Jewish Writing on Anti-Semitism

Is it “anti-Semitic” to say there is war on Christmas?

Editor’s note: This article was originally posted on December 26, 2019.

Dan Rosenberg, writing in the Canadian Jewish News, claims that it’s “anti-Semitic” to say that there’s a war on Christmas. He also says that “terms such as ‘New York lawyers (and bankers),’ and ‘Hollywood culture’ refer to Jews. When people speak of the ‘secularists’ and ‘internationalists’ who are behind conspiracies like the War on Christmas, they are also referring to Jews.” And I suppose any mentions of globalists, George Soros’s influence, or the Israel Lobby are similarly off limits. In fact, for the likes of Rosenberg (and pretty much every Jew with a high position in the media), any mention that Jews are an elite or have any influence at all (or at least not any influence that is not utterly benign and good for everyone) is horrifying and utterly irrational.

Activists like Rosenberg are not limited by having to deal with actual data and facts. It’s simple. They can claim anything they want because any assertion that Jews have anything to do with changing Christian culture of America is automatically labeled as evil.

So what evidence does Rosenberg come up with?

The idea of the War on Christmas started with one of the founding fathers of American anti-Semitism: automaker Henry Ford. Back in the 1920s, he published a newsweekly called the International Jew. It frequently featured blatantly bigoted accusations such as, “Last Christmas, most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated someone’s birth.… People sometimes ask why three million Jews can control the affairs of 100 million Americans. In the same way that 10 Jewish students can abolish the mention of Christmas and Easter out of schools containing 3,000 Christian pupils.”

In modern times, Fox News has been airing segments such as Bill O’Reilly’s 2016 “Naughty or Nice” list, which praised businesses that use “Merry Christmas” and condemned others that say “Happy Holidays.”

That’s it. No heavy lifting required. Of course, it ignores Eli Plaut’s academic book A Kosher Christmas which proudly claims, in the words of a reviewer:

Jews have been the vanguard of an effort to “transform Christmastime into a holiday season belonging to all Americans,” without religious exclusivity.  The most important Jewish mechanisms of secularization are comedy and parody, for laughter undermines religious awe.  Take, for example, Hanukkah Harry from “Saturday Night Live”, who heroically steps in for a bedridden Santa by delivering presents from a cart pulled by donkeys named Moishe, Hershel, and Shlomo.  Remarkably, Hanukkah Harry has emerged as a real Santa-alternative for many American Jews.  Plaut sees such things not as attempts at assimilation but as an intentional subversion of Christmas traditions.  “Through these parodies,” he writes, “Jews could envision not having to be captivated by the allure of ubiquitous Christmas symbols.”  And it isn’t just Jews: for Americans in general, Jewish parody helps ensure that Christmas “not be taken too seriously” and that the celebrations of other traditions “be accorded equal respect and opportunity.”

As I note in my comment, “there seem to be two messages here. One is the message of subversion utilizing ridicule among other methods. The other is that Jews are seen as high-mindedly making Christmas  ‘into a holiday season belonging to all Americans.’ The end result is that Christmas is not ‘taken too seriously’ and the Christian religious aspect central to the traditional holiday is de-emphasized.”

So is it “blatantly bigoted” to make claims such as that Jews have been instrumental in getting Christianity removed from the public square? Of course not. In Chapter 7 of The Culture of Critique I noted: “One aspect of the Jewish interest in cultural pluralism in the United States has been that Jews have a perceived interest that the United States not be a homogeneous Christian culture. As Ivers (1995, 2) notes,

Jewish civil rights organizations have had an historic role in the postwar development of American church-state law and policy.” In this case the main Jewish effort began only after World War II, although Jews opposed linkages between the state and the Protestant religion much earlier. … The Jewish effort in this case was well funded and was the focus of well-organized, highly dedicated Jewish civil service organizations, including the AJCommittee, the AJCongress, and the ADL. It involved keen legal expertise both in the actual litigation but also in influencing legal opinion via articles in law journals and other forums of intellectual debate, including the popular media. It also involved a highly charismatic and effective leadership, particularly Leo Pfeffer of the AJCongress.

