Concerning Mark Cohen, Scott Aaron and Southern “anti-semitism”.

99 Years Ago: Did Leo Frank Confess?, by Mark Cohen, National Vanguard:

The testimony of Monteen Stover (who liked Frank and who was actually a supportive character witness for him) that Frank was missing from his office for those crucial five minutes was convincing. Few could believe that Stover — looking to pick up her paycheck, and waiting five minutes in the office for an opportunity to do so — would have been satisfied with a cursory glance at the room and therefore somehow missed Frank behind the open safe door as he had alleged.

A summary of Frank’s “confessions”:

• Confession Number One — April 26, 1913: Leo Frank’s murder confession number one was made to Jim Conley when Leo Frank told him he had tried to “be with her” (have sexual intercourse with Mary Phagan) and she refused him. According to Conley, Frank then stated he had hit her, knocking her down, then adding “I guess I struck her too hard and she fell and hit her head against something.” Some of Mary Phagan’s bloody hair was discovered on Monday, April 28, 1913, by Robert P. Barret on the handle of a lathe in the second floor Metal Room.

• Confession Number Two — April 26, 1913: According to the McKnight family, Leo Frank confessed to murdering Mary Phagan to his wife Lucille Selig Frank on the evening of April 26, 1913, at around 10:30 pm, saying to his wife that he didn’t know why he would murder — and asking his wife for his pistol so he could shoot himself. Lucille reportedly told her family, and her household cook and cleaning lady Minola McKnight, about what happened that evening. Minola McKnight told her husband Albert McKnight, and full documentation can be found in State’s Exhibit J (see the Appendix to this article). Decades later, Lucille Selig Frank refused to be buried in the Frank family plot next to her husband, leaving explicit instructions to the contrary.

• Leo Frank Murder Confession Number Three — August 18, 1913: This is the “unconscious bathroom visit” statement delivered by Frank to the court in his unsworn statement, placing him unequivocally at the murder scene at the critical time. Frank would also reaffirm this admission in a newspaper interview published by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on March 9th, 1914.

Who is Mark Cohen?

Abraham Foxman and Jewish Anti-Defamation League on the Leo Frank Case: 100 Years of Blaming Anti-Semitism and Perpetuating Racist Anti-Gentile Conspiracies to Smear European-American Southerners, at leofrank.org, led me to a July 2012 article on National Vanguard, Leo Frank: Who Really Solved the Mary Phagan Murder Case?:

“Mark Cohen” is the nom de guerre of a man who has devoted his life and fortune to exposing a “century-long conspiracy of those who knowingly omitted testimony and fabricated evidence” to cover up the Leo Frank case

Government policy reflected the prevailing attitude concerning race and racial differencs at the time of the Frank trial, the gist of which is captured in the term separate but equal:

Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law that justified and permitted racial segregation, as not being in breach of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which guaranteed equal protection under the law to all citizens, and other federal civil rights laws. Under the doctrine, services, facilities, public accommodations, housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation were allowed to be separated along racial lines, provided that the quality of each group’s public facilities was equal. The phrase was derived from a Louisiana law of 1890, although the law actually used the phrase “equal but separate.”[1]

The doctrine was confirmed in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which allowed state-sponsored segregation. Though segregation laws existed before that case, the decision emboldened segregation states during the Jim Crow era, which had commenced in 1876 and replaced the Black Codes, which had restricted the civil rights and civil liberties of African Americans with no pretense of equality. 17 states had various institutionalized separation laws.

The doctrine was overturned by a series of Supreme Court decisions starting with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

My search for information about Mark Cohen led to Scott Aaron’s leofrank.info. Aaron tries to strike an equivocal pose by imagining a “middle path” between truth and lies, and pretending that there was, is, or ever can be a kind of “separate but equal” arrangement between Whites and jews.

