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Philip Weiss on AIPAC

Despite its general unwillingness to tread too far into Jewish issues (see this gem by Edmund Connelly), The American Conservative certainly has done itself proud with the publication ofPhilip Weiss’s account of the recent AIPAC convention.

The AIPAC convention is really a ritual of Jewish dominance in America. We read about the sheer political power able to command the presence of both presidential candidates and over half the Congress. The politicians truckle before their masters, competing to outdo each other with their promises and concern for Israel.  There are large banners featuring photos of wealthy AIPAC donors with their presumably non-Jewish trophy wives.

The clear message is: “We’ve got your politicians eating out of our hand. We have taken your most beautiful young women as wives (typically after having Jewish children with our non-trophy first wife). You will do what we want when it comes to anything related to Israel no matter what the cost to the U.S. Life is good.”

Power is not just having official Washington do one’s bidding. It’s also the ability to prevent public discussion of Jewish influence. There is almost no journalistic coverage of the event. “The reason seems obvious: the press would have to write openly about a forbidden subject, Jewish influence.”

Most egregiously, Weiss notes that the New York Times printed an article on a major Jewish fund raiser without mentioning that his main motivation is Zionism:

There was Donald Diamond, an Arizona real estate developer whom the New York Timesrecently profiled on the front page after he raised $250,000 for John McCain. The Times said nothing in its piece about Diamond’s Israel work. But that was all the banner was about. “The U.S.-Israel relationship is the single most important determinant of democracy in the world, and we must commit to securing it,” Diamond wrote. “It is so obvious to us that the Jewish community is a family and that we have to take care of each other.”

The reader of the New York Times article goes away thinking that Diamond is just a regular Republican kind of guy, when his main motivation is presumably to get McCain to hew to AIPAC’s line on Israel.

The result is that organized Jewry is able to have its cake and eat it too. All those politicians and the media elite are quite aware of Jewish influence. But they cannot mention it in public without suffering the consequences.

Of course, in the case of much of the media—including the NYT, the taboo against discussing Jewish influence is self-imposed. And for very good reason:  The NYT is itself a paradigm of Jewish influence.

Another example of the media blackout of AIPAC relates to the dual loyalty issue. AIPAC would probably not want it widely known that “when the national anthems are played, one cantor sings the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ but the ‘Hatikvah’ has two cantors belting it out, with the audience roaring along.”

Dual loyalty? What dual loyalty? If emotions are any indication (and they are), it’s pretty clear where their hearts lie. But don’t worry. The New York Times or, for that matter, Fox News or any other American media outlet would never think of publicizing such incidents.

As Weiss notes, “AIPAC and its roll call of politicians would say that American and Israeli interests are identical.” But how would they know? Everything we know about human psychology argues that their powerful emotional attraction to Israel would cloud their judgment and bias their thinking on anything related to Israel.

In addition to the dominance and power theme, the article is a primer on other aspects of Jewish psychology.

1.)  There’s a constant stream of Holocaust imagery designed to motivate the Jews, legitimize whatever Israel does to the Palestinians, and pull at the heartstrings of the goyim.

2.)  Tying in with the Holocaust imagery, there is a palpable sense of threat. The situation is dire—1939 all over again, and we’ve got to rally round the flag to avert total destruction. Sure, the wine is flowing and just about everyone at an AIPAC convention is rich; the goyish political and social elite are bowing and scraping before you. But disaster looms, so we have to batten down the hatches and rally the troops.

3.)  But it’s not all negative emotions. There is an unbounded love for Jews and all things Jewish. “Even a sharp critic like myself of what AIPAC is doing to American policy in the Middle East was frequently moved by the pure loving feeling that surrounds you at every moment.” Of course it’s not love for humanity as a whole (much less the Palestinians), but love for one’s tribe.

4.)  Stuff that’s okay to say among the tribe should not be publicized outside the ingroup. It’s okay to worry about whether Obama is sufficiently pro-Israel. But this sort of talk should be relegated to private conversations—exactly what Mearsheimer and Walt have found as a general characteristic of discussion of Israel. As they note, there’s far more public discussion of controversial aspects of Israel policy in Israel than in America.  And Jews who publically criticize Israel are ostracized by the Jewish community.