But, since Rosenberg focuses on Henry Ford, let’s take a look at what Ford’s The International Jew (TIJ)had to say (see my review). This was around 1920, well before the post-World War II era when Jewish influence crescendoed. The International Jew had a lot to say about Jewish efforts to eradicate the idea that America ought to be a Christian culture. Rosenberg writes that any mention of “Hollywood culture” is an unacceptable reference to Jews. Ford’s writers were well aware of this:

TIJ notes that to advocate censorship is construed as anti-Semitism: “Reader, beware! if you so much as resent the filth of the mass of the movies, you will fall under the judgment of anti-Semitism” (2/12/1921).

But, after noting that “90% of the production is in the hands of a few large companies, 85% of which “are in the hands of Jews” (2/12/1921), there was enough resentment about the movies that in fact attempts to control Hollywood were created shortly thereafter:

TIJ is careful to note that its concerns with the moral messages in movies are not idiosyncratic but part of a larger kulturkampf between the movie industry and large segments of the American public: “In almost every state there are movie censorship bills pending, with the old ‘wet’ and gambling elements against them, and the awakened part of the decent population in favor of them; always, the Jewish producing firms constituting the silent pressure behind the opposition” (2/12/1921). Indeed, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, headed by Will H. Hays, was created in 1922 in response to movements in over thirty state legislatures to enact strict censorship laws, and the Production Code Administration, headed by Joseph I. Breen, was launched in response to a campaign by the Catholic Legion of Decency (Gabler 1988). TIJ’s reservations about the moral content of movies was indeed widely shared among the American public.

The effectiveness of these organizations in influencing the content of Hollywood culture lasted until the 1960s’ counter-cultural revolution, a social transformation, that as argued in Chapter 3 of The Culture of Critique, was the product of a new Jewish-dominated elite that remains dominant today. Moreover, “the assertions of TIJ are congruent with recent studies indicating that Jews remain in control of the movie industry and that the movies often portray Christians and Christianity negatively and Jews and Judaism positively (e.g., Medved, 1992/1993; MacDonald, 2002a).” For recent examples, see Edmund Connelly’s updated War on Christmas series.

As also noted in the quote above from The Culture of Critique, TIJ was also well aware of Jewish influence in removing Christianity from the public square:

Besides the cultural influences described above, TIJ devotes a great deal of attention to the Jewish political campaigns against public expressions of Christianity and for official recognition of the Jewish religion (e.g., recognizing Jewish holidays). “The St. Louis Charity Fair in 1908 planned to remain open on Friday evening; a great outcry; did the managers of that fair mean to insult the Jews; didn’t they know that the Jewish Sabbath began on Friday night?” (6/04/1921). TIJ presents a history of Jewish activism against public expressions of Christianity based on Kehillah records [see TIJ‘s account of the Kehillah], beginning with an attempt in 1899–1900 to remove the word “Christian” from the Virginia Bill of Rights and culminating in 1919–1920: “In this year the Kehillah was so successful in its New York campaign that it was possible for a Jewish advertiser in New York to say that he wanted Jewish help, but it was not possible for a non-Jewish advertiser to state his non-Jewish preference. This is a sidelight both on Jewish reasonableness and Jewish power” (3/12/1920). “The Jews’ interference with the religion of the others, and the Jews’ determination to wipe out of public life every sign of the predominant Christian character of the United States is the only active form of religious intolerance in the country today” (3/21/1920).

Indeed, the focus of Jewish activism was that the United States was not a Christian civilization but an “unshapen mass of potentiality”:

Based on pronouncements of Jewish organizations and intellectuals, TIJ makes the important point that Jews promote “one of the dangerous doctrines being preached today” that “the United States is not any definite thing as yet, but that it is yet to be made, and it is still the prey of whatever power can seize it and mold it to its liking. It is a favorite Jewish view that the United States is a great unshapen mass of potentiality, of no particular character which is yet to be given its definite form. . . . We are not making Americans; we are permitting foreigners to be educated in the theory that America is a free-for-all, the prize of whatever fantastic foreign political theory may seize it” (3/05/1921). This comment on Jewish attitudes fits well with a great deal of evidence that Jews have consistently opposed the notion that the U.S. has any ethnic overtones or that it is a European or Christian civilization (see MacDonald, 1998/2002, Ch. 7). …

