Anti-Semitism

A Review of “The Devil That Never Dies” by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Part 3

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 Part 1
Part 2

Jews and Communism

Goldhagen angrily declares that any claim that Jews “were responsible for the Russian Revolution and its predations” is a “calumny” and that: “If you associate Jews with communism, or worse, hold communism to be a Jewish invention and weapon, every time the theme, let alone the threat, of communism, Marxism, revolution, or the Soviet Union comes up, it also conjures, reinforces, even deepens thinking prejudicially about Jews and the animus against Jews in one’s country.”[1]

So any linkage made between Jews and communism is, for Goldhagen, a “calumny” despite the fact that mainstream Jewish historians readily confirm that Jews were vastly disproportionate participants in providing the ideological basis for, and the governance and administration of, the murderous communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe.  Bernhard Wasserman, professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Chicago, notes, for example, that “the European left was in large measure a Jewish creation. In Germany in the mid-nineteenth century Marx, Hess, and Lassalle, all three of Jewish origin, had founded and shaped the socialist movement.”[2] Further,  the Jewish historian Norman Cantor pointed out that “In the first half of the twentieth century, Marxist-Leninist communism ran like an electromagnetic lightning flash through Jewish societies from Moscow to Western Europe, the United States and Canada, gaining the lifelong adherence of brilliant, passionately dedicated Jewish men and women.’[3]

The prominent Jewish intellectual and writer Chaim Bermant observed that, “To many minds, at the beginning of this [twentieth] century, the very words radical and Jew were almost one, and many a left-wing thinker or politician was taken to be Jewish through the very fact of his radicalism.” He also observed that “When, after the chaos of World War I, revolutions finally erupted all over Europe, Jews were everywhere at the helm”[4] To take just one example, of the forty-nine commissars who governed Bela Kun’s short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, thirty-one were Jewish.[5] Read more

A Review of “The Devil That Never Dies” by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Part 2

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Part 1

“Antisemitism” as “The Real Devil that Christianity Spawned”

Rather than hostility toward Jews having its origins in group competition for resources, Goldhagen contends that “antisemitism” is “the real devil that Christianity spawned.”[1] He conveniently ignores the fact that antipathy to Jews was widespread throughout the pre-Christian civilizations of Egypt, Greece and Rome, and instead claims that “antisemitism”

began in ancient Israel during the time of Jesus and migrated shortly thereafter to Greece. There it was codified in the context of early Christians’ desires to appropriate the early Jewish religious and messianic tradition, really Judaism revamped, for themselves. In Greece the Gospels were written, at best based on a long chain of hearsay, not until fifty to one hundred years after Jesus’ death by people who never knew or saw Jesus or the events surrounding his life. Antisemitism then moved to and became entrenched in Rome, the center of the Western world, where Christianity and simultaneously antisemitism had its greatest conquest when Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity for himself and the Roman Empire in the early fourth century. As his empire spread to more European lands in particular, the secular and religious authorities brought the antisemitic gospel with them, which, after Rome’s fall (which did not see the Church fall), spread to all of Europe, so that during the Middle Ages antisemitism, together with Christianity, had solidified itself as the one pan-European belief system, about which different peoples, peoples of different classes and stations, different professions, and eventually even different and warring forms of Christianity could agree upon and coalesce. Then, with European and Christian colonization of much of the world, antisemitism spread farther.[2]

In addition to ignoring the extensive and often violent pre-Christian aversion to Jews, Goldhagen also makes no mention of the fact that Christianity, unlike Judaism, is a universalist creed which eventually led to Europeans being the first people in history to ban slavery for moral reasons. Instead, he maintains that the New Testament is an “antisemitic” and “eliminationist” tract:

The Christian bible is, whatever its subsidiary pronouncement to the contrary, at its heart an eliminationist document. A codification of eliminationist antisemitism against Jews. Their evangelical calls for Jews to follow Jesus aside, the Gospels so deprecate the Jew’s existing cultural core (namely the Jewish bible’s laws and codes), implicitly and explicitly calling for an end to this people as Jews, and so demonize Jews in the process for putatively being Jesus’ enemies and murderers, and so threaten them with violence and destruction, that it is hard to see this as anything but an eliminationist mindset, a blueprint for eliminationist politics, and, if only tacitly, a call to eliminationist action — and this is how it has been taken by Christians and others beholden to the foundational paradigm it grounded.[3]       

Goldhagen claims that the New Testament contains “four hundred fifty antisemitic verses just in the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, averaging more than two per page.”[4] Conveniently, he has nothing to say about the “eliminationist” mindset, politics and actions that are far more clearly evident in the Jewish Bible, and how this has shaped Jewish attitudes toward non-Jews. Read more

A Review of “The Devil That Never Dies” by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Part 1

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Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is best known for his 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Despite its flawed historiography, this polemical work attracted enormous media attention and established his reputation as a putative authority on “anti-Semitism” and the “Holocaust.” He was soon given a regular platform to peddle his extreme brand of Jewish apologetics in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, and other Jewish-controlled media organs around the world.

