Israel

Our Rachel

For Patrick Willis, a true lover of Palestine, who decided to take a Rachel poem of mine and turn it into a moving new video: In Memory of Rachel Corrie.

It is hoped that the essay presented below will serve as an introduction to this widely acclaimed video as well as a tribute to Rachel on the 8th anniversary of her death on March 16.

She was called “St. Pancake” by her killers soon after her death. It was a term of derision for a young woman determined to make a martyr of herself. She had gotten herself pancaked. Flattened. Crushed beneath the blades of a bulldozer while giving succor to terrorists.

In the words of Zionist professor Steven Plaut, Rachel is “a sort of Mother Teresa for the radical left and apologists of Islamofascism. She is a martyr-saint for the pro-terror lobby.”

16 March will mark the 8th anniversary of Rachel’s death. It’s a good time to remember her and ask ourselves what she died for. Are the Palestinians any nearer to achieving their dreams of an independent state? Are those who killed Rachel in a stronger or weaker position than they were eight years ago? Read more

Benjamin Netanyahu: Like Father, Like Son

The War Party is beating the drums again, and much of the media is obediently falling into line. Jeffrey Goldberg, whose article for the New Yorkerwas an important part of the disinformation campaign that was so central to the successful neocon push for the Iraq war, is leading the charge once again. His recent Atlantic article, “The Point of No Return,” is a brief for another war, this time with Iran. Rather than present his own doubtless  warmongering views, he slants his article as objective reportage on the mindset of Israel’s leaders, particularly Benjamin Netanayahu’s “belief … that Iran is not Israel’s problem alone; it is the world’s problem, and the world, led by the United States, is duty-bound to grapple with it.

“Duty-bound”? That’s quite a sense of duty. The world has a duty to deal with a regime whose overt animus is directed at Israel, and if it doesn’t, Israel will do it itself. Goldberg claims that a military strike is also favored by Arab states, a point cogently disputed by Marc Lynch writing in Atlantic. In any case it’s a bit difficult to believe that “Several Arab leaders have suggested that America’s standing in the Middle East depends on its willingness to confront Iran.” How about America’s standing in the region depending on its ability to pressure Israel from its expansionist aims and end Israeli oppression of the Palestinians?Nah, the Arabs could care less about that.

In any case, one still wonders how attacking Iran is in the interests of the US or the rest of the world. But of course, interest is irrelevant. That’s the  thing about duties. When one has a duty, self-interest and personal desire are irrelevant. You have a duty. Be a good soldier. Do it and don’t ask questions. End of story.

Goldberg never tells us why the US has a duty to initiate a military strike against Iran (although one can infer it has something to do with the Holocaust). So his main thrust is to show that Netanyahu would do it unilaterally if the US won’t. And why is Netanyahu so gung-ho on war? It’s because of the influence of his father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu: “To understand why Netanyahu possesses this deep sense—and why his understanding of Jewish history might lead him to attack Iran, even over Obama’s objections—it is necessary to understand Ben-Zion Netanyahu, his 100-year-old father.”

The senior Netanyahu is a premier example of a Jewish academic ethnic activist. Goldberg informs us that he was Vladimir Jabotinsky’s secretary. Jabotinsky was the father of racial Zionism and the inspiration of the terrorist wing of Zionism prior to 1948. Since that time, Jabotinsky has been the inspiration for the pro-expansion, pro-settler Likud Party—racial Zionism in all but name.  As Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently pointed out, at the present time Israel “is governed by [Jabotinsky’s] conscious heirs.”

Goldberg describes Ben-Zion Netanyahu’s most important work, The Origins of the Inquisition in 15th-Century Spain (1995), as follows: “He argued that Spanish hatred of Jews was spurred by the principle of limpieza de sangre, or the purity of blood; it was proto-Nazi thought, in other words, not mere theology, that motivated the Inquisition. Ben-Zion also argued that the Inquisition corresponds to the axiom that anti-Semitic persecution is preceded, in all cases, by carefully scripted and lengthy dehumanization campaigns meant to ensure the efficient eventual elimination of Jews. To him, the lessons of Jewish history are plain and insistent.”

