Neoconservatism

Robert Satloff and the Jewish Culture of Deceit

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Stephen Walt had the audacity to suggest, given Dennis Ross’s close ties to WINEP, that Ross should not have a policy-making position on Middle East issues in the Obama Administration. Neocon Robert Satloff responded with outrage, claiming that Ross has been doing nothing but promoting “U.S. interests in peace and security for the past quarter-century.” And he disingenuously asks, “To which country do we allegedly have a ‘strong attachment’?  Our foreign-born scholars hail from virtually every country in the Middle East — Turkey, Iran, Israel, and at least a dozen different Arab countries.”

The best response is by MJ Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum, an organization that advocates a two-state solution to the conflict:

Steve Rosen [who was acquited on charges of spying for Israel in 2009] … cleverly came up with the idea for an AIPAC controlled think-tank that would put forth the AIPAC line but in a way that would disguise its connections.

There was no question that WINEP was to be AIPAC’s cutout. It was funded by AIPAC donors, staffed by AIPAC employees, and located one door away, down the hall, from AIPAC Headquarters (no more. It has its own digs). It would also hire all kinds of people not identified with Israel as a cover and would encourage them to write whatever they liked on matters not related to Israel. “Say what you want on Morocco, kid.” But on Israel, never deviate more than a degree or two.

In other words, Satloff’s claims that WINEP is not tied to any particular lobby or country are part of an ongoing subterfuge that fools no one except the mainstream media: “It matters because the media has totally fallen for this sleight of hand and WINEP spokespersons appear (especially on PBS) as if WINEP was not part of the Israel lobby. Some truth-in-labeling is warranted.”

This sort of subterfuge is central to Jewish efforts at influencing policy in a wide range of areas. Because they are a small minority in the US and other Western societies, Jews must recruit support from the wider community. Their positions cannot be phrased as benefiting Jews, but as benefiting the interests of the society as a whole. As a result, these movements cannot tell their name.

A great example is the $PLC, an organization that we now know is funded by Jews and, apart from the sociopathic Morris Dees, is also largely staffed by Jews. Yet whenever there is a story about “immigrant rights” or angry White people, the SPLC is called on by the mainstream media as a “respected civil rights organization” rather than for what it is: A Jewish activist organization actively attempting to further the ethnic  interests of Jews, typically at the expense of White Americans.

This sort of subterfuge was true of all the Jewish intellectual and political movements discussed in The Culture of Critique. As I noted in Ch. 6:

It is thus not surprising that although these theories were directed at achieving specific Jewish interests in the manipulation of culture, they “could not tell their name”; that is, they were forced to minimize any overt indication that Jewish group identity or that Jewish group interests were involved …. Because of the need for invisibility, the theories and movements discussed here were forced to deemphasize Judaism as a social category—a form of crypsis discussed extensively in SAID (Ch. 6) as a common Jewish technique in combating anti-Semitism. In the case of the Frankfurt School, “What strikes the current observer is the intensity with which many of the Institute’s members denied, and in some cases still deny, any meaning at all to their Jewish identities” (Jay 1973, 32). The originators and practitioners of these theories attempted to conceal their Jewish identities, as in the case of Freud, and to engage in massive self-deception, as appears to have been common among many Jewish political radicals. Recall the Jewish radicals who believed in their own invisibility as Jews while nevertheless appearing as the quintessential ethnics to outside observers and at the same time taking steps to ensure that [non-Jews] would have highly visible positions in the movement (pp. 91–93). The technique of having non-Jews] as highly visible exemplars of Jewish-dominated movements has been commonly used by Jewish groups attempting to appeal to gentiles on a wide range of Jewish issues (SAID, Ch. 6) and is apparent in the discussion of Jewish involvement in influencing immigration policy. …  [Chap. 7]: Beginning in the late nineteenth century, anti-restrictionist arguments [on immigration]  developed by Jews were typically couched in terms of universalist humanitarian ideals; as part of this universalizing effort, [non-Jews] from old-line Protestant families were recruited to act as window dressing for their efforts, and Jewish groups such as the AJCommittee funded pro-immigration groups composed of non-Jews (Neuringer 1971, 92).

