AIPAC rabbi calls for ‘militant nonviolent resistance’ to “racial injustice” in St. Louis

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A theme around here has been that Jews  have posed as moral paragons while relentlessly pursuing their ethnic interests, resulting in cognitive dissonance among many White liberals. A good example of the resulting hypocrisy is Reform Rabbi Susan Talve who is aiding and abetting the Ferguson protesters masquerading as an exemplar of enlightened liberal morality while also supporting AIPAC and its program of apartheid and ethnic dispossession of the Palestinians  (Philip Weiss: “AIPAC rabbi calls for ‘militant nonviolent resistance’ to racial injustice in St. Louis“).

The Ferguson “gentle giant” Michael Brown story continues  to unravel , but of course facts don’t matter, least of all to Rabbi Talve.

Susan Talve is the progressive rabbi in St. Louis who has been active in racial justice issues in Ferguson while supporting Israel’s occupation of Jerusalem and its onslaught on Gaza during her Israel lobby-sponsored trip to the Jewish state last summer.

Now one might suppose that she is simply living in a state of blissful ignorance, but the good news is that she is being confronted with her hypocrisy. Tweeters at one of her talks condemning “racist Whites” focused on her hypocrisy, and there were hecklers who were unimpressed with her sanctimony:

 “What about , Susan?” AIPAC supporter Ravbi Susan Talve gets heckled at her talk about civil rights.”

“Black and brown lives matter,” says rabbi Susan Talve. She forgot to add the disclaimer, “except for in Gaza.”

Pro-AIPAC rabbi Susan Talve now speaking against racism in STL while supporting racism in Israel.

To be sure, Talve claims to oppose the occupation, but, as Weiss notes, “she’s worked with an organization, AIPAC, that supports everything Israel does in the occupied territories.”

This is a common pose of liberal Jews in the Diaspora in the West — maintaining a veneer of moral consistency while doing nothing to change their own ethnic community by trying to change AIPAC, Israel, or the US government on Palestine. All their energies are directed against White America. If they were serious about criticizing Israel, they would spend as much time protesting at the Israeli embassy or at the AIPAC offices as they do in aiding and abetting the Ferguson insanity.

There is a consistency here, of course. Activists like Talve are consistently pursuing their ethnic  interests. It’s just that their interests differ dramatically depending on whether it’s about Israeli actions vis-à-vis the Palestinians, or in promoting the anti-White coalition in the U.S.

Morality has nothing to do with it.

Bruce Shipman and the Idealized Image of Jews among Elite Protestants

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In his The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, Eric Kaufmann described liberal Protestantism as one of several liberal traditions in American history. Although it had its origins in the 19th century, by 1910 there arose a liberal Protestant elite committed to “universalist, humanitarian ethics.” Elite Protestants (but not the great mass of Protestant Americans) were opposed to immigration restriction in the 1920s and were at the vanguard of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. They embraced the dream of universal humanity, and they developed idealized images of Jews who, after World War II, had assumed the leadership of liberal causes in the U.S.

But, as Kaufmann notes, Anglo-America has lost its political power and has been deposed from its position as cultural trend setter. Some of the fallout from the demise of elite Protestants can be seen in Mark Oppenheimer’s Tablet interview of Bruce Shipman — the Episcopalian chaplain who ran afoul of the Israel Lobby (my take). The interesting part:

Oppenheimer is recounting a conversation he had with a leftist Jewish friend who is critical of Israel:

[Oppenheimer]: I said to him, “You spend so much time among anti-Zionists. How can you tell which ones, which minority, are anti-Semites?” And he said, “Well, that’s easy.” He said, “It’s the liberal Protestants. The Jews aren’t anti-Semitic, even if they’re called self-loathing. And the Muslims aren’t anti-Semitic, because they get us.” He said they understand everything about us, as we understand everything about them. He said it’s the well-meaning leftie Protestants. They profess a deep spiritual kinship with Jews, they’ve often lived in the Middle East, they’ve led tours there.