Netanyahu’s apologetic account of the Spanish Inquisition is a major topic of Chapter 7 of Separation and Its Discontents (“Rationalization and Apologia: The Intellectual Construction of Judaism”), including especially a long appendix.I remember when I first read his work that I was struck at how baldly apologetic it was—up front and in your face. One reviewer referred to his “almost mystical jeremiads against the Inquisitors” — not exactly the mark of an objective historian.

Basically, it’s the same old story: the behavior of Jews is irrelevant to the hostility people have against them. In this case, he tried to show that the Jews who converted to Christianity were sincere in their beliefs so that the Inquisition was at bottom racialist. I accept that some of the New Christians may have been sincere (and even Netanyahu admits that some were not). But I point out that, whatever their beliefs, there is a lot of evidence that the New Christians continued to intermarry and retain all the other ingroup connections that have always characterized Jews. The result was that an ethnically alien group came to dominate Spanish society even though it had adopted a surface of Christianity. In other words, Jewish racialism came first, followed by the Inquisition as a reaction. In the absence of surface religious differences, the only clue the Inquisition had was suspicion based on their ethnic ties—limpieze de sangre. Ethnicity matters as a point of conflict, even when people have the same surface beliefs.

One of Netanyahu’s comments made an indelible impression because it depicted Jews as willing and self-conscious agents of princely “massive exploitation”—a major theme of anti-Jewish attitudes in traditional societies.

It was primarily because of the functions of the Jews as the king’s revenue gatherers in the urban areas that the cities saw the Jews as the monarch’s agents, who treated them as objects of massive exploitation. By serving as they did the interests of the kings, the Jews seemed to be working against the interests of the cities; and thus we touch again on the phenomenon we have referred to: the fundamental conflict between the kings and their people—a conflict not limited to financial matters, but one that embraced all spheres of government that had a bearing on the people’s life. It was in part thanks to this conflict of interests that the Jews could survive the harsh climate of the Middle Ages, and it is hard to believe that they did not discern it when they came to resettle in Christian Europe. Indeed, their requests, since the days of the Carolingians, for assurances of protection before they settled in a place show (a) that they realized that the kings’ positions on many issues differed from those of the common people and (b) that the kings were prepared, for the sake of their interests, to make common cause with the “alien” Jews against the clear wishes of their Christian subjects. In a sense, therefore, the Jews’ agreements with the kings in the Middle Ages resembled the understandings they had reached with foreign conquerors in the ancient world. (Netanyahu 1995, 71–72)

One would think on the basis of his portrayal of Jews as willing and self-conscious agents of massive exploitation in alliance with corrupt elites that Netanyahu would realize the rationality of traditional anti-Jewish attitudes. However, there is little evidence of that, and certainly his treatment of the motives behind the Inquisition strongly suggest that he thinks Jews are blameless.  (I can’t resist pointing out the parallel to our current situation—that our new American elite is substantially composed of ethnically conscious Jews with a heavy sprinkling of corrupt White people with no allegiance or loyalty to their own people—exactly the Jewish formula for success in traditional societies.)

Indeed, the above passage can be read as saying that the Jews had to be exploiters in order to survive the Middle Ages. Survival comes first before any compunction about exploiting non-Jews.(Jewish exploitation of non-Jews was greatly facilitated by Jewish religious attitudes that non-Jews are exploitable outgroups—an ideology that is enshrined in all the founding Jewish religious documents, from the Old Testament to the Talmud.) It’s an argument that can easily be applied to issues like West Bank settlements — needed to make Israel into a viable entity. George Will’s recent column pointed once again to the pre-1967 borders of Israel as dangerously indefensible.

It’s interesting that this survival-first argument is the key to the current attitudes emanating from the Netanyahu camp. Goldberg never once mentions the reality that Jewish behavior has poisoned the atmosphere in the Middle East. It’s simply about survival. As Netanyahu the elder stated: “The Jewish people are making their position clear and putting faith in their military power. The nation of Israel is showing the world today how a state should behave when it stands before an existential threat: by looking danger in the eye and calmly considering what should be done and what can be done. And to be ready to enter the fray at the moment there is a reasonable chance of success.”

This view that the behavior of Jews is irrelevant to hatred directed against them is an incredibly important part of the Jewish self-concept. A recent review of a book on the history of British attitudes on Jews begins, “What is important about anti-Semitism—a fairly modern term for an ancient clutch of ideas—is that it has less to tell us about the Jews themselves than about their enemies” (“Inverted targets,” David Vital’s review of Anthony Julius’s Trials of the Diaspora, TLS, July 23, 2010).