As Aaron explains in Why I Write: Three Strangling Deaths – The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank:

The case aroused the outrage and ire and vengeance of two great communities. One, the Jewish community, feel overwhelmingly today, and felt to a lesser but still substantial extent in 1913, that Leo Frank was tried and condemned simply because he was a Jew. They believe that Leo Frank is so obviously innocent that he never would have been tried had it not been for endemic anti-Semitism in 1913 Atlanta. And they have been remarkably effective in making Southern anti-Semitism the leitmotif of virtually all drama, documentary, and other remembrance of this case for the last half century. The other, the largely Christian Southern gentile community, believed overwhelmingly in 1913 — and to an unknown but doubtlessly large degree still believes today — that justice was done when all the jurors, and every appeal court in the land including the Supreme Court of the United States, after a monumental and impressively-funded defense, agreed that Leo Frank was fairly tried and convicted for the murder of Mary Phagan. And it must rankle Southerners almost beyond words to be accused of anti-Semitism, when no Christian community anywhere on earth has so respected and welcomed Jews, has so openly acknowledged its spiritual roots in Judaism, or has so enthusiastically supported the Jewish state of Israel.

Aaron describes well enough the increasingly obvious inequality between Whites and jews. He writes out of a concern that this could be bad for the jews:

Will this rediscovery of the truth cause a backlash of real anti-Semitism against Southern Jews or Jews in general? I think not. Just because a few soi-disant [self-styled, so-called] leaders, cranks, and self-promoters palmed off their paranoiac vision of the Frank case on a generation is no reason for a real vendetta. I intend to show that a middle path that respects truth above ethnic and religious loyalty is needed, and Jewish voices should be prominent in leading the way if we are to avoid another swing of the knife-edged pendulum of hate.

One of the most remarkable things I discovered when writing this book was that many of the original articles about this case – even major ones – and affidavits, sworn statements, and utterances of great import from the central participants in the case, were not available online, not searchable, not findable, not even readable. That is, until a courageous man named Mark Cohen, almost 100 years after the fact, scanned in and uploaded nearly all the relevant contemporary newspapers, magazines, and surviving trial materials to his Web site, leofrank.org. I deeply appreciate Mr. Cohen’s efforts in doing this service for us, for our posterity, and for history. (I do not, however, endorse all of Mr. Cohen’s theories of, or conclusions about, this case.) It was a monumental effort that must have taken years.

Aaron minimizes jewish wrongdoing by painting it as the exception and limiting the time frame. The truth is that the “paranoiac vision” of jewish leaders is the rule and the moderation Aaron calls for is the exception. The truth is that jews on the whole have supported Frank from the day he was arrested right up until today. Six short words sum up the attitude of every generation of jews for the past 100 years: “Wrongly accused, Falsely convicted, Wantonly murdered.” They continue to come to Frank’s defense using the flimsiest arguments and by trying to transfer blame to others. In their narrative Frank and jews on the whole are the ones who have been wronged.

There is no sign whatsoever that this will change, and Aaron’s call for “jewish voices” to “be prominent in leading the way” is a call for more of the same of what has been going on for the past century. Aaron simply wants jews to moderate their narrative, to make it less unbelievable. He fears that the gap between their story and reality is too large and too obvious and thus might cause a backlash. He either doesn’t understand or doesn’t want the non-jews he’s posturing for to understand that inverting reality is what jews do, what jews always do, and that they can’t stop doing it because it’s an essential part of who they are. The jewish narrative, their self-image as victims, is part of how their parasitism works. It puts their host on the defensive and provides self-justification for their aggression.

Like Aaron, my hat is off to “Mark Cohen” and his work. Unlike Aaron, it’s not because I have mistaken “Mark Cohen” for an exceptional jew who helps make jews on the whole look more moderate and fair-minded than they really are.

