Amy Biehl Syndrome

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Every so often, a tale from the world of current events manages to stand on its own as summation of the white genocide.  The murder of Amy Biehl was one such tale.  Biehl, a pretty, blonde Californian studying at Stanford, traipsed off to South Africa in the early 1990’s to assist blacks during the apartheid challenges.  One day, she was surrounded by a group of blacks (unaware of her being ‘on the good side’, if you will) who stoned her to death.

To white advocates, the implications of the tale are obvious.  But for those new to white consciousness, let me explain.  First, Biehl was an attractive, well-off white woman, and obviously bright (she did make it into Stanford).  As white advocates, we bemoan the fact that our best and brightest are so indoctrinated against their own race that they’d dive into dangerous situations to help non-whites — and worse, those in conflict with whites.  They’ve been conditioned all their lives to believe that a virtuous life means running to a far-off land to “help” the non-whites, who suffer only because of colonialism or some other white-caused unfairness.  They are not taught, by contrast, that becoming a wife and mother and helping their own race is virtuous.  No, the opposite:  those are contemptible courses.

So, that’s one level on which “Amy Biehl Syndrome” is a problem.  The other is the sheer irony of the death:  these women end up killed by the very “noble” non-whites they seek to help.  To white advocates, what this shows is that these are ill-spent efforts:  underlying the mission is an assumption that the non-whites will be grateful for the white help.  But in truth, many of these non-whites are violence-prone and so lacking in discernment that they’d kill a white person willing to help them.  This in turn reveals the deep-seated racial differences that make co-existence very difficult.

And on a third level, the parents of Amy Biehl actually forgave the black killers and shook their hands.  White advocates see this as the Stockholm Syndrome of our dispossession — rather than react in a normal, healthy way by becoming angry, we actually get on bended knee to ask the forgiveness of the murderers of our race.  We’ve become a race that wants to apologize for not dying off quickly enough.  It boggles the mind.

Was the recent murder of a white girl who sought to be a “mule” for illegals an example of Amy Biehl Syndrome?  Possibly — or this girl may have been acting out of cash-driven self-interest.  But one element, at least, is there:  a young white woman who’s been brainwashed by multiculturalism to the point that she doesn’t recognize the danger of venturing into Mexico on such a mission.  She watched “Dora the Explorer” and thus believes that Hispanics are all nice people.

When I lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, I’d read a story every few months in the New York tabloids about a young, idealistic white woman from the midwest who’d come to New York to work in the inner city public schools, only to be stabbed in the back (literally) by young black thugs.  Another white life lost to multicultural lies, I would think.  She was convinced by a hundred different propaganda points that this would be an “exciting” life (not that I was totally immune, since I was living there myself.)

The consequences of diversity propaganda are real.  Whites — often the best whites — end up dead.  We must teach them that true virtue today lies in defense of their race.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist. Email him.

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Kevin MacDonald: Mexican stories

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Kevin MacDonald: Lately I have been inundated with stories about Mexicans. Up in Morgan Hill (near San Jose), four White students had the temerity to wear American flags  on Cinco de Mayo, resulting in Mexicans swearing at them in Spanish. The John and Ken radio show, a major LA-area talk show with  a huge audience and very negative attitudes on illegal aliens, interviewed a woman who recounted being physically threatened by a crowd of Mexican students swearing at her in Spanish . She closed her comments by saying that she thinks that it may all end with a race war.

I suspect that the response of the White students indicates an emerging racial/ethnic consciousness. Overtly, it was about American flags versus Mexican flags, but the racial difference was obvious.

Today’s LA Times recounts the story of a Mexican family that crossed the border a century ago. What’s amazing is that after a century they seem completely unassimilated to the US. They have large families with “dozens of relatives” living in adjacent houses, and they still speak Spanish as their first language. A Mexican gunman with a long record of arrests murdered three family members, including the mother of his child. The family is depicted as working class. In other words, no assimilation and no upward mobility in 100 years.

Today’s LA Times also has an article on Ricardo Dominguez, a Mexican American just granted tenure at UC-San Diego. Dominguez is a performance artist who, in the words of this tenure-granting letter, is a “defining figure in the migration of performance art from physical space to virtual space.” His performances in virtual space are political gestures aimed at shutting down websites of people who are not on board with his leftist-ethnocentric, pro-immigration agenda.

His latest claim to fame is using $10,000 in public funds to develop a cell phone that tells illegals where there’s water while entertaining them with poetry as they cross the desert (“May the wind always be at your back”). His course is described as “Trans( )infinities as an (empty set) of potential aesthetic practices that move between, through, across, and beyond the post of the post-contemporary by transfixing on the loan words” — whatever that means. But it’s good enough for tenure at the University of California. And of course, his moment of fame has received a great deal of encouragement from his numerous colleagues on the academic nutcase left: Dominquez describes the praise he has received as  “a kind of glorious moment in the performance. … It’s the humanity that has gathered around … Electronic Disturbance Theatre.”

