Jewish Writing on Anti-Semitism

Jewish Privilege Devours Itself

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Octopus self-cannibalism

Octopuses can sometimes engage in self-cannibalism, eating their own arms in what is thought to be a stress reaction. What initially begins as a nervous biting of one’s own limbs, descends into frenzy, as bacteria take hold in the resultant wounds. As the infection spreads, and the stress levels increase, the octopus savages its own arms at a rate faster than it can heal, or grow new limbs. Survival in such instances is rare. There is only a terminal fate for a cephalopod in which such behavior has firmly taken hold.

Stress-related self-destruction is also relatively common among humans, and not merely in the obvious form of deliberate suicide. Melville captured it best with Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab, a figure so psychologically and spiritually wounded, so bitterly sensitive, that he would give his own life and the lives of others in pursuit of revenge — the only palliative he felt would appease his mental self-gnawing. Rebuking the admonishments of Starbuck, he cries with barely concealed anguish: “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” Ahab’s insatiable hate for the white whale was certainly not intended as an allegory for the hatred felt by modern ‘progressives’ for the White man, and yet I feel that such a comparison is apt. These people will do anything to ‘strike the sun,’ to bring down their great opponent, and we may expect self-destructive behaviors to be an aspect of their maniacal pursuit of ‘Whiteness.’

The last few weeks have witnessed a couple of important instances in which the memes of ‘privilege,’ racism, and anti-Semitism, the chief intellectual harpoons forged to pierce the White behemoth, have been turned inward on those largely behind their construction. Very recently, England’s Bristol University has been caught up in a scandal after it emerged that one of its lecturers, Dr Rebecca Gould, who is almost certainly both Jewish and a ‘progressive,’ penned an article for CounterPunch in 2011 in which she argued that “Jews should stop privileging the Holocaust.” Given that such an argument simultaneously infringes upon several taboos, and thus casts Dr Gould into the nebulous category of a ‘self-hating Jew,’ it is a miracle that her career has managed to progress uninhibited for the last six years. Apparently the piece was only brought to light, and subjected to ‘social justice’ action, after one of her undergraduate students unearthed it and initialized a campaign against her. Read more

Moral Paragons Need No Facts: The Pathetic Apologetics of Jonathan Sacks, Part 2

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Part 1

Rabbi Sacks’ “critique” of multiculturalism

As he approached the end of his tenure as Chief Rabbi of Britain in 2013, Sacks became increasingly critical of Britain’s model of multiculturalism which, he acknowledged, had originally emerged “in response to the Holocaust.” While having been “undertaken for the highest of motives” and “intended to create a more tolerant society, one in which everyone, regardless of color, creed or culture, felt at home,” multiculturalism in Britain was no longer working. It was not, however, the beheading of Lee Rigby, the no go zones, revelations of Muslim rape gangs or the racialization of politics that prompted the rabbi’s unexpected critique; it was, rather, because “Jews especially in London and Manchester have found themselves attacked on their way to and from synagogue, or abused by passers-by.”

Maintaining that “multiculturalism has led not to integration but to segregation,” Sacks argued that the policy should be reformed to place greater emphasis on “tolerance” and “integration.” [i] While still stressing the sanctity of “diversity” and “difference,” Sacks insisted the British government should do more to promote “tolerance” and called for greater consultation between ethnic communities, arguing that: “In a society of plurality and change, there may be no detailed moral consensus that can be engraved on tablets of stone. But there can and must be a continuing conversation, joined by as many voices as possible, on what makes our society a collective enterprise: a community that embraces many communities.”[ii] Elsewhere the rabbi opined that “The more plural a society we become, the more we need to reflect on what holds us together.”[iii]

Sacks here pretends that all interests can be reconciled through open dialogue, when in truth the interests of different racial and religious groups are often fundamentally opposed and irreconcilable. In responding to the proliferating social dysfunctions that “diversity” has introduced into Western societies, Sacks advises Europeans to “answer hatred with love, violence with peace, resentment with generosity of spirit and conflict with reconciliation.”[iv] The fact that the “Jewish state” he fiercely defends exhibits none of these traits causes him no disquiet. Instead, for the rabbi, this epic double standard is a normative part of contemporary Jewish identity where: “In Israel one is Jewish by living in a Jewish state, surrounded by a Jewish culture and Jewish institutions. But elsewhere, being Jewish means going against the grain, being counter-cultural.”[v] Read more

