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Manufacturing a Hate Crime, Deflecting the Gaza Fallout

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Which Twitter message sounds more objectionable — a Jewish Member of Parliament threatening to punch an elderly Muslim woman in the throat, or a tweet to a female Jewish MP that read “You can always trust a Jew to show their true colours eventually.”?

Prosecutors in England have no doubt. In the first case no action was taken against the Jewish MP in question. He issued a full apology and that was the end of the matter.

But in the second case Garron Helm, a 21-year-old working class pro-White activist, has just been sent to prison for four weeks, for sending an “offensive, indecent or obscene message” to a Shadow Labour minister called Luciana Berger. In addition he was fined and expelled from college. An equally fulsome apology and payment of ab £80 “victim surcharge” to Ms. Berger did not help him.

An undeniable example of a double standard then, and one which highlights some growing trends. One is the use of social media by mainly leftist women and minority groups to create a platform for bogus victimisation claims — effectively a market for “hate crime hoaxes”.

But another is the way that Jewish political establishment have shrewdly integrated this into their strategy of ramping up scares that their community is under attack. With the UK Israel lobby somewhat at bay over the atrocities in Gaza, they have been working relentlessly to paint the picture of a Britain infested with rabid, psychotic anti-Semitism. Read more

Richard Spencer’s Ski Club Smackdown of Randy Scheuenemann

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Richard Spencer has been leading an interesting life lately. Banned in Budapest for organizing the National Policy Institute conference, he was deported. Now we read of an encounter last winter with Randy Scheunemann that started with a chance meeting on a ski lift. Scheunemann is familiar to TOO readers as someone who has made a lucrative career by getting on the neocon gravy train:

Just recently it became  known that Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s foreign policy adviser, was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the government of Georgia. Scheunemann was also President of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, sponsored by Bill Kristols’ Project for a New American Century. Kristol, like the other neocons, is eager for the US to stand up to Russia over Georgia: “Is it not true today, as it was in the 1920s and ’30s, that delay and irresolution on the part of the democracies simply invite future threats and graver dangers?” Ah, the old argumentum ad Hitlerum. (“The Neocons Versus Russia“)

And Scheunemann is well aware that to stay in the good graces of his masters and keep the money flowing he has to toe the neocon line on race. So one can only imagine his horror when he found himself sitting next to a certified advocate for people (like Scheunemann) of European descent. As we all know, the war on Whites is massively incentivized. Scheunemann is a good example of a White person who has benefited greatly by turning his back on his own people.

An article on their encounter appeared in the Daily Beast by gay activist James Kirchick  (“A Racist’s Crazy Ski Resort Smackdown“). Kirchick’s piece exudes hostility toward Spencer and everything he stands for. Read more

Horrific War, Calamitous Peace

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HellstormHellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944—1947
Thomas Goodrich
Sheridan, CO: Aberdeen Books, 2010.

Reviewed by Nelson Rosit

Introduction

I was flattered when asked to review Thomas Goodrich’s book Hellstorm. Though first published in 2010 it has recently come out in paperback and Kindle editions and deserves wider notice. That said, I knew this would not be an easy book to read and review.

Hellstorm chronicles the atrocities and deprivations visited upon Germany from 1944 to 1947. Though much of the story will be familiar to serious students of World War II, the author appears to have also included some new primary-source material. The bibliography shows that Goodrich has accessed most of the older major works in this field, making Hellstorm a well-researched compendium. So, if you have not read Bacque, Sajar, Keeling, et al. you will find them quoted and footnoted here.[1]

In addition to hundreds of footnotes the book contains two maps, always a plus, sixteen pages of photographs, and a useful bibliography and index. If fault can be found, it would be that Goodrich seems to have completed his research by 2000 so none of the more recent historiography has been included. Also, there are places in the narrative where the events described are not assigned a date and location making the chronology a bit unclear.

These are minor criticisms, however, because it is not simply as a piece of historiography that Hellstorm finds its power, but as a gut wrenching, heart rending story of human suffering and the malice that produced that misery. Read more

Bruce Shipman and the Idealized Image of Jews among Elite Protestants

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In his The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, Eric Kaufmann described liberal Protestantism as one of several liberal traditions in American history. Although it had its origins in the 19th century, by 1910 there arose a liberal Protestant elite committed to “universalist, humanitarian ethics.” Elite Protestants (but not the great mass of Protestant Americans) were opposed to immigration restriction in the 1920s and were at the vanguard of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. They embraced the dream of universal humanity, and they developed idealized images of Jews who, after World War II, had assumed the leadership of liberal causes in the U.S.