It’s an old technique, arguably present (see also here)  from the origins of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. The sad thing is that people who should know better continue to be deceived.

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Kevin MacDonald: Review of Podhoretz, Part II

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Kevin MacDonald: Part II of my review of Podhoretz is now posted on Alternative Right. Quite a bit of it relates to the current discussion of Jewish intellectual style on this site. I agree with Podhoretz that Jews are attracted to religious thinking in which they accept theories that explain everything but are incapable of disconfirmation. The problem is that Jews have advanced these religious theories as “scientific” not only in the social sciences and humanities, but also, perhaps, in theoretical physics, as some have argued here.

The other point is to underline the fact that the only theory that can account for Jewish political behavior in the Diaspora is that it is motivated by ethnic conflict with the White, Christian majority seen as the historical enemy. I note that the status as an elite outsider has grave moral implications. In fact, Jews are actively engaged in making alliances with the soon-to-be non-White majority. Whites should be deeply concerned about what this portends for the future.

It’s interesting that in the Comments section Paul Gottfried agrees with my analysis but also points to White guilt as a critical factor. I agree with that and have written about it several places. For example, White predispositions to guilt and the manufacture of White guilt by prominent Jewish intellectual and political movements is the topic of my review of Eric Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo America. (see also here.)

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Review of Podhoretz, Part I

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I have a rather longish review of Norman Podhoretz’s Why are Jews Liberals? posted at AlternativeRight.com. I thought I would post a summary here to encourage commentary. Part I is “Remaking the Right: Liberals, Jews, Conservatives” and deals with how Jews see their history in Europe — the lachrymose view of European history in which Jews have been the victims of irrational hostility ever since the origins of Christianity. The take home point is:  “It’s a very short jump from blaming the culture created and sustained by Europeans to the idea that Europeans as a people or group of peoples are the problem. Ultimately, this implicit sense that Europeans themselves are the problem is the crux of the issue.”

This then feeds into the Jews as a hostile elite theme that is so apparent today. What’s really scary is that the Jewish Republican branch of the hostile elite represents itself as conservative. A conservative elite hostile to the traditional people and culture of the US. Orwell would love it.

The other theme is how neocon Jews like Podhoretz displaced true conservatives from the Republican Party in the interests of aiding Israel. However, they have not shed any of their hostility toward Europeans and their culture. Indeed, they have been complicit in the movement for massive non-White immigration. As I note, “With conservatives like these, who needs liberals? ”

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Kevin MacDonald: Charles Dodgson on Stratfor

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Kevin MacDonald: Charles Dodgson’s current TOO article “Stratfor’s Global Forecast: Myopia or Neoconservative Manipulation?” is a real eye-opener. I have often seen Stratfor’s forecasts distributed on email lists and other venues as representing objective, hardheaded analysis. Now it turns out that Stratfor is run by a strongly identified Jew who sees the world through a typical neoconservative Jewish lens — biased toward Israel. And, by emphasizing the benefits of immigration into Western countries but not the ethnic costs to Whites, Stratfor is an effective cheerleader for White dispossession in Europe and America.

Because they are tiny minority in Western societies, all  successful Jewish intellectual and political movements  must appeal to non-Jews. This has certainly been true of the Jewish movements of the left that dominate so much of contemporary thinking in the West. This is also true of neoconservative movements, and Dodgson’s analysis shows that Stratfor appeals to non-Jewish conservatives because  it emphasizes national sovereignty and other hot button conservative issues. But, in the end, Stratfor is yet another illustration of neoconservative Jews  reinforcing the fundamentally leftist, multicultural, anti-White status quo in the West while simultaneously advocating Jewish ethnic nationalism in Israel.

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Should Haiti be Rebuilt?

