Jill Jacobs writing in the Forward presents an interesting comment on Jewish ethics (“When the Slumlords Are Us”). She essentially corroborates Edmund Connelly’s work on “The Culture of Deceit”: Not only are sharp business practices common among religious Jews, they are encouraged in the sense that Jews with a well-deserved reputation for unethical business behavior are welcomed into the highest reaches of the Jewish community: “Some of these offending landlords have more than Jewish names. At least a couple have been accorded positions of leadership and prominence in their Jewish communities because of the money they give to Jewish groups and causes.”
That’s the important point. It’s certainly the case that all religions have their bad apples. But with Judaism, being a bad apple is quite compatible with being a pillar of the community, as long as you continue to donate generously to communal causes.
Because she has such a strong sense of being Jewish, she feels personally embarrassed because of the behavior of her landlord: “One day, the landlord himself dropped by the building. I shuddered when I saw his long black coat, black hat and bushy beard. Would the other tenants, mostly Latino families, think that all Jews treated others with such neglect?”
Yes, they probably would. That’s how human stereotyping works. The fact is that most people who develop negative attitudes about Jews probably do so as a result of personal interactions with Jews, not by delving into Jewish history or ruminating on the causes of our current malaise. Jacobs notes that she could talk all she wanted about lofty Jewish ethical principles, but it didn’t do much good when reality was so at odds with the lofty theory:
Inevitably, heartbreakingly, someone would say to me, “Jill, you’re telling us that Judaism says all of these great things about how landlords should treat their tenants. So why is it that my landlord, a religious Jew, won’t turn on the heat?” Or worse: “You’re the first Jew I’ve ever met who’s not a slumlord.”
Anti-Semitism among Blacks has often been the result of similar negative personal experiences during the period when Jews owned the stores and apartment buildings in Black communities. Jews have mainly moved on to higher callings than running stores and apartments in Black areas, their places taken by newer arrivals. Similarly, a survey conducted by the Jewish Labor Committee in 1945 indicated that the attitudes of working class Americans were shaped by actual experience with Jews. They saw
the Jew as a cheating storekeeper, a merciless landlord or rental agent, an unscrupulous pawn-broker, or an installment salesman and insurance collector who will take away the collateral or let the insurance lapse at the first delinquency. To this is added the idea that the Jews own all business and that at least most Jews are in business. All this is so because the Jews are money-crazy, selfish, grabby, take advantage of others, cheat, chisel, lie, are ruthless, unscrupulous, and so on. (See here, p. 50).
Jacobs recounts some attempts to make such unethical behavior unaccaptable within the Jewish community. She mentions some successes, but such efforts are up against the particularist, ingroup morality that has always characterized Jewish behavior and is clearly spelled out in Jewish religious writing: One moral standard within the group, and a completely different standard outside the group. Beginning with the Enlightenment, Jews put in a great deal of intellectual work inventing a universalist ethics for Judaism as a “light unto the nations” — a moral exemplar for the rest of humanity. But it was always a sham and continues to be so in the contemporary world. As reported by Haaretz, just recently, a rabbi on the West Bank wrote about how it’s permissible for Jews to kill pretty much any non-Jew even if they are not responsible for threats to Jews:
“It is permissable to kill the Righteous among Nations even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation,” he wrote, adding: “If we kill a Gentile who has sinned or has violated one of the seven commandments — because we care about the commandments — there is nothing wrong with the murder.”
Several prominent rabbis, including Rabbi Yithak Ginzburg and Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, have recommended the book to their students and followers.
The result of this Judeocentric ethics is that, apart from the efforts of Ms. Jacobs, there is far more concern about molding public perceptions than about altering Jewish behavior. This came up with the Bernie Madoff affair:
As in the [Michael] Milken case, the default strategy is to proscribe any mention that a person like Madoff, who feeds into all the negative Jewish stereotypes, is Jewish. Indeed, some voices within the Jewish community are bemoaning the fact that Madoff’s Jewishness is so central to the media coverage. For example, in a letter to the New York Times, David A. Harris, Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee wrote, “Yes, he is Jewish. We get it. But was this relevant to his being arrested for cheating investors, or so key to his evolution as a businessman that it needed to be hammered home again and again?”
