Part II: Henry Ford And The Aaron Sapiro Case

Part II: Henry Ford And The Aaron Sapiro Case

By

R.E. Prindle

Hooray For Honkety Hank

The ostensible reason for Sapiro pressing a suit against Ford was that Cameron writing for the Independent published an article claiming that Sapiro was trying to seize control of the commodity of wheat. Sapiro said this was preposterous, but how preposterous was it really?

As I understand Sapiro’s plan the producers, that is the farmers, would concentrate exclusively on farming within the collective Sapiro would organize. Sapiro would then place himself as the middleman between the sellers, that is the farmers, and the buyers.

Now, that is exactly the system the Jews had organized in Europe for hundreds of years. In Europe the Jews controlled many commodities such as grain, salt and as soap became commodified in the nineteenth century that too.

As rootless cosmopolitans, so to speak, the Jews had a presence in all European countries while employing Yiddish as their universal language. Thus, with ethnic solidarity as opposed to national Europeans who each spoke a different language and had different customs, ways of doing business. The Jews were uniquely positioned to move bulk items across borders with minimum confusion. For the European view see the movie The Jew Suss,

That is essentially what Sapiro was trying to set up in an increasingly global market where commodities were transferred around the world. This is exactly what Ford accused him of.

However Sapiro then confused the issue by leveling counter charges of anti-Semitism. The issue is not the issue. Whether Sapiro who is described as a difficult personality and therefore expendable was a foil of the international Jewish government conspiring with them to attack Ford isn’t presently clear or whether he acted on his own. Highly doubtful that.

Whichever he waited until 1924 to file his suit leaving grounds to believe the Jews were waiting for a convenient non issue to obscure their real intent- that of creating a ‘hate speech’ law with the teeth of that of present France.
Thus the trial turned not on Ford’s charge but as the American Bar Foundation ( http://americanbarfoundation,org/research/project/19 ) titles the above link, Suing Henry Ford: America’s First Hate Speech Case. The title should be a misnomer although that is how the Sapiro case is now viewed.


Quote:

Suddenly the central issue of the trial was not individual libel but hate speech. That development was decidedly unwelcome to Louis Marshall, the prominent constitutional lawyer who was also president of the American Jewish Committee. Marshall believed that no individual should recover damages from actions leading Jewish defense organizations to avoid litigating anti-Semitism unless it interfered with the civil rights of individual Jews. Mere insults…did not meet this standard.

Unquote.

As there was no legal crime involved as anti-Semitism while what constitutes ‘hate speech’ has never been legally defined or had been legally made a crime the focus of the trial was completely shifted away into irrelevant litigation. Marshall probably realized this as he was a lawyer. Unfortunately neither Cameron, Ford nor their lawyer had thought this thing through.

So actually ‘hate speech’ in this trial was a paranoid conception in the mind of the Jews while Ford’s charges of commodity manipulation was ignored.

Ford’s reasons for criticizing Jews comes next.