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A Review of Jewcentricity by Adam Garfinkle — Part 1 of 4

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Adam Garfinkle is the founding editor of The American Interest, a bimonthly magazine focused on politics, culture, and international affairs. He served as speechwriter for secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice and has taught at John Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College, and Tel Aviv University. Garfinkle’s 2009 book, Jewcentricity: Why the Jews are praised, blamed, and used to explain just about everything is touted as an examination of “the various roles Jews are imagined to play on the world stage that they do not, in fact, actually play.”[1] It was published by Wiley, an elite, academic publisher. It is an excellent example of how books with little or no intellectual or scholarly merit are published by elite publishers if they contain positive portrayals of Jews.

Garfinkle’s basic thesis is that the ideas people have about Jews — both pro-Jewish and anti-Jewish — tend to be wildly exaggerated and often stray outside the bounds of rational thought. Jewcentricity is the author’s attempt to offer a reasoned corrective to this phenomenon and to set the record straight.

Jewcentricity has a four part structure. Garfinkle identifies and analyses the positive and negative “Jewcentricity” he sees manifested among Jews and non-Jews, highlighting, along the way, the various exaggerations that supposedly distort the truth about Jews and their interactions with others. These various exaggerations are said to bounce off and reinforce each other, with the author claiming that the “four forms of Jewcentricity across our two-by-two matrix need and feed one another.”[2]  While Jewcentricity is offered as a dispassionate survey of the interactions between Jews and non-Jews, it is, not surprisingly (given that Garfinkle is himself Jewish), centrally preoccupied with the evils of “anti-Semitism.” Read more

Who Is for Free Speech? The Ariel Toaff Case

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[youtube https://youtu.be/SpOC_vHkddA]

This article is about three things: Jewish attitudes on free speech, a book about the so-called “blood libels”, and how these ritual murders of which Jewish groups have been accused are linked to aversion for Jesus and Christians in Judaism.

The threads are all related. I’ll start from the third.

The above video, which I posted on my blog, among others attracted comments to the effect that it is not representative, publishing it is a biased choice, and the people in it are just a band of idiotic alcoholics. (In addition, Christians in Israel are treated wonderfully, have the same rights as Jews, and they all lived happily ever after.)

Those who make these claims have (or pretend to have) little knowledge of Jewish religion and Jewish history.

Because the people in the clip may as well have been drunk (or not), but what they say is due to much more than just alcohol. After all, as they say, in vino veritas, “in wine there is truth.”

The video shows images of 2012 Jewish attacks on a church and a monastery in Israel, with the background of a song from a group of Jews who gathered on Christmas Eve 2007, “to ‘celebrate’, in the Jewish way, the birth of Jesus.”

The signs defacing the church’s walls read “We will crucify you”, “Death to the Christians”, “Jesus is dead”, “Jesus son of Mary, the prostitute”, “Jesus the son of a whore”, “death to Christianity!” And on a car: “Jesus is now a corpse.”

The lyrics of the song repeatedly convey one of the messages written on the church’s walls: “Jesus is a bastard.”

In the same way as Islamic apologists attempt to portray Muslim terrorists, murderers and jihadists as betraying the true meaning of Islam, so Judaism apologists try to describe Jews who have attacked Christian buildings or gratuitously insulted Christian beliefs as having nothing to do with Judaic religion.

Both are wrong. Read more

Netanyahu election aftermath: Reaping the consequences of Israeli fanaticism

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In my 2007 review of The Israel Lobby I noted that

Mearsheimer and Walt try to see Israel as a normal state capable of making rational decisions, but the extremists are in charge and have been so at least since the 1967 War. Any attempt to make a meaningful withdrawal from the West Bank and Jerusalem and to allow a viable Palestinian state would produce a civil war among Israelis and likely provoke a strong response by the lobby on the side of the nonaccommodationists. The fate of the Oslo peace process, the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and the support by the lobby of the most radical elements within Israel certainly argue that there is little chance of a successful move in this direction.

As throughout Jewish history, it is the most committed members who determine the direction of the entire group. This is doubtless true of most groups, but it is especially the case with Jews where there is a long history of fanaticism. I am reminded of Christiane Amanpour’s depiction of Jewish fanatics in her excellent TV documentary, God’s Jewish Warriors. These West Bank settlers and Jewish activists are massively ethnocentric, and, unlike the propaganda put out by the lobby, they are not at all democratic. They live in a completely Jewish world where their every thought and perception is colored by their Jewish identity. Theirs is an apartheid world separated by high concrete walls from their Palestinian neighbors, where even tiny settlements are necessarily protected by the Israeli army. And at a time when Americans are constantly being encouraged by Jewish organizations like the ADL to be ever more tolerant of all kinds of diversity, these people are anything but tolerant. Calls for expropriation and expulsion of the Palestinians are commonplace among them. Israel has created a classic Middle Eastern segmented society in which different groups live in an ingroup/outgroup world, completely isolated from each other.

And  since the fanatics are the ones having the children, this situation will become more extreme with time.

Which is why I was unsurprised by the results of the Israeli election. A Labor government would have been a sign that the most extreme elements were not in charge and would have been heartening news to the Obama administration eager to make a deal with Iran.

But this time Netanyahu may have gone too far. His speech to the U.S. Congress and open dispute with the Obama administration were incredibly aggressive moves, bound to further sour relations with the Obama administration. In this context, some pre-election rhetoric by Netanyahu has provided an opening for some real changes in policy. In the desperate lead up to the election, with polls indicating that he would lose, he pulled out all the stops, stating that there would never be a Palestinian state while he was prime minister. Read more

Even White Racists have Freedom of Speech — but only if they use it.

