Anti-Semitism

Jewish Troubles with Uppity Rappers

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“[Jews] have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes [their] agenda.”
Kanye West, 2022

“The Jews have a grip on America.”
Professor Griff, Public Enemy, 1989.

The narrator of the opening chapter of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is Benjy Compson, a 33-year-old man with an intellectual disability who is very much the embarrassment of his disintegrating family. Compson’s diminished mental capacity, and the ‘stream of consciousness’ manner in which his thoughts and perceptions are presented to the reader, make for an extremely challenging read. The result is that relatively few who embark upon the novel outside of a university setting will persevere and finish it. Those who do finish the novel, and better yet those who re-read it, are however rewarded with the understanding that behind the verbal ‘noise’ of Benjy’s apparent nonsense is an astute and unbiased insight into the motivations and behaviors of many of the novel’s other characters. In other words, despite his limitations, Benjy has some important things to say.

Ye’s Sound and Fury

Faulkner’s difficult novel came to mind during this month’s moral panic, and subsequent attempted financial annihilation, over comments made by Kanye West, now known simply as Ye, on the Jews. West’s comments certainly have a Benjy-esque quality to them, jumping from one observation to another without elaboration or logical progression. It’s probably best recounting them, more or less in the order of utterance:

  • Blacks are the 12 lost tribes of Israel, and therefore the real Jews.
  • It is impossible for West to be described as antisemitic because he is a Jew.
  • Jared Kushner only worked on a peace deal between Israel and Arab nations in order to make money.
  • Ye wished his children had learned about Hannukah instead of “a complicated Kwanzaa,” because Hannukah would at least “come with some financial engineering.”
  • “Jewish people have owned the Black voice. Either it’s through us wearing the Ralph Lauren shirt, or it’s all of us being signed to a record label, or having a Jewish manager, or being signed to a Jewish basketball team, or doing a movie on a Jewish platform like Disney.”
  • “Paparazzi taking a photo of you, you ain’t getting no money off of it. You’re used to getting screwed by the Jewish media. And I’m saying, you poked the bear too fucking long.”
  • “They blocked me out. The Jewish media blocked me out.”
  • “This ain’t a game. Imma use you as an example to show the Jewish people that told you to call me that no one can threaten or influence me. I told you this is war. Now gone get you some business.”
  • “I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE. The funny thing is I actually can’t be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also. You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda.”

While there is a lot of ‘noise’ and nonsense (Blacks as Jews) here, there are also some discernible and perfectly reasonable observations. Through his comments on Kushner and Hannukah, West suggests that Jews have a special relationship with money. Jews have, of course, been at great pains in the many volumes of apologetics and propaganda they have produced for over a century to deny any such relationship. Yet all historical and contemporary sociological data suggest that such a special relationship exists. The fact that Jews worry that widespread understanding of this relationship with money will result in a lowering of their reputation, and possible action to mitigate their success in obtaining and utilizing wealth, does not take away from the truthfulness inherent in the basic fact their privileged position in the West is long-standing, empirically observable, and obvious.

This obviousness is inferred in West’s observation that Jews occupy leading positions in many industries, including the fashion industry, the music industry, sports management and ownership, and the movie industry. West’s claim that “Jewish people have owned the Black voice,” would seem to me not only to refer to Jews profiting from managing Black musicians and seeking their works, but also more subtly to such phenomena as Jews historically taking leading roles in organizations like the NAACP. By far the most glaring comments made by West are those referring to the Jewish power to censor. West talks of “blocking out,” threats and influence against him, and the attempt to “black ball” anyone opposed to Jewish interests.

Whether or not West’s comments are helpful to those wishing for a rise in awareness of these precise issues is a matter for debate. Their presentation in such a ham-fisted and outrageous manner is far from ideal, but this downside may be offset by the fame of people like West (over 31 million followers on Twitter) and, ironically, the fact this kind of communication is relatively well-received and understood by the target audience, the Black population. That being said, few celebrities have come forward to support West. To my knowledge the only person of note is Black comedian Dave Chappelle, who once courted controversy himself for a Netflix special joke about “Space Jews” which jabbed at Jewish brutality against Palestinians. The jury is still out on the utility of West’s comments.

Lessons in Power and Censorship

For me, the biggest takeaway from the Ye outburst and its aftermath is the impressive demonstration of Jewish influence and power, exhibited in the form of censorship. In this regard, it’s important to point out that there have been prior cases of celebrities, and rappers in particular — see the case of Ice Cube, daring to mention the existence of Jewish dominance within the entertainment industry and subsequently being forced into grovelling apologies or, in more extreme cases, into exile. One example worth highlighting, purely because it has so many astonishing parallels with the Ye case, is that of Richard ‘Professor Griff’ Griffin, from the hip hop group Public Enemy, who uttered some controversial remarks in 1989.

 

In an interview with David Mills of the Washington Times in May 1989, Professor Griff responded to one question by telling Mills he believed “the Jews are wicked,” and that he could prove it. “They have a history of killing black men,” said Griff. “The Jews can come against me. They can send the IRS after me. They can send their faggot little hit men. I mean, that don’t move me. Listen, they have a history of doing this.” Griff supported his comments with references to Henry Ford’s “The International Jew,” and added that he’d obtained his knowledge of Jewish history from the Nation of Islam’s historical research department. Griff, like the other members of Public Enemy, belonged to the Nation of Islam. As the interview with Mills progressed, he further alleged that “The Jews have their hands right around (President) Bush’s throat. He won’t make the wrong move. You understand what I’m saying? The Jews have a grip on America.”

As with Ye’s comments, the emphasis here is on Jewish power and control, over the lives of Black people but more generally over the entire nation. Retribution was swift. Griff was labeled a “stone-cold racist” by Lyor Cohen of Rush Management, perhaps the most influential hip hop manager of the period (Cohen later moved to Warner, but is now YouTube’s Global Head of Music). Although Rush had been founded by Russell Simmons (a Black man whose other ventures involved a close partnership with Jew Rick Rubin), Cohen slowly assumed almost total leadership before handing control of the holding company for all Rush’s entertainment assets to fellow Jew Todd Moscowitz. Cohen’s other protégé within Rush was fellow Jew Julie Greenwald (Cohen was himself the protege of Jewish music moguls Jerry Moss and Herb Alpert). In fact, Cohen was part of a long history of powerful and often exploitative Jewish networking in Black music that has been “whitewashed” in every sense of the term. Take, for example, the following description of Cohen from a 2001 Rolling Stone article:

In these years, he has grown into perhaps the most powerful white executive in an African-American business. The history of rock & roll is, of course, riddled with pioneering white record men who built careers recording and, sometimes, exploiting black artists: Morris Levy, that burly, cigar-smoking product of the Brill Building, allegedly stealing writing credits from Frankie Lyman; Herman Lubinsky, the founder of Savoy Records in Newark, New Jersey, throwing around nickels as if they were manhole covers. But Cohen – Cohen is something different. [emphasis added]

Cohen, Levy, and Lubinsky — just your average “White” guys.

In the immediate aftermath of Professor Griff’s May 1989 comments, Lyor Cohen announced the full disbandment of Public Enemy. A few days later, however, Cohen decided to reinstate the band on condition that Griff be removed. It then fell to another “White” music mogul, Def Jam records publicist Bill Adler, to announce that Griff would be fired from Public Enemy.

Whose body language indicates dominance and submission? Jewish Def Jam Records publicist Bill Adler introduces Rapper Chuck D, left, of Public Enemy, as the latter prepares to bow to pressure and fire bandmate Professor Griff for making anti-Jewish remarks, June 21, 1989.

Not only did band member Chuck D make a grovelling apology on behalf of Professor Griff, but he also made what was presumably a much more acceptable call to arms (at least to his Jewish superiors) when he said that “the problem is the system of white world supremacy.”

In a 2020 interview, Griff explained he felt like he was “thrown under the bus” by Chuck D, and that Chuck D didn’t want him out of Public Enemy but that the heads of Def Jam, in league with “Jewish groups like the ADL,” put pressure on Chuck D to kick him out of the group. Chuck D was reported to have had an angry outburst after the public firing of Griff, and in Public Enemy’s first single after the episode, “Welcome to the Terrordome,” he exorcised his frustrations, drawing more criticism from the ADL, which deemed the lyrics antisemitic: 

Crucifixion ain’t no fiction
So-called chosen frozen
Apology made to whoever pleases
Still they got me like Jesus.

Bill Adler later said of Griff’s comments, “It wasn’t just a PR nightmare. It affected me personally because I’m Jewish and I didn’t like the idea that one of our groups was spouting these anti-Semitic comments. It was upsetting to me.” Adler explained that he called Griff in for a discussion but was dismayed that Griff appealed to “a book written by Henry Ford.” Rather than debunk Ford’s work, Adler began to describe the manner in which Ford had created two Detroit suburbs, one for White workers (Dearborn) and the other (Inkster) for Black workers. In other words, Adler tried to deflect Griff’s animosity away from the Jews, and towards Ford/segregation/Whites, even going so far as to tell Griff “[Ford] would have gladly upholstered his cars with your Black hide as well as my Jewish hide.” Griff replied, “Bill, I can’t help it. It’s in the book.”

Griff’s refusal to bow to Jewish pressure in 1989 led to career annihilation. Public Enemy later quietly attempted to reintroduce him into some form of participation in band activities, but were condemned by then ADL chief Abe Foxman who accused Public Enemy of a “repugnant charade characterized by cynicism and disdain for the public.” Public Enemy responded by releasing a track called “Swindler’s Lust” in 1999 and by forming “Confrontation Camp,” a short-lived spinoff project that put Griff in a starring role. But Griff never fully recovered.

In recent years he’s more or less taken to begging Jews to forgive him. According to an article in The Forward:

Ambassadors from Jewish organizations said in recent interviews that they simply do not think Griff has made the proper admission of guilt required for public forgiveness and re-entry into the world of mass culture. But in a series of conversations over the last several weeks, Griff told me that he is still seeking that cultural passport, and vindication for having his life “destroyed” by being labeled a Jew-hater. He said he would do whatever it takes — but that the Jewish world won’t let him. “I’ll go to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Black Power movement center, the Black Lives Matter, the White House, and I’ll apologize everywhere I need to apologize,” Griff told me. “They will never be fucking satisfied. … You can go fucking do back flips, apologize to until the fucking cows come home. You will always be antisemitic.”

 Jews Fear Black anti-Semitism

While Jews are obviously desirous and capable of snuffing out any and all criticism, they are particularly sensitive to influential examples from the Black population. In Separation and Its Discontents, Kevin MacDonald identifies the key themes of anti-Semitism as including an understanding that, speaking in general terms, Jews

  • represent a separate and clannish foreign group with their own set of interests;
  • are highly adept at resource competition and have a tendency towards economic domination;
  • tend to engage as cultural actors in order to shape non-Jewish culture to suit Jewish interests;
  • form a cohesive political entity that seeks politically dominant roles in non-Jewish societies;
  • possess negative personality traits, including the pursuance of a system of dual ethics in which non-Jews can be treated badly and exploited;
  • are disloyal to the host nation in all fundamental and meaningful ways

Among Black expressions of animosity toward Jews, the same themes can be observed, arising first from more modest economic conflicts and, as such, having something more in common with the complaints of the early modern European peasantries. Horace Mann Bond, in his own 1965 reflections on “Negro Attitudes Toward Jews,” comments on the fact Jews historically appeared in the African-American environment overwhelmingly as pawnbrokers, as monopolists of the liquor trade (“The Jews have a stranglehold on the liquor stores in this town”), as the primary sellers on credit of clothing and other essential items, and, perhaps most crucial of all, as the slumlord and property dealer (“Some Jews have bought up that urban re-development land and are putting up shoddy apartments they call “Nigger housing” on it”).[1]  In 2016, local news website Patch published a list of the 100 worst slumlords in Harlem, with the top ten including seven Jews (Mark Silber, Adam Stryker, Joel Goldstein, Marc Chemtob, Moshe Deutsch, Solomon Gottlieb, and Jason Green), a representation that has remained roughly constant every year, with Jews persistently claiming top ranking for building violations, rodent infestations, lack of maintenance, exploitative rent, mold, and other forms of building decay injurious to health. Indeed, this situation has at times resulted in considerable embarrassment to Jews.

Indeed, it is the sheer dominance and proximity of the Jews as primary exploiters of Blacks that has often caused a quite radical break in the Black imagination between perceiving wholesale “White oppression,” and the more nuanced understanding that Jews are a distinctive class unto themselves. Moreover, the reality of day-to-day interethnic exploitation leaves little room for abstract apologetic theories of anti-Semitism, since the problem is never that Jews arouse hostility merely on account of their religion or identity, but rather that Jews arouse hostility because of their behavior within certain ecological contexts (i.e., as a dominant clique within the rap scene). As Bond explains,

It is my considered view that Negro attitudes and actions towards Jews that are frequently interpreted as “antisemitic” actually lack the sinister thought-content they are sometimes advertised as holding. The occasional riots against small businessmen and landlords in Harlem — persons who may happen to be Jews — do not, in my opinion, actually possess the “classic” emotional load of aggression against a Jewish “race” or “religion,” that has been considered the essence of antisemitism.

One of the most prominent Jewish strategies when discussing Black anti-Semitism is the attempt to preserve both Jewish and Black senses of victimhood, and thus preserve the idea of an alliance against an allegedly oppressive White society. So it was hardly surprising for me to hear that Bill Adler’s first approach to Professor Griff involved a quite ludicrous attempt to turn him against the ‘racist’ Henry Ford.

*****

The very existence of a Black anti-Semitism is highly disruptive to established victim narratives which deny the privileged status of Jews as a wealthy and influential elite within Western society. While White anti-Semitism can still be portrayed (thanks to endless propaganda) as a top-down form of oppression directed against Jews, Black anti-Semitism flips the narrative since a received wisdom of modern culture is that Blacks are the most disadvantaged ethnic group in society. When Blacks “punch up” and the target is Jews, the only available solution to Jews is censorship. Blacks who grovel enough, and with enough sincerity (like Nick Cannon and Ice Cube) will be rehabilitated through Holocaust tours and such, and their apologies will be widely broadcast as a form of propaganda literature in its own right.

But those who don’t, like Professor Griff, will have their careers destroyed and they will vanish from the cultural spotlight. It may even be worse than that. In a remarkable incident covered by Tucker Carlson, Jewish trainer Harley Pasternak even threatened to have Kanye West drugged and institutionalised: “You go back to Zombieland forever.” The future of Kanye ‘Ye’ West is currently uncertain, but will undoubtedly be dictated by the extent to which he apologizes to his masters.

Lyor Cohen and Kanye West

[1] H.M. Bond “Negro Attitudes Towards Jews,” Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1, Papers and Proceedings of a Conference on Negro-Jewish Relations in the United States (Jan., 1965), 3-9, p.5.

How to become an Anti-Semite?

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Critical or laudatory writings about Jews seem to be an inexhaustible subject although it often turns into a repetitive rant. Over the last two thousand years tons of books and articles have been published either praising Jewish soul-improvers and their apostate apostles to the heavens, or describing their early Judaic brethren as the scum of the earth. Along with each historical surge in Jewish influence, there follows, as can be witnessed anew in the USA today, the inevitable upsurge in antisemitism – whatever this word means, or whomever this generic label with many meanings may apply to. Any objective account about Jews is a coincidentia oppositorum, or simply put, a conceptual tension resulting from the co-existence of two conditions which are opposite to each other, yet dependent on each other and presupposing each other. Objectively speaking every book and every remark in favor or against Jews depend on the self-avowed objectivity of a cited author. Carl Schmitt, a prominent German conservative legal scholar, now a household name for the Alt-Right and New Right in Europe and the US, shortly after the National-Socialist takeover, wrote in a chief German legal journal of that time:

The necessary task of bibliography is very difficult given that it is undoubtedly necessary that we determine as accurately as possible who is a Jew and who is not.[i]

However, the most important thing, coming to light these days, is the clear and definite understanding that Jewish opinions cannot be put on the same level in their intellectual content with the opinions of German or other non-Jewish authors. [ii]

In order to prevent any critical inquiry into the Jewish question, carried out by numerous German anthropologists, biologists, psychiatrists and legal scholars in Weimar Germany and later on in National-Socialist Germany (see here) many Jewish and many left-leaning authors, immediately after the end of WWII, began to inundate the educational and political markets with demonizing treaties not only about “ugly Nazis,” but also about the forever lurking White Gentile threat. One of the harshest critics of antisemitism, quite in line with the re-educational ukases of his coreligionists and coethnics of the newly reestablished Frankfurt School, wrote: “Judeophobia is a psychic aberration. As a psychic aberration it is hereditary, and as a disease transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable.” [iii]  The prime purpose of the newly launched academic field of psychoanalysis, which later gave birth to critical race theory, and later on to a bizarre “French Theory” curriculum, was to pathologize Whites into perpetual feelings of guilt. It spread in the 1950’s like a wild fire, particularly in American colleges. Soon, the entire social science curriculum in the West turned into courses of demonology with labels such as “antisemite” and “Nazi” becoming the symbols of Absolute Evil. It follows that is impossible to converse with Absolute Evil. With humans labeled as extraterrestrial monsters or subterranean demons, one cannot negotiate; legal provisions of human rights cannot apply to species declared as non-humans beforehand. They need to be destroyed. Such a Manichean view, based on criminalization of the adversary, soon became the foundation of US foreign policy with its latest offshoot now being observed in the US demonizing attitude toward its former WWII Russian ally. Soviet-Russian soldiers, after their liberation of Auschwitz in January 27, 1945, were crucial in cementing the post-WWII liberal and communist antifascist narrative; today, by contrast, their Russian offspring must be excluded from the protections of international law.