5.)  When someone like Obama is not an entirely known quantity in the Jewish community, then the group relies on trusted tribe members to plead his case. In this case, it’s Lee Rosenberg , a board member of AIPAC, whose main point was that Obama had “gotten to know” Benjamin Netenyahu, a stalwart on the Israeli right and well known as a strong supporter of colonizing Palestinian territory.

Besides Jewish psychology, we really have to wonder what’s going through the minds of the non-Jews in attendance. We can assume that the politicians are completely cynical and self-serving sociopaths who feel no twinges of guilt for truckling before their masters even though their masters are hardly subtle about where their loyalties lie. Who else but a sociopath could perform such a degrading ritual?

But what about the Christian evangelicals? Weiss describes one evangelical as follows: “Carrie said that at a synagogue she addressed, the first question came from a high-school girl who said, ‘But isn’t Israel an apartheid state?’”

That must cause a bit of cognitive dissonance. Let’s see. God wants the Jews to control all the land of Israel, including the West Bank, expel or otherwise dispose of the Palestinians (even the Christian ones), and erect an apartheid state where Jew and non-Jew live in separate worlds behind high barriers. And when all this comes about, then God will rapture the believers, the Jews will finally be converted, and the Second Coming will be at hand.

God works in mysterious ways.  Can these people really be that out of touch with reality? Sadly, the answer seems to be yes. But the good news is that, for a variety of reasons, their influence may be on the wane. Let’s hope so.

In the meantime, we should all be thankful to Philip Weiss for shedding a little more light on the Israel Lobby.

“Jews instinctively fear and feel threatened by nationalistic, particularistic societies” Part II

Earlier this year, in a column entitled Naming Neocons, I mentioned that The American Conservative publisher Taki Theodoracopulos had been replaced by Jewish businessman Ron Unz and wondered if that might change how the topic of Jews was discussed (or not discussed). After all, while Taki was publisher, featured writer Pat Buchanan had pointed to the heavily Jewish makeup of the neocons.

For instance, in his sizzling cover story Whose War?, he had written that the pre-planned attack on Iraq following 9/11 was instigated by a “neoconservative clique.” “We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars.”

Well, that essay was five years ago, and The American Conservative has mostly moved on to other topics. A recent article, however, prompted me to think about two things related to the above. First, having just last week written about how Jews instinctively fear and feel threatened by nationalistic, particularistic societies and seek to undermine those societies in a variety of ways, including revolutionary action, I couldn’t help but notice that Neil Clark’s June 16 essay in The American Conservative fell into the same category. Second, though the article was about European revolutionary Daniel “Red Dany” Cohn-Bendit, it failed to identify him as Jewish. 

Clark’s essay, “Children of ’68: de Gaulle restored order but the radicals won,” is an almost perfect description of the kind of society smashing Jew I had written about last week. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, born in France to German-Jewish parents who had fled Nazism in 1933, “was the antithesis of everything de Gaulle stood for. De Gaulle, the archetypal proud Frenchman, had been born into a deeply patriotic family. . . . De Gaulle loved France; Cohn-Bendit hated almost everything about it in 1968.”

Change the names of radicals and countries and you have something akin to what I wrote about last week. I showcased how prolific blogger Steve Sailer wrote about the actions of one Franca Eckert Coen, “an Italian Jew in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic city who lives in an apartment filled with Jewish art [who] was in charge of multicultural policy under the former mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni.”

Recall also that I quoted Sailer as saying about Coen’s efforts to deconstruct the unity of an ethnic Italian state: “Do you ever get the impression that Kevin MacDonald has secretly bought a controlling interest in the New York Times and is rewriting its articles to make them prove his theories correct?”

Now I have to wonder if MacDonald hasn’t invested heavily in The American Conservative as well.

Again, though Clark does not mention Cohn-Bendit’s real ethnicity in the article, it is obvious to anyone with the courage to read between the lines. Cohn-Bendit, then, is a character directly out of the pages of The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, MacDonald’s culminating volume in his trilogy on Jews.

