Moral Paragons Need No Facts: The Pathetic Apologetics of Jonathan Sacks, Part 2

Part 1

Rabbi Sacks’ “critique” of multiculturalism

As he approached the end of his tenure as Chief Rabbi of Britain in 2013, Sacks became increasingly critical of Britain’s model of multiculturalism which, he acknowledged, had originally emerged “in response to the Holocaust.” While having been “undertaken for the highest of motives” and “intended to create a more tolerant society, one in which everyone, regardless of color, creed or culture, felt at home,” multiculturalism in Britain was no longer working. It was not, however, the beheading of Lee Rigby, the no go zones, revelations of Muslim rape gangs or the racialization of politics that prompted the rabbi’s unexpected critique; it was, rather, because “Jews especially in London and Manchester have found themselves attacked on their way to and from synagogue, or abused by passers-by.”

Maintaining that “multiculturalism has led not to integration but to segregation,” Sacks argued that the policy should be reformed to place greater emphasis on “tolerance” and “integration.” [i] While still stressing the sanctity of “diversity” and “difference,” Sacks insisted the British government should do more to promote “tolerance” and called for greater consultation between ethnic communities, arguing that: “In a society of plurality and change, there may be no detailed moral consensus that can be engraved on tablets of stone. But there can and must be a continuing conversation, joined by as many voices as possible, on what makes our society a collective enterprise: a community that embraces many communities.”[ii] Elsewhere the rabbi opined that “The more plural a society we become, the more we need to reflect on what holds us together.”[iii]

Sacks here pretends that all interests can be reconciled through open dialogue, when in truth the interests of different racial and religious groups are often fundamentally opposed and irreconcilable. In responding to the proliferating social dysfunctions that “diversity” has introduced into Western societies, Sacks advises Europeans to “answer hatred with love, violence with peace, resentment with generosity of spirit and conflict with reconciliation.”[iv] The fact that the “Jewish state” he fiercely defends exhibits none of these traits causes him no disquiet. Instead, for the rabbi, this epic double standard is a normative part of contemporary Jewish identity where: “In Israel one is Jewish by living in a Jewish state, surrounded by a Jewish culture and Jewish institutions. But elsewhere, being Jewish means going against the grain, being counter-cultural.”[v]

In practical terms this means promoting pluralism and diversity and encouraging the dissolution of the racial and ethnic identification of Europeans, while endeavoring to maintain precisely the kind of intense group solidarity they decry as immoral in others. Jews have initiated and led movements that have discredited the traditional foundations of Western society: patriotism, the Christian basis for morality, social homogeneity, and sexual restraint. At the same time, within their own communities, they have supported the very institutions they have attacked in Western societies.

Writing in the Encyclopaedia of Modern Jewish Culture, Sacks observed that while “The sexual revolution of the 1960s found some Jewish protagonists,” within Jewish communities “the primary response was a strong defence of tradition.” Within diaspora Jewish communities, sexual liberation was regarded as a direct threat to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, where “not only ethical values were at stake.” Noting that “Images of marriage and family pervade Jewish theological language about the covenantal relationship between God and Israel,” Sacks observed that, “The stability and fertility of families is crucial to the demographics of Jewish survival.”[vi] As these comments indicate, healthy, functional societies coalesce around the propagation and protection of children. While Jews have endeavoured to sustain this coalescence within Jewish communities, they have actively sought to sabotage it within non-Jewish (particularly White) communities.

Despite gaining considerable media attention, it soon became apparent that Sacks’ “critique” of multiculturalism threatened none of the pillars of the Jewish diversification agenda for the West. As Commentary magazine noted:

Sacks has contested neither the reality nor the desirability of a multi-ethnic society; instead, he has consistently argued that the communally-centered model of multiculturalism that prevails in Britain has frustrated attempts to forge an overarching [post-British] British identity. No one is talking about how to persuade Muslims to leave the historically Christian nations in which they’ve settled, but rather how they might remain on peaceable terms.

So Sacks fully supports the ongoing dispossession of the British people, but prefers a version of multiculturalism more consonant with the physical safety of Jews in Britain. While advocating for the greater “integration” of migrants into the White British community and less White avoidance of non-White neighborhoods (the latter having been identified in the social science literature as critical), Sacks remains profoundly committed to Jewish separatism and is vehemently opposed to intermarriage. This leading “anti-racist” regards the latter as a “tragedy” because “a family tree that had lasted a hundred generations comes to an end with them, a chain of continuity that held strong for a hundred generations has broken.” Rather than betraying their genetic legacy, Sacks urges all Jews to be “united by a powerful sense — reinforced by the Holocaust and the State of Israel — of a shared history, fate, and responsibility.”[vii]

