Anti-Semitism

Background to the Magna Carta

/3 Comments/in , /by

The first point to bear in mind in that Magna Carta was a document produced by the nobles and presented to the monarch — in this case, King John. In this sense we should bear in mind the tensions between the nobles and the King over one chief issue — the role of Jewish usury in enabling land transfer from the nobility to the monarch. The relevant clauses are as follows:

 * (10) If anyone who has borrowed a sum of money from Jews dies before the debt has been repaid, his heir shall pay no interest on the debt for so long as he remains under age, irrespective of whom he holds his lands. If such a debt falls into the hands of the Crown, it will take nothing except the principal sum specified in the bond.

* (11) If a man dies owing money to Jews, his wife may have her dower and pay nothing towards the debt from it. If he leaves children that are under age, their needs may also be provided for on a scale appropriate to the size of his holding of lands. The debt is to be paid out of the residue, reserving the service due to his feudal lords. Debts owed to persons other than Jews are to be dealt with similarly.

So obviously these clauses weaken the ability of Jew and Crown to recoup either debt or interest on loans. It doesn’t prevent moneylending etc., but certainly we could agree that the position of Jew and King would be weakened. We must then ask, firstly, why was this necessary? And secondly, why did it suddenly disappear a year later in the 1216 charter? On the first point, as I state in my article on medieval Jewry, the relationship at this time during the Crown and the nobles was tense indeed, and the Jews were a very important factor in this tension. King John, whose actions had brought about the need for the Magna Carta, was profligate, incompetent, and utterly beholden to his Jews and their ability to provide him with seemingly unlimited funds for his misadventures on the Continent. Read more

Diversity in Outremont

/in , , /by

Here in Outremont, a borough of Montreal, things are heating up for yet another episode of “Purim” during which our thousands of Hassidic Jews have a bang-up party with adults getting totally smashed and very noisy, while the kids are supposed to go around to visit friends and relatives, all costumed in bizarre outfits, to have a great time. Except that walking seems to be out. Instead the little Hassids prefer buses that ferry everyone up and down all the streets where Hassids are concentrated. Is that a problem?

Well, there is a regulation in Outremont that prohibits big busses from going on residential streets, exceptions being school buses and mini buses. The Hassids want to use big buses on Purim. The borough says no, only mini buses.

But the back drop is a long history of acrimony between the Hassids and their mostly French Quebecois neighbors over complaints that the Hassids generally try to ignore municipal regulations they find inconvenient — building codes, parking regulations, etc. Their massive intercity buses stop illegally on residential streets, their diesel engines waking people at odd hours of the night. And they have a reputation for getting away with a lot thanks to municipal officials allegedly wanting to avoid confrontation. Read more

Spotting the Enemy

/123 Comments/in , /by

Could you spot a Jew in a crowd? And if so, what does it say about you? These questions, believe it or not, have been the subject of much hair-splitting in the academic study of nonverbal behaviour for the past seventy years. Although nonverbal behaviour (and psychology more generally) does not fall within my “expertise,” I stumbled upon this scholastic circus recently during an evening with some friends. As the night progressed, and not finding the subject of conversation among one group particularly interesting, I drifted towards a smaller knot of individuals who had assembled in front of a television of monstrous proportions. On screen was an inconsequential news item, but what drew my attention was the interviewee. It would be facile for me to name this individual, but I was struck by his appearance. I had neither heard of him, nor seen him previously. Nonetheless, I was struck with a certain sense of recognition. “A Jew,” I said. “He’s a Jew.”

Those nearby, some aghast and some smirking, turned to face me. A female acquaintance sitting nearest to me asked “How can you tell?,” while another nearby asked someone for the name of the interviewee (not, it appears, a typically Jewish name) and reached for his iPhone in an effort to verify my “psychic” supposition. A small number, I noted, began slowly moving away. I remained silent while the technophile consulted his phone, and only when he looked up, smiling and nodding, did I respond to the good lady beside me. I couldn’t then, and still can’t, articulate precisely what it was that led me to deduce that the interviewee was a Jew. The volume of the television was low, so I could neither hear his accent, nor pick up on any of the typically Jewish sound bites like “tolerance” or “persecution.” Having only recently sat in front of the television, I was entirely ignorant as to the content of the news item, and could see no indication as to this man’s profession. In terms of his bodily movements, the interviewee was not a wildly gesticulating remnant of the ghetto. In fact, he was almost perfectly still. To dismiss any further stereotypical notions, his nose looked perfectly European. Rather, it was something about the placement of his eyes, his pallid complexion, the texture of his hair, the shape of his forehead. He struck me as inescapably different. Some of my friends, not entirely satisfied with this explanation, joked that I must have known the man was Jewish. Others, evidently to some extent unsettled, asked quietly how it could be possible for someone to have such an acute awareness of the ethnic origin of someone in whom they themselves could see no visible difference from the White mean. My own curiosity aroused, I departed later that night into the cool evening air with more questions that I had answers. Read more

