It was sometime around 8 a.m. on July 15, the morning after I had interviewed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for our Presidential Roller Coaster 2024 series, when the following New York Post headline popped up on my iPhone:
“RFK Jr. says COVID may have been ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews”
What in the Sam Hill, I thought. This didn’t remotely compute with the man I had been talking with only hours earlier. This must be “yellow journalism.”
It was.
I knew it as soon as I read the first few graphs:
“Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dished out wild COVID-19 conspiracy theories this week during a press event at an Upper East Side restaurant, claiming the bug was a genetically engineered bioweapon that may have been ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
“Kennedy floated the idea during a question-and-answer portion of raucous booze and fart-filled dinner at Tony’s Di Napoli on East 63rd Street.
“‘COVID-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,’ Kennedy said. ‘COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.’
“‘We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact,’ Kennedy hedged.”
Hedged?
That’s what the author, Jon Levine, wants us to believe, but I would imagine Kennedy, who has been researching medical matters for years and wrote that detailed book on the malfeasances of Dr. Anthony Fauci, is merely filling in something that has been known scientifically for a long time - that different ethnic groups are more prone to different diseases and therefore vulnerable in different ways.
What Kennedy was clearly doing in this after-hours discussion that was supposed to be off the record (they never are) was warning of the dangerous ability of viruses to be used as bioweapons against various ethnicities - something that several countries have in all probability been working on for years or decades in clandestine manners.
To claim that COVID-19 is the product of a cabal of Chinese and Jews is so ridiculous that it only speaks to what the author wants to believe or, more accurately, wants us to believe Kennedy meant.
Which Chinese and which Jews? It’s hard to imagine since Israel was locked down to such a degree it made California look like Florida. Also, Israeli scientists were working around the clock to invent a successful vaccine but got nowhere. If they had been in on the original design, you would think they would have been able to do something, or at least have a leg up.
The internet being what it is, this fake news accusation went around the world faster than Churchill’s famous line about the truth and the time it takes to put on your pants. The lie appeared almost immediately in numerous publications from the Daily Mail to the Daily Beast as if it had to be true that RFK Jr. was anti-Semitic.
But Kennedy doesn’t need me to defend him. He’s doing a fine job himself, including demanding a retraction from the Post and an apology from Levine, in his Twitter feed.
The insinuation by @nypost and others that, as as result of my quoting a peer-reviewed paper on bio-weapons, I am somehow antisemitic, is a disgusting fabrication. I understand the emotional pain that these inaccurate distortions and fabrications have caused to many Jews who recall the blood libels of poison wells and the deliberate spread of disease as the pretext for genocidal programs against their ancestors. My father and my uncles, John F. Kennedy and Senator Edward Kennedy, devoted enormous political energies during their careers to supporting Israel and fighting antisemitism. I intend to spend my political career making those family causes my priority.
I will fight relentlessly alongside my Jewish brothers and sisters and friends against Jew-hatred and the demonization of Israel. I have just recorded an interview with @RabbiShmuley, whom the same New York Post just this month called, “the most famous Rabbi in America.” I have called upon the Biden Administration not to consummate a second Iran deal that would give that genocidal government a legitimized nuclear program. In the same interview, I called upon the Democratic Party to return to the strong, unconditional support of Israel that was the hallmark of the party under the leadership of my uncle and my father.
Today I had a great conversation with Rabbi Shmuley on Judaism and anti-Semitism.
He had this to say:
“Two things bothered me about the reports I had read about what you had said at that dinner on the upper east side. I said number one, again, this perception that you’re anti-Semitic. I know you’re not. And in fact, I know precisely the opposite is true. I know that in your heart you feel a great closeness to the Jewish people, to the Jewish community, and to Israel. And the second thing that bothered me is, that you’re being portrayed as you said before, a crank, as a loony toon…but you’re brilliant. You know your facts.”
I will continue to stand alongside my Jewish brothers and sisters. Here is an excerpt from my great conversation with @RabbiShmuley about the inaccurate distortion propagated by the @nypost pic.twitter.com/0b5KIQlvpM
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) July 17, 2023
So what’s actually going on here? This isn’t, in the end, really about anti-Semitism, real or imagined. It was just low-hanging fruit, as the “canary in the coal mine” often is, the first of many—a harbinger of many dastardly smears of the candidate to come.
If there’s one thing the military-industrial complex (endless wars from Iraq to Ukraine) and the health care-industrial complex (Big Pharma, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, et al.) do not want, it’s a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presidency.
Big Tech probably isn’t very keen on it, either.
It would cost them all incalculable amounts of money, much of it courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer and a complaisant government.
Most of all, the current leadership of the Democratic Party—bent on exploiting every so-called progressive policy, no matter how looney, for maximum gain and power—don’t want anyone bringing their party back to sanity, under the leadership of Mr. Kennedy or anyone else.
Notable is that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is backing Joe Biden for reelection, not RFK Jr.
And then there’s the CIA, whose antipathy for RFK Jr. should be obvious to all those with even a passing knowledge of the lives and deaths of his father and uncle who wanted that organization splintered in a thousand pieces and cast to the winds.
In all, it’s no surprise then that the corporate media, in which we now must include the N.Y. Post of the increasingly untrustworthy Murdoch empire, is now the mouthpiece of anti-RFK Jr. propaganda. More and most probably worse will come.
What we are looking at is what we might call the coming ‘The Plot Against Kennedy” after Lee Smith’s best-selling “The Plot Against the President,” which detailed the subversion of Donald J. Trump before and after his presidency by many of the same parties.
The similarity between the treatment of Trump by corporate media that was always dishonest and is now, if anything, worse, and the beginnings of the treatment of RFK Jr. is all too obvious.
My interview with the candidate, in which we discuss the anti-Semitism accusation and other matters, including, of course, the CIA, will appear shortly.
Roger L. Simon’s new book—“American Refugees”—will be published by Encounter in September.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
