The white male has become the monstrous Other in his own nation, a nation he does not recognize and that no longer recognizes him. In America, his invisible suffering finally found a voice after one mention of liberal Hollywood icon Rosie O’Donnell as a fat pig changed everything. Be-cucked and floundering, the Republican establishment looked on in horror as the enigmatic billionaire Donald Trump improbably won, with the commentariat scratching their heads as to how they could’ve missed all of the signs the much-maligned American hinterland was fed up with being the lone societal punching bag. Various “coastal elites” traversed what they regard as the backwoods backwaters of the nation ostensibly looking for answers, but mostly voyeuristically providing “decline porn” and freak show-peeping to the dinner party set back home. There was no attempt to understand who these people are, or why they are not even so much angry, though they are—furious in fact—but more betrayed and dismayed.

The critic Robin Wood argues that horror films usually elicit our interest in, and sympathy for, the monster. Usually these films become the vehicle for the monster, the Other, that is tormenting the normal members of a society. There is typically the moral hero who must stand against this creature. Robin Wood argues that in these horror films, the monster is usually the center of interest and sympathy from the audience. It is the strangeness and the complexity of the monster that elicits the interest in it rather than in the moral character, the character supposedly so like us; however, the argument that the monster is a center of sympathy from the audience is a far more complicated proposition.

Typically cast out of normal society, the monster returns to have its revenge upon those that define the social norms. For example, in John Carpenter’s Halloween, Michael Myers has been sequestered away from society for the grisly murders of his family, confined to an asylum. On the anniversary of these murders he returns home to wreak havoc. He is the Other, the social pariah, rejected by society. He has a seeming singularity of purpose, but there is more to him behind that mask. This elicits interest in the psyche of this monster: what are his motivations, his back-story, et cetera?

As Robin Wood would argue, Myers’s traumatic background should elicit sympathy from the audience. However, this is not wholly accurate. The assertion that horror films elicit interest in the monster is almost wholly true; the assertion that the monster is a source of sympathy from the audience is another issue entirely. Myers is after all a brutal murderer. And how else do we explain the alien in Alien, for example? It is a creature wholly unlike us as humans. Its motivations and back-story are very engaging, as it is so unlike us, and is a complete unknown (or was until Prometheus and Alien: Covenant). Yet the notion that it inspires sympathy from the audience is absurd. When the alien is finally destroyed, it pleases the audience. The creature seems driven to do nothing but kill, feed, and reproduce.

Perhaps there is more, but we are incapable of understanding the actual thought process of such a creature, if there is one. It is seemingly the complete embodiment of the Other. It does not look like us, it does not act like us, it does not communicate like us, and, most critically, it doesn’t think like us—at least not on the surface. The alien is a parasitic organism. It has an incubation period inside of another live organism before killing it and effectively hatching. From there it feeds and grows.

The alien is driven to thrive and survive despite what havoc it may wreak on the ecosystem around it. So is the alien really that much different from the alien spores eating away at and pillaging what was once a civilization? Physically it bears absolutely no resemblance to us, but its will to survive drives it to kill, feed, and reproduce.

Perhaps sympathy could be derived from the fact that it would not survive if it did not feed, but it’s hard to sympathize with something that has to continually destroy multiple lives, human lives in the context of the film, to subsist. And besides, how can we possibly excuse countless unnecessary killings/murders done not to survive but for sport or out of malice, even if one has had a tough lot in life such as Myers?

And what of situations where we may find ourselves subconsciously rooting for the monster as we do in Silence of the Lambs for Hannibal Lecter? Thanks to his intellect and charm, is that more a reflection of Lecter or of the audience? What does that say about us? Additionally, can we truly call what we feel for Lecter sympathy, or perhaps more of a camaraderie?

The point is this: in horror films the monster is virtually always a subject of interest due to its complexity; any resulting sympathy is usually fleeting as a consequence of the function of its existence as the projected Other more than anything else. The monster or Other serves a purpose—in its inscrutability, it is easy to project our fears and anxieties, and as it is so unlike us, it makes it easier to banish or kill. There is a terrific episode of Black Mirror that deals with this notion of “Otherizing” in war-time. As with the alien in Alien, there is perhaps more linking the monster to the audience than the audience would care to admit, depending on who is doing the seeing and their level of honesty about themselves and what they would do to survive. In any case, a feeling of sympathy is a reflection of removal from a situation. Empathy is where one projects oneself into the shoes of another, so to speak.

This is why the study of Alien and Silence of the Lambs is so interesting. The two monsters could, on the surface, not be more different. Yet they both inhabit a similar space in our cultural framework. The alien is truly not us; it is another species. Hannibal Lecter has committed one of the greatest taboos in Western society: cannibalism. Lecter may not be able to help his cannibalistic nature, but in a way he is more inhuman than the alien. There is a certain amount of ritual involved in his killings. He is so cold and calculating on the one hand that he is almost inhuman. Yet he is also the epitome of what humans once aimed for: he is cultured, he is intellectual, and he values things like art and classical music—in this respect the alien has human characteristics. Yet it is motivated by a profoundly base desire of survival. The alien forces us to consider what we would do in order to survive. It is difficult to forgive the alien for surviving when its life costs numerous human lives, members of our tribe so to speak, but the survival of humanity revolves around the consumption of other organisms. How are humans any different to the alien than cattle or chickens are to humans? Does the alien know morality? As it clearly does not, survival or no, the alien must be expelled. To embrace this alien, especially at the expense of one’s own, is to commit suicide.

Hannibal Lecter’s consumption of human flesh is a luxury, as he does not have to eat it strictly from a needs standpoint—there are plenty of other food options available. He is compelled to consume human flesh simply because psychologically he feels that he has to. What would we do if there was no other option to survive other than to consume human flesh? The aversion to cannibalism is quite pronounced in Western culture, and for good reason, but in many non-Western societies, it is still relatively commonplace. The idea of cannibalism sickens us, but it also fascinates us. The multifaceted elements of Lecter absolutely captivate us as an audience. Lecter looks like us in a way that the alien does not, but in many ways he is far more alien.