For instance, Cohn-Bendit’s attempts to alter the sexual mores of society leapt out at me, for MacDonald had written at length on how Freud and his successors in the psychoanalytic movement, including Norman O. Brown, Wilhelm Reich, and Herbert Marcuse, had used attacks on gentile sexual restraint to undermine those societies. “The common thread of these writings is that if society could somehow rid itself of sexual repressions, human relations could be based on love and affection. This is an extremely naive and socially destructive viewpoint, given the current research in the field. Psychoanalytic assertions to the contrary were never any more than speculations in the service of waging a war on gentile culture.”

Now read what Clark writes about Cohn-Bendit’s activities after returning from France to Germany:

Meanwhile, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the man who had done so much to stir up discontent, moved on to new pastures. Back in Germany, he became involved in radical Green politics and ran a kindergarten in Frankfurt. His stated aim: to “radically transform” German mentalities. As in 1968, it started with sex. (Clark also notes that in his 1976 book, Cohn-Bendit “wrote of children opening his trouser zipper and tickling him and how he ‘caressed’ the children,” an admission which elicited accusations of pedophilia.)

Ah, Cohn-Bendit is ever the sexual transgressor. Back in 1960s’ France, he was a leader “in claims for more sexual freedom, with actions such as participating in the occupation of the girls’ premises, interrupting the speech of a minister who was inaugurating a swimming pool in order to demand free access to the girls’ dormitory. This contributed to attracting to him a lot of student supporters later to be called the March 22nd Movement, a group characterized by a mixture of Marxist, sexual and anarchist semantics.”

Further, Clark points to Cohn-Bendit’s recent efforts in the European Parliament to legalize drugs, which also echoes MacDonald’s claim that Jews have attempted to undo adaptive restrictions on behavior similar to those that European populations have imposed for centuries.

It is the reference to Cohn-Bendit’s efforts at freer immigration into Europe, however, that really catches my attention, for that is practically the current sine qua non of Jewish activism toward breaking up what many Jews view as nationalistic, particularistic societies. According to Wikipedia, in 1989 Cohn-Bendit became deputy mayor of Frankfurt, “in charge of multicultural affairs. Immigrants made up some 30% of the city at that time.” (Clark notes that “Red Dany’s enthusiasm for overriding national sovereignty is something he shares with his fellow soixante-huitard Bernard Kouchner, the current French foreign minister,” but Clark here also fails to identify Kouchner as half Jewish.)

Now reference this back to the female Coen I wrote about above: she was “in charge of multicultural policy under the former mayor of Rome.”

This is what Sailer quoted from a New York Times article about her activism to de-Italianize Italy:

The newspapers said the Chinese were against Christianity,” she said. “So we held a public event on the Campidoglio about Chinese culture and the New Year celebration, and now we have a Chinese parade each year.

“It was the same with the Sikhs,” she added. “We had a public event after 2001. We also organized tours of the Capitoline Museums for immigrants. Then we asked them to do something. The Poles, for example, had someone play Polish music at the museum.”

“Little things,” she called them. “They can overcome big fears. I saw all these immigrants become a little bit Italian citizens. Culture is crucial to give people here a chance to see that to be foreign is to bring a different ethnic life to the city, that diversity is a positive.”

This, of course, is MacDonald thesis in The Culture of Critique all over again. Chapter seven, for instance, “Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy,” mirrors such Jewish efforts to make America a less Christian, European-derived nation. (These are also useful links to MacDonald’s arguments on Jews and immigration: “Jewish involvement in influencing United States immigration policy, 1881-1965: A historical review. HTML Version Population and Environment, 19, 295-355, 1998. “Immigration and the Unmentionable Question of Ethnic Interests.” VDARE (www.vdare.com), October 27, 2004. And “Was the 1924 Immigration Cut-off ‘Racist’?VDARE (www.vdare.com), June 19, 2004.)

Of course, MacDonald is also fully conscious of Jewish efforts in other countries to dilute the “nationalistic, particularistic “ aspects of those societies as well. In a five-page appendix to his chapter on immigration, he writes that “Jewish organizations have pursued similar policies regarding immigration in other Western societies.” In addition to France and Germany, he also documents Jewish activism in the Anglosphere countries of England, Australia and Canada, despite the fact that in the latter two countries there was never “any popular sentiment to end the older European bias of immigration policy.”

