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A review of Jewcentricity by Adam Garfinkle, Part 4 of 4: Islam

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Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

In Jewcentricity Garfinkle claims that “Muslim societies today are the site of the most virulent and widespread anti-Semitism on the planet.” He traces the source of this anti-Jewish sentiment back to the origins of the religion itself, and notes how it “inheres in the sacred narrative of Islam.” The reasons for this sentiment in Islam are akin to the reasons for it in Christianity — the desire to separate the religion from its foundational rootstock of Judaism. He notes that “just as Christianity had to find some way to separate, distinguish, and distance itself from its foundation in order to justify its claims of superiority, so did Islam.”[1]

Muslims accept a differing account of the stories from the Bible that describes the binding of Isaac on Mount Moriah, the future Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and Isaac inheriting Abraham’s covenant with God. According to the Quran, and as Muslims have always understood it, “it is not Isaac but Ismail who is bound (and of course saved), and the place is the Valley of Arafat, in Arabia, not Mount Moriah in the Land of Israel.” So while agreeing with much that is related in the Hebrew Bible, in-the-tradition Muslims argue that, with regard to the events just described, Jews have distorted the record and that “the Hebrew Bible’s account of this critical event, the “binding” of Abraham’s son, is a post-Mohammedan fabrication.”[2] Read more

A review of Jewcentricity by Adam Garfinkle, Part 3 of 4: The Israel Lobby

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Part 1
Part 2

It angers Garfinkle (doubtless due in large part to his role as speechwriter for Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice) that the influence exerted by the Israel Lobby over the foreign policy of the United States, and other Western nations, provides yet another focal point for “negative Jewcentricity.” Garfinkle’s discussion of this issue centers on the publication and reception of Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy in 2007. He notes how:

In recent years, this debate has revolved around the writings of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, notably a paper and then a book they wrote called The Israel Lobby. The authors argue in essence that U.S. foreign policy has been distorted, particularly in the Middle East but really on a global scale, by the exertions of Jews in the United States who have managed to bend the American national interest to that of Israel. The authors believe that the Israel Lobby — they always use a capital L for that word — has made U.S. foreign policy too interventionist, notably in causing the Iraq war, and that U.S. support for Israel is a main source of Islamic terrorism directed against the United States.[1]

Garfinkle freely engages in ad hominem attacks on Mearsheimer and Walt, implying that they wrote their book mainly out of desire for financial gain, rather than from a deeply felt conviction about the misdirection of American foreign policy under the influence of the Lobby. He claims “the authors parlayed the ruckus [over the influence of AIPAC] into the book, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007, for which the two reportedly received an advance of $750,000 to split between them.”[2] He likewise notes the furor over the book soon died down “despite the authors’ efforts to keep the buzz buzzing, the better to sell more books and promote their views.”[3]

As well as writing their book for mercenary reasons, Mearsheimer and Walt were also, Garfinkle contends, unqualified to offer their thoughts on American foreign policy because they are not “Middle East experts” and do not speak any Middle Eastern language. He writes:

Like many other Israel lobby critics before them, Mearsheimer and Walt are not themselves Middle East experts. Before their Israel Lobby essay and book, neither had written much on the region and anything at all for scholarly, expert audiences. They have never claimed to be regional experts, and rightly so, for neither seems to have studied, let alone mastered, any Middle Eastern language. The many factual errors they make illustrate their lack of familiarity with the basic literature on the subject. … [S]erious scholars are supposed to respect certain standards of logic and rules of evidence, and tenured faculty at prestigious institutions are presumed to be among those professionals.”[4]

Having engaged in some initial character assassination, Garfinkle finally addresses Mearsheimer and Walt’s thesis that American foreign policy has been unduly influenced by an Israel Lobby which has pushed the American government into wars not in the American national interest. Garfinkle claims this assumption is based on a “vast exaggeration” and claims The Israel Lobby is marred by a “fundamental illogic,” despite himself having, as previously noted, acknowledged in other parts of Jewcentricity the existence of a plethora of powerful and well-funded activist organizations “serving parochial Jewish ethnic interests that are simultaneously distinct from broader American interest but not related directly to religion.”[5] Read more

A Review of Jewcentricity by Adam Garfinkle — Part 2 of 4: Hollywood

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Part 1.

In his book Garfinkle laments the fact that “negative Jewcentricity” has often resulted from “exaggerated” claims that “Jews run Hollywood” and have subverted the traditional morality and social practices of the United States (and the broader West). He notes that:

The best way to get at the subject is perhaps to briefly review some irrefutable facts about the entertainment-business culture in the United States. The first of those facts is, as already suggested, that this culture has been and remains disproportionately, overwhelmingly, even astonishingly Jewish. This does not mean that Jews “run” Hollywood. No one runs Hollywood, and besides, “the Jews” are not a monolithic group that gathers secretly somewhere just off Santa Monica Boulevard to plot the moral downfall of America. “The Jews run Hollywood,” whether spoken by a Jew or a gentile, either in pride or anger, is a Jewcentric statement. It is a bald exaggeration.

But Jewish prominence in Hollywood is a fact that impresses even when it is not exaggerated. The heads of nearly every major Hollywood production studio from the beginning were Jewish, as were many of the directors and not a small number of the cinematographers and actors. Jews have been only slightly less prominent in the New York theater business for nearly a century, and in many aspects of popular music, as well.[1]  

So, according to Garfinkle, it is wrong to say that “Jews run Hollywood” despite the fact that Hollywood is “disproportionately, overwhelmingly, even astonishingly Jewish.” This is an argument that hinges on a semantic distinction of no persuasive power whatever.

When one finds arguments that are so ridiculous that even a child could see through them and finds them in a book published by an elite academic press,  it can only mean one thing: Garfinkle has plugged into a dominant religion-like mindset in which the causes of anti-Jewish attitudes are entirely beyond rational discussion.

Jews totally run Hollywood. If Jews did not control Hollywood, and, as leftists assert, it was run by corporations solely fixated on profits, we would see occasional unsympathetic portrayals of Jews and Judaism alongside the relentlessly unsympathetic portrayals of Whites (especially White men) and Christianity; we wouldn’t see blacklisting of overt Christians. The absence of such portrayals is definitive proof that Jews exercise editorial and creative control over Hollywood productions, and the consequences of this control have been incredibly damaging to the interests of the White people (and other groups). Read more

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