Jewish Defenses against Criticism

Mondoweiss excerpted a review of Max Blumenthal’s Goliath by Jerome Slater, including:

[Max] Blumenthal quotes Akiva Eldar, one of Israel’s greatest journalists, who sums up the findings of Israeli public opinion surveys: “Israeli Jews’ consciousness is characterized by a sense of victimization, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanization of the Palestinians, and insensitivity to their suffering.”

Well, we’ve known that for quite some time, but Slater’s point is that nothing will happen until American Jews pressure their government. Unfortunately, this will not happen “primarily because so many Jewish and other American ‘pro-Israelis’ … are impervious to the facts.” In Slater’s view, then, Blumenthal ends up preaching to the choir because his book is more. or less excluded from discussion in the mainstream media (apart from a hostile review by Eric Alterman in The Nation which, sadly, is part of the MSM).

This highlights once again the power of Zionism in the mainstream media (and why aren’t we hearing outrage in the MSM about the ethnic cleansing of the  Bedouins to make room for housing for Jews?). Even if Slater is right that the book was excluded for its strident tone, one has the feeling that the main problem is simply the facts that it presents. (Even Eric Alterman agrees that the book is “mostly technically accurate.”)

The reality is that a “siege mentality” goes a long way to explain Jewish political behavior in the U.S. as well as Israel — their fear of and loathing toward an America dominated by White Christians. As Elliott Abrams has stated, the American Jewish community “clings to what is at bottom a dark vision of America, as a land permeated with anti-Semitism and always on the verge of anti-Semitic outbursts” (p. 86).

When you feel you are under siege, anything is justified, and it is impossible to think critically about your behavior.  The blinders are on and there’s no way to remove them. The Simon Wiesenthal Center sends out emails reassuring its Jewish customers with the phrase, “The light of hope, the light of freedom, the light of Jewish values and solidarity.” In their own impregnable self-image, Jews have higher ethical standards than anyone else—a light unto the nations. Israel is a paragon of moral behavior, no matter what the rest of the world thinks.

This reminded me of an article by Kim Chernin, writing in Tikkun in 2002 (discussed here, p. 11). She wonders why so many Jews “have trouble being critical of Israel.” She finds several obstacles to criticism of Israel:

• A conviction that Jews are always in danger, always have been, and therefore are in danger now. Which leads to:

• 2. The insistence that a criticism is an attack and will lead to our destruction. Which is rooted in:

• 3. The supposition that any negativity towards Jews (or Israel) is a sign of anti-Semitism and will (again, inevitably) lead to our destruction. . . .

• 6. An even more hidden belief that a sufficient amount of suffering confers the right to violence. . . .

• 7. The conviction that our beliefs, our ideology (or theology), matter more than the lives of other human beings.

Chernin describes how this plays out:

We keep a watchful eye out, we read the signs, we detect innuendo, we summon evidence, we become, as we imagine it, the ever-vigilant guardians of our people’s survival. Endangered as we imagine ourselves to be; endangered as we insist we are, any negativity, criticism, or reproach, even from one of our own [like Blumenthal], takes on exaggerated dimensions; we come to perceive such criticism as a life-threatening attack. The path to fear is clear. But our proclivity for this perception is itself one of our unrecognized dangers. Bit by bit, as we gather evidence to establish our perilous position in the world, we are brought to a selective perception of that world. With our attention focused on ourselves as the endangered species, it seems to follow that we ourselves can do no harm. . . . When I lived in Israel I practiced selective perception. I was elated by our little kibbutz on the Lebanese border until I recognized that we were living on land that had belonged to our Arab neighbors. When I didn’t ask how we had come to acquire that land, I practiced blindness. . . .