One can always understand the appeal of an existential argument, but it would be much more compelling for non-Jews if Israel’s behavior since 1967 had not appalled pretty much everyone who is paying attention. The problem is that Jews have a long history of not acknowledging the role of their own behavior in fomenting anti-Jewish attitudes. Then, when it blows up, it’s all about survival. Survival trumps everything else, certainly including any need to alter their behavior. As Tallyrand saidof the Bourbon kings, “They learned nothing, they forgot nothing.”

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The Jews turn on Turkey

Well, that didn’t take long. Turkey’s involvement in the flotilla and its support for the Palestinians has now made it an enemy of the Israel Lobby, with all that that entails. All in all, it’s a good example of Jewish power and moral particularism. After long opposing any resolution on Turkey’s genocide of Armenians, Rep. Howard Berman, a major force for Israel in the US Congress,  suddenly supports a Congressional resolution, stating, “nothing justifies Turkey’s turning a blind eye to the reality of the Armenian genocide.” He and “a host of other members of the House’s unofficial Jewish caucus have signed on as co-sponsors.”

Berman suddenly found his moral bearings, along with the organized Jewish community. The neocons are naturally leading the charge, summarized byJim Lobe who quotes from a report by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs:

“If Turkey finds its best friends to be Iran, Hamas, Syria and Brazil (look for Venezuela in the future) the security of that information (and Western technology in weapons in Turkey’s arsenal) is suspect. The United States should seriously consider suspending military cooperation with Turkey as a prelude to removing it from [NATO],” suggested the group.

[JINSA’s]  board of advisers includes many prominent champions of the 2003 Iraq invasion, including former Defence Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director James Woolsey, and former U.N. Amb. John Bolton.

What’s interesting here is the proposal to eject Turkey from NATO. It wasn’t long ago that Turkey was being assured that it could become a member of the EU. Turkey’s exclusion from Europe is widely seen as a big factor in its change of foreign policy.Thomas Friedman: “After a decade of telling the Turks that if they wanted E.U. membership they had to reform their laws, economy, minority rights and civilian-military relations — which the Erdogan government systematically did — the E.U. leadership has now said to Turkey: ‘Oh, you mean nobody told you? We’re a Christian club. No Muslims allowed.’ The E.U.’s rejection of Turkey, a hugely bad move, has been a key factor prompting Turkey to move closer to Iran and the Arab world.”

And that’s the good news. The neocons and the organized Jewish community were big supporters of Turkey’s bid to join the EU–which would have meant that  71 million Turks would havethe right to move anywhere in Europe. This would mean the end of Europe as having any defining culture or biological coherence — obviously not a concern to Jewish activists like Friedman.

It’s worth remembering that Jewish activist organizations regarded the admission of Turkey to the EU as a way of civilizing Europe and ensuring cultural, religious, and ethnic pluralism — precisely the policy proposals that the Jewish community has advanced in all Western societies, particularly since the end of World War II. In 2002, at the height of the push for Turkey’s admission to the EU, the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) had this to say in response to former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s argument that Muslim Turkey has no place in the European Union:

Ironically, in the fifteenth century, when European monarchs expelled the Jews, it was Moslem Turkey that provided them a welcome…. During the Holocaust, when Europe was slaughtering its Jews, it was Turkish consuls who extended protection to fugitives from Vichy France and other Nazi allies…. Today’s European neo-Nazis and skinheads focus upon Turkish victims while, Mr. President [d’Estaing], you are reported to be considering the Pope’s plea that your Convention emphasize Europe’s Christian heritage. [The Center suggested that Giscard’s new Constitution] underline the pluralism of a multi-faith and multi-ethnic Europe, in which the participation of Moslem Turkey might bolster the continent’s Moslem communities—and, indeed, Turkey itself—against the menaces of extremism, hate and fundamentalism. A European Turkey can only be beneficial for stability in Europe and the Middle East. (Seehere; the statement has presumably been removed from the SWC website.)

Turkey in the EU was obviously a win-win situation for Jews: The end of Europe as a Christian civilization with an ethnic core combined with a moderating influence on the Muslims that would benefit Israel. I rather doubt that we’ll be seeing this sort of thing anymore. The chances of Turkey being admitted to the EU now are less than zero.