MacDonald finishes by writing, “It seems fair to conclude that Jewish organizations have uniformly advocated high levels of immigration of all racial and ethnic groups into Western societies and have also advocated a multicultural model for these societies.”

Getting back to Clark’s essay in The American Conservative , we find that he closes on a depressing note:

Cohn-Bendit’s militant ideology has infected not only the Left, but the Right, too. John McCain’s advocacy of a more liberal immigration policy and his championing of a League of Democracies, with the right to intervene in the affairs of sovereign states the world over, owes more to Daniel Cohn-Bendit than it does to Russell Kirk.

Forty years ago, Red Dany lost a battle. But the sad truth is, he won the war.

See also Part I of this article.

Edmund Connelly is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.

Eye on the Media – Before They Can Walk: Displacement of White Images in Baby Books and Toys

One good way to shove whites off the stage of the society they built is by displacing their image.  It’s noticeable everywhere:  advertising, television, magazines, billboards, movies and other media.  As a new parent, I’ve come to notice how this is happening even in a child’s world.  At the local Barnes & Noble the other day, I noticed a book, “I Am a Black Child,” which unapologetically told black children that it’s wonderful to be black, your ancestors are kings and queens, and so on.  Imagine “I Am a White Child.”

At a 2-year-old’s birthday party recently, one present was a toy fire truck featuring a sole firefighter figure:  a black male.  This is especially tweaking in light of the fact that firefighters even today are a predominately white group, so much so that lawsuits have been filed claiming that black would-be firefighters are discriminated against.


But the message is clear for the child:   the normal course is for blacks to be firefighters.  Like “Dora the Explorer,” the Hispanic child adventure character, it is pure propaganda, meant to affirm other groups and exclude whites.

Another bizarre gift was a book featuring animals on the cover and a single example of “baby”:  again, a black figure.  Message:  Babies are black.  Black is normal.  Accept black.  Accept it before you can even walk.

For whites in America, raising children is hard enough, but made harder still by the exclusion and denigration of the books, toys and other products that fill the shelves of the baby store.  Maybe it’s time for explicitly white-themed books and toys for white children.  How could non-white groups possibly complain, with books like “I Am a Black Child” around?

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist.

Eye on the Media – Lines Overlooked by the Times

This Sunday’s Week in Review section fronts with a non-groundbreaking quote corral on the Times’ favorite issue of late: Will whites vote for Barack Obama?

Not if he’s too much of a black power fist-pumper, concludes black journalist Marcus Mabry, in what I would describe as a “revelation” fit to print only by the sliding standards of affirmative action. (Really? We couldn’t figure this out?)

Mabry, whose own background suggests he’s a sort of journalistic Obama himself, lazily phones around to the short list of race talkers: John McWhorter and Orlando Patterson (black conservative, black liberal, roughly), Jesse Jackson, Jr., academic Alan Wolfe and author Rick Perlstein. Also on the list is Pat Buchanan, who’s allowed to mention that if blacks are going to support Obama by 90 percent, it’s a little silly to cry racism when whites exhibit a pattern of voting for whites. My neighbors should be grateful that Buchanan, and not David Frum or Bill Kristol, was chosen to speak for the white point of view.

Here is Buchanan, by the way, schooling Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen on this very issue. Do take a moment to watch Cohen squirm.

While not boring us with insights any third-rate blogger could have given us months ago, Mabry wrongly suggests it’s a “prejudice” for whites to think blacks are less patriotic (a little hard not to think, with Rev. Jeremiah Wright damning America and Michelle Obama saying that only now that her husband is successful is she proud of America). Mabry also thinks its prejudicial to link blacks to crime (readers not familiar with the positions of white advocacy should consult Jared Taylor’s “The Color of Crime” report to see that this is not, in fact, counter-factual).

He concludes with that media favorite: Economics, not race, tells the real story.

Mabry’s central point—that whites won’t vote for a too-black candidate—isn’t necessarily wrong. But he stops short about why: Even in this age of near-maximum saturation of political correctness and egalitarian dogma, many whites simply balk at embracing blacks. To white advocates, of course, this is perfectly natural and easily explained: Blacks are a different race with markedly different behavior patterns, intelligence levels and value systems.

