Jewish Involvement in Contemporary Refugee and Migrant Organizations — Part Two

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Editor’s note: Andrew Joyce has been permanently banned from Twitter for posting some of these names—just the names, no comments. He was also paid a visit by the UK thought police as a result of those posts. Because of new software, he has been unable to start an account even other pseudonyms. 

Go to Part 1.

Jewish Representation in Secular Contemporary Refugee and Migrant Organizations.

In contrast to the modest overrepresentation of Jews in anti-immigration groups (around 5%), Jews are nothing short of prolific in influential senior roles in contemporary refugee, asylum, and pro-migration organizations. Significantly, Jews occupy the leadership of all four of the largest and most influential (and nominally secular) organizations active in America today, the International Rescue Committee (President and CEO David Miliband), Refugees International (President Eric P. Schwartz, formerly of HIAS), International Refugee Assistance Project (Director Becca Heller), and Human Rights Watch (Executive Director Kenneth Roth, and Deputy Directors Iain Levine and Fred Abrahams).

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is one of the most significant organizations bringing migrants to the United States. In their countries of origin, refugees and their families are assisted by the IRC to prepare their cases to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), compiling personal data and background information for security clearance. Once their cases are approved, refugees are usually greeted at the airport by case workers from the IRC. The IRC then provides these migrants with a home, furnishings, food, and any other assistance that might be required. The IRC operates 27 offices across the United States, each offering food, housing, educational, and medical assistance. It also works closely with the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) Division of Refugee Assistance, which was reported in August 2018 as quietly removing its staff directory page. Consultations with the Internet Wayback Machine revealed the Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement to be one Carl Rubenstein, an alumnus of Tel Aviv Law School. In 2017, the IRC, in conjunction with Rubenstein’s ORR, resettled more than 51,000 migrants to the United States, and is currently a staunch lobbyist against current restrictions imposed by President Trump.

(Clockwise) Eric P. Schwartz, David Miliband, Iain Levine, Becca Heller, Kenneth Roth, Fred Abrahams)

Jews are very prominent in the leadership of the IRC. In addition to President and CEO David Miliband, there are at least 30 Jews in senior positions within the organization including Morton I. Abramowitz (Overseer), Madeleine Albright (Overseer), Laurent Alpert (Board Member), Clifford Asness (Board Member), Betsy Blumenthal (Overseer), Alan Batkin (Chairman Emeritus and Board Member), Michael W. Blumenthal (Overseer), Susan Dentzer (Board Member), Evan G. Greenberg (Overseer), Morton I. Hamburg (Overseer), Leila Heckman (Overseer), Karen Hein (Overseer), Marvin Josephson (Overseer),Alton Kastner (Overseer and former Deputy Director), Henry Kissinger (Overseer), David A. Levine (Board Member), Reynold Levy (Overseer), Robert E. Marks (Overseer), Sara Moss (Overseer), Thomas Nides (Board Member), Susan Petricof (Overseer), Gideon Rose (Overseer), Thomas Schick (Chairman Emeritus and Board Member), James Strickler (Overseer), Sally Susman (Board Member), Mona Sutphen (Board Member), Merryl Tisch (Board Member), Maureen White (Board Member), Jonathan Wiesner (Chairman Emeritus and Board Member), William Winters (Overseer), and James D. Wolfensohn (Overseer). Read more

Jewish Involvement in Contemporary Refugee and Migrant Organizations — Part One

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“The Tree of Life Synagogue victims died so that refugees could live.”
Rob Eshman, Jewish Journal

“We seek advantage through our dead. We make our dead your problem. The meaning we find in our deceased we find as a courtesy to you, to help you, to change your societies for the “better.””
David Cole, Takimag —

Introduction.

Refugee and asylum legislation is now a key policy area for many major immigrant-receiving countries. The UN Refugee Agency estimates there are currently 28.5 million refugees and asylum seekers worldwide, with most originating in South Sudan, Afghanistan, and Syria. The world’s largest refugee hosting countries are located near the epicenters of those countries experiencing difficulties, and include Turkey (3.5 million), Uganda (1.4 million), Pakistan (1.4 million), Lebanon (1 million), and the Islamic Republic of Iran (979,400). More incongruous, however, is the fact refugee and asylum populations from these same troubled areas have exploded in the West, in countries both geographically and culturally very distant from exporting nations. Since 1990, the new refugee population of Austria has climbed from 34,948 to 115,197; in Belgium from 25,911 to 42,128; in Finland from 2,348 to 20,713; in France from 193,000 to 337,143; in Germany from 816,000 to 970,302; in Ireland from 360 to 6,324; in Italy from 10,840 to 167,260; in Luxembourg from 687 to 1,995; in the Netherlands from 17,337 to 103,818; in Norway from 19,581 to 59,160; in Sweden from 109,663 to 240,889; in Switzerland from 40,943 to 92,995; and in the United Kingdom from 43,632 to 121,766. Increased lobbying on behalf of refugees, and increased quotas for refugee admissions, are now a very significant part of the West’s overall approach to migration. The only significant current exceptions to these trends are Hungary, where the number of new refugees has dropped from 45,123 to 5,641, and the United States and Canada, both of which were home in 2017 to roughly half the number of new refugees they hosted in 1990. Read more

