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I agree with Adelson: Democracy is not a Jewish value (or a reality in the U.S.)

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The meeting of Jewish oligarchs Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson at the Israeli-American Council has attracted considerable comment. Obviously, it’s another illustration of the power of a minuscule number of very wealthy individuals to influence the political process. And since Adelson is partial to Republicans to the tune of $150 million in the last election (more to come) while Saban donates to the Democrats (substantially less [after all, he’s only worth 3.4 billion], but certainly not to be ignored), both parties are quite prone to doing their bidding. The Israel Lobby is nothing if not bi-partisan.

As Justin Raimondo noted, “Oh, it was quite a party, as the two philanthropists did their best to conform to every caricature out of the anti-Semites’ playbook” (“Oligarchs for Israel“).

(Isn’t it amazing that if one listens to activists on the left, such as MoveOn.org [originally funded by Jewish megadonors of the left, George Soros, Peter B. Lewis, and Linda Pritzker], one would think that the only wealthy individuals involved in U.S. politics are the safely non-Jewish Koch brothers?)

In the paranoid world of pro-Israel fanatics, even the New York Times and Washington Post are insufficiently pro-Israel. Scott McConnell in The American Conservative:

The two naturally agreed that the American media was terribly biased against Israel, except for maybe Fox News, and they discussed whether they could buy the Washington Post or New York Times to correct the problem. This aspect of the performance was comic, the lament, commonplace enough among neoconservatives, that the American press is biased against Israel. Consider that the Washington Post runs (the Wall Street Journal aside), the most neoconservative major editorial page in the country, and it’s been a long time since someone that one can even conceive of being slightly sympathetic to those subjected to Israeli occupation (perhaps the late Mary McGrory?) has written there. TheTimes is more diverse and makes occasionally sincere efforts at both balance and objective journalism, but if one looks at the roster of Times-men who regularly cover Israel, one could conclude that having a child serving in the IDF is a job requirement.

Sheldon and Haim then amused themselves and their audience by talking about taking over the Times and Washington Post.

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“The Wolf of Wall Street” — the Book

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How many times have you heard about financial crimes and frauds perpetrated by people who happen to be Jewish? How many times have you heard about the association of Jews and Wall Street? For most TOO readers, these themes should be amply familiar.

Now let’s consider yet another instance of the above. Just before the economic meltdown of 2008, an important book about Wall Street appeared and became a bestseller. It was stockbroker Jordan Belfort’s first book about his crimes called The Wolf of Wall Street and was published in 2007 by major publisher Bantam Dell, a division of Random House.

Let’s allow an official overview to set up the tale:

By day he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night he spent it as fast as he could, on drugs, sex, and international globe-trotting. From the binge that sank a 170 foot motor yacht, crashed a Gulfstream jet, and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab, to the wife and kids who waited for him at home and the fast-talking, hard-partying young stockbrokers who called him king and did his bidding, here, in his own inimitable words, is the story of the ill-fated genius they called … “Wolf of Wall Street.” In the 1990s Jordan Belfort, former kingpin of the notorious investment firm Stratton Oakmont, became one of the most infamous names in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock-chopper who led his merry mob on a wild ride out of the canyons of Wall Street and into a massive office on Long Island. Now, in this tell-all autobiography, Belfort narrates a story of greed, power, and excess no one could invent — the extraordinary story of an ordinary guy who went from hustling Italian ices at sixteen to making hundreds of millions. Until it all came crashing down.

Refreshingly, throughout the book Belfort openly and explicitly notes his marked Jewish identity and that of all of his close co-conspirators. It amounts to a fascinating look at the inner workings of a corrupt Jewish financial organization — and Belfort succeeds magnificently in narrating the rollicking affair. No wonder one newspaper called it “A cross between Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Scorsese’s GoodFellas. The comparison to Wolfe is apt, but rather than Scorsese’s GoodFellas, Belfort’s tale should be compared to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas because it shares the same non-stop extreme adventure and use of mind-altering drugs. Read more

Race and the 2014 election

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Race again loomed large in the 2014 elections. The CNN exit polls showed that Whites of all age groups, both sexes, and all social classes voted Republican. White males: 64%-33%: White women: 56%-42% (likely much higher for married White women if past trends held); Whites 18–29: 54-43%. Whites without a college education voted 61–31 for Republican House candidates. (These are underestimates because voters counted as White include groups, such as Jews and Middle Easterners, who neither identify or vote like Whites.)