To my mind, Lecter is the embodiment of the cosmopolitan “elite” occupying positions of power and trying to play God.

Most horror films on the surface are a force of good pitted against a force of evil. Clarice Starling is a force of good—she is moral and she is a servant of the law. She upholds the law and is thus a reflection of our morals as a society. Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill are the Other; their behavior is completely unacceptable according to our cultural values. We do not condone eating people or killing them and fashioning accessories out of their skin, although there seems to be a very odd and deeply disconcerting fascination in the “trans community” with Buffalo Bill.

We do condone bringing people like Buffalo Bill to justice according to our laws and confining them away from the rest of society. In fact, most would favor retributive justice, resulting in execution of the cannibal, belying the notion that liberalism is natural. Regarding the alien, whether it is cognizant of its crimes or not, this does not concern us at the basest level. What concerns us—what should concern us at any rate—is our own survival.

In the case of Silence of the Lambs we have Clarice, who despite getting help from Hannibal Lecter to catch Buffalo Bill, does not deviate from her ultimate goal of catching the killer and bringing him to justice. Despite her relationship with Lecter, when he manages to get free from prison, Clarice does not maintain the collaborative spirit. Rather, despite the long odds, she attempts to get him to reveal something about his location over the phone. She does not compromise her morals. Conversely, Lecter does not have an ideology as a man governed by base desires, yet completely in touch with the most refined aspects of high our culture while, and this is crucial, being himself an alien.

The same fascination with back-story, the unseen, and the monster extends to Silence of the Lambs. We see very little of the true horrors of Hannibal Lecter in the film, and perhaps that is why it is so easy to be seduced by his humor and charm. It isn’t until the countless other sequels that we get more than a glimpse into the depths evil that this man commits. The idea of his actions being off-screen, his past shrouded in mystery, so much of this man unseen, is a very Gothic idea. David Sexton writes:

Another bloodline passes through Stoker’s Dracula. We learn in Hannibal that, like Dracula, Lecter is a central European aristocrat. His father, too, was a count and he believes himself to be descended from a twelfth-century Tuscan named Bevisangue (blood-drinker). Like Dracula, Lecter drains his victims. After meeting him for the first time, Clarice Starling feels ‘suddenly empty, as though she had given blood’. Lecter, like Dracula, has superhuman strength; he commands the beasts; and he lives in the night. Barney, the warder, tells Clarice on her second visit that Lecter is always awake at night, ‘even when his lights are off’. Many of his physical attributes resemble those of Dracula. ‘His cultured voice has a slight metallic rasp beneath it, possibly from disuse’, we are told in The Silence of the Lambs. Dracula, says Stoker, speaks in a ‘harsh, metallic whisper’. Dracula’s eyes are red, Jonathan Harker realises when he first meets him, in the guise of a coachman. Later, when he sees Dracula with his female acolytes, he says: ‘The red light in them was lurid, as if the flames of hell-fire blazed behind them.’ So too: ‘Dr Lecter’s eyes are maroon and they reflect the light in pinpoints of red. Sometimes the points of light seem to fly like sparks to his centre.’[1]

In direct opposition to the red of Dracula and Lecter is the red of consanguinity, or shared blood, the bonds of which, indeed, are thicker than water (typically colored or referred to as blue). The red is a nation’s life-blood, a nation that obviously cannot survive without its people.

The precise point at which all of this alienism radiates outward in the modern world is with a hostile “elite” that is itself alien. Of course the “elite” is not exclusively Jewish, but it has become, by necessity as a survival mechanism, philo-Semitic. In order to understand the illness slowly killing Western civilization it is crucial to trace the symptoms back to the source, to the cause of the illness. To quote Revilo P. Oliver, “The culture of the West, like every viable civilization, is a unity in the sense that its parts are organically interdependent. Although architecture, music, literature, the mimetic arts, science, economics, and religion may seem at first glance more or less unrelated, they are all constituent parts of the cultural whole, and the disease of any one will sooner or later affect all the others.” The illness is in large part born of a unique evolutionary quirk of the White race which has mutated into a self-destructive pathology. This pathology has been encouraged and exploited by a Jewish minority for its own gain in parasitic fashion, but which is ultimately maladaptive, for it causes the death of the host. By understanding Jewish influence and domination of each constituent part of the cultural whole it becomes clear that, be it the music industry, activism in the form of “social justice” and “feminism,” alcohol, opioid-producing pharmaceutical companies, pornography, the retail industry, the movie industry, finance, or the media, the negative Jewish influence is poisoning each and every part, not just one, the over-lap and mutual reinforcement of each “facet” of this imposed and alien anti-culture only serving to hasten the illness into its terminal stages.

The anxiety over the infiltration of borders is consistent throughout history in the rise, decline, and fall of once-mighty world powers. Late Georgian and Victorian England may be considered one example among many. Hyper-aware of their status as the preeminent world power, and thus a highly desirable immigration destination, Victorians in particular became fearful of, or at the very least concerned with, alien resettlement in England, particularly from Eastern Europe (read: Jewish) but also Ireland, and a distinct discourse regarding the so-called Other in poetry and fiction as diverse as Tennyson’s “The Lotus-Eaters” and Bram Stoker’s Dracula ruminated on the changing composition of England.