Many Jews are well aware that works critical of their behavior, and especially works published by German scholars prior and during WWII, were not all, and not always, products of aberrant minds. Some of those works contain unsettling truths about Jews.  Hence the reason that the first step initiated by the Allies in ravaged Europe, following WWII, was to destroy or make inaccessible thousands of books deemed to be dangerous to the establishment of the post-WWII world order.[iv] (see also here).

Early French communist and antifascist author Jean Paul Sartre, was among the first to provide the script for demonizing political adversaries, based more on his personal vendetta than on his true concern for French Jewry. As the German troops were preparing their retreat from France in the late summer of 1944, he drafted a short  book in which he commiserated with the French Jewry, comparing their plight to the hero in the Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial,  “who  knows that he is considered guilty; judgment is continually put off — for a week, two weeks… [v] .  Very likely Sartre rushed to publish this little Judeophile manifesto of his in order to better adjust himself to the spirt of the vindictive antifascist times in Europe, but also to distract his audience from the fact that in the early 1930’s he benefited from the scholarship in a nascent National-Socialist Germany. The pro-German Vichy government in France, from 1940–44, had never bothered him, leaving the performance of his dramas unscathed. This did not prevent Sartre, however, by the end of 1944, along with a bunch of his communist fellow travelers, and with the little help of American occupying powers, to launch a large-scale operation of intellectual inquisition against thousands of French anticommunist authors, artists and wrong-thinkers — the process to be known decades later in America under the name of cancel culture:

Of all professional categories, journalists and writers were hit the hardest. This underlines the ideological character of the conflict and the ensuing purges. The proportion of writers and journalists who were shot, imprisoned, and barred from their profession surpasses all other professional categories. Do we need to be reminded of the assassination of Albert Clément, Philippe Henriot, Robert Denoël, of the suicide of Drieu La Rochelle, of the death of Paul Allard in prison prior to court hearings and of the executions of Georges Suarez, Robert Brasillach, Jean Luchaire […] [or] the death sentence pronounced in absentia or a commuted prison sentence for Lucien Rebatet, Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, etc.?” [vi]

If one agrees for a minute that antisemitism is indeed a form of mental disorder necessitating the banishment of all antisemitic authors from the public domain, or having them dispatched to psychiatric wards, then one must just as well conclude that hundreds of books critical of Jews, from antiquity  to modernity, also need a similar treatment in retrospect:  from Tacitus to Treitschke, from Dickens to Dostoyevsky from Voltaire to Vacher de Lapouge. The alphabetical list of authors who have made critical remarks about Jews goes off to infinity.

The degree of antisemitism is difficult to gauge, only confirming time and again that this word has an extensive capacity for diverse meanings. There are latent antisemites who limit themselves to mild criticism of Israel in the hopes of avoiding public rebuke, and there are also those who use explicit and often gross words for the portrayal of Jews. There is a huge difference in antisemitic syntax between the well-mannered Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc and the folkish writer Louis Ferdinand Céline, who, other than writing his antisemitic pamphlets (still banned in France), is considered the best French novelist of the twentieth century.  Belloc, by contrast, prefers pussyfooting around the Jewish question, using convoluted sentences devoid of hyperbolic Jew-baiting words, always watching nervously not to cross the line, while putting it diplomatically:

It has unfortunately now become a habit for so many generations, that it has almost passed into an instinct throughout the Jewish body, to rely upon the weapon of secrecy. Secret societies, a language kept as far as possible secret, the use of false names in order to hide secret movements, secret relations between various parts of the Jewish body…[vii]

Céline, by contrast, seems to be focused in his lengthy unhinged antisemitic prose way too often on Jewish anal tracts and Jewish genitals.  In his peculiar lingo, often difficult to translate even into the crassest American slang, he notes:

The fucked up Masonic Republic, supposedly French is at the mercy of secret societies and Jewish Banks (Rothschild, Lazare, Barush etc…) it’s in agony. [viii]

Or even more:

The Kikes that rule the Universe, they understand them, those secrets of public opinion. Hidden in the corners, they have all of the wires in their hands. Propaganda, gold, advertising, radio, press, the cinema. From Hollywood the Jewess, to Moscow the Yid, same boutique, same telephone, same agencies, same Kikes manning the lookout, the cash drawer, the business affairs.[ix]

Rare are contemporary academics who would dare tackle critically, studiously, yet dispassionately,  the most explosive  taboo topic of our times: the Jewish question. For his groundbreaking work on Jews and their role in shaping academic and public discourse in the US Kevin MacDonald was bound to receive a kiss of death from his fellow American academics. The entire political communication after WWII  throughout the West has been based on fake Gentile Judeophile mimicry on the one hand, and hidden Gentile resentment of the Jews on the other. A French author writing under pseudonym notes:

From 1945 onwards, there is no longer any Jewish question, antisemitism  ceasing to be an opinion and becoming  a criminal offence instead; it’s rare to find those daring to defy this taboo. [x]

Modern German politicians are a case in point. Over the last several decades the have not even  pretended  to engage in a make-believe Judeophile mimicry; their veneration of Jews is hyperreal, if not surreal, with the existence of the state of Israeli serving as Germany’s stated raison d’état.  Every new German chancellor, when sworn in, forces himself/herself to embark on multiple pilgrimages to Tel Aviv where he or she states unambiguously, as the former Chancellor Angela Merkel did on several occasions, that  “ Israel’s right to exist is the Germany’s reason of state”.  [xi]

Jews as Gentile Doppelgangers 

Atonement rituals of US and European politicians vis-á-vis Jews can be compared to faked citizenship behavior in the former communist Eastern Europe where critical comments about the communist ruling class could only be made in private and behind bolted  doors. In a similar vein, the Jewish question today is critically discussed in America and Europe only in closely-knit circles of like-minded people. However much the so-called Western democracies like to brag on all frequencies about free speech and free academic inquiry, any critical comment about Jews must stay off limits.  With any tiny critical remark on Jews, if uttered in public, either deadly silence sets in, or all hell breaks loose in the media. Censorship in communist states was surely well described by some sharp American observers; self-censorship, by contrast, which reigns  supreme in academic and governmental  circles in America and the  EU, hasn’t as of today been critically  examined.

Surely, the System, along with its friendly scribes is overjoyed when observing the proliferation of diverse antisemitic sects and multiple “White Power” or “Hollywood Nazi” cults, or internet Jew-baiters. There are two reasons for that:  Firstly, self-declared Jew-haters are always welcome by the System given that they provide the System with necessary legal fodder further bolstering its worn-out mantra that “Western democracies extend free speech to all — even to their enemies.” And secondly, any hostile insult against Jews always comes in handy to the System’s thought police which can easily set up decoys and charge antisemitic suspects with having a master plan for a terrorist act against the Jews.

Another parallel is in order. Former communist apparatchiks in Eastern Europe used Marxist dialectics very adeptly. In the beginning of their bloody reign, dialectics was a tool to justify the physical destruction of their anticommunist critics. After the breakup of communism, they resorted to the same dialectics in order to rebrand themselves as Western liberals and exorcise themselves from accusations of having committed gigantic crimes in their recent communist past. Likewise, many Jewish scholars resort to similar dialectical invocations about “rising tide of anti-Semitism,” which serves them as a tool for further strengthening the national and racial  identity of millions of Jews and lining the coffers of Jewish organizations. One could raise a rhetorical question:  how long would Jewish identity thrive without generating its antithesis in the Absolute Evil incarnated nowadays in the so-called White Supremacist and his fellow traveler, the Antisemite?  If one assumes that all antisemites in America and Europe simply vanished into thin air, the System would likely resuscitate and reconstruct a new brand of antisemites out of the blue. Just like the System in the ex-communist Soviet Union and Eastern Europe drew its negative legitimacy by constantly reinventing the boogeyman of counterrevolutionary Fascism and Nazism, so do many Jewish agencies and pro-Jewish lobbies in the US, along with countless left-leaning social science professors, build their identity, or better yet shield their tenure, by nurturing their evil household darling Hitler and by evoking the danger of his postmodern sidekicks, the proverbial  “White Supremacist” and the “Neo-Nazi.”

In passing it must be stated over and over again that the pejorative word “Nazism”, although not legally banned in private communications, was never used officially in even one document in National-Socialist Germany. The term “Nazi” was first coined by early Spartacists, i.e.,  early German Moscow-steered Bolsheviks in Weimar Germany, later to be used massively in the  Soviet Union, before it comfortably settled during the 1950s in American academic and media vernacular.  Its derogatory equivalent would be “commie” for a communist, although not a single academic paper in the US or EU would accept a paper where a word “commie” is used as a synonym for a communist.  In addition, the compound noun  National-Socialism includes the noun ‘Socialism’, written with a capital S, a word which  had a very good reputation among all nationalists all over German-friendly countries in   Europe, prior and during WWII:  from Germany to Spain, from Croatia to Finland.[xii] Soviets and their  latter-day modern Western offspring, the  antifas, also like to adorn themselves with the word “socialism” yet cannot tolerate that the “Nazis” could also be socialists.  The two-syllable word “Nazi” sounds more demonic, hence more acceptable in the mainstream media.

In a similar vein, mainly due to the willful ignorance of the German language and German cultural history many modern self-proclaimed experts on National-Socialism refer to it as an “ideology.”  Again, not a single National-Socialist government document, not a single academic  paper in in Germany, from 1933-45 used the term Ideologie; the  official name being  Germany’s National-Socialist “Weltanschauung” (worldview). However, neither does the English word “worldview” reflect best the German word “Anschauung”, a word which has a nuanced philosophical meaning, carrying a notion of perception, imagination, figurative thinking, or pictorial apprehension. (see here)

One could also reverse the antisemitic Anschauung and pose another rhetorical question regarding the wishful thinking about the tentative disappearance of Jewish influence in the West. If Jews were suddenly to depart, as many White Christian antisemites secretly yearn – there would still remain countless of millions of US evangelicals, Christian-Zionists, millions of White  traditional Catholics in Europe, all hoping in chorus to become themselves verus Israel, i.e., more Jewish than the Jews and thus await their  turn for chosenness.  Hating or loving Jews and Judaism, yet quoting every Sunday their scripts and bowing down to their jealous god Yahweh, is surely a form — if not of the White paranoid mind, then at least a serious form of White Gentile split identity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Credo quia Absurdum (“I believe because it is absurd”)

Penile and anal analogies that many antisemites often resort to when describing the Jews were also trademarks of the chief Jewish psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud. His obsession with Oedipus complex projected on his would-be incestuous and parricide gentile clients reflected very likely his own concealed sexual disorders.  Nonetheless Freud deserves big credit when describing Christian antisemitism as a hidden “neurosis” in his best and last book   Moses and Monotheism.[xiii]

The hatred for Judaism is at bottom hatred for Christianity, and it is not surprising that in the German National-Socialist revolution this close connection of the two monotheistic religions finds such clear expression in the hostile treatment of both.

It is no accident that the intellectual and cultural foundations of Fascism and National-Socialism can be traced to central Europe and northern Italy known historically for their strong Catholic traditions yet retaining strong pagan undercurrents which the Vatican willy-nilly had to put up with over centuries, at least until the Second Vatican Council in 1962–65. Many German scholars in the footsteps of Friedrich Nietzsche and sympathetic to early National Socialism wrote hundreds of articles and books linking Judeo-Christianity to the rise of early Bolshevism.  “The Jewry, in its single-minded pursuit of the world domination through the Bolshevik deception of mankind, has had its strongest ally in the disruptive Biblical faith.”[xiv]

On the other hand it is also no accident that in WASP America Jews have had a  far better proliferating turf than  in Europe, while continuing to thrive with their overreaching zeal, especially in framing the modern American social-juridical narrative. As I wrote some time ago many Jewish scholars (J. Auerbach, M. Konvitz, J.L. Talmon) rightly acknowledged deep theological links between the American idea and Judaism. Many American traditional conservatives and White Nationalists may be correct in denouncing secular myths, such as Freudianism, Marxism and neo-liberalism, which they see as ideologies doctored up by  Jewish and pro-Jewish writers and politicians. They fail, however, to go a step further and examine the Judaic origins of Christianity and the proximity of these two monotheist religions. Or to put it into a more up to date verbiage: How can one dismiss the self-evident Holocaust story yet at the same time embrace the self-evident story of the Jew Jesus Christ or the immaculate conception of the Jewess Virgin Mary? [xv]

Putting all Jews in one basket is also a serious error given that some of them have shown strong antisemitic feelings themselves, such as the so-called “self-hating” Jews. These Jewish antisemites have simply grouped together Jewish apostates who have critically addressed  the Jewish monotheist mindset in all its religious or secular modalities. Arthur Trebitsch, Otto Weininger, Gilad Atzmon, let alone the modern Holocaust revisionist scholar, Gerard  Menuhin, are just some of the Jewish names that are wisely avoided in social science studies, both  in US and EU colleges today. Long ago a left-leaning French Jew Bernard Lazar, after publishing his classic, came under fire from both the left and the right for his criticism of his coethnicists:

The general causes of antisemitism have always resided in Israel itself, and not in those who antagonized it. This does not mean that justice was always on the side of Israel’s persecutors, or that they did not indulge in all the extremes born of hatred; it is merely asserted that the Jews were themselves, in part, at least, the cause of their own ills.[xvi]

It would be a waste of time trying to debate endlessly about the looks of Jesus Christ. Was his phenotype similar to that of Turco-Khazarian Bob Dylan, or to that of the Sephardic-Maghrebian  Enrico  Macias? Was he the son of God, or a son of a prostitute and her Gentile partner? The discussion about his heavenly or his racial origin will likely continue for another millennium. The true believer, however, always knows the right answer. Jesus certainly didn’t carry the facial features of a blond-haired Nordic superhero that we observe on crucifixes of all churches from Manila, Mexico or Munich, nor did he look like Jim Caviezel.  Moreover, his historicity has been hotly and violently debated for over two  thousand years by Christians and non-Christians alike. During the early Roman Empire his name was never mentioned anywhere in the works of Roman historians, except for the fact  that the Roman high society and the educated Romans, until the beginning of  second century AD considered Jews  (Iudeai)  and Christians (Chrestianos) as the one and the same sect. Therefore, the  expression “Judeo-Christian” is by no means an oxymoron or a deliberate verbal corruption of a single religious denomination.  Early evangelists were not Europeans; all early Christian scribes and missionaries were almost all of north African and Levantine origins, including Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustin, Origen. In his latest and thickest book, containing over one thousand pages and several thousand quotes from various often conflicting sources, Alain de Benoist writes:

In fact, Jesus never polemicized against Judaism, but rather within it. He never wanted to create a new religion, nor to establish a “Church”. At the most, he wanted to reform from within the Judean religion, this being his only objective.[xvii]

Neither has the Church, over the last decades, lagged behind in its Judeophile statements despite its own serious legacy of persecutions of Jews throughout  history. One cannot forever deny one’s own founding myths.

On November 17, 1980, in Mainz, Pope John Paul II spoke of “the people of God of the Old Covenant who have never been revoked by God.” In June 2006, Benedict XVI recalled in his turn the “inseparable relationship which binds Christianity to the Jewish religion as to its eternally living and valid matrix”.[xviii]

De Benoist writes further:

In other words, at its very beginning, Judeo-Christianity was not a form of Christianity, but rather a form of Judaism. This is the reason why, rather than speaking of Judeo-Christianity, it would be far better to speak of Christian Judaism.[xix]

But at some point, twin brothers must seek for a divorce and violent wars — which became much later a mutual trademark of all Christians beliefs during the early and late medieval period in Europe.  But first the Jewish founding father had to be removed.

The break-up between the “Jews” and the “Christians” was therefore part of a much longer process than previously thought, since it was only in the fourth century that the two systems definitively separated from each other. This was a decisive turning point, given that at this time, in 325 AD, the Council of Nicaea was held, and thereafter, in 380 AD, Christianity was declared by Theodosius the state religion. [xx]

However awful this may ring in the ears of many devout modern Christian anticommunists and many White Nationalists, Christ may qualify as an early paleo-Bolshevik of Antiquity  and his apostles dubbed as early crypto-commissars. Christians and communists, after the lengthy process of secularization throughout the period of the Enlightenment did, however, turn into mortal enemies in the first half of the twentieth century. This was to be expected as both the Communist and the Christian preachers had vied differently for the salvation of their sheep. Their underlying, allegedly pacifying dogma, has remained however the same despite the usage of different signifiers respectively: multiracialism, multiculturalism, ecumenism, i.e., communism and globalism. Next to modern-day Antifa rabble rousers and various Jewish agencies, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), along with the German  Bischofskonferenz (DBK)  is today the most vocal spokesman for non-White migrations to the West, known by now under the name of  the Great Replacement.