Another LA Times story from today describes 14 Mexican-looking people (I realize this is profiling) who were arrested after tying up traffic for hours while lying down in front of the city jail as a protest against the Arizona immigration law. They joined their hands  together inside plastic piping to make it harder to arrest them. The sign in the print edition had a clenched brown fist and a what looks like a reference to Arizona’s “racist laws.”

Finally, there was the article in the NY Times by Zev Chafets on Julian Castro, the “The Post-Hispanic Hispanic Politician.”  Castro’s mother is a former La Raza activist, and it’s pretty obvious she still identifies as a Mexican and is not too fond of Anglos:

To Rosie, the Alamo is a symbol of bad times. “They used to take us there when we were schoolchildren,” she told me. “They told us how glorious that battle was. When I grew up I learned that the ‘heroes’ of the Alamo were a bunch of drunks and crooks and slaveholding imperialists who conquered land that didn’t belong to them. But as a little girl I got the message — we were losers. I can truly say that I hate that place and everything it stands for.”

Despite this, the whole point of the article is to assure readers that there is no danger of Mexicans being an unassimilated minority:

In 2000, while Castro was still in Cambridge, the political theorist Samuel P. Huntington argued that mass immigration from Mexico poses an existential threat to the United States. “Mexican immigration,” he wrote, “is a unique, disturbing and looming challenge to our cultural integrity, our national identity and potentially to our future as a country.” At the heart of Huntington’s critique, which many Americans share, is the sense that Mexican-Americans will form a permanent, unassimilated superbarrio across the Southwest and elsewhere. Julián Castro’s San Antonio is one place that counters that concern.

Chafets writes as if finding one Mexican politician who seems on the surface to be assimilated means we should all breathe a sigh of relief–despite Castro’s radical mother and a whole lot of very unassmilated Mexicans, even after several generations. What I see does nothing to remove Huntington’s concerns.

But it’s clear that Castro is getting a huge publicity push. Chafets quotes people eager to declare him to be the likely first Latino president. And it doesn’t hurt that his chief of staff is Robbie Greenblum — a Jewish lawyer. If nothing else, Castro has figured out how to get ahead in American politics, and Zev Chafets and the NY Times are doing all they can to play along.

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The White Advocacy Movement Goes Begging

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If there’s one central truth about Jewish activism, it’s that no stone is left unturned. Since Jews are a small minority, they must make alliances with sympathetic non-Jews. For example, quite a bit of their money is spent convincing non-Jews of the nobility of the Israeli cause. This video of the recent AIPAC conference focuses on the 1321 student political leaders from 370 colleges in all 50 states who were given all-expenses-paid trips to attend the conference. The vast majority of these students are non-Jews, picked because some among them may well end up having political power and influence in the future. It’s their first lesson in where the money is, and it’s doubtless money well spent.

AIPAC also pays for week-long trips to Israel for Congressmen and journalists at around $5000 per.

JINSA (the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs) has similar programs for politicians who are more advanced in their careers than the students feted by AIPAC. However, the bulk of JINSA’s budget is spent on taking a host of retired U.S. generals and admirals to Israel, where JINSA facilitates meetings between Israeli officials and retired but still-influential U.S. flag officers.

All of this largess has predictable psychological effects. Particularly striking in the AIPAC video is the rock star greeting that the students gave to pro-Israel fanatic Alan Dershowitz, shown passionately asking for any evidence that America’s tilt toward Israel endangers American lives. I guess the Iraq war doesn’t count. I am sure he won’t count the looming war with Iran that is so ardently championed by the Israel Lobby.

But the point here is that all this costs money, and Jewish organizations are lavishly funded. Here are some numbers for public donations to Jewish and de facto Jewish organizations gleaned fromGuidestar.org for 2008:

AIPAC: $52 million; much of AIPAC’s impact is from money that is directly contributed to political candidates by Jews associated with AIPAC rather than from AIPAC’s budget, so the actual amount of money controlled by AIPAC is much larger.

JINSA: $3.5 million. Much of JINSA’s money comes from defense contractors wanting to suck up to the Israel Lobby.

ADL: $59 million in 2008 ($68 million in 2007).

ACLU: $76 million (each state also has a branch; for example  the Southern California branch reported $3.5 million in donations).

$PLC: $32 million.

That’s a brief and  very incomplete glimpse into the  world of (mainly Jewish) philanthropy directed at supporting causes that fit with Jewish political interests — Israel and the anti-White left in America. These organizations get this kind of money every year — at a time when the left is so powerful as to be virtually on auto-pilot. Imagine if there was a real threat from a pro-White movement or if Israel was in danger of losing its iron grip on the US political system. The amounts given to these organizations would skyrocket.

Now let’s look at pro-White advocacy, keeping in mind that we are in far more dire straits in terms of what we can reasonably expect the future to hold than the groups contributing to the organizations listed above.

Right now VDARE.COM is in a financial crisis, and after several weeks is still well short of getting $50,000 in contributions to bridge around half of the gap created when a major foundation donor stopped its funding.

AlternativeRight, a project of the VDARE Foundation,  is also doing a fundraiser with a goal of $50,000, of which they have gotten around $33,000 as of this writing.