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It’s impossible to turn on television these days without messages to donate to Haitian relief by Michelle Obama and others. Or we read a newspaper article and find that there is an outpouring of concern about Haiti — leading not only to financial donations but to offers of adoption by American, presumably White, parents of the estimated 380,000 Haitian orphans:

Tammy Gage of Stanberry, Mo., cries every time she turns on the TV and sees the devastation in Haiti. And though she already has three daughters, she didn’t hesitate when her husband suggested that they adopt from Haiti.

“That’s all he needed to say,” she said.

Gage and her husband, Brad, are among many Americans expressing interest in adopting children who have been left orphans from the quake last week. Adoption advocacy groups are reporting dozens of calls a day.

Patrick Cleburne points out that 37% of Americans say they or someone in their family has donated to Haitian relief.

This altruism on behalf of genetically unrelated people who have created the quintessential dysfunctional society is pathetic and shows how far we have to go to get people to think rationally about this issue.

It is yet another example of the power of the media. Imagine if the media simply framed this as what you would expect from a people with an average IQ of 72 and a 200-year record of economic failure and inability to govern themselves. Imagine if the media messages were informed by ethnic genetic interests and if adopting parents were made aware that they would feel less psychological involvement with their African children than to genetically similar others. Imagine if there were no high-status figures on TV advocating Haitian relief  and thereby appealing to our evolved psychology of emulating high-status people. (By adopting a Haitian refugee or making a donation, I can get the approval of people like George Clooney, Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera.)

Altruistic Whites who contributed to the relief effort would be scorned as naïve and misguided  — and they would be made aware that they will likely be unhappy in the long run. The aid would dry up. Our explicit processing mechanisms (human rationality) could easily overcome the natural empathy that we feel when we see human suffering. On the other hand, Whites would not at all be surprised that Blacks and other non-Whites (including presumably President Obama given his strongnon-White identity) strongly support the immigration of Haitians because in doing so they are supporting their own ethnic genetic interests in a non-White America. Indeed, 70% of Black Americans favor Haitian immigration compared to 45% of Whites.

A recent TOO article is an anecdote to all that. As it notes, the left has a “profoundly Eurocentric” belief that other peoples are the same. It adds that the result is a campaign for ever more aid and development, fuelled by the belief that, given enough money, education, and opportunity, the Third World (including even Haiti) will eventually converge with Europe.

From the standpoint of the multicultural left, societies like Haiti can’t be allowed to fail because the failure challenges their whole belief system.

It’s interesting that one of our favourite neocons, Elliott Abrams, wants to increase Haitian immigration to the US so that they can send money back to Haiti. This is a twist on the leftist theory that everyone is equal and that Haiti, given enough support, will be just like Sweden. Abrams’  implicit theory is that Haiti cannot possibly be expected to make itself into a viable society unless it can siphon off wealth from the US. As he points out, this is already happening for a great many countries, prototypically Mexico, Honduras, and, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic.

As a charter member of the Israel lobby, he knows all about siphoning off wealth (not to mention the lives of US military personnel) from the US on behalf of a foreign country. And as a Jew, he is certainly well within the Jewish mainstream when it comes to immigration policy generally. The implicit model of the US for Abrams is exactly the model advocated by Jewish activists for the last century: A proposition nation composed of different cultures and ethnicities, each with an allegiance to their own people wherever they may live.

Needless to say, this vision of American is profoundly antithetical to the interests of European-descended people in the United States.

