America as a Promised Land for Jews: Threatened by Muslims, Israel and White Identity?
Note: This is an edited, linked version of my talk at the NPI conference in Washington, DC, November 19, 2016.
I am going to talk about Jews. It’s not that I relish doing this, but somebody’s got to do it, and it’s definitely a subject that needs to be addressed as best we can, fairly and factually, and with the understanding that we are not talking about all Jews but about activist Jews and the general thrust of the organized Jewish community.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, Jews saw America as a promised land, whose “streets are paved with gold” as they often wrote to their families in Europe. Jews were therefore staunch advocates of unrestricted immigration. Writing in 1914, University of Wisconsin sociologist Edward A. Ross believed that liberal immigration policy was exclusively a Jewish issue and he quoted the prominent author and Zionist pioneer Israel Zangwill who articulated the idea that America is an ideal place to achieve Jewish interests.
America has ample room for all the six million [Russian Jews]; any one of her states could absorb them. And next to being in a country of their own, there could be no better fate for them than to be together in a land of civil and religious liberty, of whose Constitution Christianity forms no part and where their collective votes would practically guarantee them against future persecution. (Israel Zangwill, in Ross 1914, 144)
Zangwill wrote a famous play called The Melting Pot that premiered in 1908 in Washington, DC, the heart of American political culture. What’s interesting is his idea that America was a land where all the old ethnic hatreds would be abolished in a grand symphony of ethnic harmony. Sound familiar? In the play a Jewish immigrant fleeing Russian pogroms comes to America, writes a great symphony and marries a wealthy Christian woman. Audiences were wildly enthusiastic:
There were cries for Zangwill after every scene, and President Roosevelt himself joined in the applause. During the play he sat next to Mrs. Zangwill “and positively raved.” When Zangwill took his bows afterward, “the President shouted across the theater, ‘that’s a great play, Mr. Zangwill.’ “2 … Throughout the drama [the Jewish character] argues that the United States is a land of universal love and brotherhood. He sees it as a place in which the divisions among men will soon disappear. … Within the stirring and seething of the vast cauldron, the “Great Alchemist” was melting Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian, black and yellow. He was fusing together East and West, North and South, pole and equator, crescent and cross.”[1]
So there you have it. Crescent and Cross. Black, Yellow and White all coming together in blissful harmony — less than 50 years after the Civil War. The reception given the play, and remember this was over a century ago, shows that this optimistic image appealed to many Americans—prominent Americans like President Teddy Roosevelt.
Of course, it didn’t appeal to all Americans. This was the period when most Americans opposed further immigration and Jewish organizations were the major force in keeping the gates open (here, 260). Immigration restriction was picking up steam in no small part because so many Jewish immigrants were political radicals. In fact, Prof. Ross went on to discuss
the endeavor of the Jews to control the immigration policy of the United States. … The systematic campaign in newspapers and magazines to break down all arguments for restriction and to calm nativist fears is waged by and for one race. Hebrew money is behind the National Liberal Immigration League and its numerous publications. From the paper before the commercial body or the scientific association to the heavy treatise produced with the aid of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, the literature that proves the blessings of immigration to all classes in America emanates from subtle Hebrew brains. (Ross 1914, 144–145)
Nothing much has changed in the last century, except that someone like Prof. Ross in today’s academic world would have a difficult life indeed.
Jews were correct that America held great promise as a place where Jews could thrive, and part of that is about who we are — the traditional White majority. There is a very long liberal tradition in America, going back, most importantly, to the Puritan strand of American culture that dominated America really until the 1960s and the rise of Jewish power. This tradition prized individualism which I think has an ethnic basis. Individualists are relatively less ethnocentric, and they tend toward assimilating other groups rather than erecting strong barriers between groups. Hence the appeal of Zangwill’s play. He knew what buttons to push.
