The Cofnas Problem, Part 2 of 3
Argument by Anecdote
As one might suppose given the extensive range of data provided above, testing the Cofnas default hypothesis on contemporary involvement in immigration took a number of months to carry out, and involved a thorough survey of very many organizations and individuals. It was labor-intensive, but stands as an accurate and easily verifiable record of the role of Jews in contemporary American demographic and cultural change. It’s really quite remarkable, then, to see how lightly Cofnas appears to take his own hypothesis, since he refuses to subject it to any intensive testing at all. In fact, as with his brief and inaccurate accusation of MacDonald’s putative misrepresentations and omissions, there is a palpable air of laziness in all of Cofnas’s work in this area. Rather than conducting surveys of organizations, movements, or activities, Cofnas favors a kind of “argument by anecdote,” in which he simply tries to find one or two exceptions to a rule, amplifies their importance, and then reclines to bask in the dubious published glory afforded to him by co-ethnic journal editors.
One of Cofnas’s favorite anecdotes is the first American Renaissance conference, something Cofnas made much of in his original article, and which he has returned to in his 2021 rehash for Philosophia. He writes,
When given the opportunity, Jews have been overrepresented in non-anti-Semitic white nationalist movements, as MacDonald and Joyce inadvertently acknowledge. The one major white nationalist organization in the US that is not explicitly anti-Semitic is American Renaissance. Four-out-of-ten invited speakers at the first American Renaissance conference in 1994 were Jewish (Lawrence Auster, Michael Levin, Rabbi Mayer Schiller, and Eugene Valberg) (American Renaissance 2017), and many of its most prominent supporters were Jewish.
I have to begin with Cofnas’s habit of inserting claims into the mouths of others. Nowhere have I “inadvertently acknowledged” that Jews have been overrepresented in non-anti-Semitic White nationalist movements. In fact, I find the idea laughable and entirely lacking in evidence. What Cofnas is doing here is twisting MacDonald’s citing of my work, without actually consulting the original piece. Cofnas writes,
MacDonald (2016) says that “there is a historical pattern where Jews have entered putatively nationalist movements and directed them towards positions that make them ‘safe for the Jews’, at the expense of developing a true sense of ethnic interests.” He quotes his protégé, Andrew Joyce: “That Jews would try to co-opt, or attempt to derail, a potentially damaging movement does have many historical precedents.” Joyce goes on to say that “Jews attempted to take key roles” in the German nationalist movement in 1860–1880 until, under the influence of non-Jewish leaders, the “movement adopted an ‘Aryan clause.’” So if Jews want to join white nationalist movements as equals, they are accused of scheming to make the movements “safe for the Jews” and driven out. Then white nationalists ask why Jews don’t support their movements. Haven’t they answered their own question?
In a word, no. As stated above, Cofnas suffers from a serious deficit in understanding the importance of qualitative as well as quantitative data. In brief, if Cofnas can find a Jew in a nationalist movement, even if they’re proven to be subversives, half-Jews, quarter-Jews, or even anti-Semitic Jews, everything else can be discarded. The problem is that biography is absolutely crucial to testing both MacDonald’s thesis and that of Cofnas, and yet Cofnas seems entirely unconcerned with it — a good example being Cofnas’s claiming of Hans Eysenck as a Jewish hereditarian scientist, even though Eysenck was only half-Jewish in parentage, wasn’t raised within Judaism or a Jewish milieu, and made a point of explicitly denying any affinity or connection to Jewishness.[1] If Cofnas was in fact familiar with the case of Victor Adler and Heinrich Friedjung, referred to above, who competed for leadership of the German nationalist movement in Austria at the end of the nineteenth century, he would be aware that both were promoting a heavily diluted, left-leaning, and multicultural nationalism unrecognisable to those non-Jewish nationalists around them. This is not only a historical fact, but a matter of overwhelming consensus in the relevant historiography. Steven Beller, one of the foremost historians of the Jews of central Europe during this period, described Adler and Friedjung as part of a Jewish intellectual grouping that possessed its own “goals of social and cultural change.” Beller writes that Adler’s politics was inflected through a Jewish liberal lens, in which “socialism, universalist and secularist, [was viewed as a] possible answer to the antisemitism of the other parties. … Adler early on decided to stick to the rules of Austrian constitutionalist politics to bring about the revolution peacefully.”[2] Adler, who had in any case earlier described nationalism as “tactless”, “madness,” and “based chiefly on envy, misunderstanding, and irrationality,” became an out and out Marxist overnight after leaving the nationalist organization, proving in one stroke the total insincerity of his Austrian “nationalism.”[3] Friedjung, meanwhile, ostensibly a historian, was later castigated as a fraud not only for his putative political beliefs, but for producing texts based on inauthentic historical materials. Along with Adler, Friedjung was viewed as promoting a republican, anti-aristocratic, anti-clerical, and multiethnic nationalism that diverged significantly from the Austrian nationalism of non-Jews.[4] The eventual adoption of an Aryan Clause by Austrian nationalists was a response to the dilution of nationalism promoted by Adler and Friedjung and their very Jewish social circles (as well as Jewish movement predecessors like Ignaz Kuranda and Moritz Hartmann). To celebrate the removal of these influences, leading Austrian nationalist Georg von Schönerer published a new nationalist newspaper titled Undiluted German Words. The title says it all.
