Tuesday, August 08, 2023
Elder of Ziyon
Jordan's Al Ghad has an op-ed by Youssef Abdullah Mahmoud that quotes a variant of a Nazi-era libel claiming that "president" Benjamin Franklin gave a speech to the American people warning them about the dangers of Jews.
There is a great danger for the United States of America. This great danger is the Jew. Gentlemen, in every land the Jews have settled, they have depressed the moral level and lowered the degree of commercial honesty. They have remained apart and unassimilated; oppressed, they attempt to strangle the nation financially, as in the case of Portugal and Spain.If they are not expelled from the United States by the Constitution, they will stream into this country in such numbers that they will rule and destroy us and change our form of Government for which we Americans shed our blood and sacrificed our life, property and personal freedom. If the Jews are not excluded within two hundred years, our children will be working in the field to feed Jews while they remain in the counting houses, gleefully rubbing their hands.I warn you, gentlemen, if you do not exclude the Jews forever, your children and your children’s children will curse you in their graves. Their ideas are not those of Americans, even when they lived among us for ten generations. The leopard cannot change his spots. The Jews are a danger to this land, and if they are allowed to enter, they will imperil our institutions. They should be excluded by the Constitution.
This lie was first published in 1934 by an American fascist publication and quickly reproduced in Nazi Germany. Here's a Nazi poster with the lie, complete with a picture of someone who is definitely not Franklin.
The supposed speech was debunked fairly quickly - there is no record of any such speech, it uses language that was not used in the 18th century, and Franklin was a philosemite.
But that hasn't stopped this supposed "Franklin prophecy" from being resurrected every couple of years in Arab media. Usually, the articles claim Franklin was the President.
Mahmoud expands on the forgery, claiming that "Zionists" stopped early Americans from implementing Franklin's plan of ethnic cleansing Jews from the United States.
Why recycle old, provable lies? Because most people don't know they are lies, and it is easier to re-use old ones than to make up new ones.
Interestingly, as I was writing this, I found articles that give a strong indication that a 19th century Mussar work, Sefer Cheshbon ha-Nefesh based its self-improvement program on Benjamin Franklin's own program described in his autobiography. The author, Menachem Mendel Lefin, didn't credit Franklin but he didn't claim to have created the method either, and other writings of his show he was familiar with Franklin's writings. So in a way, Benjamin Franklin has influenced modern Jewish thought.