Notes:

[i] Carl Schmitt. „Die deutsche Rechtwissenschaft im Kampf gegen den jüdischen Geist“, Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung (München und Berlin: C.H Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlunog; vol.20/41, 1936), p.1194.

[ii] Ibid, p. 1196.

[iii] Rudolph M. Loewenstein, Christians and Jews; A Psychoanalytic Study (NY: International Universities Press, Inc., 1951), p. 15.

[iv] Liste der auszusondernden Literatur (Berlin: Zentralverlag, 1946).

[v]  Jean Paul Sartre,  Antisemite and Jew,  trans. Georg J. Becker (1948 NY: Schocken books, 1976). p.63

[vi] Dominique  Venner, Histoire de la Collaboration (Paris: Pygmalion, 200p),  p. 515-516.

[vii] Hilaire Belloc, The Jews (London: Constable & Company, Ltd, 1922), p. 100.

[viii] Louis Ferdinand Céline, School for Corpses, transl. Szandoer Kuragin (First published in French in 1938). https://schoolforcorpses.wordpress.com/

[ix] L.F. Céline, Trifles for a Massacre, by Translator Anonymous (AAARGH, Publishing House, Internet, 2006), p. 37.  (First  published  in French, 1937). https://aaargh.vho.org/fran/livres6/CELINEtrif.pdf

[x] Henry Boulade, “Petit inventaire de l’antisémitisme”, in Écrits de Paris, n° 656 (July 2003), pp. 29-37.

[xi] Thorsten Schmitz, „Das neue Israel“,  Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 17, 2010.

[xii] Nikica Mihaljević, Ustaški put u socijalizam : U teoriji i praksi NDH : Zbirka rasprava i članaka nikad objavljenih poslije 1945. (Zagreb: Nakladnik: Naklada Pavičić, 2016).

[xiii]  Sigmund Freud,  transl. by K. Jones,  Moses and Monotheism  (London: Published by the Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1939),  p.148.

[xiv]  Hans Hauptmann, Bolschewismus in der Bibel (A. Klein Verlag, Archiv Edition 1937), p.117-118.

[xv] T. Sunic, preface by K.MacDonald, Homo americanus; Child of the Postmodern Age (London; Arktos media, 2018), p. 120 and passim.

[xvi] Bernard Lazare,  Antisemitism, Its History and Causes  (New York; The International Library Publishing Co., 1903) p. 8.

[xvii] Alain de Benoist,  L’Homme qui n’avait pas de père (Paris: Krisis, 2021), p. 44.

[xviii] Ibid., p. 55.

[xix] Ibid., p.  873.

[xx] Ibid., p. 933.

 

Whoopie! Jews are not White

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If Whites hope to ever win the demographic war which is being waged upon us, then we need long memories—and it makes no difference if what we remember is great or small.

Earlier this week, The View co-host and former-comedienne Whoopi Goldberg did one of those small things when she inadvertently insulted a great many Jews. She stated that the Jewish Holocaust was “not about race” and later doubled down on that. She didn’t say the Jewish Holocaust was a good thing, nor did she downplay it, revise it, or deny it. She simply removed race from the equation because she felt that Germans and Jews “are two groups of white people.” Presumably, she would have the same opinion of Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul or the English Civil War. It’s just whitey killing whitey, so where does race come into it?

Instantly, however, Jews from both ends of the political spectrum (and some nastier than others) showed Whoopi exactly where race comes into it: That would be everywhere. But, of course! And Whoopi Goldberg, mainstream media talking head that she is, should have known that.

Let’s start with that doyen of diaspora, Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, who came onto The View  to scold Whoopi for her transgressions:

Well, Whoopi, there’s no question that the Holocaust was about race. That’s how the Nazis saw it as they perpetrated the systematic annihilation of the Jewish people across continents, across countries with deliberate and ruthless cruelty.

On Twitter, an organization called Stop Antisemitism j’accused:

Newsflash @WhoopiGoldberg 6 million of us were gassed, starved, and massacred because we were deemed an inferior race by the Nazis. How dare you minimize our trauma and suffering!

In an article called “Whoopi Goldberg’s Holocaust Comments Were Wrong – and I’m Glad She Said Them,” Nora Berman of the ever-useful Forward had this to say:

I am generally a fan of Whoopi. I enjoy her biting wit, and I truly don’t think she’s an anti-Semite. Yet if popular members of the mainstream media continue to affirm the false claim that all Jews are white and the Holocaust was an expression of “white on white violence,” then the broader lessons on how humans should treat each other that Goldberg was seemingly trying to articulate will be lost.

Then we have the motor-mouthed, Israel-first conservative Ben Shapiro:

Whoopi Goldberg explaining that the Holocaust wasn’t about race because these were ‘two groups of white  people’ isn’t just insipid, it’s insidious. It’s downplaying the minority status of Jews in order to uphold bullshit intersectional arguments that justify anti-Semitism today. The intersectional argument is that Jews are white people, and that Jews are disproportionately privileged thanks to ‘white supremacy.’

Even further on the Right, we have Daniel Greenfield of Front Page Magazine, who responded with an article entitled “Whoopi Goldberg’s Dumb, Antisemitic Holocaust Comments Will Come With No Consequences” (Not true; she did get suspended):

On The View and on Colbert, Whoopi “Rape, Rape” Goldberg once again showed that she’s an idiot and that the current racialist view of identity politics has holes you can drive a truck through.

And here’s Ace of Spades co-blogger J.J. Sefton, who is about as right-wing as you can get for a mainstream Jew. He has little of substance to add other than to use the L’Affaire Whoopi as an excuse spew ad hominems and rant incoherently about Democrats, as he is wont to do.

The truth of the matter is, there’s very little difference in the mindset of the thugs that murdered Yankel Rosenbaum in the 1991 Crown Heights Pogrom than in the fiend who egged them on, Al Sharpton. Nor Whoopi Rape-Rape. And it’s all because Anti-American Left crave power by any and every means necessary, including the age old strategy of divide and conquer. Whoopi is an unreconstructed pig ignorant stooge just as much as the homies who play the knockout game.

So, we should be a seeing a pattern here. Regardless of a Chosen One’s politics, being called “white” in the context of the Jewish Holocaust is deeply offensive. This is pretty much the alpha and omega of the Jewish grievance industry. In other words, when a Jewish writer, pundit, politician, activist—what have you—talks publicly about the Jewish Holocaust, you can count on it that it will be as a Jew first and foremost. It won’t be as a White person, or as an American, or a Democrat, or a Los Angeles Lakers fan. This is where the truth comes out, and it comes out urgently. This is why almost all public Jewish responses to Whoopi’s statements fall close to the Y-axis on the Grand Logarithmic Scale of Jewish Indignance.

Here is my slightly-less-than-scientific (read: fake) regression scatter plot analysis of the phenomenon:

Note that the Right-to-Left correlation on this graph is somewhere around 0.00.

In fact, I did an internet search on “Whoopi was right” and got all of one hit. A not-entirely-terrible substack article from someone named MJ Rosenberg. His basic claim is that while Jews are White and have never considered themselves a race, we still need to fight racism, anti-Semitism, etc. (Sigh.)

Where’s Norman Finkelstein when you need him?

Anyway, for what’s worth, I’m with the Jews on this one. As I have stated before, Jews are not White people. If they were, they would have just shrugged their shoulders after Whoopi’s comment and forgotten all about it. Millions were killed in the Thirty Years War too, and you don’t see the French and Germans today taking offense over a claim that the slaughter wasn’t about race. That’s because it wasn’t.

But here is where our long memories need to kick in. From now on, whenever Jews try to attain some kind of advantage by claiming that they’re White, we need to remind them of the Jew-first standard they set for themselves during Whoopi’s little dreadlock drama. The violation of such standards is what led to the “My Fellow White People” trope on the Right, which catches Jews claiming they’re White when it suits them, and then later claiming they’re Jewish when it suits them. Here it is explained pretty well in The Forward (without bothering to refute it). This Stormfront thread gives a pretty good rundown as well. Jews don’t want to be considered white? Fine. And that’s how it’s going to stay.

An instructive inverse of this scandal occurred back in 2016 when hard rock icon Ted Nugent re-tweeted a meme showing how some of the most powerful gun control advocates are really Jewish. (Yes, it is true.) Unlike Whoopi Goldberg, however, the meme reveals Jews rather than obscures them. But because the meme painted Jews as victimizers, they must not be seen as Jewish but as White. In Whoopi’s case, however, Jews are seen as victims. Therefore, they must remain as Jews.

This is perfectly self-serving and hypocritical. And if you call such people out for it, they shriek “Anti-Semitism!” and try to ruin you. If not for the manifest power Jews wield today, there’d be no reason for Whites to take these people seriously at all—except, of course, as a threat. Case in point, the Trump-hating Jew Max Boot, someone I have written about before:

Max Boot is a disingenuous, ethnocentric Jew who hates white people—especially the ones that are as ethnocentric as he is. He’s then pretends to be white in order to convince other whites that they should allow themselves to become minorities in their own countries—to atone for the sins of a tiny fraction of their ancestors or to strive nobly for equality and social justice and other leftist illusions. He has no sympathy when whites complain about discrimination and ascribes this to “fear they are losing their privileged position to people of color” rather than any legitimate concerns for their group interests.

The article he wrote that prompted my response was entitled “Get a Grip, White People. We’re not Victims.” from 2019. In it, he complains about how Trump capitalizes on “white rage,” tells of an abusive White customer at a South African restaurant, frets over how 55% of Whites see anti-White discrimination as a problem, sheds a few crocodile tears over the plight of Blacks in America, and then links all of this to the 2019 El Paso shooting. This is how he ends it:

White people can be pretty clueless. (I know, I’m one myself.) Get a grip, folks. We’re not the victims here. Thinking that we are us is not just wrong. It’s dangerous. It’s a mind-set that can justify everything from a public temper tantrum to a shooting spree.

As if White people don’t have a right not to be discriminated against. As if we don’t have a right to remain the majority in nations we founded and in lands that have been ours since antiquity.

Anti-White Jews like Max Boot are the reason why we have the “My Fellow White People” trope to begin with. This is not anti-Semitism. This is truth. So, get a grip, Jews. With the Whoopi Goldberg affair, you showed your true colors. And we’re going to hold you to it.

On the True Meaning of Hate Speech

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“A law against Jew-hatred is usually the beginning of the end for the Jews.”
—Joseph Goebbels, diary (April 19, 1943)[1]

‘Hate’ is such an ugly word.  And such a juvenile word.  It calls to mind the stereotypical eight-year-old girl who screams “I hate you!” to her mother when she is not allowed to join the local sleep-over.  The word is most often used half-jokingly—“I hate the Yankees!”, “I hate broccoli!”, etc.—or to describe some detested task (“I hate cleaning the bathroom”).  Or it can be used for rhetorical effect.  But the use of the term in the context of ‘hate speech’ is silly, juvenile, and formally meaningless.  We may dislike someone or some group, or be repulsed by them, or wish to dissociate from them.  But to hate them?  Seriously—what mature individual today is willing to openly and earnestly say “I hate you” to anyone?  Only a highly insecure or severely distressed person would do such a thing.  It’s a sign of weakness.

And yet today, hate seems to be the ethos of the moment.  More specifically, we seem to be surrounded by talk of ‘hate speech’ in the mass media.  To judge by various headlines and liberal pundits, hate speech would appear to be among the greatest dangers of modern existence—on par with racism and “White supremacy,” and greater than political corruption, international terrorism, global pandemics, financial instability, environmental decline, overpopulation, or uncontrollable industrial technology.  Most European countries have legal prohibitions against various forms of hate speech, however ill-defined, as do Canada and Australia.  Even in the US there is increasing pressure to create legal sanction for some such concept, the First Amendment notwithstanding.

I take this whole topic very personally.  It’s no secret that I’ve written harshly against Jews and other minorities.  It’s no secret that I prefer living in a White community and a White nation.  I have no need to apologize for any of this.  And yet, for these very reasons, some people find it appropriate to call me a ‘hater’:  “Dalton hates the Jews”; “he hates Blacks,” “he hates Latinos,” etc., etc.  But I state here, for the record, that nothing is further from the truth.  I hate no one.  I may dislike certain people, I may find them malevolent and malicious, I may want them punished, and I may want to separate myself from them; but this does not mean that I hate them.  In this era of “hate crimes” and “hate speech laws,” this requires some explanation.

As usual, we should start by knowing what we are talking about.  What, exactly, is it to ‘hate’?  The word has ancient origins, deriving from the Indo-European kədes and Greek kedos.  Originally, and surprisingly, it meant simply ‘strong feelings’ in a neutral sense, rather than something negative.  In fact, the Old Irish word caiss includes both love and hate.  But the negative connotation emerged with the Germanic khatis (later, hass), the Dutch haat, and eventually became ingrained in the English ‘hate.’

The standard dictionary definition typically runs something like this:  “intense or extreme dislike, aversion, or hostility” toward someone or something.  As such, the word is fairly innocuous; I can hate my job, hate asparagus, and even hate my boss.  But this is not at issue.  We are more concerned about hate as a mindset, and specifically as oriented toward classes of people, or increasingly, toward certain privileged ideologies.

But we immediately confront a major problem here:  Hate is a feeling, and feelings are indelibly subjective.  And anything that is completely subjective cannot be quantified in objective terms.  No one can say with certainty that “Dalton hates X.”  Only I can say, “I hate X,” precisely because it is my own feeling.  If there is one thing that I insist upon, it is complete sovereignty over my own feelings.  No one else will ever dictate how I feel about anything.

And even if I say “I hate X,” how does anyone else know that I really feel the hatred?  They don’t.  Maybe I’m being sarcastic.  Maybe I’m joking.  Maybe I’m just trying to cause a stir.  No one will ever know my actual feelings except me—precisely because they are my own.  No one will ever know if I am expressing “real” hatred, or just pretending.  (Does that even matter?)

The point here is that hatred, because it vanishes into a subjective void that is utterly inaccessible to others, can never be quantified or objectified, and thus can never be the basis for legal enforcement—at least, not in any rational sense.  Therefore, the corresponding concept of ‘hate speech,’ viewed as the expression of hatred, likewise melts into thin air.  It is, technically, an incoherent concept when put forth as a basis for law.  This fact, of course, does not stop corrupt lawmakers around the globe from trying to enforce it, though for very different reasons, as I will explain.

So, let’s take a look at how some attempt to define the indefinable.  Here is one interesting definition from the Cambridge Dictionary:  hate speech is

public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence toward a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation (= the fact of being gay, etc.)

This is a hugely problematic definition, on several grounds.  First, how public is ‘public’?  If I tell my neighbor, is that public?  If I publish something in a private chat room, is that public?  What if I mumble something aloud to a friend while in a shopping mall?  Am I responsible if a private email to a colleague gets reposted online?  And so on.

Second:  it involves the “expression of hate,” or “encouragement of violence.”  These are two vastly different things.  ‘Expression of hate’ is, as I said, functionally meaningless.  What, exactly, does it take for something to qualify as an “expression of hate”?  Presumably if I say “I hate X,” that counts.  But what else?  Does “I really, really, really dislike X” count?  Does “I’d like to see X die” count?  What about “I’d like to see X get very ill”?  Does “X is a total scumbag” count?  We can see the problems.  Incitement to violence is somewhat less ambiguous, but still problematic.  Who, for example, is to judge ‘encouragement’?  This is another highly subjective term.  And how much violence is necessary to qualify?  Is a good shove violent?  A pie in the face?  Tripping someone?  Is ‘emotional distress’ violence?  What about financial loss?

Third, we notice that it’s not violence per se, but rather violence “based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation.”  This is very odd.  What does the phrase “something such as” mean here?  The qualifiers mentioned are usually assumed to be intrinsic to the person or group (race, gender)—except that religion, and even sexual orientation, can be changed at the drop of a hat.  Therefore, the qualities need not be intrinsic.  So what, exactly, is this mysterious criteria, this “something such as,” that is so crucial for the whole concept?

The point here is that the whole notion of ‘hate speech,’ like hate itself, dissolves into a subjective void.  In objective terms, it is virtually meaningless.  How, then, can be it be subject to the force of law?

The UN Takes a Shot

As if they don’t have enough on their plate already, the United Nations is now highly distressed by the spread of hate speech around the world.  Recently, in May 2019, they issued a short statement called “Strategy and plan of action on hate speech.”  It included this observation:

There is no international legal definition of hate speech, and the characterization of what is ‘hateful’ is controversial and disputed.  In the context of this document, the term ‘hate speech’ is understood as any kind of communication in speech, writing or behaviour, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are—in other words, based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, colour, descent, gender or other identity factor.  This is often rooted in, and generates, intolerance and hatred and, in certain contexts, can be demeaning and divisive.

The key phrases here:  “controversial and disputed” (obviously), “any kind of communication” (very broad), “pejorative or discriminatory language” (highly subjective and undefined), and “on the basis of who they are” (mostly intrinsic factors, except for nationality and religion, and possibly “other identity factors”).  And then we read the subsequent explanatory paragraph:

Rather than prohibiting hate speech as such, international law prohibits the incitement to discrimination, hostility and violence (referred to here as ‘incitement’).  Incitement is a very dangerous form of speech, because it explicitly and deliberately aims at triggering discrimination, hostility and violence, which may also lead to or include terrorism or atrocity crimes.  Hate speech that does not reach the threshold of incitement is not something that international law requires States to prohibit.