Though Dracula, for example, pre-dates the post-World War II acceleration in the numbers of “guest workers” in Europe and the recent flood of “migrants” who have proven to be infinitely deleterious to the fabric of society, it spoke specifically to this anxiety of the Other, which in many ways remains prevalent in the general populace, but stands in stark contrast to the elites’ One World narrative. After all, Dracula and Lecter prove themselves to be subversive forces, as opposed to the naked onslaught of a zombie horde or a massive green alien. But for the discerning eye, Lecter and Dracula look just like us, they move among us, they converse with us and assume aristocratic qualities. For Greg Buzwell:

Dracula’s forays into London, for example, and his ability to move unnoticed through the crowded streets while carrying the potential to afflict all in his path with the stain of vampirism, play upon late-Victorian fears of untrammelled immigration. The latter was feared as leading to increased levels of crime and the rise of ghetto communities. Dracula creates several lairs in the metropolis, including one in Chicksand Street, Whitechapel—an area notorious for the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888—and one in Bermondsey, the location of Jacob’s Island—the low-life rookery immortalised by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist. … Such fears, which Dracula mirrors very closely, ultimately lay behind the introduction of The Aliens Act of 1905, which was put in place largely to stem immigration from Eastern Europe.[2]

The course of events in Britain, from “elite” subversion to the eventual push-back—which came too late—is witnessed almost identically, but at a slight delay, in the United States.

This wave of immigration led to a growing unease in terms of concerns about the degree of (mis- or non-) assimilation of these immigrants into English society, even, in fact, their very presence. Fears of invasion and contamination were not only expressed at this time in public discourse, but also in textual examples of the period. Dracula is a foreign invader, coming to England to buy up land and take women—“Your girls that you all love are mine already.” This invader emerged from the lands where the Huns had initially settled in Europe before their excursions against Rome, and in part evokes the image of the malicious barbarian from beyond the frontier. Dracula the character also embodies the literary trope of the “Wandering Jew.” Dracula is both new and old. As Jonathan Harker writes in his journal: “It is the nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.”

The parallels with today’s situation are striking, and indeed have accelerated even further. On top of the fact that the state of Qatar owns more London real estate than the crown, consider the proliferation of mosques as nodes or alien spores of conquest throughout British cities in general, much as Dracula bought up property throughout London. Victorian fears of the rapacious Other, so lampooned as grotesque exaggeration, have come to be realized in a modern culture unwilling or unable to confront the ramifications of what this might mean. Victorian England articulated a very clear set of norms governing sexual, economic, and social behavior. Breaking them could result in severe consequences (see, for instance, the Oscar Wilde trials in the 1890s). Dracula is the physical, over-determined manifestation of the collective fears of Victorian England. At willful odds with the rigid social code, Dracula literally punctures the surface of Victorian sensibility. For Anthony Wohl: “Popular literature assigned similar characteristics to the Irish, blacks and members of the lower classes. [They] were seen as: having no religion but only superstition, [being] excessively sexual, and [originating from] unknown dark lands or territories.” The id’s drive is at the center of horror, and the prohibitive measures taken to rectify societal transgressions stem from these primal impulses. Indeed, these tensions between societal expectations and basic impulses are at the heart of civilization; the ability to restrain oneself, to delay gratification and behave with morality and purpose for something greater than oneself, is what differentiates civilization from barbarism.

Continues David Sexton, “Lecter is the face that looks back at us out of our own boredom. He is our monster, the evil we embrace for our diversion. And he feeds on us.” Lecter is in the last nothing without the spectacle. Sexton elaborates:

In Hannibal, this idea is made explicit in a manner distinctly reminiscent of the accusation embedded in ‘Au Lecteur’. Lecter attends the exhibition of Atrocious Torture Instruments, but not to look at the exhibits. He faces the other way, back at the spectators, for his thrills. ‘The essence of the worst, the true asafœtida of the human spirit, is not found in the Iron Maiden or the whetted edge; elemental ugliness is found in the faces of the crowd,’ the oracular narrative voice proclaims. … Barney warns Dr Chilton, as he says goodbye to Lecter, that his new guards don’t know how to deal with him. ‘You think they’ll treat him right? You know how he is—you have to threaten him with boredom. That’s all he’s afraid of. Slapping him around’s no good.’ But ennui is not just his fear—‘Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books’—it’s his origin. Lecter uses his own boredom as a threat to others. When he is extracting the story of the silence of the lambs from Clarice and she is not delivering what he wants, he says, ‘If you’re tired, we could talk towards the end of the week. I’m rather bored myself.’[3]

We are pleased when the alien is destroyed, and when Buffalo Bill is brought to justice, but what about the typical response to Lecter? The audience feels a certain camaraderie with him; they delight in his ability to outsmart everyone, and they are seduced by his charms. Yet what if Lecter was a real man, how would the general public regard him? The alien is an outright monster, completely inhuman. Hannibal looks like any of us, yet his crimes are arguably more heinous, more, dare I say, inhuman. In reality, a man like Lecter would delight in the media spectacle that his actions would create; the general public would at once revile him and be drawn to him. In our culture of spectacle, Lecter and the audience alike crave attention and publicity, to “survive,” and one reflects the other insofar as the current culture is constructed, or de-constructed as the case may be.

However, the reality is that the audience would not just survive but thrive without Lecter or Dracula draining them, distracting them, arresting them. Just as the alien needs organisms to survive and reproduce, Dracula and Lecter are also strictly parasites. Without the attention, Lecter exists in a vacuum: his works, his psychological ploys, go unnoticed. He would simply wither away. Similarly, Dracula must seduce, corrupt, and draw “life” from life to sustain his living death, adding to his coterie or harem if you like. As with Lucifer, he is only as strong as others are weak, and very often relies on others to do his bidding or to do the dirty work for him. It is more manipulation than real power. This recalls the modern invention of the “masculine” financier and his violence—“making a killing,” as the case may be, which originated in the 1980s with the explosion in the Jewish-driven “financialization” of the economy, which more often than not took the form of the criminal, often in name but certainly in fact. Jewish conquest of the alien other. Though less culturally-pervasive, this “legacy” remains with us today. As Leigh Claire La Barge writes:

First reporting in 1982 on a new category of businessmen, the corporate raiders, the New York Times noted that “they have even developed their own language laced with images of aggression and sexual conquest.” Soon after, periodicals quit analyzing this language and began employing it. Time’s description of venture capitalist Arthur Rock, the man who arranged the initial financing for Apple, as one of “the men who make the killings,” is one of many examples. … Ellis’s text uses financial, journalistic language to synthesize…different texts, all unified by the representation of the masculine financier and his violence.[4]

This interpretation is almost exactly correct, although the conflation of masculinity and violence through this lens does a disservice to masculinity; it is a displaced masculinity, not a true masculinity, which finds gain as the measure of a man. Such an internal conflation could only occur by a certain kind of man, in a certain set of social, political, and economic conditions, where everything must fall under the aegis of The Market’s overlords, and in this Doppelganger World, it is the anarchists and communists who carry water for global capital.