[Shipman]: He’s talking about me! [laughs]

Muslims and Jews understand each other; they see each other as implacable enemies and they understand each other’s fanaticism, their mutual hatred, and the impermeable barriers between their groups. As Christine Amanpour showed in God’s Warriors (see also here), religious fanaticism in Israel and among Muslims is the order of the day in the Middle East. Indeed, the social structure of society fragmented into mutually hostile groups is endemic to the area and likely biologically based (see here, xxv-xxxi). Neither expects any quarter. A fight to the death. Read more

Susan Sontag’s Jewish World

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A theme of The Culture of Critique is that Jewish intellectual movements created a fundamentally Jewish intellectual and social world whose members promoted each other and socialized with each other. People outside that world didn’t matter. They could be subject to mobbing-type attacks or simply ignored.

The New York Intellectuals spent their careers entirely within a Jewish social and intellectual milieu. When Rubenfeld (1997, 97) lists people [Clement] Greenberg invited to social occasions at his apartment in New York, the only gentile mentioned is artist William de Kooning. Revealingly, Michael Wrezin (1994, 33) refers to Dwight Macdonald, another Trotskyist contributor to [Partisan Review, the flagship journal of the New York Intellectuals], as “a distinguished goy among the Partisanskies.” Another non-Jew was writer James T. Farrell, but his diary records a virtually all-Jewish social milieu in which a large part of his life was spent in virtual non-stop social interaction with other New York Intellectuals (Cooney 1986, 248). Indeed, [Norman] Podhoretz (1967, 246–248) refers to the New York Intellectuals as a “family” who, when they attended a party, arrived at the same time and socialized among their ingroup. (CoC, Chapter 6, pp. 220-221)

A discussion in the Forward of a recent biography of Susan Sontag is a nice illustration of this phenomenon (Susan Sontag’s Not-So-Secret and Not-Always-So-Jewish History: Biographer Demonstrates Author’s Persistent Charms). 

Very soon, Sontag would draw inspiration from a series of Jewish mentors and friends, or as Schreiber puts it, the “dominant, exotic European-Jewish father figure to whom Sontag was attracted throughout her career.” These include the political philosopher and classicist Leo Strauss and the sociologist Philip Rieff with whom she studied at the University of Chicago— she married Rieff at age 17. At Harvard, Sontag was taught by another sociologist, Jacob Taubes; his wife Susan’s fascination with the French Jewish philosopher Simone Weil inspired one of Sontag’s ardent campaigns to get the American reading public to heed hitherto overlooked writers and thinkers. Her publicization of “the achievements of such authors as Walter Benjamin [of the Frankfurt School], Elias Canetti, Paul Goodman, and Leonid Tsypkin, who wrote the novel “Summer in Baden Baden,” are among Sontag’s most sympathetic labors.

While respectful of literary elders, Sontag had an ironic attitude toward a few “dominant, exotic European-Jewish father figures” such as French Jewish philosopher Jean Wahl, whom she met in Paris in 1958. The septuagenarian Wahl, who had escaped from Drancy internment camp during the Nazi occupation, was mocked by Sontag for having “three holes in his pants through which his underpants were visible.” By the time she moved to New York in 1959, her Jewish influences were her contemporaries, often gay writers including the novelist Alfred Chester, poet Richard Howard and film critic Elliott Stein. The last-mentioned apparently inspired Sontag to write her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” which, if necessarily of its time, still has value as a cultural artefact today.

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Jews, ‘Israelis’ and the Israel Lobby

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News from England conveys that Andrew Bridgen, a Member of Parliament for the so-called Conservative Party, has troubled those of the Hebrew persuasion by daring to mention that there is a link between the Jewish people and the State of Israel. During an exchange in the House of Commons on proposals to recognize a State of Palestine, Bridgen is alleged to have said:

Does my hon. Friend agree that, given that the political system of the world’s superpower and our great ally the United States is very susceptible to well-funded powerful lobbying groups and the power of the Jewish lobby in America, it falls to this country and to this House to be the good but critical friend that Israel needs, and this motion tonight just might lift that logjam on this very troubled area?

A report at Breitbart.com is illustrative of irrational and pathological responses to any acknowledgement that Jewish lobbying groups (of which the Israel Lobby is only one) are well-funded and highly influential. Despite the measured tone of Bridgen’s comments, Breitbart’s journalist described the statement as a “scathing, anti-Semitic attack on pro-Israel groups in the United States. … Mr Bridgen’s comments give fuel to the anti-Israel lobby in the UK, and echo statements made by a number of anti-Semites. According to the European Monitoring Centre’s definition on Anti-Semitism, equating the actions of the State of Israel with Jewish people as a race is classed as anti-Semitism.”