An important strand of this type of American individualism has been to develop wildly optimistic and idealistic theories of the American future. Liberal theorists of the nineteenth century saw a future America as dominated by people who looked and thought exactly like themselves: Even people from different races would ultimately become White Anglo-Saxon and Protestant no matter what their racial or religious background. Or, as Zangwill proposed (and it’s actually quite different), Americans would become a new race blended from all the races of man. Now we have multiculturalism which rejects the melting pot ideal in favor of the idea that each culture should retain its separate identity. But the optimism remains — “Stronger Together” as Hillary would have it. The common denominator is optimism about a utopian vision of future ethnic harmony.
Zangwill obviously understood how to appeal to Americans’ optimism about the future even though his own views were strongly Zionist, and he saw the Jewish religion as not only morally superior but as a way of preserving racial purity) (here, p. 262). And of course, we see a lot of contemporary Zangwills in the media and the academic world.
If indeed America is an ideal promised land for Jews, a large part of the credit must go to Jews themselves for using their power in the media and the educational system to campaign against nativism while retaining their own strong ethnic commitments and for creating the image of America as “a land of immigrants.” Jews therefore did not create the liberal tradition in America, but they quickly discovered how to appeal to it, as the reception given to Zangwill’s play shows. And they fought hard against non-liberal views of America, particularly views associated with the American South where separation between the races had become the norm by 1908, but also against theorists like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard who were heavily influenced by Darwinian racial theory. After World War II, anti-Darwinian Jewish intellectuals became a dominant elite in American universities and in the media. Most noteworthy was the Frankfurt School’s claim that ethnocentrism among Whites was a psychiatric disorder. This theme was quickly picked up by Jewish activist organizations with access to the schools and the media, and of course it continues into the present.
I wrote a chapter showing that Jews were the main force and a necessary condition for the 1965 immigration law that opened up immigration to all the peoples of the world. But Jewish support for immigration and multiculturalism creates obvious problems for Jews. One example is the immigration to the West of Muslims hostile to Israel and Jews; once in the West, they typically end up making alliances with White leftists critical of Israel. The situation is particularly acute in the UK, although it’s just a matter of time before a critical mass of Muslims in the US leads to similar patterns. The Labour Party is absolutely dependent on Muslim votes and Jewish money, but Jewish money has been deserting the party as Labour takes an ever more critical view of Israel. The same process is brewing in the US but will take a while longer. Right now, only a bare majority of Democrats favor Israel (53%), compared to 23% for Palestinians, much lower than Republicans (79%–7%) (which is why it would have been foolish indeed for Trump to criticize Israel).
As usual, Jewish money talks. It should surprise no one that the far left Center for American Progress hosted far-right Israeli ethnonationalist Benjamin Netanyahu with a softball interview. Wikileaks showed that this action resulted in a new member of their board of directors, the implication being that he came up with a large donation (“CAP scored a big donor, and we won’t be called anti-Semitic again”). The result is that someone who supports the ethnonationalist right in Israel is on the board of the Center for American Progress in the U.S., making it unlikely that the CAP will take a principled stand on Israel.
As Philip Weiss notes, Jewish money is critical to the Democrats and a big reason is supporting Israel. He cites Jeffrey Goldberg saying that the Democratic Party is divided between the progressive rank-and-file, who have had it with Israel, and the donor class which is “disproportionately Jewish, and has been so for many years.” For example, the top 5 donors to Clinton were Jews. Forward editor J.J. Goldberg said: “You ask a Democratic fundraiser, where do you get the money from? ‘Well from trial lawyers, from toys, from generic drugs, from Hollywood. From Jews.’ Those are all essentially Jewish industries… When you are raising money, you need to find rich people who are not right wing, and there are not– pardon me for saying this, there are not many rich goyim who are not right wing.” This is another reminder that Jews fund the left.
But it’s a mixed picture. The times are changing and a good sign of this is that both Bernie Sanders and Israel Lobby stalwart Chuck Schumer are supporting Black Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison for head of the Democratic National Committee even though he has been a strong critic of Israel, calling Israel an apartheid state. Further, despite the continuing vital importance of pro-Israel Jewish money in the Democratic Party, even many Jewish donors are discontinuing their support for Israel because of Israel’s policies. According to demographer Steven Cohen, where they used to say “I don’t like Israeli policies but I love Israel,” it is now affecting their commitment to Israel. Being a liberal and a supporter of Israel obviously sets up a lot of cognitive dissonance, but there is still lots of evidence from Wikileaks that the Clinton campaign was exquisitely sensitive to the pro-Israel sentiments of its Jewish donors, such as pro-Israel fanatic Haim Saban.