What strikes the reader of TIJ is its portrayal of Jewish intensity and aggressiveness in asserting its interests. Jews were unique as an American immigrant group in their hostility toward American Christian culture and in their energetic efforts to change that culture (see also MacDonald 1998b, 2002b). From the perspective of TIJ, the United States had imported around 3,500,000 mainly Yiddish speaking, intensely Jewish immigrants over the previous 40 years. In that very short period, Jews had had enormous effect on American society.

Fundamentally, TIJ was correct in all of its important assertions. I conclude:

Mainstream scholarship supports the following contentions of TIJ regarding Jewish influence on the U.S. as of the early 1920s:

  1. Jews had achieved a great deal of economic success, even to the point of dominating certain important U.S. industries.

  2. Jewish organizations had launched highly successful campaigns to remove references to Christianity from U.S. public culture and to legitimize Judaism as a religion on a par with Protestantism and Catholicism.

  3. Jewish organizations had been able to impose their ethnic interests on certain key areas of domestic policy. As TIJ noted, Jews were the main force behind maintaining the policy of unrestricted immigration; by 1920, unrestricted immigration policy had continued nearly 20 years after U.S. public opinion had turned against it (see MacDonald 1998b, Ch. 7). Jews had also shown the ability to have a great deal of influence in the executive branch of the U.S. government, as indicated by their influence in the Wilson administration.

  4. Jews had also been able to impose their ethnic interests in the area of foreign policy despite widespread feelings among the political establishment that the policies advocated by the Jewish community were often not in the best interests of the United States. The main examples highlighted by TIJ were the abrogation of the Russian trade agreement in 1911 and post-W.W.I policy toward Eastern Europe where Jewish attitudes were entirely dictated by their perceptions of the interests of foreign Jews rather than the economic or political interests of the U.S. Jews achieved their goals on these issues despite the views of the Taft Administration on the Russian Trade Agreement and the views of a wide range of military and diplomatic figures that the U.S. should support post-W.W.I Poland as a bulwark against Bolshevism and that Jewish complaints against Poland were exaggerated (see Bendersky 2000).

  5. Jews had been a major force behind the success of Bolshevism and its incredibly bloody reign of terror in the Soviet Union and in the abortive Communist revolutions in Hungary by Kun and Germany by Eisner.

  6. Jews were the main component and by far the most energetic component of the radical left in the United States, a movement that advocated a massive political, economic, and cultural transformation of the U.S.

  7. Jews had attained a substantial influence over the U.S. media via a virtual monopoly on the movie production business, domination of the theater and music businesses, their influence in journalism, ownership of some newspapers, and their ability to apply economic pressure on newspapers because of their importance as advertisers. In turn, the ability of Jews to pressure non-Jewish newspapers depended on Jewish ownership of department stores in major cities. Jews used this media influence to advance their domestic and foreign policy agendas, portray Jews and Judaism positively while portraying Christianity negatively, and promote a sexual morality at odds with the traditional culture of the United States.

In turn, these consequences stemmed from critical features of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy

But for an activist like Rosenberg, all that is necessary is to scream “bigoted,” “anti-Semitic,” and the vast majority of people, unaware of the history of Jewish activism, acquiesce. This is unsurprising because the history of Jewish activism and influence can’t even be discussed in polite circles much less be disseminated in the mainstream media or the educational system.

Or they are well aware of  the Jewish role in transforming the culture of the United States, but they also aware of the Jewish power to ruin their lives.

In short the present situation is an excellent marker of Jewish power in contemporary America. And yes, Christianity remains in their crosshairs.

On Russophobia and “Anti-Semitism”

I first learned of the term “Russophobia” many years ago in Robert Wistrich’s 1991 book Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred. My initial impression was essentially that Russians on the “radical right” were attempting to turn the tables on Jews by accusing them of what is effectively the inverse of anti-Semitism (i.e., Russophobia). Of course, this was little more than a mere stratagem designed to obscure their true anti-Semitic intentions. Although not at all thuggish or violent, the proponents of Russophobia, according to Wistrich, were especially dangerous since they included many prominent writers and scholars and had viable connections within the Soviet power structure of the day. Wistrich saw through it all, and so should any right-thinking gentile.

