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The case for Obama: Why four more years may be less disastrous than unrestrained GOP rule

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Shortly after Mitt Romney locked up the GOP nomination, tried-and-true political axioms fell right into place. With the state primaries over and the August convention looming, Romney’s presidential campaign moved Left, a common window-dressing tactic intended to appeal to “moderate” and independent voters.

GOP insiders, primarily advocates of the “Big Tent” Republican Party, believe that this superficial move — intended to capture the political “center” — is a successful tactic that will pay off in November. The attempt is to peel off disaffected independent voters, who were a key voting bloc for Obama in 2008.

So where does the Romney campaign focus their attention? Latino activists, the NAACP, and Israel! Three well-organized ethnic lobbies and key constituencies that form the core of the Democrat’s base. As soon as any Republican candidate secures the nomination, one of the first priorities is to visit Tel Aiv or Jerusalem and placate the neoconservatives and organized Zionist groups. Romney is reportedly planning to host a fundraiser and charge “$60,000 or more per plate” in a scheduled visit to Israel later in July. Right on schedule!

Republicans never tire of trying to out democratize the Democrats. The ruling elites in the GOP establishment continue to take for granted their core constituency: Middle American Whites. As a potential voting bloc, White voters could make a substantial difference in this year’s election. However, the Romney campaign, much like other Republican presidential campaigns, assumes that this bloc of conservative White voters will remain loyal to a political party at odds with their own group interests. Read more

“Flight”: Denzel Washington’s New Movie, Part II

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Now comes a truly sardonic confirmation that I am right. A good part of my teaching involves showing the changing images of a high-level American vocation that has not changed much racially over the last century: that of the pilot. Few careers have for so long captivated the imaginations of American boys and men. See Joseph Corn’s wonderful book The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation or read anything about flying by the peerless Ernest Gann to capture this romance. Gann’s 1953 novel The High and the Mighty became a film featuring that stalwart American actor, John Wayne. Read more

“Flight”: Denzel Washington’s New Movie, Part I

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I find myself in a conflicted position. While I enjoy being right as much as the next guy, it hurts to be right about something with negative consequences. Imagine, for example, that you are convinced you have a serious malady, yet your stubborn doctor pooh-pooh’s your concerns. As a result, you conduct a grueling online search and eventually pin down your ailment to an obscure but quite harmful degenerative disease.

You take these results to a more accommodating doctor, who indeed confirms your suspicious. You, then, are left congratulating yourself for outwitting your original doctor — but you have also confirmed that your quality of life is inextricably going to erode. Mixed emotions, right?

I suffer from a parallel syndrome. For well over a decade I’ve been parsing Hollywood films and finding in them a pronounced bias against straight White European-derived males. To be sure, we still have traditional fare with White male stars as the lead — think George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, even Mel Gibson now and again. But we also find so many films in which only the White guy is bad.

What really troubles me is the fact that so much of this imagery is counterfactual. We race realists know that it is White males who have built so much of civilization over the last five centuries and that now it is we who bear the brunt of the anti-White multicultural onslaught. The cultural Marxists have cleverly used women and minorities against White males, and we see this imagery many times a day now. Go to your bank’s website, for instance, and I’ll bet you’ll see a parade of non-White faces and smart White women staring back at you. Try, however, to spot the White males. It’s often not easy. Read more

Manny Friedman: Jews “own a whole freaking country”; and yes, that includes the media

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Well, it turns out after all that Jews do control the media—and a whole lot besides. So says Manny Friedman, writing in the Times of Israel (“Yes, Jews DO control the media“).  Of course, we at TOO have known this for quite a while, but it’s nice to hear it from a Jew, even though it’s in a Jewish publication and intended to be part of a Jews-only dialog. The thing is, it’s okay for someone like Friedman to say it (or Joel Stein, writing in the LATimes and linked by Friedman). But it’s definitely not okay for someone like me. In fact, Friedman is typical of Jewish writers who inhabit a completely Jewish universe when they talk about anything relating to Jews. Friedman is well aware that non-Jews who talk about such issues should prepare for a wall-to-wall, no-holds barred, 24/7 campaign against them:

The funny part is when any anti-Semite or anti-Israel person starts to spout stuff like, “The Jews control the media!” and “The Jews control Washington!” Suddenly we’re up in arms. We create huge campaigns to take these people down. We do what we can to put them out of work. We publish articles. We’ve created entire organizations that exist just to tell everyone that the Jews don’t control nothin’. No, we don’t control the media, we don’t have any more sway in DC than anyone else. No, no, no, we swear: We’re just like everybody else! Does anyone else (who’s not a bigot) see the irony of this?

I don’t see any “funny parts” to this, and I rather doubt that “irony’ is the right word here. How about “ethnic strategizing,” as in “Does anyone else (who’s not a bigot) see the ethnic strategizing of this?” Read more

Who are the Jews?

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Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People
Harry Ostrer
Oxford University Press: 2012
288pp., $24.95

Are Jews a religion or race?

This is the age-old question that medical geneticist Harry Ostrer tackles in his concise but informative book, Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People.

As Professor of Pathology and Genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and Director of Genetic and Genomic Testing at Montefiore Medical Center, as well as former Director of the Human Genetics Program at New York University’s School of Medicine, Ostrer has devoted much of his career to unraveling the DNA sequencing of recessive genetic disorders common among Jews, such as Tay-Sachs and Gaucher disease. After two decades of medical research, he explains that Jews share more than religious and cultural traditions — a common biological bond links Jews throughout the Diaspora.

