Jews as An Elite

In Praise of James Petras

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I’m thrilled to see that retired scholar James Petras is still punching above his weight. Last month he published yet another powerful essay on his website, this one explicitly bringing to our attention the whopping over-representation of one particular ethnic group at the top of America’s power structure. He begins: “Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court marks a continuation and deepening of the lopsided ethno-religious representation in the US judicial system. If Garland is appointed, Jewish justices will comprise 45% of the Court, even though they represent less than 2% of the overall population.”

PowerPetras, retired Bartle Professor of sociology at Binghamton University whose views are generally on the left, came to my attention nearly a decade ago when he released three books that were extremely critical of not just Israel but Jewry as a whole. First was the 2006 book The Power of Israel in the United States, followed a year later by Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire: Bankers, Zionists and Militants. Then, in 2008, came Zionism, Militarism, and the Decline of US Power. (For those interested, my forty-two-page review of The Power of Israel and Rulers and Ruled appeared in the Winter 2007–2008 issue of The Occidental Quarterly.)

Obviously, it’s rare to see such critical prose from an academic. Despite his stature and wide exposure, Petras has continued to this day his principled criticism of Jews and Zionism — and has not been silenced by the usual tactics. I’m impressed. Read more

“As Happy as God in France”: The state of French Jewish elites, Part 2

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Part 1

Raymond Aron on Jewish ethnocentrism

It is effectively illegal in France to suggest that over-represented Jewish elites are ethnocentric, have dual-loyalty problems with regard to Israel, and that this has an influence on the way power is wielded in the country. Two men who do so, the nationalist essayist Alain Soral and the Franco-Cameroonian comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, have paid a hefty price for it, although their struggle has earned them a certain notoriety and place in history in compensation.

I will therefore not say anything of the community, but quote Raymond Aron, a universally-respected liberal-conservative French patriot of Jewish origin, who died in 1983. Towards the end of his life he increasingly, in his ever-diplomatic, reasoned and understated way, criticized the rise of Western Jewish elites’ ethnocentrism and uncritical support for Israel, worrying that these would contribute to anti-Semitism.

In a text sent to the 28 January 1980 World Jewish Congress, Aron said:

In the United States, the American Jewish Community, almost always if not always, supports the diplomatic positions adopted by the Israeli government. The French Jews who publish Jewish reviews and are active in Jewish organizations do the same. Whatever is the Israeli party (or coalition) in power, the official representatives of the community support the arguments of the Israeli government. This situation does not strike me as healthy.[1]

These elites have typically paired their uncritical support for Israeli nationalism with hysterical opposition to any flicker of French nationalism. Read more

“As Happy as God in France”: The state of French Jewish elites, Part 1

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Valls BHL

Then-interior minister and current Prime Minister, Manuel Valls tells a Jewish audience (including the Jewish Defense League) on 19 March 2014: “The Jews of France are more than ever at the vanguard of the Republic!” Bernard-Henri Lévy watches over him.

The Jewish community in France, as in most Western countries at least since the Second World War, has been remarkably successful. This very success however has brought on backlash as other groups — Whites, Blacks and Arabs — feel their interests and honor are not as well-respected by the French politico-media system.

There are an estimated 600,000 Jews in France, or just under 1% of the population. Almost half are Ashkenazim (a mix of people living in France for centuries, especially from the eastern parts of the country, and immigrants from Germany, Poland, etc.), while the rest are Sephardim, most of whom came to France from North Africa in the wake of decolonization in the 1960s.

According to the francophone Jewish-Israeli nationalist website “Terre Promise,” Jews are massively over-represented among the 500 richest Frenchmen: three out of the top 20 (15%), nine of the top 50 (18%), 23 out of the top 50 (18%), 23 of the top 200 (11.5%) and 44 out of the top 500 (8.8%). This is the same order of magnitude of over-representation (1000–2000%) that one finds in the United States. Ashkenazim and Sephardim are equally-well represented among this elite, showing the remarkable social mobility of the new arrivals from North Africa.[1] Read more

Tom Perkins’ faux pas

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There’s a bit of civic tension in San Francisco these days, pitting mostly young, relatively rich employees of tech companies against the older residents. Rents and housing prices are skyrocketing, forcing some of the previous residents to flee. The most visible results of this upheaval are the tech company buses that roam the streets, picking up and dropping off techies. Lately there have been protests of the buses, including threats of violence. A NY Times report:

Demonstrators regularly block the shuttles. Last week, a group of activists stalked a Google engineer at his East Bay house, urging the masses to “Fight evil. Join the revolution.” A prominent venture capitalist struck back, comparing the tech elite with persecuted Jews in Nazi Germany.