In short, Jews have been accused of “scheming” to subvert nationalist movements because they are very often proven to be doing just that. The problem with Cofnas is that he insists that these figures should still be considered nationalists, and that we have to ignore all evidence that they associated predominantly with Jewish milieus and often explicitly professed to seek after Jewish interests. Unfortunately, Cofnas doesn’t provide any meaningful reason for doing so, resorting repeatedly only to anecdotes like that of the first American Renaissance conference. In any case, what is the real substance of this anecdote?
Cofnas remarks that “four-out-of-ten invited speakers at the first American Renaissance conference in 1994 were Jewish (Lawrence Auster, Michael Levin, Rabbi Mayer Schiller, and Eugene Valberg) (American Renaissance 2017), and many of its most prominent supporters were Jewish.” He furthermore argues that this is evidence that “Jews have been overrepresented in non-anti-Semitic white nationalist movements.” But the logic here surely breaks down when given even the briefest of considerations. These speakers were not representational, but invited. Their mere presence at the conference reflects in large part the tastes, preferences, and, I would argue, anxieties of the person or persons who invited them. In this regard, I believe it’s been a longstanding position of Jared Taylor that he not be seen as anti-Semitic, and Taylor has himself on many occasions expressed hostility to anti-Semitism. In his own words, Taylor has maintained that “American Renaissance has taken an implicit position on Jews by publishing Jewish authors and inviting Jewish speakers to AR conferences.” Could his selection of these speakers have been an over-compensation to fend off accusations of American Renaissance being anti-Semitic? I believe so. Does the skewed representation of 40% at this one conference indicate that Jews are necessarily over-represented in non-anti-Semitic white nationalist movements? Only a fool would think so. Which brings us finally to biography, that important facet so often neglected by Cofnas. Auster, of course, was an adult convert to Christianity, which doesn’t prove anything conclusively but does suggest a weakened attachment to Jewishness. Moreover, Auster, despite acknowledging the Jewish role in the transformation of America, vigorously condemned MacDonald. All four figures are primarily concerned with race and IQ, a preoccupation of the almost explicitly philo-Semitic Jared Taylor (and one I personally find both distracting and overplayed in the context of broader civilizational collapse), rather than having ties to broader White nationalist ideology. Schiller was an almost comical inclusion given his lack of academic credentials and attachment to certain crackpot fringe ideologies. As for Cofnas’s claim that “many of [AmRen’s] most prominent supporters were Jewish,” I note that he provides no names or data for the claim, or any evidence that such support would amount to an overrepresentation commensurate with his default hypothesis.
Critics might accuse me of picking at a weak spot here in Cofnas’s work, but the point I’m trying to make is that, to Cofnas, the 1994 American Renaissance is a trump card that he sees as worth repeating every time he publishes a critique of MacDonald. I’m not highlighting the conference — Cofnas is, and quite shamelessly.
It’s my belief that Cofnas makes his arguments in bad faith, and I’m led to this belief primarily due to the slowly shifting sands of Cofnas’s own position and the fact he regularly makes claims unsubstantiated by evidence. Without any kind of broad or detailed survey, for example, Cofnas claims that “Jews have also been represented in the leadership of non-anti-Semitic right-wing movements.” Which movements? Which leaders? In which countries? Relative to what? In what time period? We don’t get any such information, just the claim. And where Cofnas does attempt to bridge the gap between claim and evidence, the result is nothing short of laughable. Take the following, from his 2021 Philosophia rehash:
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is leading the charge to censor politically incorrect speech, but the most prominent pro-free speech organization in the US—the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)—was founded by Jews (Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate).