[1] Sexton, David, “Mr. Harris’s cookbooks,” August 18, 2001. Guardian Saturday Review.

[2] Buzwell, Greg, “Dracula: vampires, perversity and Victorian anxieties,” 2014. Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians.

[3] Sexton, David, “Mr. Harris’s cookbooks,” August 18, 2001. Guardian Saturday Review.

[4] La Barge, Leigh Clare, “The Men Who Make the Killings: American Psycho, Financial Masculinity, and 1980s Financial Print Culture,” 2010. Studies in American Fiction 37 (2).

From Kosher to Halal: When Greed, Politics, and the Sneaky Destruction of Western Civilization Intertwine
Suzanne Bousquet
Translated from French by David Smith, 2020.

Four years ago, I was asked by a Jew on social media why I thought myself an expert on the Jewish people. The question was obviously intended as the prelude to an argument or abuse, and I’d gotten used to such approaches. “I don’t think any such thing,” I replied. “There are large swathes of information about Jews, their religion and history, that I’m not even remotely interested in. The Talmud, for example, would bore me to read in full. But I do consider myself to possess some expertise on the subject of anti-Semitism. I’m interested in Jews only insofar as they affect, and have affected, Europeans. You can start with the cumulative bibliography of my essays, spanning hundreds of texts, if you wish to argue otherwise.” My Jewish correspondent had no reply to this, and I never heard from him again.

The Jewish Question is, of course, vast in terms of its historical and geographical spread, and my claims of expertise were somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Yes, I’ve read a great deal of the historical literature. I’ve even spent 12,000 words in reviewing much of the best of it, and I’ve written over 200 essays of original material on aspects of the subject. But there are always areas in which it is best to defer to others. I was reminded of this when reading Suzanne Bousquet’s recently-published From Kosher to Halal which, more than any other book I’ve read in recent years, confirmed for me just how much I don’t know about the Jewish Question. Much of my pre-existing opinion on kosher slaughter had been informed by the 1920s pamphlet “The Legalised Cruelty of Schechita” by the eccentric British veterinarian, and avowed Fascist, Arnold Spencer Leese. But this pamphlet, although retaining remarkable relevance, is now a century old, and has nothing to say about the modern mass-certification industry. Bousquet’s extremely well-researched, well-written, and tightly argued book brings an entirely different, and infinitely more professional, level of detail and context to this quite convoluted subject, and she connects dots I barely knew existed. In the following review I want to offer a summary of what I now regard as an essential text in the study of Jewish influence on Western modernity.

Bousquet’s From Kosher to Halal is a fascinating combination of religious study, history, and contemporary political commentary. In the words of the Quebec-born author,

This book seeks to fill a remarkable gap, viz., the absence from any Canadian publisher’s catalogue of any rigorous explanation of the business of kosher and halal certification from an outsiders’s point of view. This absence can be explained in several ways, including a certain sensitivity about dealing with a subject whose mere mention causes controversy — as if there were domains that must remain taboo from the mere fact of their religious connotations.

Bousquet is the granddaughter of the former owner of one of Canada’s largest industrial bakeries, and, in From Kosher to Halal, she combines some inherited instincts from the Agri-Food industry with editorial and communications experience gained in her professional life. Bousquet’s concern is primarily that, although we live in an age of “enlightened consumerism,” kosher and halal certification is shrouded in almost complete secrecy and is declared off-limits politically.  The author comments that although

there are discreet kosher logos on nearly 80% of products at the grocery, and subtle pressures are increasingly felt by producers to acquire halal certification as well, these two labels are not publicized: they remain a mystery for many people. And meat from animals slaughtered in kosher or halal fashion are still not subject to systematic, strict identification and labelling even now.

The agencies which sell religious certification services, and the companies which profit from products labelled kosher or halal, have never been subject to an objective or critical scholarly examination of their practices. We soon learn just how necessary such an examination is. Bousquet argues that these agencies push companies to adopt high certification costs that are then passed on to the consumer, a kind of “kosher tax,” with the acquired funds funnelled into the Jewish and Muslim communities. Bousquet proposes to analyze the practices of the agencies, and follow the money trail, “modestly putting down a first milestone toward a better understanding of a reality unknown to the public.”

The book’s first chapter “From Kashrut to Kosher Industry,” begins with an historical overview of the development of kashrut, the set of dietary laws dealing with the foods that Jews are permitted to eat and how those foods must be prepared according to Jewish law. Bousquet points out that dietary laws were a means by which Jews could accentuate ethnic particularism, arguing that “the ‘chosen people’ distinguish themselves in particular by the way they eat.” Bousquet demonstrates a comprehensive reading of Jewish religious texts in this area, including the Mishnah, and is very clear in their implications:

Rabbi David Bar-Hayim of the Merkaz HaRav Yeshiva confirms in a study that Judaism establishes a distinction between individuals based on religion. Meat designated “kosher,” and by extension the absolute obligation that the slaughter be carried out only by a believing Jew, comes from a conception which figures in the Hebrew Law (the halakha), whereby non-Jews (goyim) are considered animals. The terrestrial soul of non-Jews has the same type of anima as that of impure animals (such as pigs or apes): the goyim are creatures judged very inferior, and this is why meat from an animal slaughtered by them cannot be kosher.

