(RNS) — In retrospect, we should have seen this coming.
Robert Kennedy Jr., who has presidential ambitions, has long trafficked in conspiracy theories. In particular, he is an anti-vaxxer.
This week, however, he went to the truly dark side, as The New York Times reported:
“Covid-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Mr. Kennedy said at a private gathering in New York that was captured on videotape by The New York Post. “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
So, yes — shocked, but not surprised.
RFK Jr. might take a certain pride in the fact that this antisemitic conspiracy theory has a long lineage.
- It goes back to the centuries before the Common Era, when Jews were accused of kidnapping Greeks and sacrificing them. In Christian times, this mutated into the blood libel.
- It goes back to the Middle Ages, when Jews were accused of poisoning the wells of Europe, hastening the devastation of the Black Death.
- It goes back to irrational beliefs in the Middle Ages that Jews controlled the climate and were responsible for cold snaps in global weather.
- It goes back to the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the Russian Czarist forgery that theorized that a secret cabal of Jews control the world. (By the way, the word “cabal,” a secretive, furtive group, comes from the word kabbalah or cabala, Jewish mysticism. Because anyone who can bring forth the manifestation of the Shechina, the indwelling feminine presence of God, could easily pull off the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and also cause the breakup of the Beatles.)
- It goes back to the scurrilous late-20th century accusations that Jewish scientists created AIDS in a laboratory.
- It is found in the current Great Replacement Theory, which suggests Jews are conspiring to import dark-skinned people to take over America — as in: “The Jews will not replace us!” chanted at Charlottesville.
- And, of course, its most recent manifestation is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who put forth the wackadoodle (that is the technical term for it) theory that forest fires have been caused by Jewish space lasers.
Please notice: There are no political or social boundaries to these Jewish conspiracy theories. They come from the right, the middle, the left, the apolitical and the simply insane and evil.
And, please notice something else: When it comes to conspiracy theories, of any sort, there is a one hundred percent probability rate that eventually — and it will not take that long, really — those conspiracy theories will implicate the Jews.
So, as for Robert Kennedy Jr., may not even the grace of a good family name save his campaign. Let it go down into dirt and infamy, where it, and he, belong. Let this irrational behavior, to which he is no stranger, become the eternal asterisk that will sit next to his short-lived and very minor place in American political history.
“The grace of a good family name.” Yes, I just wrote that.
Here is what should sadden us.
No doubt the primal trauma — perhaps the defining moment in RFK Jr’s life — was the assassination of his father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, in June, 1968.
What many people seem to forget is that Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, is a Palestinian Christian, who came from the West Bank village of Silwan, outside of Jerusalem. He shot Senator Kennedy on the first anniversary of the Six Day Wa, as an act of vengeance against Kennedy for his support of Israel.
Irony: Senator Kennedy’s life ended because of his admiration for the Jews and the Jewish state.
Robert Kennedy Jr.’s political life might just end because of his bizarre contempt for the Jews — at least, the Ashkenazim (Oh, by the way, RFK: please ask me how many Ashkenazic Jews I know who had COVID and/or succumbed to COVID. But, somewhere along the line, you abandoned rationality, anyway, so this is no surprise).
“The grace of a good family name.” We might invoke Senator Robert Kennedy, but perhaps RFK, Jr. is channeling the dark legacy of his grandfather, Joseph P. Kennedy, who was a successful businessman and served as the Ambassador to the Court of St. James — the U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain — in the days that led up to World War II.
To wit:
Anti-Semitic views claimed to have been expressed by Joseph P. Kennedy — during the time when he was U.S. Ambassador in London — in his conversations with the German Ambassador there in 1938, were revealed here today in captured German diplomatic documents made public by the State Department.
The documents, which claim that Kennedy approved of the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany, were discovered in the top secret archives of the German Foreign Ministry. One of them is a letter from the then German Ambassador to Great Britain, Dr. Herbert von Dirksen, to Baron Ernst von Weizsaecker, State Secretary of the German Foreign Ministry who was recently convicted on war crimes charges. In this report, von Dirksen wrote of Kennedy as follows:
“The Ambassador then touched upon the Jewish question and stated that it was naturally of great importance to German-American relations. In this connection it was not so much the fact that we wanted to get rid of the Jews that was so harmful to us, but rather the loud clamor with which we accompanied the purpose. He himself understood our Jewish policy completely; he was from Boston and there, in one golf club, and in other clubs, no Jews had been admitted in the past 50 years. In the United States, therefore, such pronounced attitudes were quite common, but people avoided making so much outward fuss about it.
This barely scratches the surface of the historical record. I have always believed that John, Robert and Ted did their best to transcend the grim record of their father, and they succeeded in doing so. Each of them was a great friend to the Jewish people.
Tragically, RFK Jr. walks in the path of his grandfather — not his father or uncles.
It is a tragedy, but it is a self-inflicted tragedy.
Shalom, RFK Jr.