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The Ilya Somin Conspiracy

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Ilya Somin’s blog at the Volokh Conspiracy, “Confusing Overrepresentation with Domination” raises some interesting issues that are at the heart of my work. His purpose is to claim that Jews may be overrepresented in various movements, such as neoconservatism, without Jews dominating these movements. He also claims that Jews involved in various movements do not differ from non-Jews involved in these movements, so that the idea that Jews involved in these movements are pursuing Jewish interests is a non-starter. For example:

In the 1920s, Jews were indeed overrepresented (relative to their percentage of the general population) among both Bolshevik leaders and international capitalists [in Weimar Germany]. At the same time, non-Jews still greatly outnumbered Jews in both groups. A closely related fallacy was the assumption that overrepresentation in a field proved that the Jews involved in it were using it to promote some specifically Jewish interest. In reality, Jewish capitalists tended to behave much like gentile ones, focusing primarily on maximizing their profits. Jewish communists such as Leon Trotsky were brutal totalitarians. But their gentile counterparts, such as Lenin and Stalin, were much the same. There was no real evidence that either Jewish capitalists or Jewish communists were promoting specifically Jewish interests in any systematic way. Indeed, Jewish communists in the USSR actually supported the regime’s suppression of Jewish culture and religion.

I don’t dispute this argument when it comes to capitalists, although there is good evidence that the political attitudes of Jewish capitalists were not interchangeable with non-Jewish capitalists — the  latter more inclined to liberal internationalism than their non-Jewish counterparts. But when it comes to leftist politics, one must deal with the data in Chapter 3 of The Culture of Critique — that Jewish Bolsheviks retained a Jewish identity and saw Communism as good for Jews — as indeed it was. As Yuri Slezkine exhaustively describes, Jews became an elite in the USSR, their influence declining only after WWII. As I concluded in CofC, “Clearly, Jews perceived communism as good for Jews: It was a movement that did not threaten Jewish group continuity, and it held the promise of power and influence for Jews and the end of state-sponsored anti-Semitism.”

Responding to Somin’s point about the suppression of Jewish culture and religion, I also show that Jewish communist activists produced a secular Jewish culture within the communist system, concluding:

Despite their complete lack of identification with Judaism as a religion and despite their battles against some of the more salient signs of Jewish group separatism, membership in the Soviet Communist Party by these Jewish activists was not incompatible with developing mechanisms designed to ensure Jewish group continuity as a secular entity. In the event, apart from the offspring of interethnic marriages, very few Jews lost their Jewish identity during the entire Soviet era (Gitelman 1991, 5), and the post–World War II years saw a powerful strengthening of Jewish culture and Zionism in the Soviet Union.

Somin goes on to dispute the importance of Jewish identity in the neoconservative movement (Mearsheimer and Walt to the contrary) and the recent financial crisis. Again, I don’t  want to dispute this with respect to the financial crisis because I have not seen a good article showing differences between Jews and non-Jews in the financial industry. (On the other hand, there is evidence, soon to be presented in TOO, that Bernie Madoff’s scheme likely could not have happened apart from his Jewish connections.)

But in the case of neocons, it’s simply not enough to claim “that the views of Jewish neoconservatives differ little from those of gentile ones, that neocon hawkishness on the Arab-Israeli conflict is just one facet of their hawkishness on other foreign policy issues unrelated to Israel (and therefore not likely to be a specifically Jewish agenda), and that the overrepresentation of Jews among neocons is similar to that in many other intellectual movements (including plenty that were opposed to neoconservatism on most issues).”

I agree that non-Jewish neocons typically hold the same views as Jewish neocons (otherwise they wouldn’t be neocons!). The question is whether Jewish and non-Jewish neocons have different motivations, and there is overwhelming evidence that they do. In my article on neocons, it quite clear that Jewish neocons typically have close family connections to Israel (e.g., Douglas Feith’s father was a member of a Jabotinskyist terrorist group), are involved with Israeli think tanks, and are on personal terms with Israeli political and military leaders. Many have ties with Jewish activist organizations such as the Zionist Organization of America. Several have been credibly charged with spying on behalf of Israel (Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Bryen, Douglas Feith, and Michael Ledeen). When not working in the government, they often work for overtly pro-Israel organizations such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. It’s simply not credible that their Jewish identity is not a critical factor in explaining their behavior.