An Academic Book on Jewish Subversion of Christmas

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Editor’s note: Originally posted in 2012, this article gets at the Jewish ethnic angle behind the “War on Christmas.”

A new book, Joshua Eli Plaut’s A Kosher Christmas: ’Tis the Season to Be Jewish, documents what we have known all along: The Jews did indeed subvert Christmas.  This book deserves a full review, but Ethan Schwartz’s summary and comment (“Twas the night after Christmas“) deserve scrutiny. First the summary:

Jews have been the vanguard of an effort to “transform Christmastime into a holiday season belonging to all Americans,” without religious exclusivity.  The most important Jewish mechanisms of secularization are comedy and parody, for laughter undermines religious awe.  Take, for example, Hanukkah Harry from “Saturday Night Live”, who heroically steps in for a bedridden Santa by delivering presents from a cart pulled by donkeys named Moishe, Hershel, and Shlomo.  Remarkably, Hanukkah Harry has emerged as a real Santa-alternative for many American Jews.  Plaut sees such things not as attempts at assimilation but as an intentional subversion of Christmas traditions.  “Through these parodies,” he writes, “Jews could envision not having to be captivated by the allure of ubiquitous Christmas symbols.”  And it isn’t just Jews: for Americans in general, Jewish parody helps ensure that Christmas “not be taken too seriously” and that the celebrations of other traditions “be accorded equal respect and opportunity.”

There seem to be two messages here. One is the message of subversion utilizing ridicule among other methods. The other is that Jews are seen as high-mindedly making Christmas  “into a holiday season belonging to all Americans.” The end result is that Christmas is not “taken too seriously” and the Christian religious aspect central to the traditional holiday is de-emphasized.

People who take their religion seriously do not allow their religion to be ridiculed. One need only think of the Muslim reactions to cartoons ridiculing Mohammed. The fact that Jews have been able to ridicule Christianity without any serious negative consequences is an important marker of Jewish power and an equally strong indication of the decline of Christian religious belief. I suspect that the organized Jewish community would react in outrage if non-Jews ridiculed religious Judaism. Indeed, any criticism of Jews as Jews is off limits in the mainstream media. (A topical short list of verboten topics: the loyalties of neocon Jews and their role in promoting the war in Iraq, the Jewish aspect of the Ivy League admissions scandal, how Jewish control of Hollywood influences media content.) Read more

Leonard Bernstein and the Jewish Cultural Ascendancy – PART 2

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Go to Part 1. 

Bernstein’s Mahler obsession

I have previously examined the tendency of Jewish intellectuals to use their privileged status as the self-appointed gatekeepers of Western culture to advance their group interests through the way they conceptualize the artistic and intellectual achievements of Jews and Europeans. Jews have long used their cultural dominance to construct “Jewish geniuses” to enhance ethnic pride and group cohesion (think Einstein). In this endeavor, Jewish music critics and intellectuals have transformed the image of the Jewish composer Gustav Mahler from that of a relatively minor figure in the history of classical music at mid-twentieth century, into the cultural icon of today. The tendency among Jewish intellectuals has been to overstate and ethnically-particularize Jewish achievement, thereby making it a locus for ethnic pride. Meanwhile, European achievement is downplayed, or where undeniable, universalized and thus neutralized as a potential basis for White pride and group cohesion.

Leonard Bernstein played a leading role in the development of the Mahler cult and the movement of the composer’s music to the center of the classical repertory. The proliferation of performances of Mahler’s music in the United States between 1920 and 1960 can be ascribed to the combined efforts of Bernstein and a coterie of Jewish advocates like Bruno Walter, Arnold Schoenberg, Theodor Adorno, Aaron Copland, and Serge Koussevitzky. Lionizing Mahler as the saintly Jewish victim of European injustice, the Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg “canonized Mahler as ‘this martyr, this saint’ and in a Prague lecture in March 1912 announced: ‘Rarely has anyone been so badly treated by the world; nobody, perhaps, worse.’”[1] Frankfurt School music theorist Theodor Adorno later took up this theme, affirming that:

