for Arafat?

Nader was one of the first on the left to realise how the issues of safety and the environment could be used to attack capitalism. He knows Americans will never buy socialism but they will support cleaner air and safer cars. So the strategy of using a regulatory policy to strangle capitalism was born. If the people, in their ignorance, refuse to rise up against capitalism then capitalism must be disposed off by regulatory asphyxiation, or so these self-appointed elitists hope.

Unfortunately, though space is abundant my time isn't, so I’ll have to content myself with a brief outline of Ralph's activities. In 1965 he published +Unsafe At Any Speed, an attack on the automobile industry but singling out General Motors' Corvair, claiming it was dangerous, despite GM's denials. Being stupid, GM used private detectives to dig into his past. He found out and forced GM into making a public and humiliating apology. The compnay was also forced to pay Nader $425,000 in damages for invasion of privacy.

Overnight Nader become the leftwing media's hero and the consumers' champion, a man born to stand up to evil corporations. The rest of the story, however, took an embarrassing turn Nader. At his insistence the government instituted an inquiry into the Corvair issue. After an exhaustive study the Sen. Ribicoff Commerce Committee rejected Nader's charges and concluded that the car was as safe as any comparable of car its time. But the damage was done, financially and politically. Naturally, Nader was not forced to compensate the company for loss of revenue and the media continued to cover for him.

In 1975 columnist Ralph de Toledano reported "250 devastating columns of the Congressional Record to demonstrate conclusively that Nader had falsified and distorted evidence to make his case against the automobile". Nader sued for libel but the judge through his case out of court. Burning with vengeance he carried out a vindictive campaign of legal harassment again de Toledano who could not match Nader's income and other resources.

To Nader people are always the victims of ruthless corporations (read capitalism) and need to be protected. This view led him to even attack the National Safety Council for associating driving (at least bad driving) with accidents. His so-called reasoning leaves people to conclude that when a drunken driver wipes out a family it's the automobile manufacturer who should be imprisoned. It is this kind of stupid logic that leads Nader such ridiculous assertions that "inflation is caused by people who profit from it", the “corporate perpetrators". Forget about money supply, think Microsoft, Ford, IBM, GM, etc., not that I have any sympathy for these political morons, particularly Ford and Microsoft.

In one brilliant piece of thinking he seriously equated corporations with actions of burglars. The only thing missing from this nonsense was the Marxist theory of exploitation. But clearly, Nader believes that capitalism thrives by exploiting people both as workers and as consumers. Nader's aid was so taken with this idiocy that he asserted that corporations were cheating consumers out of $400 billion dollars a year, a sum that exceeded all corporate manufacturing profits by a factor of 10.

There are times when I think Nader is genuinely nutty in a utopian sense. This is the joker who actually claimed that insanity was caused by "the institutional pathologies of the corporation". (No wonder those fruitcakes in Hollywood love him). Then one begins thinking about those old-time Stalinist intellectuals who used to wax lyrical about Soviet Man and the miracles being performed in the first Workers' State. Their like-minded ideological descendants gave us the same garbage about Mao and Castro.

Unlike the old-time lefties, however, Nader is not in love with industrial, or even hi-tech, societies. He looked with favour on Ernest Callenbach's book +Ecotopia which recommended a massive drop in living standards and a policy of keeping energy prices high. Nader's support for this lunacy is not as weird as it sounds. He did, after all, suggest that the whole of America's petro-chemical industry might have to be abolished.

Nader is a hypocrite who takes enormous liberties with the truth to advance his own ideology. Like the late Stalinist Gus Hall, former head of the Communist Party of the USA, Nader has done well out of his crusade. This socialist makes about $300,000 a year from speeches and has acquired a $US4 million dollar or so portfolio by investing in rapacious corporations whose +evil activities he has dedicated himself to combating. (Even now he still refuse to make his tax returns public). And people like silly Bill Murray and Susan Sarandon, the workers friend, are stupid enough to treat him as the people's tribune.

Nader is more than just a hypocrite. His support for Arafat was a backdoor way of denying the right of Israel to exist — and what would that mean for Jews everywhere? In a letter to the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism the insightful Hannah Arendt put her finger on the button when she said:

". . . . I know, or believe I know, that should catastrophe overtake this Jewish state, for whatever reasons (even for reasons of its own foolishness [think Barak's stupidity]), this would be perhaps the final catastrophe for the whole Jewish people, no matter what opinions every one of us might hold at the moment." Does anyone really think that Nader doesn't know that? Which leads us to the question: Why is Nader so hostile to the state of Israel?

Anyhow, why shouldn't candyfloss-for-brains Sarandon and Murray the Confused root for Nader? The way things are moving I can even imagine Rob Reiner directing a PLO remake of Mel Brooks' +The Producers, with Streisand the Pretentious singing "springtime for Arafat, winter for Israel, such is Hollywood's political depravity.

Hell, what does it matter anyway? It's not as if Nader's terrorist buddy wants to exterminate Hollywood, at least not yet, just little ol' Israel an' all them Yids. I mean, it ain't as if they're like the rest of us. Ask the anti-Semitic Farrakhan and Hillary's pal the equally anti-Semitic Al Sharpton? What a sweet bunch of guys. And all Democrats, too. What more could an American Jew ask for?