It’s well known that when the financial meltdown first hit, the ADL was concerned about “a dramatic upsurge” in anti-Jewish messages on Internet discussion boards devoted to finance and the economy in reaction to the huge bailout of Wall Street. The ADL press release is predictable in its attempt to characterize such outbursts as irrational hatred against Jews: Abe Foxman complained darkly that in times of economic downturns, ”The age-old canards [the ADL's favorite word is 'canard'] about Jews and money are always just beneath the surface.”
The recent indictment of Goldman Sachs for security fraud is doubtless causing similar angst in Jewish circles. Yesterday’s front page headline in the LA Times screamed “E-mails show Goldman traders rushed to bet against the mortgage market as crisis spread.” [Addendum, headline for 4/27, print edition: Senate Evidence Mounts against Goldman; online: Goldman Played Key Role in Mortgage Meltdown, Senate Investigators Say] Based on documents released prior to Senate hearings this week, the article and the impending Senate hearings are sure to once again place Goldman and Jewishness front and center in the public’s mind as the main villain in the meltdown — whether this is deserved or not. After all, despite the fact that any mention of the Jewishness of the key figures is verboten in the MSM, Goldman Sachs is an icon of Jewish financial power. Everyone knows that its basically a Jewish firm. It certainly doesn’t help that Lloyd Blankfein heads Goldman and is its publicly visible face. Nor does it help that the deal that brought the charges netted the firm of another Jew, John Paulson, $1 billion. (Paulson is worth $12 billion and is #45 on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans.)
Nor does it help that another firm that is being prominently mentioned as engaging in practices that exacerbated the mortgage meltdown is Magnetar whose principals, including founder Alec Litowitz, are all Jewish. According to this article, Magnetar actively sought to include the worst possible mortgages into its CDO’s, then managed to get them rated as AAA investments, and then bet massively against them, leaving large financial institutions holding the bag.
Given the enormity of the repercussions of the economic crisis, it is only natural to seek the culprits. The fact that Goldman is the most prominently featured firm and that other Jews also profited so greatly from the crisis while engaging in questionable practices will naturally feed into the stereotype of Jewish financial perfidy — a stereotype that goes back at least to the 19th century. (See Edmund Connelly’s discussion of Albert Lindemann’s historical research.)
But one thing we can be sure of, if anyone breathes a mention of Jewish involvement in the financial collapse in the mainstream media, the ADL will come out with its guns blazing. Truth is no defense.
Facing the Future as a Minority
ADL: Simply Part Of Criminal Network Covering For Enemy Terror-State Of Israel
(Apollonian, 26 Apr 10)
Indeed, these comments by Jill Jacobs go to show Jews are capable of registering the truth about things. And such truths and observations then go to the construction of “stereo-types”–which are GENERALIZATIONS, products of inductive logic–which then only depend upon specific instances for their truth, don’t they?
And at this pt., the more ADL screams, the more they reduce themselves to absurd; they’ve cried “wolf” now soooo many times, ever fewer seem to be listening–even among Jews, Ha.
CONCLUSION: For evermore people see what ADL really is–a bunch of extortionists, pure and simple, who further then just provide cover for fellow criminals and enemy Israeli terror-state. Honest elections and death to the Fed.
The Jewish attitude to wrongdoing is likely due to their collectivist, extended family social structure. The English seem to be the most exteme example of the opposite. The Pinch”.
I wonder if Gregory Clark’s work is relevant and the behavior of the Puritans was influenced by English institutions as much as the Ice Age. Is that why they become the ‘mark’ of people with a different attitude to playing by the rules? Israelis seem to find it easier to succeed in the US.
When the major banks started to announce that they were making mortage loans to illegal aliens is when I got out, except for a couple of percent tied to a bond fund, of the stock market. I went 98% into cash.
Lots of people lost lots of money in last years equity collapse, and they should be bitter and demanding prosecution. What could be more sub prime, and a bigger violation of fiduciary duty & responsiblity than any loan or service given by a bank to an illegal alien?
Now we find that the Jews at the big banking, and investment houses were betting against their own customers.