But, as Kaufmann notes, Anglo-America has lost its political power and has been deposed from its position as cultural trend setter. Some of the fallout from the demise of elite Protestants can be seen in Mark Oppenheimer’s Tablet interview of Bruce Shipman — the Episcopalian chaplain who ran afoul of the Israel Lobby (my take). The interesting part:

Oppenheimer is recounting a conversation he had with a leftist Jewish friend who is critical of Israel:

[Oppenheimer]: I said to him, “You spend so much time among anti-Zionists. How can you tell which ones, which minority, are anti-Semites?” And he said, “Well, that’s easy.” He said, “It’s the liberal Protestants. The Jews aren’t anti-Semitic, even if they’re called self-loathing. And the Muslims aren’t anti-Semitic, because they get us.” He said they understand everything about us, as we understand everything about them. He said it’s the well-meaning leftie Protestants. They profess a deep spiritual kinship with Jews, they’ve often lived in the Middle East, they’ve led tours there.

[Shipman]: He’s talking about me! [laughs]

Muslims and Jews understand each other; they see each other as implacable enemies and they understand each other’s fanaticism, their mutual hatred, and the impermeable barriers between their groups. As Christine Amanpour showed in God’s Warriors (see also here), religious fanaticism in Israel and among Muslims is the order of the day in the Middle East. Indeed, the social structure of society fragmented into mutually hostile groups is endemic to the area and likely biologically based (see here, xxv-xxxi). Neither expects any quarter. A fight to the death. Read more

Susan Sontag’s Jewish World

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A theme of The Culture of Critique is that Jewish intellectual movements created a fundamentally Jewish intellectual and social world whose members promoted each other and socialized with each other. People outside that world didn’t matter. They could be subject to mobbing-type attacks or simply ignored.

The New York Intellectuals spent their careers entirely within a Jewish social and intellectual milieu. When Rubenfeld (1997, 97) lists people [Clement] Greenberg invited to social occasions at his apartment in New York, the only gentile mentioned is artist William de Kooning. Revealingly, Michael Wrezin (1994, 33) refers to Dwight Macdonald, another Trotskyist contributor to [Partisan Review, the flagship journal of the New York Intellectuals], as “a distinguished goy among the Partisanskies.” Another non-Jew was writer James T. Farrell, but his diary records a virtually all-Jewish social milieu in which a large part of his life was spent in virtual non-stop social interaction with other New York Intellectuals (Cooney 1986, 248). Indeed, [Norman] Podhoretz (1967, 246–248) refers to the New York Intellectuals as a “family” who, when they attended a party, arrived at the same time and socialized among their ingroup. (CoC, Chapter 6, pp. 220-221)

A discussion in the Forward of a recent biography of Susan Sontag is a nice illustration of this phenomenon (Susan Sontag’s Not-So-Secret and Not-Always-So-Jewish History: Biographer Demonstrates Author’s Persistent Charms). 

Very soon, Sontag would draw inspiration from a series of Jewish mentors and friends, or as Schreiber puts it, the “dominant, exotic European-Jewish father figure to whom Sontag was attracted throughout her career.” These include the political philosopher and classicist Leo Strauss and the sociologist Philip Rieff with whom she studied at the University of Chicago— she married Rieff at age 17. At Harvard, Sontag was taught by another sociologist, Jacob Taubes; his wife Susan’s fascination with the French Jewish philosopher Simone Weil inspired one of Sontag’s ardent campaigns to get the American reading public to heed hitherto overlooked writers and thinkers. Her publicization of “the achievements of such authors as Walter Benjamin [of the Frankfurt School], Elias Canetti, Paul Goodman, and Leonid Tsypkin, who wrote the novel “Summer in Baden Baden,” are among Sontag’s most sympathetic labors.