Mahler’s tonal chords, plain and unadorned, are the explosive expressions of the pain felt by the individual subject imprisoned in an alienated society. … They are also allegories of the lower depths of the insulted and the socially injured. … Ever since the last of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen Mahler was able to convert his neurosis, or rather the genuine fears of the downtrodden Jew into a vigor of expression whose seriousness surpassed all aesthetic mimesis and all the fictions of the stile rappresentativo.”[2]

Bernstein likewise conceptualized Mahler as a cruelly persecuted and alienated Jew torn apart by dualisms: “composer/conductor, Christian/Jew, sophisticate/naïf, provincial/cosmopolitan — all of which contributed to the musical schizo-dynamics of his texture, and his ambivalent tonal attitudes.”[3] Bernstein advocated for Mahler with missionary zeal, introducing the symphonies to audiences from New York to Vienna. He considered Mahler “the twentieth century’s musical prophet, whose extremes spoke for the times, and thought his symphonies constituted ‘as sacred a bunch of notes as Brahms’s symphonies.’”[4] While all Mahler’s works were available singly on recordings, it was Bernstein who first recorded the complete set of symphonies. Read more

Leonard Bernstein and the Jewish Cultural Ascendency — PART 1

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Introduction

2018 marks the centenary of the birth of Jewish-American conductor, pianist, composer and teacher Leonard Bernstein. This milestone has seen a global bonanza of 2,500 concerts, programs, exhibitions and theatrical productions. Bernstein features prominently in the pantheon of “Jewish geniuses” as designated by the West’s Jewish-dominated cultural and intellectual establishment. Bernstein’s centenary year inevitably yielded hagiography: for his Jewish biographer Allen Shawn, he was not just a “genius” but “a powerful cultural and political voice and symbol, transcending all categories.”[1] Mark Horowitz, curator of an exhibition at Philadelphia’s Jewish museum celebrating Bernstein’s “pride of tribe,” fully endorses this view, while for the Jewish music writer for the New Yorker, Alex Ross, Bernstein remains “American music’s dominant figure.”

Bernstein lived during the heyday of the recording industry, at the dawn of the television era and of video recording. He left behind what is possibly the most extensive documentation in recordings, films, and on paper of any musician in history. His archive at the Library of Congress already lists some 400,000 items.[2] During the 1950s and 1960s Bernstein was not only the best known of all American classical musicians; his fame rivalled that of Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe. Attitudes to Bernstein varied dramatically during his lifetime, and many responded negatively to the fact he was so visible, so outspoken, so dramatic, and so politically active on the left.

Famous for his flamboyantly extroverted temperament, Bernstein was a “personality on such a big scale that he would naturally manage to offend many people along the way. … His self-regard and need for attention were also, to be sure, extreme.”[3] Bernstein’s brash self-confidence and monstrous ego incurred the enmity of many of those he encountered. He “loved to be the center of attention, even if it meant being obnoxious” observed a fellow student at the Curtis School of Music who noted that his “extroversion was extreme.”[4] John Rockwell, writing for the New York Times in 1986, observed that “It is quite a remarkable personality, for better and for worse, the defines every aspect of his near-manic existence. There are those who still find him inherently annoying — when he shoots off what he likes to call his ‘big Jewish mouth,’ when he prances and gyrates on the podium, when he seems to squander his compositional gifts in flashy trivia or overwrought excess.”[5] Bernstein’s own children pointed out his unsurpassed ability to become emotional on his own behalf, to “move himself.”[6]

Bernstein’s unusual, extremely emotional, visual presentation was his trademark as a conductor. He conducted with his entire body in a style that led to much criticism and derision over the years. German composer Gunther Schuller, for example, observed that Bernstein was “one of the world’s most histrionic and exhibitionistic conductors.” Schuller saw Bernstein as a musician with “very little discipline and no shame,” whose interpretation of Brahms’ First Symphony contained “too much of an ‘oy-vey’ Weltschmerz to be bearable.”[7] Read more

Whites as Witches: “We Must Be Eternally Vigilant against Racism”

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As Mark Twain probably never said: “History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.” Old patterns return in new forms, ancient errors and superstitions slide back into unsuspecting modern minds. It’s very unwise for liberals in 2018 to think themselves superior to the past, because in some ways they’re far inferior. If you believe in the supernatural and accept the existence of an immaterial, spiritual realm, there’s nothing irrational about also believing in miracles and witchcraft.

The irrationality of liberalism

Modern liberals reject the supernatural and embrace materialism. At the same time, they believe in miracles and witchcraft. This is highly irrational. As I described in “Dawkins’ Demon,” liberals scornfully reject the idea that a single human being, Jesus Christ, was miraculously born to a virgin about 2,000 years ago in a tiny region called Palestine. Instead, they fervently embrace the idea that billions of human beings have been miraculously born for many millennia over vast stretches of the earth’s surface.