Muslim hostility toward Israel is deeply entwined with their religious identity, but among Whites, as usual, it’s all about wanting to feel morally upright. In the past, much of the support for Israel has been based on a sense of the moral righteousness of Israel as a result of wall-to-wall propaganda for as long as I can remember. It’s the usual mantras: Israel is America’s best ally and the only democracy in the Middle East. The Israeli army is the most moral army in the world. Israel made the deserts bloom. But basing this sense of righteousness on Israel is indefensible given Israel’s ethnic cleansing, apartheid and oppression of the Palestinians, resulting in their increasing international isolation.
This increasing isolation and contentiousness within the Jewish community will continue because the oppression is so obvious that even the media can’t cover it up completely. Fundamentally, Israel is incapable of reforming itself. We have to come to grips with how pervasive Jewish ethnocentrism is, particularly in Israel. I suspect that there has always been a tendency for the most ethnocentric Jews to move to Israel. In my 2007 review of Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby I noted that
Mearsheimer and Walt try to see Israel as a normal state capable of making rational decisions, but the extremists are in charge and have been so at least since the 1967 War. Any attempt to make a meaningful withdrawal from the West Bank and Jerusalem and to allow a viable Palestinian state would produce a civil war.
As throughout Jewish history, the most committed members determine the direction of the entire group. This is doubtless true of most groups, but it is especially the case with Jews where there is a long history of fanaticism[, even suicidal fanaticism.] I am reminded of Christiane Amanpour’s depiction of Jewish fanatics in her excellent TV documentary, God’s Jewish Warriors. These West Bank settlers and Jewish activists are massively ethnocentric, and, unlike the propaganda put out by the lobby, they are not at all democratic. They live in a completely Jewish world where their every thought and perception is colored by their Jewish identity. Theirs is an apartheid world separated by high concrete walls from their Palestinian neighbors. And at a time when Americans are constantly being encouraged by Jewish organizations like the ADL to be ever more tolerant of all kinds of diversity, these people are anything but tolerant. Calls for expropriation and expulsion of the Palestinians are commonplace. Israel has created a classic Middle Eastern segmented society in which different groups live in an ingroup/outgroup world, completely isolated from each other.
And since the fanatics are the ones having the children, this situation will become more extreme with time. The present government is the most extremely right wing in its history and includes overtly racialist cabinet members like Avigdor Lieberman. Israel is not going to change; the fanatics would go down fighting rather than give up the West Bank or Jerusalem. This does not appeal to typical Social Justice Warriors in the West.
What I am saying is that the combination of Israeli intransigence, the felt need to cooperate with other Muslim groups critical of Israel, hostility by White social justice warriors, and now even from many Jews, the traditional relationship between Israel and the Jewish diaspora faces difficult times. In this regard it’s interesting that in the wake of the election, Jewish groups have been making high-profile attempts to strengthen ties with Muslim organizations. This may be behind Chuck Schumer’s push for Keith Ellison as head of the DNC.
But realize that non-White immigration and the fueling of the social justice warrior mentality have been intensively advocated by Jewish organizations for decades. In a very real sense, they brought this on themselves. The fact is that despite Muslim hostility and increasing felt need for Jews to cooperate with groups hostile to Israel, Jewish organizations have uniformly supported high levels of Muslim immigration and refugees without limit.
