Two Ingroup Morality Items

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infiltration_pesach_400As noted ad nauseum at TOO, while Diaspora Jews in the West continue to promote immigration and multiculturalism as intrinsic goods and unquestioned moral ideals, in Israel the whole point of public policy is to retain its Jewish character. The most recent example is shipping to Sweden dozens of African refugees living in Israel. Patrick Cleburne’s account at VDARE says it all:

  • The similar size and ethnic diversity of the two countries means that the only rationale for sending Africans to Sweden is that Sweden cares nothing about retaining a Swedish identity, whereas Israel cares deeply about remaining a Jewish state;
  • While the U.S. government policy on immigration and multiculturalism remains at odds with the interests of the traditional people of the West, especially the working class (so, as Cleburne notes, we can expect many of these African refugees to end up in the U.S.), the Israeli government sticks up for their own people: Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar said he was “not very impressed with all the crying and complaining” by business owners whose employees were on strike. “With all due respect to the restaurant and café owners in crisis, or those whose cleaning staff didn’t show up, this will not determine Israel’s national policy. On the contrary, let’s think about those Israelis who have lost their jobs [to migrant workers].”

Given that immigration and multiculturalism are presented as moral imperatives in the West, this results in a double moral standard—one morality for the ingroup and a quite different morality toward the outgroup; the theme of Jewish moral particularism. Unlike the addiction of the West to moral universalism, Jewish groups behave as a foreign policy realist (or evolutionary psychologist) expects states to behave. They simply pursue their interests with the aim of surviving and prospering.

And that means pursuing radically different strategies depending on whether Jews are a demographic majority or a tiny minority. In the West, the organized Jewish community avidly pursues displacement-level immigration and multiculturalism as tools to render the traditional majorities relatively powerless and incapable of mounting attacks on Jews. In Israel, the goal is to retain Jewish identity and minimize the presence and the influence of non-Jews—goals that are enthusiastically supported by Diaspora Jews and Jewish organizations.

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Moshe Is Monitoring You: Duplicity, Double-Think and the Jewish Dream of a Communist Europe

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Denis “The Slug” MacShane had a bad 2013. This veteran campaigner against anti-Semitism, a former Minister for Europe and policy advisor to Labour Friends of Israel, was charged with fraud in July and jailed shortly before Christmas (see here). But he must have been celebrating in March. Why? Because, like the journalist Nick Cohen and the lawyer Anthony Julius, he’s a staunch defender of free speech. In March, a university tribunal struck a strong blow for this vital freedom:

Lessons should be learned from this sorry saga. We greatly regret that the case was ever brought. At heart, it represents an impermissible attempt to achieve a political end by litigious means. It would be very unfortunate if an exercise of this sort were ever repeated … We are also troubled by the implications of the claim. Underlying it we sense a worrying disregard for pluralism, tolerance and freedom of expression. (See here)

Cohen, Julius and MacShane must have celebrated this ruling long into the night. When Cohen published a book defending free speech in 2012, Julius and MacShane wrote extravagantly positive reviews. Julius said the book deserved to stand beside “Milton’s Areopagitica and Mill’s On Liberty” (see here); MacShane saluted Cohen as heir to Voltaire and other “giants of the 18th century” (see here). That’s why they must have been so pleased by the university ruling in March. But what was the case about? Here are the details:

Denis MacShane, Friend of Free Speech

Denis MacShane, Friend of Free Speech

A Jewish academic who claimed the University and College Union’s policy on Palestine constituted harassment has been rebuked by an employment tribunal for misusing the legal process. Ronnie Fraser, a further education lecturer and founding director of Academic Friends of Israel, argued that the UCU [University and College Union] was institutionally anti-Semitic owing to motions passed in favour of a boycott of Israel.

Despite enlisting the services of Anthony Julius, best known as Diana, Princess of Wales’ divorce lawyer and a partner at Mishcon de Reya, all of his 10 claims of harassment have been “dismissed in their totality”. During the 20-day hearing in December, Mr Fraser called several witnesses to give evidence, including Howard Jacobson, the Booker Prize winning novelist, John Mann MP, the former MP Denis MacShane and numerous leading Jewish academics. …

The action is branded by tribunal panel members as “an impermissible attempt to achieve a political end by litigious means” and a case which showed a “worrying disregard for pluralism, tolerance and freedom of expression”. Scorn is also invoked for Mr Julius’s decision to pursue certain points, with complaints variously dismissed as “palpably groundless”, “obviously hopeless” and “devoid of any merit”. (Tribunal slams academic for bringing anti-Semitism case, Times Higher Education Supplement, 27th March 2013) Read more

Making “America as user-friendly to Jews as possible.” The Anti-Defamation League and the Indoctrination of our Youth.

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I’ve recently been occupying my spare time with careful study of the ADL’s “Anti-Bias Lesson Plans and Resources for K-12 Educators.” On the ADL’s website, it is said that these lesson plans, which target children in grades three through twelve, have been designed to help “educators” “integrate multicultural, anti-bias, and social justice themes into their curricula.”