So, hate speech per se is not to be prohibited, but rather only a special kind of hate speech—“inciteful (to violence) hate speech.”  In other words, only the worst of the worst, apparently.  Clarification and elaboration would soon follow.

Also, the Foreword to the statement reveals something of the deeper motives at work here.  We find, in the opening paragraph, references to “anti-Semitism,” “neo-Nazis,” and the dreaded “White supremacy.”  Strange how we inevitably find such terms in any discussion of hate speech; more on this below.

Evidently dissatisfied with this short statement, the UN issued a 52-page “detailed guidance” report, under the same name, in September 2020.  Here they establish three levels of hate speech:  1) the worst kind: “direct and public incitement to violence” (including to genocide), 2) a grey zone of hate speech to be prohibited based on “legitimate aims” and only as “necessary and proportionate”, and 3) an unrestricted and lawful form that may still be “offensive, shocking, or disturbing.”  Level One (“Incitement”) hate speech in turn is based on, and determined by, six conditions:

  • 1) social and political context
  • 2) status of the speaker (!)
  • 3) intention of the speaker (!)
  • 4) form and content of the speech
  • 5) extent of dissemination
  • 6) likelihood of harm

Level One Hate must satisfy all six criteria, meaning (presumably): a sensitive time or social context, an influential or important speaker, bad intent, provocative style, widely disseminated, and with reasonable probability of harm.  Again, all six are required, for Level One status.  Levels Two and Three may meet some, or none, of these.  The six criteria are elaborated on pages 17 and 18 of the report.

Later in the document we find an interesting admission:  “The terms ‘hatred’ and ‘hostility’ should be understood to refer to intense and irrational emotions of opprobrium, enmity, and detestation towards the target group” (p. 13).  This is actually quite a relief; any opposition to Jews or other minorities, if rational and non-emotional (e.g., fact-based) cannot count as hate speech!  Therefore, writings by scholars, academics, or other serious researchers, who build a case based on facts, history, and plausible inference, are under no circumstances engaging in hate speech.  This is a huge loophole that somehow slipped past the ideological censors, one which we should be able to use to our advantage.

We (some of us, at least) get further relief on the following page, where we read that Level Three (allowable) Hate includes not only “expression that is offensive, shocking, or disturbing” but also covers “denial of historical events, including crimes of genocide or crimes against humanity.”  As the UN sees it, so-called Holocaust denial is permissible, or at least non-punishable, hate speech.[2]  And in Figure 4 they go further still, stating that Level Three hate “must be PROTECTED” as a form of free expression.  This is a remarkable concession.  Ah, but there’s a catch:  “unless such forms of expression also constitute incitement to hostility, discrimination, or violence under article 20 (2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.”  This document, written in 1966 and made effective in 1976, includes these words under article 20:  “Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.”  So it would seem that, for example, Holocaust “denial” (whatever that means) is not prohibited as long as it avoids any connection to “incitement” of any kind.  Presumably discussing it as a historical subject is fine; just don’t implicate anyone today who promotes, exploits, or profits from the conventional Holocaust story.

“It’s always about the Jews!”

So, let’s get down to the rub.  I have a tentative hypothesis that I am willing to put forward:  Hate speech is by, for, and about Jews.  (Oops—is that hate speech?)  That is, that hate speech laws have been invented and promoted by Jews, primarily for their benefit.  I further hold that Jews are the master-class haters in world history, and that they understand the power of hatred better than any other people.  They have furthermore learned how to project their hatred onto others in service of their own ends, including by trickery and deception.  Let me marshal whatever evidence I can, mostly implicit, to build a case for this hypothesis.

Start with a little history of Jews and hatred.  Perhaps the first explicit connection came way back in 300 BC, in a short writing by Hecateus of Abdera titled “On the Jews.”  Only two fragments remain, one of which is relevant:  As a result of the Exodus, “Moses introduced a way of life which was, to a certain extent, misanthropic (apanthropon) and hostile to foreigners”.[3]  It is striking that, even at that early date, the Jews had a reputation for misanthropy—a hatred of humanity.  The same theme recurs in 134 BC, when King Antiochus VII was advised “to destroy the Jews, for they alone among all peoples refused all relations with other races, and saw everyone as their enemy.”  The king’s counselor cited “the Jews’ hatred of all mankind, sanctioned by their very laws.”[4]  Not only was their hatred notable, so too was the fact that it was “they alone, among all peoples”; the Jews were exceptional haters, it seems.

It is worth further expanding on the idea that Jewish hatred is “sanctioned by their very laws”—by which they mean, the Old Testament.  We know, of course, that the Jews viewed themselves as “chosen” by the creator of the universe:  “For you are a people holy to the Lord your God.  The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth” (Deut 7:6).  Clearly, then, everyone else is second-best.  We also know that God supposedly gave the Jews a kind of dominion over the other nations of the Earth.  The Book of Exodus states, “we [Jews] are distinct…from all other people that are upon the face of the earth” (33:16).  Similarly, the Hebrew tribe is “a people dwelling alone, and not reckoning itself among the nations” (Num 23:9).  In Deuteronomy (15:6), Moses tells the Jews “you shall rule over many nations”; “they shall be afraid of you” (28:10).  There is Genesis:  “Let peoples serve you, and nations bow down to you” (27:29); or Deuteronomy, where God promises Jews “houses full of all good things, which [they] did not fill, and cisterns hewn out, which [they] did not hew, and vineyards and olive trees, which [they] did not plant” (6:11).  And outside the Pentateuch, we can read in Isaiah:  “Foreigners shall build up your walls, and their kings shall minister to you…that men may bring you the wealth of the nations” (60:10–11); or again, “aliens shall stand and feed your flocks, foreigners shall be your plowmen and vinedressers…you shall eat the wealth of the nations” (61:5–6).  What is this but explicit misanthropy, sanctioned by God, and sustained “by their very laws”?

Around 50 BC, Diodorus Siculus wrote Historical Library where, in the course of discussing the Exodus, he observes that “the nation of Jews had made their hatred of mankind into a tradition” (34,1).  A few decades later, Lysimachus remarked that the Hebrew tribe was instructed by Moses “to show good will to no man” and to offer only “the worse advice” to others.  And in the early years of the Christian era, the writer Apion commented on the Jewish tendency “to show no goodwill to a single alien, above all to Greeks.”[5]  Again, repeated observations of Jewish hatred toward Gentile humanity.

The most insightful ancient critique, though, comes from Roman historian Tacitus.  His works Histories (100 AD) and Annals (115 AD) both record highly damning observations on the Hebrew tribe.  In the former, the Jews are described as “a race of men hateful to the gods” (genus hominum invisium deis, V.3).  Somewhat later, he remarks that “the Jews are extremely loyal toward one another, and always ready to show compassion, but toward every other people they feel only hate and enmity” (hostile odium, V.5).  But his most famous line comes from his later work, Annals.  There he examines the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD, and Nero’s reaction to it.  Nero, says Tacitus, pinned the blame in part on the Christians and Jews—“a class of men loathed for their vices.”  The Jews “were convicted, not so much on the count of arson as for hatred of the human race” (odio humani generis, XV.44).  Clearly this was the decisive factor, certainly in Tacitus’ eyes and perhaps in all of Rome:  that the Jewish odio humani generis, hatred of humanity, was a sufficient crime to banish and even slay them.

I could go on, but the message is clear:  The ancient world viewed the Jews as exceptional haters.  I could also cite, for example, Philostratus circa 230 AD (“The Jews have long been in revolt not only against the Romans, but against all humanity”) or Porphyry circa 280 AD (The Jews are “the impious enemies of all nations”)—but the point is made.

Importantly, this impression carried on for centuries in Europe, into the Renaissance, the Reformation, and even through to the present day.  Martin Luther’s monumental work On the Jews and Their Lies (1543) includes this passage:  “Now you can see what fine children of Abraham the Jews really are, how well they take after their father [the Devil], yes, what a fine people of God they are.  They boast before God of their physical birth and of the noble blood inherited from their fathers, despising all other people.”[6]  Two centuries later, circa 1745, Jean-Baptiste de Mirabaud wrote that “The Jews…were hated because they were known to hate other men.”[7]  And then we have Voltaire’s entry on “Jews” in his famous Philosophical Dictionary, which reads as follows:

It is certain that the Jewish nation is the most singular that the world has ever seen, and…in a political view, the most contemptible of all. …  It is commonly said that the abhorrence in which the Jews held other nations proceeded from their horror of idolatry; but it is much more likely that the manner in which they, at the first, exterminated some of the tribes of Canaan, and the hatred which the neighboring nations conceived for them, were the cause of this invincible aversion.  As they knew no nations but their neighbors, they thought that, in abhorring them, they detested the whole earth, and thus accustomed themselves to be the enemies of all men. …  In short, we find in them only an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched.[8]

British historian Edward Gibbon stated the following in his classic work of 1788, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

The Jews…emerged from obscurity…and multiplied to a surprising degree. …  The sullen obstinacy with which they maintained their peculiar rites and unsocial manners seemed to mark them out a distinct species of men, who boldly professed, or who faintly disguised, their implacable hatred to the rest of human-kind.[9]

A similar observation came from the pen of German philosopher Johann Fichte in 1793:

Throughout almost all the countries of Europe, a mighty hostile state is spreading that is at perpetual war with all other states, and in many of them imposes fearful burdens on the citizens: it is the Jews.  I don’t think, as I hope to show subsequently, that this state is fearful—not because it forms a separate and solidly united state, but because this state is founded on the hatred of the whole human race…[10]

Who, then, are the master haters in all of history?

Particularly striking are the words of Nietzsche.  A long series of negative comments on the Jews began in 1881 with his book Daybreak, where he observes in passing (sec. 377) that “The command ‘love your enemies’ had to be invented by the Jews, the best haters there have ever been.”  So it would seem that the Jews are truly best at something after all: hatred.  Then in The Gay Science (1882), Nietzsche sarcastically notes that the Jews are indeed ‘chosen’ people, precisely because “they had a more profound contempt for the human being in themselves than any other people” (sec. 136).

But the most stunning discourse appears in Nietzsche’s work of 1887, On the Genealogy of Morals, where he offers a detailed analysis of hatred from the Judeo-Christian perspective.  In short, Jewish hatred is manifested most visibly in their rabbis, religious men, and their priests.  Sanctioned by God, priestly hate is the deepest and most profound; it is the hatred of those without tangible power.  Jewish hatred then metastasized in Christianity, taking form as its nominal opposite, namely, love.  The First Essay is a masterpiece of literature and philosophy; I quote it at length:

As is well known, priests are the most evil of enemies—but why?  Because they are the most powerless.  From their powerlessness, their hate grows among them into something huge and terrifying, to the most spiritual and most poisonous manifestations.  The really great haters in world history and the most spiritual haters have always been priests—in comparison with the spirit of priestly revenge, all the remaining spirits are generally hardly worth considering.

Let us quickly consider the greatest example.  Everything on earth which has been done against “the noble,” “the powerful,” “the masters,” “the rulers” is not worth mentioning in comparison with what the Jews have done against them: the Jews, that priestly people, who knew how to get final satisfaction from their enemies and conquerors through a radical transformation of their values, that is, through an act of the most spiritual revenge.  This was appropriate only to a priestly people with the most deeply repressed priestly desire for revenge.  In opposition to the aristocratic value equations (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = fortunate = loved by god), the Jews, with an awe-inspiring consistency, dared to reverse things and to hang on to that with the teeth of the most profound hatred (the hatred of the powerless)…  (sec. 7)

But you fail to understand that?  You have no eye for something that needed two millennia to emerge victorious? … That’s nothing to wonder at: all lengthy things are hard to see, to assess.  However, that’s what took place: out of the trunk of that tree of vengeance and hatred, Jewish hatred—the deepest and most sublime hatred, that is, a hatred which creates ideals and transforms values, something whose like has never existed on earth—from that grew something just as incomparable, a new love, the deepest and most sublime of all the forms of love: —from what other trunk could it have grown?

However, one should not assume that this love arose essentially as the denial of that thirst for vengeance, as the opposite of Jewish hatred!  No: the reverse is the truth!  This love grew out of that hatred, as its crown, as the victorious crown unfolding itself wider and wider in the purest brightness and sunshine, which, so to speak, was seeking for the kingdom of light and height, the goal of that hate, aiming for victory, trophies, seduction, with the same urgency with which the roots of that hatred were sinking down ever deeper and more greedily into everything that was evil and possessed depth.  This Jesus of Nazareth, the living evangelist of love, the “Saviour” bringing holiness and victory to the poor, to the sick, to the sinners—was he not that very seduction in its most terrible and most irresistible form, the seduction and detour to exactly those Jewish values and innovations in ideals?  (sec. 8)

On this view, Christian ‘love’ grows out of Jewish ‘hate,’ like the crown of the tree from its roots.  The Jews (and Paul specifically), the master haters, purveyors of the “deepest and most sublime hatred” that has ever existed, created the idea of a saviour who loves everyone.  They did so as cover for their hatred of humanity, and as an enticement into their Jewish-inspired worldview—one of a Jewish man-god (Jesus), of Jehovah the Almighty, of heaven and hell.  These destructive and nihilistic “values and innovations” could only be foisted upon a humanity that was detested.  Christianity was thus the greatest manifestation of Jewish hatred ever conceived.

Nietzsche summarizes his thesis concisely in section 16:

In Rome the Jew was considered “guilty of hatred against the entire human race.”  And that view was correct, to the extent that we are right to link the health and the future of the human race to the unconditional rule of aristocratic values, the Roman values.

The nihilistic Christian values—based on a mythical God and an unknowable and perhaps nonexistent future life—managed to undermine and ultimately displace the superior Greco-Roman values that had flourished for 800 years and created the foundation of all of Western civilization.  Only an overthrow of Judeo-Christianity and a return to classic, aristocratic values can save humanity at this point.  The quoted passage refers, of course, to Tacitus.

We can’t leave the Genealogy without brief mention of a fascinating and humorous allegory on hatred that Nietzsche offers in section 13.  There he compares the situation between lowly (Judeo-Christian) haters and the strong and noble (Roman) aristocrats to the opposition that might exist between baby lambs and some nasty predator (Raubvogel), like an eagle.  The lambs are innocently and peacefully munching grass in a field, but live in constant fear of a predator who may, at any time, swoop in and snatch them up.  The weak lambs are haters; they hate those birds of prey.  But the noble eagles don’t hate at all.  Nietzsche explains:

But let’s come back: the problem with the other origin of the “good,” of the good man, as the person of ressentiment has imagined it for himself, demands its own conclusion.  —That the lambs are upset about the great predatory birds is not a strange thing, and the fact that they snatch away small lambs provides no reason for holding anything against these large birds of prey.  And if the lambs say among themselves, “These predatory birds are evil, and whoever is least like a predatory bird, especially anyone who is like its opposite, a lamb—shouldn’t that animal be good?” there is nothing to find fault with in this setting-up of an ideal, except for the fact that the birds of prey might look down on them with a little mockery and perhaps say to themselves, “We are not at all annoyed with these good lambs.  We even love them.  Nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.”

The noble don’t hate; they rule and dominate.  Only the weak hate.  The weak haters furthermore seek to portray the strong and noble in the harshest possible terms: “evil,” “killers,” “sinners.”  But this is ludicrous, of course.  The strong are just doing what is appropriate to their nature.  The haters might then try to confuse the strong, to guilt them into changing their behavior, to get them to become ‘weak’ and ‘good’ like the haters themselves.  But this would be the death of them, just as a life of munching grass—so pleasant for a lamb—would mean death for an eagle.  Nietzsche emphasizes this very point:

[I]t’s no wonder that the repressed, secretly smouldering feelings of rage and hate use this belief for themselves, and basically even maintain a faith in nothing more fervently than in the idea that the strong are free to be weak and that predatory birds are free to be lambs: —in so doing, they arrogate to themselves the right to blame the birds of prey for being birds of prey.

Today, weak and lowly haters—Jews, Jewish-inspired Christians, and Jewish lackeys in the media—have been working hard to convince the strong and noble that they are bad, evil, bigoted, racist, and supremacist.  And to the extent that they have succeeded, it has been the death of noble humanity.  We must resist this tendency with all our might.

Hate Speech in the Twentieth Century

With growing wealth and financial clout, and with a 2,000-year history of skill in hatred under their belts, organized Jewry began to press the case for legal sanctions against their opponents.  With the flood of Jewish immigrants around the turn of the century, it is perhaps not surprising that Jewish legal advocacy took hold in the US.  In the first two decades, a number of major pro-Jewish groups emerged, including the American Jewish Committee (1906), the Anti-Defamation League (1913), the American Jewish Congress (1918), and the American Civil Liberties Union (1920).  All these groups were de facto anti-hate speech advocates, even if the federal legal apparatus did not really exist at that point.  Their focus was on so-called “group libel,” a novel legal concept that was formulated specifically to benefit Jewish interests.