The premise that members of different races are fungible is completely mistaken. Only in the deepest reaches of their subconscious do whites still get this. And to my mind, their enthusiasm for Obama is only more evidence of this: It’s the exaggerated gesticulation of a white person forcing themselves to be, or appear, “non-racist.” TOO contributor Hereward Lindsay observes this superficial overfriendliness when a white person will grunt or merely nod to another white, but all of a sudden becomes animated and solicitous when speaking to a black.

In other words, the Obama ascension isn’t a sign to me that races have changed, or even that the human capacity for dealing with racial difference has changed: we have simply moved the furniture around.

There’s another point that the Times and much of the blogosphere has missed in the swoon over this “historic moment”. Obama is a politician. He is not the first black politician. Blacks, in fact, are pretty well suited to politics: they are often gregarious, good speakers, able to command loyalty and work the room. They are typically elected where blacks are concentrated. And indeed, Marion Barry, Wilson Goode, David Dinkins, Cory Booker, Ray Nagin and many others fill a volume like this.

This is not, I repeat, not, a sign that blacks have achieved more than they would have absent intelligence and behavior levels on parity with that of whites. It’s a sign that blacks are loyal to blacks, and have figured out (mostly) how to pull the lever at the local voting precinct (though apparently, requiring them to produce ID is “racist”). Clearly, Marion Barry’s “stewardship” of Washington, D.C. did nothing to improve crime rates or education problems in that heavily-black city — and he personally actually made them worse.

Asians are good counter-example: they are quieter and far less adept at politics, as their anemic numbers in those ranks demonstrate. But they fare better because they’re entrepreneurial, hard-working and math-smart.

So Obama’s securing the Democratic nomination is not, in fact, a sign that blacks have “progressed” to actual equality with whites, only that our media and minders have hustled a black man to the front of the line for their own purposes. President Obama will not erase inherent racial differences. He will not make it so that whites in Cambridge will invite black gang members into their midst. He will not make it so that blacks outscore whites on the LSAT. He will not make the Bronx a friendlier environment for whites (and might even make it more dangerous, with that extra boost of confidence for the swaggering black male).

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In fact, as others have noted, it might actually do some damage to the black cause, in so far as affirmative action starts to look still more ridiculous with a black man sitting in the White House (though I am confident that the anti-white network will manage this situation effectively, patiently explaining to credulous whites why they must accept this contradiction). One hopes for some white consciousness-raising, but every time I think to myself that some catastrophic event will “wake whites up,” it never does. Whites, despite their revealed internal instincts, are determined to consciously believe that “race is just a skin color,” and many will use the image of President Obama to sustain that illusion.

Our task as white advocates is to show that the reality on the ground is a far cry from black Camelot.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist.

Rachel Abramowitz on Mel Gibson: Are the Goyim making an empire of their own in Hollywood?

Rachel Abramowitz, an entertainment commentator for the LA Times, is of two minds regarding Mel Gibson. On the one hand, Gibson seems like a really nice guy. He helps other Hollywood types get over their addictions—most recently Britney Spears, but also Robert Downey Jr. and Courtney Love. And he very generous to charities, giving out huge sums to UCLA, Cedars Sinai Medical Center and Healing the Children without seeking any publicity for it. And even in Abramowitz’s experience, he has been “always friendly and unpretentious, a macho goofball.”

But then there’s that other side.  

Until “The Passion of the Christ,” few in showbiz had a problem with Mel, the person. He wasn’t a nightmare on two legs, and he worked happily and closely with gays and Jews. It’s just when he vocalized what was putatively in his heart — when he went ideological — that his public perception problems began. …

I saw him in 2004 during the media meltdown of “The Passion of the Christ.” Huddled in a swank hotel room, Gibson had aged considerably and appeared harried and even paranoid, which is a strange quality for a gazillionaire mega-star. “I’ve been subjected to religious persecution, persecution as an artist, persecution as an American, persecution as a man,” he told me, which was a little hard to take, given that he didn’t have a concentration camp number on his wrist or hadn’t just spent five years in a labor camp in Siberia.

Still, he was remarkably warm and seemed genuinely surprised when I told him how much “The Passion of the Christ” upset me. As a Jew, it made me feel like I had a target on my back. “I’m sorry if it’s caused you to feel that way, because you’re a friend of mine and I love you,” he said sincerely. “It completely tears my heart out when I see you like that.”

