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Kevin MacDonald: Like Father, Like Son

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

The War Party is beating the drums again, and much of the media is obediently falling into line. Jeffrey Goldberg, whose article for the New Yorker was an important part of the disinformation campaign that was so central to the successful neocon push for the Iraq war, is leading the charge once again. His recent Atlantic article, “The Point of No Return,” is a brief for another war, this time with Iran. Rather than present his own doubtless  warmongering views, he slants his article as objective reportage on the mindset of Israel’s leaders, particularly Benjamin Netanayahu’s “belief … that Iran is not Israel’s problem alone; it is the world’s problem, and the world, led by the United States, is duty-bound to grapple with it.

“Duty-bound”? That’s quite a sense of duty. The world has a duty to deal with a regime whose overt animus is directed at Israel, and if it doesn’t, Israel will do it itself. Goldberg claims that a military strike is also favored by Arab states, a point cogently disputed by Marc Lynch writing in Atlantic. In any case it’s a bit difficult to believe that “Several Arab leaders have suggested that America’s standing in the Middle East depends on its willingness to confront Iran.” How about America’s standing in the region depending on its ability to pressure Israel from its expansionist aims and end Israeli oppression of the Palestinians?Nah, the Arabs could care less about that.

In any case, one still wonders how attacking Iran is in the interests of the US or the rest of the world. But of course, interest is irrelevant. That’s the  thing about duties. When one has a duty, self-interest and personal desire are irrelevant. You have a duty. Be a good soldier. Do it and don’t ask questions. End of story.

Goldberg never tells us why the US has a duty to initiate a military strike against Iran (although one can infer it has something to do with the Holocaust). So his main thrust is to show that Netanyahu would do it unilaterally if the US won’t. And why is Netanyahu so gung-ho on war? It’s because of the influence of his father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu: “To understand why Netanyahu possesses this deep sense—and why his understanding of Jewish history might lead him to attack Iran, even over Obama’s objections—it is necessary to understand Ben-Zion Netanyahu, his 100-year-old father.”

The senior Netanyahu is a premier example of a Jewish academic ethnic activist. Goldberg informs us that he was Vladimir Jabotinsky’s secretary. Jabotinsky was the father of racial Zionism and the inspiration of the terrorist wing of Zionism prior to 1948. Since that time, Jabotinsky has been the inspiration for the pro-expansion, pro-settler Likud Party—racial Zionism in all but name.  As Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently pointed out, at the present time Israel “is governed by [Jabotinsky’s] conscious heirs.”

Goldberg describes Ben-Zion Netanyahu’s most important work, The Origins of the Inquisition in 15th-Century Spain (1995), as follows: “He argued that Spanish hatred of Jews was spurred by the principle of limpieza de sangre, or the purity of blood; it was proto-Nazi thought, in other words, not mere theology, that motivated the Inquisition. Ben-Zion also argued that the Inquisition corresponds to the axiom that anti-Semitic persecution is preceded, in all cases, by carefully scripted and lengthy dehumanization campaigns meant to ensure the efficient eventual elimination of Jews. To him, the lessons of Jewish history are plain and insistent.”

Netanyahu’s apologetic account of the Spanish Inquisition is a major topic of Chapter 7 of Separation and Its Discontents (”Rationalization and Apologia: The Intellectual Construction of Judaism”), including especially a long appendix. I remember when I first read his work that I was struck at how baldly apologetic it was—up front and in your face. One reviewer referred to his “almost mystical jeremiads against the Inquisitors” — not exactly the mark of an objective historian.

Basically, it’s the same old story: the behavior of Jews is irrelevant to the hostility people have against them. In this case, he tried to show that the Jews who converted to Christianity were sincere in their beliefs so that the Inquisition was at bottom racialist. I accept that some of the New Christians may have been sincere (and even Netanyahu admits that some were not). But I point out that, whatever their beliefs, there is a lot of evidence that the New Christians continued to intermarry and retain all the other ingroup connections that have always characterized Jews. The result was that an ethnically alien group came to dominate Spanish society even though it had adopted a surface of Christianity. In other words, Jewish racialism came first, followed by the Inquisition as a reaction. In the absence of surface religious differences, the only clue the Inquisition had was suspicion based on their ethnic ties—limpieze de sangre. Ethnicity matters as a point of conflict, even when people have the same surface beliefs.

One of Netanyahu’s comments made an indelible impression because it depicted Jews as willing and self-conscious agents of princely “massive exploitation”—a major theme of anti-Jewish attitudes in traditional societies.

It was primarily because of the functions of the Jews as the king’s revenue gatherers in the urban areas that the cities saw the Jews as the monarch’s agents, who treated them as objects of massive exploitation. By serving as they did the interests of the kings, the Jews seemed to be working against the interests of the cities; and thus we touch again on the phenomenon we have referred to: the fundamental conflict between the kings and their people—a conflict not limited to financial matters, but one that embraced all spheres of government that had a bearing on the people’s life. It was in part thanks to this conflict of interests that the Jews could survive the harsh climate of the Middle Ages, and it is hard to believe that they did not discern it when they came to resettle in Christian Europe. Indeed, their requests, since the days of the Carolingians, for assurances of protection before they settled in a place show (a) that they realized that the kings’ positions on many issues differed from those of the common people and (b) that the kings were prepared, for the sake of their interests, to make common cause with the “alien” Jews against the clear wishes of their Christian subjects. In a sense, therefore, the Jews’ agreements with the kings in the Middle Ages resembled the understandings they had reached with foreign conquerors in the ancient world. (Netanyahu 1995, 71–72)

One would think on the basis of his portrayal of Jews as willing and self-conscious agents of massive exploitation in alliance with corrupt elites that Netanyahu would realize the rationality of traditional anti-Jewish attitudes. However, there is little evidence of that, and certainly his treatment of the motives behind the Inquisition strongly suggest that he thinks Jews are blameless.  (I can’t resist pointing out the parallel to our current situation—that our new American elite is substantially composed of ethnically conscious Jews with a heavy sprinkling of corrupt White people with no allegiance or loyalty to their own people—exactly the Jewish formula for success in traditional societies.)

Indeed, the above passage can be read as saying that the Jews had to be exploiters in order to survive the Middle Ages. Survival comes first before any compunction about exploiting non-Jews.(Jewish exploitation of non-Jews was greatly facilitated by Jewish religious attitudes that non-Jews are exploitable outgroups—an ideology that is enshrined in all the founding Jewish religious documents, from the Old Testament to the Talmud.) It’s an argument that can easily be applied to issues like West Bank settlements — needed to make Israel into a viable entity. George Will’s recent column pointed once again to the pre-1967 borders of Israel as dangerously indefensible.

It’s interesting that this survival-first argument is the key to the current attitudes emanating from the Netanyahu camp. Goldberg never once mentions the reality that Jewish behavior has poisoned the atmosphere in the Middle East. It’s simply about survival. As Netanyahu the elder stated: “The Jewish people are making their position clear and putting faith in their military power. The nation of Israel is showing the world today how a state should behave when it stands before an existential threat: by looking danger in the eye and calmly considering what should be done and what can be done. And to be ready to enter the fray at the moment there is a reasonable chance of success.”

This view that the behavior of Jews is irrelevant to hatred directed against them is an incredibly important part of the Jewish self-concept. A recent review of a book on the history of British attitudes on Jews begins, “What is important about anti-Semitism—a fairly modern term for an ancient clutch of ideas—is that it has less to tell us about the Jews themselves than about their enemies” (”Inverted targets,” David Vital’s review of Anthony Julius’s Trials of the Diaspora, TLS, July 23, 2010).

One can always understand the appeal of an existential argument, but it would be much more compelling for non-Jews if Israel’s behavior since 1967 had not appalled pretty much everyone who is paying attention. The problem is that Jews have a long history of not acknowledging the role of their own behavior in fomenting anti-Jewish attitudes. Then, when it blows up, it’s all about survival. Survival trumps everything else, certainly including any need to alter their behavior. As Tallyrand said of the Bourbon kings, “They learned nothing, they forgot nothing.”

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Kevin MacDonald: The Jews turn on Turkey

Friday, June 18th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Well, that didn’t take long. Turkey’s involvement in the flotilla and its support for the Palestinians has now made it an enemy of the Israel Lobby, with all that that entails. All in all, it’s a good example of Jewish power and moral particularism. After long opposing any resolution on Turkey’s genocide of Armenians, Rep. Howard Berman, a major force for Israel in the US Congress,  suddenly supports a Congressional resolution, stating, “nothing justifies Turkey’s turning a blind eye to the reality of the Armenian genocide.” He and “a host of other members of the House’s unofficial Jewish caucus have signed on as co-sponsors.”

Berman suddenly found his moral bearings, along with the organized Jewish community. The neocons are naturally leading the charge, summarized byJim Lobe who quotes from a report by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs:

“If Turkey finds its best friends to be Iran, Hamas, Syria and Brazil (look for Venezuela in the future) the security of that information (and Western technology in weapons in Turkey’s arsenal) is suspect. The United States should seriously consider suspending military cooperation with Turkey as a prelude to removing it from [NATO],” suggested the group.

[JINSA's]  board of advisers includes many prominent champions of the 2003 Iraq invasion, including former Defence Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director James Woolsey, and former U.N. Amb. John Bolton.

What’s interesting here is the proposal to eject Turkey from NATO. It wasn’t long ago that Turkey was being assured that it could become a member of the EU. Turkey’s exclusion from Europe is widely seen as a big factor in its change of foreign policy. Thomas Friedman: “After a decade of telling the Turks that if they wanted E.U. membership they had to reform their laws, economy, minority rights and civilian-military relations — which the Erdogan government systematically did — the E.U. leadership has now said to Turkey: ‘Oh, you mean nobody told you? We’re a Christian club. No Muslims allowed.’ The E.U.’s rejection of Turkey, a hugely bad move, has been a key factor prompting Turkey to move closer to Iran and the Arab world.”

And that’s the good news. The neocons and the organized Jewish community were big supporters of Turkey’s bid to join the EU–which would have meant that  71 million Turks would have the right to move anywhere in Europe. This would mean the end of Europe as having any defining culture or biological coherence — obviously not a concern to Jewish activists like Friedman.

It’s worth remembering that Jewish activist organizations regarded the admission of Turkey to the EU as a way of civilizing Europe and ensuring cultural, religious, and ethnic pluralism — precisely the policy proposals that the Jewish community has advanced in all Western societies, particularly since the end of World War II. In 2002, at the height of the push for Turkey’s admission to the EU, the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) had this to say in response to former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s argument that Muslim Turkey has no place in the European Union:

Ironically, in the fifteenth century, when European monarchs expelled the Jews, it was Moslem Turkey that provided them a welcome…. During the Holocaust, when Europe was slaughtering its Jews, it was Turkish consuls who extended protection to fugitives from Vichy France and other Nazi allies…. Today’s European neo-Nazis and skinheads focus upon Turkish victims while, Mr. President [d'Estaing], you are reported to be considering the Pope’s plea that your Convention emphasize Europe’s Christian heritage. [The Center suggested that Giscard’s new Constitution] underline the pluralism of a multi-faith and multi-ethnic Europe, in which the participation of Moslem Turkey might bolster the continent’s Moslem communities—and, indeed, Turkey itself—against the menaces of extremism, hate and fundamentalism. A European Turkey can only be beneficial for stability in Europe and the Middle East. (See here; the statement has presumably been removed from the SWC website.)