The goal for both these sites is $50 thousand, not the well over $50 million that the ADL rakes in every year. I won’t even mention the contributions to this website — small in comparison even to these pro-White sites.

The point is that the funding picture for race realist, immigration patriot, pro-White organizations is ridiculously minuscule compared to the funding of our adversaries.

There are very real consequences to this. The one I want to emphasize here is that vanishingly few people are able to actually make a living by writing for these sites or by being an on-the-ground activist promoting our ideas on college campuses and elsewhere. I recently had a phone conversation with a young 20-something writer and activist on college campuses who told me about his $5000 credit card debt and living in a large house with like-minded others to save money on rent.  Most importantly, he said he was anticipating giving up his position in order to get a real job, get married and have a family — none of which are remotely possible in his current situation. The guys he is living with are doubtless in a similar situation. Pro-White activism is something you can do when you are young and want to live like a college student. But it’s not a viable career option.

And there is the writer of the current TOO article, who goes by the pen name of Simon Krejsa. (He has also written for VDARE). He just emailed me saying that he has entered a homeless shelter in Oshkosh.

And there are the young men associated with A3P, none of whom is receiving a dime for his work despite all the time and energy they are putting into it. Perhaps they too will come to think that their activism will have to take second place to a job that can pay a mortgage and support a family.

There are also quite a few people with advanced degrees who are good writers and on-page intellectually, but who are forced to work in other jobs, typically low paying, just to get by.

It’s pretty pathetic when one contrasts that with the vast resources of the organizations arrayed against us. (One of the things that angers me most is what rich White people do with their money. See “A Tale of Two Rich Guys, Haim Saban and Charles T. Munger.”)Young people who support these anti-White organizations can rest assured that they can have a good middle-class or even upper-middle class income by working for them — and quite a few do. Politicians see nothing but financial and political upside by taking their points of view.

On our side, it’s all self-sacrifice and altruism, especially for the young people who are so essential to any really effective movement. But we will never be effective if that’s the way it’s going to be. A young person active in pro-White advocacy must think not only that there is no future in it, but that pro-White activism when they are young is likely to be a major problem when they apply for a job in the mainstream economy. So they will have to use pen names and hope for the best.

We have to do all we can to make pro-White advocacy a viable career. And that most likely means that we have to find some really big sources of money able to make a credible showing against the seemingly inexhaustible fount of money that can be harnessed by anti-White activists.

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Does Jewish financial misbehavior have anything to do with being Jewish?

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As expected, the fraud charges brought against Goldman Sachs by the SEC and now the Senate hearings are producing a lot of anxiety in Jewish quarters. Back in January, Michael Kinsley wrote an article telling us how to think about the Jewish angle in the financial meltdown (“How to Think About: Jewish Bankers”). The question for Kinsley isn’t whether negative qualities of Jewish bankers or the bad behavior of Jewish firms like Goldman have anything to do with being Jewish.

The question is whether anyone who criticizes Goldman is an anti-Semite:

Because Goldman is thought of as a “Jewish” firm, and because it dominates the financial industry, criticism of Goldman, or of bankers generally, is often accused of being anti-Semitic. Commentators including Rush Limbaugh and Maureen Dowd have been so accused. When, if ever, are such accusations fair?”

So Kinsley passes his Geiger Counter over non-Jews like Limbaugh and Dowd and passes judgment on their moral worthiness. Any link between Jewishness and misbehavior is automatically out of bounds for serious discussion: “Certainly any explicit suggestion that Goldman’s alleged misbehavior and its Jewishness are related in any way is anti-Semitic.”

This statement draws on a general reluctance to ascribe negative traits as being reasonably associated with a certain group. But this can easily be seen to be just another example of political-correctness think. What if indeed a particular group is more likely to engage in some sort of bad behavior? For example, J. Philippe Rushton and Glayde Whitney have claimed on the basis of a rather powerful theory and a considerable amount of data that Blacks are prone to criminality and this is true wherever there are Blacks — whether in Africa, North America, South America, or the Caribbean.

If indeed that is true or at least reasonable, then it would also be reasonable to say being Black contributes to the likelihood that a certain group of Blacks are criminals — that a considerable part of the explanation for the criminality of these particular Blacks stems from their group membership. It would certainly not imply that all Blacks or even anywhere near all Blacks are criminals. Just that Blacks are more likely than other groups to be involved in certain kinds of crime — Rushton and Whitney would argue for a strong role of their common genetic ancestry.

