April 23, 1976 7 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS Hate-Monger Gerald Smith Unmourned By ROBERT ST. JOHN Special to The Jewish News WASHINGTON — Ger- ald L. K. Smith is dead and perhaps his fellow bigots across the country are mourning, No one knows the exact extent of his following. He claimed to have a mailing list of five million. And that was also what he called the total number of his support- ers. But for years I was on his mailing list and I know many other Christian liber- als who had only contempt for him, yet were flooded with his propaganda right o the day of his death. _ we were all obviously counted as his devotees, even though some of us, nauseated by his diatribes against Jews, Blacks, Cath- olics and Communists, tried to get off his list. In my days as an NBC commentator his fulmina- tions used to come to my of- fice in New York or Wash- ington by private messenger. And then the next day Gerald L. K. Smith himself would phone to in- quire why his "news" had not been used on the air. Bi- gotry has always raised my blood pressure rather dan- gerously, so my secretary took all of Mr. Smith's calls. He had his own printing presses which (so he claimed recently) turned out 200,000 pieces of propa- ganda a day. One has the right to question this piece of statistics, because Ger- ald L.K. Smith followed the old rule of sensational journalism: "Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story." He was the modern-day inventor of the Big Lie, long before Herr Gobbels began using the technique. Examples? He once said he had positive proof that Dwight Eisenhower was "a Swedish Jew unfit for pub- lic office." He also published as fact that Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he called "that cripple Jew" and "one of the biggest crooks who ever lived in the White House," was really named Rosenfeld. The latest G.L.K.S. publi- cation to come across my desk is a letter from the hate maestro himself with a heading in inch-tall letters: "The War Has Begun." What war? The "Jew-manu- factured war." (Smith sel- dom used the word "Jewish." It was always the "Jew-controlled news me- dia" or the "Jew-Arab war" or the "Jew-manufactured treason.") Smith was constantly re- writing history to prove that the world was in the grip of Jews, Blacks, Communists and other lesser breeds. From his latest hate-letters: "By emasculating Egypt, which has gone broke because of the tor- ture which she has experi- enced from the Jew invad- ers, the most efficient fighting equipment in the Middle East has been taken out of circulation by bribery and blackmail." Smith's dying campaign was to try to prove that the Lebanese civil war is ac- tually a "Jew-manufactured catastrophe" sold to the American public by the "Jew-controlled news me- dia" as a fight between Christians and Moslems." Not at all! He says of the Palestinian refugees that "these inno- cent people, who were dri- ven out by the barbaric Christ-hating Jews, sur- passed the total population of Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston, Texas." (The offi- cial combined population of those three cities is 2,469,- 000; the official UN esti- mate of the number of Pa- lestinians who left Israel in 1948 was 539,000, one-fifth Mr. Smith's inflated total.) Gerald L.K. Smith died of pneumonia April 15, which was not as he had expected. He had antici- pated a much more dra- matic end. His most recent communication tells of kidnapping and death threats he claimed that both he and his wife had received. But, he reas- sured his supporters, "I am among a handful of leaders who are holding the line, refusing to retreat one-sixteenth of an inch and determined to carry on; regardless of the price, whether it be death, prison or ridicule." And then came the pitch. He needed money. Desper- ately. He said his Crusade (always capital C) could not continue "without your con- tribution of money." I wonder how people who sent in "sacrificial gifts" felt when they read in the New York Times obituary that in one year Mr. Smith col- lected $365,000 from his fol- lowers and that he had "sumptuous homes in Los Angeles, Tulsa and Eureka Springs, Ark.," and that his private antique collection had an insured value of $500,000. The sub-head over that paragraph in the obitu- ary could well have read: Bigotry Pays. My final reaction to the death of this fanatic is that he should get one small mark on the credit side of the ledger for at least being honest in calling himself an anti-Semite. He argued that all Zionists should be de- ported out of the United States and he made no se- cret about what he thought ought to happen to Israel, but he never hid behind that now popular but flimsy cloak of "I have nothing against Jews, it's only Zion- ists I hate." 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