Moral Paragons Need No Facts: The Pathetic Apologetics of Jonathan Sacks, Part 1

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Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Jonathan Sacks has been acclaimed by the Jerusalem Post as “one of contemporary Britain’s most outstanding thinkers and spokesmen.” The former Chief British Rabbi, who has been showered with awards from Jewish organizations and appointed to professorships in New York and London, has been feted as a “brilliant philosopher and an enlightening presence for the whole world.” He has even been called “the outstanding moral authority of our time,” while the egregious Prince Charles once described him as “a light unto this nation.” Not surprisingly, given the Jewish stranglehold over the Western media, Sacks, who was made a peer of the House of Lords in 2009, is given a regular platform to peddle his brand of Jewish ethno-politics in a range of media outlets including the BBC, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

Despite his high profile, and the honors and appointments that have been lavished upon him, an examination of Sacks’ intellectual output soon reveals it to be filled with feeble apologetics, empty platitudes and facile homilies. All of these are fully evident in a speech this “brilliant philosopher” recently gave to the European Parliament entitled “The Mutating Virus — Understanding Antisemitism,” (full text here) to open a conference on the future of Jewish communities in Europe hosted by Martin Schulz, the President of the European Parliament.

In his speech Sacks bewails the supposedly dire plight of European Jewry and offers his analysis of “what antisemitism is, why it happens, [and] why antisemites are convinced that they are not antisemitic.” Like the Jewish “historian” Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Sacks favors using the term “antisemitism” over the hyphenated “anti-Semitism” — doubtless because the latter implies the existence of a “Semitism” which could (and indeed does) provide the dialectical basis for “anti-Semitism.” In this way they signal their denial of the reality that hostility to Jews stems from conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews in a Darwinian world. Read more

Exodus Redux: Jewish Identity and the Shaping of History

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“Under the pretext of recording fables and current reports about the Jews, he [Manetho] took the liberty of introducing some incredible tales, wishing to represent us as…condemned to banishment from Egypt.”
Flavius Josephus, Against Apion

I’ve been intrigued by the story of the Israelite Exodus from Egypt for more than a decade. More than any of its close rivals, including the tale of Haman in the Book of Esther, the Exodus looms large as an early and extremely influential psychological landmark in the lachrymose and highly dubious pseudo-history of the Jewish people. Most obviously, the putative liberation from Egypt is commemorated by Judaism every year, in the form of the Pesach, or Passover festival. Indeed, this festival is one of the most important features of the Jewish religious calendar. Historian Paul Johnson remarks that Exodus “became an overwhelming memory” and “gradually replaced the creation itself as the central, determining event in Jewish history.”[1]

Exodus has a power that exists independently from the trappings of religious myth, acting through the centuries as a defining narrative of victimhood, group vindication, and self-validation. Jews living under the Tsar produced endless Yiddish plays and satires containing barely concealed allusions to the Tsar as the latest incarnation of Pharaoh.[2] Exodus is a foundation upon which Jewish identity, as well as Jewish religiosity, is built, and for this reason it has greatly preoccupied even the most atheistic of Jews, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud among them. Moses, as a subconscious archetype, squats in the shadows of the Jewish psyche.

The early reception of Exodus by non-Jews also plays an important role in the Jewish worldview, in the sense that the “virus” of “anti-Semitism” is said to have originated in response to it. In this regard, there is an almost universal consensus among Jewish intellectuals that the earliest origins of “anti-Semitism” can be traced to the writings of an Egyptian priest allegedly offended by the account of the Israelite escape from Pharaoh. The theory relates specifically to a history of Egypt, the Aegyptiaca, written by an Egyptian priest named Manetho around the third century BC. Although the Aegyptiaca is lost to us, we are able to piece together much of its contents based on subsequent rebuttals by later Jewish writers such as Flavius Josephus, and also references to the text by several Greek and Greek-Egyptian intellectuals.

In summary, Manetho reported that centuries earlier a foreign population had entered Egypt’s eastern border via “infiltration of the Delta.” This foreign population subsequently rose in power within Egypt, becoming a burden and a pestilence to the natives. At some point, the foreign population developed a serious disease of the skin, and the Egyptians were finally motivated to expel the invaders, who later relocated to Jerusalem. Read more

The big chill on free speech hits Britain

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It is a fair bet that any ‘media reform’ welcomed by Dr Moshe Kantor, President of the European Jewish Congress, will be bad news for the defenders of free speech. So it is with his reaction to the British government’s groundbreaking new definition of anti-Semitism.