Meanwhile, across the ocean, Jews were making better legal progress in the proto-Soviet Union.  The rise of Jewish Bolsheviks from around 1900, including Leon Trotsky and the quarter-Jewish Vladimir Lenin, brought a new concern with anti-Semitism to the Russian Empire.  When they took power in the February Revolution of 1917, they immediately set to work to make life better for Russian Jews.  Pinkus (1990) explains that these Bolsheviks “issued a decree annulling all legal restrictions on Jews” in March 1917.[11]  He adds that, unsurprisingly, “Even before the October [1917] Revolution, Lenin and the Bolshevik Party were hostile to anti-Semitism.  Lenin castigated it in the strongest terms on a number of occasions.”  As soon as July 1918, the Soviet Council issued a decree (though without legal enforcement) stating that “the anti-Semitic movement and the anti-Jewish pogroms are a deadly menace to the Revolution”; all Soviet workers are called upon “to fight this plague with all possible means”.[12]  Lenin himself continued to press his pro-Jewish propaganda; in one short but notable speech of March 1919, he said:

Anti-Semitism means spreading enmity towards the Jews.  When the accursed Czarist monarchy was living its last days, it tried to incite ignorant workers and peasants against the Jews.  The Czarist police, in alliance with the landowners and the capitalists, organized pogroms against the Jews.  The landowners and capitalists tried to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants who were tortured by want against the Jews. … Only the most ignorant and downtrodden people can believe the lies and slander that are spread about the Jews.  This is a survival of ancient feudal times, when the priests burned heretics at the stake, when the peasants lived in slavery, and when the people were crushed and inarticulate.  This ancient, feudal ignorance is passing away; the eyes of the people are being opened.

It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people.  The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries.  Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority.  They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. … Shame on accursed Czarism which tortured and persecuted the Jews.  Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations.

As (non-Jew) Joseph Stalin rose to power in the 1920s, he found it expedient to continue working with the Soviet Jews and generally defended their status.  Consequently, that decade became a sort of ‘golden age’ for Jews; it saw the emergence of the likes of Lazar Kaganovich, Yakov Sverdlov, Lev Kamenev, Karl Radek, Leonid Krasin, Filipp Goloshchekin, and Yakov Agranov—all high-ranking Jews in the Soviet hierarchy.[13]  Partly because of this governmental dominance, anti-Semitism among the Russian masses continued to percolate.  Eventually, “in 1927, a decision was reached to take drastic steps to repress anti-Semitism.”[14]  Various forms of propaganda were employed, including books, pamphlets, plays, and films; the process culminated in harsh legal action against anti-Jewish hate, up to and including the death penalty.  Stalin confirmed this in writing in 1931:

Anti-Semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism.  Anti-Semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle.  Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-Semitism.  In the USSR, anti-Semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system.  Under USSR law, active anti-Semites are liable to the death penalty.

The Jewish Golden Age in the Soviet Union lasted until the late 1930s, when Stalin inaugurated a retrenchment of Jewish power, apparently in response to the National Socialist stance.[15]

But the Soviet (and Bolshevik) philo-Semitic policies of the 1920s and 1930s were not lost on Hitler.  He and Goebbels were relentless, and justified, in their critiques of “Jewish Bolshevism” as a dominant threat to Germany and Europe.  Goebbels in particular noted the growing push for ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crime’ laws in defense of Jews in both the USSR and the UK; for him, this was proof of (a) a deep-seated and imminent mass uprising against the Jews, and (b) an over-playing of their legal authority.  Anti-hate laws are a sign of desperation; they indicate that the end-game is near.  In a revealing diary entry of 19 April 1943, Goebbels writes:

The Jews in England are now calling for legal protection against anti-Semitism.  We know that from our own past, in the times of struggle.  But even that didn’t give them much advantage.  We’ve always understood how to find gaps in these protective laws; and moreover, anti-Semitism, once it rises from the depths of the people, cannot be broken by law.  A law against Jew-hatred is usually the beginning of the end for the Jews.  We will make sure that anti-Semitism in England does not cool down.  In any case, a longer-lasting war is the best breeding ground for it.[16]

The following month, in his published essay “The War and the Jews,” Goebbels commented on the legal situation in the USSR—the very law that Stalin described above, and that was still in force some 13 years later:

We constantly hear news that anti-Semitism is increasing in enemy nations.  The charges being made against the Jews are well-known; they are the same ones that were made here.  Anti-Semitism in enemy nations is not the result of anti-Semitic propaganda, since Jewry fights that strongly.  In the Soviet Union, it receives the death penalty.[17]

The status of anti-Semitic hate speech laws was of importance to Goebbels right to the very end.  In his last major essay, “Creators of the World’s Misfortunes” (1945), he reiterated the significance of the Soviet law:

Capitalism and Bolshevism have the same Jewish roots—two branches of the same tree that in the end bear the same fruit.  International Jewry uses both in its own way to suppress nations and keep them in its service.  How deep its influence on public opinion is in all the enemy countries and many neutral nations is plain to see: it may never be mentioned in newspapers, speeches, and radio broadcasts.

There’s a law in the Soviet Union that punishes ‘anti-Semitism’—or in plain English, public education about the Jewish Question—by death.  Any expert in these matters is in no way surprised that a leading spokesman for the Kremlin said over the New Year that the Soviet Union would not rest until this law was valid throughout the world.  In other words, the enemy clearly says that its goal in this war is to put the total domination of Jewry over the nations of the Earth under legal protection, and to use the death penalty to threaten even a discussion of this shameful attempt.  It is little different in the plutocratic [Western] nations.

Even at the bitter end, this theme still impressed Goebbels.  In one of his final diary entries, he wrote:

The Jews have already registered for the San Francisco Conference [on post-war plans].  It is characteristic that their main demand is to ban anti-Semitism throughout the world.  Typically, having committed the most terrible crimes against mankind, the Jews would now like mankind to be forbidden even to think about them.[18]

And indeed, they have succeeded, at least in part.  The postwar German Volksverhetzung and the Austrian Verbotsgesetz both stand as among the most embarrassing legal capitulations to Jewish interests in the Western world.

Thus we clearly see the origins of hate speech legislation in the twentieth century: it was first constructed by Jews and their sycophants (like Stalin), both in the US and in the Soviet Union, to quell any looming opposition to their power structure.  So intent were they on stifling objection to Jewish rule that they were willing to kill those who opposed them.

To the Present Day

With the growing dominance of Jewish influence in American government over the past five decades, and ongoing influence in Europe, calls to restrict and punish any anti-Jewish commentary via hate speech laws have become ever more strident.  The U.S. government—or at least the Republicans—have so far mostly resisted such efforts, but social media has come around to the philosemitic stance.  Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram, Twitter, and Google-owned YouTube, have all taken it upon themselves to censor hate speech, especially of the anti-Semitic variety.  Google has altered its search algorithms to de-rank offensive and “hate” sites.  All this is perfectly understandable, given the huge Jewish presence atop Big Tech; we need only mention Mark Zuckerberg, Sergei Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Sheryl Sandberg, Safra Katz, Susan Wojcicki, Steve Ballmer, Brian Roberts, Marc Benioff, Craig Newmark, and Jeff Weiner, for starters.

Parallel to Big Tech censorship, Jewish advocacy groups like the SPLC and the ADL continue to press civil cases against those ‘haters’ who they believe have violated the rights or reputation of some aggrieved party.  The SPLC has a section of its website dedicated to “anti-Semitism and hate speech,” and the ADL—well, that’s their raison d’etre.  Third-party lawsuits and tech censorship serve the purpose of implementing de facto pro-Jewish hate speech policies, at least within the U.S.

Conclusion

But to come full circle:  I began this piece with a discussion about the logical vagueness and incoherence of the concept of hate speech.  Clearly, though, many powerful, Jewish-inspired corporations and politicians find the concept useful.  For them, in the most basic and practical terms, it becomes quite simple:  Hate speech is any speech that Jews hate.  Yes, they may claim to hate anti-Muslim speech or anti-Black speech, but this is so only because it is a necessary corollary to anti-Jewish hate speech.  The Jews are not so stupid today as to push for uniquely Jewish, “anti-anti-Semitism” laws; those are a thing of the past.  Today, such laws require cover language that, at least in theory, includes other “oppressed” groups.  Jews and their defenders must appear universal and fair—when in reality most seem to have utter contempt for virtually all non-Jewish groups (there’s that “hatred of humanity” again).  Hate speech is any speech that Jews hate.

Consider:  If you hate what I say, who’s the hater?  It’s you, not me.  The fact that you may not like what I’m saying does not make me a hater.  It makes you the hater.  And if you happen to be a champion, master-class, world-historical hater, well then—it’s all hate to you.

Thomas Dalton, PhD, has authored or edited several books and articles on politics, history, and religion, with a special focus on National Socialism in Germany.  His works include a new translation series of Mein Kampf, and the books Eternal Strangers (2020), The Jewish Hand in the World Wars (2019), and Debating the Holocaust (4th ed, 2020), all available at www.clemensandblair.com.  For all his writings, see his personal website www.thomasdaltonphd.com.

[1] Reprinted in Goebbels on the Jews (2019; T. Dalton, ed), p. 199.  This and most other books cited below are available at www.clemensandblair.com.

[2] For the record, I am no denier.  I believe that there was a Holocaust of the mid-20th century:  it was called World War Two, and some 60 million people died as a result of Jewish-instigated actions both here and in Europe.  Jewish fatalities seem to have numbered around 500,000, according to the major revisionists.  For more on these issues, see my books The Jewish Hand in the World Wars (2019) and Debating the Holocaust (4th ed, 2020).

[3] Eternal Strangers (2020; T. Dalton, ed), p. 16.

[4] Emilio Gabba, “The growth of anti-Judaism,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism (vol. 2, 1984; Cambridge University Press), p. 645.

[5] Eternal Strangers, pp. 19, 21, and 25, respectively.

[6] On the Jews and Their Lies (2020, T. Dalton, ed; Clemens & Blair), p. 53.

[7] Eternal Strangers, p. 68.

[8] Eternal Strangers, pp. 70-71.

[9] The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1788/1974, vol. 2; AMS Press), p. 3.  See also Eternal Strangers, p. 59.

[10] Eternal Strangers, p. 78.

[11] Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union (1990; Cambridge University Press), p. 84.

[12] In Pinkus, p. 85.

[13] The parallels to the Biden regime are striking; see my recent piece “Confronting the Judeocracy.”

[14] Pinkus, p. 86.

[15] Postwar, Stalin’s purging of high-ranking Jews accelerated, resulting in a decade-long period of virtual state-sponsored anti-Semitism, ending only with Stalin’s death in 1953.

[16] Goebbels on the Jews, p. 199.

[17] Ibid., pp. 206-207.

[18] 4 April 1945, in Goebbels on the Jews, p. 255.

Is Jewish Leftism a ‘Reform Problem’?

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“What Reform did not do, any more than the ‘Science of Judaism,’ was to solve the Jewish problem.” Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, 1987.

Sparked by Tucker Carlson’s remarkable move towards the Jewish Question, the recent condemnation of the ADL issued by 1,500 rabbis associated with the Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV) has once more raised the question as to whether destructive activity perpetrated by Jewish activists in America is a matter of denomination rather than ethnicity. For several years now, but increasing during the early Trump years, there’s been a quiet but growing argument from self-styled ‘right-wing Jews’ that Jewish leftist activists are anathema to Judaism, or that as adherents of the Reform movement or Liberal Judaism they are a variety of heretical neo-Frankists unrepresentative of “true Jews.” Underlying these arguments is the implication that anti-Semitic theories involving Jews as an ethnic group, perceived as uniform, rely on weak generalizations that do not take into account the political and cultural nuances of American Jews, and therefore that such theories are illogical and irrational. In the course of almost a decade of writing about anti-Semitism and historical and contemporary Jewish behavior among Europeans, I’ve addressed this issue of political nuance more or less directly in a number of essays, especially my discussion of Jewish attitudes to Brexit and Jewish Leftist activism in children’s fiction. Given the quite dramatic nature of this most recent intervention from a signification number of rabbis against one of the world’s most prominent Jewish organizations, however, I think it’s an appropriate time to tackle the subject directly.

Before beginning, it’s worth reflecting on the context of the initial contention made by self-styled right-wing Jews. These Jews, one of the most prominent being Nathan Cofnas, make the argument that Jewish involvement in the advancement of Leftism in the West is both limited (in the sense that the advancement of Leftism also involves massive numbers of Whites and other ethnic groups), and is a predominantly Reform affair, whereas Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jews have a different socio-political direction entirely. In regards to the first element, the ‘limits’ of Jewish involvement, there are few, if any, anti-Jewish theories in circulation which ascribe to Jews sole responsibility for the entirety of contemporary leftist activism. What does exist, however, is a substantial volume of evidence demonstrating that individuals who self-identify as Jews have been over-represented as innovators, leaders, and funders of the modern Left, and this evidence has led to the logical and tactical adoption of an anti-Jewish political position by many conservative Europeans and those of European ancestry. To put it simply, Jews don’t need to be orchestrating a kind of solo conspiracy against the West for an anti-Semitic political position to make theoretical sense and be supported by the data, or for Jewish influence to be a reasonable and rational topic of public discussion.

In regards to the second element of the ‘right-wing Jewish’ contention, it should be understood that the trajectory of the argument is essentially diversionary. When I first read the “not all Jews” argument being employed by Cofnas against Kevin MacDonald, for example, I was immediately reminded of the historical framework of prior debates in which minor concessions on the Jewish Question appear to be made, but are then narrowed and finally diverted. Relevant examples can be found in the public debates between Christian Wilhelm Von Dohm and Moses Mendelssohn[1], and between Karl Marx and Bruno Bauer.[2] In both cases, which concerned the question of Jewish political emancipation, and the undesirability of such an event in the context of negative Jewish group behavior, the Jewish participants attempted to rhetorically carve off elements of the Jewish population, scapegoating them temporarily in order that broader Jewish goals (social, political, or economic) might be achieved. Both Mendelssohn and Marx conceded that harms were being wrought by Jews, but added that this was the result of historical mistreatment that produced a class of renegade Jews (crooks and usurers for Mendelssohn; arch-capitalists for Marx). The fundamental goal of these rhetorical strategies was to defuse and weaken the anti-Semitic reaction, with both Mendelssohn and Marx keen to ease the Jewish path to full civic equality in Europe.

The modern version of these strategies appears to be the insistence that historical treatment (exclusion from the Right[3]) and contemporary circumstances (tendencies in Western liberalism) have created a Frankenstein’s monster in the form of a radical left Reform Judaism. While right-wing Jews are comfortable, to an extent, in condemning these radical Reform Jews, they insist that the host population should remain tolerant of the Jewish ethnic group as a whole and to continue to support Israel. The crucial point here is that, because of its diversionary nature, and its quite obvious side-stepping of the cost-benefit implications of philo-Semitic tolerance (as if European problems with Jews and Judaism have ever been limited to postmodern Leftism), it is inherently political to ask if Jewish Leftism is a Reform problem. It is nevertheless interesting to ask, given that it interrogates the framing of anti-Semitism and opens up valid questions about the Jewish relationship to the Left, and about the nature of the Jewish-European conflict more generally. Most pertinently we should ask, even if Jewish Leftism is a Reform problem, does it ultimately matter?

Gaining conclusive and detailed insight into the socio-political leanings of contemporary American Jews is difficult. Part of this difficulty lies in historical Jewish evasiveness when it comes to, for example, being counted in national censuses, and more general suspicions that data collected on Jews will inevitably be used against them by the host population.[4] When Jewish organizations conduct their own surveys of political, social, or cultural attitudes, the direction of analysis is overwhelmingly against the host population. In fact, surveys of alleged anti-Semitism in the host population are extremely common, if not the most common type of social survey conducted by Jewish groups.[5] Scholars have pointed out that in those instances where Jewish groups engage in surveys among their own people, these surveys are overwhelmingly concerned with population size and Jewish identity, and are often loaded with agendas, biases, and goals such as the boosting of Jewish fertility and the reduction of intermarriage rates.[6] Furthermore, in those instances when Jews have conducted social research on themselves as a means of ‘explaining’ themselves to host peoples, this has also been warped by ulterior and often apologetic motives. Hebrew University’s Sergio Della Pergola, for example, has argued that “Jewish social research was never the mere exercise of human curiosity or analytical skill. Rather it was a means of advancing specific theses regarding the nature of the Jews vis-a-vis world society.”[7] All of which is to say that survey data and social research concerning Jews should be treated with an appropriate level of caution.

It’s nevertheless clear that gaining some kind of reliable insight into the political positions and divisions of American and Western Jewry is important, if not crucial, for host nations. Since their earliest arrival in Europe, Jews have been noted as influential political actors in Western nations, and in recent decades this influence has extended even to the manipulation of the demography of those countries. Della Pergola, for example, has argued that Jewish populations “may significantly influence national population trends in order to advance their own corporate interests — for example, by advocating particular policy interventions.”[8] Della Pergola notes that Jewish populations can often be divided into at least two categories: the core Jewish population of strongly-identified, full-blooded, and often religious, Jews; and the ‘enlarged Jewish population’ which embraces all those with at least some Jewish ethnic heritage that they have consciously embraced, as well as those full-blooded Jews of a less religious inclination but who see themselves as part of a Jewish peoplehood. It’s important to stress at this stage that both divisions are fully capable of formulating and pursuing ideas of what constitutes “corporate interests,” even differing ideas, since the ultimate corporate body in both divisions is not Judaism as such but the Jewish people or even merely the idea of the Jewish people and its putative destiny.