Turkey in the EU was obviously a win-win situation for Jews: The end of Europe as a Christian civilization with an ethnic core combined with a moderating influence on the Muslims that would benefit Israel. I rather doubt that we’ll be seeing this sort of thing anymore. The chances of Turkey being admitted to the EU now are less than zero.

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s argument that Turkey has no place in Europe is just as valid against admitting any Muslims to Europe. Although the rejection of Turkey doesn’t change the present suicidal dynamic in Europe, it will certainly slow down the process compared to what would have happened had Turkey been admitted, perhaps allowing enough time for Europe to waken from its slumbers.


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Kevin MacDonald: Charles Krauthammer’s “Those Troublesome Jews”

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Charles Krauthammer has always been extreme even by neocon standards. He was among the first to recommend that America seize the opportunity created by the fall of the Soviet Union to remake the entire Arab world in the interests of “democratic globalism.”

Beyond power. Beyond interest. Beyond interest defined as power. That is the credo of democratic globalism. Which explains its political appeal: America is a nation uniquely built not on blood, race or consanguinity, but on a proposition—to which its sacred honor has been pledged for two centuries.

America as a country with no biological identity should go to war so that Israel can achieve its ethnic interests. Americans are wonderfully principled people who have no ethnic identity. So he pitches eternal war as a moral crusade for righteousness that America must be committed to because that’s just how Americans are: Principled people who must be reminded once in a while that they need to wage holy war to uphold their lofty principles.

America is committed not to blood but to supporting democracy and freedom. America must defeat “the new global threat to freedom, the new existential enemy, the Arab-Islamic totalitarianism that has threatened us in both its secular and religious forms for the quarter-century since the Khomeini revolution of 1979.”

He’s probably had to rethink the rationale for war against the Arab and Islamic world since Hamas won the largest number of votes and parliamentary seats in democratic elections held in 2006.

Moral posturing is absolutely central to Krauthammer’s modus operandi.  While the rest of the world remains horrified at the behavior of the Israeli military, his column on the 2009 Gaza invasion was titled “Moral clarity in Gaza“:  “Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating.”

Krauthammer always knows who the good guys are and he knows Americans are suckers for arguments framed as moral imperatives.

So it’s not surprising that he sees Israel as the hapless victim in the flotilla incident, condemned for simply “defending” itself. Andrew Sullivan is correct that to read Krauthammer is to enter into an alternate universe where aggressors are victims and where “forward defense” means invasion and murder of civilians. Krauthammer is the foremost exponent of the Israeli Derangement Syndrome: “This is a form of derangement, or of such a passionate commitment to a foreign country that any and all normal moral rules or even basic fairness are jettisoned.”

What’s different about Krauthammer is his willingness to play the anti-Semitism card — combined with the usual trademarked dose of moral posturing. His column on the flotilla is titled “Those Troublesome Jews” — troublesome in his view because Jews insist on defending themselves:

The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, 6 million — that number again — hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists — Iranian in particular — openly prepare a more final solution.

Israel’s problems don’t stem from push back resulting from its aggressive ethnonationalism. They stem from the fact that the world–the entire world–wants another Holocaust, including “the supine Europeans who’ve had quite enough of the Jewish problem.” While the rest of the world hates Jews because of Third Worldism, the Europeans hate Jews just as they have for the last millennium. They’re all basically Nazis at heart.

This is not an exaggeration. His 2002 article “Please excuse the Jews for living” had the same logic. He recited the many sins of France, including the fact that Jean Marie LePen – “the modern incarnation of European fascism” — had enough votes to be a run-off candidate for president.

I don’t recall Krauthammer condemning the many signs of fascism in Israel — particularly the present Israeli government and, most famously, its foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. It’s clear that Krauthammer thinks that European countries are proposition countries too. For Europeans, nationalism is a morally reprehensible reminder of National Socialism; for Israelis, it’s simply Jews being assertive.

And what accounts for the fact that European governments join in the chorus of condemnation of Israel? Plain old-fashioned anti-Semitism. Europeans just don’t like assertive Jews.

The explanation is not that difficult to find. What we are seeing is pent-up anti-Semitism, the release – with Israel as the trigger – of a millennium-old urge that powerfully infected and shaped European history.

What is odd is not the anti-Semitism of today, but its relative absence during the last half-century. That was the historical anomaly. Holocaust shame kept the demon corked for that half-century. But now the atonement is passed. The genie is out again.

This time, however, it is more sophisticated. It is not a blanket hatred of Jews. Jews can be tolerated, even accepted, but they must know their place. Jews are fine so long as they are powerless, passive and picturesque.

What is intolerable is Jewish assertiveness, the Jewish refusal to accept victimhood. And nothing so embodies that as the Jewish state. What so offends Europeans is the armed Jew, the Jew who refuses to sustain seven suicide bombings in the seven days of Passover and strikes back. That Jew has been demonized in the European press as never before since, well … since the ’30s. …

Just when Europe had reconciled itself to tolerance for the passive Jew – the Holocaust survivor who could be pitied, lionized, perhaps awarded the occasional literary prize – along comes the Jewish state, crude and vital and above all unwilling to apologize for its own existence.

It’s a clever argument of the sort that appeals to those morally principled Westerners. Israeli nationalism and aggressiveness are good, and if you don’t think so, you’re an anti-Semite. Europeans have always hated Jews. In another column, Krauthammer writes of “a history of centuries of relentless, and at times savage, persecution of Jews in Christian lands.”

One wonders if there are any examples of Israeli aggression that he would see as morally reprehensible. Probably not. He has rationalized every example of Israeli aggression to date and has denounced the Oslo Accords as  “the most catastrophic and self- inflicted wound by any state in modern history.”

The existence of fanatical Jews like Krauthammer isn’t a surprise given what we know about the massive ethnocentrism at the heart of Jewish identity. What is truly depressing is that he is published in the Washington Post and syndicated in over 200 other newspapers and websites, such as Townhall. He is a regular commentator on Fox News and Inside Washington.

The result is that Americans are continually subjected to pro-Israel chauvinism, towering Jewish ethnocentrism, and anti-European hatred in the most prestigious and popular media outlets. We internalize the double standard in which Krauthammer rationalizes Israeli racialism and apartheid but promotes and exploits the idea that America and European countries exist for the purpose of defending abstractions like “freedom” and “democracy”; any signs of White identity and sense of White interests are morally repugnant.

We come to take these ideas for granted–to the point that Krauthammer is eminently respectable, especially among conservatives. Other commentators, like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, seem to have internalized this mindset as well. Accepting people like Krauthammer is what it means to be a mainstream conservative.

It’s a major part of the sickness we face.

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Posted in Anti-Semitism, Israel, Israel Lobby, Media Influence, Media bias, Neoconservatism | 91 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: The burden of Israel

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: The Obama administration continues to insist that Israel is not a burden to the US, but even the LA Times came out with an article showing describing the problems that Israel presents to the US. (Print version headline: “Raid throws a wrench in U.S. agenda“). The article  lists several current foreign policy problems exacerbated by the raid:

  • US-sponsored peace talks in the region (despite the fact that Israel has no interest in peace);
  • US drive for new U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran (in other words, Israel has made it more difficult for the US to advance Israel’s agenda);
  • Complications with the US relationship with Turkey which is “a NATO member and has been important to U.S. military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan” (several Turkish nationals were killed in the raid, and the ships sailed under Turkish flags);
  • Difficulties in the US push for nuclear non-proliferation given that Israel is well-known to have nuclear weapons: “other countries demanded that Israel take a more active role in the effort to reduce nuclear arms, a reference to the atomic arsenal Israel has never acknowledged possessing.”

The article also highlights comments from a prominent foreign policy expert and from General David Petraeus:

“The costs of alignment with Israel are becoming ever more apparent, and the benefits are becoming harder to identify,” said James Dobbins, who was an envoy for both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and now heads Rand Corp.’s International Security and Defense Policy Center. …

This week’s raid underscored concern expressed in recent congressional testimony by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. forces in the Middle East, who said perceived U.S. bias toward the Jewish state was a negative factor in the Muslim world.

What’s remarkable about this article is that it doesn’t quote the usual well-placed Zionist fanatics in the media who claim that Israel is a great asset to the US. Glib talk about the benefits of Israel to the US will be more difficult to maintain with a straight face. But of course those concerned about their political future will continue to do so:

U.S. officials say they do not view their relationship with Israel as a burden, regardless of criticism from the Middle East, Europe or elsewhere.

“Let me be clear here,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Tuesday. “We have a trusted relationship. They’re an important ally. And we are greatly supportive of their security. That’s not going to change.”


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Kevin MacDonald: Flotilla fallout

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Jake Tapper,  a reporter for ABC News writes that “there won’t be any daylight between the US and Israel.” The rationale? A senior administration official says “The president has always said that it will be much easier for Israel to make peace if it feels secure.”

Of course, that’s nonsense. Israeli security has nothing to do with it. The reality is that Israeli aggression is possible only because Israel understands that the US is its poodle and that the US will work on its behalf in the UN and elsewhere, no matter what Israel does. The Israel Lobby is ultimately to blame, meaning ultimately the influence of Jewish money on the political process.

AIPAC’s spin on this is an amazing piece of propaganda. AIPAC’s article is headlined, “Radical Hamas Supporters Beat, Stab Israeli Soldiers“–a breathtaking lack of context. The ADL said pretty much the same thing, calling the flotilla “a deliberate provocation against Israel.”

From Israel’s point of view, “the government appeared anxious to make an example of this six-ship flotilla — the largest effort to date to break the blockade of Gaza — to show the world that it would not tolerate efforts to break the blockage, international condemnation notwithstanding.” The main Israeli talking point, apparent in the AIPAC press release and the ADL statement, is that they had offered to unload the cargo at the Israeli port of Ashdod where it would be shipped overland to Gaza.

But that doesn’t square with the common understanding that Israel has erected a barrier of red tape for getting supplies into Gaza. A 2009 Christian Science Monitor report pointed to delays and arbitrary exclusions and stated that around 25% of the pre-blockade supplies were getting into Gaza. Another CSM article from June 2009 pointed to growth stunting in Palestinian children.

Despite Israel’s claims, there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Israel’s actions will likely make it far more difficult to develop a consensus against Iran, and that’s all to the good. It will also greatly increase the cost of the Israeli-American alliance, as the US attempts to shore up support for Israel in the teeth of moral outrage around the  world. That may well result in some push back here, as happened recently with the statement by General David Petraeus that Israeli policies oppose vital US interests in the Middle East. (He later denied it, doubtless under pressure.) Even Meir Dagan, the head of the Mossad, acknowledges that Israel is becoming more and more of a burden to the US.

Israel’s supporters in the US never tire of playing the role of innocent victim. They will continue to do so, as indicated by the statements of AIPAC and the ADL. But such rhetoric is so far out of touch with reality that at some point politically aware Americans must realize that US support for Israel is based on nothing more than Jewish power with no moral justification at all. That doesn’t mean that the lobby will lose its power, but at least we will all know that it’s about power, and can’t be intellectually justified.

In turn, that may well help Americans to see Jews in a more realistic light–not as morally blameless victims, but as cynical and ruthlessly self-interested ethnic actors . The egregious double standard in which Jews profess to be dedicated to democracy, ethnic tolerance and human rights in the US while supporting a vicious ethnonationalism in Israel will be more and more difficult to hide.

And that should give us hope, because the collapse of the Jewish position commanding the moral high ground is a critical support for the multicultural left in America and throughout the West.