California Assembly Attempts to Stifle Reasonable Debate on Israel and Jewish Power

/191 Comments/in , /by

First Amendment protection of speech liberals don’t like is under siege. Leading the charge is Prof. Jeremy Waldron, whose book was ably dismantled by Jared Taylor (“Why we should ban ‘Hate Speech’“; see also Anthony Hilton’s “‘Hate’ Laws” on Waldron’s earlier work). It’s clear that the entire focus of Waldron’s ire is the hurt feelings (“dignity”) of the targets of speech. As both Taylor and Hilton point out, in Waldron’s world true statements about group characteristics would be subject to ban. The outrageous basis for this is the claim that any departure from liberal orthodoxy—e.g., that races have the same talents and abilities and that multiculturalism is just wonderful for everyone—are so obviously false that they can easily be banned without any loss to legitimate debate. Waldron claims that  “In fact, the fundamental debate about race is over—won; finished.” Race is “no longer a live issue.” Taylor summarizes Waldron’s position:

Diversity is glorious, the races are interchangeable, and any white who wants to live among other whites is a hatemonger. Professor Waldron would say that these ideas are now part of the “settled features” of our way of life, and so to crush dissent takes nothing away from the search for truth or legitimate debate.

Throughout the Western world, Jewish organizations are the main force in favor of this sort of legislation (“The Hate Crimes Prevention Bill: Why Do Jewish Organizations Support It?“). From the Jewish perspective, such legislation has several benefits, not the least of which is to ban honest, fact-based discussions of Jewish power and Israeli behavior. This can be seen in a recent resolution, adopted without debate by the California Assembly: House Resolution 35: Relative to Anti-Semitism. Introduced by two Jewish legislators, the bill artfully includes behaviors that would be illegal in any case (e.g., physical aggression against Jews) with a whole slew of items whose intention is to shut down open debate about Israeli behavior and Jewish power in America. The key section: Read more

The War on White Australia: A Case Study in the Culture of Critique, Part 2 of 5

/65 Comments/in , , , /by

The History of Judaism in Australia

Jews have been present in Australia since the beginning of European settlement. Around a dozen Jewish convicts came with the First Fleet in 1788. When the transportation of convicts to eastern Australia ended in 1853, around 800 of the 151,000 convicts to have arrived were of Jewish origin. The first free Jewish settlers arrived from Britain in 1809, and there were three subsequent waves of Jewish immigration to Australia between 1850 and 1930 – mainly German Jews arriving during the gold rushes, refugees from Tsarist Russia from 1880 to 1914, and Polish Jews after 1918. The numbers arriving with each of these waves were, however, comparatively small and Australian Jewry remained a tiny isolated outpost of world Jewry until the 1930s.[i]

Unlike in Britain where Jews were gradually emancipated through Parliamentary Acts in 1854, 1858 and 1866, in the Australian colonies they enjoyed full civil and political rights from the beginning: they acquired British nationality, voted at elections, held commissions in the local militia, were elected to municipal offices and were appointed justices of the peace.[ii] Jews were well integrated into the political and administrative structure of the colonies. Sir John Monash (1865-1931) became a general in the Australian army and was, according to Goldberg, “the only Jew in the modern era outside Israel (with the exception of Trotsky) to lead an army.”[iii]  Sir Isaac Isaacs (1855-1948) became Australia’s first native-born Governor-General.  In Australia under the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 these highly assimilated Anglo-Jews were regarded as “White,” whereas Jews of middle-eastern origin were regarded as Asian and therefore barred from entry.

Sir Isaac Isaacs

Jewish academic Jon Stratton points out that the high level of assimilation of Anglo-Australian Jewry was reflected in the relatively high levels of intermarriage through the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. In 1911, some 27 per cent of Jewish husbands in Australia had non-Jewish wives and 13 per cent of Jewish wives had non-Jewish husbands. In 1921 these figures had increased to 29 per cent and 16 per cent respectively. However, by the 1991 census there had been a decline to an overall rate of 10-15 per cent.[iv] Stratton notes that “the acceptance of intermarriage signifies a lack of racial difference. Jews were thus caught on the horns of a dilemma. If they were accepted as marriage partners by gentiles this was a crucial step in the process of national assimilation but, in marrying gentiles, they destroyed the endogamous basis of Jewish particularity.”[v] This is an acknowledgment of the essentially incompatibility of Judaism and Western culture in the tendency of individualistic Western cultures to break down Jewish cohesiveness.