It’s worth remarking first that there’s no evidence suggesting that FIRE is the “most prominent pro-free speech organization” in the US, relative to other groups like the Institute for Free Speech, which wasn’t founded by Jews, has no Jewish board members, and does not restrict itself to higher education. FIRE is also certainly not more prominent than the American Civil Liberties Union, which also advocates on free speech issues. The more obvious problem, of course, is once again qualitative in that many “pro-free speech” groups dovetail ideologically with the ADL in many areas, and a lot of these organizations are inherently left-wing dating back to periods in which they fought against the censorship of pornographic or homosexual material (e.g. the Free Speech Coalition), for drug use, or for the rights of students to protest on campus. It goes without saying that the ADL is absolutely in favor of this kind of “free speech,” and that its primary concern is with White nationalist, and similar, content — something FIRE, or any of these groups, have yet to defend. Cofnas’s use of the anecdote of FIRE is interesting because of the (by now predicable) lack of biography for Kors and Silverglate (e.g., do they see a Jewish interest in free speech?), and the total lack of nuance or context in making a comparison between the ADL and FIRE. As with other examples produced above, we simply have an “argument by anecdote” in which an organization is inflated in prominence so that its small number of Jewish founders or members can be raised to the purely rhetorical position of overrepresentation, behind which there is no meaningful substance. The biography and intentions of these Jews doesn’t matter to Cofnas, nor does the huge disparity in Jewish support, material and/or ideological, between them and the ADL. It certainly doesn’t seem to matter to Cofnas that Silverglate is a lifelong leftist married to a dedicated Jewish feminist and AIDS activist. The only significant example of Kors engaging in racial issues is when he came to the defense of a University of Pennsylvania student accused of making racist remarks to a group of Black students. That student’s name was Eden Jacobowitz. Is Kors a dedicated conservative free speech activist? Or is he an ethnocentric Jew “looking out for his own”? Ultimately, when contrasted with Jewish wealth and support behind the ADL (unlike FIRE, an explicitly Jewish organization), it doesn’t really matter, because FIRE is utterly dwarfed by the Jewish behemoth and its unrelenting campaign to smother the freedoms of White Americans.
Shifting Sands
As stated above in relation to the so-called “default hypothesis,” Cofnas argues that, predominantly due to a higher than average IQ and a tendency toward urban living, Jews will naturally be over-represented in all intellectual movements and activities that are not overtly anti-Semitic. While Jews may be overrepresented in pro-immigration, pro-pluralism organizations and movements, the default hypothesis insists that they will also be overrepresented in nationalist, anti-immigration or restrictionist movements (that are not anti-Semitic) also. There is an inherent implication that these over-representations will be, more or less, to the same degree, and Cofnas, for the most part, refuses to discuss the matter in any serious way that might allow for, or explain, why any potential divergence in over-representation might occur. In his new piece for Philosophia, however, Cofnas inserts a minor qualification: “In recent history, Jewish involvement in politics has skewed left because a higher proportion of right-wing than left-wing movements were overtly anti-Semitic.” He also adds that his overall thesis
should not be misinterpreted as a claim that Jews are exactly the same as white gentiles, or that they’re just like high-IQ, urban white gentiles. All groups differ from each other in interesting ways, reflecting their evolutionary and cultural histories. But, in general, anything unusual about Jewish political behavior is mostly a predictable reaction to their historical circumstances.
From my discussion of Jewish involvement in refugee and migrant organizations, it should be clear that Jewish involvement in U.S. politics hasn’t merely “skewed” left, but has been overwhelmingly encamped in the left, at least since the late nineteenth century. That being said, there are clearly other questions arising even from this one sentence. What are the parameters of “recent history”? Since 1900? Since 1800? In what countries? Other questions quickly surface. Why is Jewish political involvement still “skewing” left even though we are constantly fed narratives of leftist anti-Semitism/anti-Zionism? Most important of all, the sentence marks a departure from Cofnas’s earlier statement that Jews would avoid specific movements due to anti-Semitism, and towards the implication that Jews are suspicious of right-wing movements in general over fears surrounding anti-Semitism on the Right — a concession that would all but render the “default hypothesis” redundant in any political or cultural context, and require several more layers of explanation. Any attempt to insist that Cofnas is still referring to the avoidance of specific movements would need to answer why Jews remain under-represented in non-anti-Semitic right wing movements like the NRA and the gun rights movement, as well as the pro-life movement and attempts to prevent same-sex marriage.