In reality, it doesn’t take long for the informed individual reading through these lesson plans to conclude that they are little more than crude tools designed to strip White children of any sense of identity, rendering them little more than androgynous automatons — pliant prototypes of the ‘tolerant age,’ utterly devoid of race and gender.

There is a range of delicious fare on offer for those teachers with an appetite for ensuring that little boys and girls understand the concept of “gender stereotyping,” and who believe that little Mikey should be actively encouraged to play with dolls and a stroller since, as one ADL anti-bias handbook puts it, “there really is no such thing as a girl’s toy or a boy’s toy.”

More interesting still are the numerous lesson plans on offer which claim to “address anti-Semitism,” bearing tag-lines boldly proclaiming that these educational gems will challenge anti-Semitism by “debunking the myths and responding with facts.”

It is to an example from the latter set of these lessons plans that I wish to devote some attention in the following article. In studying these plans, we may well come to learn something — though that “something” will be considerably different from that envisaged by our erstwhile tutors. Read more

https://youtu.be/wdbOOalrTSA

Dear Abby

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Stanley Fischer: A Dual U.S./Israeli Citizen and Pro-Israel Activist as Vice-Chair of the Fed

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fische1Grant Smith, writing at Antiwar.com provides an enlightening account of the nomination of Stanley Fischer as Vice-Chair of the Federal Reserve (“AIPAC’s Fed Candidate Stanley Fischer on a Warpath against Iran: Dual-citizen nominee’s lifetime benefit to Israel comes at a heavy cost to America“). When I first read that Fischer was a possibility, my only thought was something like “Can’t we find anyone who’s not Jewish to fill a post like that?” After all, the Chair of Federal Reserve has been Jewish since 1987, Janet Yellen, the present vice-chair, will likely be the next chair, and Yellen’s predecessor was Donald L. Kohn.

And one would think that appointing an Israeli citizen —and a high-level one at that (former head of the Israeli Central Bank and likely on a first-name basis with everyone who matters in Israel) — would raise all kinds of red flags about old-fashioned issues like dual loyalty.

But there is much more to the story. Fischer, it turns out, will be AIPAC”s man at the Fed.  Smith notes that

as Bank of Israel governor, Stanley Fischer played a central role in coordinating the implementation of AIPAC-generated sanctions against Iran—ostensibly over its nuclear program.  Stuart Levey, the head of the U.S. Treasury Department’s division for “Terrorism and Financial Intelligence,” an office created after heavy AIPAC lobbying, met often with Fischer in Israel alongside the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and chiefs of both the Mossad and Shin Bet to explore how to “supplement” UN sanctions and end-run Russian and Chinese opposition.[v]  The Levey-Fischer strategy was “to work outside the context of the Security Council to engage the private sector and let it know about the risks of doing business with Tehran” particularly against European banks that had only partially drawn back their business dealings with Iran.  In 2010, Israel dispatched Fischer to meet with Chinese and Russian “counterparts” in order to financially isolate Iran.[vi]

Smith’s phrase “ostensibly over its nuclear program” is beautifully suggestive. The fact is that Israel has many reasons to want a destructive war with Iran besides the putative nuclear weapons program—its support of Hezbollah, its alliance with Syria, its hostility toward Israel, and simply the fact that it is an energy-rich, technologically sophisticated neighbor with a population of around 75 million and regional ambitions. Israel would love to crush a rising rival power in the region before it becomes too difficult. Read more

Freedom of Association and the Right of Exclusion: The Rights Before All Others, Part 3

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Part 1
Part 2

The Legal Landscape

American law deals frequently and expansively with the topic of race[1]. The Constitution itself has three amendments that implicate race.  The 13th Amendment outlaws slavery, though it does not explicitly mention race.  The 14th Amendment requires governments to give citizens the “equal protection of the laws.”  It also does not mention race, but it plainly forbids many imagined government treatments of race — say, a state law prohibiting Asians from owning property or setting different punishments for different races for the same criminal act.  The 15th Amendment forbids both federal and state (and by extension, local) governments from prohibiting anyone from voting for racial reasons (“race, color, or previous condition of servitude”).  The Voting Rights Act, absurdly applied though it is, is a good example of racial legislation based on the 15th Amendment.

Brown v. Board[2], because public school segregation was at issue, is a good example of a case decided under the 14th Amendment.  The “separate but equal” defense, it should be noted, was perfectly Constitutional, but the true inequality between Blacks and Whites was exposed:  an all-Black school, by virtue of lower Black IQ and behavioral differences, was bound to be a shabbier environment, and it was imagined that the by the alchemy of shoulder-rubbing with White students, Blacks would by osmosis become smart, well-behaved little versions of Whites.

The 14th Amendment, however, has a “state action” requirement:  the racial discrimination must be accomplished by the government for it to be illegal.  In the Supreme Court case of Shelley v. Kraemer[3], the court managed to wrangle in the “state action” requirement by declaring that two private parties, battling over a racially exclusive covenant in the sale of a home, had created state action by merely seeking enforcement of that right in a state court.  A decision like this shows the depths to which courts will sink to defeat a White right of association. Read more