Jews and the Left

Was Ed Miliband’s father a KGB stooge? (contd.)

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With a year to go before the next British general election, the strategic brains behind an increasingly confident looking Labour Party are trying to tackle a matter of some delicacy — how are the British going to react to a Jewish Prime Minister? It is a tricky one because there is no disguising the fact that Ed Miliband is not only as Jewish as they come, but he has as much in common with the average Brit as a man from Mars.

The son of famous Marxist academic Ralph Miliband, he was born into a privileged and intellectual Hampstead milieu and has moved effortlessly via Oxford University and the London School of Economics to becoming a bag-carrier for senior politicians and then parachuted into the safe Labour seat of Doncaster north. A fairly normal trajectory then for a member of the increasingly hereditary political class and one that would have no doubt baffled the founders of  Labour Party in the coal pits of South Wales, the cotton mills of Lancashire and the shipyards of Clydeside.

Ed’s father Ralph was of Polish Jewish stock originally and arrived in Britain after fleeing Belgium in 1940 when the Germans invaded the Low Countries. Ralph worked as a lecturer at the LSE and became something of a fashionable academic fixture in the sixties New Left.

After Ralph’s son Ed became Labour leader, it was obviously decided that the matter of Jewishness had to be tackled head on, so once enough extended family Holocaust victims were discovered to make a suitable back story, Ed headed to Israel to meet his 84-year-old aunt, bond with Prime Minister Netanyahu and visit the Holocaust museum.

Benjamin Netanyahu and Ed Miliband

Benjamin Netanyahu and Ed Miliband

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More on Ralph Miliband: A KGB Connection?

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From a correspondent:

In Britain the media row over whether an obscure, deceased Marxist academic Ralph Miliband was a loyal British patriot who loved his country, rumbles on (see Alex Kurtagic’s article, “Ralph Miliband was not unique”). It is important for two reasons. One is that the Daily Mail, the voice of middle England is very much at bay with the Guardian and BBC snapping at its heels over what it has printed about Miliband.

The second is that Ralph Miliband was the father of the current Labour leader Ed Miliband who may or may not have inherited his father’s radical attitudes. But in all the sound and fury of the Daily Mail row, one question remains unasked.

Who was “Lev” the mysterious Russian figure who moved in Ralph Miliband’s circle in the sixties and was willing to pay for information about NATO.

We are introduced to “Lev” in the autobiographical writings of David Horowitz who is now a prominent Neocon but was then part of the left wing Jewish Marxist academic milieu. Horowitz moved to London in the mid-sixties and was taken under the wing of Ralph Miliband when the two lived next door to each other in Hampstead. Read more

Jews and the Civil Rights Movement

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Occidental Dissent has an article on Solomon Blatt, a powerful Jewish politician in South Carolina who was a staunch proponent of segregation during the 1950s and 1960s (“The Strange Career of Solomon Blatt“). Interesting article, but it ends thus:

South Carolina’s desegregation shows that the existence of the Union, not Jewish influence, was the primary cause of the South’s racial and cultural decline.

This does not follow. One surely can’t argue that because one Jewish politician in one state opposed desegregation that Jews did not have a decisive influence on the Civil Rights movement in general. South Carolina by itself could not withstand the onslaught against desegregation given that the laws against segregation were national in application.

First, one Jew who fought for segregation etc. really doesn’t change the big picture. There is likely no issue on which 100% of Jews agree; indeed, it’s well-known that the great majority of Southern Jews accepted the Southern status quo. For example:

Jews in the South were typically reluctant participants in the Civil Rights movement. The Southern Jewish community was relatively small compared to the much larger Jewish population that immigrated from Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1924, and had relatively little national influence. Southern Jews immigrated in the 19th century mainly from Germany, and they tended toward political conservatism, at least compared to their Eastern European brethren. The general perception of northern Jews and southern blacks and whites was that southern Jews had adopted white attitudes on racial issues. Moreover, southern Jews adopted a low profile because southern whites often (correctly) blamed northern Jews as major instigators of the civil rights movement and because of the linkages among Jews, communism, and civil rights agitation during a period when both the NAACP and mainstream Jewish organizations were doing their best to minimize associations with communism. (Jews were the backbone of the Communist Party USA, and the CPUSA agitated on behalf of black causes. It was common for southerners to rail against Jews while exempting southern Jews from their accusations: “We have only the high-type Jew here, not like the kikes in New York.” Read more

Ian Tattersall on Stephen Jay Gould

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The great thing about being a liberal/radical academic is that even falsifying data isn’t enough to seriously tarnish one’s reputation. Franz Boas’s finagling of his data on the skull shapes of immigrants in pursuit of his ethnopolitical agenda certainly hasn’t hurt his reputation, and Ian Tattersall’s remembrance of Stephen Jay Gould in the current issue of Natural History certainly won’t do anything to damage Gould (“Remembering Stephen Jay Gould“). Indeed, we read that the tenth anniversary of Gould’s death occasioned a “commemorative meeting in Venice organized by the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in collaboration with the Università Ca’ Foscari.” Doubtless replete with adulation.