The tiny Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO) has a membership of just 7,000 with no paid staff and annual revenue of less than $130,000. Since members are not required to be Jewish, it would be reasonable to assume that the organization boasts fewer than 7,000 members in a Jewish population of 6 and 7 million. In other words, a Jewish crusade for gun freedom in America resonates with less than 0.1% of American Jews. The National Rifle Association has had only one Jewish President (Sandra Froman) since it was founded in 1871, and, as one commentator put it “the vast majority of American Jews and much of the organized Jewish community consistently support gun control measures. Hadassah, B’nai B’rith, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the American Jewish Committee and others have been essentially “blacklisted” by the National Rifle Association on its website.” There are apparently no Jews on the NRA Board of Directors. Interestingly, Froman, the NRA’s only Jewish President, could hardly be described as strongly identifying with Judaism or Jewishness. She told one interviewer that “her parents didn’t emphasize her Judaism. … She doesn’t remember the denomination of the synagogue near San Francisco where her family occasionally attended services and where she was married the first time. She speaks freely both of her respect for the Jewish spiritual tradition and of her lack of meaningful connection with it.”
By contrast, Jews are dominant in the fight to increase gun control. Jewish lawyers Robyn Thomas and Nina Vinik, executive director and senior counsel, respectively, of the Legal Community Against Violence, are quite prominent in lobbying for gun control legislation, and Thomas also acts as executive director for the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Within these groups there’s often a crossover between lobbying for gun legislation and lobbying for hate/speech legalization, as evidenced by Giffords Law Center’s Ari Freilich, a Jewish lawyer who acts as State Policy Director and as a specialist in “hate crimes.” The strongest supporter of gun control measures in Connecticut in recent years is Jewish Senator Richard Blumenthal. The biggest gun control group in Pennsylvania is CeaseFirePA. The board of CeaseFirePA is dominated by Jews (around 80-90%) and includes such figures as Nancy Gordon, a member of the Jewish Social Policy Action Group, and Shira Goodman, Che Saitta-Zelterman and Fred Kaplan-Mayer. In New York, Michael Bloomberg formed and financed Everytown, a new gun control organization, and pledged $50 million to the cause of making it harder for citizens to purchase arms and ammunition. The Huffington Post reports that in California Dianne Feinstein has “long been one of the Senate’s strongest advocates for gun control.” In Michigan, Jewish Senator Carl Levin has been at the forefront of gun control efforts, earning him an “F” score from Gun Owners of America.
Again, in line with his “argument by anecdote” approach, Cofnas would likely balance this with the 0.1% Jews in the JPFO (“Jews are leaders in the pro-gun movement too!”) and insist that Jews have merely “skewed” left. Since no evidence has been brought to light that the gun freedom movement has been historically anti-Semitic, the “default hypothesis” is entirely inadequate to explain the balance of Jewish representation inside and outside the gun rights movement. The only reasonable conclusion would be that Jews are overwhelmingly suspicious of this predominantly White right-wing movement with strong roots in small-town and rural America—if not openly and intensely hostile to it and its members, and are correspondingly to be found in much larger numbers in those movements that restrict the freedoms or otherwise harm the interests of the White demographic (e.g., gun control and hate speech laws), than those movements that seek to improve them.
Similarly stark disparities can be found in other contemporary right-wing political and cultural movements with no history of anti-Semitism. Studies from the Pew Research Center show that Jews overwhelmingly (83%) support abortion rights (compared with 57% of the general population). In fact, Jews support abortion at a higher rate than any other religious group in America. The National Council of Jewish Women, a 126-year-old organization that helped establish some of the first birth control and abortion clinics across the country, considers reproductive rights a cornerstone issue and has publicly condemned the strict abortion bans recently handed down in Alabama and Mississippi. Cecily Routman, the founder of the tiny Jewish Pro-Life Foundation, the only such group within the American Jewish community, has said that her position is essentially “counter-cultural” within Judaism and that, after being horrified by a radio show on the details of abortion, was prompted to examine the Jewish role in what was happening in America.