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s argument that Turkey has no place in Europe is just as valid against admitting any Muslims to Europe. Although the rejection of Turkey doesn’t change the present suicidal dynamic in Europe, it will certainly slow down the process compared to what would have happened had Turkey been admitted, perhaps allowing enough time for Europe to waken from its slumbers.


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Jews, Israel, and South Africa

An article in the Forward describes a new book by Sasha Polakow-Suransky on Israel’s relationship with apartheid South Africa (“Writer Takes Controversial Look at Israel-South Africa Ties“). It’s long been known that Israel had a warm relationship with South Africa. This book describes just how close they were. They engaged in “extended cooperation” on nuclear issues, with SA providing uranium and both countries cooperating in building and testing missiles.

More importantly, it claims that some important Israelis went beyond purely practical support to approving apartheid itself: “For at least some on the Israeli side, … it became a bond of two allies who understood and sympathized with each other’s existential struggles. He sees similarities between Afrikanner nationalism and the revisionist Zionism of Ze’ev Jabotinsky and his ideological heirs.”

The latter claim especially is distasteful to Jews who want to believe that applied liberalism is a timeless moral imperative in Judaism — that is, the vast majority of American Jews. But the reality is, as Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently pointed out, at the present time Israel “is governed by [Jabotinsky’s] conscious heirs,” and Israel is routinely referred to as an apartheid state.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (left). A photo of Vladimir Jabotinsky (right) loomed over former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as he spoke at the Likud Party convention in August, 2004.

Polakow-Suransky’s parents left South Africa in 1973 because his mother faced the prospect of arrest for her anti-apartheid work. The parents were high-profile opponents of apartheid–an aspect of Jewish involvement in the left that has been such an important influence in the US and elsewhere. The Forward article quotes Gideon Shimoni, a prominent Israeli historian who is rather negative about the book because it presents Shimon Peres as a hypocrite “who spoke out against apartheid in public but fostered the relationship in secret.”

But hypocrisy among Jews about apartheid-related issues is utterly commonplace, and I can’t see any reason why Peres should be an exception. This is particularly an affliction of Jews in Western societies who simultaneously support a Jewish apartheid ethnostate in Israel and vigorously and effectively oppose any sign of ethnic/racial consciousness among Whites in the US.

Shimoni’s book on Jews in South Africa during apartheid presents a nuanced picture. This is my summary (see here, p. 338):

The great majority of Jews in South Africa cooperated with the apartheid system. Between 1948 and 1970, most Jews gave their political allegiance to the United Party which “was quite as committed to white supremacy as were the Afrikaner nationalists.” By the 1970s Jews were turning more to the Progressive Party which advocated a gradual dismantling of apartheid, but “there appeared to be a grain of truth in the then current cynical quip that most Jews spoke like Progressives, voted for the United Party, and hoped that the Nationalist Party would remain in power.”

However, the most striking feature of Jewish political behavior under apartheid was that Jews were vastly overrepresented among those banned by the government because of their opposition to apartheid. For example, Jews represented more than half the whites arrested in the Treason Trial of 1956 and almost half of whites suspected of being members of the Communist Party in 1962; in the public mind therefore, “Jews were inordinately prominent in the ranks of those who were attempting to subvert the state.” The best predictor of Jewish participation in radical politics in South Africa was exposure to the political radicalism of the Eastern European Jewish subculture as a child. As indicated below, it is the special character of this Jewish group that has been so critical to the revolution in race relations in the U.S. since WWII. (Shimoni, G. (2003; Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa.)

This is similar to the American South prior to 1965. Jews generally went along with segregation. There is nothing in Judaism per se that is inconsistent with apartheid-style social systems. Indeed, ethnic separation is essential to Judaism, and Jews have often made alliances with oppressive elites.  It was the politically radical Eastern European Jews who changed the world by promoting political radicalism — often in conjunction with Zionism. Leftist radicalism and Zionism are the two great movements of Jews in the last 100 years. (See also Caryl Johnston’s current TOO article on Douglas Reed.)