The Ashkenazi Jews who migrated from central and eastern Europe between 1930 and 1950 created an identity crisis within the established Anglo-Jewish community. In their political radicalism, avowed Zionism and intense ethnocentrism, they differed greatly from the Anglo-Australian Jews. The new migrants had the effect of making the Anglo-Jews more visible as a group through their association with the new European Jews. They also provoked hostility from significant sections of the Australian community, who correctly sensed that the psychologically intense and politically radical newcomers posed a fundamental threat to their nation. Read more

Not just a Religion

/53 Comments/in , /by

Not just a Religion: The American psychologist Kevin B. MacDonald observes Judaism from the perspective of evolutionary psychology 

Thorsten Thomsen, editor of, Hier und Jetzt, reviews the German translation of Separation and Its Discontents

Translated by Tom Sunic

Absonderung und ihr Unbehagen. Auf dem Weg zu einer Evolutionären Theorie des Antisemitismus
Kevin MacDonald
Libergraphix, Gröditz 2011, €22.80

Introduction, by Tom Sunic

Much has been written and said in TOO about the self-constrained, self-contained and self-censored intellectual and cultural life in today’s Germany. In the modern Federal Republic of Germany, a state that officially brags about being “the freest of all states in Germany’s history,” even a minor politically incorrect joke can cause somebody a lot of legal troubles, something (as of now) inconceivable in the USA. In this sense the recent appearance of a classy, scholarly, right-wing nationalist quarterly in Germany, Hier und Jetzt, containing over 150 well-illustrated pages, feels like a breath of fresh air. What follows below is the review by Thorsten Thomsen of Prof. Kevin MacDonald’s book Separation and its Discontents in its recent German translation. Thomsen’s review of MacDonald’s book was published in # 18 of the Spring issue of the journal this year. Mr. Thomsen’s language and style, reproduced here in the English translation, may give a brief hint to an American reader about the overall political, intellectual and rhetorical climate in today’s Germany.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The psychologist and professor Kevin B. MacDonald from California State University has the reputation of being a “controversial” scientist in the USA. Controversial because his published research does not please certain influential circles and earns him therefore the sweeping label “unscientific.” Therefore, the high- flying American society cannot add up MacDonald to the circle of its friends, similar to a colleague of his, J. Philippe Rushton—also dubbed “controversial”—or the other authors who write in his journal The Occidental Quarterly, such as Tom Sunic and Alex Kurtagić, or the British psychologist and IQ researcher Richard Lynn. Read more

Joe Walsh and the 9/11 cover-up: Jewish power on display

/484 Comments/in , , /by

Congressman Joe Walsh has a sure-fire way to end the Palestinian/Israeli conflict: Palestinians move to Jordan, and those who don’t move reconcile themselves to permanent second-class status. As Robert Wright notes,

 Offhand, I don’t recall a member of Congress in my lifetime saying anything so grotesquely at odds with American ideals about ethnic relations and for that matter basic human rights. Will the Anti-Defamation League denounce Walsh? Will the American Jewish Committee? Will AIPAC have anything to say about the congressman whose strongly pro-Israel views its newsletter approvingly highlighted? If not, why not? (“Congressman endorses ethnic cleansing, apartheid for Palestinians“; The Atlantic)

Walsh’s proposal contravenes the entire zeitgeist of Jewish intellectual and political activism in the West. It dovetails nicely with Newt Gingrich’s statement during the Republican primaries that the Palestinians already have a state: Jordan. Except that Gingrich apparently would like the Palestinians to be expelled.

The mere fact that Walsh could propose such a thing is a telling sign of Jewish power. There is no other group in the entire world whose permanent subordination could be advocated by a US politician.

But there will be no outrage by Jewish activist organizations, even though they are a major support for utopian multiculturalism in the US and even though they routinely act as arbiter on statements related to Israel by US politicians. The Jabotinskyists are in charge in Israel, and, given Israeli demographic trends favoring the religious and secular ethnonationalists, there is no going back. The Israel Lobby will support whatever Israel does. Read more