Jews and the Left

A Dissident Meditation on Jewish Identity: A Review of Gilad Atzmon’s “The Wandering Who?”

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Gilad Atzmon, The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics (Winchester, UK and Washington, DC: Zer0 Books, 2011, 202 pp.)

Gilad Atzmon is one of those rarest of all birds—the sort of person who would be called a “self-hating Jew” by Jewish activists. Except that he doesn’t really hate himself and really doesn’t have much of a Jewish identity at all. He is an honest leftist who happens to be of Jewish origin; or perhaps one should label him a liberal devoted to the values of the Enlightenment,  without the typical Jewish blinders. Although he has a few blinders of his own, he sees quite clearly the incompatibility of Zionism with post-Enlightenment Western civilization.

For Atzmon, Zionism is all about Judaism as racial identity politics, ethnic cleansing, and manipulating Western governments via the Israel Lobby. As a child growing up in Israel, “supremacy was brewed into our souls, we gazed at the world through racist, chauvinistic binoculars. And we felt no shame about it either” (p. 2). He began his journey of embracing the West as a result of immersion in jazz. Eventually, “I somehow already yearned to become a Goy or at least to be surrounded by Goyim” (p. 7).

For Atzmon, the racialism so fundamental to Zionism is an aberration from Judaism the religion. He has no problem with people who “regard themselves as human beings that happen to be of Jewish origin.” The problem arises with “those who put their Jewish-ness over and above all other traits” (p. 16). This sort of Jewish essentialism was central to Zionism from the beginning, often with strong racialist overtones. Quoting Vladimir Jabotinsky, the father of the Israeli right:

A Jew brought up among Germans may assume German customs, German words. He may be wholly imbued with that German fluid but the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish because his blood, his body, his physical racial type are Jewish. Read more

Obama’s Fundraising Triumph: Thank The Jews

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Vogue's Brit Anna Wintour: Performing A Cosmetic Function

Friday was Fundraising disclosure day for the Presidential aspirants – and the winner was Barack Obama. He won because of the Jews.

Reminding us that Rupert Murdoch’s injection of U.K. Tabloid style has its uses, The New York Post has the most succinct account: O’s pals pony up $68 mil by Geoff Earle July 16, 2011

Obama’s huge $68 million campaign-money haul in the last quarter came with a big assist from an array of big-money donors — 27 of whom raised more than $500,000 each for his re-election campaign…

The 244 big-cash bundlers raised at least $37 million, or more than half of Obama’s total fund-raising haul for the quarter…

By contrast, Mitt Romney, the top fund-raiser among GOP candidates, brought in $18 million…

The Obama campaign has released a list of these 244 “bundlers” – parties who undertake their own fund-raising efforts for a campaign. It is here.

By my count (which is still rising) 120 of these individuals are Jewish. No other ethnic or social group (such as the Gays) can be identified as supplying more than a handful.

Occidental Observer readers will be interested in my methodology. A number of these bundlers, like Chicago’s Penny Pritzker (“$100,000- $200,000”) or Hollywood’s Jeffrey Katzenberg (“$500,000+”) are very well-known. And a large number have obviously Jewish names (is it really necessary to spend much time, on, for instance “$100,000-$200,000” category bundler Israel Roizman of Lafayette Hill Pennsylvania?).

No doubt one or two of these Jewish-surnamed people will turn out to have inherited or converted to Christianity. In the context of supporting Obama, this may be less significant to evaluating Jewish influence than in other situations. But far more important, there are a considerable number of names not obviously Jewish which upon investigation turn out to be, in fact, held by Jews.

For example Mark Gilbert of Boca Raton ($500,000+) has been discussed by Mondoweiss for his demanding Zionism. And Marc Stanley of Dallas ($100,000-$200,000) is Chairman of the National Jewish Democratic Council and wrote Why Jews Overwhelmingly Support Obama for the Huffington Post back on March 25 2009. So far, I have found rather more than a dozen examples of this.

One of the pleasures of blogging for Occidental Observer is the frequency of constructive contributions by some of our commentators. Googling deep enough on a name often produces proof of ethnicity, but it takes time. I invite OO friends to look into the non-Jewish names on the Obama Bundler list and send me any interesting results.

After an initial celebration, Obama’s MSM friends are in Spin mode. Emphasis is being laid on the presence on the of some non-Jewish celebrities such as Vogue editor Anna Wintour ($500,000+) and of Gays (there are three male couples on the list and one of the $500,000+ bundlers is Democratic National Committee Finance Treasurer Andrew Tobias – who is of course also Jewish). A press kit has obviously gone out emphasizing the large number of Obama’s small donors (no surprise: there a lot of Jewish doctors and dentists out there).

But it is increasingly obvious that the 2012 is going to pit a coalition of colored voters, managed and financed by the Jews, against White America. Obama delights the Jews because they see his being President as a humiliating defeat of the ethnicity which built this country. Particularly if the Republicans nominate an explicit Christian like Michele Bachman (whose groveling to Israel will count for nothing) rage will explode and the coffers will open.