One of the weaknesses of Della Pergola’s division of contemporary Jewry is its lack of utility in the religious sense. Orthodox and Reform Jews can only be roughly mapped onto “core” and “enlarged” categories because, in an American context in which Reform Jews are certainly an influential demographic majority, it makes little sense to argue that they are not in fact the “core” of the American Jewish community. This is where the argument of the self-styled right-wing Jews encounters its first major stumbling block, because the attempt to defend Jews in toto by scapegoating Reform Jews misses the point that Reform, for all intents and purposes, is American Jewry and will remain so demographically far into the future.[9]

The “core” and “enlarged” categories are, however, of some interest and utility when discussing survey data on Jewish political attitudes. It’s been noted that most exit polls will collect reasonably accurate data on “core” Jews because they capture “Jews by Religion” (JBR) when asking if voters are Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, etc. The “core” Jewish population is more likely to include the more religiously identified Orthodox Jews, but it’s interesting that most recent exit polls (conducted by Pew Research) continue to show that even in the JBR category the party split was 68 percent Democratic, 7 percent Independent, and 25 percent Republican. Figures for “Jews of No Religion” (JNR) were 78 percent, 10 percent, and 12 percent. More than 40 percent of JBRs described themselves as liberal, while only 22 percent described themselves as conservative. The rest indicated only that they were moderate, which is open to any number of interpretations. Herbert Weisberg, writing in The Annual Jewish Year Book 2019 explained the figures as indicating that “Jews should be considered to be more Democratic and more liberal than media surveys and exit polls typically show.”[10] This would seem to be indicated also by a number of J Street exit polls which showed that Orthodox Jews are more liberal than ‘right-wing’ Jewish diversionists would have us believe. More than half of Orthodox Jews (59 percent), for example, voted for Obama in 2012, and a similar proportion (56 percent) voted for Clinton in 2016.[11] Even among the Ultra-Orthodox, normally viewed as overwhelmingly hawkish and likely to vote along with the flamboyant Zionism of the GOP, more than a third of respondents (35 percent) to one poll described themselves as Democrats.[12]

It’s important to note that the Jewish political profile is unique. While attempts have been made, by diversionists like Cofnas, to explain Jewish liberalism as an aspect of their higher educational attainment or their likelihood to be more urban-dwelling, serious scholars of Jewish demography and politics have long noted that “studies consistently find that Jews are significantly more Democratic than non-Jews with similar socio-demographic characteristics … Indeed, Wald’s calculations show they are more Democratic than the non-Jew who is their closest match on demographics and economic status.”[13] Wald and Weisberg instead argue that all Jews, whether Orthodox or Reform, “core” or “enlarged,” will vote or engage politically as part of a reaction to “the greatest perceived threat to their interests.”[14] In other words, Jewish political behavior is best explained by Jewish agency and perceptions of Jewish interests rather than cultural context.

It’s arguable that two of the most important Jewish interests are in the form of socio-economic dominance and multiculturalism, and here the unique pattern of Jewish political activity continues and amplifies. It’s extremely interesting that Jews very heavily support non-economic forms of Leftism, and are very much in favor of the expansion of government power, but are much more reluctant to back purely economic forms of socialism. In this regard they differ significantly from non-Jewish Leftists who embrace and emphasize economic socialism within their worldview. A 2012 survey found that a majority of Jews were not willing to pay more taxes in order to help the poor, were not likely to support a government health scheme, and were generally not supportive of government economic guarantees.[15] Jews have also been noted in the past as strong opponents of affirmative action, with even the ADL and the American Jewish Committee filing briefs against it.[16] This can be easily interpreted not as a method of opposing race politics, but as a means of preventing incursion into, or a breaking up of, established Jewish dominance within the professions. This would indicate that Jerry Muller’s theory that Jews have long had a “special relationship” with capitalism,[17] continues to have resonance despite the leadership of Jews in the onward march of purely cultural and political forms of Leftism—now championed by large swaths of other elite sectors of America, including large corporations.[18] The general image that emerges is one in which Jews act politically to create socially and culturally fluid societies where a façade of social justice and equality is promoted and celebrated, and in which a pseudo-elite (Whites) is attacked, but in which no real threat to Jewish privileges and socio-economic dominance is present.

Jews also quite obviously have a special relationship with multiculturalism, being Europe’s first significant minority and the passive or active cause of most of the continent’s earliest legislation on tolerance and migration. It’s an unfortunate commonplace that many of those who have criticized Kevin MacDonald for suggesting that Jews promote multiculturalism in order to feel more secure, are completely ignorant of the fact that several of his ideas are in some form or another slowly becoming fairly mainstream in the sociological study of contemporary Jews. Historian Diana Pinto, a Jewish Harvard graduate, Fulbright Fellow, and board member for the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, has argued that, within a multicultural context, “Jews are no longer perceived as the only ‘diasporic’ people, or as the most significant ‘other’ in the society,” and that this “relieves Jews of burden.”[19] Any scenario in which the pluralistic principles of the host nation are fundamentally challenged, or in which demographic change could return Jews to a position of ‘burden,’ would therefore quite obviously represent a perceived threat to Jewish interests along the lines discussed by Wald and Weisberg, and the question of immigration and associated laws would be an area of political activity that one would expect to see high levels of Jewish participation. Jewish opinions on threat level can of course vary, with some Jews feeling content and secure with moderate levels of pluralism while others would feel secure only when the demographic dominance of the host population is completely undermined. If a proportion of the immigrating demographic is itself a perceived threat to Jews, for example in the case of Muslim migration to France and other parts of Europe, further division and divergence would be expected. The most important aspect of the topic, however, remains that Jews have a fundamental interest in preserving the pluralistic principles of the host nation and avoiding a return of the Jews to a position of being a salient ‘other,’ and therefore a ‘burden.’ In this respect, much as with the nature of Jewish Leftism in relation to economic and social questions, the Jewish relationship to multiculturalism is unique, and involves a blurring of the standard Left-Rright political categories that can be more crudely applied to non-Jewish political activity.

The apparent clash between the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV) over Tucker Carlson presents an interesting case in which fundamental agreement on Jewish interests can be overlaid with disagreement between fringe cliques of Jews and the great majority of the Jewish population on how to best achieve those interests. The first point worth stressing is that the incident is not a straightforward case of Orthodox versus Reform. The Coalition for Jewish Values is, as far as I am aware, exclusively staffed by Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jews who can be usefully described as “core” Jews. The ADL, however, cannot be neatly categorized as a Reform organization, because its most recent Directors have been Orthodox (Abe Foxman, Director 1987–2015) and Conservative (Jonathan Greenblatt, Director 2015–present), and because its behavior since its founding can be most accurately described as an expression of the “enlarged” Jewish population rather than any specific denomination within that. Further, the motivations and past actions of the CJV map comfortably within a reasonable conception of Jewish interests rather than being a novel break from them. And finally, in all such cases of division within the Jewish community, it’s important to assess where the power lies if one is attempting to discern relative influence on the wider society. The ADL, representing the interests of the “enlarged” Jewish population, is far more powerful and influential than CJV.

Even aside from the fact that they emerged from the momentum of Trumpist Zionism, it’s interesting that the CJV has rationalized its more socially conservative positions via the lens of Jewish interests. When the group filed an amicus brief in support of Christian groups fighting to keep a large cross placed on public grounds in Pensacola, Florida, for example, the CJV claimed that ruling against the right to place a cross would also “encourage the erasure of minority religions from public life.” In other words, they viewed their actions primarily as protecting Judaism and pluralistic principles in the host society, even if this commitment to pluralistic principles has not extended, as in the case of the “enlarged Jewish community,” to gays and transsexuals. The CJV may also be a response of sorts to increasing awareness among conservative Whites (like Tucker Carlson) that Jews occupy a very unique and prominent role in American Leftism. This increasing visibility would obviously be perceived as a threat by Jews. Yaakov Menken, the CJV’s managing director, has recalled a conversation with a Christian pro-Israel leader who told him: “I can’t tell you how often people ask me “‘why are you devoting so much time to supporting the Jews and Israel when Jews oppose us on our core issues?’” The potential collapse of Christian Zionism and philo-Semitism in America would obviously have significant consequences for Jewish influence globally, and it should therefore come as no surprise that an effort to heighten the visibility of a “right-wing Judaism” would be made, no matter how superficial or self-interested.

Concluding Remarks

Is Jewish leftism a Reform problem? No. The Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox have their own history of endorsing and supporting Leftism if it suited Jewish interests, motivated by their attempting to avoid or lessen perceived threats. Moreover, even if Jewish Leftism was a Reform problem, the broader causes of anti-Semitism wouldn’t evaporate with the disappearance of that denomination. The Reform movement, we should recall, began in the nineteenth century — around 2,000 years after the earliest writings against the Jewish people. Many of the major historical provocations of anti-Semitic attitudes such as high levels of Jewish ethnocentrism, Jewish economic domination and exploitation, and the special political relationship between Jews and elites, cross denominational lines and precede by centuries the emergence of the modern Left. Some aspects of problematic contemporary Jewish behavior such as slumlordism, fraud, and white-collar crime are actually found in higher numbers among the Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox than among Reform Jews.[20]

In short, the case for an ethnic interpretation of Jewish behavior far outweighs that for a denominational perspective. In the end, the diversionary argument of the self-styled Right-wing Jews can only gain traction among those whose worldview is simplistic and without nuance, and who perceive all of contemporary politics under the basic rubric of Left versus Right. Among such people, it’s perfectly possible to look at the handful of anti-transsexual or anti-ADL statements of the CJV and conclude that one has an ideological brother. Among the more sophisticated, however, in which a definite sense of ethnic interests is foremost, a more nuanced approach emerges, along with a new question altogether: For how long will the politics of my nation turn on the axis of Jewish interests?

[1] Crouter, Richard. “Emancipation Discourse in the Late 18th Century: Christian Wilhelm von Dohm on the Jews (1781)” Journal for the History of Modern Theology, vol. 13, no. 2, 2006, pp. 161-178. For translated primary sources on the debate between the two intellectuals see Mendes-Flohr, Paul R. (ed) The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 27-43.

[2] See on this topic, Peled, Yoav. “From theology to sociology: Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx on the question of Jewish emancipation.” History of Political Thought 13, no. 3 (1992): 463-485; Blanchard, William H. “Karl Marx and the Jewish question.” Political Psychology (1984): 365-374; Leopold, David. “The Hegelian Antisemitism of Bruno Bauer.” History of European ideas 25, no. 4 (1999): 179-206.

[3] Although ‘right-wing’ Jews like Cofnas seem unaware of it, they’re actually regurgitating an old-fashioned and now more or less discredited theory of Jewish liberalism. See, for example, the work of Werner Cohn in the late 1950s, where he often argued that Jews had been ‘pushed’ to the left by the association of the right with anti-Semitism.

[4] For a more detailed discussion of these difficulties see Della Pergola, Sergio, “Jewish Demography: Fundamentals of the Research Field,” in Rebhun, Uzi, The Social Scientific Study of Jewry: Sources, Approaches, Debates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Also of interest in the same volume is Saxe, Leonard et al, “Measuring the Size and Characteristics of American Jewry: A New Paradigm for an Ancient People.”

[5] Smith, Tom W. “A Review: Actual Trends or Measurement Artifacts? A Review of Three Studies of Anti-Semitism.” The Public Opinion Quarterly 57, no. 3 (1993): 380-93.

[6] Della Pergola, Sergio, “Jewish Demography: Fundamentals of the Research Field”, 10 & 23. Such studies can, for example, be designed to “greatly exaggerate” notions of Jewish population decline in order to promote endogamy and increase Jewish fertility.

[7] Ibid., 15.

[8] Ibid., 17.

[9] Although having a higher birth rate, Orthodox Jews comprise only around 10 percent of American Jewry, and around 10 percent of Orthodox youth eventually drift into more liberal Jewish milieus or forms of Judaism. The decline of the Reform population via intermarriage has rightly been described as “greatly exaggerated” by Calvin Goldscheider. See Goldscheider, Calvin, Studying the Jewish Future (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004).

[10] Weisberg, Herbert. F. “The Presidential Voting of American Jews,” in Sheskin, Ira (ed), American Jewish Yearbook 2019 (New York: Springer, 2020), 43.

[11] Ibid., 82.

[12] Ibid., 77.

[13] Ibid., 73.

[14] Ibid., 46.

[15] Weisberg, Herbert F. The Politics of American Jews (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019),127-128.

[16] Van Horne, Winston A. Ethnicity in the Work Force (Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 56.

[17] See Jerry Z. Muller, Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

[18] Jack Dalton, “’Be Brave, Do Something’: Ashley Rae Goldenberg’s List of Corporations that Support the Riots asnd Want You Dead,” VDare (June 6, 2020). https://vdare.com/posts/be-brave-do-something-ashley-rae-goldenberg-s-list-of-corporations-that-support-the-riots-and-want-you-dead

[19] Quoted in Hartman, Harriet, “Studies of Jewish Identity and Continuity: Competing, Complementary, and Comparative Perspectives,” in Rebhun, Uzi, The Social Scientific Study of Jewry: Sources, Approaches, Debates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 93.

[20] See, for example, Rosen, Michael, “God Will Not Provide: Hasidic Jews and Fraud.” Journal of Law & Social Deviance 3 (2012): 245.

“Secure Tolerance”: The Jewish Plan to Permanently Silence the West, Part 2

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Go to Part 1.

2012–2015: The National Statute for the Promotion of Tolerance

Between 2012 and January 2015, Dinstein and three other experts on constitutional law, backed by Kantor’s ECTR developed a draft 12-page pan-European “tolerance law” for adoption by the European Union. The law was intended to “criminalize ‘group libel,’ such as negative stereotyping, target group-to-group intolerance, and ban neo-Nazi and other discriminatory organizations in Europe.” On January 27, the draft legislation debuted at the European Jewish Congress, then meeting in Prague, with Kantor presiding and throwing his “support behind the proposal, which would grant harsher punishments for hate crimes against Jews, Muslims, Roma, women, and LGBQT alike across the continent.” Minor complaints came from Alan Dershowitz and Bernard Henri-Levy, who believed that an educational (indoctrination) strategy would be a more effective (safer for Jews) way of pursuing an end to anti-Semitism. Dinstein (and, one would presume, Kantor), according to Times of Israel, was “undeterred by the criticism, insisting that he would continue to promote the legislation to European governments, in the hopes that like Holocaust denial criminalization, which he said was initially perceived as a “pipe dream,” the tolerance law will ultimately take root.”

Dinstein’s document, innocuously titled “A European Framework National Statute for the Promotion of Tolerance,” [full text here] but also known by the name “Model National Statute for the Promotion of Tolerance,” was designed to legally implement Kantor’s ideological proposals as outlined in the 2011 Manifesto for Secure Tolerance, and made provision for the explicit criminalization of “overt approval of a totalitarian ideology, xenophobia or anti-Semitism.” It proposes to make “education in tolerance” mandatory from elementary school to college. All governments will be legally obliged to ensure their schools “introduce courses encouraging students to accept diversity. … It is very important to start such courses as early as possible in the educational programme, i.e. in elementary school.” The same measures will have to be imposed in the education of the military and the police, and for the entire professional class within society.

The statute also makes it a legal obligation for every EU country to ensure that public broadcasting “devote a prescribed percentage of their programmes to promoting a climate of tolerance.” It asserts a legally binding commitment that: “The production of books, plays, newspapers reports, magazine articles, films and television programmes – promoting a climate of tolerance – will be encouraged and, where necessary, subsidized by the Government.” Mass media will be completely given over to the development and dissemination of pro-diversity propaganda:

  • The Government shall ensure that public broadcasting (television and radio) stations will devote a prescribed percentage of their programmes to promoting a climate of tolerance.
  • The Government shall encourage all privately owned mass media (including the printed press) to promote a climate of tolerance.
  • The Government shall encourage all the mass media (public as well as private) to adopt an ethical code of conduct, which will prevent the spreading of intolerance and will be supervised by a mass media complaints commission.

In short, the proposals aim to make “commitment to tolerance” a total and legally binding principle, bringing about a revolution in culture. In other words, nations will be punished if their TV stations do not produce pro-tolerance propaganda, if they fail to indoctrinate their children in pro-tolerance propaganda, and if they fail to aggressively prosecute and imprison dissidents. In fact, it provides for the establishment of “special administrative units” dedicated to the direct surveillance of all individuals or groups deemed to possess “intolerant” views.” The statute develops a framework of “concrete and enforceable obligations that ensure tolerance and stamp out intolerance.” The proposals were also designed by Kantor and Dinstein to include explicit, special protections for Jews. Dinstein, for example, remarked at a 2012 presentation of an early draft to then-EU President Martin Schulz, that “Whilst current definitions of tolerance would preclude racism and religious-based bigotry, anti-Semitism must be individually stated as a separate definition. Holocaust denial should be a crime.”

Crucially, the statute provides for the legal protection of all standard Jewish historical narratives, not just that of the Holocaust. It asserts, for example, that “It must be understood that the “group libel” may appear to be aimed at members of the group in a different time (another historical era) or place (beyond the borders of the State).” Based on one of his most recent speeches, Kantor’s own interpretation of history leaves a lot to be desired: “Historically, Jews were always among the most loyal citizens of their countries, and did their best to integrate and to become pillars of society in all walks of life.”

