Making “America as user-friendly to Jews as possible.” The Anti-Defamation League and the Indoctrination of our Youth.
I’ve recently been occupying my spare time with careful study of the ADL’s “Anti-Bias Lesson Plans and Resources for K-12 Educators.” On the ADL’s website, it is said that these lesson plans, which target children in grades three through twelve, have been designed to help “educators” “integrate multicultural, anti-bias, and social justice themes into their curricula.”
In reality, it doesn’t take long for the informed individual reading through these lesson plans to conclude that they are little more than crude tools designed to strip White children of any sense of identity, rendering them little more than androgynous automatons — pliant prototypes of the ‘tolerant age,’ utterly devoid of race and gender.
There is a range of delicious fare on offer for those teachers with an appetite for ensuring that little boys and girls understand the concept of “gender stereotyping,” and who believe that little Mikey should be actively encouraged to play with dolls and a stroller since, as one ADL anti-bias handbook puts it, “there really is no such thing as a girl’s toy or a boy’s toy.”
More interesting still are the numerous lesson plans on offer which claim to “address anti-Semitism,” bearing tag-lines boldly proclaiming that these educational gems will challenge anti-Semitism by “debunking the myths and responding with facts.”
It is to an example from the latter set of these lessons plans that I wish to devote some attention in the following article. In studying these plans, we may well come to learn something — though that “something” will be considerably different from that envisaged by our erstwhile tutors.
I have long been amused, and also more than a little annoyed, by the claims of Jewish activists and historians that anti-Jewish attitudes are so utterly baseless and entirely irrational that they can be explained away with a short list of rebuttals and “facts.” In this reading of Jewish history and the Jewish present, the problem of anti-Jewish feeling is simply one of “myths” and all that is required to combat anti-Jewish feeling is enough “education” to overcome these ‘blatant falsehoods.’
However, underlying this simplistic and deeply problematic reading of the relations Jews and the peoples that have lived among over the centuries is a rather more sinister undercurrent. The offending “stereotypes” or “canards” themselves are viewed as being on a par with a highly infectious disease — with inoculation, in the form of aggressive “educational” treatment, at an early age seen as the surest remedy for the ills of an “intolerant society.”
That this process of ‘inoculation’ is geared primarily against our children is an open secret at best. Although the idea that anti-Jewish attitudes are a form of disease with roots in childhood goes back to Freud,[1] it remains current in mainstream Jewish academic and political circles. Take, for example, the closing remarks from Abraham Foxman’s unintentionally hilarious Jews and Money: The Story of a Stereotype, where parents and teachers are urged to “try to help the next generation grow up freer from the infection of intolerance.”[2] The goal being, as Mr. Foxman so recently articulated, to “make America as user-friendly to Jews as possible.”
Theodore Isaac Rubin’s equally poor effort, Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind, describes anti-Jewish feeling as a “contagious, malignant disease,”[3] and concludes by stating, “extremely active application of insight and education is necessary to check the disease. Checkmate and eradication is [sic] extremely difficult and probably only possible if applied to the very young before roots of the disease take hold.”[4]
To Rubin, and his like-minded co-ethnics at the ADL, the solution to the problem of anti-Jewish feeling is one of “prophylaxis” and “approaches to children.”[5] In the ADL-sponsored tome Anti-Semitism in America (1979), concludes that “It is apparent that the schools are the most appropriate and potentially effective agent to carry out the instructional strategy just outlined.”[6]
Ignoring the view of at least one notable scholar that “using the metaphor of disease to describe antisemitism’s career is perniciously deceptive,”[7] the ADL’s drive to “inoculate” our young and its emphasis on “education” has grown significantly in recent years. In July 2013 ADL National Chair Barry Curtiss-Lusher told the Jerusalem Post that while in previous decades the ADL had been primarily active “in the newspapers and in court…today we are more likely to be in schools. …We know the greatest use of our resources is in education.”
The ADL’s “instructional strategy” is directed by the occupant of its National Chair of Education. Although hardly surprising, it’s probably worth pointing out that the position of ADL National Chairman of Education has never been a bastion of diversity, in any sense or application of the term. The current Chair, David S. Waren, is a Jewish lawyer who grew up in an affluent suburb of the 80% White West Hartford, Connecticut. A brief bio in the Jewish Ledger accompanying his appointment as Chairman of Education reveals that Waren was heavily influenced during his own childhood by local Jewish teachers like Barry Gordon, who taught a course on Zionism at Midrasha, and Rita Spitz, who instilled in him a passion for Jewish literature. As a teen, Waren failed to “diversify” his education any further, choosing instead to spend “most of his free time reading about Jewish history and Israel.” He later added to this diverse cultural cornucopia when at the age of sixteen, “he spent a summer in Israel, and as a student at Brandeis University, studied for a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.” After his first year at UConn School of Law, Waren returned “to study at Machon Pardes, a yeshiva in Jerusalem.”