The text then moves to an analysis of the essential rules of kashrut before providing a very interesting, and for me entirely novel, account of the origins of kosher certification in North America. Kosher certification is, we learn, an invention of early twentieth-century New York, having no real precedent in history. The practice, revealed here as little more than an elaborate scam, was created in 1919 by a New York Jew named Joseph Jacobs. Jacobs had been a school teacher in the Bronx until a failed attempt to obtain a promotion resulted in a move to the advertising industry. Taking up a position at the Yiddish-language Daily Forward (Forverts), Jacobs “got the idea of offering his services to facilitate the sale of certain products to the Yiddish-speaking community of New York, at that time 1.5 million strong and unable to understand English.” In 1919, Jacobs founded the Joseph Jacobs Advertising Agency, Inc., which still exists. In the early days of the company, kosher certification was more or less limited to kosher marketing — convincing Yiddish-speaking Jews that foods they thought were prohibited were in fact permitted under kashrut. Bousquet uses the example of coffee:

To illustrate how Jacobs worked, let us take the example of coffee. At the time, religious Jews considered this vegetable matter, a bean, and thus not kosher for Passover. Jewish grocers classed coffee with hamets (forbidden for Passover) under the erroneous belief that coffee beans were kitniyot, when they are in fact the seeds of a fruit — and not beans. So Jacobs launched a publicity campaign to explain that coffee beans are not leguminous vegetables but fruits, and consequently kosher. He found a cooperative Rabbi to confirm his point of view and published announcements in the Yiddish papers. This is how Maxwell House became kosher: without inspection or blessing.

Jacobs soon merged this kind of kosher marketing campaign with a more formal style of kosher certification rooted in Jewish communal meat regulation. This latter context is explored in detail by Bousquet, who reveals the entire subject to be rooted in Jewish gangsterism, violence, and attempted murder. The violence had its origins in the desire of the rabbis to boost their income by overseeing shechita, or kosher slaughter. Rabbis would form small kosher certification boards and, if a town or city had two or more rabbis, violent rivalry would break out between factions as each sought a monopoly on shechita funds. As part of this rivalry, each faction would place its own brand on kosher products (e.g. “U” for Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations), and encourage the boycott of products marked with a rival brand.

Joseph Jacobs saw an opportunity to bring this branding into play in his own marketing efforts, and convinced an increasing number of non-Jewish businesses to mark their products with “K” for kosher and, later, any one of the expansive range of other logos or initials that represented the various kosher certification factions. Competition between Jews persisted to some extent but, since the target was now the more lucrative outgroup market, the violence eased. Maxwell House (1923) and Coca-Cola (1937) were among the first mass market products to obtain kosher certification, but the pace didn’t really begin to pick up until the 1960s, alongside Jewish advertising campaigns that marketed kosher hot dogs and rye to non-Jews as “healthier, superior foods.” [Bousquet skewers this later in the book.] Despite the relatively minuscule numbers of observant Jewish consumers, over the next six decades the kosher certification industry has expanded in the West to cover everything from toilet paper, household soap and diapers, to pet food and suppositories. In America, up to 50% of grocery products are now kosher certified, for an estimated annual sales of 500 billion dollars.

When you want your ferret to have a better diet than the goyim

At this point, Bousquet’s book really comes into its own. The most contentious aspect of kosher certification, aside from methods of slaughter, is the question of cost. What expenses are incurred by certification, and what impact do they have on retail prices? Here Bousquet employs detective work and penetrating logic. The author notes the mafia-like silence on this issue, pointing to a “sort of omertà regarding how much money certifiers earn from their activities, going as far as denying all profitability.” The Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs, for example, decries “mistaken beliefs” that kosher certification is a for-profit industry, arguing that costs merely cover inspection and that certification only profits the companies certified. Other interested parties have argued that “the additional costs assumed by consumers are quite minimal,” and that “rabbis make no profit from certification.” Bousquet, by contrast, points to a number of studies, including a 2011 PhD thesis, demonstrating that kosher certification brings in enough profits to be dispersed not only within certification bodies, but also Jewish schools, cultural institutions, and other Jewish communal organizations. In short, it’s quite easy to deduce that kosher certification is not only highly profitable, but that it involves a significant transfer of wealth from the general population to the Jewish population.

Bousquet describes in detail this “lucrative racket,” which involves the mass certification even of products already regarded as intrinsically kosher (e.g. virgin olive oil, frozen blueberries, coffee, detergent, dishwashing soap, toilet paper, salt, and pepper). In Bousquet’s native Canada, the kosher-certified market has expanded 64% since 2003. We learn that the situation reached such ridiculous proportions in Canada that Paul Lungen, an investigative journalist with Canadian Jewish News, conducted an eight-month investigation into kosher certification practices at the Kashrut Council of Canada (COR) that exposed numerous irregularities and abuses. These included arbitrary pricing and false declarations of what is and isn’t kosher. It was also revealed that COR reported annual revenues of over $5 million, but, despite being a registered charity, dispensed only $2,500 to charitable causes. One vegetable oil company reported that it had to cancel its kosher certification after learning that COR would charge $45,000 just to have a rabbi, possessing no meaningful qualifications in food production, attend an annual inspection of their manufacturing processes. For his efforts in reporting these facts, Lungen was quickly denounced by his co-ethnics for committing the sin of chillul HaShem, which translates as “profanation of the name of God” but actually means that a Jew has informed non-Jews of Jewish misdeeds. In other words, Lungen was declared a race traitor.

The scam runs deep, and often has links to Jewish influence in government. At least one Canadian kosher certification business, the Canadian Kosher Food Safety Initiative (CKFSI), was started thanks to a $763,650 funding grant from government minister Christian Paradis, the latter having a history of bribery allegations. The government has also permitted rabbis from organizations like CKFSI to profit from conducting general health inspections at food production sites, despite their overwhelming lack of professional or educational qualifications in the area. This has prompted economist David MacDonald from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives to declare: “It is not the responsibility of a religious organization to determine the safety of the food you eat. … We cannot have the same level of confidence. … We will have less well-trained, less experience personnel.” Because Jews are combining their dubious “health inspections” with expensive kosher certification, production costs are expected to increase 5-7%, with the additional costs then passed on to consumers.

