Rupert Murdoch's Jewish origins: a matter of controversy

A well placed correspondent with connections to the newspaper world (who has asked to remain anonymous) reports to us:

"I shall quote exactly what Candour [a rightwing British journal edited by A K Chesterton] said in its June 1984 issue (vol. XXXV, no. 6):

 BIOGRAPHICAL details of [Rupert] Murdoch's past are sketchy and often contradictory. One reads that his grandfather was an impoverished Presbyterian minister who migrated to Australia from England, that his father was a low-paid reporter for a British newspaper in Australia, and yet, young Rupert divided his time between his family's suburban home near Melbourne and the family's sheep ranch in the country. He was educated first at the fashionable Geelong private school, and went on to the elitist and aristocratic Oxford University in England.

"Rupert's father Sir Keith Murdoch [see below] attained his prominent position in Australian society through a fortuitous marriage to the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family, née Elisabeth Joy Greene. Through his wife's connections, Keith Murdoch was subsequently promoted from reporter to chairman of the British-owned newspaper where he worked. There was enough money to buy himself a knighthood of the British realm, two newspapers in Adelaide, South Australia, and a radio station in a faraway mining town. For some reason, Murdoch has always tried to hide the fact that his pious mother brought him up as a Jew...

And that, as I am sure you know, makes him a Jew according to the law of the Talmud, and indeed according to the present laws of Israel.

Spotlight [a rightwing Washington weekly published by Willis Carto] in fact examined Murdoch in considerable depth in no fewer than three issues, 30th January and 6th and 13th February [1984]. My friend Ivor Benson whom I regarded as a very judicious observer and commentator, reckoned, along with Spotlight, that his meteoric ascent was completely artificial, and that he was a front for far more powerful super- rich subversives, Michel Fribourg, Armand Hammer and Edgar Bronfman, "all of them part of a super-rich 'Zionist Mafia'", to quote Benson, who added: "By comparison with these three, Murdoch is just an ambitious midget who has been given the job of drawing all the public attention away from those who make the real decisions." (Benson's Behind the News, March 1984)

Could well be. Certainly I can confirm that at least part of his meteoric ascent was artificial. I remember my brother-in-law [a former editor of The Times] telling me, at the time of Murdoch's acquisition of The Times, that it was a strange business. Murdoch was by no means the highest bidder.

For my part, I myself have always had good personal motives to take a favourable view of Murdoch, because my brother-in-law was easily his favourite editor of The Times, and, when my brother-in-law died (in office), Murdoch treated my sister completely fairly, from a financial point of view, without making the slightest difficulty. But, despite that reason for some prejudice in his favour, I have always been forced to the judgement that he has been a force for unspeakable evil.

• His was the "breakthrough" which made the tabloids genuinely pornographic.
• In my opinion at least, his policy with The Times completed its collapse from its position as the most respected newspaper in the world.
• And his republicanism makes me sick -- it is not for the purpose of creating a better world, but quite obviously purely destructive. And I could go on.

PS: QUITE recently, a Times correspondent actually resigned because he was not allowed to report properly what was going on in Israel, or even to use accurate words to describe facts which were undisputed. He stated: "Murdoch's executives were so scared of irritating him that, when I pulled off a little scoop by tracking, interviewing and photographing the unit in the Israeli army which killed Mohammed al-Durrah, the 12-year-old boy whose death was captured on film and became the iconic image of the conflict, I was asked to file the piece 'without mentioning the dead kid'. After that conversation, I was left wordless, so I quit." Unusually courageous for a modern journalist.