Or take a presumably benign example: It’s well known that the Ashkenazi Jewish mean IQ higher than the European mean. If then one finds that Jews are highly overrepresented in a particular high-IQ occupation, say among mathematicians, then it is certainly reasonable to explain this as partly due to the general traits of the group, as writers ranging from Charles Murray, Henry Harpending and Greg Cochran, and I have argued

Can such an argument be made Jewish involvement in financial scandals has something to do with being Jewish? Back in the 1980s a major financial scandal revolved around Michael Milken. Much of the discussion of the Jewish role in this financial scandal centered around the book Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart. Jewish activist Alan Dershowitz called Den of Thievesan “anti-Semitic screed” and attacked a review by Michael M. Thomas in the New York Times Book Review because of his “gratuitous descriptions by religious stereotypes.”  Thomas’s review contained the following passage:

James B. Stewart . . . charts the way through a virtual solar system of peculation, past planets large and small, from a metaphorical Mercury representing the penny-ante takings of Dennis B. Levine’s small fry, past the middling ($10 million in inside-trading profits) Mars of Mr. Levine himself, along the multiple rings of Saturn — Ivan F. Boesky, his confederate Martin A. Siegel of Kidder, Peabody, and Mr. Siegel’s confederate Robert Freeman of Goldman, Sachs — and finally back to great Jupiter: Michael R. Milken, the greedy billion-dollar junk-bond kingdom in which some of the nation’s greatest names in industry and finance would find themselves entrapped and corrupted.

Thomas was attacked as an anti-Semite simply for mentioning so many Jewish names all in one paragraph. His defense was to note that “If I point out that nine out of 10 people involved in street crimes are black, that’s an interesting sociological observation. If I point out that nine out of 10 people involved in securities indictments are Jewish, that is an anti-Semitic slur. I cannot sort out the difference. . . .”

I can’t sort out the difference either. And once again, the current financial meltdown has revealed a large role for Jewish companies and Jewish money managers who engineered the meltdown and profited handsomely from it.

Kinsley acknowledges that Jews predominate on Wall St. and it’s okay to criticize a Jewish firm like Goldman Sachs — but only if there is no mention that Jewishness has anything to do with it.

Sometimes the stereotype about Jews and money takes a harsher form: Jews are greedy, they lie, cheat and steal for money, they have undue influence with the government, which they cultivate and exploit ruthlessly, and so on. In recent weeks, many have said this sort of thing about Goldman Sachs, but with no reference to Jews. Are they all anti-Semites? No. It ought to be possible to criticize Goldman in the harshest possible terms–if you think that’s warranted–without being tarred as an anti-Semite.

So is it possible to frame an argument that bad behavior in the financial realm does indeed have something to do with Jewishness? Note that this is quite different from showing that Jewishness is involved in the creation of culture — the argument of The Culture of Critique. There it was only necessary to show that a movement was dominated by Jews who identified as Jews and saw their work as advancing Jewish interests.

As I see it, the argument has two parts:

1.)    Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy has always had a strong element of ingroup/outgroup thinking. Entirely different moral standards are applicable inside and outside the group. The result is that the Jewish moral universe is particularistic and the attitude toward non-Jews is purely instrumental — aimed at maximizing personal benefit with no moral concerns about the consequences to non-Jews. For example, a common pattern in traditional societies was that Jews allied themselves with exploitative non-Jewish elites.

The evolutionary aspects of this situation are obvious. Jews were the ideal intermediary for any exploitative elite precisely because their interests, as a genetically segregated group, were maximally divergent from those of the exploited population. Such individuals are expected to have maximal loyalty to the rulers and minimal concerns about behaving in a purely instrumental manner, including exploitation, toward the rest of the population. (A People that Shall Dwell Alone, Ch. 5)

2.)    One would then have to show that actual Jewish behavior reflected the double moral standard that is ubiquitous in Jewish religious writing. There is in fact a long history of anti-Jewish attitudes focused around the charge that Jews are misanthropes with negative personality traits who are only too willing to exploit non-Jews. This history is summarized in Ch. 2 of Separation and Its Discontents, beginning with the famous quote from Tacitus, “Among themselves they are inflexibly honest and ever ready to show compassion, though they regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies.” Among the more illustrious observers are the following (see here for the complete passage, p. 46 ff):

  • Immanual Kant: Jews are “a nation of usurers . . . outwitting the people amongst whom they find shelter. . . . They make the slogan ‘let the buyer beware’ their highest principle in dealing with us.”
  • Economic historian Werner Sombart: “With Jews [a Jew] will scrupulously see to it that he has just weights and a just measure; but as for his dealings with non-Jews, his conscience will be at ease even though he may obtain an unfair advantage.”
  • Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz: “[The  Polish Jew] took a delight in cheating and overreaching, which gave him a sort of joy of victory. But his own people he could not treat in this way: they were as knowing as he. It was the non-Jew who, to his loss, felt the consequences of the Talmudically trained mind of the Polish Jew.”
  • Sociologist Max Weber: “As a pariah people, [Jews] retained the double standard of morals which is characteristic of primordial economic practice in all communities: What is prohibited in relation to one’s brothers is permitted in relation to strangers.”
  • Zionist Theodor Herzl: Anti-Semitism is “an understandable reaction to Jewish defects” brought about ultimately by gentile persecution: Jews had been educated to be “leeches” who possessed “frightful financial power”; they were “a money-worshipping people incapable of understanding that a man can act out of other motives than money.”
  • Edward A. Ross: “The authorities complain that the East European Hebrews feel no reverence for law as such and are willing to break any ordinance they find in their way. . . . The insurance companies scan a Jewish fire risk more closely than any other. Credit men say the Jewish merchant is often “slippery” and will “fail” in order to get rid of his debts. For lying the immigrant has a very bad reputation. In the North End of Boston “the readiness of the Jews to commit perjury has passed into a proverb.”

