The Time The FBI Tried To Get Meir Kahane's Jewish Fascists To Murder Black Panthers

Edited by Sam Thielman

TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES and additional projects (i.e., nearly-finishing a second pre-submission draft of The Book) kept FOREVER WARS from publishing a second edition this week until today. But Monday's edition, on the War on Terror heritage of a torture technique observed at Alligator Alcatraz, went viral. So viral that my former employer, The Daily Beast, bent over backward to rewrite it as if they were the ones who discovered the story. The point is, many of you subscribed to this newsletter this week, and we're grateful that you did. 

We're so grateful that we think you deserve a batshit episode from the history of Security State repression. 

Last night I was researching something in Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall's 1990 edited compendium The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from The FBI's Secret Wars against Dissent in The United States for a project I've pitched and which is awaiting a decision. Many of you will be familiar with COINTELPRO, the Bureau's infamous 1960s-70s secret-police operations to infiltrate, discredit, neutralize and kill left-wing, Black, Puerto Rican, Indigenous and other minority social and political movements. For those who don't: this is the program that yielded a 1964 attempt to make Martin Luther King Jr. commit suicide. COINTELPRO is the FBI's DNA, the bureau distilled to its purest form, no matter how many FBI former officials promote the bureau on cable news as a bastion of lawfulness, and no matter how much any one of them decries the lawless Donald Trump. It's the bureau as it is known to former special agents who thought they were there to do good only to learn that they served something monstrous. It is not ancient history. It is right now. 

In the hefty section of the book that reproduces the FBI memos on destroying movements for Black liberation, I came across a memo written in September 1969 for Director J. Edgar Hoover by the head of the New York FBI. That was John F. Malone, the longest-serving field-office chief in FBI history. Malone pitched an initiative against the Black Panthers. "Initiative" is a mild way of putting it. The FBI was trying to find cutouts it could instigate into murdering prominent Panthers. Malone had a guy in mind: Meir Kahane. 

Kahane, a violent Jewish supremacist from Brooklyn, was at the time a disreputable thug. Today he's best understood as a harbinger of the regnant fascist politicians in Israel. Kahane, starting in the 60s, created and commanded a street gang called the Jewish Defense League. In Laurelton, Queens—at the time a Jewish neighborhood transitioning into a Black one; it's where JFK airport is—the JDL harassed my mother and her friends because one of her friends' prom dates was Black. (That friend, a dear person in my life, is now a rabbi.) Thirty years after that, one JDL member, Baruch Goldstein, committed one of the most noteworthy atrocities in the history of Zionism—quite a crowded field—when he murdered 29 Palestinians while they prayed at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994.

Anyway, Malone told Hoover that Kahane would be a "suitable recipient of information furnished on an anonymous basis that the Bureau wishes to disseminate and/or use for future counterintelligence purposes." In a euphemism typical of COINTELPRO, Malone's "counterintelligence purposes" was murder. He wanted to provoke Kahane to "act against such groups as the BPP," the Black Panther Party. 

So Malone put together a pitch—a "suggested communication to be used to establish rapport between the anonymous source" and the JDL. It's so jaw-droppingly racist and antisemitic that I passed the book over to my wife so I could watch her face while she read it. And so, now, in the spirit of the forthcoming NSPM-7 antifa domestic-terrorist list, I present to you the "suggested communication" between the FBI and Meir Kahane that Malone wrote on September 10, 1969:

"Dear Rabbi Kahane,

I am a Negro man who is 48 years old and served his country in the U.S. Army in WW2 and worked as a truck driver with "the famous red-ball express" in Gen. Eisenhour's [sic] Army in France and Natzi [sic] Germany. One day I had a crash with the truck I was driving, a 2 ½ ton truck, and was injured real bad. I was treated and helped by a Jewish Army Dr. named "Rothstein" who helped me get better again. 