Nazi Germany?? This stems from what Tom Perkins, the “prominent venture capitalist,”  wrote to the Wall Street Journal:

Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its “one percent,” namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the “rich.”

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these “techno geeks” can pay. …

This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now? Read more

Philip Weiss on Jewish Success

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Philip Weiss, ever (self-)conscious of the power of Jews in American society, has another meditation on the topic (“Jewish success– is it ever a story?). Once again, the larger point is that Jewish power is off limits for public discussion—a theme that goes back at least as far as Wilmot Robertson’s Dispossessed Majority in the early 1970s.

This morning National Public Radio aired a story on the rivalry between Lawrence Summers and Janet Yellen to be the next Fed chairperson, succeeding Ben Bernanke. All three of these economists are Jewish. It is plain evidence of the fact that Jews make up a large segment of the new Establishment, if not the leading segment.

What other identifiable group could possibly be considered to make up the “leading segment” of the new Establishment? The WASPs are long gone, without even one representative on the Supreme Court (compared to three Jews). Joe Biden, among others, thinks that Jews have “immense” influence, so who are we to argue?

The result will be that Jews will have held the most important economic post in the U.S. for thirty years, since Alan Greenspan’s tenure began in 1987. But not a word in the MSM about the fact that Fed Chairman has become a Jewish fief, that the three leading candidates are Jews (the short list, according to Obama, now includes Donald L. Kohn), or that the person in charge of the search, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, is Jewish. Read more

Israel and the NSA Scandal

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Steve Sailer has an article on the tie-in between Israeli high tech firms and the NSA spying on American citizens (“Does Israel Have a Backdoor to US Intelligence?“). It’s always seemed very suspicious that Amdocs, an Israeli firm, was responsible for billing for US phone companies, and that two Israeli firms, Narus and Verint, are involved in wiretapping AT&T and Verizon for the NSA. It’s also not surprising that, as noted by James Bamford in his April 2012 article for Wired,  someone with close connections to Israel secretly gave software designed by NSA to Israel:  “the advanced analytical and data mining software the NSA had developed for both its worldwide and international eavesdropping operations was secretly passed to Israel by a mid-level employee, apparently with close connections to the country.” Bamford’s source describes him as “a very strong supporter of Israel.”

This is likely yet another example of a long list of American Jews who are credibly believed to have spied for Israel, including pretty much the entire roster of prominent neocons (Perle, Wolfowitz, Stephen Bryen, Douglas Feith, and Michael Ledeen; see here, p. 47ff)—none of whom, with the exception of Jonathan Pollard, have been convicted, and many of whom, like the person mentioned here, have never been indicted.  And given this long list, it is certainly reasonable to think that Israel is using its connections with the NSA to mine US data for its own purposes. In fact, it would be silly to think otherwise. Read more

Joe Biden’s faux pas

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Good  grief!  Joe Biden should  know the ground rules by now. You can praise the contributions of individual Jews. It’s totally permissible to wax eloquent on the accomplishments of  Sigmund Freud, Jonas Salk, or Albert  Einstein—perhaps even implying that humanity would never have come on these ideas and thus be infinitely poorer for it. (John Derbshire seems to agree, but it’s ridiculous on the face of it.) You  can even  praise the Jewish community’s role in enacting public policy on which there is a broad consensus, such as the Civil Rights movement.

But you can’t imply that Jews have real power and have used it to push America in directions most Americans don’t want to go or obviously conflict with the legitimate interests of other  groups—particularly Whites.

The Jewish people have contributed greatly to America. No group has had such an outsized influence per capita as all of you standing before you, and all of those who went before me and all of those who went before you … I think you, as usual, underestimate the impact of Jewish heritage. I really mean that. I think you vastly underestimate the impact you’ve had on the development of this nation. (See Jonathan Chait, “Biden praises Jews, Goes Too Far, Accidentally Thrills Anti-Semites“)

In particular, as noted also at TOO, Biden claims that Jews have been at the vanguard of gay marriage. We have also noted Jewish domination of the gun control movement and their responsibility for the mainstreaming of pornography and for the sexualization of culture. Jewish neocons with their power in the media and in the government were the main force behind the costly war in Iraq. And by far most importantly Jews have been the main force behind displacement-level non-White immigration (see also here regarding the current push for yet more massive increases in non-White immigrants). Biden cheerfully says, ““The embrace of immigration” is part of that, as is the involvement of Jews in social justice movements.” Read more