So Abramowitz finds Gibson a “nightmare on two legs” because he made a movie of his version of the crucifixion — a version that is fits squarely with the Gospel account and mainstream historical Christianity. The persecution Gibson endured for this “crime” can’t even be termed ‘persecution’; since that word is reserved for victims of real suffering such as the Holocaust survivors. And it doesn’t help to say that you are sorry that you caused such pain. What matters is that you offended Jewish sensibilities.

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Even for strongly identified Jews, to say that The Passion of Christ made her feel like she had a target on her back is a bit over the top. But we are so used to reading such individuals in the mainstream media that we hardly notice it when Abramowitz makes such a comment. And lest we forget, Charles Krauthammer termed The Passion of Christ a “blood libel” against Jews. And Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic wrote: “In its representation of its Jewish characters, The Passion of the Christ is without any doubt an anti-Semitic movie, and anybody who says otherwise knows nothing, or chooses to know nothing, about the visual history of anti-Semitism, in art and in film. What is so shocking about Gibson’s Jews is how unreconstructed they are in their stereotypical appearances and actions. These are not merely anti-Semitic images; these are classically anti-Semitic images.”

Abramowitz recounts the campaign to shun Gibson because of Passion as well as his comments on Jews after being arrested for DUI. Leading the campaign isAri Emanuel, described as a Hollywood “super agent” who called for“professionally shunning Mel Gibson and refusing to work with him, even if it means a sacrifice to their bottom line.”

Emanuel appears to have made good on his threat: According to Abramowitz, Gibson’s agent was forced to go with another talent agency.

Incidentally, Emanuel has many relatives in Israel, and his brother, CongressmanRahm Emanuel is a citizen of Israel and a Jewish patriot as well as a major force in the Democratic Party. His father was a member of Irgun, the Zionist terrorist group closely associated with the ethnonationalist Jabotinsky wing of Zionism, while his mother was a civil rights activist in the US.

Emanuel’s background thus epitomizes a very common Jewish stance: Deeply committed to an ethnonationalist vision of Israel and actively opposed to it anywhere else, especially on the part of whites.

The interesting thing is that despite the lingering hostility toward him, Gibson will soon be starring in his first film since 2002. (Passion, which he directed, came out in 2004, and his comments about Jews during his DUI arrest occurred in 2006.) The film is The Edge of Darkness, to be directed by Martin Campbell who most recently directed the James Bond film Casino Royale. The screenwriter is William Monahan who won an Oscar for writing The Departed, a film on Irish mobsters in Boston. And the movie is being bankrolled by independent financier Graham King.

What do these three have in common? Well, for one thing, they aren’t Jewish —and that may be the most important thing they have in common given the hostility toward Gibson that still simmers in Hollywood. Could it be that non-Jews are finally carving out an empire of their own in Tinsel Town? Certainly hiring Gibson is not the sort of thing that ingratiates one to the Hollywood power elite. But these guys don’t seem to be intimidated. Perhaps Gibson is assuming the persona of his Braveheart performance as William Wallace and his example is rubbing off on others. An omen of things to come?

“Hate” laws

Jeremy Waldron, in the latest NYRB, has reviewed what looks to be a valuable book by Anthony Lewis, Freedom for the thought that we hate: A biography of the First Amendment. However, Waldron ends his review with a rather insidious plea concerning the legal restriction of public pronouncements about other races and ethnies. Here’s what he says (p. 44) [emphasis added]:

Lewis’s settled position, I think, is that we do better to swallow hard and tolerate ‘the thought that we hate’ than open ourselves to the dangers of state regulation. I am not convinced. The case is certainly not clear on either side, and Lewis acknowledges that. But it is worth remembering a couple of final points.

First, the issue is not thought that we hate, as though defenders of hate speech laws want to get inside people’s minds. The issue is publication and the harm done to individuals and groups through the disfiguring of our social environment by visible, public, and semi-permanent announcements to the effect that in the opinion of one group in the community, perhaps the majority, members of another group are not worthy of equal citizenship. The old idea of group libel — as opposed to hateful thoughts or hateful conversation — makes this clear, and it is no accident that a number of European countries still use that term.