Also I was encouraged to remain in high school for two years by my favorite teacher, Mr. Katz. [Interjecting here because the invocation of a Jewish teacher is deliberate: the JDL's origins are tied up in the late-60s struggle in New York for Black community control over local schools that clashed with "the predominantly Jewish teachers' union"—clashes with which Malone would be very familiar.] I have always thought Jewish people are good and they have helped me all my life. That is why I became so upset about my oldest son who is a Black Panther and very much against Jewish people. My oldest son just returned from Algers [sic] in Africa [meaning the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers] where he met a bunch of other Black Panthers from all over the world. He said to me that they all agree that the Jewish people are against all the colored people and that the only friends the colored people have are the Arabs.

I told my child that the Jewish people are the friends of the colored people but he calls me a Tom and says I'll never be anything better than a Jew boy's slave. 

Last night my boy had a meeting at my house with six of his Black Panther friends. From the way they talked it sounded like they had a plan to force Jewish store owners to give them money or they would drop a bomb on the Jewish store. Some of the money they get will be sent to the Arabs in Africa. 

They left books and pictures around with Arab writing on them and pictures of Jewish soldiers killing Arab babys. [sic] I think they are going to give these away at Negro Christian Churchs. [sic]

I though [sic] you might be able to stop this. I think I can get myself some of the pictures and books without getting myself in trouble. I will send them to you if you are interested.

I would like not to use my real name at this time. 

A friend."

I don't know if Malone ever sent this message or if anything came of it. But after presenting it in the memo, he told Hoover that he thought it would be best if the anonymous, FBI-penned missives to Kahane continued and escalated. Subsequent letters, Malone proposed, "will contain as enclosures some BPP artifacts such as pictures of BOBBY SEALE, ELDRIDGE CLEAVER, a copy of a BPP newspaper, etc." After sufficient rapport had been established between the unwitting Kahane and his incognito FBI handler purporting to be a Black veteran, the purported Black veteran would "reques[t] some response." What response, Malone was careful not to memorialize. But in Chicago around the same time, Fred Hampton sure learned what people like Malone were talking about. 

Something you'll also find in the COINTELPRO memo traffic: the bureau talking about its actions against Black liberation movements in terms of combatting "hate groups." Remember that when the FBI talks about taking action against "Black Identity extremists" or portrays its desire for ever more intrusive powers of surveillance and disruption as tools against racism.

THE LEGACY OF the Iraq War is no abstract question for Shukria Mahmoud. She lived through the two 2004 Battles of Fallujah only for the lingering effects of U.S. weaponry, including white phosphorus and depleted uranium, to have poisoned her young daughter, born soon afterward. Jaclynn Ashly reports for Jacobin from Iraq:

Since 2004, childhood cancer rates in Fallujah have risen twelvefold, while birth defects have increased seventeenfold. Although the exposure scenarios differ significantly, increases in certain childhood cancers exceed those recorded in post-bombing Hiroshima. The offspring of US military personnel who were in Iraq and Afghanistan have been similarly affected.

Research by Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, a leading environmental toxicologist known for her extensive investigation into the effects of war contamination on human health, attributes these spikes to toxic exposure. Her work has long traced Fallujah’s 2004 bombardment to the city’s ongoing health crises.

She found that children with defects carried far higher levels of lead and mercury in their hair, with congenital malformations — most commonly heart and neural tube defects — affecting over 15 percent of births after 2003. The miscarriage rate rose sharply from 10 percent before the conflict to more than 45 percent; research also recorded a significant increase in infant mortality, much of it linked to congenital birth defects.

FINALLY, IF YOU'RE IN NEW YORK THIS AFTERNOON, come to Chinatown Soup at 16B Orchard Street. From 4 pm to 7 pm, a group led by artist Wendy Xu will be decorating bags of groceries for needy Chinatown senior citizens; and preparing information for neighbors to protect one another against ICE. This is an event put on by Comix Action, a crew of local comics creatives uniting for community resilience and support. I'm proud to be part of it—at least until the New York FBI, presenting itself as a fan of my IRON MAN run, turns me against Wendy. See you there.