Press Action ::: Haim Saban’s Deal-Making in a Nazi Concentration Camp

Thursday, September 09, 2004

Haim Saban’s Deal-Making in a Nazi Concentration Camp

By Abu Spinoza

Dachau Memorial Site Media mogul Haim Saban boasts of making mergers and acquisition deals in a former concentration camp. Saban, who is a multi-billionaire media baron, is one of the key supporters of Israel. He is also a leading financier of “liberal” Democratic politicians in the United States. He recently told the New York Times how he conducted business deals while visiting Dachau, a Nazi concentration camp, without any sense of shame.

“Mr. Saban remembers precisely where he was when he clinched the deal for ProSiebenSat.1: on his cellphone, as he was standing in the middle of the former concentration camp at Dachau, where he and his family had gone to visit. ‘I found it kind of interesting, to say the least, that the timing and the geography all came together the way they did,’ he said.”

Mr. Saban’s conduct, which goes without comment in annals of the New York Times, is quite typical of the cavalier and callous attitude and thoughtless behavior of the supporters of Israel and Zionist extremism. The passionate advocates of Israel’s occupation have lost all sense of morality and any understanding of history. No wonder the likes of Haim Saban do not have any qualms about conducting business deals in a former concentration camp. For Saban the main thing is acquire more and more control of the media.

Saban is not only a media mogul. He rubs elbows with the powerful. He counts former governor Howard Dean, former President Bill Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and John F. Kerry as his buddies. The dictum that money is power and that access to power translates into money is nicely illustrated in the article about him that appeared in the business section of the New York Times.

It is perhaps not an accident that the likes of Saban do not feel any restraints about business deals at a site of murder. As Norman Finkelstein has documented, the memory of the Nazi holocaust is not to be actually remembered but rather used for both rationalization of Israel’s occupation and injustice and the expropriation of funds. The antics of the Holocaust Industry are quite bizarre, vulgar, and an insult to those who died at the hands of Nazis.

Saban’s deal-making in a concentration camp or the increasing concentration of the mainstream corporate media into among narrow circles are unlikely to evoke any remarks from the pundits of the press. The conduct and actions of Saban & company are not results of any conspiracy but rather merely the functioning of the existing system of money, power, and capitalism. But the moral bankruptcy has to be exposed and the Anglo-American funding and the support for Israel’s harsh and horrid occupation of Palestine must always be challenged.

Abu Spinoza is an international economist.

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