If the America and the world feel ran like Epstein’s Island, were the general population is the infantile victim class, well that’s because the feeling is accurate.
How Tony Blinken’s Stepfather Changed the World—and Him
POLITICO, 01/19/2021
Samuel Pisar was a Holocaust survivor who pushed rival nations to engage in commerce, and he left an imprint on the likely next secretary of State.
Samuel Pisar, photographed inside his home in Paris, France on May 2, 2010. Pisar is a renowned international lawyer, an author and a Knight of the French Legion of Honor. He was ten when his native Poland was invaded by Stalin and then Hitler. He survived the Nazi death camps of Majdanek, Auschwitz and Dachau, escaping at the age of 16. At the request of Leonard Bernstein, Pisar wrote the lyrics to Bernstein’s Symphony No. 3, the Kaddish. | Tomas van Houtryve / VII
One day in October 1986, an American lawyer who had the ear of presidents and corporate moguls was approached at a hotel by a group of Soviet Jews seeking help for members of their community.
The lawyer, a famed Holocaust survivor named Samuel Pisar, spoke Russian, among other languages. He was visiting Moscow with a delegation from the American Jewish Congress. Suddenly, however, he found himself asking a Soviet judge, and later a magistrate, to free five Soviet Jewish men who had been arrested on accusations of disturbing the peace during recent celebrations of the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. Pisar’s lawyerly efforts worked. The men were soon released to cheers from friends and family, although each was fined 50 rubles.
It was an unusual sight: An American advocating on behalf of Soviets in the Soviet legal system. But, in a sense, Pisar was the perfect man for the job. For years, he’d pushed for greater Western engagement with the Soviet Union and other adversarial nations, saying that through increased connections, chiefly trade, East and West could reduce the risk of a catastrophic military clash and improve the lives of people living under oppressive regimes. He encapsulated his ideas in a 1970 book titled Coexistence & Commerceas well as other writings, and his work informed U.S. presidents such as John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.
Pisar’s life story is remarkable on many levels. He was one of the youngest survivors of Adolf Hitler’s death camps, whisked to freedom by U.S. troops; he went from European black marketeer to receiving doctorates in law from Harvard and the Sorbonne; he advised French and American presidents and was granted U.S. citizenship through a special act of Congress; he served as a lawyer for Hollywood stars, corporate bigwigs, UNESCO and the International Olympic Committee; he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize; he wrote new text for Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 3 (“Kaddish”) that shared his story through a conversation with God; and to his final days he worked to preserve the memory of the Holocaust.
Pisar, who died in 2015, also left a lasting imprint on the man tapped to be America’s next secretary of State: his stepson, Antony Blinken. A suave, self-assured diplomat, Blinken has often spoken of how Pisar’s Holocaust survival story instilled in him the importance of maintaining America’s status as a beacon of freedom on a planet where too many remain in shackles.
Less discussed, though just as relevant now as Blinken prepares to tangle with adversaries like China, Iran, North Korea and Russia, are Pisar’s views on ways to improve relations between rival powers—views that have to some degree influenced his stepson. The main gist of Pisar’s idea—that ramping up connections, especially economic ones, will reduce tensions between adversaries—helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the Nixon policy of detente, and it has drawn plenty of acolytes as well as critics over the years. In the 1980s, elements of Pisar’s theory got a boost as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to open up the Soviet system—exposing its citizens to ideas and goods from the West—helped lead to the fall of the communist bloc.
Today, his argument may seem like an obvious one, but as Pisar began laying it out in the 1950s, a decade dominated by the Korean War, confrontation with the Soviets and Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s hunt for communists inside the U.S. government, it was nothing short of groundbreaking.
While Pisar cast his theories primarily in the context of Western relations with the Soviet Union, he believed they also were relevant in other cases, including Western relations with China. But, perhaps more than any other example, China is now testing the hopes of people who, like Pisar, believe that commerce can help lead to peace. Despite years of increased trade, cultural and other ties between the United States, Europe and Beijing, tensions have spiked as the ruling Chinese Communist Party has become more authoritarian and oppressive. The U.S.-China relationship has further soured under President Donald Trump, who pursued a tariff-driven trade war with Beijing while alienating U.S. allies.