Of the people decrying Russophobia, Wistrich writes:

They are in favor of patriotism, law and order, and traditional values blended with ecological concerns to preserve the Russian cultural heritage. What they claim to hate are the destructive influences of ‘liberals’ in Soviet life, the fads and so-called ‘Russophobes’ – those émigrés, dissidents and above all Jews who are quite falsely said to denigrate Russian history and mock the backwardness of Russian culture. [Igor] Shafarevich’s tract, entitled Russophobia (1989), can be taken as the Bible of this anti-Western, anti-Socialist and antisemitic gospel, driven by intellectual paranoia and an apocalyptic vision of the spiritual crisis confronting Soviet society.

This was essentially my baseline for Russophobia for many years prior to my conversion on the Jewish Question upon reading Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique. I again encountered Shafarevich’s name when researching Solzhenitsyn and the Right. Solzhenitsyn mentions Shafarevich quite often in his memoirs—always in a positive light—and included three of Shafarevich’s essays in his 1974 From Under the Rubble collection. One of these essays was the incipient version of Shafarevich’s famous work The Socialist Phenomenon.

Shararevich (who was one of the twentieth-century’s leading mathematicians and who died in 2017 at the age of 95.) distributed his long essay “Russophobia” as samizdat in the early 1980s, and published it in the Soviet periodical Nash Sovremennik in 1989. In 2002, he published an expanded version of this essay as Three-Thousand-Year-Old Enigma, a full-length treatise on Russo-Jewish relations, similar to Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Togetherbut with greater emphasis on religion. Unfortunately, no English translation of this work exists as of yet.

What’s interesting about “Russophobia,” however, is not only its thoughtful and well-argued counter-Semitism, but the shallow and dishonest responses it engendered from Jewish writers, which tarnished much of Shafarevich’s reputation in the West after the fall of the Soviet Union. From the essay’s onset, Shafarevich expresses concern for the “spiritual life” of Russia. He notes that starting in the 1970s, a flood of anti-Russian literature was being produced which he saw as “the expression of the view of an established, cohesive school.” According to these writers, Russia is inherently despotic and oppressive due to the backward nature of the Russians themselves, which manifests itself mostly through violence, servility, and “messianism.”

Shafarevich counters such slander over several pages of historical discussion, for example, on Richard Pipes’ claim that Tsar Nicholas I served as the model for not only Soviet totalitarianism but for Hitler’s Third Reich as well. Shafarevich demonstrates clearly that totalitarianism was fully developed in the West prior to Nicholas I, and so Tsarist Russia should be let off the hook for initiating “all of the 20th century’s antiliberal tendencies.” As for “Messianism,” Shafarevich deftly reminds his readers that the outlook which appoints a certain group as being “destined to determine the fate of humanity and become its savior” began not with the Russians but with the Jews thousands of years ago. And as for the claim that “the revolution in Russia was predetermined by the whole course of Russian history,” Shafarevich points out that socialism was already fully-developed in the West before gaining any kind of foothold in Russia in the nineteenth century. For evidence, he cites the lack of Russian proto-socialist authors of the stature of Thomas More or Tommaso Campanella, and how early Russian socialists such as Mikhail Bakunin and Alexander Herzen started their socialist endeavors only after they emigrated to the West. He concludes [emphasis in the original]:

Thus, many phenomena that the authors of the tendency we are examining proclaim to be typically Russian prove to be not only not typical of Russia but altogether non-Russian in origin, imported from the West: that was the payment, as it was, for Russia’s entry into the sphere of the new Western culture.