The contradictions between leftist radicalism as a Jewish Diaspora strategy (aimed at displacing non-Jewish elites–often with a mask of universalism) and Zionism (aimed at establishing a Jewish ethnonationalist state) remain with us. Abe Foxman and his ilk are still trying to have their cake and eat it too by promoting the leftist anti-White agenda in the Diaspora in Western Societies while also supporting the most extreme manifestations of ethnonationalism among the Israelis. But their rhetoric is getting quite threadbare as Israel’s apartheid nature is becoming apparent to all. At least people like Sharon and Peres understood the reality that in the end Israel would have to be an apartheid state — even though they had to be hypocrites in public.

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Shocker! Abe Foxman is a hypocrite.

Israel has long had  policies where people can be stopped and asked for identification; racial profiling is the norm. But Jewish organizations in America are vehemently and pretty much unanimously opposed to the Arizona law that does the same thing.

Now an article in Haaretz discusses the fact that it’s not just about suspicious-looking Palestinians (“Reminders of Israel in the Arizona immigration debate“). Prime Minister Ariel Sharon instituted a policy to cleanse Israel of foreign workers in 2002, and “by the end of 2005 about 145,000 ‘illegal residents’, as they were called, were expelled or ‘left willingly.'” There were objections to the policy, but everyone got over it pretty easily.

Fast forward to 2010 and the Arizona law. A group of Reform rabbis sent a letter to Arizona Governor Brewer expressing their outrage at the (U.S.) law, calling it, “inhumane and retrogressive”; “an affront to American values of justice and our historic status as a nation of immigrants”; a slippery slope, to say the least….. This bill moves us in the wrong direction, violating the principles of justice on which our nation was founded. We should, instead, focus our energy on comprehensive reform of our immigration system.”

Abe Foxman called it “biased, bigoted and unconstitutional.” When asked about how to reconcile this with Israel’s successful policy, Foxman doesn’t see a problem: “Well, in terms of size and dimension [??] Israel is nowhere near the U.S.”

So you see, size is everything. If you are small, you don’t have any obligation to have a government based on “principles of justice.” (For the record, the percentage of illegals in the US [probably more than 4% if there are 12 million] is much higher than illegal Israelis [~2.4%].) You can be as “inhumane and retrogressive” as you want. Big countries, on the other hand, have a moral obligation to uphold the highest standards of justice by letting in anyone who manages to get here–legal or not.

This “argument” isn’t worth bothering with. About the only thing it shows is the inexhaustible depths that an obsessively ethnocentric person can descend to. There are no contradictions; no hypocrisy; no double standards. It’s inconceivable that what’s good for Jews could possibly depart from the loftiest of principles.

White advocates tend to have a much harder time reconciling interests with principles: We are quite aware that the proposition nation isn’t working for us–that ethnic activists like Foxman and the Reform rabbis love to invoke high-minded principles to advocate policies that are against the interests of White Americans (while ignoring those principles in judging what is going on in Israel). That’s a big part of our problem because so many Americans–especially White Americans — are addicted to these principles. They are deeply embedded throughout the school system and are suffused with patriotic sentiments. Our wars are framed as having been fought for these principles.

Getting White Americans to think about their ethnic interests first and foremost is a tough sell indeed, but I think it will happen as Whites realize that their principles can’t save them from being submerged and displaced.  The first step is to get Whites to realize that explicit expressions of White ethnic identity and interests are legitimate–morally legitimate.

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Charles Krauthammer’s "Those Troublesome Jews"

Charles Krauthammer has always been extreme even by neocon standards. He was among the first to recommend that America seize the opportunity created by the fall of the Soviet Union to remake the entire Arab world in the interests of “democratic globalism.”

Beyond power. Beyond interest. Beyond interest defined as power. That is the credo of democratic globalism. Which explains its political appeal: America is a nation uniquely built not on blood, race or consanguinity, but on a proposition—to which its sacred honor has been pledged for two centuries.

America as a country with no biological identity should go to war so that Israel can achieve its ethnic interests. Americans are wonderfully principled people who have no ethnic identity. So he pitches eternal war as a moral crusade for righteousness that America must be committed to because that’s just how Americans are: Principled people who must be reminded once in a while that they need to wage holy war to uphold their lofty principles.

America is committed not to blood but to supporting democracy and freedom. America must defeat “the new global threat to freedom, the new existential enemy, the Arab-Islamic totalitarianism that has threatened us in both its secular and religious forms for the quarter-century since the Khomeini revolution of 1979.”

He’s probably had to rethink the rationale for war against the Arab and Islamic world since Hamas won the largest number of votes and parliamentary seats in democratic elections held in 2006.