Edmund Connelly has reviewed the work of two academic historians, Paul Johnson (A History of the Jews) and Albert Lindemann (Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews), who “have shown that this pattern of Jewish deception and fraud in pursuit of wealth and its legitimacy within the Jewish community have a long history.”

The key point is the legitimacy of fraud within the Jewish community. Successful fraudsters are not shunned but rather become pillars of the  community:

Reflecting the legitimacy of white collar crime in the wider Jewish community in the contemporary world, [Michael] Milken is a pillar of the Jewish community in Los Angeles and a major donor to Jewish causes. Indeed, this is part of a pattern: Ivan Boesky donated $20 million to the library at the Jewish Theological Seminary. And the notorious Marc Rich has donated millions of dollars to a wide range of Jewish causes, including Birthright Israel, a program designed to increase Jewish identification among young Jews. The list of people supporting Rich’s pardon by Bill Clinton was “a virtual Who’s Who of Israeli society and Jewish philanthropy.” A rabbi concerned about the ethics of these practices notes, “it is a rare Jewish organization that thinks carefully about the source of a donor’s money. … The dangerous thing is not that people make moral mistakes, but that we don’t talk about it.”

The idea is that the Jewish financial elite sees the non-Jewish world in instrumental terms — as objects with no moral value. As I noted earlier,

there is a strong suggestion that the financial elite behaved much more like an organized crime syndicate than as an elite with a sense of civic responsibility or commitment to the long term viability of the society. Whereas organized crime stems from the lower levels of society, this meltdown was accomplished at the very pinnacle of society — the Ivy League grads …, the wealthy financial firms and investment rating agencies, the strong connections with government that facilitated the bailout and failed to provide scrutiny while it was happening. It seems highly doubtful that all this would have happened with the former WASP elite.

In psychological terms, these Jews are behaving in a sociopathic manner toward the non-Jewish world. That is, they have no concern for the moral consequences of their actions — no empathy or concern for victims. Recent neuroscience data shows that people are quite capable of having a great deal of empathy and concern for people in their ingroup while having no empathy at all toward outsiders, especially if they are highly ethnocentric. This implies that a strongly identified Jew could be the epitome of a well-socialized, empathic group member when he is among Jews, but treat the rest of the world in a cold and calculating manner and have no remorse or empathy for the victims.

Nor would such a person have any concerns about the long-term future of the society he lives in. Richard Spencer discusses the fact that so many of our politicians are sociopaths (my favorite example is Winston Churchill), noting that “Aristocrats governed with a healthy, long-term goal in mind: they wanted their great grandchildren to inherit a prosperous, powerful realm.”

It can safely be asserted that concerns about the long-term health of the society are not uppermost in the minds of our financial elite.

Concerns that Wall Street is socially irresponsible are widespread now. Just last week I saw CNBC reporter David Faber asking Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs whether Wall Street was good for America. Is it serving any positive social function? — with the implication that it’s at least reasonable to think it isn’t. Such a question would have been inconceivable a couple years ago. Rather than producing any tangible goods or allocating financing in a way that benefits good businesses, Matt Taibbi’s analogy seems to hit home:  “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

As Kinsley notes, this analogy was immediately deemed anti-Semitic by the usual thought police: “This sentence, many have charged, goes beyond stereotypes about Jews and money, touches other classic anti-Semitic themes about Jews as foreign or inhuman elements poisoning humanity and society, and—to some critics—even seems to reference the notorious ‘blood libel’ that Jews use the blood of Christian babies to make matzoh.”

It also conjures up a strong image of economic parasitism, another ancient anti-Jewish theme: the financial sector as not producing products or wealth, but extracting wealth to the detriment of the society as a whole.

The problem for Kinsley and like-minded people is trying to seriously rebut the claim that the socially destructive behavior of the  predominantly Jewish financial elite does in fact fit a strong historic pattern of Jewish ethical behavior vis á vis the non-Jewish society — behavior that is well grounded in Jewish religious ethics.

In any case, it is a very troubling sign indeed for the  US that the financial sector is vastly outpacing the rest of the economy in corporate earnings as well as in executive compensation — especially when it’s being run by a group of people who have sociopathic attitudes toward non-Jewish America.

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Julius Evola on Race

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Growing interest in English speaking countries for the Italian philosopher Julius Evola may be a sign of the revival of the awesome cultural legacy of the Western civilization (see here and here). This legacy is awkwardly termed the “traditional –revolutionary – elitist – anti-egalitarian – postmodern thought.” But why not simply call it classical thought?