At less than 1% of the population in Canada and the United States, with similar representation throughout the West, it’s clear that Jews aren’t assuming the costs of the vast kosher certification enterprise, which takes up 60% to 80% of the grocery trade and has “kosherized” entire production chains. Jewish apologists for the kosher certification industry have claimed that non-Jews have come to the conclusion that kosher foods are of superior quality and that kosher means “good food” to many consumers. They argue that kosher certification is sought after by the general consumer, and that the various kosher logos are therefore an attractive attribute for any product. Bousquet points out that such claims stand in sharp contrast to university studies that have found these kosher labels “pass almost unnoticed by the general population,” many of whom have absolutely no idea what the logos actually mean.

To those that do know what the labels mean, and object to the wholesale kosherization of the food industry, Jews have a blunt response. Bousquet has a very interesting section on how Jews, especially the ADL, have used accusations of anti-Semitism to silence criticism of kosher certification and prevent meaningful investigation of its practices. In 1991, the ADL effectively created a template response to accusations of a “kosher tax” that has been used by almost every kosher certification body since. The hallmarks of this template response are:

• Declare the idea of a “kosher tax” to be a “hoax” concocted by “right wing extremists.”
• Assert that any insinuation that rabbis are enriched by kosher certification is a “conspiracy theory” dependent on “stereotypes about Jews.”
• Deny that only a small segment of the general population desires such markings.
• Repeatedly mention that the idea of a kosher tax has been promoted by “various Ku Klux Klan groups” thus making anyone uneasy to share these ideas.

Bousquet does an excellent job of interrogating the ADL’s claim that kosher certification costs are “so negligible in practical terms as to be virtually non-existent.” In response, Bousquet asks, if they are so low, why no business has ever revealed the exact figures, and why the Jewish communities which demand certification can’t pay the costs themselves. Also, asks Bousquet, if this is such a low-revenue industry, why are there 273 kosher certification agencies in the United States all competing fiercely for a slice of what is alleged to be a very meagre pie? The author then points out that COR’s revenues for 2013 were $5.4 million, with nine of its employees earning salaries of between $80,000 and $119,000, with one making between $120,000 and $159,000. All from a “virtually non-existent” income!

Despite its factual bankruptcy, the ADL template is used with alarming regularity. When Louise Mailloux, a philosophy professor and candidate for the Parti Québécois, spoke of a “religious tax” during an April 2014 electoral campaign, the Quebec branch of the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs issued a statement accusing Mailloux of echoing “a conspiracy theory created and spread by the Ku Klux Klan” and insisting that there is no real cost behind certification and that companies get certified in order to “open up a new market segment and boost sales.” When Pierre Lacerte, a journalist, attempted to defend Mailloux and add detail to her claims, a Rabbi Zvi Hershcovich issued a statement accusing both of “bringing up a myth created by Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups. … The cost of certification is minimal. … Acquiring kosher certification is a wise business decision.” All of which goes to show that while Jews are not a creative people, what they lack in originality they make up for in sheer repetition. As such, their outcries are not so much dramatic, as possessing the ominous monotony of the drone of an approaching swarm of hornets. Undeterred by the obvious weakness of a lie, they’ll beat you with it a thousand times rather than open up the books.

Bousquet is undeterred by the swarm, and swats back at it very effectively. She follows the money relentlessly, and finds many examples of major companies and organizations (and even one rabbi) who are willing to go on record as confirming that kosher certification is expensive and that the costs are passed on to the consumer. When Jewish pressure was brought to bear on the Girl Guides to make their cookies kosher, Girl Guide Cookies replied publicly: “Although the ingredients are kosher; Dare equipment is not. The kosher certification is very expensive, over and above the annual cost required to maintain it. We are refraining from certifying these produces because the costs greatly outweigh the benefits. We are sorry, but making these cookies kosher is not a good business decision.” Didn’t these Girl Guide bigots, with their prejudiced cookies, realize they were making the same claims as the Ku Klux Klan? Apparently not. Later, however, after “lots of perseverance,” Jewish lobbying was able to achieve the desired result. How many observant Jewish consumers of Girl Guide Cookies are out there? It doesn’t matter. What matters is the Girl Guides aren’t like the Ku Klux Klan, and you can now be sure you’re eating a superior, and more expensive, food.

The book’s treatment of halal is no less fascinating and infuriating. Although there is a richness of detail, the main theme that emerges here is that Muslims have essentially followed the Jewish template, inventing a certification system that funnels money into their community while spreading their unchecked influence in the food production system. In the words of Hajj Habib Ghanim, President of the USA Halal Chamber of Commerce:

The introduction of halal certification to the United States owes much to the kosher certifiers who conducted similar, well-established activity and know the industry. We have learned from them. … We are learning from our Jewish cousins who have been operating for years. We are learning, and we have a great deal of support from them.

Much of this mutual support is rooted in the shared desire to continue ritual slaughter in Western lands where the mistreatment of animals is illegal. Bousquet’s chapter on ritual slaughter is exceptional, with an excellent section titled “From Multiculturalism to Legal Pluralism,” in which she argues that the “pernicious cultural relativism of multicultural policies has allowed religious fundamentalists quietly to impose legal pluralism.” Thus the laws for producing kosher and halal meat obey Hebrew and Islamic law and not the law of the nation. Bousquet explores these grim methods of slaughter and succinctly dismantles apologetics in their favor. Most concerning to the author is the fact that a lot of kosher and halal meat finds its way to the mass market, where it is not labeled as such. For example, Jews might ritually slaughter 100 cattle, but perhaps only 10 will pass inspection as kosher after the slaughter. This is because a rabbi conducts an examination of the major internal organs after the killing of the animal, and even a slight blemish on a lung is sufficient for the meat to be declared unclean and fit to be consumed only by goyim. It is then placed back onto a conveyor belt, butchered, packaged, and sold to an unsuspecting housewife entirely unaware that this evening’s steaks were earlier essentially tortured alive, eviscerated, mulled over, and rejected by an Ashkenazi fanatic.