Moral posturing is absolutely central to Krauthammer’s modus operandi.  While the rest of the world remains horrified at the behavior of the Israeli military, his column on the 2009 Gaza invasion was titled “Moral clarity in Gaza“:  “Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating.”

Krauthammer always knows who the good guys are and he knows Americans are suckers for arguments framed as moral imperatives.

So it’s not surprising that he sees Israel as the hapless victim in the flotilla incident, condemned for simply “defending” itself. Andrew Sullivan is correct that to read Krauthammer is to enter into an alternate universe where aggressors are victims and where “forward defense” means invasion and murder of civilians. Krauthammer is the foremost exponent of the Israeli Derangement Syndrome: “This is a form of derangement, or of such a passionate commitment to a foreign country that any and all normal moral rules or even basic fairness are jettisoned.”

What’s different about Krauthammer is his willingness to play the anti-Semitism card — combined with the usual trademarked dose of moral posturing. His column on the flotilla is titled “Those Troublesome Jews” — troublesome in his view because Jews insist on defending themselves:

The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, 6 million — that number again — hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists — Iranian in particular — openly prepare a more final solution.

Israel’s problems don’t stem from push back resulting from its aggressive ethnonationalism. They stem from the fact that the world–the entire world–wants another Holocaust, including “the supine Europeans who’ve had quite enough of the Jewish problem.” While the rest of the world hates Jews because of Third Worldism, the Europeans hate Jews just as they have for the last millennium. They’re all basically Nazis at heart.

This is not an exaggeration. His 2002 article “Please excuse the Jews for living” had the same logic. He recited the many sins of France, including the fact that Jean Marie LePen — “the modern incarnation of European fascism” — had enough votes to be a run-off candidate for president.

I don’t recall Krauthammer condemning the many signs of fascism in Israel — particularly the present Israeli government and, most famously, its foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. It’s clear that Krauthammer thinks that European countries are proposition countries too. For Europeans, nationalism is a morally reprehensible reminder of National Socialism; for Israelis, it’s simply Jews being assertive.

And what accounts for the fact that European governments join in the chorus of condemnation of Israel? Plain old-fashioned anti-Semitism. Europeans just don’t like assertive Jews.

The explanation is not that difficult to find. What we are seeing is pent-up anti-Semitism, the release – with Israel as the trigger – of a millennium-old urge that powerfully infected and shaped European history.

What is odd is not the anti-Semitism of today, but its relative absence during the last half-century. That was the historical anomaly. Holocaust shame kept the demon corked for that half-century. But now the atonement is passed. The genie is out again.

This time, however, it is more sophisticated. It is not a blanket hatred of Jews. Jews can be tolerated, even accepted, but they must know their place. Jews are fine so long as they are powerless, passive and picturesque.

What is intolerable is Jewish assertiveness, the Jewish refusal to accept victimhood. And nothing so embodies that as the Jewish state. What so offends Europeans is the armed Jew, the Jew who refuses to sustain seven suicide bombings in the seven days of Passover and strikes back. That Jew has been demonized in the European press as never before since, well … since the ’30s. …

Just when Europe had reconciled itself to tolerance for the passive Jew – the Holocaust survivor who could be pitied, lionized, perhaps awarded the occasional literary prize – along comes the Jewish state, crude and vital and above all unwilling to apologize for its own existence.

It’s a clever argument of the sort that appeals to those morally principled Westerners. Israeli nationalism and aggressiveness are good, and if you don’t think so, you’re an anti-Semite. Europeans have always hated Jews. In another column, Krauthammer writes of “a history of centuries of relentless, and at times savage, persecution of Jews in Christian lands.”

One wonders if there are any examples of Israeli aggression that he would see as morally reprehensible. Probably not. He has rationalized every example of Israeli aggression to date and has denounced the Oslo Accords as  “the most catastrophic and self- inflicted wound by any state in modern history.”

The existence of fanatical Jews like Krauthammer isn’t a surprise given what we know about the massive ethnocentrism at the heart of Jewish identity. What is truly depressing is that he is published in the Washington Post and syndicated in over 200 other newspapers and websites, such as Townhall. He is a regular commentator on Fox News and Inside Washington.