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A week ago there was news about the University of Oklahoma’s chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, because of a video showing members of the fraternity singing a chant that was derogatory of Blacks. This occurred off-campus, on a chartered bus. An anonymous person made a video-recording of the chant and gave it to Unheard, a Black campus organization (formed in response to the recent sensationalist propaganda about events in Ferguson, Missouri), predictably provoking a ruckus, since the agitation over events in Ferguson and the consequent Black yearning for vengeance have yet to subside. Unheard happens to be favored by the university’s president, former U.S. Senator David L. Boren, whose legislative record includes initiatives unfavorable to White people.

Early reporting indicated that Boren was not certain that students involved in the racist chant could legally be expelled from the university, but advisors were suggesting that it might be possible under the Civil Rights Act. Boren did announce on 10 March the expulsion of Levi Pettit and Parker Rice, the two students who led the chant, using verbiage carefully crafted to resonate with the Civil Rights Act (alleging that the two had created a “hostile educational environment”), but the general consensus seems to be that under the Constitution of the United States what Boren has done is not legal at all. Read more

Steve Sailer on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement

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Steve Sailer has produced an interesting piece over at Takimag, with his thoughts on the growth (or lack thereof) of the BDS movement on US college campuses. The overly-optimistic title of the article can be overlooked in favor of what remains — a very astute summation of the state of this decade-old movement in America. Given that BDS is ostensibly built along the same lines and moral foundations as the agitation against White rule in South Africa, Sailer questions why BDS “hasn’t yet become respectable in the United States.” His answer is that as long as Whites clung to the top rung of America’s demographic ladder, Jews enjoyed power and control, as victim and outsider, over the Israel-Palestine discourse. They could also present themselves to the gullible and venal members of the White “pro-Isruhl” crowd as the apple of Jehovah’s eye, with every moral and divinely sanctioned entitlement to their ‘birth right.’ With the grip of the White demographic slipping (or lost entirely in the case of many Californian college campuses), the rainbow coalition of minorities, religions, identities and perversions now challenges organized Jewry for the gold medal in the farcical victimhood Olympics which comprises modern political culture.

Sailer points out that in the quest to crush ‘privilege,’ the new coalition has not failed to note the “privileges of the single richest and most influential group in America: Jews.” In response, Jewish journalists like Jonathan Chait and Jamie Kirchick have become increasingly alarmed over “whether the Obama Coalition’s identity politics jihad against white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, and now even cisgender privilege” will eventually turn against them. One of the ways in which this had become manifest is in relation to the BDS movement on California’s college campuses. Sailer demonstrates that BDS has been least successful on those campuses which retain the highest percentage of White students (e.g. UC Santa Barbara which has a 36% White student body — the whitest college to table a BDS resolution). But among those colleges burgeoning with the new ethnic demographic, Jewish influence and arguments hold little sway: “So far, BDS resolutions have been passed by eight student governments, Loyola of Chicago and seven California schools: private Stanford and a half dozen public University of California campuses, including Berkeley and UCLA, both of which are of symbolic importance.” Read more

Jihadi John

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The unmasking of the internet executioner known as Jihadi John has driven the British chattering classes into a frenzy of hand-wringing. What strange forces can have turned an ordinary London schoolboy into a depraved monster able to decapitate another human being?

His puzzled schoolteachers, parents, Mosque and the media have all wrestled  with various possible explanations. Apparently Mohammed Emwazi suffered bullying at school. His former head teacher said he was a misfit loner. Apparently he was never the same after hitting his head on a goalpost during a game of soccer.

A similar mystery surrounds the three east London schoolgirls who have taken it upon themselves to leave school and jet off to Syria to become “brides of ISIS”. The Spectator said that it must have been an online crush similar to a schoolgirl infatuation with Justin Bieber. Apparently 60 other Muslim girls have made the same journey.

All of these “British” school children were brought up on welfare in free housing, enjoyed free health care and free education in one of the most tolerant societies in the world. What on earth caused them to act in this way? Read more

Martha Stewart and the Ferguson Lynch Mob

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The New York Times states:

They were four words that became the national rallying cry of a new civil rights movement: “Hands up, don’t shoot.”

The slogan was embraced by members of Congress, recording artists and football players with the St. Louis Rams.

It inspired posters and songs, T-shirts and new advocacy groups, a powerful distillation of simmering anger over police violence and racial injustice in Ferguson and beyond.

But in its final report this week clearing the police officer, Darren Wilson, of civil rights violations in Mr. Brown’s death, the Justice Department said it may not have happened that way. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. cast doubt on the “hands up” account even as he described Ferguson as having a racially biased police department and justice system. (March 4, 2015: Ferguson Report Puts ‘Hands Up’ To Reality Test)

It is worth correcting from the get-go the statement that “it may not have happened that way.”

The spin doctors of the New York Times are clever but cleverness doesn’t make it so.  It did not happen that way. It isn’t a case that it may not have happened that way.

As journalists, Mr. & Ms. New York Times reporters, let’s try to speak plainly and in accordance with the facts.  It may be painful for the Times and its journalists with their agendas so firmly in place.  But it is the right thing to do.

The Times goes on to blandly quote the co-chair of and outfit calling itself “The Don’t Shoot Coalition” a Black person named Michael T. McPhearson:

“To me, he had his hands up,” said Michael T. McPhearson, co-chairman of the Don’t Shoot Coalition in St. Louis. “It doesn’t change it for me.”

Isn’t that nice?  The facts don’t matter to Mr. McPhearson.  He has the right to choose his own facts:  “to me” he had his hands up…” Read more