Now, Democrats all the way up to President-elect Joe Biden are signaling doubts about whether China will ever be anything but a foe to be confronted. Should Blinken be confirmed by the Senate, his handling of China could define his tenure at Foggy Bottom. It also could help further shape his stepfather’s geopolitical legacy, one that made Pisar especially proud because of his ardent desire to spare others the horrors he experienced as a child.
Continue reading on POLITICO
Now, some facts Politico left out:
Secretary Blinken’s stepfather was a close confidant and lawyer for Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell. Pisar is reportedly one of the last people to have spoken to Maxwell before his death, according to the New York Times.
Among those arguing against any signs of despair are Mr. Maxwell’s son Ian and his lawyer and confidant, Samuel Pisar. They are among the last people, aside from the crew members, to talk to Mr. Maxwell. Both men spoke to him by phone aboard his yacht, around 11 P.M., about an hour after he returned from a solitary dinner in a restaurant in the port city of Santa Cruz.
Mr. Pisar said Mr. Maxwell seemed his normal, confident self and discussed plans and appointments. Ian Maxwell told reporters that his father had planned to travel to London the following day and that their conversation ended with Ian saying, “See you tomorrow, then,” and his father replying, “You bet.”
Obituary: Samuel Pisar, lawyer and holocaust survivor
Born: 18 March, 1929, in Bialystok, Poland. Died: 27 July, 2015 in Manhattan, New York City, aged 86
SAMUEL Pisar, who was ten when he entered the Holocaust and 16 when he was liberated by an American tank battalion, moved his Edinburgh Festival audience to tears at the Usher Hall a year ago when he narrated the Jewish mourning prayer, the Kaddish, to a symphony by his fellow Jew Leonard Bernstein. At Bernstein’s request, Pisar had written lyrics to the symphony as a Holocaust Oratorio, which reflected Pisar’s years as a boy in the Nazi extermination camps of Auschwitz, Dachau, Majdanek and Sachsenhausen. His father had been murdered by the Gestapo and his mother and little sister were gassed in the camps.
At the Usher Hall last August, when he was 85, he was accompanied by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by the American John Axelrod, and by the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the National Youth Choir of Scotland’s red-clad National Girls Choir led by Christopher Bell. The ensemble, and particularly Pisar, received a 15-minute standing ovation. Pilar said his recitals made him feel he was “saying Kaddish for all the six million”.
Bernstein had written the symphony and his own lyrics in memory of President John F Kennedy after his 1963 assassination.
But shortly before the great conductor died in 1990, he asked his dear friend Pisar to write new and stronger lyrics to reflect not only the tragedy of the Holocaust but the hope which drove the survivors.
Bernstein did not live to hear the new text, first performed to the backing of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2003 and given added poignancy by America’s mourning of the 9/11 victims two years earlier.
Polish-born Pisar was a globally known lawyer based in New York and Paris, a foreign economic policy advisor to president John F Kennedy, the longtime lawyer and confidant of posthumously disgraced publisher Robert Maxwell, a lifelong supporter of human rights and a friend and advisor to French presidents François Mitterrand and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.
He remained close to US presidents, including Barack Obama, for the rest of his life and represented movie stars including Elizabeth Taylor and corporate executives such as Steve Jobs. He also served as chief counsel to the International Olympic Committee and helped Sydney, Australia, a nation he had come to love, get the 2000 Olympic Games. He was an honorary ambassador for Unesco.
Pisar was one of the last people to speak to Maxwell, by phone, probably an hour before the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers fell off his luxury yacht the Lady Ghislaine on 5 November, 1991.
“He had dined onshore in Santa Cruz (Tenerife), seemed his normal, confident self and discussed plans and appointments,” Pisar said. “He had planned to travel to London the following day and told his son Ian on the phone that he would see him tomorrow.”
Pisar attended the subsequent inquest in Madrid, which found that the publisher’s death was most likely caused by a heart attack and accidental drowning although conspiracy theorists maintain to this day he may have been murdered, something his family had at first contemplated but later rejected.
Pisar expressed shock when he learned, after the publishing magnate’s death, of his embezzlement of pension funds from his own Mirror Group.
Samuel Pisar was born on 18 March, 1929 in Bialystok, Poland, and was ten when the city was invaded by the Nazis in September 1939.
Young Sam, as he was always known, his little sister Frieda and his mother Helaina Suchowolski Pisar were taken immediately to concentration camps.