Now, by this point in the essay, the savvy reader will know where it’s going. Although Shafarevich had hardly used the J-word, the people he was skewering had names that echo into eternity—or if they don’t, they should. Grigory Pomerants, Richard Pipes, Boris Shragin, Alexander Yanov, Boris Khazanov, and others. Essentially, Shafarevich is accusing Jewish writers for being the nucleus of this Russophobia and imbuing it with Jewish nationalism. He’s not responding to these people as individuals. He’s responding to them, however politely, as Jews. And that is unacceptable to the same Jews who gleefully condemn Russians as Russians. See how that double standard works?

“Are these authors interested in the truth at all?” he asks. He later probes for ulterior motives:

And hatred for one nation is usually associated with a heightened sense of one’s belonging to another. Doesn’t this make it likely that our authors are under the influence of some sort of powerful force rooted in their national feelings?

In this passage, one can sense a precursor to the evolutionary struggles between populations as found in MacDonald’s Separations and its Discontents and The Culture of Critique.

Shafarevich borrows terms from historian Augustin Cochin, who divided the antagonists of the French Revolution into “Lesser people” and “Greater people.” The former group, an elite minority, lived in a spiritual and intellectual world at odds with the established order, as represented by the latter group. The Lesser People were bent on revolution and enforcing newfangled notions such as equality and freedom, while the Greater People insisted upon Catholicism, concepts such as honor and nobility, loyalty to the King, and taking pride in French history. These were the very things that the Lesser People considered dead weight and wished to remove, with maximum violence if necessary.

Shafarevich applies this duality to 1980s Soviet life by demonstrating how this Jewish school of Russophobia had the same motives and possessed the same hatred that Cochin’s Lesser People had for the Greater People. Their platforms were eeriely similar. In both cases, the Lesser People stressed individualism over nationalism, a disconnect from history, and an utter contempt for the people.

He states that Yanov pushed the idea that

humanity is quantized ONLY INTO SEPARATE INVIDUALS, and not into nations. It is not a new viewpoint. Humanity dispersed (or “quantized”) into individual units that are totally unconnected to one another—such, evidently, is Yanov’s ideal. [emphasis in the original]

As for Russian history, it is complete “savagery, coarseness and failure;” nothing but “tyranny, slavery, and senseless, bloody convulsions.” Religion, according to Pomerants “has ceased to be a trait of the people.” Pomerants also declared that love for one’s people is more dangerous then love for animals and that Russians possess “a lackeyish mixture of malice, envy and worship of authority.” Watch how he advocates for genocide:

The peasant cannot be reborn except as a character in an opera. Peasant nations are hungry nations, and nations in which the peasantry has disappeared [sic!] are nations in which hunger has disappeared.

Andrei Amalrik, a non-Jewish ally, insults the Russian thusly:

And if language is the fullest expression of the spirit of the people, then who is more Russian—the “little Negro” Pushkin and the “little Jew” Mandelshtam, or the muzhik in the beer hall who, wiping his spittle across his unshaven cheeks, bellows: “I’m a Russian!”

Khazanov declares not only that he finds Russia repulsive but that “to be a member of the Russian intelligentsia at the present time inevitably means being a Jew.” Shragin proclaims that the Russians being treated worse than all other groups in prisons was “just and logical.” Furthermore, none—not a single one—of these authors apply similar criticisms to Jews—only to Russians. The authors simply presume Jewish innocence before going out to destroy the reputation of the Russian people. Such attitudes breed revolution and terrorism, as was demonstrated in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, and culminated in the inhuman atrocities of the Bolsheviks (which, Shafarevich demonstrates, also contained a nucleus of Jews). Shafarevich recognizes that for the Greater People, this is essentially a recipe for death.

Shafarevich:

[a] people that assesses its own history IN THAT WAY cannot exist. We are dealing here with a phenomenon that vitally affects us inhabitants of this country. [emphasis in the original]

This sentence represents the essence of the current struggle of the White Dissident Right, and the core of “Russophobia.” We, as the Greater People elite, oppose the Lesser People elite—most of whom are Jews—not because we possess an a priori hatred of Jews but because we wish to survive as a people. Shafarevich demonstrates how adhering to the Lesser People’s platform will guarantee that we won’t survive as a people. Really, it’s either-or.