The advantage of Evola, in contrast to many modern scholars of the same calibre, may be his staggering erudition that goes well beyond the narrow study of race. Evola was just as much at ease writing thick volumes about religion, language and sexuality as writing about legal issues related to international politics, or depicting decadence of the liberal system. His shortcomings are, viewed from the American academic perspective, that his prose is often not focused enough and his narrative often embraces too many topics at once. Evola was not a self-proclaimed “expert” on race — yet his erudition made him compose several impressive books on race from angles that are sorely missing among modern sociobiologists and race experts. Therefore, Evola’s works on race must be always put in a lager perspective.

In this short survey of Evola’s position on race I am using the hard cover of the French translation of Indirizzi per una educazione razziale (1941) (Eléments pour une éduction raciale, 1984) and the more expanded Sintesi di dottrina della razza (1941), (“Synthesis of the racial doctrine”), translated into German by the author himself and by Annemarie Rasch and published in Germany in 1943. To my knowledge these two books are not available in English translation. His and Rasch’s excellent German translation of Sintesi had received (in my view an awkward and unnecessary) ‘political’ title; Grundrisse der faschistischen Rassenlehre (“Outlines of the fascist racial doctrine”) and is available on line.

Race of the Body vs. Race of the Spirit

Evola writes that race represents a crucial element in the life of all humans. However, while acknowledging the clear-cut physical and biological markers of each race, he stresses over and over again the paramount importance of the spiritual and internal aspects of race — two points that are decisive for genuine racial awareness of the White man. Without full comprehension of these constituent racial parts — i.e., the “race of the soul” and the “race of the spirit” — no racial awareness is possible. Evola is adamantly opposed to conceptualizing race from a purely biological, mechanistic and Darwinian perspective. He sees that approach as dangerously reductionist, leading to unnecessary political and intellectual infighting.

Diverse causes have contributed until now to the fact that racism has become the object of propaganda entrusted to incompetent people, to individuals who are waking up any day now as racists and anti-Semites and whose simple sloganeering has replaced serious principles and information. (Eléments pour une éduction raciale, p. 15)

Evola freely uses the term ‘racism’ (razzismo) and ‘racist’ (razzista). This was quite understandable in his epoch given that these words in Europe in the early thirties of the 20th century had a very neutral meaning with no dreaded symbols of the absolute evil ascribed to them today. The same can be said of the word ‘fascism’ and even ‘totalitarianism’ —  words which Evola uses in a normative manner when depicting an organic and holistic society designed for the future of the Western civilization. For Evola, the sense of racial awareness is more a spiritual endeavor and less a form of biological typology.

And in this respect, we need to repeat it; we are dealing here with a formation of a mentality, a sensibility, and not with intellectual schemes or classifications for natural science manuals. (Eléments p. 16)

For Evola, being White is not just a matter of good looks and high IQ, or for that matter something that needs to be sported in public. Racial awareness implies a sense of mysticism combined with the knowledge of one’s family lineage as well as a spiritual effort to delve into the White man’s primordial and mythical times. This is a task, which in the age of liberal chaos, must be entrusted only to élites completely detached from any material or pecuniary temptation.

Thus, racism invigorates and renders tangible the concept of tradition; it  makes the individual get used to observing in our ancestors not just a series of the more or less illustrious “dead,” but rather the expression of something still alive in ourselves and to which we are tied in our interior.  We are the carriers of a heritage that has been transmitted to us and that we need to transmit  – and in this spirit it is something going beyond time, something indicating,  what we called elsewhere, ‘the eternal race.’ (Eléments, p.31)

In other words race is at a same time a heritage and a collective substrate. Irrespective of the fact that it expresses itself among all people, it is only among few that it attains its perfect realization and it is precisely there that the action and the significance of the individual and the personality can assert themselves. (Eléments, p.34)

Evola offers the same views in his more expanded Sintesi (Grundrisse), albeit by using a somewhat different wording. Racial awareness for Evola requires moral courage and impeccable character and not just physical prowess. It is questionable to what extent many White racists today, in a self-proclaimed “movement” of theirs, with their silly paraphernalia on public display, are capable of such a mental exercise.

Race means superiority, wholeness, decisiveness in life. There are common people and there are people “of race”. Regardless of which social status they belong to, these people form an aristocracy(Grundrisse, p.17).

In this particular regard, the racial doctrine rejects the doctrine of the environment, known to be an accessory to liberalism, to the idea of humanity and to Marxism. These false doctrines have picked up on the theory of the environment in order to defend the dogma of fundamental equality of all people. (Grundrisse, p. 17)

And further Evola writes:

Our position, when we claim that race exists as much in the body as in the spirit, goes beyond these two points of view. Race is a profound force manifesting itself in the realm of the body (race of the body) as in the realm of the spirit (race of the interior, race of the sprit).  In its full meaning the purity of race occurs when these two manifestations coincide; in other words, when the race of the body matches the race of the spirit and when it is capable of serving the most adequate organ of expression. (p.48)

Racial-Spiritual Involution and the present Dark Ages

Evola is aware of the dangerous dichotomy between the race of the spirit and the race of the body that may occur within the same race — or, as we call it, within the same ingroup. This tragic phenomenon occurs as a result of selecting the wrong mates, miscegenation, and genetic flaws going back into the White man’s primordial times. Modern social decadence also fosters racial chaos. Evola argues that very often the “race of the body” may be perfectly pure, with the “race of the spirit” being already tainted or destroyed. This results in a cognitive clash between a distorted perception of objective reality vs. subjective reality, and which sooner or later leads to strife or civil war.