In his autobiography Of Blood and Hope, first published in 1979 and affirming the triumph of the human spirit, Pisar described how he got through the Holocaust through quick-wittedness, trickery and pitilessness – even to his fellow Jewish inmates.
When he was picked to die in the gas chambers, he grabbed an abandoned cleaning bucket and scrubbed the floor past the guards and back to his camp hut.
After the war, he maintained these “bad habits”, as he called them, to become a black marketeer and self-described “hooligan” in the American-occupied zone of Germany.
He sold American Lucky Strike cigarettes and coffee, stolen from the occupying troops, to German citizens, eventually earning enough to ride around on a BMW motorbike.
An aunt in Paris helped get him to Australia “to mend his reckless ways” and he later confessed: “If I had stayed in Europe, I might have become a terrorist or gangster.”
“Pisar was one of the last people to speak to Maxwell, by phone, probably an hour before the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers fell off his luxury yacht the Lady Ghislaine on 5 November, 1991.”
He got a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Melbourne in 1953 before moving to the US for a Doctorate of Law from Harvard (where he first met former student JFK).
“There was a strange cohabitation within me of these two disparate human beings,” he once said. “The little feral child – sunken eyes, shaved head, skeletal – and suddenly the scholar who is pretending to compete as if he had a normal childhood and education.”
He later went to Paris for a further doctorate from the Sorbonne and his life thereafter became a pendulum between the US and France. In 1961, he was granted American citizenship through an Act of Congress and in 1974 was short-listed for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The man whose concentration camp number remained tattooed on his arm throughout his life was also named Grand Officer of the French Legion of Honour by then President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012, an honorary officer of the Order of Australia (AO) by the Queen and a commander of Poland’s Order of Merit.
Samuel Pisar died of pneumonia after a stroke. He is survived by his second wife Judith, their daughter Leah, who worked in the White House for Bill Clinton, and daughters Helaina and Alexandra from his first marriage to Norma Pisar.
His stepson Tony Blinken is deputy US Secretary of State and former deputy national security adviser to President Obama.
Donald Blinken served as the chairman of the State University of New York system from 1978 to 1990 and was U.S. Ambassador to Hungary from 1994 to 1997, during the Clinton administration.
Associated Press
Bonus from BUZZ CHRONICLES, 2021
So our new Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s stepfather, Samuel Pisar, was “longtime lawyer and confidant of…Robert Maxwell,” Ghislaine Maxwell’s Dad…
OK, so that’s just a coincidence. Moving on, Anthony Blinken “attended the prestigious Dalton School in New York City”…wait, what? https://t.co/DnE6AvHmJg
Dalton School…Dalton School…rings a bell
The dad of the U.S. Attorney General under both George W. Bush & Donald Trump, William Barr, was headmaster of the Dalton School.
Donald Barr was also quite a writer.
I’m not going to even mention that Blinken’s stepdad Sam Pisar’s name was in Epstein’s “black book.”
Lots of names in that book. I mean, for example, Cuomo, Trump, Clinton, Prince Andrew, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen – all in that book, and their reputations are spotless.
Samuel Pisar was the Maxwell family’s “long-trusted attorney.”
Based in Paris, Pisar “had become one of [Robert] Maxwell’s few confidants and probably his closest business adviser. He had helped pave Maxwell’s entry into Israel’s business community.”
SOURCE
It does seem like Pisar and the family found Robert Maxwell’s death very suspicious (like another death 28 years later).
“Could it be that no one wanted a thorough
investigation?”
I do find the claim that Maxwell’s “long-trusted” attorney Pisar, “one of [Robert] Maxwell’s few confidants and probably his closest business adviser,” didn’t know Robert was working for Mossad a bit of a stretch.
Our Secretary of State Antony Blinken went to the Dalton School, and his stepdad Samuel Pisar was tight with both Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine’s dad and spy, & apparently Jeff Epstein (that French article above).
The “Rappaport” mentioned here would be Bruce Rappaport (#GIK).
Pisar is Blinken’s stepdad, of course, not Blinken, but still…so many odd coincidences.
If you feel like going even deeper down the rabbit hole, check:
Trump had more airplanes than Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell flew at least one of them
Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine’s father, Israel’s superspy
To be continued?
Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production.
Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!
! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
SEE DETAILS / ORDER
SILVIEW.media 