Moral Paragons Need No Facts: The Pathetic Apologetics of Jonathan Sacks, Part 1

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Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Jonathan Sacks has been acclaimed by the Jerusalem Post as “one of contemporary Britain’s most outstanding thinkers and spokesmen.” The former Chief British Rabbi, who has been showered with awards from Jewish organizations and appointed to professorships in New York and London, has been feted as a “brilliant philosopher and an enlightening presence for the whole world.” He has even been called “the outstanding moral authority of our time,” while the egregious Prince Charles once described him as “a light unto this nation.” Not surprisingly, given the Jewish stranglehold over the Western media, Sacks, who was made a peer of the House of Lords in 2009, is given a regular platform to peddle his brand of Jewish ethno-politics in a range of media outlets including the BBC, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

Despite his high profile, and the honors and appointments that have been lavished upon him, an examination of Sacks’ intellectual output soon reveals it to be filled with feeble apologetics, empty platitudes and facile homilies. All of these are fully evident in a speech this “brilliant philosopher” recently gave to the European Parliament entitled “The Mutating Virus — Understanding Antisemitism,” (full text here) to open a conference on the future of Jewish communities in Europe hosted by Martin Schulz, the President of the European Parliament.

In his speech Sacks bewails the supposedly dire plight of European Jewry and offers his analysis of “what antisemitism is, why it happens, [and] why antisemites are convinced that they are not antisemitic.” Like the Jewish “historian” Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Sacks favors using the term “antisemitism” over the hyphenated “anti-Semitism” — doubtless because the latter implies the existence of a “Semitism” which could (and indeed does) provide the dialectical basis for “anti-Semitism.” In this way they signal their denial of the reality that hostility to Jews stems from conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews in a Darwinian world. Read more

The Face of Revolution: Reflections on Red Rosa

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The Polish-Jewish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) was that rare thing: a sympathetic Marxist. Unlike Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and the feuding revolutionaries of our own day, she doesn’t seem to have fuelled her politics mainly on power-lust, egomania and hatred. She opposed Bolshevik tyranny and defended free speech with the classic line Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden — “Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently.” She loved nature, wanted the call of the “large blue titmouse” carved on her gravestone, and even had a soft spot for wasps.

“Written on her face…”

Would she have remained sympathetic if she’d come to power in the working-class revolution she tried to foment in Germany after World War I? We’ll never know, because she was murdered in 1919 by right-wing Freikorps troops in Berlin. One thing seems certain, however. If Marxists had come to power in Germany, they would have created tyranny à la Lenin, not Freiheit à la Luxemburg. That’s what happened in Hungary at the same time during the disastrous but thankfully brief “communist republic” ruled by the Jewish Marxist Béla Kun (i.e., Cohen). Unlike Kun, Luxemburg never got to power and her martyr’s death has ensured her a special place in Marxist hagiology. You could call her the Bonnie Prince Charlie of progressive politics, but with an important caveat: she wasn’t bonny.

The face of revolution: Rosa Luxemburg

Instead, she had decidedly Jewish features. You can see them on almost every page of Kate Evans’ Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg (Verso, 2015). Evans doesn’t merely embrace Luxemburg’s Jewishness: you could say she insists on it. She quotes from a letter of Luxemburg’s: “I have no special place in my heart for the ghetto. I feel at home wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.” (15) To illustrate these sentiments, Evans portrays Luxemburg in profile gazing at a swallow through the window of a synagogue. The text below continues: “Rosa’s lack of religious faith cannot buy her freedom. Her cultural identity is written on the features of her face. She will always be seen as a Jew.”

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The Real Obama Legacy, Part 4: Chicago as a case study of liberal failure in American cities

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Link to Part 1: Foreign Policy
Link to Part 2: The Economy
Link to Part 3: Race Relations

We have chosen Obama’s adopted hometown of Chicago and the actions taken by his friend and former Chief of Staff Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel as a case study to illustrate how liberal ideologically driven interventions actually exacerbate a problem without solving it. The unsolved problem is the skyrocketing number of murders in Chicago, the highest in almost 20 years. In 2016 Chicago had more murders than Los Angeles and New York combined.