Wherever we look, we see nothing but impending Jewish destruction. . . . I was walking across the beautiful square in Nuremberg a couple of years ago and stopped to read a public sign. It told this story: During the Middle Ages, the town governing body, wishing to clear space for a square, burned out, burned down, and burned up the Jews who had formerly filled up the space. End of story. After that, I felt very uneasy walking through the square and I eventually stopped doing it. I felt endangered, of course, a woman going about through Germany wearing a star of David. But more than that, I experienced a conspicuous and dreadful self-reproach at being so alive, so happily on vacation, now that I had come to think about the murder of my people hundreds of years before. After reading that plaque I stopped enjoying myself and began to look for other signs and traces of the mistreatment of the former Jewish community. If I had stayed longer in Nuremberg, if I had gone further in this direction, I might soon have come to believe that I, personally, and my people, currently, were threatened by the contemporary Germans eating ice cream in an outdoor cafe in the square. How much more potent this tendency for alarm must be in the Middle East, in the middle of a war zone! . . .

This is intense ethnocentrism with a peculiarly Jewish twist—ethnic paranoia might be a better term. Even when things seem really good, death and destruction are only moments away, and that justifies taking any and all measures to ensure the safety of the group. Every event is seen through the eyes of the group—an extreme form of collectivism foreign to the Western tradition of individualism.

Another aspect that fuels Jewish ethnic paranoia on display here is a very long historical memory that colors everything. Events that happened centuries ago color their current perceptions. This powerful sense of group endangerment and historical grievance is associated with a hyperbolic style of Jewish thought that runs repeatedly through Jewish rhetoric. Chernin’s comment that “any negativity, criticism, or reproach, even from one of our own [like Bluenthal’s Goliath], takes on exaggerated dimensions” is particularly interesting. In the Jewish mind, all criticism must be suppressed because not to do so would be to risk another Holocaust. As Peter Novick noted in his The Holocaust in American Life (p. 178), the general attitude among Jews is that “There is no such thing as overreaction to an anti-Semitic incident, no such thing as exaggerating the omnipresent danger. Anyone who scoffed at the idea that there were dangerous portents in American society hadn’t learned ‘the lesson of the Holocaust.’”

So when John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt publish The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy, a scholarly effort explicitly directed at securing Israel’s long-term interests, it is greeted with charges that it is a reincarnation of the Protocols by the Zionist Organization of America and even by J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami.

It’s been going on for a long time. Here’s Heinrich von Treitschke, the prominent nineteenth-century German intellectual:

“about the shortcomings of the Germans or] French, everybody could freely say the worst things; but if somebody dared to speak in just and moderate terms about some undeniable weakness of the Jewish character, he was immediately branded as a barbarian and religious persecutor by nearly all the newspapers.” (see here, p. 74)

This is the same mentality behind the push by Jewish organizations for laws against “hate crimes” construed as anything that makes a group feel uncomfortable. No criticism is allowable, no matter how well-founded or well-intentioned. In Australia, the new attorney general wants to rescind hate crime legislation, “especially … provisions that make it unlawful to offend or insult people on the basis of their race.” Jewish organizations, as usual, are leading the opposition (“Racism is not free speech“). For Jewish groups, there is no real difference between well-reasoned honest criticism and irrational ravings. All criticism must be suppressed as vilification and “racism.”

Of course, this is really just yet another facet of Jewish ethnocentrism, with a strong dose of aggressiveness. That is, Jewish groups are very aggressively pursuing their interests, in this case removing a powerful weapon from those who would defend the traditional peoples and cultures of Australia and other Western societies—the weapon of being able to criticize the many peoples who are invading their lands (e.g., talk about IQ and immigration) and to openly discuss conflicts of interest between Jews and the traditional people and culture of the West which obviously have a bearing on the long term  White survival and well-being.

In other words, Jewish ethnic paranoia is quite adaptive because it results in vigorous attempts to remove the weapon of simply being able to have open and honest discussions, even in a society that prides itself in the  right of free speech. Preventing such discussions completely (as in the case of Australia) or pushing them underground (as in the case of the U.S. with its teetering First Amendment), means that reasonable discussions of issues like dual loyalty (possible in Israel but not the  U.S.) or the Jewish ethnic interest in promoting multiculturalism are suppressed. As Wilmot Robertson and Joe Sobran noted long ago, the greatest power that  Jews have is to prevent discussions of Jewish power, to the point that even positive assessments of Jewish contributions, such as Joe Biden’s recent faux pas, do not have much media penetration.

Definitely a tough nut to crack. And it reminds us once again that a little bit of a similar psychological profile would result in a dramatic turnaround in the fortunes of Whites.