Review of : The Controversy of Zion
by Douglas Reed
ISBN: 0-945001-38-X
First Published: 1978
Reviewed by Robert Sungenis
In his day, “Douglas Reed was on everyone’s lips; his books were being sold by the scores of thousand, and he was known with intimate familiarity throughout the English-speaking world…one of the world’s leading correspondents,” says the writer of the Preface, Ivor Benson. But by the end of the 1940s Reed had almost vanished from the scene. The likely reason for his exile was Reed’s book, Far and Wide, which took a critical look at the history of the United States. We might say the second and decisive reason was his discovery of Israel’s connection to that history. Of himself Reed says, “I am a fairly obscure person and when I went to America in 1949 was almost unknown…the publication of most of my books having been prevented by the methods above described. I found that the ADL watched me like a hawk from my arrival and from this first realized its immense spread and vigilance.” After having been invited to a dinner party by the “cousin” of a friend, Reed says, “I learned a year later that he was head of the ADL’s New York office…and thereafter the ADL knew my every movement. They knew about the book I was writing and when it was ready for publication the ‘cousin’ approached the American publisher of an earlier book of mine with a pointed request to know if he contemplated issuing this one; a man of discretion, he answered No. Three years later, in 1952…the American Legion’s magazine at Hollywood published some five hundred words from it. The ADL at once demanded a retraction from the Hollywood commander of the Legion…No inaccuracy was alleged; the deputation just called the book ‘antisemitic.’”(346) Commencing in 1951, Reed spent three years in the New York Central Library amassing this 300,000 word treatise, The Controversy of Zion, which itself became a controversy and remained in obscurity for almost 20 years before it was published. After his research, Reed concluded: “The peoples of the Western nation-states are deprived of information in the matters most vitally affecting their present and future, by a press which (they are continually told) is ‘the freest in the world.’”(346-7) I must say, by the time one gets to the end of Reed’s book, if it is all true, one cannot escape the conclusion that almost everything we see, hear and feel is an illusion created by the powers-that-be, and an overwhelming amount of those powers reside in the Zionist cartel of bankers, politicians, government officials, lobbyists, journalists, educators, scientists, professionals and Hollywood producers.