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Kevin MacDonald: Philip Weiss: “The American Jewish revolution is over”

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Philip Weiss is a unique American Jewish voice — a Jew without all the usual rationalizations and blind spots–at least most of them. A recent piece of his, titled “This is how the world now sees Jews,” consisted simply of this photo, with a note that it probably depicted Israeli settlers:

How the world now sees Jews

Below is a Palestinian woman whose house in East Jerusalem has been occupied by settlers. She is arguing with nationalist Jews.

Making the case for seizing Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem

The photo is from Weiss’s article, “Making the case for Zionism,” which quotes Peter Beinart in the NY Review of Books:

In the American Jewish establishment today, the language of liberal Zionism—with its idioms of human rights, equal citizenship, and territorial compromise—has been drained of meaning.

Weiss comments: “Why? Because the territorialist-nationalists have won, and from Deir Yassin to Al-Atatra to Sheikh Jarrah, they have uprooted and humiliated Palestinian women.”

The point is that Israelis are  thugs with machine guns and ethnic cleansers. More importantly, all Jews, including the organized American Jewish community which supports Israel to the hilt, have lost the moral high ground.

This is familiar territory for Weiss, but his article “Lame Specter, Blumenthal, and Kagan show — the American Jewish revolution is over” extends his critique of Jews to their role in the contemporary American elite.  The basic message is that Jews in America started out as morally aggrieved outsiders who have ultimately morphed into symbols of the worn out establishment (Arlen Specter), liars (Richard Blumenthal), and calculating achievers and hacks (Elena Kagan).

Although I am far less romantic about the Jewish left and its moral imperative of revolution against the traditional people and culture of America than Weiss is, he certainly does understand that the new Jewish elite is fundamentally corrupt. This Jewish elite consists of people like Adam Kirsch “who steps into the New Yorker and all the other magazines with an air of entitlement, and who can blame him, Jews run the important magazines, with all the passion of printing a train timetable.”

Notice that Kirsch “steps into” his job at the New Yorker – his position as the editor of an elite publication simply handed to him as part of his Jewish entitlement. No need for struggle or for particularly great qualifications. Jews have arrived.

Kagan too “stepped into” her position as Supreme Court nominee. Her only qualifications are being Jewish and knowing the right people. The entire passage bears quoting:

Kagan is the ultimate sign that our brand is finished. She is the best of breed, as they say at Westminster. According to this Times profile, she comes out of the same hothouse I came out of, in her case the Upper West Side. Achievement, liberalism, and no partying. Arguing at the dinner table. Presumably no physical life. [Interesting comment on what it means to be Jewish. On the other hand, there's that famous photo in the WSJ of her playing softball.] …

Kagan’s world is the Jewish success world, she stepped into it like Kirsch did. She loved the hothouse. She emulated Felix Frankfurter, who didn’t stand for much either, and is pals with Sarah Walzer,daughter of Michael Walzer, the political theorist and Jewish parochialist. She went to Jeffrey Toobin’s wedding, she was picked by Larry Summers at Harvard around the time he was saying that divestment was anti-semitic. Eliot Spitzer, Ted Weiss and Elizabeth Holtzman were among her backers. She clerked for Abner Mikva, a Chicago macher who backed Obama.

It’s a Jewish world — a world where being in the right circles counts far more than genuine talent. Kagan, the Harriet Miers of the Obama Administration, simply “steps into” her position in the top court in the land.

This reminds me of Jews as an elite in the Soviet Union, where a nascent Jewish elite motivated by moral fervor  and hatred unleashed by their exclusion under the Czar morphed easily into a corrupt, nepotistic elite that was hostile to the traditional people and culture of Russia. A report to the Soviet Central Committee reminds me of Kagan’s route to success: “They gather around themselves people of the same nationality, impose the habit of praising one another (while making others erroneously believe that they are indispensable), and force their protégés through to high posts” (see here, p. 78). Another report, from 1942, noted that elite cultural institutions “turned out to be filled by non-Russian people (mainly by Jews)” (see here , p. 51, ff). For example, of the ten top executives of the Bolshoi Theater—the most prestigious Soviet cultural institution—there were eight Jews and one Russian. Similar disproportions were reported in prestigious musical conservatories, the Soviet Academy of Science Institute of Literature, and among art and music reviewers in elite publications. Ethnic nepotism, not IQ, is the only way to explain these disproportions.

So now we are looking at a Supreme Court that is one-third Jewish–another disproportion that can’t be explained by Jewish IQ but reeks of ethnic nepotism. The ADL will of course attempt to squelch anyone who talks about the new Jewish elite publicly. But as time goes on, it’s going to be more and more apparent who runs the US.

Fundamentally, White Americans have to wrap their minds around the fact that this new elite is corrupted by nepotism,that it supports policies like massive non-White immigration aimed at the racial dispossession of Whites, and that it has no moral standing, most obviously because of the gap between its moral posturings in the US versus the reality Israel as a an aggressive, ethnonationalist state.

 

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Posted in Israel, Israel Lobby, Jewish attitudes in Israel versus the Diaspora, Jewish ethnocentrism, Jews and the Left | 68 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: Alison Weir at UC-Irvine

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: It’s Israel Apartheid Week at the University of California-Irvine. I went to see Alison Weir who runs  IfAmericansKnew.org. She gave a great talk, a beautiful combination of data and emotionally compelling comments on her personal experience as a witness to the plight of the Palestinians–very moving.

When  it comes to the data, she is at her best in showing how the US media is corrupted by its coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict–an issue that extends far beyond the Middle East to include everything related to multiculturalism in America, including coverage of the Kagan nomination. She presented data on the New York Times, the San Jose Mercury News, and National Public Radio. NPR is particularly interesting because it is often the target of pro-Israel activist organizations like CAMERA. Pro-Israel groups have sought to boycott NPR and have pressured it financially. (Corroborating Alison’s work, just today Mondoweiss posted another devastating critique of NPR–this time “on the month-old Israeli ‘military order’ that allows the IDF to deport any Palestinian inhabitant of the West Bank it defines as an ‘infiltrator,’ simply for lacking the paperwork that the Israeli government itself refuses to issue”–Arizona on steroids. But don’t expect American Jewish organizations to get worked up about it even though they are unanimously against the Arizona law.)

And here she lists all the journalists writing for American publications (one hesitates to call them American journalists) who cover the conflict but also have family ties to Israel or have served in the Israeli army (some may still be in the IDF). Two particularly struck me:

• A previous [New York]  Times bureau chief, Joel Greenberg, before he was bureau chief but after he was already publishing in the Times from Israel, actually served in the Israeli army.

• Media pundit and Atlantic staffer Jeffrey Goldberg also served in the Israeli military; it’s unclear when, how, or even if his military service ended.

Weir is optimistic that things are heading in the right direction. She thinks that more and more Americans seem aware of the situation in Israel. The Israel Apartheid week and the movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions are high-profile efforts on college campuses. Outside the lecture hall was an elaborate display of anti-Israel cartoons and an apartheid wall that had been around to a number of campuses.

Apartheid Wall
Apartheid Wall; Universities are listed on bottom
Mock Israeli tank
Mock Israeli tank
Latuff Cartoon on display
Latuff Cartoon on display

It made me think that my current TOO article on John Mearsheimer may have been too pessimistic. Let’s frame it at its most hopeful: If the Israel Lobby loses its control of the political process in the US, it would mean that Jewish power in general loses. And that would have major implications for a wide range of issues, from immigration to the legitimacy of assertions of White identity.

One thing that struck me was that almost all the ~150  students who came to her talk were Arabs. The women wore scarves, and almost everyone wore a black anti-Israel tee shirt, so the meeting had the air of a uniformed, homogeneous, almost military group, with a couple of White outliers like me. Her talk was sponsored by the Muslim Students Association. It was preceded and followed by the reading of a passage from the Koran in Arabic, followed by an English translation. The event was held in the campus Cross-Cultural Center which has offices for all the ethnic activist student organizations. Immediately following her talk, the MECHA activists set up their meeting, presumably to denounce what’s going on in Arizona. (MECHA and all the other student ethnic lobbies and leftist groups are co-sponsors of Israel Apartheid Week. Hostile Jews have turned up at some of the IAW events, especially Norman Finkelstein’s talk, but I felt cheated by not witnessing any shows of Jewish hostility. They evidently pick their targets, and Finkelstein as a “self-hating Jew” is certainly high on their list.)

So even though I was cheered by the thought that more people are becoming aware of what’s going on in  Israel, it was depressing to think that the anti-Apartheid doings are basically just another ethnic lobby. These students identify with the left, and I rather doubt they would be sympathetic to my view that they really shouldn’t have been allowed into the US in the first place. And they would be rather hostile to the idea that Whites have interests too.

I felt like a foreigner viewing someone else’s show. Outside the lecture hall, I felt like a foreigner even more. Despite the fact that UC-I is in the heart of Orange County (formerly considered a bastion of White Republicanism), spotting a White student was almost a rarity.  Whites officially make up around 23% of the students at UC-I, well below their proportion in the state. UC-I is often called the University of Chinese Immigrants, but Chinese were not particularly noticeable. It was all manner of non-Whites, from every part of the world.

Just walking around campus the percentage of Whites seemed to be far less than what the university says. The official statistics are based on freshman enrollment, and I suspect that a lot of White freshmen decide UC-I is not the place for them and transfer to some other university.

It was actually rare to see a White student. When I got into the student union, there were 2 or three Whites in a total of about a hundred. Four White guys later came in and sat together–probably at least implicitly realizing that their association was based on their race. But it was eerie how Whites stood out because of their minority status–almost like being in Hong Kong or Karachi and noticing a few stray Americans.

Like the Palestinians, I had the feeling of being displaced. Only I very much doubt that the Arab students who were involved in the Israel Apartheid Week would sympathize with my feelings.

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Posted in Decline of Whites, Ethnocentrism, Israel, Israel Lobby | 43 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: Elena Kagan Gets the Nomination

Monday, May 10th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald:It’s great to be Jewish in the year 2010. The latest evidence is the appointment of Elena Kagan as the third Jew on the Supreme Court. Philip Weiss puts it this way:

The Kagan appointment means that we have entered a period in which Jews are equal members, if not actually predominant members, of the American Establishment. Obama’s two closest political advisers are Jewish, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, and are said to be his foreign-policy braintrust. The economy is supervised to a large degree by Jewish appointees, Larry Summers and Fed Reserve Board chair Paul Bernanke (Time’s man of the year last year, a selection overseen by Rick Stengel, the Time magazine editor, who is also Jewish).

Of course, that’s just scratching the surface on Jewish representation among the elites in politics, law, the financial world, the media, and personal wealth. Weiss goes on to take the standard line that Jews have achieved so much because of their bookish culture. But if there’s anything that stands out about Kagan, it’s how utterly ordinary she is in terms of scholarly accomplishment or anything else that would qualify her for the court–very few publications, no experience as a judge, little courtroom experience – the Harriet Miers of the Obama administration. (I stole that one from someone on the Rachel Maddow show, maybe Maddow herself. But it shows the depth of her inaptitude that even liberals are sensitive to it. For example, Paul Campos writes on the Daily Beast, “if Kagan is a brilliant legal scholar, the evidence must be lurking somewhere other than in her publications. Kagan’s scholarly writings are lifeless, dull, and eminently forgettable. They are, on the whole, cautious academic exercises in the sort of banal on-the-other-handing whose prime virtue is that it’s unlikely to offend anyone in a position of power.”  Here’s my version: “When she received tenure at the University of Chicago in 1995, she had exactly two scholarly articles published in law journals — a record that would ordinarily not get her tenure even at quite a few third tier universities much less an elite institution like the University of Chicago.”)