Jewish money is the poison of American political life. The pattern of Obama fund raising is going to make this difficult to hide.

The Labour Party War Against White Britain

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Paul Weston’s article “Why is this not treason?” will make your blood boil. It describes the Labour Party’s war against White Britain. (The article links to another article, “Ethnically cleansing the English” that is also well worth reading.) Key quotes:

Despite the obvious violence that emanates from massed Muslims wherever they are in the world, the Labour government went to great lengths to portray Islam as The Religion of Peace, even as Christianity was mocked and defiled, and decent, moral and patriotic Britons were re-cast and criminalised as Islamophobic, race-hating Nazis….

There were two main reasons for such treachery. The first was held by Labour’s minority hard-left who wanted to destroy utterly the hated traditional establishment, and in this respect they had no choice but to declare war on their own people. To the hard-left, the enemy was the conservative, Christian, capitalist West of liberal-democracy Western civilisation — or, in other words, the majority of the English.

The second reason, held perhaps by the majority of Labour apparatchiks, was to ensure a socialist government in perpetuity via the imported foreign vote. Research into voting patterns conducted for The Electoral Commission in May 2005 showed that Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshis voted 56%, 50% and 41% for Labour. The equivalent figures for the Conservatives were 11%, 11% and 9%. … Read more

“During 1917”: Chapter 14 of Solzhenitsyn’s “200 Years Together”

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Chapter 14 of Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together (available here) recounts the events of 1917, a pivotal year in Russia. The main impression conveyed throughout the chapter is the sheer energy of the Jews—what I have elsewhere (pp. 24–26) labeled the psychological intensity of Jewish activism.

1917 in Russia was a year of rapid change, uncertainty and chaos—exactly the situation where even a relatively small but well-organized, energetic and highly motivated force may have a very large impact. As an analogy, consider how relatively easy it would have been to influence the structure of the U.S. government in the unsettled period after the Revolutionary War than it is today.

Jews developed a huge range of organizations of all types. Politically, they ranged from the center to the far left.

From the very first days after the February Revolution, central newspapers published enormous number of announcements about private meetings, assemblies and sessions of various Jewish parties, initially mostly the Bund [a socialist-labor party with a strong Jewish identity], and later of Poale Zion, Zionists, Socialist Zionists, Territorialist Zionists, and the Socialist Jewish Workers’ Party (SJWP). Already by March 7 we read about an oncoming assembly of the All-Russian Jewish Congress.

The various Zionist groups were the most popular among Jews; these groups tended to support socialist candidates in the Russian milieu. As an aside, one can’t help but notice the irony in the fact that Jacob Schiff, who had bankrolled Jewish revolutionary groups in Russia (see here, p. 36), announced that he had decided to join the Zionists “because of fear of Jewish assimilation as a result of Jewish civil equality in Russia. He believes that Palestine could become the center to spread ideals of Jewish culture all over the world.”

Would that he had directed all his financial support to Zionist causes rather than at attempts to topple the Czar. Wasn’t it obvious that Jewish civil equality would make assimilation and intermarriage more likely? Read more

The House I Live In

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Anyone who wants to know how we got to the point of all this Diversity nonsense and multicultural madness, and where it came from, should watch this short film called The House I Live In. Starring Frank Sinatra, it came out in 1945, and was created “to oppose anti-Semitism and racial prejudice.” It was awarded both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award in 1946.

The plot’s pretty simple. Sinatra, playing himself, heads outside for a cigarette break in the middle of a recording session, where he happens upon a gang of about a dozen young boys chasing and cornering another kid, getting ready to pummel him. Sinatra intervenes, asking what the trouble is. The ruffians explain that they want to beat the kid up because they don’t like his religion. One tells Sinatra “he’s a dirty -” but Frank cuts him off before he can finish the sentence. Read more

Judith Coplon–and why the Venona Project was stopped

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A generation of adults has now arisen which never experienced the dreadful certainty felt by those just a few years ahead of them (especially if they grew up in Europe): that ultimately Communism would win the Cold War.

Consequently they do not perhaps fully comprehend the iniquity of some of the actors in this drama. Such a one was Judith Coplon (Socolov) who died on February 26th.

Coplon was revealed by the Venona Project to be spying for the Russians. Because the authorities wanted to keep secret the fact they were able to read Russian cable traffic, her two convictions were able to be overturned on grounds of flawed procedure. She was never punished. The facts are well recounted here. Read more

More on Jonathan Haidt’s Tribal Moral Communities

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The video of Jonathan Haidt’s talk on tribal moral communities (see here), has some interesting additions to the NYTimes report. He says that when scholarly articles that contravene the sacred values of the tribe are submitted to academic journals, reviewers and editors suddenly become super rigorous. More controls are needed, and more subjects. It’s not a representative sample, and the statistical techniques are inadequate.

This use of scientific rigor against theories that are disliked for deeper reasons is a theme of Chapter 2 of The Culture of Critique where it was also noted that standards were quite lax when it came to data that fit the leftist zeitgeist. Read more