Well, the term “libel” is a good one. But when applied to the libeling of a private individual, whose reputation has supposedly been unjustly tarnished, the libeler has to have made a false statement. If the statement turns out to be true, it is not libel. “Reputation” is a critical feature of social relations. It can take a long time to establish a good one and an instant to lose it. But when an accusation is valid, the person’s reputation deserves to be affected. The same holds for “group libel” when one calls attention to group differences (e.g., blacks have lower IQ) or mentions the activity of ethnic organizations (e.g., the role of the organized Jewish community in ending immigration policies that favored the European majority in the U.S.).

A court punishes a libeler via due process in which both the falsity and the harmful nature of the statement must be demonstrated to the court’s satisfaction. But truth is a perfectly adequate defense. If the truth is harmful or distasteful to a group, that’s just too bad, just as is the case for an individual. Of course, when people are interacting in good faith, there is no reason for not conveying the truth diplomatically and politely.

One must also consider the fact that to be consistent with principle, any law must apply equally to all parties. Therefore harsh criticisms of ‘whites’, ‘white society’, and ‘Western civilization’ would also have to be examined as potential cases of ‘hate speech’. In that case, would the words of Rev. Wright constitute an offense? Or those of the late literary darling of NY intellectuals, Susan Sontag, who retracted her remark that the white race is the cancer of human history by saying that it slandered cancer patients? To do otherwise would be to violate neutrality, one of the fundamental principles of, dare one say it, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ jurisprudence?

Waldron continues:

Secondly, the issue is not just our learning to tolerate thought that we hate — we the First Amendment lawyers, for example. The harm that expressions of racial hatred do is harm in the first instance to the groups who are denounced or bestialized in pamphlets, billboards, talk radio, and blogs. It is not harm — if I can put it bluntly — to the white liberals who find the racist invective distasteful. Maybe we should admire some lawyer who says he hates what the racist says but defends to the death his right to say it, but this sort of intellectual resilience is not what’s at issue. The question is about the direct targets of the abuse. Can their lives be led, can their children be brought up, can their hopes be maintained and their worst fears dispelled, in a social environment polluted by these materials? Those are the concerns that need to be answered when we defend the use of the First Amendment to strike down laws prohibiting the publication of racial hatred.

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Of course people may be offended, deeply hurt even, when members of other branches of humanity look down on them because of behaviors which are indeed widespread within the targeted group. But traditional Mormons (LDS) and Muslims really do sanction polygamy and many of these polygamous families are indeed on welfare. And the organized Jewish community is indeed the main force influencing U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. We should be able to say these things even if those discussed are offended by such remarks.

This is something that Waldron and other racial apologists cannot accept and why his special pleading is insidious. Of course, Muslims who oppose polygamy and Jews who oppose the Israel lobby don’t deserve to be included as guilty of these actions. But they either have a moral imperative to control the perpetrators in their midst or, if that is not possible — as it usually is not — to dissociate themselves from them and their anti-social acts (as many members of many groups have).

Human cognitive systems are evolutionarily preprogrammed to attend to cues for danger and to avoid things that are disliked. Such stereotyping, when applied to other human groups, may not appeal to many people’s moral sense, but it is a form of generalization which is an invaluable and constant cognitive process for all humans — even when the stereotype does not apply to all members of the group.

Stereotypes are rules of thumb. When we are in an in-group, we tend to exaggerate the extent to which members of out-groups have negative traits. These perceptions are useful for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that they make us cautious in dealing with members of the out-group. If I know that young black men are much more likely than whites or Asians to be street criminals, I would be well advised to keep a good distance from a young black man even when a particular black is not a criminal. “Better safe than sorry” is a good mammalian rule. Like it or not, our evolutionary history has been dictated by an eye toward survival, not canonization.

And if the information that young black men are much more likelyto be street criminals is useful in everyday life, then we should be able to state it without incurring the wrath of the thought police — even if it hurts the feelings of blacks.

Typically lost sight of is the fact that hate is a complex emotional/motivational mechanism that evolved as part of a defense system. If it were totally absent, our ancestors wouldn’t have lasted long in the face of the predatory humans of other tribes, ethnies, or races. Why? Because they wouldn’t have been motivated to defend themselves. Remember all those propaganda images from WWII. They promoted hatred toward stereotyped enemies.