Her only talent seems to be getting really prestigious jobs without any obvious qualifications apart from her ethnic background. And her appointment is a sure thing for the left: Whereas Republicans have been disappointed several times by nominees who converted into liberals (like John Paul Stevens), Kagan’s ethnic identity ensures that she is on the side of all things multicultural.

My take (see also here) is that this is an affirmative action appointment of someone who has benefited greatly from Jewish ethnic networking and has dangerous views on the First Amendment that are in line with the views of the ADL, the SPLC, and the rest of the organized Jewish community. (See also Patrick Cleburne’s post at VDARE.com.)

It’s amazing to see liberals expressing doubts about Kagan. (In fact, one wonders where these people were before her nomination was a done deal. Kagan’s name has been floated since the Sotomayor nomination, but suddenly we see all these doubts about her – mainly from liberals feigning concern.) She is clearly on the left, perhaps with some neocon tendencies regarding executive power. But that is hardly reassuring. Put these tendencies together and you have someone who could be very dangerous to an incipient racialist movement: Anti-”hate speech” and comfortable with using government power to suppress political action that conflicts with the aims of the regime.

Another thought that crossed my mind was that Obama and his advisers may have wanted to court Jews [bad pun] because of the fallout from the tensions with Israel. Despite the fact that, as John Mearsheimer recently noted, the confrontation with Israel was won hands down by Israel, a recent poll shows that American Jews are defecting from Obama in droves, with only 42% saying they would now vote for Obama (down from 83% who voted for him in 2008). A recent visit to the White House (”Obama Tries to Mend Fences with Jews“, NYTimes, May 4, 2010)  by Elie Wiesel indicated shows that Obama sees a need to placate the Jewish community:

The lunch meeting between Mr. Wiesel and Mr. Obama came three weeks after Mr. Wiesel took out a full-page advertisement in a number of United States newspapers criticizing the Obama administration for pressuring Mr. Netanyahu to stop Jewish settlement construction in East Jerusalem, where Palestinians would like to put the capital of an eventual Palestinian state.

The advertisement, in which Mr. Wiesel wrote that “Jerusalem is the heart of our heart, the soul of our soul,” alarmed White House officials, in part because it came on the heels of similar advertisements from the World Jewish Congress and grumbling from members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, that Mr. Obama was pushing Mr. Netanyahu too hard.

Giving them yet another appointment to the Supreme Court certainly can’t hurt.

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Posted in Anti-Defamation League, Elena Kagan, Israel Lobby, Jewish ethnic networking, Jews as an elite, SPLC | 82 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: Dr. Lasha Darkmoon’s latest

Monday, April 26th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Whenever Lasha Darkmoon sends me something to post I get a bit of an anxiety attack. On one hand, I know that her articles draw huge interest from readers. Her articles on Jewish influence on art struck a real chord, leading to dozens of emails to her and two later articles that summarized some of the comments — many from artists grateful that someone had finally put a finger on the problem.

On the other hand, she seeks to have impact an an emotional level that is at times unsettling and may be seen by many as “over the top.” Her latest articles (see here and here) definitely push the envelope — beginning with the illustrations from Dees that appear at the top of each article. I cringed at both, especially the one that graces the top of the second article and only left it in after special pleading from Lasha. It’s not my style, certainly. But then I said to myself: Is it really wrong or inaccurate? Comparisons between Israel and Nazism are common these days, and this website has many examples (particularly by Edmund Connelly and me)  where the future is depicted as a brutal dystopia in which Whites are victimized by the emerging non-White coalition. Dees, who is a graphic genius, is simply depicting it in a very powerful way.

So as I went through the article, I tried to make sure that what she writes is accurate but to allow her to present her emotional appeal, toning it down and eliminating quite a bit of material that I thought was needlessly offensive.

One example that got the editorial ax: The famous quote from T.S. Eliot: The rats are underneath the piles./The Jew is underneath the lot. Maybe I should have left it in, but that’s the kind of anti-Jewish comment that I find unhelpful, even if it is comes from a great poet. In the absence of a real analysis, it just lends itself to being rejected out of hand as merely an expression of prejudice — as, of course, it has: Here’s a review of a recent book on Eliot titled: “‘Underneath the lot’: An incredible mind, for sure, though touched by blatant prejudice.”

But I left in the section where she depicts the horrific crimes against Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom — even though she thought I would remove them. Probably most TOO readers have heard this crime discussed, but Darkmoon’s treatment hits home emotionally in a way that I have never seen.

Will readers be upset? Perhaps. But the mainstream media does exactly the same thing in sensationalizing crimes by Whites against non-Whites — and particularly the crimes against Jews committed in WWII. And if one really has an image of this crime in your mind, the result will be a righteous anger that will motivate people to challenge what’s going on. This, of course, is exactly why such crimes against Whites are completely ignored by the media.

Darkmoon also did a photo essay interspersed with poetry that is a tribute to Rachel Corrie, martyr for the Palestinians (“She Died for Palestine”). Again, there was a huge positive response. I think that because the fate of the Palestinians has become a moral touchstone in the contemporary world to many across the entire political spectrum, the response was uniformly positive. (We don’t have many pro-Zionist readers.)

So I said to myself, why is this any different? TOO has posted numerous articles primarily directed at the left side of the brain — the facts and analysis that are entirely on our side. But facts and analysis only go so far in motivating people.  The fact is that we have to start screaming about what is happening, not only in Israel but in the West generally. We should have a righteous anger not only about the crimes of Israel, but about the crimes of Freud and the Frankfurt School. We have to have clear, emotionally compelling images in our memories — memories that motivate action. And Lasha Darkmoon is screaming.

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Posted in Israel, Israel Lobby | 394 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: Lawrence Auster Gets Unhinged

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: I made a resolution to not to waste time and energy on Internet squabbles with people like Lawrence Auster. Auster’s agenda is pretty clear. As I said in some previous comments on him, “ Auster’s comments, posted on his website, are first and foremost an attempt to place me beyond the realm of legitimate discourse. By titling the article ‘The idiocy of Kevin MacDonald,’ Auster is saying, “Don’t go near MacDonald—he is off limits.” Auster continues to draw lines, now trying to anathematize anyone who is remotely associated with me.

For awhile, it seemed that Auster had decided not to bother with any arguments at all. His complaints about my review of Norman Podhoretz’s Why are Jews Liberals? referred to “MacDonald-style Jew-hatred” and then had long quotes from the article. Not exactly an overwhelming argument.

Now Auster has taken to calling me an “exterminationist anti-Semite,” again with the aim of drawing boundaries for acceptable discourse and again without much of an argument:

Since Kevin MacDonald sees the Jews as a group that are genetically determined by Darwinian evolution to subvert and destroy white gentile societies wherever they encounter them, in the same way that rattlesnakes are genetically determined to sink their venomous fangs into the flesh of mammals wherever they encounter them, we must conclude that he doesn’t want Jews to exist in America and Europe. Further, as I explain here with regard to MacDonald’s recent article at Alternative Right, it is clear that he doesn’t want Jews to exist in Israel either. So MacDonald doesn’t want Jews to exist anywhere.

If anyone has a reasonable interpretation of MacDonald other than that he is an exterminationist anti-Semite, I’d like to hear it.

There is a whole lot wrong with this, starting with interpreting me as saying that “Jews as a group … are genetically determined by Darwinian evolution to subvert and destroy white gentile societies wherever they encounter them.”

I certainly do think I have shown that Jews have a powerful sense of groupness. This is apparent throughout history and can be seen today in pretty much any statement put out by organizations like the ADL. And I do think that there are conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews in a wide range of areas — my writing has focused on immigration policy, policy toward Israel, and the construction of culture generally.  Whenever I discuss these issues I always qualify my remarks by noting that not all Jews hold the same opinions. Making a case for Jewish influence is a matter of looking at where the great mass of Jewish money and influence is being brought to bear and trying to determine if their efforts are effective. For example, in the case of immigration policy, it matters little if Auster and Stephen Steinlight oppose our anti-White immigration policy when the organized Jewish community and the vast majority of Jews (including a great number of Jews with influential positions in the media and in politics) are in favor of it. (Here’s a recent example: the ADL condemning the Arizona law that attempts to rid the state of illegal immigrants.) My argument is that Jewish influence was a critically necessary condition for the passage of the disastrous 1965 immigration law.

But this is a far cry from saying that Jews are “genetically determined by Darwinian evolution to subvert and destroy white gentile societies wherever they encounter them.” Even a casual reading of my work would show that it’s all about culture–why else write a book titled The Culture of Critique. (This is a recent academic version of my theory of culture.) Genetic determinism plays no role in my theory.

When it comes to why the organized Jewish community and most Jews have supported policies that oppose the interests of people of  European descent, I implicate Jewish ethnocentrism combined with their lachrymose view of their own history among Europeans — summarized in my review of Podhoretz. Briefly stated, Jews have a historical grudge against Europeans and their culture.

Besides the historical grudge that has fueled so much Jewish hostility toward European-descended peoples and their culture, the rise of a Jewish elite in 20th-century America is a story of ethnic displacement. No evolutionist is surprised at the desire to achieve elite status and displace previously dominant elites, and Jews are certainly no exception. Jews are doing what pretty much any ethnic group would do if they could. In today’s column, Pat Buchanan writes, “The Chinese of 2010 call to mind 19th-century Americans who shoved aside Mexicans, Indians and Spanish to populate a continent, build a mighty nation, challenge the British Empire — superpower of the day — and swiftly move past her in manufacturing to become first nation on earth.”

Yeah, we shoved aside other peoples. And now it’s happening to us — mainly, in my opinion, because of the  power of the new Jewish elite. The Indians didn’t like it when  it happened to them. I don’t like it as it’s happening to me and people like me. The Palestinians don’t like it either.

The only thing is that I suspect that everyone would have assumed that a 19th-century American Indian complaining about what was happening was being entirely rational. But now someone like me is treated as a raving lunatic and moral reprobate — ignored by the  elite media and vilified by the lavishly funded Jewish activist organizations like the ADL and the SPLC. We are not supposed to put up a fight. We are supposed to simply accept our displacement and pledge fealty to our new elite.

But I am not an exterminationist. Since when is someone who calls attention to conflicts of interest between groups necessarily advocating the extermination of one of the groups? By that logic, a historian documenting the influence of, say, Christian Zionists  and noting how their interests conflict with those of others would necessarily be advocating their extermination. By that logic Mearsheimer and Walt are exterminationists. Auster’s comment is nothing but an attempt to have any discussion of Jewish interests and Jewish influence be completely off the table–unlike the interests and influence of any other group.

I am perfectly happy for Jews to live where they want. I just wish they would not continue to oppose the interests of people like me.  Obviously, in saying this, I am implying that  I don’t believe in genetic determinism in the area of political choices. It is within the power of Jews to change their political behavior. In fact, rather than behaving like mindless robots acting out of a genetic imperative, Jews have always been flexibly responsive to historical contingencies, and this agrees with everything we know about human psychology.

It really doesn’t matter if groups with little power and influence oppose the interests of White Americans. But it matters greatly if a substantial component of the elite in terms of wealth as well as political power and media influence opposes our interests and brings to economic ruin and political oblivion anyone (Jew or non-Jew) who comes to our defense.