As expected, Jews everywhere accused Shafarevich of anti-Semitism. Walter Laqueur responded with a New Republic essay entitled “From Russia with Hate,” in which he straight-facedly asks if Shafarevich was an admirer of Hitler (despite how Shafarevich condemns the Nazis as totalitarians in “Russophobia”). Semyon Resnik nitpicked on minor factual inaccuracies regarding Shafarevich’s treatment of the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. He also accused Shafarevich of perpetuating a blood libel by describing the murder as a “ritual act”—as if this undermines the main points of Shafarevich’s essay.

In his stunningly spiteful 1990 essay entitled “Russian History and Anti-Semitism of Igor Shafarevich,” Eliezer Rabinovich sets up a straw man by accusing Shafarevich of blaming solely the Jews for the Bolshevik Revolution (something Shafarevich explicitly does not do in section eight of his essay). He dodges the question of whether Jews were prominent among the Bolsheviks by declaring such Jews as Trotsky and Zinoviev as “anti-Jewish Jews.” He then disputes much of Shafarevich’s historical exegesis and harps on Russian flaws and Russian culpability for past atrocities. Fair enough. No people is without sin, and Shafarevich claims nothing of the sort with Russia. Further, Rabinovich’s arguments do not necessarily refute Shafarevich’s. It is possible for Russophobia and anti-Semitism as the authors describe them to exist simultaneously. Yet Rabinovich states flatly that “Jewish Russophobia simply does not exist,” while Russian anti-Semitism does. Talk about presumption of innocence! How can anyone take such a self-serving zealot seriously?

Josephine Woll in her Soviet Jewish Affairs essay entitled “Russians and ‘Russophobes’” smears Shafarevich as a radical slavophile. She then, quite superficially, attempts to employ logic against him.

Shafarevich argues inductively, from results to ’causes.’ There are demonstrations and strikes. Their causes cannot be objective circumstances (in any event, Shafarevich does not consider that possibility). Therefore they must be provoked. Who could benefit from provoking them? Those who hate Russia and wish to see her weak. Who feels such hatred for Russia? Jews. QED.

Note how Woll completely ignores the evidence Shafaravich presents to support his idea that Jewish nationalism is the driving force behind Russophobia. Do the quotes he presents not evince contempt for Russia? Are most of their authors not Jewish? Aren’t these authors attacking Russia and Russians while not simultaneously attacking Israel and Jews? How can one not detect enemy action in all of this?

And this brings us back to Wistrich and his ludicrous claim that certain Jews “are quite falsely said to denigrate Russian history and mock the backwardness of Russian culture.” Falsely, is it? Did he not read “Russophobia?” In his book, Wistrich didn’t even include “Russophobia” among his source material, only Woll’s article and others like it. Did Robert Wistrich lie out ignorance or knowing? And none of these writers make credible attempts to counter Shafaravich’s evidence or disprove his conclusions. For them, it’s enough to label such conclusions as anti-Semitic. Whether such conclusions adhere to the truth, like the existence of Russophobia itself, is a less pressing matter.

Review of Nothing Sacred: The Truth about Judaism

I had known about Douglas Rushkoff’s treatment of Judaism; Nothing Sacred: The Truth about Judaism, for some time and had always meant to read and review it.[i] A video of Rushkoff discussing his take on Judaism surfaced online discussing the infamous ‘Barbara Spectre moment’ — that is a political gaffe from the tribe’s mouth. We can say these “Spectre moments” are when a Jewish activist candidly discusses Jewish cultural activism on non-Jews and their nations. Here’s Rushkoff’s Barbara Spectre Moment:

The thing that makes Judaism dangerous to everybody, to every race, to every nation, to every idea, is that we smash things that aren’t true, we don’t believe in the boundaries of nation-state, we don’t believe in the ideas of these individual gods that protect individual groups of people; these are all artificial constructions and Judaism really teaches us how to see that.

 

In a sense our detractors have us right, in that we are a corrosive force, we’re breaking down the false gods of all nations and all people because they’re not real and that’s very upsetting to people.”