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Evola harbors no illusions about master race; he advocates racial hygiene, always emphasizing the spiritual aspect of the race first. On a practical level, regarding modern White nationalists, Evola’s words are important insofar as they represent a harsh indictment of the endless bickering, petty sectarianism and petty jealousy seen so often among Whites. A White nationalist may be endowed with a perfect race of the body, but his racial spirit may be dangerously mongrelized.

Studying racial psychology is a crucial task for all White racialists — an endeavor in which Evola was greatly influenced by the German racial scholar and his contemporary Franz Ludwig Clauss.

Furthermore, a special circumstance must be singled out, confirming the already stated fact that races that have best biologically preserved the Nordic type are inwardly sometimes in a higher degree of regression than other races of the same family. Some Nordic nations — especially the Anglo-Saxons — are those in which the tradition-conditioned normal relationship between the sexes has been turned upside down. The so-called emancipation of woman — which in reality only means the mutilation and degradation of woman — has actually started out among these nations and has been most widespread among them, whereas this relationship still retains something of a tradition-based view among other nations, regardless of it its bourgeois or its conventional echo.(Grundrisse p. 84).

Evola is well aware of the complexity of understanding race as well as our still meager knowledge of the topic. He is well aware that race cannot be just the subject of biologists, but also of paleontologists, psycho-anthropologists and mystics, such as the French mystic René Guenon, whom he knew well and whom he often quotes.

Following in Evola’s footsteps we may raise a haunting question. Why individuals of the same White race, i.e. of the same White in-group frequently do not understand each other? Why is it that the most murderous wars have occurred within the same race, i.e. within the same White ingroup, despite the fact that the European ingroup is more or less biologically bonded together by mutual blood ties?  One must always keep in mind that the bloodiest wars in the 20th century occurred not between two racially opposed out-groups, but often within the same White ingroup. The level of violence between Whites and Whites during the American civil war, the savagery of the intra-White civil war in Spain from 1936 to 1939,  the degree of mutual hatred amidst White Europeans during WWII, and not least the recent intra-White barbarity of the Yugoslav conflict, are often incomprehensible for a member of the non-European outgroup. This remains an issue that needs to be urgently addressed by all sociobiologists. It must be pondered by all White nationalist activists all over the world.

There are actually too many cases of people who are somatically of the same race, of the same tribe, indeed who are fathers and sons of the same blood in the strict sense of the word and, yet who cannot “understand” each other. A demarcation line separates their souls; their way of feeling and judging is different and their common race of the body cannot do much about it, nor their common blood.  The impossibility of mutual understanding lies therefore on the level of supra-biology (“überbiologische Ebene”). Mutual understanding and hence real togetherness, as well as deeper unity, are only possible where the common “race of the soul” and the “spirit” coexist. (Grundrisse, 89)

In order to understand his political and moral predicament, the White man must therefore delve into myths of his prehistory and look for his faults. For Evola, we are all victims of rationalism, Enlightenment and positivistic sciences that keep us imprisoned in a straitjacket of “either-or,” always in search for causal and rational explanations. Only by grasping the supraracial (superraza) meaning of ancient European myths and by using them as role models, can we come to terms with the contemporary racial chaos of the modern system.

It is absolutely crucial to grasp the living significance of such a change of perspectives inherent to racist conceptions; the superior does not derive from the inferior. In the mystery of our blood, in the depth of our most abysmal of our being, resides the ineffaceable heredity of our primordial times. This is not heredity of brutality of bestial and savage instincts gone astray, as argued by psychoanalysis, and which, as one may logically conclude, derive from “evolutionism” or Darwinism. This heredity of origins, this heredity which comes from the deepest depth of times is theheredity of the light. (Eléments 72–73)

Briefly, Evola rejects the widespread idea that we have evolved from exotic African monkeys, as the standard theory of evolution goes, and which is still widely accepted by modern scientists. He believes that we have now become the tainted progeny of the mythical Hyperborean race, which has significantly racially deteriorated over the eons and which has been adrift both in time and space. Amidst the ruins of the modern world, gripped by perversion and decadence, Evola suggest for new political elites the two crucial criteria, “the character and the form of the spirit, much more than intelligence.” As a racial mystic, Evola warns:

Because the concept of the world can be much more precise with a man without instruction than with a writer; it can be more solid with a soldier, or a peasant loyal to his land, than with a bourgeois intellectual, professor, or a journalist. (quoted in Alain de Benoist’s, Vude droite, 1977, p. 435)

We could only add that the best cultural weapons for our White “super-race” are our common  Indo-Aryan myths, our sagas, our will to power — and our inexorable sense of the tragic.

