Gaza and Rosenberg Case

[John Simkin]

It is reported that public opinion polls in Israel show 95% of its citizens support its government policy of the bombing of Gaza. Whereas polls show in the UK that 62% believe Israel is guilty of war crimes in Gaza.

It reminds me of the Rosenberg case in 1951. In the United States only the Daily Worker and the Jewish Daily Forward opposed the death sentence for the Rosenbergs and this is reflected in the public opinion polls taken at the time. However, the rest of the world was appalled by the decision and it led to protests taken place in all major cities. Judge Irving Kaufman, who had passed the death sentence, considered the whole thing a communist conspiracy.

Interestingly, one person campaigning behind the scenes against the sentence was J. Edgar Hoover. He thought in the long-term that it would reflect badly on the FBI. He was right of course, we now have the documents that it was Hoovers idea that Ethel Rosenberg should be arrested and used as a means of getting Julius to confess. (It was a tactic that he had borrowed from Stalin who had the wives and children of leading Bolsheviks arrested and threatened with execution in order to gain confessions.)

http://spartacus-educational.com/USArosenberg.htm

http://spartacus-educational.com/USArosenbergE.htm