“I knew very little, she said, “but what I learned horrified me. And I realized in my heart that it was a ghastly business and I didn’t understand how Jewish people had gotten so involved in it.” Jews were not only outspoken in favor of the right to choose, she said, but were also “charitable donors for Planned Parenthood, and hosting fundraisers for Planned Parenthood. I did not understand that.”
In the area of same-sex marriage, Pew Research Center found that 77% of Jews were in favor/strongly in favor, while a further 5% were not opposed. Even accounting for the explicitly Christian nature of many, but not all, of the major bodies opposed to abortion and the marriage of gays, no Jewish leaders or board members could be found in their ranks.
The fact that Jews don’t just “skew” left on social, cultural, and political issues like this, and in fact overwhelmingly take up dominant positions within the left while being almost totally absent from meaningful positions on the right, has a direct relation to Cofnas’s argument that Jews have avoided right-wing movements because of historical anti-Semitism. As mentioned above, there is no historical anti-Semitism in the gun freedom, anti-abortion, and anti-gay marriage movements. What Cofnas in fact appeals to with such a claim is a kind of chicken-and-egg scenario in which anti-Semitism is always said to precede Jewish political attitudes and activity when actually, as in the case of the subversives Adler and Friedjung mentioned above, the opposite is the case. In this light, the most surprising thing about Jewish activity against gun freedom, and on behalf of abortion and gay marriage, isn’t the simple fact of Jewish overrepresentation, but that this overrepresentation hasn’t already led to an increase in anti-Semitism on the American Right.
Cofnas’s attribution to Jewish political “skewing” is also an example of a common approach in Jewish apologetics within historiography and scholarship more generally — a tactic I’ve described as the “cropped timeline explanation.” When faced with an uncomfortable and unavoidable fact involving negative Jewish behavior (Leftism, usury, financial crime, pornography, etc.) the reader of the apologetic is encouraged to begin with assumptions of anti-Jewish prejudice, and to work exclusively from there. Jews are on the Left? The only explanation offered is that they were excluded from the Right. In historiography, we are often subjected to a process of historical gerrymandering. This most often involves beginning and ending all explanations for anti-Jewish animosity with a timeline most befitting the idea of blameless Jewish victimhood and predatory Europeans. Problems begin to arise, however, when the question is asked why Jews were excluded or viewed as socially or culturally oppositional in the first place. Here, “irrational prejudice” is the last resort, but beyond it, when faced with further interrogation of that idea and the even deeper historical context, nothing is there. One is confronted with blank stares, rhetorical dead ends, and a factual wasteland. The essays of Nathan Cofnas offer nothing more than this, which sits extremely uneasily alongside his admission that groups differ in “interesting ways, reflecting their evolutionary and cultural histories.” By reducing all nuances in Jewish political activity to the aggression of non-Jews, Cofnas makes the remarkable argument that where Jews are seen to cluster in a “positive” manner it is simply because they have a IQ and high ability, but where they cluster “negatively,” it is purely due to exclusion or prejudice. In either case, the assumption seems to be that Jews ultimately have no individual political inclinations of their own. By advancing such an argument, Cofnas is firmly within a dubious, and quite shamelessly deceptive, Jewish scholarly tradition.
[1] “Hans Eysenck’s Controversial Career,” The Lancet, Vol. 376, August 7 2010, 407.
[2] S. Beller, The Habsburg Monarchy (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 177.
[3] S. Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 162. See also A.G. Whiteside, Austrian National Socialism before 1918 (Martinus Nijhof, 1962), 67; and also J.M. Fischer, Gustav Mahler (Yale University Press, 2011), 344.
[4] R.S. Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (Plunkett Lake Press, 2019).
It’s painfully obvious that Cofnas argues in bad faith. Jews are not “excluded” from the right wing due to prejudice.
Jews HATE the right wing and anything to do with conservative politics. The insane irrational hatred of Donald Trump
can be explained by the fact that Jews HATE any strategy that would unify white Christian people. In fact, Jews work feverishly
day and night to destroy any hint of white unity. My God….the jews can’t even leave Nascar or the Boy Scouts alone!