Nor do I have any conceptual problem with Jews living in Israel. As I wrote in my previous comments on Auster, I would be willing to make a quid pro quo with the organized Jewish community: If you support white ethno-nationalism in the US and provide intensive, effective support for ending and reversing the immigration policy of recent decades (i.e., something approaching the support you presently provide Israel), I would be willing to go to the wall to support Jewish ethno-nationalism in Israel, even at substantial cost for the US. The fact that a minuscule number of Jews — none of them part of the main Jewish activist organizations that have been so destructive to White ethno-nationalism — are immigration patriots and see value in America as ethnically and culturally European is certainly not a reason for someone like me to support Jewish ethno-nationalism in Israel.

But I don’t see the organized Jewish community getting behind a White America any time soon — from which I infer that they continue to believe that it is their self-interest to oppose the interests of White Americans (not that they are the victims of some phantasmagorical genetic imperative). The fact is that Israel is costing the US dearly in terms of blood and treasure at the same time that the Jewish community in the US opposes the interests of White Americans. I really don’t see why I should support it.

However, that’s not the same as wishing Israel would be wiped off the map — only that they should fend for themselves. I do not believe that it is in my ethnic interests nor is in the interests of the United States to antagonize the Arab and Muslim world in the interests of an expansionist, apartheid, ethno-nationalist Israel. It’s simply not our fight.

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Posted in Anti-Semitism, Ethnocentrism, Israel Lobby, Neoconservatism, White Racial Consciousness and Advocacy, White victimization | 145 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: A Tale of Two Rich Guys, Haim Saban and Charles T. Munger

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: A Sacramento Bee op-ed by Dan Morain points out that the motives for all the money going into a California ballot proposition on redistricting are hidden from the public. The two men couldn’t be more different. Haim Saban, the billionaire media tycoon, wants the politicians to redraw boundaries so that the Congressional seat of Howard Berman, a Jewish politician who is strongly pro-Israel  is protected from the ever expanding Latino population. As Morain notes, Saban’s only motivation in life is to advance the cause of the Jewish state, famously telling the New York Times “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.”

It’s interesting that activist Jews are now worried that there will be fewer Jewish politicians with the rise of the same minorities that Jewish activist organizations have been so eager to populate the country with. Organizations like the ADL have expressed concerned that new ethnic blocs will not be appropriately sympathetic to Jewish causes such as Israel. Their solution is not to try to stem the tide of non-White immigration but to make political alliances with the new arrivals and, as indicated by Saban’s actions, skew the political process in a way where Jewish political assets (particularly money) will still be effective.

Charles T. Munger is a completely different story. Munger, a Stanford physicist,  is also very wealthy, his wealth stemming from his father’s partnership with Warren Buffet. Munger wants a citizen’s panel to draw the redistricting lines in the hopes that politics will be less partisan — a position that sounds like high-minded idealism. As a Republican, he may well want more  Republicans, but as Morain notes, he is almost certainly wrong about that. If he really wanted to have more Republicans elected, he should have invested his money in anti-immigration efforts. No matter how California is redistricted, Latinos and other minorities are going to continue to increase in political power while Whites are increasingly dispossessed.

So Munger is tilting at windmills while Saban is helping his people. There is a great deal of wealth controlled by people like Munger, but in general its wasted on things like this. As I noted in an earlier blog:

One of the biggest problems for European-Americans is that wealthy non-Jews seem far more interested in funding the opera or getting their name on a building at the local university than in helping their people. A good example is the Chandler family who formerly owned the L. A. Times. They had no interest in the media, and the company is now controlled by Sam Zell, who is Jewish. The family remains wealthy but in general seems to be involved in finding fun and interesting ways to spend their time (one of them flies around the world to attend the opera; another is into building outsize model trains) rather than influencing the world.

Munger is more politically involved than the Chandlers, but his efforts are absolutely useless in really achieving anything remotely beneficial to Republicans — or, more importantly, White Californians.

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Posted in Anti-Defamation League, Dual loyalty, Israel Lobby, White pathology/guilt | 37 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: More on Dual Loyalty — Dr. Lani Kass and Gen. Norton Schwartz

Friday, April 16th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Dual loyalty issues have once again arisen, this time in conjunction with Philip Giraldi’s astonishing essay on antiwar.com. Giraldi discusses the curious career of Dr. Lani Kass — formerly a senior military officer in the Israeli Defense Force, and now the  senior Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force General Norton A. Schwartz. “Kass appears to have close and continuing ties to her country of birth, frequently spicing her public statements with comments about life in Israel while parroting simplistic views of the nature of the Islamic threat that might have been scripted in Tel Aviv’s Foreign Ministry.”

Giraldi notes that her appointment raises a host of issues, including the possibility that she is an Israeli spy and exactly how she managed to get security clearance. Given that the official policy of the Israeli government is to advocate a war with Iran, it is more than interesting that she has an important influence on US policy and that she is involved in Project CHECKMATE responsible for drawing up war plans. She is quoted as having what Giraldi characterizes as a “dismissive” comment on a possible war with Iran, and has the views on the Islamic threat usually associated with neocons.

The role of Kass in the Defense Department is at least as questionable as the role of Dennis Ross in the State Department. In fact, it would seem to be an even more clear-cut case because Kass was actually born and raised in Israel and rose to the rank of major in the IDF. Although she is a naturalized US citizen, she has doubtless retained her Israeli citizenship. It would more than a bit surprising if she did not retain an allegiance to Israel. And is there any evidence at all that she has allegiance to the US? When asked about possible war with Iran, she responded, “We can defeat Iran, but are Americans willing to pay the price?” — as if she is not an American.

By Stephen Walt’s criteria, therefore, Kass should not have any policy-making role on any issue that relates to Israel. A more difficult case is that of her boss, Gen. Norton Schwartz. Schwartz is also Jewish, although does not have the close ties to Jewish activist organizations like Ross or the strong connections to Israel like Kass. As reported in the Forward,

Schwartz’s Jewish identity did not go unnoticed after his appointment, particularly given the current military tensions with Iran. Press TV, an Iranian English language media outlet, wrote an article last week, titled “U.S. Names Jewish [sic — presumably an intentionally awkward translation] as Air Force Chief.”

There have long been rumors that Schwartz’s predecessor, Michael Moseley, was opposed to a military attack on Iran. The appointment of Schwartz has prompted speculation in the Iranian press and on some blogs that the Bush administration is yet again seriously considering the military option to thwart Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

Unlike the vast majority of Americans, the Iranians assume that Schwartz’s ethnic identity would make a difference, and I must agree that it should raise red flags. The vast majority of American Jews have a very strong emotional commitment to Israel that may bias their judgment even if they are not consciously aware of their biases.

As I noted elsewhere,

In my ideal world, Jonah Goldberg’s op-eds and Paul Wolfowitz’s advice to presidents and defense secretaries should be accompanied by a disclaimer: “You should be cautious in following my advice or even believing what I say about Israel. Deception and manipulation are very common tactics in ethnic conflict, so that my pose as an American patriot should be taken with a grain of salt. And even if I am entirely sincere in what I say, the fact is that I have a deep psychological and ethnic commitment to Israel and Judaism. Psychologists have shown that this sort of deep commitment is likely to bias my perceptions of any policy that could possibly affect Israel even though I am not aware of it.”

We would certainly like to know the details of Schwartz’s ties with Jewish organizations and activist groups, as well as any ties that he has with Israel. (For example, Paul Wolfowitz has family members living in Israel.) The fact that Schwartz has hired Kass as his senior Special Assistant suggests that the taboo against discussing Jewish loyalty issues is so strong that they feel free to be entirely public about it. (There might be some sensitivity, however, since the Pentagon has removed Kass’s biography from its website.)

Nevertheless, a war with Iran would be very costly for the US and may well have huge long term implications for the region and the world. Surely if the government wanted to project the image that US policy was not being shaped by people with a strong personal ethnic attachment to Israel (as clearly happened in the war with Iraq), they would remove people like Ross, Kass, and Schwartz from any role in making policy.

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Posted in Dual loyalty, Evolutionary Psychology, Israel, Israel Lobby | 28 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: Robert Satloff and the Jewish Culture of Deceit

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Stephen Walt had the audacity to suggest, given Dennis Ross’s close ties to WINEP, that Ross should not have a policy-making position on Middle East issues in the Obama Administration. Neocon Robert Satloff responded with outrage, claiming that Ross has been doing nothing but promoting “U.S. interests in peace and security for the past quarter-century.” And he disingenuously asks, “To which country do we allegedly have a ’strong attachment’?  Our foreign-born scholars hail from virtually every country in the Middle East — Turkey, Iran, Israel, and at least a dozen different Arab countries.”

The best response is by M. J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum, an organization that advocates a two-state solution to the conflict: 

Steve Rosen [who was acquited on charges of spying for Israel in 2009] … cleverly came up with the idea for an AIPAC controlled think-tank that would put forth the AIPAC line but in a way that would disguise its connections.

There was no question that WINEP was to be AIPAC’s cutout. It was funded by AIPAC donors, staffed by AIPAC employees, and located one door away, down the hall, from AIPAC Headquarters (no more. It has its own digs). It would also hire all kinds of people not identified with Israel as a cover and would encourage them to write whatever they liked on matters not related to Israel. “Say what you want on Morocco, kid.” But on Israel, never deviate more than a degree or two.

In other words, Satloff’s claims that WINEP is not tied to any particular lobby or country are part of an ongoing subterfuge that fools no one except the mainstream media: “It matters because the media has totally fallen for this sleight of hand and WINEP spokespersons appear (especially on PBS) as if WINEP was not part of the Israel lobby. Some truth-in-labeling is warranted.”

This sort of subterfuge is central to Jewish efforts at influencing policy in a wide range of areas. Because they are a small minority in the US and other Western societies, Jews must recruit support from the wider community. Their positions cannot be phrased as benefiting Jews, but as benefiting the interests of the society as a whole. As a result, these movements cannot tell their name.

A great example is the $PLC, an organization that we now know is funded by Jews and, apart from the sociopathic Morris Dees, is also largely staffed by Jews. Yet whenever there is a story about “immigrant rights” or angry White people, the SPLC is called on by the mainstream media as a “respected civil rights organization” rather than for what it is: A Jewish activist organization actively attempting to further the ethnic  interests of Jews, typically at the expense of White Americans.

This sort of subterfuge was true of all the Jewish intellectual and political movements discussed in The Culture of Critique. As I noted in Ch. 6:

It is thus not surprising that although these theories were directed at achieving specific Jewish interests in the manipulation of culture, they “could not tell their name”; that is, they were forced to minimize any overt indication that Jewish group identity or that Jewish group interests were involved …. Because of the need for invisibility, the theories and movements discussed here were forced to deemphasize Judaism as a social category—a form of crypsis discussed extensively in SAID (Ch. 6) as a common Jewish technique in combating anti-Semitism. In the case of the Frankfurt School, “What strikes the current observer is the intensity with which many of the Institute’s members denied, and in some cases still deny, any meaning at all to their Jewish identities” (Jay 1973, 32). The originators and practitioners of these theories attempted to conceal their Jewish identities, as in the case of Freud, and to engage in massive self-deception, as appears to have been common among many Jewish political radicals. Recall the Jewish radicals who believed in their own invisibility as Jews while nevertheless appearing as the quintessential ethnics to outside observers and at the same time taking steps to ensure that [non-Jews] would have highly visible positions in the movement (pp. 91–93). The technique of having non-Jews] as highly visible exemplars of Jewish-dominated movements has been commonly used by Jewish groups attempting to appeal to gentiles on a wide range of Jewish issues (SAID, Ch. 6) and is apparent in the discussion of Jewish involvement in influencing immigration policy. …  [Chap. 7]: Beginning in the late nineteenth century, anti-restrictionist arguments [on immigration]  developed by Jews were typically couched in terms of universalist humanitarian ideals; as part of this universalizing effort, [non-Jews] from old-line Protestant families were recruited to act as window dressing for their efforts, and Jewish groups such as the AJCommittee funded pro-immigration groups composed of non-Jews (Neuringer 1971, 92).