The central reason Jews like Rushkoff and Barbara Spectre allow themselves to speak candidly about Jewish social engineering is because they believe that by manipulating predominantly non-Jewish societies they are doing the world a service — they are in fact doing God’s work. By undermining their host nations so as to bring about conditions of disunity, Jews like Rushkoff and Spectre believe that in performing this role of “a corrosive force” “breaking down the false gods of all nations and all people,” they are performing a mitzvah as part of their god-ordained task of tikkun olam. A mitzvah is translated as a ‘commandment’ but more commonly means a good deed done from religious duty. Rushkoff describes tikkun olam as “a poetic way of expressing the responsibility Jews have to ‘heal the earth.’[ii] In my two part essay on integration, “Manspreading for Lebestrum,” I discuss the HBO series Show me a Hero, based on a book by Jewish New York Times writer Lisa Belkin about the integration struggle in Yonkers between the NAACP and their Jewish lawyers versus the ethnic Whites of Yonkers. Again we discern the same underlying self-justification:

Belkin seeks to frame the issue of integration in terms of a progressive Jewish solution to the Jewish problem, while fully retaining her Jewishness. When asked about the overtly Jewish role in integration, Belkin neither denies nor downplays the Jewish role. Instead she invokes the Jewish religious principle of Tiklun Olam, a Hebrew phrase meaning ‘repairing the world.’ Tiklun Olam, was described by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch in terms of a Kehilla (community) of Jews in galut (diaspora) successfully influencing their non-Jewish neighbors.”[iii]

Read more

Review: The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews — Part Two

Everard Mercurian (1514-1580)

Being children of this world, pompous, cunning, fake, self-seeking, etc., it is certain that they fit religious life very badly and that it is impossible to maintain union with them. If those of this blood are made superiors, they employ almost all their government in external things: they promote genuine mortification and solid virtues very little, and seem to be merchants, seeking first seats and being called rabbis; they are hardly eager to seek perfection that is described in the parts 5 and 6 of the Constitutions; and readily admit others of the same blood who are very unworthy.”
Manuel Rodrigues, Jesuit curia in Rome.

Go to Part 1.

The Racial Struggle for the Jesuit Order

The complaints of native Spanish members of the Society of Jesus, regarding the crypto-Jewish Jesuit elite, are remarkably uniform. Predominant among their concerns was the Jewish tendency towards monopoly, nepotism, arrogance, aggressive ambition, and an air of insincerity in the practice of Christianity. Of particular concern was the fact that the Spanish Jesuit Order was becoming an exclusive enclave of influential Jews that stretched out even into the heart of Rome.

The epigraph above, from Manuel Rodrigues, highlights all of these themes, some of which have been empirically demonstrated. For example, the body of research compiled by Maryks and other scholars, and discussed in Part 1, more than provides sufficient evidence in support of the accusation that crypto-Jews were “readily admitting others of the same blood.” Moreover, Benedetto Palmio, an Italian assistant to two native European Jesuit Superior Generals (Francisco de Borja and Everard Mercurian), complained of the “multitude and insolence of Spanish neophytes,” whom he described as a “pestilence (133).” Stressing that “where a New Christian was found, it was impossible to live in peace,” he added that “those who governed in Rome were almost all neophytes. … This sort of people and almost no other were being admitted in Spain (133).” King Phillip II of Spain had by the 1570s taken to describing the Jesuits as a “Synagogue of Hebrews.” (133)

The method of leadership employed by this crypto-Jewish elite was further described by Palmio as despotic. The crypto-Jewish elite in Rome was behaving “not as fathers but as masters (135).” Reflecting age-old Jewish ethnic networking, there were gross ethnic disparities in promotions to high office, with Palmio stressing that “the neophytes want to dominate everywhere and this is why the Society is agitated by the tempest of discords and acrimonies (138).” Conversos were “overly ambitious, insolent, Janus-faced, pretentious, despotic, astute, terrible, greedy for power, and infamous.” (142) Lorenzo Maggio, an Italian Jesuit curia in Rome, complained that “those from the circumcision subverted the entire house of the Society.” (117) Read more

Reflections on the History of the Jewish Hoax

The Times’ accounts of what took place at each of those places contains the greatest exaggerations, and the account of what took place at some of those places is absolutely untrue.”
British Consul-General Stanley on the Russian ‘pogroms,’ January 1882.