An obvious problem for Jews is that opposing Muslim immigration would be completely at odds with the ideology of multiculturalism and diversity, the “we’re all the same” mantra, the idea that immigration is a moral imperative that should not be judged by the interests of Western countries, and the ideology that the nations of the West are proposition nations committed only to abstract ideas like “freedom” and “democracy” with no ethnic or religious connotations. We can already see this attitude in Zangwill’s melting pot idea of America, so it goes back a long time. This ideology of America has been promoted by Jewish intellectual movements and the organized Jewish community since before World War II and is a major theme of Culture of Critique. Jewish organizations were unanimous in condemning Trump’s proposal for a moratorium on Muslim immigration and have been strong proponents of increased Syrian and African refugees throughout the West.
Lawrence Auster framed it this way:
When Jews put together the idea that “all social prejudice and exclusion leads potentially to Auschwitz” with the idea that “all bigotry is indivisible,” they must reach the conclusion that any exclusion of any group, no matter how alien it may be to the host society, is a potential Auschwitz.
So there it is. We have identified the core Jewish conviction that makes Jews keep pushing relentlessly for mass immigration, even the mass immigration of their deadliest enemies. In the thought-process of Jews, to keep Jew-hating Muslims out of America would be tantamount to preparing the way to another Jewish Holocaust. (Here, p. 12)
Another important reason Jewish organizations have not opposed Muslim immigration is that they see White Europeans as potentially far more dangerous than Muslims. In general, given their proneness to street crime and they fact that Muslims are a low-IQ group with poor academic achievement (see also previous link), they will not compete for elite status with Jews. And finally, it is very common for Jews to have historical grudges against Europeans because of their perceptions of Jewish history as a lachrymose tale of persecution at the hands of Europeans. Jews are taught that Western history begins with the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 A.D., followed by expulsions and the Inquisition in the Middle Ages. Then in the modern era there were the pogroms in Czarist Russia, exclusion by WASPs in America, and finally the holocaust. Who did all this? White, often Christian Europeans.
Jewish organizations in the West have been aware for some time that many non-White immigrants have anti-Jewish attitudes or are at least likely to be far less sympathetic to Jewish issues, such as Israel and the holocaust. One issue has been street crime against Jews, especially in Europe, and as a result Jews have been strong advocates of police-state type controls on thought and behavior to ensure Jewish security. In Germany, Belgium, and elsewhere in Europe, synagogues, Jewish schools and other organizations were under constant police protection even before the recent upsurge in the migrant invasion.
So an obvious upside of low to moderate levels of Muslim hostility for Jewish organizations is that they provide a rationale for adopting policies that have long been advocated by the Jewish community, including especially curbs on free speech, and in particular speech related to ethnicity and immigration. It is no accident that, for example, in Germany, the migrant crisis has led to a campaign to shut down criticism of the invasion on Facebook, with the full cooperation of open borders fanatic Mark Zuckerberg. Recently Twitter set up a committee, which includes the ADL and various Social Justice Warriors, in order to better police its content, and now Richard Spencer, Radix and NPI have been suspended. The ADL is notoriously opposed to free speech, and in general the organized Jewish community throughout the West has been a major force in placing penalties on speech related to race, ethnicity, and immigration. I worry that there will be a major campaign to keep discussion of the Alt Right out of the media — to put it back in the box after its usefulness in attacking Trump has petered out.
In short, the mainstream view among Jews remains that the transformation of the West is manageable for Jews. And if some Jews are motivated to emigrate to Israel because of street-level hostility toward Jews by Muslims, this will not impact Jewish elites in Europe who are not affected by street-level violence. Wealthy, powerful Jews are not at all likely to leave and will continue to be a critical force in favor of the dissolution of traditional European cultures and the displacement of European peoples. Jewish power and influence in the West has never rested on numbers. Western societies have functioned much more like oligarchies than democracies as seen in huge differences between popular and elite attitudes on immigration (see Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page in Perspectives on Politics, Sept. 2014, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”), and in such a political structure a tiny but wealthy group with access to the media can yield enormous power. Steve Bannon saying he would like to “destroy all of today’s establishment” is heartening indeed.
And no, it’s unlikely that Bannon is an anti-Semite, despite all the hoopla to the contrary, given his association with ardent Zionist David Horowitz and his intention to attend a dinner put on by Morton Klein’s Zionist Organization of America and attended by many ultra-Zionist lumenaries (in the event, Bannon did not attend the dinner). However, some have noted regarding Bannon that one can be a Zionist and an anti-Semite at the same time (!).