Sacks is quite open about Judaism being not just a religion but a group evolutionary strategy, noting that “the first recorded words of man to God in the history of the covenant are a plea for there to be future generations,” and how “the secret of Jewish continuity is that no people has ever devoted more of its energies to continuity. The focal point of Jewish life is the transmission of a heritage across the generations.”[viii] He has noted that National Socialism, in having addressed itself “to the biological, not the theological community of Jews,” actually served to reinforce “the traditional understanding of keneset yisrael as a community of birth, not faith alone.”[ix]

 “The Holocaust” and the “new antisemitism”

Sacks laments that “the Holocaust” — which he regards as that other “moral stain on Europe’s name that all eternity will not erase” — has lost some of the immense power it once exercised over the Western imagination in curbing “antisemitism.” Despite the unceasing efforts of Jewish activists, the invocation of “the Holocaust” no longer yields the bountiful ethno-political dividends it once did. The aggressive ethno-nationalism of the current Israeli government (despite the endless compensatory stream of “Holocaust” propaganda from Hollywood), has led to the rapid erosion of Jewish pretentions to moral authority. Sacks is appalled by this development, observing that:

If there is one thing I and my contemporaries did not expect, it was that antisemitism would reappear in Europe within living memory of the Holocaust. The reason we did not expect it was that Europe had undertaken the greatest collective effort in all of history to ensure that the virus of antisemitism would never again infect the body politic. It was a magnificent effort of antiracist legislation, Holocaust education and interfaith dialogue. Yet antisemitism has returned despite everything.

Here Sacks admits the entire post-World War II political and cultural order throughout the West (centered on non-White immigration, multiculturalism and legislated speech codes) was essentially a grand exercise in Jewish ethno-politics. “The Holocaust” has, of course, been the rhetorical lynchpin of this new order. To anyone familiar with the belligerent and ethnocentric mentality of Muslims in the Middle East, it is hardly surprising that it exerts little moral leverage over the Muslim migrants and refugees that Jews have lobbied tirelessly to bring to the West.

Having the temerity to notice that the conduct of the Israeli state is starkly at odds with the “human rights” rhetoric and political prescriptions espoused by Jews for other societies is, for Sacks, a key feature of the “new antisemitism”:

The ultimate weapon of the new antisemitism is dazzling in its simplicity. It goes like this. The Holocaust must never happen again. But Israelis are the new Nazis; the Palestinians are the new Jews; all Jews are Zionists. Therefore the real antisemites of our time are none other than the Jews themselves. And these are not marginal views. They are widespread throughout the Muslim world, including communities in Europe, and they are slowly infecting the far left, the far right, academic circles, unions, and even some churches. Having cured itself of the virus of antisemitism, Europe is being reinfected by parts of the world that never went through the self-reckoning that Europe undertook once the facts of the Holocaust became known.

In condemning this “new antisemitism,” Sacks makes no attempt to set the record straight and correct the supposedly flawed notions that underpin this worldview: that the state of Israel was founded on terrorism and ethnic cleaning where Palestinians were killed or violently driven from land they occupied for millennia to make way for Jewish settlers, that Israel continues to erect settlements on Palestinian land that it obtained by military force, that Israel’s immigration policy discriminates on the basis of race, that Israel bans marriage between Jews and non-Jews, and that Israel has a two-tier political and legal system that is akin to the old South African apartheid. For Sacks, these notions are apparently so self-evidently false they require no gainsaying — like the rest of his statements on anti-Semitism. Despite the “new antisemitism” being supposedly “dazzling in its simplicity,” Sacks thus shies away from the ostensibly simple task of deconstructing its main logical fallacies.

Aware, however, that Israel is exposed to attack from those noting its fundamental lack of multiculturalism, Sacks feebly attempts to argue that Israel is actually a pillar of “diversity” because it has so many different kinds of Jews in it. It is only in Israel, he notes “that you become conscious, in the faces you see and the accents you hear, of the astonishing diversity of Jews from every country and culture, brought together in the great ingathering as once, in Ezekiel’s vision, the dismembered fragments of a broken people joined together and come to life again.”[x]

What the “new antisemitism” shares with the old variety, according to Sacks, is that while “there is a difference between Zionism and Judaism, and between Jews and Israelis,” this difference “does not exist for the new antisemites themselves. It was Jews not Israelis who were murdered in terrorist attacks in Toulouse, Paris, Brussels and Copenhagen. Anti-Zionism is the antisemitism of our time.” Rather than regarding these attacks (all by Muslims migrants or their offspring) as evidence, alongside the ever-growing list of terrorist attacks in Europe and throughout the West, of the total disaster of mass Islamic immigration, they are, for Sacks, symptomatic of the anti-Zionism that is “the antisemitism of our time” and which is but a “mutation” of the inveterate Jew-hatred that has existed among Europeans for millennia.