A staggering total of 762 people were murdered in Chicago in 2016, more than 2 murders every day on average. This represents a 57% increase over the 468 murders reported in 2015, which was a 12.5% increase from 2014.

During Obama’s eight years in office 3,930 people have been killed in homicides across Chicago. The vast majority were young Black males killed by other young Black males. To put this in perspective, this is nearly as high as the 4,229 service members killed during the Iraq War under President George W. Bush.

Residents are fleeing the city and Illinois at a record pace. Illinois lost 37,508 residents in 2016, bringing the state population to the lowest level since 2009. Homicides in Chicago in 2016 skyrocketed passed previous figures, rising from 496 in 2015 to 762 in 2016.

The numbers out of Chicago clearly show a reversal in the decades-long downward trend in murder rates in American cities. And it is certainly not unique to Chicago. In the most populous American cities, murder rates generally increased in 2015 over 2014 ( e.g. Baltimore, 63% increase, Washington, D.C., 54%, Milwaukee, 65%, etc.)

Non-fatal shootings are perhaps an even better barometer of the level of violence in a community, at least partly because better medical procedures saving lives. On that front, Chicago’s numbers are also record-setting. The city recorded 3,550 shooting incidents and 4,331 shooting victims in 2016, compared with 2,900 shootings in 2015. Again, 2015 was 13% more than 2014. So the data we seek to explain is the accelerating rise in both murders and non-fatal shootings over this two-year span.

Chicago keeps detailed annual statistics on major crimes. Until 2011, it published the race of offenders, but shortly after Obama’s election, Mayor Emanuel, ordered the police department to stop releasing that information to the public. The most recent racial data, the 2011 report (p. 53) shows that, like most US cities, there are stark racial differences. Murder offenders were 70.5% Black, 24.3% Hispanic, and 3.5% White.

The first action Mayor Emanuel took upon taking office took is quite illuminating. He chose to eliminate any potential discussion of Black violent crime in the city by simply erasing that information from the public record. In traditional Orwellian doublespeak, this is referred to by the extreme left as “transparency”, or sometimes as “openness”.  While the MSM does not like such facts to be generally known, Black murder rates are consistently 7 to 10 times higher than White murder rates in US cities, including Chicago, and the overwhelming majority of Black homicide victims (93 percent from 1980 to 2008) are killed by blacks. Read more

The Real Obama Legacy, Part 3: Race Relations

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Link to Part 1: Foreign Policy
Link to Part 2: The Economy

Obama was voted into office on the promise of “Hope and Change,” and chief among the many hopes for many voters was that there would be a dramatic improvement in race relations. This did not occur. In fact, Gallup polls showing historical trends found that racial attitudes for both Blacks and Whites were substantially worse after nearly 8 years of Obama than prior to that. Importantly, the dropoff really began in 2013, after Obama’s reelection.

Similarly, Washington Post-ABC News poll, taken in July, 2016 found 63% seeing race relations as “bad,” with a majority believing they are getting worse. Again, we see major changes in the last 2-3 years.

First, Obama’s being Black remained highly salient to Americans. The utopian dream of a post-racial America never materialized. His policies were “colored” by his name being attached to them. For example, a scholarly paper showed that racial polarization in support for health care reform was much greater in 2009–2010, when Obamacare was enacted, than under President Clinton in 1993–1994 (American Journal of Political Science 56.3 (Jul 2012): 690-704). This effect likely had ramifications for Obama’s other policies, such as immigration. “President Obama possesses a unique potential to polarize public opinion by race.” So even though perceptions of race relations did not deteriorate in Obama’s first four years, issues became racially polarized. People saw things through the lens of race.