Essentially Waren, who seems to believe he has the right and responsibility to instruct our children in ‘diversity,’ has lived his life in a Jewish bubble, immersed in solely in Jewish culture and working exclusively for Jewish interests. Waren’s immediate predecessor was also a wealthy Jewish lawyer whose background is anything but diverse. Rick Barton, grew up in a home where “anti-Semitism and the Holocaust were huge themes.” When not directing the ADL’s Orwellian Campus of Difference program, Barton relaxed at his home in the overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, White enclave of Olivenhain, on the outskirts of the 85% White Encinitas, California.
What then of the lesson plans and resources that our helpful diversity coaches have devised for our youth? I have selected one for particular attention: “Using Facts to Respond to Anti-Semitism” (for Grades 8–10). Students are to be given a handout on Myth #1 — that Jews are good with money, and tend to be greedy and materialistic. Students are then given the ADL’s interpretation of where and how this “myth” arose, and then supplied with the ADL’s prescribed cure ‘facts.’ A set of questions is then posed to the students: Where does this myth come from?; What are the facts?; and How would you refute this myth if asked about it?
To all three of these questions, you can be sure that parroting the ADL’s nonsense will score an A. The child can then be said to be safely on his way to an “inoculated” state. Allow me, however, to demonstrate to you just how instructive an F-scoring paper could be.
According to the section of the student handout headed “Where does it come from?”, the ‘myth’ of Jewish greed goes back to the New Testament story of Jesus forcing the Jewish moneychangers out of the Temple: “Teachings concerning the ‘cursed’ Jews radiated into all aspects of Christian culture. … In the Middle Ages, some Jews became moneylenders.” The problem later worsened because “both the Church and the State appointed Jews as moneylenders and tax collectors. In a classic example of blaming the messenger, Christians directed their anger at having to pay back loans and taxes against the Jewish moneylenders and tax-collectors.”
Imagine the young thirteen-year old, head full of the rancid effluent of the media age, imbibing this elixir of falsehoods! Note the accusing finger being pointed at “all aspects of Christian culture,” and the poor, helpless “messenger” status of the Jew. What possible intellectual defence could a child muster against the ‘vaccine’ on offer? Of course, it is precisely the defencelessness of the child that makes him or her the most inviting target for the “instructional strategy.”
Imagine, though, that there sits in one classroom a precocious child; one who knows a little more than the others, and who cares more about being right than he does about simply parroting information in order to get the grades. He raises his hand indignantly and asks to speak on the material just handed out because he feels that none of it is correct, and in some cases is quite obviously untrue. The boy patiently explains to his fellow students that associations of Jews with lending money at interest, financial greed, and tax-collecting pre-dated the legal entanglements of the Middle Ages, and even long pre-dated the founding of Christendom. He points out, quoting Mary Smallwood’s The Jews Under Roman Rule (1976) that during the reign of Claudius, Jews had long been heavily involved in money-lending among the Greeks, and that “in a papyrus letter dated August 41, the writer, a Greek, warns a financially embarrassed friend to “steer clear of the Jews, as everyone else does.” In normal times, clearly, the Greeks had recourse to Jewish money-lenders, but now they were boycotting them.”
He goes on to state that in the possession of several museums are countless examples of Jewish money-lending contracts from Hellenistic Egypt, and he continues by quoting the rather anti-Christian Emperor Hadrian’s letter to the Alexandrian consul Servianus, in which Hadrian states that Jews “adore money.” The boy informs his teacher that there is such an abundance of evidence that Jews were lending money at interest before, during, and after Christ, that any suggestion that Jews were ever “forced” to undertake such low-effort, yet highly lucrative “work” represents a gross distortion of history.
He further takes issue with the fact that the handout he received makes no reference to the Siphre or ancient commentary on Deuteronomy, which “insisted that a definite command was laid on Jews to exact interest from foreigners” and which amounted to, in the words of one scholar of financial history, the “use of interest as a weapon against those outside the community.”
The boy’s teacher, a little flustered, asks the child to be quiet, and the lesson continues with a move to the second half of the handout — the ADL’s “facts” section, which is intended to permanently “cure” the class of any notion of Jews being “good with money.”
The “facts” presented by the ADL are as derisory as they are banal. Take for example the statement “Like all groups of people, some Jews are good with money; some are not.” At this, our boy again speaks out, stating that this is what’s known as being “economical” with the truth. He states that he is absolutely certain that there are a great many Jews out there in the world today who aren’t remotely “good with money.” But, he continues, saying that Jews are like all groups of people, because some are good with money and some are not, is a lot like saying “NBA players, like all groups of people, can shoot the ball through the hoop, and they also sometimes miss.” Without lying, it leaves a great deal of essential truth unstated.
And what is that essential truth that has gone unstated? That Jews, as an economic group, are nothing at all like “all groups of people.” The boy quotes figures from The Jewish Federations of North America in which analyzed census data reveals that Jewish households are twice as likely as the US average to have an income over $75,000. They are also 17 times more likely to be a billionaire. His teacher counters by referring to the ADL’s student handout, in which another “fact” is that “many Jews are not wealthy” and “close to one million American Jews live in low-income households.” The boy retaliates by referring once more to the Jewish Federations data, in which it is made clear that Jewish households are under-represented among low-income households, and that the median Jewish income is in fact 29% higher than the US average, and that furthermore this is actually down from the astonishing 34% figure recorded in 1990. The teacher, entirely without recourse to further argument, falls silent.