Tattersall is quite frank that Gould’s politics influenced his views on science, describing him as “an unrepentant political liberal, he was firmly on the side of nurture.” Tattersall is saying that being a liberal implies that one will naturally support environmentalist positions in the social sciences. Given the dominance of the left in the academic world and the media, that means that the official message promulgated from elite institutions in the West inevitably supports the nurture argument and its typical correlate that all problems of non-Whites are due to White racism. (Predictably, Adam Carrolla was recently called a ‘racist’ for wondering why 50% of Blacks and Latinos in California couldn’t manage to obtain a checking account when Asian immigrants have managed to do just fine despite the pervasive racism by White Americans.) And of course this means that social science is impossible. The same names can be counted on to go to bat against any data that threaten the egalitarian academic consensus.

It also goes without saying that the media falls in line with the same mantra. This is true even for what passes as conservative media. Discussions of the failure of public education to erase racial/ethnic differences among mainstream conservatives routinely blame lack of choice in schools or poor teachers and completely stay away from mentioning IQ. If the ballgame is over, Gould won. Read more

Lee Siegel: Exuding Jewish Triumphalism

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A bit of Jewish triumpalism by Lee Siegel in the Wall Street Journal (“Rise of the Tiger Nation“). The basic plot line is that Jews overcame WASP dominance to attain the high ground in American culture. Now there is a rising Asian minority which, according to a Pew  Research Center Study is “the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States.”

My basic premise is that it is entirely reasonable for elites to resist displacement. For Siegel, the Jewish displacement of the WASP elite is a morality tale, with Jews as the good guys. The WASPs resisted by establishing quotas at Ivy League universities. They resented Jewish incursions into “WASP bastions such as rarefied country clubs, exclusive professional clubs, white-shoe law firms, prestigious foundations and the like…[;] these were the very institutions that resisted them the most intensely.” Writing from his position as a dominant elite, Siegel is not shy at hinting that some complaints about Jews were quite reasonable:

One reason that anti-Semitism persisted even as Jews ascended in American life was that Jews were frequently in the vanguard of American social and political dissent, from the anarchist Emma Goldman to Yippie Abbie Hoffman and beyond. Not only that, but many of the architects of America’s archenemy, Soviet Communism, had been Jews. As the WASP establishment lost ground to Jewish newcomers, the words “communist” and “Jew” often became synonymous. The association of Hollywood with lax morality, and of Jews with Hollywood, heightened a kind of low-grade hum of anti-Jewish feeling, even as it proved the general acceptance of the Jewish sentiments and sensibility that permeated American entertainment.

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Liberal Bias in Academia: The role of Jewish academics in the creation and maintenance of academic liberalism

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A study to be published in September in Current Directions in Psychological Science, prominent peer-reviewed academic journal, goes beyond the well-known fact that the vast majority of social psychologists are on the left (“Survey shocker: Liberal profs admit they’d discriminate against conservatives in hiring, advancement“).

Psychologists Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers, based at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, surveyed a roughly representative sample of academics and scholars in social psychology and found that “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists admit that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues.” …

More than a third of the respondents said they would discriminate against the conservative candidate. One respondent wrote in that if department members “could figure out who was a conservative, they would be sure not to hire them.” …

Generally speaking, the more liberal the respondent, the more willingness to discriminate and, paradoxically, the higher the assumption that conservatives do not face a hostile climate in the academy. …

A 2007 report by sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons found that 80 percent of psychology professors at elite and non-elite universities are Democrats. Other studies reveal that 5 percent to 7 percent of faculty openly identify as Republicans. By contrast, about 20 percent of the general population are liberal and 40 percent are conservative. …

[While much larger percentages of faculty are economic conservatives,] the widest divide occurs on social issues, the contested terrain in the culture wars shaking the academy. On these contentious issues, 90 percent identified as liberal and only 4 percent as conservative.

Of course, social psychologists by definition perform research on social issues—precisely the areas where they are overwhelmingly liberal. Don’t expect any race realist research on criminality or ethnic differences in aggressiveness to come out of mainstream social psychology. Read more

Sheldon Adelson: Israel and Immigration

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VDARE.com’s Patrick Cleburne has a nice article on Sheldon Adelson (“Has Romney Sold Immigration Policy To Sheldon Adelson?“), the billionaire who has emerged as the largest single donor in the current presidential campaign, promising up to $100 million for the Republicans. After supporting Gingrich in the primaries, Adelson has thrown his considerable weight behind Romney. We all know what that money buys: fealty to Israel. Throughout the campaign, Romney and Gingrich competed on who would be more slavish to Israel; Gingrich must have seemed slightly more reliable to Adelson, but Adelson must have been impressed with Romney as well.

There is no question about Adelson’s support for the most racialist and nationalist elements in Israel. Adelson owns an Israeli newspaper that supports PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard right Likud government. And there can be little question of where his loyalties lie. He has stated that he wishes he would have served in the Israeli military rather than in the US Army, and that he wants his son to grow up to “be a sniper for the IDF.”

All we care about is being good Zionists, being good citizens of Israel, because even though I am not Israeli born, Israel is in my heart. … All we care about is being good Zionists, being good citizens of Israel, because even though I am not Israeli born, Israel is in my heart,” he said toward the end of his talk.

I was surprised to read that Senator John McCain, referring explicitly to Adelson, complained that foreign money is entering the US presidential election race. This seemed too good to be true, and it was. It turns out that he was only making the point that a lot of Adelson’s money comes from his casino operations in Macau. What McCain should have been saying loud and clear is that Adelson is for all practical purposes a citizen of Israel with no demonstrated loyalty to the US and that he should not be allowed to influence the US political process.

But he won’t.  Read more