This is because liberals believe that the human brain, unlike all other parts of the material body, was miraculously shielded from evolution when human beings migrated from Africa and entered new and often very different environments in Europe, Asia and the Americas. And liberals believe in a further miracle: that when  some groups of Homo sapiens interbred with distinct human species like the Neanderthals and Denisovans, the new genes they acquired had no effects on their cognition and psychology. Liberals know this because “There is Only One Race — the Human Race.” For many thousands of years all human beings, no matter how different their environments, have kept the same average range of cognitive abilities and psychological traits.

New ways of saying “witchcraft”

In short, liberals think that we’re all the same under the skin. And if some groups do less well than others in an advanced Western democracy, there can be only one explanation. Witchcraft! Liberals don’t call it that, of course. Instead, they use terms like racism, sexism and Islamophobia. But the underlying concepts and psychology are the same as those that worked in ancient and medieval Europe. And that still work in many parts of the modern world. In Black Africa and the Black African diaspora, belief in witchcraft and magic is still widespread and powerful. Albinos and others are butchered for their magically potent body-parts in Tanzania and South Africa, sometimes while still alive. Adults and children are sacrificed to the spirits in return for material success and riches in Nigeria and Uganda.

Children are also sacrificed for those things in Western nations. In 2001, the headless torso of a young Black boy was retrieved from the river Thames in London. Named Adam by the British police, he had been poisoned and dismembered as part of a magical ritual. And the British police have spent a great deal of time and money trying to find his killers. The same police would also be eager to arrest anyone who said that migration by Black Africans into the West is a very bad idea. People who accept barbarisms like child sacrifice and child exorcism are not likely to be valuable citizens of a Western nation. And they’re not: Blacks in Britain hit the headlines for their criminality, not their contributions to science and high technology.

Whites are to blame

But they’re not to blame for this. When Blacks and other non-Whites in London fail at school, throw acid, and commit murder with guns and knives, this says nothing about non-White genetics and everything about White racism. After all, genes are material things, susceptible to scientific investigation and analysis. How could a mere chemical like DNA affect human cognition and psychology, which long ago slipped the surly bonds of matter and soared into the psychic empyrean? No, for secularist liberals it’s obvious that non-White failure and criminality must be blamed on the supernatural force of White racism.

When Blacks murder Blacks, Whites are to blame

That is certainly the only explanation on offer in an anti-racist investigation launched by the Guardian in December 2018. It carries the portentous title “Bias in Britain” and bewails such things as the way White men pass driving-tests at a higher rate than Black women. What more proof do you need that witchcraft at work? According to liberal ideology, human beings of all colours are the same under the skin, with the same cognitive abilities. Therefore non-Whites or women should succeed at exactly the same rates as Whites or men. If this doesn’t happen, then the more successful group must be guilty of racism or sexism. In the case of Black women and driving-tests, it’s both. Black women are the innocent victims of sexist racism and racist sexism. Read more

Tis The Season for Love

‘Tis the Season: A Pro-White, Pro-Natal TV Movie

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Last year just before Christmas a movie caught my attention because it’s one of the rare pro-White modern Christmas movies, and, for added surprise, it is also pro-natal. Try to name any Hollywood film or any kind of TV fare that fits that bill.

The movie is called  ‘Tis the Season for Love (2015) and it comes from the Hallmark Channel.

In this day and age with the war on Christmas in full swing and at a time when births to White parents are way, way down historically, what a treat it is to have one movie straight out of the maw of our entertainment industry that shows for one woman, life in a small town with a traditional man beats out the “You Go, Girl” life of a single woman in New York City. And there is not an ounce of irony in the entire movie.

Here is Hallmark’s summary of the show:

Beth Baker is an out-of-work actress stuck in New York City without her friends at Christmas time. She decides to return home to the quaint small town she escaped 10 years before and finds a place far different than the hamlet she left. She suddenly finds performing possibilities and even romance that kind of blow her away. Will the holidays prove to be as magical for Beth as they appear, or is Christmas magic doomed to disappear as quickly as it arrived for a lady who is ready to take chances she could never have imagined a decade before? Then again, this is the kind of thing that seems to happen during the Christmas season all the time.

Further, this movie got some serious numbers—2.3 million viewers at its debut three years ago. As far as I can tell, there has been no backlash against the movie, its actors, or its creators, and this year Hallmark again ran it. My own motive for highlighting this movie is to give TOO readers a small Christmas present as we head into the thick of the Christmas season. To be honest, so much of my own cultural criticism has been negative and pessimistic — if only because circumstances and honesty dictate it. So I’d like to offer something positive at this wonderful time of year. Read more