Obama thus contributed to the racialization of politics in America —  TOO has 40 articles on the topic. By all accounts, the left promoted identity politics for non-Whites and sexual minorities. But these data show that White Americans also became, at least implicitly, more strongly identified as White — a phenomenon that may well have helped Trump and that bodes well for the Alt Right in the long run. And because Trump is seen as racially polarizing because of his statements on immigration, racial identities are not likely to diminish among all groups, including Whites, in the coming years. Read more

New Year’s Thoughts: Celebrating in the Police State

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My New Year’s thoughts do not circle around new resolutions, seeing as that I have already resolved to do everything possible to make this difficult existence more tolerable.  Rather, my thoughts linger on the fact that we now live in a police state precipitated by Muslim immigration and the general coexistence with various and sundry other non-White people.

This was brought to mind by a photomontage from New Year’s Eve, featuring ominous looking police and military figures guarding areas which would formerly appear in a more celebratory aspect.  Could there be any better symbol of our current maladies? All our holidays are now sullied with the countermeasures made necessary by…diversity.  1,500 armed polizei in Cologne—in some ways a welcome sign that Chancellor Merkel has tacitly acknowledged that Germany is out of control; but unwelcome insofar as, well, Germany is out of control.  Heavily armed NYPD are seen guarding Times Square in anticipation of a truck-style attack as perpetrated in Berlin and Paris. Somehow it just doesn’t feel “festive.”

Similarly, 90,000 security personnel were deployed in France. Camouflaged soldiers in Paris could be seen guarding key sites, after having experienced their dose of diversity via truck turned mass-murder weapon.  And, according to the French government, it was a great success, as only ~1000 cars were torched by vandals.

These are the memorable scenes and photographs which in and of themselves provide excellent social commentary on the depth to which Western Civilization has sunk, as though we were in a dystopian sci-fi film. This is not a civilization in optimistic confidence, but rather one that is girding for an enemy which might attack from all sides, and is especially apt to strike on those brief occasions when we seek to revel and celebrate life.  Hence we can literally never relax, but can only put on a brave face if we wish to enter a public place, to show that “the terrorists haven’t won.”  We congratulate ourselves for venturing outside in our own cities as an act of defiance.

Suffice it to say that we are a little beleaguered at the moment. Read more

Exodus Redux: Jewish Identity and the Shaping of History

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“Under the pretext of recording fables and current reports about the Jews, he [Manetho] took the liberty of introducing some incredible tales, wishing to represent us as…condemned to banishment from Egypt.”
Flavius Josephus, Against Apion

I’ve been intrigued by the story of the Israelite Exodus from Egypt for more than a decade. More than any of its close rivals, including the tale of Haman in the Book of Esther, the Exodus looms large as an early and extremely influential psychological landmark in the lachrymose and highly dubious pseudo-history of the Jewish people. Most obviously, the putative liberation from Egypt is commemorated by Judaism every year, in the form of the Pesach, or Passover festival. Indeed, this festival is one of the most important features of the Jewish religious calendar. Historian Paul Johnson remarks that Exodus “became an overwhelming memory” and “gradually replaced the creation itself as the central, determining event in Jewish history.”[1]

Exodus has a power that exists independently from the trappings of religious myth, acting through the centuries as a defining narrative of victimhood, group vindication, and self-validation. Jews living under the Tsar produced endless Yiddish plays and satires containing barely concealed allusions to the Tsar as the latest incarnation of Pharaoh.[2] Exodus is a foundation upon which Jewish identity, as well as Jewish religiosity, is built, and for this reason it has greatly preoccupied even the most atheistic of Jews, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud among them. Moses, as a subconscious archetype, squats in the shadows of the Jewish psyche.

The early reception of Exodus by non-Jews also plays an important role in the Jewish worldview, in the sense that the “virus” of “anti-Semitism” is said to have originated in response to it. In this regard, there is an almost universal consensus among Jewish intellectuals that the earliest origins of “anti-Semitism” can be traced to the writings of an Egyptian priest allegedly offended by the account of the Israelite escape from Pharaoh. The theory relates specifically to a history of Egypt, the Aegyptiaca, written by an Egyptian priest named Manetho around the third century BC. Although the Aegyptiaca is lost to us, we are able to piece together much of its contents based on subsequent rebuttals by later Jewish writers such as Flavius Josephus, and also references to the text by several Greek and Greek-Egyptian intellectuals.