It’s an old technique, arguably present (see also here)  from the origins of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. The sad thing is that people who should know better continue to be deceived.

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Kevin MacDonald: Stephen Walt on Dennis Ross

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Stephen Walt has once again raised the issue of dual loyalty of American Jews — this time in the context of the role of Dennis Ross in shaping Obama Administration policy in the direction of Israel. As I have argued previously, I think that Walt (and Mearsheimer) tend to underestimate the problem of Jewish dual loyalty. It’s often been said of Jews that they are just like everyone else, only more so. In the case of dual loyalty, it’s certainly true that other people have various loyalties, but no other group has had such a passionate attachment to a foreign country. As The Israel Lobby shows, the American Jewish community is galvanized around doing the bidding of a foreign government. Dissent within the Jewish community has been effectively silenced, and the most energized, radical elements of the Jewish community determine the direction of the entire community.

Given all that, it is certainly not surprising that issues of loyalty would be raised. And, because of their status as a wealthy, powerful elite, Jews, far more than other minority groups, have been able to influence American foreign policy in the direction of Israel despite making up less than 3% of the population.

The charge of dual loyalty is an ancient one (reviewed here under the heading “The Theme of Disloyalty”), present in Jewish religious writing. In the Book of Exodus, Pharaoh states, “Behold, the people of the children of Israel are too mighty for us; come, let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply, and it come to pass, that, when there befalleth us any war, they also join themselves unto our enemies, and fight against us, and get them up out of the land” (Exod. 1:9–10).

Walt writes that the accusation of dual loyalty was “a nasty anti-Semitic canard in old Europe.” But, then as now, dual loyalty accusations had much more than a grain of truth. For example, between the mid-19th century and the Bolshevik Revolution, there can be little doubt that the Jewish Diaspora throughout Europe and America opposed the Russian government and often influenced policy in other countries to oppose Russia — often in opposition to the governments of those countries. In 1911, long before Jews attained the level of power in the US that they have now, there was a successful Jewish campaign to abrogate a US trade agreement with Russia aimed at getting Russia to change its policies on Jews in opposition to the views of the Taft Administration.

The similarities to today are striking: AIPAC has rammed through punitive trade restrictions on Iran not because such restrictions benefit the US, but because Iran is seen as threatening Israel. And now there is a major push to get the US to bomb Iran — again promoted by Israel’s friends in the US. (Here’s Bill Kristol stating that it’s better for the US to attack Iran than for Israel to have to do it.)

Walt writes:

Needless to say, in a melting-pot society like the United States, it was inevitable that many Americans would also have strong attachments to other countries. These different attachments may reflect ancestry, religious affiliation, personal experience (such as overseas study), or any number of other sources. The key point, however, is that in the United States it is entirely legitimate to manifest such attachments in political life.  Americans can hold dual citizenship, for example, or form an interest group whose avowed purpose is to shape U.S. policy towards a specific country. This is how the American system of government works, and there is nothing “disloyal” about such conduct.

Dual loyalty issues therefore mesh with America as a multicultural society. Jewish dual loyalties are no different, say, from Mexican dual loyalties. But, whatever its legitimacy in multicultural America, dual loyalties are surely not ideal for the country as a whole because they detract from cohesion and sense of common interest and purpose. Whereas in the past assimilation was the norm (and was easy because the vast majority of immigrants were European ethnically), immigrants now are encouraged to retain their own language and culture, and they are encouraged to retrain powerful ties to their countries of origin.

Historically, this ideology of multiculturalism was the product of Jewish intellectuals (prominently Horace Kallen) designed to legitimize Jewish separateness in America while at the same time legitimizing the continuing ties between American Jews and the rest of the Diaspora. (Kallen, for example, was a strong Zionist and activist on behalf of Jews in Eastern Europe.) In the future we can expect that the US will be increasingly Balkanized as different ethnic and national groups jockey for political power in the US and seek to influence foreign policy in favor of the countries they left behind.

But I have to agree with Walt that even accepting the legitimacy of a multicultural model, people like Dennis Ross should not be allowed to have a voice within the administration. Walt points out that Ross has a long involvement with pro-Israel activist organizations, such as being director of WINEP.

But Ross’s ties to Israel are even deeper than that. Until his appointment as Middle East envoy in the Obama Administration, from 2002–2009 Ross was Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute. This organization has assumed the role of long term planning for the Jewish people, not only in Israel but also the Diaspora. The JPPPI is an independent think tank that reports to the Israeli government and has close ties with other Jewish organizations. Its mission is “to promote the thriving of the Jewish people via professional strategic thinking and planning on issues of primary concern to world Jewry. JPPPI’s work is based on deep commitment to the future of the Jewish people with Israel as its core state.”

The JPPPI’s report Facing Tomorrow 2008 is interesting because it focuses on the threat of Iran and but also because it sees people like Stephen Walt as a threat to Israel:

The Jewish people must, as the highest priority, develop an appropriate response to the Iranian nuclear threat to Israel and to global stability as a whole. While there is no ambiguity about the need to do so in Israel, it is necessary to mobilize Jewish opinion around the world as well. The American Jewish community cannot be intimidated either by a post Iraq syndrome in the United States, or by the false and pernicious allegations of Professors Walt and Mearsheimer, or former President Carter.

In other words, Jews around the world are encouraged to mobilize to combat the threat to Israel represented by Iran. The assumption is that Jews have common interests as Jews no matter what country they happen to live in. Dennis Ross is doing his best to promote exactly this view within the Obama administration.

One might think that such a view would leave Jews in the Diaspora open to the charge of disloyalty, but the problem is easily finessed: Jews in the Diaspora are told to frame Israel’s concerns about Iran as a global threat, not simply as a threat to Israel.

Of course, that’s what we are seeing now. But we needn’t be naïve. Jews like Dennis Ross are clearly far more loyal to Israel than to the US. Speaking as a psychologist, they wouldn’t be able to see a conflict of interest between the US and Israel if it was staring them in the face. Indeed, as Gore Vidal said of Norman Podhoretz, they are unregistered agents of a foreign government.

In a sane society, there would be a huge groundswell of public opposition to Ross’s appointment–as there has been for a number of Obama’s appointments. But that won’t happen.

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Kevin MacDonald: Review of Podhoretz, Part I

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: I have a rather longish review of Norman Podhoretz’s Why are Jews Liberals? posted at AlternativeRight.com. I thought I would post a summary here to encourage commentary. Part I is “Remaking the Right: Liberals, Jews, Conservatives” and deals with how Jews see their history in Europe — the lachrymose view of European history in which Jews have been the victims of irrational hostility ever since the origins of Christianity. The take home point is:  “It’s a very short jump from blaming the culture created and sustained by Europeans to the idea that Europeans as a people or group of peoples are the problem. Ultimately, this implicit sense that Europeans themselves are the problem is the crux of the issue.”

This then feeds into the Jews as a hostile elite theme that is so apparent today. What’s really scary is that the Jewish Republican branch of the hostile elite represents itself as conservative. A conservative elite hostile to the traditional people and culture of the US. Orwell would love it.

The other theme is how neocon Jews like Podhoretz displaced true conservatives from the Republican Party in the interests of aiding Israel. However, they have not shed any of their hostility toward Europeans and their culture. Indeed, they have been complicit in the movement for massive non-White immigration. As I note, “With conservatives like these, who needs liberals? ”

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Kevin MacDonald: The Netanyahu-Obama Flap

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Michael Oren, the Israeli Ambassador to the US, says that the US-Israel relationship is at its lowest ebb in 35 years. Well, maybe.  But the Israel Lobby is far from dead. Half of Congress turned out at the recent AIPAC convention in Washington, and there were  pledges of eternal support by Hilary Clinton, followed up by a host of politicians. In the conflict between the Obama administration and Netanyahu, the media was solidly lined up on the side of a foreign country.  Indeed, as Philip Giraldi notes, “The Washington Post led the charge, calling on ‘expert’ analysis of the situation from Elliot Abrams, Danielle Pletka, David Makovsky, Aaron David Miller, Daniel Curter, Martin Indyk, and Charles Krauthammer while excoriating the White House with its own lead editorials.”

Dominating the mainstream media definitely has its advantages.

Meanwhile, more than 3/4 of the House of Representatives signed on to a statement asserting “unbreakable bonds” between the US and Israel and ludicrously asserting that “A strong Israel is an asset to the national security of the United States and brings stability to the Middle East.”

We are reassured that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s commitment to put in place new procedures will ensure that such surprises [a municipal Jerusalem announcement on approval of another step towards the construction of 1,600 apartments in a post-1967 Jerusalem neighborhood during U.S. Vice President Biden's recent visit to Israel], however unintended, will not recur.

In other words, the House is satisfied that Israel will not to make any surprise announcements that coincide with a visit of a US dignitary. But the House does not expect Israel to stop confiscating Palestinian land and building housing for Jews. Business as usual. Don’t ask. Don’t tell.

There is a long history in which Congress is far more susceptible to pressure from the Israel Lobby than the administration. Congress understands that opposition to the lobby means that their opponents will suddenly have a great deal of money donated by Jews who live outside their districts and they will have far less positive media coverage.

On the other hand, American presidents must at least make a show of promoting peace in the region, and that means putting up a credible facade to other countries. All American administrations since Carter have officially opposed the colonization of the West Bank, and this has at times led to well-publicized conflict. For example, in 1992 the first Bush administration attempted to withhold loan guarantees for Israeli housing. It backed down, with Bush famously saying “I’m one lonely little guy” up against “some powerful political forces” made up of “a thousand lobbyists on the Hill.” Bush seems to believe that his defeat in the 1992 election stemmed from this action, and I can vividly remember the sudden shift in media coverage of Bush at the time. George W. Bush’s awareness of the power of the Israel Lobby from conversations with his father may well have been a primary force in making him the most pliable president  in history to the pleadings of the Israel Lobby.

The clincher from the House statement is: “Above all, we must remain focused on the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear weapons program to Middle East peace and stability.” And therein lies the rub for AIPAC. For all its influence on Congress, it will be much more difficult to get an angry Obama and his administration fully on board with the Israel Lobby’s project of destroying Iran. The reality of the Lobby’s power even in presidential politics, as indicated by what happened to George H. W. Bush,  is doubtless sobering to the Obama administration. But it’s one thing to effectively turn a blind eye to Israeli colonization and apartheid (as, in the end, all US administrations have done). It’s quite another ball of wax to get the US to lead the charge in a confrontation with Iran after 5000 deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and a $3 trillion price tag just for the war in Iraq. This in an era where the federal deficit is already through the roof. Doing the Israel Lobby’s bidding on Iran requires a great deal of pro-active effort in getting international cooperation in the teeth of Israeli intransigence on settlement issues and the spectacle of Israel as an expansionist apartheid state for all the world to see.