While respectful of literary elders, Sontag had an ironic attitude toward a few “dominant, exotic European-Jewish father figures” such as French Jewish philosopher Jean Wahl, whom she met in Paris in 1958. The septuagenarian Wahl, who had escaped from Drancy internment camp during the Nazi occupation, was mocked by Sontag for having “three holes in his pants through which his underpants were visible.” By the time she moved to New York in 1959, her Jewish influences were her contemporaries, often gay writers including the novelist Alfred Chester, poet Richard Howard and film critic Elliott Stein. The last-mentioned apparently inspired Sontag to write her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” which, if necessarily of its time, still has value as a cultural artefact today.

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Jews, ‘Israelis’ and the Israel Lobby

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News from England conveys that Andrew Bridgen, a Member of Parliament for the so-called Conservative Party, has troubled those of the Hebrew persuasion by daring to mention that there is a link between the Jewish people and the State of Israel. During an exchange in the House of Commons on proposals to recognize a State of Palestine, Bridgen is alleged to have said:

Does my hon. Friend agree that, given that the political system of the world’s superpower and our great ally the United States is very susceptible to well-funded powerful lobbying groups and the power of the Jewish lobby in America, it falls to this country and to this House to be the good but critical friend that Israel needs, and this motion tonight just might lift that logjam on this very troubled area?

A report at Breitbart.com is illustrative of irrational and pathological responses to any acknowledgement that Jewish lobbying groups (of which the Israel Lobby is only one) are well-funded and highly influential. Despite the measured tone of Bridgen’s comments, Breitbart’s journalist described the statement as a “scathing, anti-Semitic attack on pro-Israel groups in the United States. … Mr Bridgen’s comments give fuel to the anti-Israel lobby in the UK, and echo statements made by a number of anti-Semites. According to the European Monitoring Centre’s definition on Anti-Semitism, equating the actions of the State of Israel with Jewish people as a race is classed as anti-Semitism.”

Bridgen’s sin, we can deduce, is deemed to be two-fold. The first element was that he dared to state that a Jewish lobby existed and that the government of the United States is “very susceptible” to its influence. Although this is a clear and demonstrable fact, it is off-limits for public discussion. His second sin was to dare to suggest that Britain should be a “critical” friend, and that Israel “needs” friends who will carefully point out when it has committed wrongs or errors — another perfectly reasonable statement, that is, unless you are Jewish in which case anyone who criticizes you or blames you for anything is an “anti-Semite.”

Israel’s actions are clearly blameworthy, and have cost it support. The Guardian reported that in the same debate, Sir Richard Ottaway, the Conservative chairman of the foreign affairs select committee, said the Netanyahu government’s recent appropriation of land in the Etzion Bloc area of the West Bank had cost Israel his support. He said he had long been a supporter of Israel but “I realize now Israel has slowly been drifting away from world public opinion. The annexation of the 950 acres of the West Bank just a few months ago has outraged me more than anything else in my political life. It has made me look a fool and that is something I deeply resent.” A significant problem is that there are many more fools, with a variety of motives, who will persist in their support for Israel. Read more

Diseased Defectors: UKIP, Islam and the Hand of the Board of Deputies

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UKIP has won a landslide victory in the south of England. It also came within just over 600 votes of winning a formerly safe Labour seat in the north. Both the Tories and Labour are running scared. They’re paying the price for ignoring public anger about immigration. The old accusation of “Racism!” isn’t working any more. And both parties may see MPs defecting to UKIP, frightened that they’ll lose their seats if they stay where they are.

After all, UKIP’s election victor, Douglas Carswell, is a defector from the Tories. But that’s what worries me. Carswell is a plague-bearer from a diseased party. He’s said this: “I have no difficulty with Britain as Britain is today.” Rape-gangs, riots, FGM, electoral fraud — Carswell is fine with all that.

He’s also declined to endorse what the UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, said about banning people with HIV from entry to Britain. This is an eminently sensible proposal with majority support, which is why it has been greeted with outrage by the liberal elite. Don’t White tax-payers realize how privileged they are to fund vibrant enrichers with hugely expensive diseases?

Apparently not. But Carswell won’t side with the White majority against the liberal elite.

Nor is he opposed to further immigration:

On the subject of immigration, let me make it absolutely clear; I’m not against immigration  … We should welcome those that want to come here to contribute. We need those with skills and drive. There’s hardly a hospital, GP surgery or supermarket in the country that could run without that skill and drive.

Apparently the native British are incompetent to run a modern society. The UK simply must have ever more immigrants or the whole society will fall apart. Read more