Of course today’s politically correct dogma has pathologized “hate”, presumably on the grounds that there is no good reason to have negative stereotypes of certain targets, especially other races and ethnies. To the extent that we can know anything in the social sciences, this is simply untrue.

Often the people complaining most about negative stereotypes are quite prone, themselves, to stereotyping when it suits their interest (e.g., blacks blaming white “racists” and “hate mongers” for their own especially high black crime rate). And it is doubtless true that people do sometimes make mistakes and falsely accuse others (e.g., certain extreme varieties of “Holocaust Denial”). But the solution to that is to educate, inform and explain.

If  a public verbal attack on a group turns out to be malicious accusation where the accuser cannot back up his accusation with facts, then the accuser  might well be held accountable for “group libel,” even if the punishment is nothing more than hostile public opinion. For example, the loss of one’s job as a broadcaster for saying blacks have superior athletic ability because of breeding practices is certainly substantial punishment — especially since the essential notion (that racial differences in talents can arise through differential breeding) is true.  To go beyond that and enlist laws and tribunals of the state to penalize such speech, as a form of “group libel”, would absolutely require following the logic of libel for individuals: prove that the defendant intended to defame a whole group and not just some individuals within it and that what the defendant said was false. This won’t be easy since most people who hold negative views of out-groups probably genuinely believe whatever they may have expressed publicly.

Thus, if “group libel” is so difficult to prove, don’t mess with the First Amendment! The best solution, if ethnic or racial groups cannot seem to resolve their hostile opinions of each other, is that they simply live separately where they can’t get on each other’s nerves. As Steve Sailer says, “It’s what separate countries are for.”

Those tempted to take the anti-hate speech arguments seriously, might want to reflect on the words of Heinrich Himmler, quoted by Lothrop Stoddard who interviewed Heinrich Himmler in Germany back in 1939 and asked “Is any political opposition allowed?”

“What a person thinks is none of our concern,” shot back Himmler quickly.  “But when he acts upon his thoughts, perhaps to the point of starting a conspiracy, then we take action.  We believe in extinguishing a fire while it is still small.  It saves trouble and averts much damage.

Sounds like Waldron’s view of the First Amendment.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to the editor and Travis Woodson for their suggestions on the article.

Anthony Hilton is Associate Professor of Psychology (Ret.) at Concordia University, Montréal, Québec, Canada.

Cooter Obama, George Obama: The Onion (Inadvertently?) Beats Real Life to the Punch

The satirical newspaper The Onion, once a college campus mainstay out of Madison, Wisconsin that in recent years has moved its headquarters to New York for a more national reach, has a habit of creating spoofs that are one step ahead of reality.

Last week, it ran a pretty funny piece on “Cooter Obama,” Obama’s embarrassing half-brother.

Cooter Obama welcomes his brother’s supporters with a jug of “white lightning” before whipping up a steaming vat of flat-possum stew.

Now, it’s being reported by the UK’s Telegraph that the Italian Vanity Fair has found a real — and probably embarrassing — half-brother.  George Obama lives in a hut in Kenya, doesn’t seem to have an identifiable job, lives on a dollar a month, and describes himself as “good with his fists.”

Did Onion writers know something the rest of us didn’t?  Probably not.  Modern life can be so predictably ridiculous that satire is probably a more accurate forecaster than serious pundit divinations (think of the Mike Judge movie, Idiocracy).

Although in this case, the real half-brother might have taken the Onion by surprise, because the supposed comedy premise of “Cooter Obama” is that such a figure would be restricted to whites.  Political correctness restrains us from imagining an embarrassing black or African half-brother.

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The Onion was once more daring on racial issues, but its rise to prominence has tempered that.  For instance, the fake columnist “Amber Richardson,” known for such declarations as “My baby don’t want no medicine,” was originally black.  Now, “Amber Richardson” is depicted as a white woman with a bandana on her head.  (Caution: Rough language.)

It’s not as funny.

The Onion’s still pretty funny (personal favorite headline:  “New Crispy Snack Cracker to Ease Crushing Pain of Modern Life“), but one wonders if it would be funnier still if it were more willing to poke all of America’s sacred cows.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist.