Old Article About JTF

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This is linked from Wikipedia. When I used to do searches to research about JTF before I was in contact with official JTF people, I saw this and the Suck.com interview with Chaim.

http://www.simpleton.com/19990406.html

2. Longtime viewers of New York public access television will know about Victor Vancier's Jewish Task Force (formerly the Jewish Task Force on Media Bias). Mr. Vancier (who goes by the Hebrew name Chaim Ben Pesach) has spent most of the 1990s broadcasting a monotonous but hypnotic blend of extreme Kahane Chai invective, eugenicist propaganda and reports on what he views as his own embattled civil rights. Vancier's show has been shut down at least once, on the argument that involvement in an extremist organization violates his parole agreement (he was jailed in the eighties for involvement in bombing campaigns against Soviet property in New York), and he has been denied entry to Israel (where the Kahane Chai party is outlawed). We have no opinion on the legitimacy of his legal claims, but the JTF has migrated, inevitably, to the web, where you can find his weekly screeds in text form (the "no frills" site contains no links, email or archives, but you can contact Mr. Vancier at [email protected] or at 212 802 5240).

Vancier's rhetorical devices have not aged, or in fact changed at all, since last I saw his show in 1995: There's the cascade of adjectives ("white-hating, Jew-hating, police-hating human excrement like Manhattan Borough President Virginia Fields,"); the parade of nicknames ("Senator Schmuck Schumer" supports "First Dyke" Hillary Clinton as that "Arafatan whore" runs for the Senate, where she will push for a "PLO terrorist state"); and a wealth undisguised racist paranoia ("Black police officers are really criminals in uniform who will surely destroy New York City."). Anybody who differs, intentionally or not, from the JTF's razor-thin idealogy is immediately declared a Nazi: The New York Times becomes the "New York Nazi Times," CNN is "CNN Nazi News," New York State Comptroller Carl McCall is a "Farrakhan-supporting black Nazi;" even poor Amadou Diallo, whose political beliefs we can safely say are not known, becomes "black Muslim Nazi Amadou Diallo." At the same time, "the noble people of Serbia," and others involved for any reason in combating Arabs, Muslims or black people, get unqualified praise. Strangely, Chaim Ben Pesach's most voluptuous racist descriptions are reserved for Jews: Revlon CEO Ronald Perelman is an "ugly, bald, self-hating kike cockroach;" the Park East Synagogue at East 67th Street is a "temple of Baalist idolatry." In text form, this language may lose some of the effect it has when given Vancier's speedy delivery.

Even if you don't appreciate extremism for its own sake, the JTF site is worth looking at, not least for its demonstration of the circular nature of extreme ideaology. Chaim Ben Pesach's proposal to depopulate and annex all of Southern Lebanon up to the Litani River is what everybody in Lebanon assumes is Israel's real aim anyway; his calls for the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin - which he made every time I watched him in the early nineties - seemed outlandish until Rabin was in fact assassinated. And more people follow this stuff than you might think. Vancier claims to have 300,000 viewers for his show, and the JTF seems to be completely contributor-funded (not that it costs much to produce). The show was prominent enough in the early part of the decade to warrant coverage in The New Yorker and the Village Voice, and his unusual ideas continue to play to a wide audience.