A former associate professor of political science and social studies at Harvard University, Goldhagen has since produced further books that morally indict Europeans for their inveterate “anti-Semitism” and supposedly enthusiastic participation in the “Holocaust.” These include A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (2002), and Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (2009). His latest offering is his 2013 book The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise of Global Antisemitism, published by a major commercial publisher and touted as “a groundbreaking — and terrifying — examination of the widespread resurgence of antisemitism in the twenty-first century.”

Goldhagen favors using the term “antisemitism” over the hyphenated “anti-Semitism” — doubtless because the latter implies the existence of a “Semitism” which could (and indeed does) provide the dialectical basis for “anti-Semitism.” Goldhagen, in this way, signals his rejection of the reality that hostility to Jews stems from conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews in a Darwinian world. The assertion by Jews of their ethnic interests (Semitism) inevitably leads to resentment from those whose interests are compromised as a result (so-called anti-Semitism). To admit this basic truth is to admit that non-Jews (including Europeans) have interests that are legitimate, and that the desire to resist those opposed to our interests is eminently rational.

For Goldhagen, however, Jewish behavior is irrelevant for understanding the hostility to Jews that has existed across nations and cultures for over two millennia. He observes that: “Antisemitism has moved people, societies, indeed civilizations for two thousand years, and has done so despite the other vast changes in the world and in these civilizations and societies — economic, scientific, technological, political, social, and cultural.”[1] Despite the persistent, and often intense, antagonism between Jews and non-Jews throughout much of recorded history, Goldhagen argues that “attributing antisemitism to a reasonable (if sometimes exaggerated) reaction against the Jews’ own conduct” is an example of “faulty thinking.”[2]  Read more

Jews Continue Pressure for Internet Censorship

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Back in March TOO came under sustained cyber-attack from the enemies of our people. This vital resource for truth was brought to a stand-still by a large number of bogus service requests, with Kevin MacDonald noting that one IP address in Israel “attempted to access the site 13,125 times within the span of three days.” Our mission of enlightenment and liberation is deeply loathed by those intent on bringing our race to its knees. The Occidental Observer is a truly unique site, and we can be sure that the commentary and research it continues to present is giving our enemies sleepless nights. I’m certain that TOO, and other sites sharing our goals and worldview, have a special place in the hateful hearts of the alien elite. They won’t stop until they have found a way to silence us. But cyber-attack is just one prong in this assault on truth and our right to self-determination. Another major frontline in the assault on our mission is the international legislative effort to permanently shut us down.

A few days ago the fifth biennial meeting of the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism convened in Israel. Run by the Israeli government, mainly its many-tentacled Foreign Ministry, the Global Forum makes a priority of fighting ‘cyber hate.’ A few days ago it issued statements recommending steps for international governments and major websites to radically restrict material critical of Jews and Israel. The Forum has also very cleverly presented the issue of restricting internet freedom as a moral imperative — our enemies are obviously playing to our weakness. A statement issued by the Forum on Thursday night read:

Given the pervasive, expansive and transnational nature of the internet and the viral nature of hate materials, counter-speech alone is not a sufficient response to cyber hate. The right to free expression does not require or obligate the internet industry to disseminate hate materials. They too are moral actors, free to pursue internet commerce in line with ethics, social responsibility, and a mutually agreed code of conduct.

The Forum should be seen as an exercise in the spread and influence of international Jewish power and activism. The number of representatives alone from various organizations totalled just over one thousand. That number also includes a number of non-Jewish representatives and delegates from governments under Jewish influence. The latest convention of the Forum, the largest of its kind in the world, included the Justice Ministers of Germany and Romania, the Education Minister of Bulgaria, the Mayor of Paris, and the Minister of State for Multiculturalism from Canada. More predictably, leaders from many of our most prominent opposition groups were in attendance, including the Anti-Defamation League; 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. Read more

MailOnline lies about anti-Semitism

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Power flows from victimhood but what do you do when there is not enough victimhood to go around?  You have to manufacture it wholesale. That is the problem with anti-Semitism — demand always exceeds supply. So a certain sleight of hand is needed to make up the shortfall. First you need a stunt to create the necessary conditions.  Then you need to employ deceit  in its presentation. Finally you will need a suitably compliant media vehicle.