Presumably, anything outside such a fantasy would be considered criminal hate speech. In other words, if a modern-day Italian made the claim that Jews were dominant moneylenders in England during the medieval period, and that they contributed to the hostility demonstrated against them during that time, and which resulted in their expulsion in 1290, this individual could be subjected to the same harsh legal penalties as someone who made “anti-Semitic” criticisms of Israel today, or “denied the Holocaust.” And these penalties are harsh. The document argues there is “no need to be tolerant to the intolerant.” Group libel, “Overt approval of a totalitarian ideology,” xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and public approval or denial of the Holocaust, are all to be treated as “aggravated crimes.” Juveniles “guilty of intolerance” will avoid prison, but are to be brainwashed via “a rehabilitation programme designed to instill in them a culture of tolerance.”

Since first presenting a draft to Martin Schulz in 2012, Kantor’s ECTR has presented the Model Statute in a series of meetings and seminars with international organizations, including the Council of Europe and the OSCE, as part of an intensive lobbying effort to have it written into law throughout Europe. There is currently a joint ECTR-European Council task force which is working on its implementation. Kantor has ensured his measures are massively incentivized. He has launched a $1 million “Kantor Prize for Secure Tolerance,” an ECTR annual European Medal of Tolerance, and a research fund offering grants of “20–50 thousand Euro each” for experts who can advance the legal and cultural enforcement of diversity.


Incentivizing treason: Kantor, awarding the European Medal of Tolerance to Prince Albert II of Monaco: “Your Highness’ gesture of supporting historical truth and unveiling a monument commemorating deported Jews in World War II has been such a liberating act of contrition, all the more impressive because it concerned not only your own people, but also because of your own family’s political responsibilities for the course of events.”

2016–2018: Kantor, the ADL, and the War on “Cyber Hate”

Beginning in late 2015, Kantor began accelerating a more global approach to “Secure Tolerance” by building a more intensive relationships with the ADL and focusing more heavily on internet “intolerance.” In January 2016, Kantor’s European Jewish Congress and the ADL announced “a partnership to cooperate on advocacy work within European Union institutions,” that would involve lobbying for the implementation of the Model Statute and for heightened levels of internet censorship. At a meeting of the EJC’s General Assembly in Brussels, it was announced that the move would “enable the ADL to have a greater impact on E.U. policies and programs,” while providing Kantor’s policies with a pathway to U.S. legislators. ADL Director Jonathan Greenblatt boasted that “Working together, we will leverage our respective strengths to pursue our common goals more effectively.” An enthused Kantor replied, “I am delighted that we are partnering with such an august institution as ADL which has a longstanding record of fighting for greater tolerance and against the scourge of hatred, racism and anti-Semitism.” Ultimately, of course, it meant the further dilution of democracy in Europe, with an unelected and unsolicited gang of American Jews now free to engage in “advocacy work within European institutions such as the European Parliament and the European Commission.”

By 2018, Kantor’s effort at international Jewish co-operation to bring about “secure tolerance” had settled on the internet as a matter of major concern and as a potential springboard for further movement on repressive international legislation. There had been earlier grumblings. In 2015, then ADL Director Abraham Foxman, and also Yoram Dinstein, had called for measures to end internet anonymity and therefore expose the “intolerant” to “the censure of society. … If you want to be bigot you have to take responsibility for it.” But by 2018 this had evolved into the quest for more systematic, legal solutions to online dissent.

Moshe Kantor and the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt

In March 2018, the sixth biennial meeting of the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism convened in Israel. Run by the Israeli government, hosted by Benjamin Netanyahu, addressed by former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, and staffed by a large cast of Jewish academics from around the world, the Global Forum made a priority of “fighting cyber hate.” A modern day meeting of the Elders of Zion, the number of representatives from various Jewish organizations totaled just over one thousand, including leaders from the ADL; Simon Wiesenthal Center; American Jewish Committee; Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations; Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France; the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance; B’nai B’rith; World Jewish Congress; and the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy.

The Global Forum, in common with so much of what we have seen so far, is essentially a central “think tank” for the campaign to introduce internet censorship throughout the West. It devises intellectual and political strategies styled as “recommendations” for Western governments to restrict the freedoms of their respective populations. The ‘recommendations’ of the 2018 Forum included a demand that all governments adopt “a clear industry standard for defining hate speech and anti-Semitism” the latter being achieved quite quickly since the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism was devised in 2016.

The Global Forum called for the introduction of an international legal ban on “Holocaust denial sites,” and its plan to “eliminate anti-Semitism” is comprehensive. Among its more recent recommendations were proposals to establish national legal units responsible for combating ‘cyber hate’; making stronger use of existing laws to prosecute ‘cyber hate’ and ‘online anti-Semitism,’ and enhancing the legal basis for prosecution where such laws are
absent.

 

Latter-Day Elders of Zion

In much the same way that Kantor’s “secure tolerance” policy proposes that “restrictions are necessary for freedom,” many if not all of the Jewish intellectuals involved in the campaign to end free speech on the internet do so while shamelessly and hypocritically posing as the truest defenders of freedom and liberty. A classic example in this regard is Raphael Cohen-Almagor, author of Confronting the Internet’s Dark Side (2015) and a key figure in the Global Forum as well as perhaps the leading anti-free speech intellectual active today. Cohen-Almagor received his D. Phil. in political theory from Oxford University in 1991, and his B.A. and M.A. from Tel Aviv University. In 1992–1995 he lectured at the Hebrew University Law Faculty. From 1995–2007 he taught at the University of Haifa Law School, Department of Communication, and Library and Information Studies University of Haifa. He is a very strongly-identified Jew, having acted as Chairperson of “The Second Generation to the Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance” Organization in Israel. He also shamelessly but aggressively postures himself as a “defender of democracy,” acting as Founder and Director of Center for Democratic Studies at the University of Haifa. He is currently Chair in Politics at the University of Hull, United Kingdom. As with other aspects of the “think tank” strategy, this is “democracy,” but not as you know it.

Cohen-Almagor’s most recent significant production, titled “Taking North American White Supremacist Groups Seriously: The Scope and the Challenge of Hate Speech on the Internet,” appeared in 2018 in the International Journal of Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy.[1] Along with an earlier piece from 2016,[2] the article is an excellent sample and summary of Cohen-Almagor’s work to date, and also acts as a remarkable and important example of Jewish manipulation of discussions of free speech and the politics of White advocacy. The article’s basic argument is that American so-called “White supremacist” websites are a hotbed of dangerous hate speech which can be conclusively linked to criminality. Since hate speech “can and does inspire crime,” it is incumbent upon governments to introduce legislation banning such speech under harsh legal penalties.

We will never know how Charlottesville might have been remembered without the incident involving James Fields and Heather Heyer, but there is little doubt that it was perhaps the greatest propaganda coup that Jewish organizations could have hoped for. It therefore comes as no surprise that Cohen-Almagor should open his article with this: “On 12 August 2017, James Alex Fields Jr rammed his car into a crowd of anti-fascist protesters united against a white supremacist rally, Unite the Right, in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America (USA).” Despite the extreme rarity of violence from the Alt-Right, and the many singular aspects of this particular episode, Cohen-Almagor employs the most sweeping generalizations to assert the incident “illustrates the danger that the white supremacist movement poses to American society, and the close connection between hate online and hate crimes.”

Cohen-Almagor, along with the 18 Jews from the ADL, SPLC, and similar organizations he interviewed for the paper, are aware of the objections of classical liberalism to restrictions on speech:

[C. Edwin] Baker (1992, 1997), for instance, argues that almost all of the harm inflicted by free speech is eventually mediated by the mental processes of the audience. The audience decides its reaction to speech. The listeners determine their own response. Any consequences of the listeners’ response to hate speech must be attributed, in the end, to the listeners. The result is the right of speakers to present their views even if assimilation by the listeners leads to or constitutes serious harm. Baker (1997, 2012), like many American liberal philosophers and First Amendment scholars, wishes to protect freedom of expression notwithstanding the harm that the speech might inflict on the audience. … Consequently, many of my interviewees argue that American liberals thus tend to underestimate the harm in hate speech.

The key Jewish counter-argument is to assert that speech itself can be harmful and that “the audience” can be harmed merely by exposure to it. In practical terms, Cohen-Almagor contends that James Fields drove his car into a crowd at Charlottesville solely because he was exposed to hate speech — not because of his mental health, situational factors that day and immediately prior to his conduct in the vehicle, or because of catastrophic policing failures. Why everyone else “exposed” to “White supremacist hate speech” didn’t engage in similar conduct is left unexplained. Instead, we are to agree with Cohen-Almagor and his Jewish colleagues that “hate speech should not be dismissed as ‘mere speech.’ … The preferred American liberal approach of fighting ideas with ideas, speech with speech, is insufficient. Hate speech needs to be taken more seriously by the legal authorities than it currently is.”

Just as the James Fields episode is extrapolated exponentially to define an entire movement, so the issue of “hate speech” and censorship is based on an extremely small number of exceptional cases. Cohen-Almagor claims that “internet hate can be found on thousands of websites, file archives, chat rooms, newsgroups and mailing lists,” so one might assume that his methodology and argument would involve a wide range of examples where these thousands of sources are linked to thousands of instances of violence and criminality — particularly since Cohen-Almagor argues that “White supremacist” websites are “like terrorist groups.” The problem, however, is that he does no such thing, because there are no such examples.

In order to present even the most tenuously relevant research, Cohen-Almagor relies purely on unsophisticated comments from a handful of the most extreme and obscure racialist sites on the internet, and even here the author fails to provide a single instance where a White racialist website has suggested any acts of violence. So inconsequential and amateurish were such sites that by the time of writing his article Cohen-Almagor has to concede “quite a few sites discussed here are now defunct.” Having initially made a small directory of such sites, he admits the “vast majority of the web pages in that directory are no longer operative.” It is surely a damning indictment of the state of modern peer-reviewed academic journals that someone could publish an argument against the principle of free speech solely on the basis of the putative content of obscure and minuscule internet sources which are no longer even in existence.

In fact, Cohen-Almagor can’t even come to a fixed and satisfactory definition of “hate speech” or “hate sites.” This is presumably by design, with the intention that the topic is plagued by so many gray areas that any future legislation in the area is, like all existing examples of hate legislation, destined to be rhetorically capacious enough to ensure easy arbitrary interpretation by those in control. Early in his essay he asserts that “Hate speech is intended to injure, dehumanize, harass, intimidate, debase, degrade, and victimize the targeted groups, and to foment insensitivity and brutality against them.” But he also later endorses a definition of the Alt-Right, which is routinely portrayed by Cohen-Almagor and his Jewish allies as a body of “hate groups,” as merely “critical” of “multiculturalism, feminists, Jews, Muslims, gays, immigrants and other minorities.” Criticism thus becomes conflated with hate. It goes without saying that there is a crucial difference between the two definitions, and it is in the gulf between these two definitions that these activists seek to destroy freedom of speech. Mere criticism may not “injure, dehumanize, harass, intimidate, debase, degrade, and victimize” anyone, but the existence of a legislative framework privileging minority interpretations of such criticism will surely consign it to hate speech categorization.

Cohen-Almagor and his co-ethnic activists are equally vague in explaining exactly how “White supremacist” websites are morally or legally wrong. Despite its initial claims and promises, much of the article is in fact taken up with banal observations. White racialist websites, Cohen-Almagor informs us, often have “forums, discussion groups, photos and videos.” They offer “eye-catching teasers such as symbols and pictures.” Readers of such websites “talk to each other, thereby reinforcing their commonly held views, empowering people who share their beliefs.” A key strategy involves “encouraging interpersonal socialization in the offline world.” Members “use cyberspace as a free space to create and sustain movement culture and coordinate collective action.” Website proprietors can also “make appeals for funding.” Perhaps this is quite terrifying to Jews, but as a philosophical argument for the annihilation of free speech it is catastrophically lacking.

Cohen-Almagor provides no evidence suggesting a link between even the most incendiary racial commentary on the internet and acts of violence. The only two examples he attempts to provide are almost two decades old, and concern individuals with clearly unsound mental health — spree-shooter Benjamin Nathaniel Smith having exhibited all the signs of conduct disorder and psychopathy in adolescence prior to his 1999 rampage, and Buford O. Furrow having been hospitalized a number of times due to psychiatric instability and suicidal tendencies prior to his shooting spree at a Jewish community center, also in 1999. Even the most basic critique of such a proposed link would ask why, given the proliferation of the internet and social media between 1999 and 2018, there has been a decrease in violence from the far right. Indeed, if one can excuse the continued use of the “racist” and “hate” buzzwords, it’s difficult to disagree with one University of California, Berkeley study that pointed out: “Although White racist groups have proliferated on the Internet in recent years, there appears to have been no corresponding increase in membership in these groups or in hate crime rates. In fact, one might argue that the prevalence of racist groups on the Internet works to reduce hate crime, perhaps by providing less physical, more rhetorical outlets for hate.”[3] The entire foundation of Cohen-Almagor’s argument — that there is a link between internet activity and White racialist violence — is a total fabrication.

It is a fabrication that is being used in conjunction with some of the biggest international Jewish organizations and, via the Global Forum, the State of Israel, to blackmail and deceive Western populations via a specious sense of morality (i.e., a “morality” that denies the legitimate interests of White populations in maintaining political, cultural, and demographic control) coupled with activism in the media and financial pressure on politicians. Christopher Wolf, Chair of the Internet Task Force of the ADL, argues shamelessly in an interview with Cohen-Almagor: ‘The evidence is clear that hate online inspires hate crimes.’ Cohen-Almagor writes:

Overly permissive and tolerant attitudes towards hate speech is a form of akrasia, whereby people act against their better judgment. Not just those who post but also those who allow such postings on their servers are culpable for their akratic conduct. Whether through ignorance, indifference or insistence on clinging to freedom of speech without caring about dangerous consequences, these are unjustifiable. Internet service providers are expected to abide by a basic code of conduct, one that objects to rather than celebrates violence and its promotion. When it comes to hate speech on the Internet, society and its regulators cannot continue to remain akratic and avoid responsibility for the harm that is inflicted.

Go to Part 3.

[1] R. Cohen-Almagor, ‘Taking North American White Supremacist Groups Seriously: The Scope and the Challenge of Hate Speech on the Internet,’ International Journal of Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2018), pp.38-57.

[2] . Cohen-Almagor, ‘Hate and Racist Speech in the United States: A critique,’ Philosophy and Public Issues, Vol. 6, No.1, pp.77-123.

[3] J. Glaser, J. Dixit & D. Green, ’Studying Hate Crime with the Internet: What Makes Racists Advocate Racial Violence?’ Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 58, No. 1, 2002, pp. 177–193 (p.189)

Jewish Reactions to Black anti-Semitism

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“Jews often become convenient stand-ins as the purveyors of the structures of systemic racism that continue to plague Black America.”
Tema Smith, The Forward, 2019

As remarked in “Aspects of Black anti-Semitism,” it’s clear that visible and occasionally violent Black hostility towards Jews presents the latter with an objective problem in terms of their (publicly expressed) self-concept as a people and the received wisdom regarding the nature of anti-Semitism (now given quasi-legal standing in many countries via the IHRA definition). In general terms, Jews have tended to avoid any sense of responsibility for anti-Semitism by creating and promoting narratives in which they are passive victims of a phenomenon that is the result of fundamentally irrational bigotry. This is often accompanied by the insistence that anti-Semitism has its origins in what are seen as pathological elements in European Christianity and that anti-Semitism is little more than a set of ideas that act as a viral psychosis among Whites.

Since the early twentieth century, this understanding has been augmented with a variety of modifications, many derived from Marxism and psychoanalysis, but the essential argument that anti-Semitism is a White pathology has survived, and has been very widely disseminated in Western cultural, political, and educational spheres. In fact, it has been challenged in significant terms only by the rise of anti-Jewish hostility in the Middle East, but even in that instance it has been characterized by Jewish historians like Bernard Lewis as being influenced by Europeans. Within the West, and omitting anti-Semitism among Muslim immigrants, the periodic spike in anti-Jewish hostility among American Blacks represents perhaps the only persistent Western challenge to the received wisdom that anti-Semitism is a White problem, rather than a problem that originates with Jewish behavior. Black anti-Semitism also problematizes notions that Jews have been selfless and valuable allies to Blacks and other minorities, something that has been a key aspect of Jewish propaganda campaigns for pluralism in Western nations. As such, Jewish rhetorical and legal responses to Black anti-Semitism are of interest to White advocates, and to all peoples concerned with Jewish/Zionist group influence and behavior.

Victims of White Systems

One of the most prominent Jewish strategies when discussing Black anti-Semitism is the attempt to preserve both Jewish and Black senses of victimhood, and thus preserve the idea of an alliance against an allegedly oppressive White society. On the most basic level, this strategy involves denying any specificity to Black complaints against Jews and essentially involves an entrenchment of the idea that anti-Semitism is a White pathology. Black socio-economic grievances are radically downplayed or even ignored entirely in this framework, and the locus of all discussion tends to be on vague, putative historical contexts of Jewish victimhood (e.g. “This is another sorry chapter in the history of the Longest Hatred”), rather than on serious thinking about perpetrator motivation.