However, given that a major political party in the UK has gone in a direction not at all to the liking of the Jewish establishment and could not have done so without the aid of Muslim votes, I suspect that a change of attitude on Muslim migration and refugee policy may well be in the offing. There is definitely a point at which Jews would be forced to rethink their attitudes.
Notice that such a shift in attitude would not be the result of low-level street crime and occasional acts of terrorism against Jews by Muslims. This is manageable and does not threaten the power of the Jewish community. Indeed, it may increase Jewish solidarity, as has often been the case with anti-Jewish behavior, and there are positive upsides in terms of clamping down on free speech and increased police state controls in the West. The shift in Jewish attitudes would come about because such a development hits the Jewish community where it really hurts: at the level of political control — because Muslim votes are having an effect on policy that affects Jewish interests. The very real consequences of this for Jewish political power are indeed very worrying to the Jewish establishment.
If the UK is any indication, this Jewish donor base for the left will bail if the Democrats adopt anti-Israel positions, and I assure you that when that happens we will be reading about anti-Semitism among the Democrats in all the big media, as we see now in the UK. Indeed, the Keith Ellison nomination as head of the DNC is having exactly that effect. This could result in another crisis in American politics where most Jews would support the Republicans, but of course only if the Republicans retain their cuckservative, globalist ways and support things like non-White immigration. However, if Donald Trump succeeds in reshaping the Republican Party into a White populist party, this will not happen. Mainly Jewish neocons and the Chamber of Commerce, both of which are globalist to the core, led the Republican opposition to Trump, and that will not soon be forgotten. But if the GOP becomes a populist party, Jews will have a virtually insoluble problem—having only a choice between an anti-Israel, rainbow coalition of the left and a White populist right, both with overtones of anti-Semitism. That is not a choice they want to be forced to make.
By far the biggest problem for Jews is that the forces unleashed by Jewish activism in favor of immigration and multiculturalism have unleashed a rise in White identity politics, either implicitly, as among most Trump supporters, or explicitly, as among the Alt Right which has been the only intellectual movement supporting Trump. Jewish writers like Jonathan Chait (New York Magazine), David Brooks, and Paul Krugman (New York Times) have been very aware of that Trump has been successful because of White identity politics. For Chait, Trump is a reincarnation of a decades-old Jewish bogeyman in American politics, right wing populism: He says, “The party has grown increasingly reliant upon White identity politics to supply its votes, which has left an indelible imprint on not only the Republican Party’s function but also its form.”
For Brooks, Trump voters are “just going with their gene pool,” a rather bald statement that Trump voters are voting their racial interests. After the election, Brooks predicted that the country would be split into two factions, with one faction advocating ethnic separatism, which many on the Alt Right are already advocating. Would that it were so.
For Krugman, Trump voters were motivated by “blood and soil, patriarchy, and racial hierarchy.”
While these statements seem over the top, in fact implicit White identity politics were doubtless an important aspect of the election. Research shows that Whites who see diversity increasing tend to vote for candidates of the right. Anxiety over those changes may explain a lot of Trump’s support, even if they don’t admit it (here; also here and here). In fact, the Wall Street Journal reported that the counties in Iowa and Wisconsin that changed from Obama to Trump were the areas in the US undergoing the fastest ethnic changes.
Once White identity politics starts gaining traction, it’s only a matter of time before there is a critical mass of Whites who are dialed into the Jewish role in White dispossession, and that would not, as they say, be good for the Jews. Psychologically, we expect that racial identity and a sense of racial interests will be more important as Whites head toward minority status. Being the object of hostility increases this tendency to identify as White, so it is noteworthy that Whites are routinely subjected to hostility in the educational system and the media. In a very poignant letter commenting on an article in The American Conservative, a college Republican wrote:
I am in college and nearly all of my conservative friends are at least sympathetic to the alt-right. Even if they don’t openly talk about it, they’re regularly browsing 8chan’s /pol/, The Right Stuff, Radix, VDare, Occidental Observer, AmRen, etc.
