Loonwatch has an interesting article drawing our attention to the latest twist in Eric Allen Bell’s erratic political evolution.
Bell, you may recall, is the US filmmaker who made a documentary giving sympathetic coverage to the Muslim community of Murfreesboro as they struggled to build a new place of worship in the face of fierce opposition from Islamophobes. Not long afterwards, Bell executed a complete about-turn and announced that the Muslim Brotherhood was engaged in a plot to take over the USA and that the Murfreesboro “mega-mosque” was an integral part of this project of Islamist conquest.
Predictably, Bell was enthusiastically taken up by Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and David Horowitz, who helpfully provided him with a platform to expound his newly acquired hatred of Islam. His conversion to rabid Islamophobia also made Bell welcome in the more mainstream right-wing media, resulting in several appearances on Fox & Friends. Even his demented suggestion that a nuclear attack on Mecca might be a good idea failed shake his admirers’ confidence in his political judgement.
Bell still retains his mindless bigotry towards Islam. A recent post on his Facebook page featured a map of the world with countries ranked according to “rates of inbreeding”. Claiming that “inbreeding can often cause lower levels of IQ and higher levels of aggression”, Bell noted that Muslim-majority countries are particularly prone to this phenomenon because “first cousin intermarriage is a long practiced Islamic tradition”, and he invited a Swedish supporter to “look at the percentage of rapes committed by people who came to Sweden from these countries”.
However, Bell has now extended the range of his bigotry to target all of the faiths he refers to as the “Abrahamic death cults”. This week he asked:
Will there ever be a day when hundreds of millions of women are not suffering under Islamic gender apartheid? Will there ever be a day when hundreds of millions of children are not brainwashed into believing superstitions, for fear of burning in hell when they die? Will there ever be a day when a small but elite group no longer takes from others, under the premise that they are “god’s chosen”?
Yes, you read that last question right. Not content with embracing Islamophobia, Bell has lately become a convert to antisemitism as well.
An earlier thread on his Facebook page had already been notable for the expression of openly antisemitic views by Bell. Challenged over his claim (in itself not unreasonable) that “the Evangelicals and the Zionists are taking the lead in Counter Jihad for reasons other than the kindness of their hearts”, Bell retorted: “What do you know about Jewish Supremacy?” He went on to argue that Jewish supremacists
control the IMF, the Federal Reserve, the US Treasury, the media and Goldman Sachs (which owns Obama). They seek to preserve and expand their influence, geographically, monetarily, culturally and every other way possible. To the Jewish Supremacist, “god” gave everything to the Jews and everyone else exists to serve this interest.
True, Bell emphasised that he doesn’t believe all Jews are supremacists – just those who hold influential positions in society, it would appear. In response to a question about what this had to do with religion, Bell advised his critic to “study the Jewish scriptures with regard to Jewish supremacy”. He added: “I don’t think you understand what Judaism is – Money, power, prestige and supremacy: aka ‘God’s Chosen People’.”
Bell followed this up with another Facebook post that included a graphic depicting leading US media organisations, to which he appended the following observation:
These 6 companies control over 90% of the media. What religion must one belong to, in order to have a chance at being CEO of one of these companies? BONUS QUESTION: What name or names is a person called, for even raising this basic and reasonable question?
In the discussion that followed Bell defended this view, demanding to know:
Is there a head of a TV network or a movie studio that is not Jewish? The answer is almost always no. Look at who runs the IMF, the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury, just to name a few. Is it “the Jews”? No. But is it almost exclusively Jewish? Yes.
He went on to argue:
Our society is slowly overcoming the brainwash around criticizing religion. However, we are not allowed to say anything remotely critical of the Jewish religion without being branded bigots, Nazis or antisemitic. How cleverly engineered our culture is. And who engineers the culture? What is the nerve center of our culture? Hollywood. Having worked in Hollywood for 20+ years I can tell you that everyone in the industry knows who is in charge.
One former supporter expressed his shock at Bell’s promotion of such a classic antisemitic stereotype: “A while back you said that the Jews controlling the media was an outright lie…. This is actually really disturbing hearing you do a complete 180 and engage in conspiracy theories like this.” In response, Bell wrote: “A conspiracy theory is a theory without proof. Look into how the food chain works in media and find out who is consistently on top. Same with banking.”
It was pointed out to Bell that other minority communities are concentrated in certain business activities. “I guess Indians owning the majority of hotels proves it’s Hindu Supremacism”, his critic commented sarcastically. To which Bell replied: “Motel monopoly is hardly the same base of power as monopolizing banking and media.”
Bell is evidently an unstable individual who is prone to sudden and irrational swings in opinion. However, in contrast to the dramatic reversal of views that saw him turn from condemning anti-Muslim bigots to becoming one himself, there is an obvious continuity in Bell’s move from simple Islamophobia to the adoption of antisemitism. His paranoid conspiracy theory of Jewish supremacists motivated by their religious beliefs to seize control of the media and the banks has clear parallels with the “counter-jihad” narrative he had already bought into, of Islamic supremacists bent on conquering the West and imposing sharia law.
It’s very doubtful that Geller, Spencer or Horowitz will be publishing any more of Bell’s rants about Islam. Most likely they will just quietly drop him. But turn to Atlas Shrugs, Jihad Watch or FrontPage Magazine for a serious accounting of their decision to promote this poisonous hate-monger in the first place and, as Loonwatch points out, you’ll probably be waiting a very long time.