I also try to fathom the motives of non-Jews involved in neoconservatism, noting “Because neoconservative Jews constitute a tiny percentage of the electorate, they need to make alliances with non-Jews whose perceived interests dovetail with theirs. Non-Jews have a variety of reasons for being associated with Jewish interests, including career advancement, close personal relationships or admiration for individual Jews, and deeply held personal convictions.” But whatever these motives are, they are not the same as the motives of the Jewish neocons.

It’s also true that Jewish neocons are generally hawkish, but this certainly doesn’t imply that their attitudes about anything affecting Israel are not affected by their Jewish identifications. Again, neocons have to make alliances with non-Jews; one  way to do this is to adopt a generally aggressive foreign policy stance that appeals to non-Jewish foreign policy hawks. Further, hawkish Jewish interests extend beyond directly aiding Israel. For example, the role of neocon Jews in the Cold War fit well not only Jewish interests in weaking an ally of the Arabs, but also with improving the status of Jews in the USSR.

And finally, it doesn’t follow from the fact that Jewish neocons are motivated by their attachment to Israel that Jews who are opposed to neoconservatism are not motivated by their own conception of Jewish interests. In the same way, before the establishment of Israel there was real debate within the Jewish community over whether Zionism was a good idea. The point is that both factions in the debate viewed their perspective as better for Jews. Right now we have the conflict between AIPAC and J Street. (Granted, the conflict may be more apparent than real). But in any case, both sides see their perspective as good for Jews.  Even Mearsheimer and Walt argue that their approach to Israel policy is good for the Jews. But M&W are surely correct in seeing Jewish neocons as motivated by their perception of Jewish interests.

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Martin Webster: Fabrication published by the London Times

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Martin Webster: In my recent TOO article “Is there a revolt against the Israel Lobby brewing in Britain?” I noted that The Times (London), like all of Rupert Murdoch’s media properties, had become a mouthpiece for Zionism. The Times editor, Richard Harding, is Jewish and a strong Zionist, as is his assistant editor and chief leader-writer Danny Finkelstein, as is his chief political columnist David Aaronovitch, as are a large and increasing number of his editorial staff in all departments and at all grades. Finkelstein, Aaronovitch and other Times journalists write guest columns in the Jewish Chronicle, while the JC‘s editor Stephen Pollard often writes a column in The Times. (See Kevin MacDonald’s blog on a particularly loathsome article by Pollard published recently in The Times.)

It’s a wonder the two papers don’t merge.

It’s therefore not surprising that on December 14 The Times published an article (“Secret document exposes Iran’s nuclear trigger“) on an Iranian report describing plannedwork on a “neutron initiator” for an atomic weaponhead. The article asserts that “independent experts confirm [the neutron initiator] has no possible civilian or military use other than in a nuclear weapon.” Former CIA official Philip Giraldi now claims based on his sources in the US intelligence community that US intelligence has determined that the report is a  fabrication, most likely by Israeli intelligence. Giraldi notes that “The Rupert Murdoch chain has been used extensively to publish false intelligence from the Israelis and occasionally from the British government.”  

The article goes on to note that “The Times is part of a Murdoch publishing empire that includes the Sunday Times, Fox News and the New York Post. All Murdoch-owned news media report on Iran with an aggressively pro-Israeli slant.”

The publication achieved its intended aim: “The story of the purported Iranian document prompted a new round of expressions of U.S. and European support for tougher sanctions against Iran and reminders of Israel’s threats to attack Iranian nuclear programme targets if diplomacy fails.”

US intelligence has not made any pronouncements on the authenticity of the document despite its being out for more than a year. Interestingly “foreign intelligence sources” (presumably Israel) dated the document to early 2007. The article suggests this dating was motivated by an attempt to  “discredit the U.S. intelligence community’s November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran had discontinued unidentified work on nuclear weapons and had not resumed it as of the time of the estimate.”

One can only imagine the intense pressure on US intelligence not to release its findings if they do in fact implicate Israel — and its willing minions in the media.

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