Aaron does however seem to recognize the jewish canard about Southern “anti-semitism”, and this is noted in 100 Reasons Leo Frank Is Guilty, at The American Mercury:

91. The writer Scott Aaron gives insight into Southern attitudes toward Jews when he says: “In the race-conscious South of 1913, Jews were considered white. In fact, in the newspapers of Atlanta before, during, and after the trial of Leo Frank for the murder of Mary Phagan, Frank was referred to as a ‘white man’ on innumerable occasions by reporters, witnesses, African-Americans, fellow Jews, pro-Frank partisans, and anti-Frank polemicists. Jews, furthermore, were not known for violent acts or crimes, nor feared as violators of white women. If anything, they were seen as an unusually industrious, intelligent, and law-abiding segment of society, even if they were a bit peculiar in their religious views.

“Marriage between Jews and Christians might have raised a few eyebrows in both communities – just as did intermarriage between members of widely different Christian denominations – but it was far from unknown, and such couples were not ostracized. In fact, Leo Frank’s own brother-in-law, Mr. Ursenbach, with whom he canceled an appointment to see a baseball game on the day Mary Phagan was killed, was a Christian.

“If there was prejudice against Leo Frank in 1913 Atlanta, it was almost certainly not because he was a Jew. He was, however, a capitalist, a business owner, a manager, an employer of child labor, and a Northerner with an Ivy League education. He also came to be known during the course of the trial as sexually profligate. These facts probably did count against him.”

92. Aaron also cites a study funded and published by a Jewish group: “John Higham, in his ‘Social Discrmination Against Jews 1830 – 1930,’ a work commissioned by the American Jewish Committee, called the South ‘historically the section least inclined to ostracize Jews,’ and drew attention to the ‘striking Southern situation’ of almost no discrimination against Jews there. True, Jewish-Gentile relations had somewhat declined there by the mid-twentieth century, and the massive campaign during the Frank appeals to paint his prosecution, and the South generally, as anti-Semitic — and the eventual creation of the Anti-Defamation League in the wake of Frank’s death — played their part in this change…

“But the aftermath of the Frank trial had no part, of course, in the attitudes of the people of Atlanta on the day Mary Phagan was murdered. All things considered, the South in general and Atlanta in particular seem to have been, if anything, safe havens for Jews where they might escape from the anti-Semitism that was rampant around the beginning of the last century.”

93. Southern attitudes toward Jews can be further gauged by the fact that, during the Civil War, Southerners made a Jew their Secretary of the Treasury: Judah P. Benjamin was the first Jewish appointee to any Cabinet position in any North American government. Benjamin also served as Attorney General, Secretary of State, and Secretary of War for the Confederate States of America. He was so highly regarded that his portrait graced the paper money of the South. Meanwhile, around the same time, Northern general Ulysses S. Grant issued an order physically expelling all Jews from the parts of the South under his control, even demanding that they leave a huge multi-state area “within 24 hours.”

The claim that a pervasive and vicious anti-Semitism was the real reason for the prosecution and conviction of Leo Frank is an absurd lie and a fantastic misrepresentation of history. Nevertheless, it is now the stuff of innumerable works of alleged scholarship, drama, and fiction, and is viewed by naive students who are exposed to such works as the central “truth” of the case. If Leo Frank were innocent, why would his supporters have to fabricate such blatant impostures and engage in emotional blackmail on a colossal scale?

The asymmetry in attitudes between “anti-semitism” and jewish ethnocentrism as motives mirrors the inequality between Whites and jews. Whites recoil from the charge of “anti-semitism”. They regard it as something to deny rather than as an attack. Jews don’t recoil from recognition of their ethnocentrism. They regard it as an attack and respond by attacking.

Southern Whites did indeed respect and welcome jews, and it was to their own detriment. The Southerners gave and the jews took. The jews aren’t grateful. In the 100 years since, the jews have allied themselves with the blacks and overthrown White dominance. Today the jew-controlled mainstream media pours hatred on Whites everywhere with impungnity. They pour hatred most especially on White Southerners, and most especially on the poorest and most powerless. White Southerners like Mary Phagan.

Today Atlanta is a black city. Whites having been leaving in droves for decades. Jews are flocking in. That’s where respecting and welcoming jews gets you.

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