Prof. Tony Martin provides an excellent overview of this exchange in his landmark book THE JEWISH ONSLAUGHT (pp. 71-72):
And now in the era of conservatism, we discover that the Anti-Defamation League is spying on everything Black, from the NAACP to the African National Congress of South Africa.
It was coincidentally the African National Congress which unwittingly provided the occasion for one of the Jewish establishment’s more overt attempts to dictate to Black people. In the process there appeared on the record as clear a statement of Jewry’s conception of its power in the United States political system as one is likely to find.
On June 21, 1990 the ABC Television program Nightline aired a special New York town meeting with the ANC’s Nelson Mandela, recently released from twenty seven years in prison, and on a triumphant tour of the United States. Israel’s nuclear collaboration with South Africa and its sanctions-defying diamond and weapons trade with the white supremacist apartheid state were by then well known. So was the fact that South Africa’s Jews, beneficiaries of apartheid, were the world’s richest community and the world’s highest per capita contributors to Israel.
\Still, under the direction of the program’s Jewish moderator, Ted Koppel, the town meeting quickly developed into one more battleground of the Jewish onslaught. One Ken Adelman of the Institute for Contemporary Studies, Henry Siegman, executive director of the American Jewish Congress and Koppel, as if by prearrangement, all sought to dictate to Mandela what the ANC’s position should be on Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian struggle.
Drawn out by the wily Mandela, Koppel abandoned his euphemism-laden innuendoes and stated frankly that he saw this as a Black-Jewish problem. “There has been for many years a close alliance between the Jewish population and the Black population in the Civil Rights struggle,” Koppel alleged. “There is likely to be a rather negative reaction” to the ANC’s refusal to renounce comradely ties with Arafat, Koppel threatened. “That reaction,” he continued, “could very well cause [Jewish] people to call up their congressmen, their senators” and urge action against the ANC’s request for a continuation of sanctions against the apartheid regime.
Mandela’s response to the three pronged attack was to lecture his inquisitors in his headmasterly way – “One of the mistakes which some political analysts make is to think that their enemies should be our enemies.” The Black section of the audience cheered lustily while Jesse Jackson and New York Mayor, David Dinkins, both victims of the Jewish onslaught, huddled together poker faced and inscrutable in the front seat. But not before Koppel, perhaps in an unguarded moment, impressed Mandela and the world with the awesomeness of Jewish power in these United States. Mandela, Koppel warned, should “have been more concerned about not alienating” American Jews, “who have it within their hands, within their power [emphasis mine] either to continue sanctions against South Africa or to raise those sanctions, to lift them.”