This body of work has led Ostrer to conclude that Jews are genetically related worldwide. Three millennia of selective breeding have created a distinct population with unique racial characteristics. Within this broad isolated population, diverse ethnic tribes formed and branched out. Mutual genes serve as the ancestral linkage between major Jewish tribes: Ashkenazi (who are related to one another on average as fifth cousins), Sephardic, Eurasian Khazars, Middle Eastern, and Mizrahi or African Jews.

Legacy is a slim book that incorporates history, natural selection, population genetics, evolutionary psychology, and contemporary medical findings. The author’s quest for the basis of Jewish origins and identity forms the basic storyline of Legacy. Each chapter highlights various aspects of Jewish ancestry: physical measurements and characteristics, DNA studies, blood groupings, genealogical evidence, tribal lineage, physical and psychological traits, and, finally, the crux of Jewish identity. The result is an informative overview of 25 years of detective work unraveling the genetic kinship of Jews. Read more

Jewish Intelligence

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Editor’s note: This was originally posted on August 19, 2007 on my website, before TOO was established. I re-post it here to encourage comments and because it remains relevant given continuing interest in Jewish IQ—e.g., Richard Lynn’s The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement (Whitefish, MT: Washington Summit Publishers, 2011). Lynn finds that the average IQ for Ashkenazi Jews is 110, for Sephardic Jews 98-99, Oriental Jews 91, and Falasha Jews (a largely African group genetically) < 70. Lynn’s book will be reviewed by F. Roger Devlin in the Summer issue of The Occidental Quarterly (see also “Are Jews Smarter“). The focus on IQ in this article does not imply that ethnic networking is unimportant, for example, in admission to elite universities. Thus taking Richard Lynn’s estimates of Ashkenazi Jewish IQ and correcting for the greater numbers of European Whites in America, the ratio of non-Jewish Whites to Jews should be around 7 to 1 (IQ >130) or  4.5 to 1 (IQ > 145). Instead, the ratio of non-Jewish Whites to Jews is around 1 to 1 or less. There is also presumptive ethnic networking at work in particular niches, such as Hollywood and other forms of media where Jews are represented far beyond anything predicted by IQ  (see, e.g., Edmund Connelly’s work and this recent blog on Jewish networking in literature and art). As noted often in TOO, the problem is not that Jews are an elite. The problem is that they have a long track record as a hostile elite —hostile to the people and the culture of the West.

Jewish intelligence has become a hot topic following the publication of a paper by Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending in The Journal of Biological Science. Charles Murray weighed in with an article in Commentary (“Jewish Genius”, April, 2007). Murray’s theory is quite a bit like the one I published in my 1994 book, A People That Shall Dwell Alone (Ch. 7). I discussed eugenic events such as the Babylonian exile in which the elite Israelites were relocated to Babylon and refused to intermarry with those left behind when they returned (as graphically recounted in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah). I also described a great deal of discrimination against the illiterate in the ancient world, with the effect that such people were excluded from the Jewish community. Marriage to such a person was especially abhorrent. And I recounted the history of Jewish education and Jewish idealization of the scholar, including especially the practice of wealthy Jews marrying their daughters to scholars and providing them with business opportunities. Because wealth was correlated with reproductive success in traditional societies, this had the effect of eugenic selection for intelligence. All of these practices originated in the ancient world and are well attested among both Ashkenazi and Sephardic populations in later centuries. Read more

Heinrich Heine: German Lyric Poet and Jewish Political Agitator

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A hundred years before Adolf Hitler assumed power an event occurred in Germany that was a harbinger of worse things to come in the relations between Germans and Jews. It was the German reaction to the “Young Germany” movement led by several young Jews whose aim it was to introduce certain liberal social reforms, including greater opportunities for Jews in all aspects of German society. In the course of their campaign, the participants said and did things that German authorities and large segments of the population found insulting and offensive. At the center of the movement and considered by many the personification of the Jewish mentality and nature was world-famous poet Heinrich Heine.

Heine was a sorely conflicted man. While still young he quickly rose to be recognized as Germany’s greatest Romantic poet after Goethe. Because of the beauty and subject matter of his poetry, he was thought to be a man who loved his homeland, especially the Rheinland region, but by middle age he had morphed into a bitter, sarcastic critic,  hostile to almost everything and everyone he had previously loved or admired. In the absence of any other known cause, his life and personality, even his health, seem to have been wrecked by a psychological clash between his genetic makeup, essentially his core Jewish nature, and the culture of the world in which he lived. In his Faust, Goethe had the appropriate line to describe the condition: “Two souls dwell in my breast, alas, forever warring with each other.”

Born in 1797 to ethnically Jewish parents who lived comfortably but modestly in Duesseldorf, young Harry Heine, as he was so named, entered life in an essentially Roman Catholic city whose Jewish residents, but only a minority of the German majority, had welcomed the liberal reforms introduced by Napoleon. Harry’s parents put the poet-to-be in a German kindergarten at age four while concurrently instructing him in Jewish traditions at home and making available additional instruction in the Jewish religion in a private school. Harry attended the local Lyceum in a Franciscan cloister run and taught by Catholic priests, often Jesuits. Discipline was strict— designed to provide useful subjects of Napoleon. Read more