As we previously discussed, the Hollywood Media District BID recently expanded the size of its board of directors in order to include Joseph Varet, who told the assembled worthies that he wanted to be on the board “to contribute my own non-profit/for-profit board experience to just contribute towards further…uh…developing the district in a positive and sustainable way.” We don’t know about you, but, to paraphrase Hanns Johst, “Wenn ich überzeugt und nachhaltige höre … entsichere ich meinen Browning!”¹

Joseph didn’t go into details about his “own non-profit/for-profit board experience” but, as you may have guessed, have we got some details for you!

See, Joseph’s mom is Elizabeth Rosenwald Varet, chair of American Securities Group² and leader of the (possibly now defunct because Bernie Madoff) Anchorage Charitable Fund.³ One piece of Joseph Varet’s “non-profit/for-profit board experience” is sitting on the board of directors of Anchorage.³

And what did Anchorage do with its megabucks? Well, according to the Center for American Progress, between 2001 and 2008 they gave more than $2,300,000 to the Middle East Forum,⁴ run by the fanatical racist hate-spewing Daniel Pipes.⁵ They also gave a few $100K each to various Pipes lackeys, e.g. Stephen Emerson and other such out-from-under-the-rock crawlers, but we’ll leave you to find the details for yourself if you care.

Well, time goes by. Bernie Madoff seems to have sucked all the money of the foundation into his vortex, although Joseph and Mom were amongst those sued by Irving Picard, trustee of the assets seized from Madoff.⁶ Meanwhile, a young Norwegian man, Anders Behring Breivik, was sitting around in Scandinavia, looking at Muslims through his windows, plagiarizing the work of Pipes and other Muslim-haters for his kilopage manifesto, and cleaning his guns. Inspired by these words, written by Pipes and funded by Varet, well, you know the rest of the story.

And now we residents of Hollywood have Joseph on the board of our BID, responsible for overseeing armed thugs who seem to see us as Breivik sees Muslims: undesirables bent on mucking up their neighborhood who are to be removed by any necessary means. According to the New York Times, Varet sees “life as a kind of experiential art form.”² The gallery that he runs with his Wife Esther Kim is “dedicated to exhibitions that challenge conventional modes of art production and presentation,” and Breivik’s work certainly qualifies as that. Perhaps some day we’ll be lucky enough to have Joseph fill us in on the aesthetics of mass murder, an area of performance art sadly hitherto neglected by the artistico-critical elite.

1. The original version of this line, “whenever I hear the word ‘culture’ I flip the safety on my Browning,” is often misattributed to Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and other leading lights of the Nazi party. But it’s not hard to check where it really came from, something that’s always worth your time if you don’t want to look foolish. And you don’t, do you?
2. See Esther Kim and Joseph Varet, NYT April 22, 2011.
3. See Meet An Islamophobia Network Funder: The Varet And Rosenwald Family.
4. See Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, specifically Chapter 1 (PDF).
5. See Who is Daniel Pipes?, published by the Media Monitors Network, for reasons why it’s accurate to call Daniel Pipes fanatical, racist, and hate-spewing.
6. See the complaint here and there’s lots more filings available here and there. Who has time to read all this stuff?

Image of painting of Breivik by Thierry Ehrmann via Wikimedia Commons and released under the CC-BY 2.0. Image of Daniel Pipes by Luke Ford via Wikimedia Foundation and released under the CC-BY 2.5. Image of Bernie Madoff via Wikimedia and is in the public domain because it was produced by a federal officer in the course of the performance of her duties (lawyerese for “it’s a mugshot.”).