In summary, Manetho reported that centuries earlier a foreign population had entered Egypt’s eastern border via “infiltration of the Delta.” This foreign population subsequently rose in power within Egypt, becoming a burden and a pestilence to the natives. At some point, the foreign population developed a serious disease of the skin, and the Egyptians were finally motivated to expel the invaders, who later relocated to Jerusalem. Read more

Zionist Extremism as Product of the Internal Dynamics of Judaism: Conclusion

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Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

CONCLUSION

An important mechanism underlying all this is that of rallying around the flag during times of crisis, a phenomenon that is well understood by social psychologists. Group identification processes are exaggerated in times of resource competition or other perceived sources of threat,131 a finding that is highly compatible with an evolutionary perspective.132 External threat tends to reduce internal divisions and maximize perceptions of common interest among ingroup members, as we have seen among American Jews in response to perceived crises in Israel, ranging from the Six-Day War of 1967 to the unending crises of the 1990s and into the new millennium.133 Jewish populations also respond to threat by developing messianic ideologies, rallying around charismatic leaders, and expelling dissenters from the community. Traditionally this has taken the form of religious fundamentalism, as among the Hasidim, but in the modern world these tendencies have been manifested in various forms of leftist radicalism, Zionism, and other Jewish intellectual and political movements.134 Throughout Jewish history, this siege mentality has tended to increase conflict between Jews and non-Jews which then has a feed-forward effect of increasing the perception of threat among Jews. In the context of the intense ethnic conflict of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, the conflict was exacerbated by an enormous increase in the Jewish population and the resulting poverty.

And in all cases, the leaders of this process are the more ethnocentric, committed Jews. They are the ones who donate to Jewish causes, attend rallies, write letters, join and support activist organizations. As J. J. Goldberg, the editor of the Forward, notes, Jews who identify themselves as doves feel much less strongly about Israel than those who identify themselves as hawks. “Jewish liberals give to the Sierra Fund. Jewish conservatives are Jewish all the time. That’s the whole ball game. It’s not what six million American Jews feel is best — it’s what 50 Jewish organizations feel is best.”135 In other words, it’s the most radical, committed elements of the Jewish community that determine the direction of the entire community.

As a European in a society that is rapidly becoming non-European, I can sympathize with Jabotinsky’s envy of the native Slavic peoples he observed in the early twentieth century:

I look at them with envy. I have never known, and probably never will know, this completely organic feeling: so united and singular [is this] sense of a homeland, in which everything flows together, the past and the present, the legend and the hopes, the individual and the historical. Every nation civilised or primitive, sees its land as its national home, where it wants to stay as the sole landlord forever. Such a nation will never willingly consent to new landlords or even to partnership.137

It is the memory of this rapidly disappearing sense of historical rootedness and sense of impending dispossession that are at the root of the malaise experienced by many Europeans, not only in the U.S. but elsewhere. The triumph of Zionism took a mere fifty years from Herzl’s inspiration to the founding of the state of Israel. There is a tendency to overlook or ignore the powerful ethnocentrism at the heart of Zionism that motivated people like Jabotinsky, especially on the part of the American Jewish community, which has been dedicated throughout the twentieth century to pathologizing and criminalizing the fragile vestiges of ethnocentrism among Europeans.138

But the bottom line is that the Zionists were successful. Israel would not have become a state without a great many deeply ethnocentric Jews willing to engage in any means necessary to bring about their dream: a state that would be a vehicle for their ethnic interests. It would not have come about without the most radical among them—people like Jabotinsky, Begin, Shamir, Sharon, and their supporters—a group which now includes the entire organized American Jewish community. The impending dispossession of Europeans will only be avoided if people of their ilk can be found among the political class of Europeans.