Antisemitism means denying the right of Jews to exist collectively as Jews with the same rights as everyone else. It takes different forms in different ages. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated because of their religion. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century they were hated because of their race. Today they are hated because of their nation state, the state of Israel. It takes different forms but it remains the same thing: the view that Jews have no right to exist as free and equal human beings.

Are Palestinians treated as “free and equal human beings” in Israel? Despite his weasel words, it is clear that Sacks absolutely denies the right of Europeans to exist collectively with the same rights as Israelis: that is, to explicitly define their national identity in ethnic or racial terms, to protect their group genetic interests through a racially-restrictive immigration policy, and to have no moral obligation to accept Muslim (or any non-kindred) refugees. Sacks takes it as axiomatic that Jews should be able reside in all non-Jewish nations with the same rights as natives, despite the fact that this arrangement is emphatically not reciprocated by Jews.

Sacks laments that those who criticize Israel have plausible deniability to the charge of “antisemitism.” He notes that today the highest source of moral authority worldwide is “human rights” and that Israel “is regularly accused of the five cardinal sins against human rights: racism, apartheid, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide.” Once again, Sacks doesn’t bother to refute these charges but simply assumes it is morally reprehensible that they even be levelled, and that criticizing Israel on human rights grounds is “anti-Zionism” which is the “new antisemitism.”

The new antisemitism has mutated so that any practitioner of it can deny that he or she is an antisemite. After all, they’ll say, I’m not a racist. I have no problem with Jews or Judaism. I only have a problem with the State of Israel. But in a world of 56 Muslim nations and 103 Christian ones, there is only one Jewish state, Israel, which constitutes one-quarter of one per cent of the land mass of the Middle East. Israel is the only one of the 193 member nations of the United Nations that has its right to exist regularly challenged, with one state, Iran, and many, many other groups, committed to its destruction.

Have activist Jews not been committed to the destruction of European and European-derived nations in their traditional incarnations? Which traditionally White Christian nation is today accepted as such by activist Jews like Sacks? Certainly not the Britain in whose parliament the celebrated rabbi now sits. Jews not only challenged the right of Australia to exist under the White Australia policy but actively fought for, and achieved, its ultimate destruction (see my series “The War on White Australia: A Case Study in the Culture of Critique”).

Conclusion

The absurdly inflated status of Jonathan Sacks as a public intellectual, pillar of the new establishment, and “outstanding moral authority of our time” is a testament to Britain’s cultural decline. Rabbi Sacks plays ethnic hardball while posing as a moral beacon and is rewarded with acclaim and sinecures from the representatives of the people he has devoted his life to destroying. His writings and public utterances are suffused with the same ethnic strategizing that preoccupied the Jewish intellectuals that Kevin MacDonald examined in The Culture of Critique.

It is the political prescriptions of Sacks and innumerable other Jewish intellectuals and activists enjoining White people to “make space for difference” that have resulted in current the non-White swamping of European homelands, the Islamization, and the spiralling crime rates (including the mass rape of European women and children by Muslims). In peddling cultural Marxism and the lies of Boasian anthropology for decades, Jewish intellectuals and activists laid the intellectual and moral foundations for the insane actions of Angela Merkel.

Yet when the negative (and entirely predictable) consequences of “making space for difference” inevitably rebound on Europe’s Jews, Sacks has the chutzpah to go before the European Parliament and depict his community as the blameless victims of European “antisemitism” and demand a crackdown on speech to “stop it now while there is still time.” Instead of being feted as a moral beacon — a moral beacon whose evident virtue relieves him of any obligation to provide factual support for his many assertions — Jonathan Sacks should to be subjected to the same relentless attack that he and other Jewish activists have mounted on our people and culture.


[i] Jonathan Sacks, The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society (London; Bloomsbury Academic, 2009), 3.

[ii] Jonathan Sacks, The Persistence of Faith: Religion, Morality and Society in a Secular Age (London; Bloomsbury Academic), 68.

[iii] Ibid., 67.

[iv] Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (London; Bloomsbury Academic, 2003), 190.

[v] Jonathan Sacks, Will we have Jewish Grandchildren?: Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It (London; Vallentine Mitchell, 1994), 38.

[vi][vi] Jonathan Sacks, Encyclopedia of Modern Jewish Culture, Ed. By Glenda Abramson (Abingdon, Oxon; Routledge, 2004), 245.

[vii] Jonathan Sacks, One People?: Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity (London; Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1993), 195.

[viii] Ibid., 112; 34.

[ix] Jonathan Sacks, Radical Then, Radical Now (London; Bloomsbury Academic, 2004), 184.

[x] Jonathan Sacks, Future Tense: Jews, Judaism and Israel in the Twenty-first Century (New York; Schlocken, 2012), 46-7.

30 replies

Comments are closed.