Anti-Semitism

Spotting the Enemy

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

Myth and the Russian Pogroms Part 3 – The Jewish Role

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We continue our series of essays examining the Russian Pogroms with this essay on the part played by Jews in provoking the disturbances. As stated in Part Two, one of the key problems with existing historiography on the pogroms (and ‘anti-Semitism’ generally) is that these narratives invariably argue that the plight of the Jews was the result of nothing more than irrational hatred. Jews adopt a meek and passive role in this narrative, having committed no wrong-doing other than being Jews. There is no sense of Jewish agency, and one is left with the impression that Jews historically have lacked the capacity to act in the world. In almost every single academic and popular history of the pogroms, the author blindly accepts, or willfully perpetuates, the basic premise that Jews had been hated in the Russian Empire for centuries, that this hatred was irrational and rootless, and that the outbreak of anti-Jewish riots late in the 19thcentury was a ‘knee-jerk’ emotional response to the assassination of the Tsar and some blood libel accusations.

This is of course far from the truth, but the prevalence of this ‘victim paradigm’ plays two significant roles. Firstly, Jewish historiography is saturated with allusions to the “unique” status of Jews, who have suffered a “unique” hatred at the hands of successive generations of Europeans. In essence, it is the notion that Jews stand alone in the world as the quintessential “blameless victim.” To allow for any sense of Jewish agency — any argument that Jews may have in some way contributed to anti-Jewish sentiment — is to harm the perpetuation of this paradigm. In this sense, the ‘victim paradigm’ also contributes heavily to the claim for Jewish uniqueness and, as Norman Finkelstein has pointed out, one can clearly see in many examples of Jewish historiography the tendency to focus not so much on the “suffering of Jews” but rather on the simple fact that “Jews suffered.”[1] As a result, the paradigm offers no place to non-Jewish suffering. Simply put, the ‘victim paradigm’ is a form of secular “chosenness.” This aspect of the narrative is seen, quite rightly, as a useful tool in the here and now. There is perhaps no race on earth which uses its history to justify its actions in the present quite like the Jewish people. From seeking reparations to establishing nation states, Jewish history is one of the foundation stones propping up Jewish international politics in the present. As such, Jewish history is carefully constructed and fiercely defended. The interplay between Jewish history and contemporary Jewish politics  is plain to see — I need only make reference to the terms “revisionist” and “denier” to conjure up images of puppet trials and prison cells.

Secondly, the omission of the Jewish contribution to the development of anti-Semitism (be it in a village setting or a national setting), leaves the spotlight burning all the more ferociously on the ‘aggressor.’ Within this context, the blameless victim is free to make the most ghastly accusations, basking in the assurance that his own role, and by extension his own character, is unimpeachable. The word of this untainted, unique, blameless victim is taken as fact — to doubt his account is to be in league with the ‘aggressor.’ In Part Two we explored the manner in which the RJC took full advantage of this construct to purvey appalling, and unfounded, atrocity stories. More generally, exaggerated tales of brutality by non-Jews are commonplace in Jewish literature and historiography, and go hand in hand with images of dove-like Jews. For example, Finkelstein has pointed to Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, a work now widely acknowledged as “the first major Holocaust hoax,” as an example of this “pornography of violence.”[2] The twin concepts of Jewish blamelessness and extreme Gentile brutality are inextricably bound up together, and supporters of one strand of the ‘victim paradigm’ are invariably supporters of the other. Take for example that high priest of Jewish chosenness, Elie Wiesel, who praised Kosinki’s pastiche of sadomasochistic fantasies as “written with deep sincerity and sensitivity.”[3]    Read more

Myth and the Russian Pogroms, Part 2: Inventing Atrocities

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Having grounded ourselves in the history of Russia’s Jewish Question, it is now time for us to turn our attention to the anti-Jewish riots of the 1880s. The following essay will first provide the reader with the standard narrative of these events advanced by Jewish contemporaries and the majority of Jewish historians — a narrative which has overwhelmingly prevailed in the public consciousness. The latter half of the essay will be devoted to dissecting one aspect of the Jewish narrative, and explaining how events really transpired. Other aspects of the Jewish narrative will be examined in later entries in this series. While a work like this can come in for heavy criticism from certain sections of the population who may denounce it as ‘revisionist,’ I can only say that ‘revisionism’ should be at the heart of every historical work. If we blindly accept the stories that are passed down to us, we are liable to fall victim to what amounts to little more than a glorified game of Chinese whispers. And, if we taboo the right of the historian to reinterpret history in light of new research and new discoveries, then we have become far removed from anything resembling true  scholarship.

The Jewish Narrative.

In 1881 the ‘Russo-Jewish Committee,’ (RJC) an arm of Britain’s Jewish elite, mass-produced a pamphlet entitled “The Persecution of the Jews in Russia,” and began disseminating it through the press, the churches, and numerous other channels. By 1899, it was embellished and published as a short book, and today digitized copies are freely available online.[1] By the early 20th century, the pamphlet had even spawned a four-page journal called Darkest Russia – A Weekly Record of the Struggle for Freedom, ensuring that the average British citizen did not go long without being reminded of the ‘horrors’ facing Russian Jews.[2] The fact that these publications were mass produced should provide an indication as to their purpose: It is clear that these publications represented one of the most ambitious propaganda campaign in Jewish history, and combined with similar efforts in the United States, they were aimed at gaining the attention of, and ‘educating,’ the Western nations and ensuring the primacy of the ‘Jewish side of the story.’ Implicit in this was not only a desire to provoke anti-Russian attitudes, but also copious amounts of sympathy for the victimized Jews — sympathy necessary to ensure that  mass Jewish chain migration to the West went on untroubled and unhindered by nativists. After all, wasn’t the bigoted nativist just a step removed from the rampaging Cossack? Read more