As Thomas Edsall notes,

It has not escaped the notice of political analysts that 72 percent of whites without college degrees — a rough proxy for what we used to call the white working class — believe that “the U.S. economic system generally favors the wealthy.” Or that on Nov. 4, these same men and women voted for Republican House candidates by a 61-31 margin.

Similarly, the overwhelmingly white electorates of Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota voted decisively in referendums to raise the minimum wage while simultaneously voting for Republicans, whose party has adamantly rejected legislation to raise the minimum wage. (“The Demise of the White Democratic Voter”)

Whites are deserting the Democratic Party, but that doesn’t mean they advocate plutocratic policies traditionally associated with Republicans. They are voting Republican even though Democrats are generally seen as the party of the non-wealthy and are far more likely to advocate policies like minimum wage hikes.

And Obamacare. The problem with Obamacare from the standpoint of Whites is that they are well aware that a disproportionate share of the costs will be borne by people like them, while a disproportionate share of the benefits will go to poor non-Whites. Edsall again:

Obamacare shifts health care benefits and tax burdens from upper-income Americans to lower-income Americans, and from largely white constituencies to beneficiaries disproportionately made up of racial and ethnic minorities.

So once again we come up against biological realities — that people are less likely to contribute to public goods that will disproportionately benefit people unlike themselves. This is a well-known cost of multiculturalism. Why should White voters want a law they know will benefit non-Whites far more than themselves? In fact, immigrants are major beneficiaries of Obamacare, accounting for 42% of the growth of Medicaid since 2011.

Race is never part of the explicit rhetoric of White opposition to policies that disproportionately benefit non-Whites — it tends to be expressed as opposition to the federal government, the welfare state, taxation, and the desire for better schools, or even perceived moral issues like abortion and homosexuality. But at the implicit level, the aversion to contributing to public goods for non-Whites is the overriding motivation for opposition to Obamacare. When Republicans shut down the US government over Obamacare, it was widely perceived as motivated by Whites concerned that poor non-Whites would disproportionately benefit from the law, while it would increase taxes on Whites. Read more

Eye on Hollywood: Reel Bad Anti-Semites

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Originally posted on August 20, 2008.

In my last column, I wrote that the Hollywood depiction of the Holocaust “was the result of a complex narrative full of sudden stops, starts and dead ends.” For instance, immediately after the war, Hollywood was far more interested in something closer to home for American Jews than the Holocaust: anti-Semitism.

This was addressed forcefully in 1947, when there was obvious coordination in addressing barriers against Jews moving into the American mainstream. First, Laura Hobson, daughter of two Jewish socialist immigrants, wrote “the runaway bestseller” Gentleman’s Agreement, a novel about social anti-Semitism. Not surprisingly, the Jewish-owned New York Times featured a book review which called it “required reading for every thoughtful citizen in this perilous century.”

Within months, a polished film version starring Gregory Peck was released (this film too failed to mention the Holocaust). In addition to taking home Best Picture for that year, it also won Best Supporting Actress and Best Director, along with a slew of nominations. The same year also saw Crossfire, another film about anti-Semitism. 

For a variety of reasons, the theme of anti-Semitism largely disappeared from movie screens after this, emerging only sporadically in films of the late sixties. When it did reappear, it was as a tangential subplot, though still obvious and important. For instance, Woody Allen inserted such a scene into Annie Hall (1977), which a film critic described thus:

The difference between Annie’s background and Alvy’s upbringing is brought into sharp relief in this short but memorable scene juxtaposing a dinner with Annie’s family and a meal chez Singer. The split-screen scene illustrates the huge gulf between the two cultures, both of which are ridiculed. Allen’s comic condemnation of both exaggerated extremes pits the stifling, superficial Halls, who quietly speak about swap meets as they pick at their skimpy meal and sip cocktails, against the vulgar, emotional Singers, who gobble a vast dinner as they argue loudly. Although Alvy may be embarrassed by his uncouth family, he shows even greater disdain of the cold, repressed, bigoted Hall clan. Annie’s brother Duane, played by Christopher Walken, is actually psychotic, and a mean-faced Grammy Hall is blithely described by Annie as “a real Jew hater.”