How did this come about? It’s harder for older people to understand, but we younger whites have been vilified all our lives. Throughout elementary school and high school, I was regularly demonized for being white. (I attended public and Christian schools and it was even worse at the latter.) And now it’s even more extreme in college. Our entire white race is regularly trashed on a daily basis. … We have the right to oppose our own dispossession and extinction – just as every other race does. It’s time for younger whites to pick up the gauntlet because we’re the future.
I imagine that quite a few of you here today know exactly what he is talking about. Whites tuned into the internet are also aware of disproportionate crime committed by Blacks, Latinos, and Muslims against Whites, and this awareness also leads to the Alt Right and results in very real worries about what the future will be like for Whites if we become a minority. Will juries convict non-Whites who attack Whites? What are the implications of the vast majority of non-Whites voting Democrat and wanting big government handouts when Whites are a minority? What about affirmative action at universities were Whites are trapped between low-achieving Blacks and Latinos in need of affirmative action and high-achieving minorities such as East Asians. Given all the corruption by the Clintons uncovered in the recent campaign with the entire establishment nevertheless backing her, we cannot suppose that the rule of law will survive a White minority.
So the bottom line is that Jews remade America in their interests, constructing intellectual theories and media messages designed to make White America comfortable with massive non-White immigration and its own dispossession. Toward the end of Hillary’s campaign, we were treated to a constant barrage of such messages on the wonders of diversity and inclusiveness. “Instead of [Trump’s] dark and divisive [vision], [mine is] hopeful and inclusive. [Mine is] big-hearted, not small-minded. It is about lifting people up, not putting them down. … It’s a vision that says, and I believe this with all my heart, we are stronger together.” (Nov. 1, 2016). I’d like to see the research showing that America has become stronger because of importing millions of non-Whites, but obviously a lot of White Americans don’t think so.
But let’s face it, 35–40% of White Americans still buy into it. Too many Americans are suckers for idealistic, optimistic rhetoric, full of lofty moralism and entreaties for empathy, and Jewish activists have known this for a long time. As our friend Israel Zangwill said to a Jewish audience in opposition to the immigration restriction law of 1924, “You must make a fight against this bill; tell them they are destroying American ideals” (here, p. 266). Again, Zangwill knew exactly which buttons to push. I am sure Zangwill would be quite happy that Israel doesn’t believe in such ideals.
But this idealism is part of the psyche of many Whites, and engrained in our culture, blasted out 24/7 by the media and the educational system. Interviews with White protestors horrified by Trump’s victory shows their extreme sense of moral superiority and moral fervor and their genuine belief in the glorious rainbow, kumbaya America. We have to understand these White people and convince them of the moral righteousness of our cause. We must show them that their idealism about the future is suicidal.
Multiculturalism is the contemporary version of utopian Marxist rhetoric that was pushed by three generations of Jewish intellectuals: Even after millions of murders and the incarceration of many more millions, they preached that we can look forward to the utopian dream of a classless society. Now we are supposed to look forward to a future of blissful ethnic harmony, despite the long and bloody history of ethnic conflict around the world. As with communism, these utopias ultimately fail because they are not based on scientific views of human nature or on the social science research on the costs and consequences of multiculturalism to native populations.
The end result of this Jewish activism has been White flight away from diversity, the beginnings of a police state, restrictions on free speech, an upsurge of implicit White identity politics and the racialization of politics in general as the GOP becomes the White people’s party, and an urgent need to create an explicitly White politics of the Alt Right. This activism has also resulted in increased conflict — conflict that could ultimately lead to civil war. The protests following Trump’s election and the banning from social media have just begun. We are entering a very dangerous period now, and we can only hope that Donald Trump will live up to the expectations of those who voted for him.
[1] Zangwill’s “The Melting Pot”: Ethnic Tensions on Stage by Neil Larry Shumsky American Quarterly Vol. 27, No. 1 (Mar., 1975), pp. 29-41
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