The result is that Americans are continually subjected to pro-Israel chauvinism, towering Jewish ethnocentrism, and anti-European hatred in the most prestigious and popular media outlets. We internalize the double standard in which Krauthammer rationalizes Israeli racialism and apartheid but promotes and exploits the idea that America and European countries exist for the purpose of defending abstractions like “freedom” and “democracy”; any signs of White identity and sense of White interests are morally repugnant.

We come to take these ideas for granted–to the point that Krauthammer is eminently respectable, especially among conservatives. Other commentators, like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, seem to have internalized this mindset as well. Accepting people like Krauthammer is what it means to be a mainstream conservative.

It’s a major part of the sickness we face.

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Ted Sallis on Jewish genetics

Ted Sallis’s current TOO article makes a number of important points.

First, the fact that Jews are most closely related to Northern Italians does not imply that this was due to conversion in the ancient world. He points out that “the relatively greater similarity of Jews to southern rather than central/eastern Europeans may also to some extent reflect the greater Neolithic ancestry in the southern European groups that is shared by various Jewish groups as one component of their ancestry.”

In other words, the similarity may be due to simple geographic closeness. The similarity may be due to similarities that long pre-date the Jewish Diaspora in the Greco-Roman world of antiquity. This then suggests that my doubts about large-scale conversions to Judaism in the ancient world may be well-founded after all.

Further, the fact that there is very little similarity between Ashkenazi Jews and Eastern and Central Europeans indicates that Ashkenazi Jews remained separate from these populations for hundreds of years.

Sallis also points out that there are technical problems with the PCA analysis — the analysis with the pretty picture showing genetic distances. Such pictures are beguiling and doubtless represent the take-home message for most people. The picture suggests that Ashkenazi Jews (ASH) are more closely related to Northern Italians than to Iranian or Iraqi Jews. But this is not actually the case. In fact, Gil Atzmon explicitly denies it here.

But the IBD (Identical By Descent) analysis provides a very clear picture indicating very close relatedness among Jewish groups. IBD analysis compares gene sequences that are similar or completely identical because they descend from a common ancestor.

As Sallis notes, “this is a strong demonstration of the common origins and very close genetic connections among these groups.” Indeed, twelve of the thirteen comparisons with the highest degree of sharing are between Jewish groups. (The red bars in Part A of the figure represent comparisons of  Jews with other Jewish groups.) This analysis shows that Ashkenazi Jews (ASH in the figure) are substantially more closely related to all other Jewish groups than to any non-Jewish group, including the Northern Italians.

Finally, Sallis makes the important point that

when it comes to Jewish populations and the relatively small genetic distance separating Jews from both Europeans and Middle Easterners, “academics” (particularly Jewish scientists) and the media (as well as Jewish ethnic organizations) have no problem in stressing the genetic uniqueness of Jews and that this uniqueness stamps them as a separate and distinct biological/ethnic entity.However, when it comes to the objectively larger genetic gulf that separates Europeans from, say, Africans or Asians, why, that’s only an “illusion,” there is “no biological basis for race,” “we are all the same,” and “there is more genetic variation within groups than between them.”The contrast in attitude could not be greater.

Indeed, the Forward has an editorial based on the Atzmon et al. article titled “We are one genetically.” They clearly see the data as a wake-up call for Jews to preserve their genetic heritage:

In an age when exclusivity is frowned upon and multiculturalism prized, some Jews may celebrate if the genetic distinctions fade away and are replaced by a more pluralistic definition of who we are — or at least, who our genes say we are. But breaking down the cultural and religious isolation that has characterized Jewish life since ancient times also contains risks. Science tells us that we have, indeed, been one people. Will we remain so?

Well, the only people whose exclusivity is frowned on are White Europeans. But the sad reality is that Jews will continue to attempt to have their cake and eat it too on the issue of concern for genetic continuity as they have on all the other issues related to multiculturalism and Israel: Support for massive non-White immigration and opposition to White identity and interests in America and other Western societies while supporting an ethnonationalist, apartheid state in Israel and taking steps to ensure Jewish genetic continuity in the Diaspora.

Again, it’s worth remembering that a major motivation of the Jabotinsky faction of racial Zionists that now rules Israel was to prevent genetic assimilation that they saw going on the Diaspora. (See Ch. 5 of Separation and Its Discontents, p. 152ff.) They succeeded in their aims.

The ethnonationalist aspirations of Europeans are no less legitimate.

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