Then in the 1982 hit Porky’s there is a subplot that has newcomer Brian Schwartz bullied and challenged to a fight by Tim, one of the Porky’s gang. Losing the fight to a Jew, Tim is berated by his father, Hollywood’s stock Southern redneck, who himself picks a fight with teenage Brian. Ashamed, Tim intervenes and beats up his own father, thereby becoming Brian’s friend. Asked to explain his physical prowess, Brian says, “When you’re Jewish, it’s either fight or take shit.” Read more

Eye on Hollywood: Reel Bad WASPs

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Originally posted on August 7, 2008

Today the leisure suit of the mid-to-late 1970s is rightly ridiculed. Many things were askew in those years of economic “malaise” and high interest rates. Most importantly for whites, the 1960s cultural revolution had settled into a prolonged assault on the cultural image of whites.

Needless to say, Hollywood was an enthusiastic participant in this assault. An interesting example is the movie Caddyshack, starring Chevy Chase. Caddyshack is doubtless a trivial movie, but it has been heralded as one of the funniest movies of all time, and it continues to be shown endlessly in TV reruns.

Although the point is presumably lost on the vast majority of its audience, the real narrative of the movie is the Jew-as-outsider “comically” assaulting the WASP-as-insider. The setting of Caddyshack is apt, for the private country club represented one of the last bastions of WASP privilege.

Jewish resentment over WASP snobbery toward upwardly mobile Jews continues to rankle among Jews. For example, Jacob Heilbrunn emphasizes this resentment as a key motivator for the neocons who have been so influential in the current Bush administration. The early neocons attempted “to overturn the old order in America …. There were the fancy clubs, the legal and financial firms that saw Jews as interlopers who would soil their proud escutcheons and were to be kept at bay. Smarting with unsurpassed social resentment, the young Jews viewed themselves as liberators, proclaiming a new faith” (p. 28). The same could be said of Jews in Hollywood, doubtless including Harold Ramis, the director and a co-screenwriter of Caddyshack.

The tension in Caddyshack revolved around the way the uncouth Jew played by Rodney Dangerfield upset the elite country club’s leader, played by Ted Knight, creator of the Ted Baxter buffoon from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. In Caddyshack, he reprised the role of a “vain, pompous, dim-witted” WASP. As Judge Smails, Knight was always an easy target. Read more

Anti-White themes in Hollywood movies: Jews as elite outsiders

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Hatred and [the] spirit of sacrifice . . . are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren. (Illuminations, Walter Benjamin 1968, 262)

I recently came across a very well-done video featuring Edmund Connelly’s TOO article “Reel Bad WASPs,” part of his excellent 8-part “Eye on Hollywood” series. I don’t know who produced the video, but it’s a great example of the effectiveness of this medium for getting out our ideas, with spot-on clips from the movies, and a calm, “just the facts” voice over.

It completely belies the constant refrain of the ADL that the Jews who dominate Hollywood just happen to be Jews — that their Jewish identity is completely irrelevant to American movies.

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A Tale of Two Nations: Democracy in Israel, Depravity in Britain

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The Israeli journalist Benjamin Pogrund has laid it on the line: “Israel is a Jewish state because that is the will of the majority; this will not change.” Millions of Jews around the world will applaud that sentiment. I applaud it myself: Israel is a genuine democracy. But imagine a White journalist saying this: “Europe is a White Christian continent because that is the will of the majority; this must not change.”

How would most Jews react? With horror, of course. What’s good for Jewish Israel isn’t good for White Christian Europe, which must open its borders to the world and abolish itself in a flood of non-White, non-Christian vibrancy. The Jewish vision for Europe is simple: it must undergo a “transformation from monolithic ethnic-based nation-states into heterogeneous nations built on citizenship.”

Those are the words of Barbara Lerner Spectre, an energetic Jewish activist who works hard to keep Sweden at the forefront of that transformation. And Sweden has certainly been transformed: from a peaceful, female-friendly White nation into one full of non-White rioters and rapists (and here).

Perhaps that’s why Ms Spectre calls the transformation “treacherous.” She seems to think that rape at levels that were inconceivable in Sweden prior to the immigration onslaught is a price worth paying for Sweden’s transformation from monolith to multiculture. But how do Israelis react to the first tremors of such vibrancy? Read more