People should be screaming for blood.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/19/bear-stearn-spurned-paulson-deal
Years ago I got interested in Jewish ethical teachings in relation to business ethics. The bottom lines was: there was no real, distinctive and superior Jewish ethical teaching about business practices. In some areas, such as charitable giving, especially to worthy Jewish causes, Jews do indeed strive to excel. There is no equivalent competition for fame as the most ethical in business. There is no accepted standard by which such a competition would be measured, and no interest in it. Jews do business for money, period.
Three things struck me.
1. Being Jewish in an anti-Jewish social order has been accepted as an extra expense, and there has been tacit rabbinical understanding of the need to go get the money to meet that expense. There has been nobody with the authority and the interest to say: this is no longer an anti-Jewish social order and your free pass on business ethics is over.
2. Given the enclosed nature of the Jewish realm of ethics, of religion, of community and of the Jewish family game, versus the profane and alienated nature of galut, of exile, non-Jewish partners of strongly Jewish identified businessmen are at a disadvantage: on the outside, without connections, without information, without a rabbi to speak for them (literally or figuratively) if they feel cheated. Community self-interest and strong sentiments of in-group adhesion and out-group aversion would have a lot to do with the average result even if a non-Jew in a case like this was shameless enough to go among Jews and ask for moral condemnation of a pillar of the Jewish community.
3. Jewish in-group charity is very important, because poignant needs have been met this way (for example seeing that the Jewish dead are properly taken care of), and because the exceptional wealth of some Jews but not others puts the wealthy Jews in a position automatically to create widespread, intense and lasting social debts. The people who meet this needs in the Jewish community, because they have the means, are not going to get called on how they got the money to do what has to be done. It’s totally unrealistic to think they could seriously be condemned and cast out. On the contrary, they easily make themselves Jewish community leaders, at least for purposes of dealing with the Gentile world, and normally without the bother of elections.
@Bill Thomas
Greenberg and the Jews at AIG had to have known what the game was, and were playing it too.
Are you sure John Paulson is Jewish? That sounds like a Northern name, and all the other Paulsons on Wikipedia appear non-Jewish. Again, it’s critical to accurate about these things.
Who Controls Goldman Sachs?
http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showthread.php?14947-Who-Controls-Goldman-Sachs
Who Controls American International Group?
http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showthread.php?15039-Who-Controls-American-International-Group
Who Controls the U.S. Treasury Department?
http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showthread.php?14925-Who-Controls-the-U.S.-Treasury-Department
Who Controls the Federal Reserve System?
http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showthread.php?14912-Who-Controls-the-Federal-Reserve-System
Who Controls the U.S. Economy?
http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showthread.php?14895-Who-Controls-the-U.S.-Economy
Obviously there’s “one moral standard within the group, and a completely different standard outside the group”, as there is for lots of ethnic groups. But in practice, most Jewish businessmen don’t seem to give fellow Jews any special breaks. MacDonald’s own example, Bernie Madoff, illustrates that crooked Jews are often quite willing to cheat other Jews. When I first arrived in Israel I thought that businessmen, landlords, etc. were trying to take advantage of me because I was American, but soon I realized that they were just treating me the same way they treated their fellow Israeli Jews.
Also, just to keep some perspective, Jewish business practices might be pretty tough compared to European ones, but not compared to lots of other ethnic groups.
KMaC has mentioned before that a thorough analysis of the current financial disaster and Jewish culpability in it is outside the scope of his study and expertise.
I find this a great pity, if ever another volume needed to be added to the classic KMac trilogy, it is a root and branch, thorough analysis of the history, causes and main actors behind the catastrophe.A no holds barred, minute, scholarly analysis is called for.
@Fabricius
John Paulson is a New York Jew. He is not related to “Southerner” Hank Paulson who is a gentile. If you Google John Paulson you will find numerous Jewish & business sources claiming John Paulson.
Although this article doesn’t say so explicitly, I think it’s pretty strong evidence that John Paulson is, indeed, a member of the Tribe.
Link: http://www.ujafedny.org/press-releases-2/view/19-million-raised-at-wall-street-dinner-honoring-john-a-paulson-and-marc-s-lipschultz
I especially love verification from Jewish sources–nothing like an admission from party opponent.
That sounds like a Northern name
Jon “Stuart”
Richard “Holbrooke” (note the additional e, deliberately archaic)
Theodore “dalrymple”
John Paulson is definitely a Jew. He even has a stereotypical Jewish appearance:
http://assets.portfolio.com/images/site/editorial/magazine/2009/01/paulson-main-slide.jpg
a guy working for ‘big blue’, middle level, graduate of some Israel university, rides fancy car, fails to pay $30…no more services till paid forward…
This link says that Paulson “grew up attending the Whitestone Hebrew Centre in Queens.”
http://njjewishnews.com/article/lifetimes/chronicling-wall-street-and-its-greatest-trade/
Paulson’s biographer Zuckerman says:
“John Paulson, although he is a Wall Street person, is pretty much the last person you would have expected to have pulled off the greatest trade in financial history, because he wasn’t a real estate guy, he wasn’t a mortgage guy, he wasn’t a derivative guy, and he wasn’t a short seller, and that’s what it took to do this trade,” Zuckerman said. “It took outsiders to see this coming. They weren’t caught up in it. They didn’t drink the ‘Kool-Aid’ of real estate.”
Then again, “Jews are no longer outsiders on Wall Street,” he said; the insiders are also Jewish.
The problem with claiming that the Jews are of Israel of the Old Testament is that there are Ten Commandments. So for a Jew to say “If we kill a Gentile who has sinned or has violated one of the seven commandments — because we care about the commandments — there is nothing wrong with the murder.” the Jews are either idiots that can’t count (yea, right.) or they are not the people to whom the ten Commandments were given
K Mac says “the article and the impending Senate hearings are sure to once again place Goldman and Jewishness front and center in the public’s mind as the main villain in the meltdown”
It’s interesting therefore to see that one of the Tribe’s Political Legion, Carl Levin, is making a great show of faux outrage against the Tribe’s Financial Legion Standard Bearer, Lloyd Blankfein.
I assume that the tactic on display here is by one Tribe taking the limelight in “attacking” another that they are busy building an alibi.
“See how that boy Levin attacked that boy Blankfein”.
The subliminal, though never openly stated, message is that it can’t be a Tribe thing ‘cos “look at the way one of us is attacking the other”.
The showboating for the cameras may well fool who it’s meant to as any likely outcome of concrete restrictions on GS et al’s MO to manufacture money for itself (one of the few sources of manufacturing left in the US & GB) will be surely left unaffected.
Somehow I don’t think Levin will lead the charge on Clamping the Cadillac Cavaliers ability to electronically leverage their own money supply….
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63Q35320100428?feedType=nl&feedName=ustopnewsearly
Goldman CEO, under siege, concedes changes coming
“You shouldn’t be selling junk. You shouldn’t be selling crap. You shouldn’t be betting against your own customer at the same time you’re selling to them,” said Senator Carl Levin.
“You’re going short against the very security (you’re selling) … many of which are described as crap by your own sales force internally.” said Levin, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.”
meanwhile back in TV la-la land……
Comment on above article by BeReel41n which seems to show that this Tribe “Gatekeeping” tactic is working:
“Thank you for your article. It’s seems a lot more based in reality and why so many were glued to the tube. Unlike CNBC’s coverage that seemed to be obviously covering and smoothing over for GS. Hopefully, they will lose many of their faithful viewers for such a gross error. Levin and the Senators earned their keep and stood up for the people for once.”
“K Mac says “the article and the impending Senate hearings are sure to once again place Goldman and Jewishness front and center in the public’s mind as the main villain in the meltdown”” -Freddie Turnill says: April 28, 2010 at 8:35 AM
* * * * *
State Of Arizona Says To Feds: “Make My Day, Sucker”
(Apollonian, 28 Apr 10)
Yes, perhaps, “Freddie,” but much more prominent now for public interest and consumption, no doubt, will be the Federal-State conflict regarding Arizona’s magnificent new measure against illegal alien invasion fostered by the Fed traitors and enemies-of-the people, led by the usurper, Obama/Soetoro.
Present Internet blog weaponry is now going great-guns, I submit, and tide is turning against Judeo-conspirators behind the Fed traitors.
CONCLUSION: So will the Fed psychopaths now make use of false-flag option to declare martial law against people of USA and states’ rights? “Make my day,” say the states’ rights folks. Honest elections and death to the Fed. Apollonian
Someday says: “The Jewish attitude to wrongdoing is likely due to their collectivist, extended family social structure”
My experience of the workplace with secular Tribe (although many comply to varying degrees with Kosher dietary laws and are circumcised) compared with working alongside Turks, Arabs from various places (Yemeni, Syrian), Somalis, Indians. Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Africans are that the latter groups’ everyday psychic and physical existence and loyalties revolve around a ripple effect of extended families and eventually encompassing their ethnic group.
So you hear the latter forever talking about cousins, further cousins and even more cousins and nothing but cousins!
This aspect of their life is hard to miss and much more of a feature than any prejudice (which is always there waiting for the right moments to come out) they will display openly towards the host culture.
I have never found the “Rule of the Cousins” amongst secular (or the more openly Observant) individual Tribe members. (Actually they are all, to various degrees, “Observant”)
No constant repetition of referencing a life that revolves, above all else, around their extended family contacts: the existence of what controls much of the most crucial behaviour: especially a choice of whom they marry and therefore have children with, of the 3rd World ethnicity’s does not hold with the secular Tribe. (even if the males are circumcised!).
It is the crucial part of their leveraging themselves to power and their success in keeping it that they seem to have succeeded in establishing a collective identity without the constraints of obligation imposed by extended family contacts ((but crucially keeping a settled nuclear type family within a wider Tribe community (but not based on the extended family) for the purposes of creating progeny for the next generation)).
The secular variant can recognise and live around their obligation to the Tribe first and foremost after their own immediate family in its near nuclear state and it dispenses with what makes a dystopian mess of the 3rd world by having identities which escalate through various layers in an ever widening ripple of extended family of obligations
It’s obviously different for those belonging to Orthodox sects of the Tribe where life revolves around the extended family and Talmudic law pretty similar to the role that Sharia plays encompassing family disputes and punishing criminality within their community. (though thankfully these days no where near as brutal or Stone Age: Still a literal meaning in Islamic Law countries!)
But they are not representative of the organised Tribe who have smashed Western culture and our (relatively) homogeneous ethnic groupings with their Culture of Critique, the opening up of our borders to the importation of the 3rd World and who lead the repression of any resistance to “The Project”.
(The founder of the Faith shoe chain in Britain is a Observant Jw but he has great difficulty in interesting his fellows in joining him in making being Observant as part of Tribal identity)
These “Destroyers of the West” are the secular Rabbinate and the type of social organisation they have evolved of going straight from a individual through to an extremely strong collective identity, without the mass of debilitating extended kin obligations which bedevil the 3rd Worlders, and is a lethal combination against us.
The sloughing off of extended kin obligations is not enough of course.
The Afros in the West have done that but they forever create civil chaos amongst their own kind and everywhere they tread. An ever more rising tide of Afros in the West seem well on their way to dispensing with any kind of family which involves a male breadwinner who stays around long enough to raise a family.
The straight line from individual to wider community which both Tribe and the “Western” Afros now have, have very different outcomes, though, despite the chaos which Afros bring everywhere, their powerful sense of “the Group” has huge advantages to grabbing resources in the current “Decline and Fall of the West” where stealing from “Whitey” is now a legal occupation blessed by the State Apparat’s adherence to the doctrine of “Affirmative Action” though it’s quite interesting that in their “Private Enterprise” MO’s The Tribe uses “investment banking” to rob whilst the Afro is still is out on the streets.
Is there a peacful solution? I think there is it’s caled war.
Is there a peacful solution? I think there is it’s called war.
Of course the Jews are embarrassed, and running scared too. They’re nefarious, back stabbing activities are being exposed for all white Americans to see. Whites are realizing a hostile, alien racial minority is running the nation into the ground for its benefit at the expense of white Americans. When the backlash against them does erupt, angry whites during armed revolts are not going to distinguish between the ones who are crooks and those who are not. Collective punishment will be coming for their efforts to de-stabilize and destroy western nations and peoples. There is a very good reason why Jews have been expelled or killed en-masse over 100 times since the year 250 A.D. It seems they never learn from history, or their past misdeeds do they?
I have been meaning to post about something like this on one of my blogs and this has given me an idea. Cheers.