The Jews have targeted and ruined every white institution on earth, including the church, the university, and the government itself.
Jewish subversion is unlimited, outrageous, and toxic.
Well-said Barney, and so very true.
Excellent summation, Mr. Joyce.
Well said. It’s good to see others reading and commenting positively to this article, which I view as a toure deforce on many levels.
…I loved the line, “factual wasteland” brilliantly conveyed.
It is interesting that Cofnas is a race realist, who are constantly faced with the cliched fallacy of NAXALT (not all X are like that), which can’t null a group average, yet he is willing to do it on other issues (argument by anecdote).
NAXALT is the most irritating of retorts and when it is offered my initial response before clarifying on whatever NAXALT was uttered in response to is that NAXALT is a childish argumentative, which solves nothing and has no benefit to the overall body of rhetorical usefulness, whatsoever. If that’s your response to the issues at hand, I’d suggest you take up knitting… Etc…
NAXALT… I’m gonna use that 😭😭😭😭🕎🐖🕎🐖🕎🐖🕎🐖😭😭😭😭
Joyce writes that “There are apparently no Jews on the NRA Board of Directors” and gives a link to a list on Medium where one board member (Todd J Rathner) describes himself as a “Jewish redneck.” Furthermore, the Medium post doesn’t provide a complete list of board members (e.g., current Jewish board member Sandra Froman is missing). It’s not clear what the current statistic is, but, according to Forward Magazine, in 2005 Jews were 7 out of 76 members of the NRA’s Board of Directors, including the President (https://forward.com/news/2584/powerful-gun-lobby-takes-aim-with-first-jewish-lea/?gamp).
The Forward (16 years ago) doesn’t provide any names, and the current NRA website lists no Jews.
The last complete list of names available is dated 2013 from Mother Jones.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/nra-board-members-selleck-nugent/
I think the Forward’s over-estimation is based on their assumption that names like Cushman are Jewish when in fact it’s an old English name e.g. John Cushman III is not Jewish but of Old Anglo stock.
In this list (of around 60 board members), the only identifiable Jew aside from the weakly identified Sandra Froman is California’s Joel Friedman, who doesn’t appear to be involved in the organised Jewish community at all.
As for Rathner, I find no evidence other than the Forward that he used that description, nor does he ever appear to have engaged in Jewish communal life.
In terms of actual, self-identified Jews, their representation is either proportionate to their numbers in the population or less. I see no hard evidence of over-representation, and certainly nothing that remotely compared with their representation on the other side of the debate.
also to note that the Jewish Board member in the NRA Todd J Rathner has a strong Jewish identity and ethnic interest.
“I hope Israel levels all of Gaza. U people voted for the terrorist Hamas government.”
“Oh yeah bc Europe’s open borders so damn successful in preventing terror! #Paris #Brussels #AdviceFromIslam”
“My fellow Jews better wake up soon, the self hating Debbie Wasserman Schultz has allied herself with today’s Nazi’s.”
Rathner called then-MSNBC host Keith Olbermannn a “dirty Nazi”
“Good [that] #GiladSchalit is home…Better [that] #Israel should start assassinating the Arab dogs they were forced to release to get him home”
“Rathner retweeted a tweet from David French which stated, “The Iraq war was not a mistake. The Iraq retreat was a mistake. D-Day would have been a ‘mistake’ if we invaded then left before victory”
““Fellow Jews #Obama handcuffing #Israel US can’t insult Iran as they build the tool 2 hasten the return of the Caliphate”
http://nraontherecord.org/todd-rathner/
He has shared stories of armed Jewish groups defending themselves against BLM. I’m personally not sure how much his Jewish identity shapes his views on gun rights. I will freely admit he probably shares the same shared concerns that gentiles have on this issue but he does seem to be motivated by his Jewish Identity. Also, this doesn’t disprove the unequal Jewish involvement in gun rights vs gun control.
By any analysis Jews are vastly more overrepresented in the gun control movement than in organizations like the NRA. Besides the material reviewed here, see “Jews and Jewish organizations lead the gun control campaign,” and AJ’s “Jews and gun control: A reprise.”
The default hypothesis fails again.
The history of disarming the public in the UK since Hungerford is a cast of characters from Thatcher’s Old Estonians. Jews in the UK don’t mind possessing special licences for firearms while the English go without.