Introduction

The 19th-century humorist Josh Billings once wrote that “there is no greater evidence of superior intelligence than to be surprised at nothing.” Demonstrating its superior intelligence on Jewish matters, few events shocked the Alt Right less than the recent arrest of a Jewish teenager in Israel for hoax bomb threats against Jewish community centers in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Although we are now some weeks removed from the epicenter of this hoax, the sheer scale of its attending political and media hype are deeply significant and deserve further discussion and contextualization. Of particular interest are the actions and posturing of the Anti-Defamation League, shameless in its immediate assertion that the perpetrator was a White anti-Semite, again demonstrating great tenacity in the exercise of its considerable political and cultural influence. Employing the flimsiest of narratives, underpinned by an equally suspect “history of persecution,” the ADL was able to disseminate the myth of Jewish victimhood in the media, secure top-level consultation with the FBI, and even publicly chide the President of the United States for his “inadequate” response. In particular, Trump’s refusal to automatically assume that the bomb threats were a “hate crime” was met with bitter rebukes from several Jewish organizations.

After the “US-Israeli” culprit was apprehended, the naive might have expected some humility and soul-searching from these groups. Yet, in a development that will again fail to surprise the Alt Right, the ADL was unapologetic and intransigent. With extreme arrogance, the organization issued a statement reading: “While the details of this crime remain unclear, the impact of this individual’s actions is crystal clear: these were acts of anti-Semitism.”

Although Jews themselves seem to have learned little from the episode, it does provide us with some food for thought. From beginning to end, the episode perfectly revealed in microcosm the Jewish relationship to anti-Semitism, the construction of narratives through which Jews understand themselves, and the importance of myth and deception in sustaining Jewish identity. In short, the episode revealed the core of a singular phenomenon — the quintessential ‘Jewish hoax.’ Since no language better grapples with the concept of the compound noun than German, we may even coin a term for this phenomenon — the Judenscherz. Read more

Jewish Privilege Devours Itself

Octopus self-cannibalism

Octopuses can sometimes engage in self-cannibalism, eating their own arms in what is thought to be a stress reaction. What initially begins as a nervous biting of one’s own limbs, descends into frenzy, as bacteria take hold in the resultant wounds. As the infection spreads, and the stress levels increase, the octopus savages its own arms at a rate faster than it can heal, or grow new limbs. Survival in such instances is rare. There is only a terminal fate for a cephalopod in which such behavior has firmly taken hold.

Stress-related self-destruction is also relatively common among humans, and not merely in the obvious form of deliberate suicide. Melville captured it best with Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab, a figure so psychologically and spiritually wounded, so bitterly sensitive, that he would give his own life and the lives of others in pursuit of revenge — the only palliative he felt would appease his mental self-gnawing. Rebuking the admonishments of Starbuck, he cries with barely concealed anguish: “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” Ahab’s insatiable hate for the white whale was certainly not intended as an allegory for the hatred felt by modern ‘progressives’ for the White man, and yet I feel that such a comparison is apt. These people will do anything to ‘strike the sun,’ to bring down their great opponent, and we may expect self-destructive behaviors to be an aspect of their maniacal pursuit of ‘Whiteness.’

The last few weeks have witnessed a couple of important instances in which the memes of ‘privilege,’ racism, and anti-Semitism, the chief intellectual harpoons forged to pierce the White behemoth, have been turned inward on those largely behind their construction. Very recently, England’s Bristol University has been caught up in a scandal after it emerged that one of its lecturers, Dr Rebecca Gould, who is almost certainly both Jewish and a ‘progressive,’ penned an article for CounterPunch in 2011 in which she argued that “Jews should stop privileging the Holocaust.” Given that such an argument simultaneously infringes upon several taboos, and thus casts Dr Gould into the nebulous category of a ‘self-hating Jew,’ it is a miracle that her career has managed to progress uninhibited for the last six years. Apparently the piece was only brought to light, and subjected to ‘social justice’ action, after one of her undergraduate students unearthed it and initialized a campaign against her. Read more

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] Read more