Presto! A spanking  new victimhood narrative which looks like real journalism if you don’t examine it too closely. So it is with the new video produced by London’s MailOnline in association with a new group called the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism which has already been much criticised by it’s own community for its flawed use of statistics.

According to the MailOnline, “British journalist Jonathan Kalmus” decided to walk around streets in Manchester and Bradford wearing a Jewish ‘kippah’ (head cover) to see what reaction he got. This stunt, marked “Exclusive” as if it was real journalism, is not even a new idea. The article admits that is following on from a similar prank only a few weeks ago in Paris when an Israeli journalist carried out the same exercise in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings. Read more

Advance Ethnic Warfare. Chill Criticism: The Moral and Political Fraud of Anti-Semitic Theory

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Jewish gatekeepers are concerned. And for good reason. Anti-Semitism is once again ‘on the rise’.  Even new strains of anti-Semitism are threatening to break loose. This is where the scientific study of anti-Semitism comes in.

One scholar that’s devoted to this subject is Dr. Charles Ascher Small, founder and director of the New York based Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy (ISGAP).  ISGAP now has offices on college campuses in Canada, Europe and the US.  Recently, the Jerusalem Post interviewed Dr. Small who, not surprisingly, sees himself an expert on this subject. Small offered these provocative insights:

[Anti-Semitism] is inherently genocidal, because when the dominant way of perceiving reality was through the lens of religion, the Jews were the wrong religion and they were blinded by evil for not accepting the Christian notion of the messiah, so in order for the individual Jew to redeemed he or she had to accept the Christian version of the messiah.

Small, like virtually all of the world’s ‘experts’ on anti-Semitism (including the bizarre Dr. Theodore Isaac Rubin whose profundities were recently reviewed in TOO by Andrew Joyce), happens to be Jewish. Acknowledging that Muslims and atheists can also be ‘anti-Semitic’, Dr. Small nuances his analysis by saying that other groups mistakenly tar the Jews unfairly by viewing them through the lens of racial (impurity) or other xenophobic avenues.

‘”In contemporary times, says Dr. Small, “Israel, as the Jewish nation-state, has become a stand-in for the Jew in this regard.
“Now people in governments in the Western world, in the United States and Europe, say that for the world to be saved the stubborn Jew has to change. Not only to they have to change to protect their own society, but if only the stubborn Israelis would change, jihadism and radical Islam will dissipate.
The world will be saved.
And this is a very dangerous aspect of anti-Semitism that is irrational,” he asserted.’

Dr. Small has given the world a very concise and multi-purpose theory. It reveals a lot. Mostly, it reveals the self-serving mission of Jewish theories of Anti-Semitism. Dr.Small’s familiar storyline goes this way:

Jews are continuously persecuted but always blameless. This is because ‘anti-Semitism’ is a disease. And for murky reasons, Jews are the only target of this unique sickness. Key axioms baked into anti-Semitic theory include: (1) Jewish innocence, and (2) eternal and unjustified outside hostility which Small says is ‘irrational’.

How shall we explain this to the Palestinians? Read more

The Bizarre World of Dr Theodore Isaac Rubin

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We all have our guilty pleasures. One of mine is that I occasionally love reading the often crazy and convoluted theories of Jews who wrestle with the question: why have Jewish populations attracted so much animosity through the centuries? Whether the authors call it anti-Semitism, Judeophobia, Jew-hatred or any other label which is fashionable these days, the theories, abstractions, emotions, obfuscations and intellectual blindness in their works rarely fails to shock or amuse me. The productions of the psychoanalysts are among the most dependable for raising a chuckle. Clearing out a bookshelf recently, I found an old favorite tucked away and decided to give it one last read before consigning it to its rightful home — the trashcan. And before it began its fateful final journey, I took some notes in the hope of putting together an article through which I might share with you some of its choice pieces of dubious wisdom.

Although written in 2009, Ted Rubin’s Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind,[1] is in several respects a relic of a by-gone era in that it is a classic work of old-school Freudianism and psychoanalysis. Kevin MacDonald has noted in The Culture of Critique that:

One way in which psychoanalysis has served specific Jewish interests is the development of theories of anti-Semitism that bear the mantle of science by deemphasizing the importance of conflicts of interest between Jews and gentiles. Although these theories very greatly in detail — and, as typical of psychoanalytic theories generally, there is no way to empirically decide among them — within this body of theory anti-Semitism is viewed as a form of gentile psychopathology resulting from projections, repressions, and reaction formations stemming ultimately from a pathology-inducing society.[2]

Read more