Indeed, in her speech to AIPAC Hilary Clinton pointedly noted that “We cannot escape the impact of mass communications” — perhaps a comment that the reality of Israel’s brutal program of expansion is a very hard sell to the rest of the world, especially in the age of the Internet when there is more and more leakage in Jewish control of the media in the US and elsewhere. The statement by General David Petraeus that Israeli policies oppose US vital interests in the Middle East is all over the Internet — much to the chagrin of the ADL.  Petraeus himself has done his best to limit the damage by disputing this account. 

It’s the same for Joe Biden’s statement that Israeli policy is dangerous for the US. It’s also all over the Internet,  quoted, for example, by John Mearsheimer in his blog – despite denials by Biden that he ever said it. As Mearsheimer notes, “it is now commonplace to talk about the lobby in the mainstream media and almost everyone who pays serious attention to American foreign policy understands – thanks mainly to the internet – that the lobby is an especially powerful interest group.”

With information about Israel more available than ever, with the costs of doing Israel’s bidding ever more prohibitive, and with Israel getting ever uglier with the passage of time, the job ahead for the Israel Lobby is going to be increasingly difficult. And Israel can’t escape its ugliness. The slow motion ethnic cleansing and land grabbing, the apartheid, the vast open air prisons for 3.8 million Palestinians simply can’t be stopped by any force within Israeli society. And it certainly won’t be stopped by the Jewish Diaspora no matter how much hypocrisy that entails given its commitment to multiculturalism and its opposition to White ethnonational interests. The racialist and religiously fundamentalist right is firmly in charge in Israel, and all the Jewish demographics are on their side. The extremists, as always, will win the day. That forecasts a very bloody future in the Middle East and beyond. And here in the US, AIPAC and the ADL have a long, tough road ahead.

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Kevin MacDonald: Pat Buchanan is Censored by Human Events

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Pat Buchanan is a national treasure — by far the most articulate and sensible spokesman in the mainstream media — or at least close to it — for a wide range of issues, from immigration, to economic nationalism, to foreign policy issues. Unfortunately, his exposure in the MSM seems to be on the wane. He still appears on the McLaughlin Group, but his former base at MSNBC has disappeared, and his exposure in the major newspapers seems non-existent. I can remember in the 1990’s when he was a regular on the LA Times op-ed page, which seems inconceivable now. (There was an LA Times column he did on the Frankfurt School at a time when I was starting to research Jewish intellectual movements. After reading his account of how the Frankfurt School undermined the family, I thought that there might be a Jewish story there. Not a bad guess. The Frankfurt School was labeled a “Jewish sect” by Gershon Scholem, and the Frankfurt School became the subject of Ch. 5 of The Culture of Critique and much subsequent writing. Thanks Pat.) Not surprisingly, Buchanan has a very long rap sheet at the ADL.

Buchanan’s latest article, “The Poodle Gets Kicked,” on the Biden visit to Israel will do nothing to endear him to the ADL. Buchanan makes an excellent case on the absurdity of supposing that US and Israeli interests are identical. The  interesting thing is that the version that appeared on the Human Events website was about half the length of the original. (See “Human Events Censors Pat Buchanan’s Latest Column” at Buchanan.org). Linda Muller, who runs Buchanan.org, suggests that this is the result of neocon censors at Human Events, and notes that the revised version leaves out any mention of AIPAC or the USS Liberty incident.

It should surprise no one that Human Events would be involved in such a clumsy version of censorship. These are the people who fired Kevin Lamb after a phone call from the SPLC. (See Lamb’s VDARE article, “The Leftward Course Of Human Events.“)

The Human Events censor seems to have been motivated to expunge statements implying extreme groveling by Biden, as in his ridiculous statement  “Progress occurs in the Middle East when everyone knows there is simply no space between the United States and Israel.” Of course, the opposite is the case. No space means that Israel can stall peace talks forever without having to worry that the US will do anything about it. Biden should have a special place in George Orwell’s Hall of Fame.

The censor also expunged the most egregious examples where Israel has demonstrated quite clearly that it has always pursued its own interests even when they conflict with US interests — not only in the USS Liberty case, but also stealing uranium during the JFK administration, transferring US technology to China, and spying on the US. (Buchanan was being kind by only mentioning Pollard; there are many more examples; see here and here.) The Israeli policy of ethnic cleansing on the West Bank and Jerusalem is therefore part of a long list of areas where Israel refuses to modify its goals by listening to its poodle. Why should it? Nobody cares what poodles think.

The following is Buchanan’s entire column with the censored parts underlined.

Actually, Joe set himself up. From the moment he set foot on Israeli soil, our vice president was in full pander mode.

First, he headed to Yad Vashem memorial, where he put on a yarmulke and declared Israel “a central bolt in our existence.”

“For world Jewry,” Joe went on, presumably including 5 million Americans, “Israel is the heart. … Israel is the light. … Israel is the hope.”

Meeting Shimon Peres the next day, Joe confessed that when he first visited at age 29, “Israel captured my heart.”

In Peres’ guestbook, he wrote, “The bond between our two nations has been and remains unshakeable.”

He then told Peres and the world, “There is absolutely no space between the United States and Israel when it comes to Israel’s security.”

As Peres spoke, Biden took notes. When Peres called him “a friend,” Joe gushed, “It’s good to be home.”

Even at AIPAC, they must have been gagging.

Walking around the corner to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office, Joe called him by his nickname, “Bibi,” declared him a “real” friend and said the U.S. relationship with Israel “has been and will continue to be the centerpiece of our policy.”

Then the sandbag hit.

Interior Minister Eli Yishai announced construction of 1,600 new apartment units in Arab East Jerusalem. Stunned and humiliated, Biden issued a statement saying he “condemned” the decision.

He then retaliated by coming late to dinner at Bibi’s house.

Netanyahu has apologized for the timing, but they are going ahead with the apartments. What are the Americans going to do about it? At this point, nothing but bluster.

Indeed, a day later, at Tel Aviv University, Joe was back at it: “(T)he U.S. has no better friend … than Israel.”

On his departure for Jordan, Ha’aretz reported that Israel plans to build 50,000 new homes in East Jerusalem over the next few years.

Biden may feel he was played for a fool, and Americans may feel jilted, but we got what grovelers deserve. And if we wish to understand why the Arabs who once respected us now seem contemptuous of us, consider that battered-spouse response to a public slap across the face.

Consider also the most remarkable statement of Biden’s first 24 hours.

“Progress occurs in the Middle East when everyone knows there is simply no space between the United States and Israel.”

Biden is saying we are a more effective force for Mideast peace in a region where Arabs outnumber Israelis 50 to one if everyone knows we sing from the same song sheet as Israel and have no policy independent of Israel’s.

How can America be seen as an honest broker between Arabs and Israelis if there is “no space” between America and Israel?

Even with the closest ally in our history, Britain in World War II, there was space between Winston Churchill and FDR on where to invade — North Africa, Italy, France, the Balkans? — whether to beat Stalin to Berlin, Prague and Vienna, who should be supreme allied commander, even whether the British Empire should survive.

Israel keeps its own interests foremost in mind, and when these dictate actions inimical to U.S. interests, Israel acts unilaterally. David Ben-Gurion did not seek Dwight Eisenhower’s permission to attack Egypt in collusion with the French and British in 1956, enraging Ike.

Israel did not consult JFK on whether it could steal enriched uranium from the NUMEC plant in Pennsylvania for its atom bomb program.

Israel did not consult us on whether it could attack the USS Liberty in the Six-Day War, or suborn Jonathan Pollard to loot our security secrets, or transfer our weapons technology to China. They went ahead and did it, knowing the Americans would swallow hard and take it.

Ehud Olmert did not consult President-elect Obama on whether to launch a war on Gaza and kill 1,400 Palestinians. Nor did Netanyahu consult us before Mossad took down the Hamas minister in Dubai.

What Netanyahu and Yishai are telling Obama with their decision to keep building on occupied land is, “When it comes to East Jerusalem and the West Bank, we decide, not you.”

And if Netanyahu has jolted Joe and others out of their romantic reveries about Israel, good. At least now we no longer see as through a glass darkly.

Israeli and U.S. interests often run parallel, but they are not the same. Israel is concerned with a neighborhood. We are concerned with a world of 300 million Arabs and a billion Muslims. Our policies cannot be the same.

If they are, we will end up with all of Israel’s enemies, who are legion, and only Israel’s friends, who are few.

And if our policy and Israel’s are one and the same, the Arab perception will be what it is today — that America cannot stand up to Israel, even when her national interests command it.

Joe’s performance before he got the wet mitten across the face only underscored the point: The mighty superpower is a poodle of Israel.

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Kevin MacDonald: Christian Zionism

Friday, March 12th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Max Blumenthal has a post that he  claims shows that “Biden should have known that Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu intended to upset his plans by Netanyahu’s appearance with John Hagee.” This refers to one of the oddest phenomena in American politics: The rabid pro-Israel activities of the Christian Zionists as exemplified by Pastor Hagee. Hagee is the ultimate Christian Zionist, using his speech before a who’s who of the Israeli government and other elements of the Israeli far right to state that Jerusalem is “the undivided, eternal capitol of the Jewish people.” He called Iranian President Ahmadinejad “the Hitler of the Middle East” and denounced the Goldstone Report as “character assassination by an unbiased and uninformed committee.”

In the audience was “Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the chief rabbi of the illegal West Bank settlement of Efrat who gained notoriety for lobbying President Bill Clinton to pardon his friend, fugitive billionaire Marc Rich. Ayalon had stirred controversy days before when he refused to meet with a US congressional delegation brought to Israel by the progressive Jewish group J Street.”

What’s amazing to me is that the point of Hagee’s speech was to tout the $58,000,000 (!) that his group of Christians have donated to far-right causes in Israel since 2001, including settler groups and a group that aims to ensure” that students in Israel are on the right path, the path of Zionism, the love of Israel, the path of solidarity.”

As it was explained to me, Hagee, believes that God actually decreed not one, but two, plans of salvation:  one for the church, which requires faith in Christ’s atonement, and another for the Jews, which does not require them to have faith in Christ at all, but is a parallel covenant that bypasses the Church and Christ completely.  They regard the creation of the modern state of Israel as nothing less than the precursor of that heavenly kingdom, the fulfillment of prophecy, and the sign of Christ’s imminent return.