The complicity of the major meat processors is revealed by Bousquet as owing much to the desire to build a thriving meat export business supplying the Middle East and North Africa, while filtering undesired meat to Western consumers without even a hint of the way in which the animal was killed. The author’s detailed and lengthy analysis in this area, too sizeable to be given adequate treatment in this review, represents a damning indictment of modern monopoly capitalism and its willing participation in Western cultural decline, a participation motivated by greed and underscored with a cold indifference to the great mass of consumers. Indeed, in an age where we are fed the lie that the consumer is king, Suzanne Bousquet’s exploration of kosher and halal certification reveals we are more like the topic’s unfortunate cattle, being mass farmed and abused for the benefit of others.

Suzanne Bousquet is to be congratulated for this brave, original, and detailed study of a subject I was quite unfamiliar with. I have no hesitation in recommending it to others with an interest in Jewish influence, the kosher and halal industries, or the interplay between multiculturalism and globalist capital. This is precisely the kind of investigative and damning literature we need, and it’s a very worthy addition to my library. If there’s a Jew out there busily preparing to ask the author just why exactly she thinks herself an expert in this area — I can assure you, she is.

I discussed this video with Frodi Midjord on the Scandza Forum.

Noam Chomsky is, as this documentary notes, “widely regarded as the most influential intellectual of his time.” Given that Chomsky is on the left, it might seem that he has little to offer. But in many respects, his comments here reinforce many of the ideas linked to the populist right, although, as with the influence of the (never mentioned) Israel Lobby, he also has an very large blind spot when it comes to Jewish power. Chomsky, born in 1928, was already a superstar linguistics professor at MIT by the 1960s when he became a fixture among New Left activist intellectuals, joining such figures as Paul Goodman, Herbert Marcuse, and Howard Zinn. The documentary is really a history of America beginning in the 1950s seen through the eyes of a New Left intellectual.

Unlike the continued vilification of the 1950s that streams out of Hollywood, Chomsky labels the decade a relatively egalitarian “golden age,” noting that the relative wealth of the bottom 20% increased about as much as the top 20%, labor unions were strong, working class people could afford a home and a car, and taxes  (including taxes on capital gains and dividends) were relatively high on the wealthy. Nowadays we are told only about Jim Crow practices that still occurred  in the South in the 1950s, but Chomsky notes that Blacks were able to get good jobs working in automobile factories, etc.

All that changed, beginning with what Chomsky calls the “significant democratization” of the 1960s—the Civil Rights movement, feminism, and environmentalism. In my writing, both in The Culture of Critique and Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, I regard the 1960s as a watershed, transformative decade, marking the rise of a new Jewish-dominated left-of-center elite based on power in media and the academic world. Chomsky does not agree, claiming that beginning in the 1970s there was a reaction against the 1960s that culminated in the relative dispossession of the working class. This is true as far as it goes, but it fails to come to note the rise of Jewish power in finance and business also occurred during this period.

In arguing for his position, Chomsky emphasizes that the 1970s marked the beginning of the rise of the financialization of the economy. Whereas in the 1950s manufacturing was 28% of the economy and finance 11%, the balance had reversed by 2010. Chomsky notes that companies like General Electric realized they could make more money with sophisticated financial maneuvering than by manufacturing. Complex financial instruments were invented and financial regulations that had been in place since the 1930s to prevent economic crashes were removed. And it was the beginning of outsourcing manufacturing to foreign countries with cheap labor and the consequent decline of labor unions and the economic and political power of the White working class. And when the complex financial instruments blew up (as happened in 2008 with collateralized debt obligations [the result of bundling good and bad (including “liar loans’) loans into one financial product]), the government bailed out “too big to fail” Wall Street but not individual homeowners.

As Chomsky notes, the result of these developments was rising economic inequality—the rise of the super-rich top 0.1 percent to unrivaled political power. Chomsky notes that the super-rich much prefer oligarchy to democracy and indeed the data support him. they are able to control the political process via donations to political candidates and control of media messages. Jews are recognized as the “financial engine of the left,” as Norman Podhoretz phrased it, and contribute around 75% of the funds for Democrats and probably at least 50% for Republicans (Sheldon’ Adelson’s generosity toward Trump. (A prominent example is Sheldon Adelson whose support of Trump [north of $200 million] is predicated on a pro-Israel foreign policy; in general the Republican Jewish Coalition favors a pro-Israel foreign policy and moving the party to the left on social issues like immigration and gender).

Illustrating the importance of media control, Chomsky notes that Obama’s presidential campaign received an award for the most effective public relations media campaign and he decries the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case which framed financial donations to political campaigns by corporations and labor unions as free speech, in effect further opening the gates for the wealthy to control the political system. He then notes this is quite unlike media corporations like CBS which are “supposed to be a public service.”

This of course, is absurd, implying that CBS (and by implication other mainstream media corporations) has no political biases and acts as a public service. CBS is part of ViacomCBS, whose major owners are the Sumner Redstone and his family, who are Jewish and whose values are typical of the liberal-left attitudes of the mainstream Jewish community (here, p. xlvi–lvi).

Chomsky clearly has a distaste for oligarchy but he fails to mention the very large body of writing by Jews opposed to populism—a major theme of The Culture of Critique, especially Chapter 5. As noted there, citing Paul Gottfried (After Liberalism) and Christopher Lasch (The True and Only Heaven):

In the post–World War II era The Authoritarian Personality became an ideological weapon against historical American populist movements, especially McCarthyism (Gottfried 1998; Lasch 1991, 455ff). “[T]he people as a whole had little understanding of liberal democracy and . . . important questions of public policy would be decided by educated elites, not submitted to popular vote” (Lasch 1991, 455).