Kantor said:

We welcome the UK’s landmark decision to define anti-Semitism, particularly in the face of rising attacks against Jews. We must now look towards other European governments to follow the example set by the UK.

He is referring to the British government’s decision to adopt a “legally binding definition” which will be used by police forces, councils, universities and public bodies. This ratchets the law sharply in the direction of making Jews a legally protected group and placing them beyond criticism. It would certainly sharply curtail academic and journalistic discussion of Jewish group behaviour.

For if the ethnic agendas of this very powerful and ethnocentric group cannot be discussed, it would effectively end legitimate academic and journalistic inquiry on the matter. It would certainly curtail discussion of all unflattering examples of Jewish group behaviour such as those outlined in the Culture of Critique.

The definition drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition (IHRA) is broadly the same one contained in the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act that quietly went through the US senate. The aim seems to be to create a global standard on stifling free speech about Jewish power.

The definition itself is so open-ended as to be meaningless. Read more

T.S. Eliot and the Culture of Critique, Part Two

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eliot

‘We must discover what conditions, within our power to bring about, would foster the society that we desire. … Reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.’
 T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods, 1934.

One of the most striking features of Julius’s T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form is that it is no mere literary critique. This basic and relatively short work is a multi-pronged and vicious ad hominem masquerading, with odious pretentiousness, as criticism. Eliot, the man, is attacked in multiple, often scurrilous, forms throughout.

These are subtle attacks, perpetrated under the cover of a flimsy, indeed petulant, thesis. This thesis, such as it exists, is two-dimensional. Summed up, it consists of two basic arguments. The first is that Eliot drew on “anti-Semitic” themes for some of his poetry, themes that were characterized by their disdainful attitude towards Jews. The second is that “anti-Semitism” was an intrinsic part of Eliot’s art, and therefore Eliot himself was ‘anti-Semitic.’ Of course, in and of itself, the accusation that Eliot wasn’t fond of Jews is hardly damning. However, in the hands of Jewish ethno-activists the accusation of “anti-Semitism” is often loaded with deeper and more insidious aspersions. As such, the thesis and the ad hominem nature of its arguments and content are bound up intricately via a single common thread: Julius’s own corrupt understanding of what “anti-Semitism” is.

Julius’s professed understanding of anti-Semitism is identical to that of other Jewish ethno-activists. In this perception, “anti-Semitism” is a mixture of “incoherent” discourses riddled with “internal contradictions.”[1] It arises, at worst, in the sick, irrational mind. At best, it develops ex nihilo, since, as Julius puts it, “no external factor can induce it.”[2] In this remarkable psychological bubble, Jews are entirely blameless. Ever passive, they lack all agency. They exist merely to register the irrational mental undulations of “the nations,” that confused, miasmic mass of humanity they have been tasked by Jehovah to act as a “light unto.” The problem with such a perception, of course, is the existence of an overwhelming amount of contradictory evidence. Read more

T.S. Eliot and the Culture of Critique, Part One of Two

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ts-eliot

“My house is a decayed house,
And the Jew squats on the window-sill”
T.S. Eliot, Gerontion, 1920.

In a previous article I explored the nature of academic ethno-activism in the deconstruction of the cultural legacy of Ezra Pound. The article adopted the approach of a broad overview, emphasizing the scale of successive critiques and, to some extent, illuminating the psychology of those whose caustic attentions had been aroused by the interplay of Pound’s genius and politics. It was argued that these individuals exhibited a psychological duality of both attraction and hatred. The academic activists drawn to figures like Pound were “appalled because they perceived an unjustified critique upon their ethnic group, and they perceived this critique all the more keenly because of their ethnocentrism. They were impressed because they appreciated, and were threatened by, the talent of their target, often despite themselves. The ‘attraction’ arises from the desire to deconstruct and demean that talent, and thus avenge or assuage the critique.”

Although the previous article fulfilled its purpose of providing a succinct overview of the forms of the critical assault on ostracized cultural figures, in this article I wish to present a more thoroughgoing treatment of the psychology underpinning these forms. Included also are reflections on what this reveals about “anti-Semitism” as it exists in the socio-cultural consciousness of strongly-identified Jews. In order to explore this matter on a deeper level, and to keep our material fresh, we now turn our attention to the academic deconstruction of Pound’s associate, and fellow Modernist poet, T.S. Eliot. Read more