Christian Zionism is a very powerful force for philosemitism in the US.  There is a fascinating history (see, e.g., here) that suggests but falls short of proof that early Zionists like Samuel Untermeyer were important in promoting and publicizing the work of C. I. Scofield whose annotated Bible, published by Oxford University Press in 1909, is the basis of Christian Zionism. In any case, the above source discusses footnotes to the Scofield Bible added in 1967 that emphasize Zionist aims. For example,  “For a nation to commit the sin of anti-Semitism brings inevitable judgment.” ” God made an unconditional promise of blessing through Abram’s seed to the nation of Israel to inherit a specific territory forever.” “It has invariably fared ill with the  people who have persecuted the Jew, well with those who have protected him. The future will still more remarkably prove this principle.” (Footnotes to Genesis 12:3)

Jews have not stood by idly on this but have actively supported the Christian Zionism movement. Beginning in 1978, the Likud Party in Israel has taken the lead in organizing this force for Israel, and they have been joined by the neocons. For example, in 2002 the Israeli embassy organized a prayer breakfast with the major Christian Zionists. The main organization is the Unity Coalition for Israel which is run by Esther Levens. It consists of ~200 Christian and Jewish organizations has strong connections to neocon think tanks such as the Center for Security Policy, headed by Frank Gaffney, pro-Israel activist organizations the Zionist Organization of America, the Likud Party and the Israeli government. This organization claims to provide material for 1,700 religious radio stations, 245 Christian TV stations, and 120 Christian newspapers.
Christian Zionism is a very powerful force for philosemitism in the US.  There is a fascinating history (see, e.g., here) that suggests but falls short of proof that early Zionists like Samuel Untermeyer were important in promoting and publicizing the work of C. I. Scofield whose annotated Bible, published by Oxford University Press in 1909, is the basis of Christian Zionism. In any case, the above source discusses footnotes to the Scofield Bible added in 1967 that emphasize Zionist aims. For example,  “For a nation to commit the sin of anti-Semitism brings inevitable judgment.” ” God made an unconditional promise of blessing through Abram’s seed to the nation of Israel to inherit a specific territory forever.” “It has invariably fared ill with the  people who have persecuted the Jew, well with those who have protected him. The future will still more remarkably prove this principle.” (Footnotes to Genesis 12:3)

Jews have not stood by idly on this but have actively supported the Christian Zionism movement. Beginning in 1978, the Likud Party in Israel has taken the lead in organizing this force for Israel, and they have been joined by the neocons. For example, in 2002 the Israeli embassy organized a prayer breakfast with the major Christian Zionists. The main organization is the Unity Coalition for Israel which is run by Esther Levens. It consists of ~200 Christian and Jewish organizations has strong connections to neocon think tanks such as the Center for Security Policy, headed by Frank Gaffney, pro-Israel activist organizations the Zionist Organization of America, the Likud Party and the Israeli government. This organization claims to provide material for 1,700 religious radio stations, 245 Christian TV stations, and 120 Christian newspapers.

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Kevin MacDonald: J.J. Goldberg’s Reflections on Purim

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Forward columnist J. J. Goldberg is distinguished among Jewish writers for acknowledging that yes, Jews are indeed powerful. The basic message of his 1996 book, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment,  was that American Judaism is well organized and lavishly funded. It has achieved a great deal of power, and it has been successful in achieving its interests.

Goldberg’s book is a good rejoinder to those who claim that the Jewish community is hopelessly divided on all issues and therefore doesn’t have any net effect on public policy. His book acknowledged that in fact there is a great deal of consensus on broad Jewish issues, particularly in the areas of Israel and the welfare of other foreign Jewries, immigration and refugee policy, church-state separation, abortion rights, and civil liberties. As I noted in CofC, the massive changes in public policy on these issues beginning with the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s coincide with the period of increasing Jewish power and influence in the United States.

Goldberg tackled Jewish power again in a recent Forward column, “Purim’s Lessons About Diaspora Power.” Again the point is that Jews are certainly not the weak, beset group typically presented by activist organizations like the ADL. He notes that since WWII, Jewish power increased while the enemies of Jews “declined in numbers and influence.” However, he sees a fundamental change:

Today, quite unexpectedly, we’re back where we started. Diaspora Jews still have resources to protect their interests and values, as they’ve had since World War II. But Jewish communities also face mounting threats from real enemies once again, thanks to the combined effects of the September 11 attacks, the Al-Aqsa Intifada and the Iraq War. Anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activists and ideologues have taken to claiming with unaccustomed boldness that organized Jewry controls and undermines whole governments and industries. Israel’s sworn enemies are broadening their focus and taking aim — with words and sometimes with bombs — at Israel’s closest overseas ally, the Jewish community. Perhaps most important, verbal attacks on organized American Jewish activity are no longer taboo. Diaspora Jewry hasn’t lost legitimacy, but its enemies have regained theirs.

Israel and Diaspora Jewish communities are indeed being criticized as never before. Right now, there is Israeli Apartheid Week aimed at boycotts, demonstrations, and divestment from Israel.  At this point, you would  have to be living under a rock to be unaware of the iron grip that the Israel Lobby has on US foreign policy and at its role in fomenting the Iraq war.

I would also  like to think that people are becoming more willing to openly and honestly discuss Jewish influence in the other areas mentioned in Goldberg’s 1996 book, especially on immigration policy and other areas related to multiculturalism. That is certainly what we at TOO are trying to do.

Goldberg makes two remarkable recommendations:

First, remember that [in the Purim story] Haman plotted to destroy the Jews because Mordecai insulted him. Sometimes your enemies hate you because of something you did, not just who you are. Sometimes a small concession now can save a lot of grief later.

Wouldn’t it be great if people like Abe Foxman, Heidi Beirich, and Mark Potok took that to heart? — that some criticisms of Jews are not just “canards” based on ancient prejudices but reflect real conflicts of interest in the contemporary world. But of course, it’s unrealistic. The organized Jewish community cannot acknowledge Jewish involvement in promoting the Iraq war any more than it can acknowledge its role in promoting and financing immigration and multiculturalism into Western societies. The changes unleashed by Jewish influence in America have been profound–literally transformational. Taking any responsibility would be dangerous indeed for Jews, especially as we see that American politics is increasing defined by racial identity.

Further, especially in Israel, Jewish behavior is on “feed forward” in the sense that the most committed Jews are in determining the direction of policy. It’s always been that way, and in the contemporary world, this means that the fundamentalists, the settlers, and the overtly racialist Zionists are in the driver’s seat, dominating the most right wing government in Israeli history.  The result is that Israeli expansionism, apartheid, and the oppression of the Palestinians will not be halted as a result of pressures within the Jewish community. The American Jewish community will continue to support all this — despite the glaring hypocrisy such behavior implies given the role of Jews as a pillar of multiculturalism in the Diaspora. There will be no concessions.

As a result, the ADL’s policy of condemning any discussion of Jewish influence will doubtless continue. Reasonable criticism must be completely suppressed because any leak in the dike is likely to lead to a deluge. And yet, as Goldberg seems to be admitting, Jewish influence can’t be ignored forever. I think he’s probably right. At least, I hope so.

Goldberg’s second bit of advice is: “Don’t abandon your intermarried relatives. They might save your life some day.” In other words, there is likely to be an anti-Jewish backlash at some point, and Jews had better be prepared. It’s an interesting suggestion to look to intermarried Jews for help. Goldberg’s implicit theory is that blood ties are critical in the end, and I couldn’t agree with him more.

Although intermarriage is often condemned in the Jewish community and there are high profile programs like Birthright Israel aimed at reducing it, several Jewish theorists have pointed out that intermarriage has certain strategic benefits for Judaism.  Chapter 9 of Separation and Its Discontents has the following quote from two Jewish scholars of the Diaspora:

The successful exercise of influence is best achieved in a community with a large subset of members interacting with politicians and opinion leaders. Through intermarried Jews themselves, and certainly through their social networks involving Jewish family and friends who may be closer to the core of the community, Jewish concerns, interests, and sensibilities can be articulated before a wider, more influential audience. In a recent interview, Presidential aide Robert Lipshutz traced the origin of Jimmy Carter’s concern for Israel to his close friendship with a first cousin, an Orthodox Jew (Carter’s aunt married a Jewish man, and their two children were raised as Jews). Intermarrying Jews, while perhaps diluting the community in one sense, perform compensating strategic functions in another. (Lieberman and Weinfeld, Demographic trends and Jewish survival. Midstream 24 (November), 1978, 16.)

Goldberg’s comment agrees with my conclusion:

The deepest layers of Jewish commitment [i.e., Orthodox, Conservative and other strongly ethnic forms of Judaism] constitute the long-term well spring of Judaism, with the outer layers acting as mere temporary appendages that will be cast off in the long run. This deep inner layer of very intense group commitment provides demographic vigor to replenish those in the outer layers [i.e., they're the ones having the babies] who are gradually moving away from Judaism while nevertheless performing political and social roles that are indispensable for the contemporary vitality of Judaism. Such a perspective essentially agrees with the views of political scientist Michael Walzer (1994, 5), who notes that without radical transformation, secular Judaism cannot reproduce itself; since the Enlightenment, “it [has] remained parasitic on an older religious Judaism that it didn’t and couldn’t pass on.”

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Posted in Anti-Semitism, Israel, Israel Lobby, Jewish influence, Jewish religiosity, Racial Zionism | 23 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: Alex Kurtagic’s “It’s Not the Arguments”

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Alex Kurtagic’s current TOO piece (It’s not the arguments“) is an argument for the importance of solid funding for the success of any media venture, TOO included. The basic idea is an important one to discuss — that high status confers influence. Indeed, the importance of high status is a critical ingredient of theories of influence in sociology, and psychologists have argued that attraction to high status is part of our evolutionary heritage.

We see this repeatedly in the key institutions throughout the West, including the media and the academic world. Jewish influence basically stems from their influence on all of the high ground of the culture. The revolution of the Left was a top-down revolution that began in the most prestigious academic and media institutions and then spread to the lower reaches of the media and the K-12 educational system.

For all its espousal of egalitarianism, the academic world is a hierarchical system in which the highest levels are rigorously policed to ensure ideological conformity because any leak in the system would mean that non-conformists would benefit from institutional prestige. This, of course, is exactly why John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt caused such a panic attack in the ranks of the Israel Lobby. Mearsheimer and Walt weren’t just two easy-to-ignore guys from some college no one heard of; nor were they members of an easily marginalized group, such as Arabs. They were well-known and academically productive professors from prestigious institutions — the University of Chicago and Harvard respectively. This resulted in a full-fledged smear campaign emphasizing “shoddy scholarship” (typically made by Jewish activist organizations or others without the least experience as scholars) and charges of being anti-Semites on a par with the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When all else fails, …

Another example is E. O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist who in 1975 stunned the academic left with the publication of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Wilson included a chapter applying evolutionary thinking to humans — a topic that had been expunged from the social sciences ever since the triumph of Boasian anthropology in the 1920s. Wilson was already well-known as an entomologist and ecologist, and his position at Harvard gave him immense authority.

The Left went into full-fledged moral panic mode, led by high-profile attacks from Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould — both of whom were also at Harvard and were discussed in Chapter 2 of Culture of Critique as examples of leftist Jewish intellectuals who undermined evolutionary and biological approaches in the social sciences.

The Israel Lobby and the Left won these battles ultimately. Politicians are loathe to cite Mearsheimer and Walt, and it is unthinkable that they could attain positions in the government where they could directly influence US foreign policy. Tamer versions of evolutionary psychology are tolerated, but arguments related to ethnic interests (Salter), the reality of ethnic and racial differences (Jensen, Lynn, Rushton), and my writing on Jewish influence on culture have been expunged from the mainstream media. I have sometimes thought that my ideas would be more influential if I held a position at Harvard. But the reality is that occasional lapses from decorum have been managed quite effectively.

The result is that Whites are intellectually and culturally insecure. Any cultural confidence they have must buck the tide of elite opinion which is constantly telling them they are racists who owe whatever success they have in life to “White privelege” or other inventions of the Left. As I noted elsewhere, “one of the greatest triumphs of the left has been to get people to believe that people who assert white identity and interests or who make unflattering portrayals of organized Jewish movements are morally degenerate, stupid, and perhaps psychiatrically disturbed. Obviously, all of these adjectives designate low status.”

The revolution may well begin because of the rage of non-elite Whites. But it won’t be successful until the elite bastions of anti-White opinion are breached. And that will not be an easy fight to win.

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Posted in Evolutionary Psychology, Israel Lobby, Jews as an elite, Race differences in behavior, The Left | 38 Comments »

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