Oh dear… It explains a few things, doesn’t it? I’ve heard that the NRA has some serious issues IN RE their actual position on gun control. I have not investigated that but if they’ve been (((hijacked))), we really have no voice in gun ownership rights, whatsoever.
The best way to beat the opponent is to control the platform of the opponent. Controlled opposition… Just like the KKK (…assumed to be taken over or coopted during the early 1960s, as the deep state infiltrated and disrupted operations?), Muslim Brotherhood https://www.timesofisrael.com/conspiracy-has-muslim-brotherhood-jews-aligned/, Catholic Church.(fully decloaked). Etc etc etc
Got ‘im.
Mr Joyce is obviously a very talented historian, and he has done some excellent research. The acerbic and overly strident tone of this article weakens his position. I see no reason to believe that Mr Cofnas is writing in bad faith. His questions deserve a careful answer. In particular, the null hypothesis he proposes is crucial for clarifying the argument.
That Judaism like all religions/cultures is a group strategy is blatantly obvious. Does the undeniable over-representation of Jews among groups on the political left prove anything over and above that?
“That Judaism like all religions/cultures is a group strategy is blatantly obvious. Does the undeniable over-representation of Jews among groups on the political left prove anything over and above that?”
It dismantles one of Cofnas’ chief arguments against MacDonald’s thesis, the former being that Jews will be naturally over-represented in ALL non-anti-Semitic movements due to their higher average IQ. Indeed it is so obvious that Jews are over-represented on the political left that you have to wonder why Cofnas would ever assert that they are equally represented on the right, unless he is simply a liar arguing in bad faith.
OK, I get it: it’s about differential over-representation, not about over-representation per se. Jews are more over-represented in groups on the left than they are in groups on the right:-)
Even with this modification, I fear it is a losing proposition. And I write as somebody who believes that Professor MacDonald’s work is sound and important.
Besides, I still feel that the language used in some of the posts here (“bad faith”, “liar”) reflects badly on their authors and will undermine their credibility in the eyes on any impartial observer.
Should this be an echo-chamber for true believers or a place for intelligent analysis and enlightened discussion?
I think you’ll find that Jews, when confronted with proof of their malfeasance, will not engage in intelligent analysis or enlightened discussion, but will retreat into denial, pilpul, and ad hominem. An excellent example is the way Jewish scholars deal with the holocaust – they make no attempt to debate revisionists, preferring instead to shut down any and all dissent on the received history.
Dear Doctor Joyce,
As in Part 1, Part 2 of your essay is logical, meticulous and with respect for the subject matter and persons therein mentioned. Except, I must point out the error you make with regard to Rabbi Meir Craig Schiller, “Schiller was an almost comical inclusion given his lack of academic credentials and attachment to certain crackpot fringe ideologies.” I must correct you that Rabbis Schiller most certainly has academic credentials: he is a university professor of Biblical, Talmudic and Jewsih history. He has not attached himself to crackpot frnge groups, unless of course that is your opinion of Far Right Brtiish politcal organisations, and Tradtional and Orthodox Roman Apostolic Catholic personages and their respective groups. Comical isn’t his defense of Mister Ernst Zündel to the bitter end and his maintaning contact with Misses Ingrid Zündel-Rimland. Two other non-comical facts about him: observing as a non-religious Jew yet not of the politcal Left, the evolvement and development of authentic Roman Apostolic Catholic reaction to the nefarious and noxious Second Vatican Council, he analogously was influneced by this to become an Hassidic Jew. When asked if the filth written about Christ Our Lord and His Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary in The Babylonian Talmud was true as described by Misses Elizabeth Dilling in her fourth and final work, “The Plot Against Christianity”,his reply was, “Unfortuantely it is there; it is true, and I wish I had the rabbinical authority to remove those pages from it.” I see nothing negatively amusing about him.
Now, regarding Jews entering Right-Wing political entites that aren’t anti-Semitic, what is your opinion of the fact that percentually, although numerically a minority, it has been claimed there were more Italian Jews who adhered to Il Duce Benito Mussolini’s Fascism than those who were Roman Apostolic Catholic. If not more, a great number did. Let me clarify, in the begininng Fascism was considered very much a Left idea and movement, unitl forces placed on the Right, also joined forces with it officially. It then was, and is, neither Left nor Right. God Bless, Aristo Boho