The boy continues by quoting the Times of Israel’s article on the 165 Jews worldwide who together possess $812 billion; or expressing it another way the fact that an ethnic group comprising 0.2% of the global population boasts 11% of the world’s billionaires. He concludes by stating that the idea that Jews have what could be described as an “unusual” aptitude in financial matters is not in fact a myth, but a clearly demonstrable fact with an abundance of evidence, from ancient times to the present, to support it.
Moreover, he indicates that there is an abundance of evidence that Jews have from time immemorial used this aptitude, and the resultant wealth, for the advancement of ethnic group interests — and that one of the productions of this effort to promote Jewish interests rests before their very eyes in the form of the ADL’s lavishly funded “instructional strategy.” He goes on to state that the “facts” presented in this ADL “educational” tool are nothing more than clever diversions or outright falsehoods, designed to conceal and obfuscate rather than enlighten.
On the final question; “How would you refute this myth if asked about it?” the boy looks around at the faces of his classmates and tells them that the only thing requiring vigorous refutation is the ADL’s glut of “Anti-Bias Lesson Plans,” which are not worth the paper they are written on. He gets to his feet and rips his handout to shreds as his classmates follow suit. Their teacher sits in silence, as the scales slowly begin to fall from her eyes also. …
What I have just outlined is, of course, a fantastic fiction. The number of thirteen year olds with the knowledge, intellectual capacity, and tenacious personality required to mount such a defence against the “inoculation” process would be somewhere close to zero. This is why the “instructional strategy” has been, and henceforth will be, directed towards them with ever-increasing effort. Success, in the words of Theodore Rubin, will be found in the ADL’s “approaches to children.” Our children.
The great English poet Rudyard Kipling once warned against “diversity” when he wrote at the end of The Stranger:
This was my father’s belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf–
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children’s teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.
Dear Reader, the corn is no longer of one sheaf, and the grapes are no longer of one vine. And as the noble Mr. Kipling’s warning went unheeded, we find ourselves in a world where “bitter bread and wine” has become the daily diet of our children. While the ADL will present a picture of our children one day entering some kind of golden age, the facts tell a different story. Our children and young people, lacking in identity, and severed from faith, folk, and fatherland, are being emasculated, crippled, and killed.
Looking at events from 2012 and 2013 alone, we can see that this is the ADL utopia in which a 13-month old White baby was shot in the face at point blank range by two blacks “for the fun of it.” This the ‘golden age’ in which a 23 year old White Australian studying in Oklahoma on a baseball scholarship was shot dead by a black gang “for the fun of it.” Or this series of attacks on Whites in Denver. This is the multicultural heaven, in which a gang of three blacks in Nelson Mandela’s ‘Rainbow Nation’ of South Africa (95+% black on White murder rate) drowned a White child in boiling water while they disembowelled his dog, shot his father, and raped his mother before shooting her too. In 2007, suicide was the third leading cause of death among young people in the United States. The cultural revolution, and the multicultural experiment in Britain has resulted in the fact that a short period of unemployment is all that is now required for three quarters of a million British youngsters feel that “life is not worth living.” I have two young sons in elementary school. What a morally, spiritually, culturally, and racially bankrupt world they will inherit.
Abraham Foxman of the ADL claims he has been “losing sleep” over weakening American support for Israel. I endure sleepless nights because when I put my boys to bed at night, and watch them drift off to sleep as their blond hair falls softly across their pillows, I am filled with a dread inspired by the activities of that same Mr. Foxman. I know the future that he and others want for my sons, and I am moved to act in any way I can.
Over 350 years ago, Sir Francis Bacon wrote “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.” Even though we have moved on from social and economic life based on relatively small communities and slowly changing technology, there remain real risks for the person who attracts social disapproval. There are many within the White advocacy movement whose experiences can testify well to the veracity of this statement. Motivated to do something because of what they had, particularly their children, they were nonetheless hostages to fortune because doing something to help can, in the wrong social environment, ultimately come to hurt those innocents they originally set out to protect.
But doing nothing is not, and should never be, an option. That something can be as little as finding out just what is in your children’s textbooks, educating yourself either with independent study or with the help of websites such as this which bring together scholars and commentators with backgrounds in a number of fields. Doing something continues with imparting that knowledge to our children in a way that is accessible and usable to them — our thirteen-year olds don’t necessarily need to cite page references from Jews Under Roman Rule, but they do need to know the essential and relevant facts, and a place to which they can direct their fellow students, and even their teachers, for further discovery.
In this day and age of hacking, leaks, and loose tongues, no anonymous Internet voice will remain anonymous forever. But for some of us, permanent anonymity isn’t, and never was, the goal. My anonymity won’t last forever, either because I will end it, or because some very busy bees on the other side will. I act regardless, in this way and in others, because I believe that doing something can be its own reward. And as Sir Francis himself once said “adversity is not without comforts and hopes.”
So let us hope as this New Year begins — for our movement in all its forms, for our people, and most importantly, for our children.
Comments are closed.