March 17, 2009
Jeff Rense is an Ashland, Oregon-based Internet and satellite radio host who maintains a virulently anti-Semitic Web site, Rense.com. His radio show promotes a wide variety of conspiracy theories, often focusing on extraterrestrial aliens but including a great deal of anti-Semitism expressed both by Rense's guests and Rense himself.
Rense.com, which claims to receive over ten million hits a month, contains thousands of regularly updated links to articles and posts on the Internet, many of which focus on Jews, Zionism, and the state of Israel. For example, the site has featured posts entitled "Coming Zionist Police State" and "Zionist Jewish Talmudic Massacre of Palestinians." Rense.com has also posted at least one quote from The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic tract that claims that Jews are plotting to take over the world -- connecting it to a statement by former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Many of the posts on Rense.com link to some of the most virulent anti-Jewish writings on the Internet. For example, the site regularly links to RealJewNews, an anti-Semitic Web site run by Milton Kapner, a rabidly anti-Semitic street preacher who goes by the name Brother Nathanael and describes himself as a Jewish convert to Greek Orthodoxy. Rense.com has also linked to Judicial-Inc, which offers a regularly updated collection of articles accusing Jews of plotting every perceived ill in the world, from the mistreatment of Native Americans to the promulgation of pornography, to even being Jack the Ripper, a late 19th-century English serial killer. On its front page, Rense.com often features anti-Semitic images by the conspiratorial artist David Dees, including some that explicitly deny the Holocaust. The Web site also maintains an archive of Dees' images, many of which are explicitly anti-Semitic.
In addition to its links to the Web sites of other anti-Semites, Rense.com posts original articles. Several praise Kevin MacDonald, the anti-Semitic California State University, Long Beach professor. Other articles argue that Judaism is an exclusivist "racial credo," and that American Jews staged the 9/11 terrorist attacks for their own financial gain and to induce the American people to "endorse wars of aggression and genocide on the nations of the Middle East and the theft of their resources for the benefit of Israel." Another article, produced exclusively for Rense.com, argues that Zionism is "the belief in the 'Jewish' state, the primary one being the United States, and of secondary significance, the state of Israel."
A disclaimer on Rense.com denies official endorsement of any of these views, but Jeff Rense's assertions on the show make clear he is himself anti-Semitic. For example, during July 2007 broadcasts, Rense claimed, "A lot of Zionists were in the slave trade too. A tremendous Zionist/Jewish participation in that filthy business." He also alleged, "The Neocons are essentially servants of the Zionist/Jewish/ Rothschild cartel that is pushing the Middle East agenda," and referred to Zionists as "evil Satanists."
Rense has also hosted overt anti-Semites on his radio show, including Ted Pike, an Oregon-based anti-Semite, who denied on the show that the Nazis had built the Auschwitz concentration camp or used it for the murder of Jews. In addition, Rense has offered a platform to Lyndon LaRouche, an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, and to Hector Carreon, the founder and editor of "La Voz de Aztlan," an anti-Semitic online publication.
Prior to hosting his current radio show, "The Jeff Rense Program," Rense hosted "Sightings," an Internet radio show that focused on alleged human contact and sightings of extraterrestrial aliens. ("Sightings" was first known as "The End of The Line" and was broadcast on an AM channel out of Santa Barbara, California.) Before that, Rense claims to have worked for 12 years as a local television news director and anchor at various locations in California and Oregon. Rense.com first appeared in early 2000, when "Sightings" was renamed "The Jeff Rense Program."
Rense.com has also linked to Judicial-Inc, which offers a regularly updated collection of articles accusing Jews of plotting every perceived ill in the world, from the mistreatment of Native Americans to the promulgation of pornography, to even being Jack the Ripper, a late 19th-century English serial killer.