In his 1963 book The Tolerant Populists,  Walter Nugent, was

explicit in finding that Jewish identification was an important ingredient in the [anti-populist] analysis, attributing the negative view of American populism held by some American Jewish historians (Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, and Seymour Martin Lipset) to the fact that “they were one generation removed from the Eastern European shtetl [small Jewish town], where insurgent gentile peasants meant pogrom.” 

Indeed, another example comes from Chomsky which occurred well before the rise of Jews to cultural dominance. Walter Lippmann, also Jewish, is quoted as writing in 1925 “The public must be put in its place.” Throughout European history down to the Soviet Union and post-World War II communist societies in Eastern Europe, Jews have always made alliances with ruling elites, often alien ruling elites and often in opposition to other sectors of the population.

Chomsky’s blinders on the media and populism are part of a larger pattern. Chomsky sees post-1960s America as a backlash against the 1960s but in fact the post-1960s America described by Chomsky is the result of the same forces that produced the 1960s counter-cultural revolution: the rise of Jewish power discussed in The Culture of Critique. Chomsky fails to mention that Wall Street and corporate America are decidedly on the left when it comes to the social issues that came to prominence in the 1960s: civil rights (now morphed into racial identity politics for all non-Whites), feminism (now morphed into gender identity politics), and the environment (now dominated by “climate change”). Leftist attitudes on these issues pervade elite media, the academic world, and corporate America.

And he fails to mention that Wall Street is well known to be a center of Jewish power. In his 1999 book, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State,  Benjamin Ginsberg claimed that Jews comprised 50% of Wall Street executives. It’s doubtless at least that high now, and that number doesn’t really get at the extent of Jewish control of key Wall Street players like Goldman Sachs.

Kevin Phillips provides some detail on Chomsky’s economic history of America since the 1980s:

My summation is that American financial capitalism, at a pivotal period in the nation’s history, cavalierly ventured a multiple gamble: first, financializing a hitherto more diversified U.S. economy; second, using massive quantities of debt and leverage to do so; third, following up a stock market bubble with an even larger housing and mortgage credit bubble; fourth, roughly quadrupling U.S. credit-market debt between 1987 and 2007, a scale of excess that historically unwinds; and fifth, consummating these events with a mixed fireworks of dishonesty, incompetence and quantitative negligence.

The Occidental Observer has posted 44 articles on the topic of Jews in the Economy/Finance. (This link goes to the most recent of these articles, Edmund Connelly’s “Jews and Vulture Capitalism: A Reprise.” If you scroll to the bottom of the page there are links to the other articles in this topic—an awkward system; will fix.) Connelly has contributed several other articles on these topics, including “The Culture of Deceit” illustrating the legitimacy of financial fraud within the mainstream Jewish community and several articles on how the Jewish role in financial manipulation has been airbrushed by Hollywood. Also included in this collection are are several articles by Andrew Joyce (“Vulture Capitalism Is Jewish Capitalism,” “Paul Singer and the Universality of Anti-Semitism,” and “Jews and Moneylending: A Contemporary Case File), and by me (“Does Jewish Financial Misbehavior Have Anything To Do with Being Jewish?” and “Now Comes the Anger.”

Finally, another enormous blindspot is Chomsky’s never mentioning immigration at all, despite its tranformative effects on America. Chomsky dutifully mentions the role of outsourcing jobs in compromising the interests of the working class but never mentions that immigration is a major part of the reason for wage stagnation since 1970 as well as forcing working-class Whites to move out of formerly White areas in areas like Southern California which have been inundated by immigration. Chomsky champions a class-based politics, but the Democratic Party, formerly the bastion of labor unions, has become the party of diversity, embodying all the themes of the 1960s counter-cultural revolution and ignoring the interests of their White working-class constituents, with the result that the White working class was the largest group supporting Donald Trump with his populist rhetoric during the 2016 election. Because of importing of millions of non-Whites, the class-based politics of the 1950s has been destroyed in favor of a coalition of non-Whites and upper-middle-class White liberals (Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, Chapter 8).

Another blind spot is free speech. Free speech was a rallying cry for the Old Left in the 1950s and for the New Left in the 1960s, at a time when the anti-communist movement was able to force professors to sign loyalty oaths. The original 1960s protest movement at the University of California was called the Berkeley Free Speech movement. Even during the 1950s, Jews were deeply involved in creating a culture of the left that was mainly concerned to protect communist professors and other leftist dissidents, such as Hollywood screen writers, targeted by McCarthyism. Inherit the Wind (by Jerome Lawrence Schwartz and Robert Edwin Lee) was written to oppose McCarthyism. Another famous example of anti-McCarthyism from the 1950s is Arthur Miller’s The Crucible which implicitly condemned the  House Un-American Activities  Committee by comparing it to the Salem witch trials. Although quite powerful, the culture of the left was not yet the dominant elite that it has become since the 1960s.

Chomsky thinks that free speech is still championed by the left, but he is sorely mistaken. The rise of the new elite has coincided with the power of organizations that support leftist attitudes on free speech—organizations like the now discredited Southern Poverty Law  Center and the ADL that  specialize in getting people fired for  thought crimes and care nothing  for  free speech. Mainstream conservatives are  prevented from speaking at universities or greeted with riots and protests. There is clearly an  ethnic aspect to this transformation,  with Jewish organizations acting as leading proponents of “hate speech” legislation throughout the West. While there are endless tears (see here and here, pp. 39–40) for Hollywood screenwriters blacklisted during the anti-communist fervor of the 1950s and since promoted to cultural sainthood, don’t  expect our new elite to condemn witch hunts like the ones that have targeted right-wing dissidents, many of whom have been fired from their jobs and ostracized from their families and friends. And don’t expect a hit Broadway play based on an allegory in which the ADL or the SPLC are condemned for their persecution of race realists and White advocates.

Since Chomsky, the renowned professor of linguistics, is an intelligent person, it’s hard to believe that he is not aware of all this. Of course, self-deception is always a possibility.