Bridgen’s sin, we can deduce, is deemed to be two-fold. The first element was that he dared to state that a Jewish lobby existed and that the government of the United States is “very susceptible” to its influence. Although this is a clear and demonstrable fact, it is off-limits for public discussion. His second sin was to dare to suggest that Britain should be a “critical” friend, and that Israel “needs” friends who will carefully point out when it has committed wrongs or errors — another perfectly reasonable statement, that is, unless you are Jewish in which case anyone who criticizes you or blames you for anything is an “anti-Semite.”

Israel’s actions are clearly blameworthy, and have cost it support. The Guardian reported that in the same debate, Sir Richard Ottaway, the Conservative chairman of the foreign affairs select committee, said the Netanyahu government’s recent appropriation of land in the Etzion Bloc area of the West Bank had cost Israel his support. He said he had long been a supporter of Israel but “I realize now Israel has slowly been drifting away from world public opinion. The annexation of the 950 acres of the West Bank just a few months ago has outraged me more than anything else in my political life. It has made me look a fool and that is something I deeply resent.” A significant problem is that there are many more fools, with a variety of motives, who will persist in their support for Israel. Read more

Diseased Defectors: UKIP, Islam and the Hand of the Board of Deputies

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UKIP has won a landslide victory in the south of England. It also came within just over 600 votes of winning a formerly safe Labour seat in the north. Both the Tories and Labour are running scared. They’re paying the price for ignoring public anger about immigration. The old accusation of “Racism!” isn’t working any more. And both parties may see MPs defecting to UKIP, frightened that they’ll lose their seats if they stay where they are.

After all, UKIP’s election victor, Douglas Carswell, is a defector from the Tories. But that’s what worries me. Carswell is a plague-bearer from a diseased party. He’s said this: “I have no difficulty with Britain as Britain is today.” Rape-gangs, riots, FGM, electoral fraud — Carswell is fine with all that.

He’s also declined to endorse what the UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, said about banning people with HIV from entry to Britain. This is an eminently sensible proposal with majority support, which is why it has been greeted with outrage by the liberal elite. Don’t White tax-payers realize how privileged they are to fund vibrant enrichers with hugely expensive diseases?

Apparently not. But Carswell won’t side with the White majority against the liberal elite.

Nor is he opposed to further immigration:

On the subject of immigration, let me make it absolutely clear; I’m not against immigration  … We should welcome those that want to come here to contribute. We need those with skills and drive. There’s hardly a hospital, GP surgery or supermarket in the country that could run without that skill and drive.

Apparently the native British are incompetent to run a modern society. The UK simply must have ever more immigrants or the whole society will fall apart. Read more

Tom Sunic’s letter to the US Ambassador to Hungary

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October 11, 2014

Mr. André Goodfriend
Chargé d’Affaires
Embassy of the United States of America
Szabadság tér 12
H-1054 Budapest

Dear Mr. Goodfriend,

As an American citizen I would hereby like to express my concern over the recent decision by the Hungarian government to ban the National Policy Institute (NPI) conference which had been scheduled to take place in Budapest from October 3 to October 5, 2014. I would also like to express my dismay at the arrest and expulsion of my good colleague, the NPI Chairman, Mr. Richard Spencer, whose colleagues and I decided to proceed with the conference despite the previous ban by the Hungarian government. The interdiction of the conference by the Hungarian government caused severe financial losses to the organizers, to the speakers, as well as to all registered and would-be attendees of the conference.

While I am aware that the truncated NPI conference, held in private in Budapest on October 4, was in legal defiance of the earlier decision made by the Hungarian government, let me also state the following: The NPI has hosted over the years prominent scholars in the field of sociobiology and political science, both from the USA and Europe. Contrary to frequent media headlines and often bizarre speculations, as well as the earlier statements issued by the Hungarian government about the alleged NPI racist gathering, the speakers, including myself, at that smaller version of the event did not preach xenophobia or promote racial hatred. Instead, the main focus of our short lectures was how to prevent nationalist and racial violence in the EU and the USA, which, as an historical rule, always occurs in forcibly and artificially created multicultural and multiracial social structures. Read more