An excellent example in this regard is Tema Smith’s Forward article “How to talk about Black anti-Semitism.” Smith attempts to preserve both Jewish and Black senses of victimhood by arguing that “Jews often become convenient stand-ins as the purveyors of the structures of systemic racism that continue to plague Black America.” This is really a fascinating statement given that it comes in the aftermath of Black attacks on Jews involving everything from “fists and stones to machetes, automatic weapons, and explosive devices.” Despite very clear dynamics of targeted hostility, the victimhood of both peoples is preserved and asserted since the putatively passive Jews are merely “convenient stand-ins,” and Blacks are themselves “plagued” by “the structures of systemic racism.” In other words, antagonistic Jewish behaviors are either non-existent or ultimately irrelevant, while Blacks can’t be fully condemned for their attitudes and behavior because they’ve essentially been fooled by an exploitative racist system. Thus, in a context in which a disproportionately vast numbers of Hasidic Jews exploit their tenants and accumulate hundreds of building violations through sheer greed and disdain for those living in their properties, and in the process making life hell for many Blacks, the real villain of the story is somehow the White man — a figure, curiously enough, that is almost totally absent from all “Worst Landlord” lists.

In this reaction, therefore, Jews and their behaviors dissolve into the abstraction of imagined social systems—specifically “racist” systems that are part of a putative White power structure. Smith continues:

What is remarkable, though, is that a single factor underlies every attempt to diagnose a unique form of Black anti-Semitism: systemic racism. In analysis after analysis, antisemitism in the Black community is shown to be the symptom of the structures of racism in the United States—housing insecurity, lack of access to quality education, food deserts, access to political capital, discriminatory policing, and on and on. Ultimately, the conversation about Black anti-Semitism is not actually about Blacks and Jews. [emphasis added]

This is a capable use of persuasive language, but what is truly remarkable is that Smith fails to identify the true “single factor” underlying attempts to diagnose Black anti-Semitism — the stunning avoidance of any significant confrontation with the worst aspects of Jewish behavior in Black districts. Whether or not housing insecurity, lack of access to quality education, food deserts, access to political capital, or discriminatory policing have anything to do with the specific issue of Black anti-Semitism is up for debate, but what is clearly contributing to Black anti-Semitism is the decades-old prevalence of Jews as the very worst of ghetto slumlords, pawn brokers, loan merchants, and political hypocrites. Smith doesn’t provide a single reference or footnote to any of the examples of “analysis after analysis” allegedly proving a thesis that conveniently absolves Jews of provoking Black aggression because these analyses are almost non-existent outside the ridiculous offerings of the Jewish power structure’s own self-defense bodies. In fact, when serious unbiased scholarly studies are made of Black anti-Semitism they tend to overwhelmingly conclude, in the words of Ronald Tsukashima and Darrel Montero, that “economic mistreatment [by Jews] is strongly related to heightened antipathy toward Jews.”[1]

One study that concedes economic mistreatment of Blacks by Jews, but insists that Whites and their “racist system” are still responsible for the situation, is the ADL-sponsored Anti-Semitism in America (1979) by Harold Quinley and Charles Glock. In the fourth chapter of this text, “Anti-Semitism Among Black Americans,” the authors concede their findings “are consistent with a theory that black anti-Semitism is economically based,” and that having business contacts with Jews “was associated with a sharp rise in anti-Semitic responses.”[2] In particular, it was found that Jewish credit practices were one of the “principle areas in which blacks are exploited. They often end up paying exorbitant prices for inferior goods.”[3] Remarkably, however, in summarising their conclusions the authors move away radically from the specificities of Black-Jewish interactions, instead abstracting into discussion of systems of racism. In essence, they replicate the process of Jews dissolving into Whiteness. For example, they assert that “it is largely as members of the oppressive white majority that blacks seem to react to Jews.”[4] This is followed by what amounts to absolution of both Blacks and Jews, and a condemnation of Whites:

Prejudice should be deplored wherever it exists and for whatever reason. At the same time, prejudice toward the oppressor is not to be equated with prejudice toward the oppressed. The prejudice of blacks is in part a response to circumstances which white-dominated culture has imposed on them. The opposite does not apply with respect to the prejudice of whites.

The rhetorical pattern is thus replicated that negative Jewish behavior is either non-existent or irrelevant, that, in a sense, Black violence is excusable, and that the real enemy of both is White people and their culture.

The Judeo-Bolshevik Inflection

Part of the “system’s” apologetic, but worthy of analysis in its own right, is the Jewish-Marxist treatment of Black anti-Semitism. A good example of this approach was published last month at Jacobin, in the form of Aaron Freedman’s article “To Defeat Antisemitism, We Must Defeat Capitalism.” It’s long been my opinion that a significant element of historical Jewish support for Marxism is that Marxism is itself a kind of “escape into systems.” Jews have for centuries been noted as particularly negative forces within capitalism, and it would appear that Jews have much to gain by advancing the idea that it is the system of capitalism, rather than Judaism and Jewish approaches to capitalism, that is inherently bad. It is indeed a curio of history and contemporary economics that Jews have heavily accumulated, and often dominated, in those economic areas widely seen as exemplifying the worst of capitalism: usury/high interest loans, including the modern payday loan; sub-prime mortgages; tax farming; vulture funds; monopoly; fraud; Ponzi schemes; slumlordism; tax avoidance; internet gambling; and malicious bankruptcy. I’ve tackled the Marxist critique of anti-Semitism in great detail in relation to the ideas of Slavoj Zizek (who later referenced the “true anti-Semitism” of my essay at RT but—rather tellingly—offered no rebuttal, refusing even to answer the question he quotes). But here I want to discuss it specifically with reference to the issue of Black anti-Semitism.

Aaron Freedman, who lives in Brooklyn and should therefore know better, is quite unabashed in asserting that “Antisemitism endures because capitalist oppression needs a scapegoat,” which is really no more than a rephrasing of Tema Smith’s claim that Jews are merely “convenient stand-ins” for the real problem — the racist structure of White society. Freedman admits that there has been a sudden increase in Black attacks on Jews, but his first attempt at explanation can only be described as nothing less than remarkable: “A surge in white-nationalist activity since Donald Trump’s election is surely the main part of the story.”

Inserting “surely” into a sentence is a nice effort at persuasive writing, but the logical gap is so great in this instance that it resembles the rhetorical equivalent of putting a band-aid on the hull of a sinking ship. Freedman qualifies his astonishing claim only by adding “But Trump’s victory alone does not explain the spate of incidents in New York, committed in many cases by black individuals in both planned assaults and apparently random street encounters.” The confusion unfortunately escalates from there, with Freedman commenting “The Right obviously does not have an answer.” The problem here is that we obviously do have an answer for the causes of Black anti-Semitism, and like all great theses it can be summed up in a single, short sentence: “Jews have been behaving badly again.” Freedman dodges any hint at such an explanation, moving into his own breakdown of why Blacks have been attacking Jews: Capitalism.

Like all Marxist interpretations of anti-Semitism, Freedman asserts that “Its roots in the United States, by way of Europe, come from Christian discrimination against “Christ killers,” dating as far back as the 2nd century CE.”  This is, quite frankly, a nonsensical oversimplification, and the dating of the origins of anti-Semitism from medieval Christendom, rather than the ancient world, is an depressingly common feature of Jewish apologetics, a tactic that typically owes much of its development to the convenience of placing the blame for anti-Semitism on early Christianity. Most significantly, it is based on the theories of Gavin Langmuir, a philosemitic scholar who by his own admission dated his discussion of the origins of anti-Semitism to the medieval period because, “I am respectably knowledgeable only about the history of the West since the fall of the Roman Empire and am most at home in the Middle Ages.” Compounding Freedman’s gross errors, the Jacobin journalist states with brazen duplicity that Jewish financial activities in the Middle Ages were “far less oppressive” than that of other peoples (again, see my commentary on the ideas of Slavoj Zizek for historical sources contradicting such assertions), and that they were only quaintly engaged in “petty bourgeois profit-seeking.” No mention of Jewish elite status. No discussion of Jewish tax-farming. No inclusion of peasant revolts against the unusually oppressive nature of Jewish finance. Jews appear in Freedman’s narrative only as “a religious other,” picked on because they were “also very vulnerable.” So vulnerable they typically had royal protection? So vulnerable that most of the oldest residential houses in England were built for Jews, their thick stone standing the test of centuries and countless reactions from the goyim?

If by now, like me, you’re wondering what Freedman has to say specifically on the matter of Black anti-Semitism, then also, like me, you’ll be frustrated with the fact he finishes the piece without mentioning anything at all about Black anti-Jewish hostility in Brooklyn. In a grand piece of diversionary nonsense, he merely recounts the standard Judeo-Bolshevik narrative of anti-Semitism, declaring Black anti-Semitism to be inconsequential to the greater story: “the specific threat of white-nationalist organizations remains the paramount one,” and “in any society in which the few rule over the many, racist and antisemitic victim-blaming will thrive.” The message is therefore more or less identical to that offered by Tema Smith — when Blacks attack Jews it has nothing to do with either Blacks or Jews, and everything to do with Whites. The situation thus presents itself that Jewish slumlords abuse and exploit their Black tenants, Blacks react by assaulting Jews, and Whites are encouraged to chastise themselves for causing it all through their evil desire for private property.

Pleading Ignorance

In “Aspects of Black anti-Semitism,” I noted that,

A fascinating feature of coverage of the Winter 2019/2020 attacks on Jews by Blacks in New York has been the total absence of media enquiry into why the assaults took place. Like so much historiography on European anti-Semitism, there is simply no room for the question Why? As in Kiev, or Odessa, or the Rhine Valley, or Lincoln, or Aragon, or Galicia, the assaults on Jews in Brooklyn apparently emerged from the ether, motivated by some miasmic combination of insanity and demonic aggression. NBC New York reported bluntly on a “spree of hate,” but had nothing in the way of analysis of context other than a condemnation of “possible hate-based attacks” — one of the most remarkably opaque pieces of analytical nomenclature I’ve ever come across.

Mirroring media neglect of context, some Jewish reactions have consisted of feigned ignorance and bafflement at what might have caused Black anti-Semitism. In a December 2019 article for the Daily Beast, Brooklyn-based Jay Michaelson attempts to explain “What’s Behind the New Wave of Anti-Semitic Hate?” What his article in facts consists of is a series of mystifications of what is really a fairly straightforward story. For Michaelson, “speaking as a Jewish parent who lives in Brooklyn, I can tell you that it’s terrifying. It is also confusing. [emphasis added]” The only thing Michaelson seems sure of is that “hate” is involved, but he courageously probes deeper by asking: “Hate, yes, but what kind of hate?” His conclusion? “The answer is not simple.” Michaelson does concede that some of the anti-Jewish actions of recent decades contain “glimmers of ideology” — “the Crown Heights riot of 1991 was in part about city resources, housing, gentrification, policing and political power”—but he follows this by insisting that “These attacks say nothing about African-Americans or anti-Semitism in black communities. … To eradicate anti-Semitism, we must understand it—and right now, when it comes to this devastating new wave of attacks, we don’t.”

Other than blank confusion, then, does Michaelson suggest that anyone at all is blameworthy for the recent outbreaks of Black anti-Semitism? After much confusion, the fog settles and the real perpetrator comes into Michaelson’s view: Donald Trump. Michaelson unveils the villain of the story as follows:

While conspiracy-mongering exists on the left and the right, there is no left-wing or African-American equivalent of President Trump, who has freely traded in anti-Semitic stereotypes, sometimes in a joking way. … Indeed, Trump’s contribution to our conspiracy-fevered culture is broader than specifically anti-Semitic conspiracies. For example, regarding the 2016 election alone, Trump has claimed, baselessly, that it was rigged (even though he won anyway), that millions of people voted illegally in it, that Ukraine (not Russia) interfered with it, and that there are still important email servers floating around out there that we have to get our hands on. When you play with fire like this, vulnerable populations get burned. Especially Jews.

The real reason for Black attacks on Jews is thus unveiled with crystal clarity. According to Michaelson, it all began when Donald Trump made some jokes that some Jews perceived to refer to “canards” about Jews and money. The situation was compounded further when Trump complained about Hillary Clinton keeping state business on a private email server. Unable to control themselves in light of Trump’s jokes, and rendered paranoid by talk of Ukrainian meddling and the security protocols of email servers, the Blacks of Brooklyn rose up in violence against the “vulnerable population” in their midst—the entirely innocent, passive and wealthy Hasidic landlords who owned their slums and debts. Right.

Some things never change: Covers of Commentary from 1963 and 2018.

The Material Reaction

It often pays to observe what Jews do rather than what they say. Steven Gold, writing on the Jewish response to growing Black anti-Semitism in 1940s Harlem, comments:

Being well organized, Jewish communal associations took note when Jewish merchants were accused of inappropriate behavior. When African-American journalists or activists complained about the exploitative behavior of ghetto merchants, Jewish spokesmen often resisted accepting responsibility and instead labeled accusers as anti-Semites for referring to the merchants’ religion. Contending that Jewish merchants treated Blacks no worse than other Whites did, they objected to being singled out.[5]

Resisting accepting responsibility for exploitative and inappropriate behavior has long been the favored option of Jews, even when confronted with quite extreme and violent manifestations of anti-Semitism. In fact, one of the obvious themes of Jewish history is the persistence of negative behaviors amidst ever-intensifying efforts to entrench within the host society, often via radically increased security and associated privileges (e.g. restricted freedoms for non-Jews, harsh penalties for anti-Semitism). A constant of Jewish history is that in general Jews do not change behavior that is seen negatively by non-Jews; rather, they find ways to continue to engage in the behavior but avoid the consequences—a facet of aggression as a background trait of Jewish behavior (p. 26ff). As such, one would expect that Black anti-Semitism will not significantly change patterns of Jewish behavior in Black areas, and that we will instead witness Jewish communities enjoying very high levels of police protection and the promotion of the idea that Jews are a vulnerable, passive, and special people entirely deserving of special treatment. Additionally, despite Jewish rhetoric blaming Black anti-Semitism on Whites, one would expect a high level of suspicion of Blacks among Jews, and subtle attempts by Jews to punish Blacks for their aggressions.

Security for Jews has already vastly increased since December 2019, with the Guardian reporting that police have stepped up patrols in “Borough Park, Midwood, Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Williamsburg, as well as establishing community-based neighborhood safety coalitions overseen by the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes. In addition, the city announced an increased NYPD presence at houses of worship and during local events. Six new surveillance towers and additional security cameras will be installed throughout the neighborhoods.” As well as increasing security on the ground, Jewish leaders last week successfully lobbied Attorney General William Barr to announce a “zero tolerance” policy for anti-Semitism at federal level. The new, harsher approach to crimes against Jews will get its first trial in the case of Tiffany Harris, a Brooklyn-based Black woman of dubious mental health who slapped three Jewish women and now, on the orders of Barr, will face federal hate crime charges which carry a maximum of 30 years in prison.

The issue of Jewish security has also called into question the putatively selfless Jewish interest in “social justice.” Having previously backed New York’s “no bail” criminal justice reforms, ostensibly intended to stop the injustice of those in poverty (mainly Blacks) spending more time in jail than those with the funds to bail their way out (mainly Whites), Jews are now rapidly turning on the policy change and demanding that “hate crime” exemptions be considered. In other words, Jews want subtle protections and subtle punishments. The Forward reports:

People are panicking, people feel frightened,” said Chaim Deutsch, a New York City councilman who represents a Brooklyn district with a large Hasidic population. “When they see someone like Tiffany Harris is released on bail, and got released only to go assault someone again, it sends the wrong message.” Deutsch is circulating an open letter to Cuomo criticizing the new criminal justice reforms. Simcha Eichenstein, a state assemblyman who also represents a Brooklyn district, plans to introduce legislation that would remove all hate crime charges from the list of crimes that judges cannot set bail for. Deutsch told the Forward he supports Eichenstein’s legislation. Concern for the repercussions of the bail reforms is growing among politicians. Cuomo has said he wants to reconsider the rules. Even progressives like Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the New York State Senate majority leader, has signaled her willingness to look at the rules again.

A policy change that has been the cause célèbre of liberal multiculturalists for years is thus forced into sharp revision solely because it has been deemed to negatively impact Jewish security.

This is the true Jewish reaction to Black anti-Semitism, devoid of rhetorical smoke and mirrors, and steeped in centuries of tradition: Deny Responsibility; Entrench in the Society; Continue and Intensify Existing Behaviors; Increase Privileges and Protections; Punish Opponents.

What a vicious and endless circle.

[1] Ronald Tadao Tsukashima, Darrel Montero, “The Contact Hypothesis: Social and Economic Contact and Generational Changes in the Study of Black Anti-Semitism,” Social Forces, Volume 55, Issue 1, September 1976, 149–165. Although more ambiguous in their representation of findings, see also, Gary T. Marx, Protest  and Prejudice: A Study of Belief in the Black Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1967) and Harold Quinley and Charles Glock, Antisemitism in America (New York: Free Press, 1979).

[2] Harold Quinley and Charles Glock, Antisemitism in America (New York: Free Press, 1979), 57.

[3] Ibid., 66.

[4] Ibid., 72.

[5] S. Gold, The Store in the Hood: A Century of Ethnic Business and Conflict (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 75.