Tom Sunic (http://www.tomsunic.info; http://doctorsunic.netfirms.com) is author, translator, former US professor in political science and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Third Position. His new book, Postmortem Report: Cultural Examinations from Postmodernity, prefaced by Kevin MacDonald, has just been released. Email him

James Angleton and Ezra Pound

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For it is not the wolf or any of the other beasts that would join the contest in any noble danger, but rather a good man. — Aristotle,Politics, Book IIX.

Before James Angleton became an institution at the CIA as czar of the counterintelligence staff from 1954 to 1975, he was friends with the poet Ezra Pound. Both men sacrificed themselves in an attempt to save their country from plutocrats. Pound did this by speaking his mind, while Angleton sold his conscience for “the greater good.”

Angleton first met Pound in Rapallo, Italy in 1938.  Ezra was often visited by famous or aspiring artists. Then a young man, Angleton photographed Pound at the meeting. Mary Barnard reminisces that these portraits were among the poet’s favorites.

TIME Pound portrait, attributed to J. J. Augleton but likely to be by J. J. Angleton

What was a young American doing in Italy in the 1930s? Angleton was born in Boise, Idaho. His father Hugh was a self-made man working for the National Cash Register company. Hugh had married a Mexican lady in a small border town while serving as a cavalry officer under General Pershing. (Hence James’ middle name “Jesus”.) (See Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton — CIA’s Master Spy Hunter,)

Hugh Angleton made his fortune by developing NCR’s Italian branch during the 1930s. Italy had been transformed under Mussolini’s rule and Hugh seems to have had sympathies with the leader’s policies. Yet, during WWII he joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) presumably to supply information on Italy. By 1943 he had shifted to training recruits, and he distanced himself from espionage after 1945.

His father’s work meant James Angleton enjoyed a cosmopolitan lifestyle. Apart from exploring the expatriate scene in Italy, in 1933 he entered Malvern College (an elite British boarding school) and went on to Yale University in 1937. He developed a taste for poetry, which in the pre-war years was as glamorous as rock musicians are today.

Angleton maintained his relationship with Pound at Yale. He also tapped into some of his father’s contacts from the OSS. In the words of E. E. Cummings to Ezra: “Jim Angleton has been seemingly got hold of by an intelligent prof & apparently begins to begin to realize that comp mil ser [compulsory military service] might give the former a respite from personal responsibility. … maybe he’s developing.”

The “prof” was Norman Holmes Pearson. Later during WWII, Pearson would run the OSS’s X-2 counterintelligence division in London. But in 1937 the professor was already famous for his anthology of English literature which Pound recommended to his young daughter Mary. (See James J. Willhelm, Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, 1925-1972.)

Pearson was a man at the heart of the pre-war literary world. Under the professor’s wing, Angleton would launch his most successful publication: Furioso. Angleton’s ebullient wife Cicely recalls that Pound described her husband as “one of the most important hopes of literary magazines in the United States.” This is high praise — Pound had left the US in 1908 because of the dearth of opportunity for writers.

1939 Letter to Jim Angleton from Pound, discussing content of proposed journal. Beinecke Library, Yale University.

First Copy of Furioso, Summer 1939

The first volume of Furioso (Summer 1939) is a nexus of history: Writers who would be promoted by the new establishment wrote alongside those old-fashioned enough to criticize the Washington regime. Archibald MacLeishwould be made the head of the Library of Congress by FDR and would help the CIA coordinate its fact-finding there. William Carlos Williams a college friend of Pound, would write for The New Republic and become a mentor to Charles Olson. Whereas,  E. E. Cummings would have a fecund career without obvious Washington patronage. The root of the political tension was described in Pound’s contribution Introductory Text-Book, which is among the most succinct explanations of Pound’s views: A free nation has control of its own currency and this is what the Founding Fathers intended for America.

The following is the text of Pound’s contribution to the first copy of Furioso, Summer 1939.

Introductory Text-Book [In Four Chapters]

  1. “All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their constitution or confederation, not from want of honor and virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.” – John Adams.
  2. “… and if the national bills issued, be bottomed (as is indispensable) on pledges of specific taxes for their redemption within certain and moderate epochs, and be of proper denominations for circulation, no interest on them would be necessary or just, because they would answer to every one of the purposes of the metallic money withdrawn and replaced by them.” – Thomas Jefferson (1816, letter to Crawford).
  3. “… and gave to the people of this Republic THE GREATEST BLESSING THEY EVER HAD — THEIR OWN PAPER TO PAY THEIR OWN DEBTS.” – Abraham Lincoln.
  4. “The Congress shall have power: To coin money, regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin, and to fix the standards of weights and measures.”

Constitution of the United States, Article I Legislative Department, Section 8, pp.5. Done in the convention by the unanimous consent of the States, 7th September, 1787, and of the Independence of the United States the twelfth. In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names. — George Washington. President and Deputy from Virginia.

NOTE.

The abrogation of this last mentioned power derives from the ignorance mentioned in my first quotation. Of the three preceding citations, Lincoln’s has become the text of Willis Overholser’s recent “History of Money in the U.S.,” the first citation was taken as opening text by Jerry Voorhis in his speech in the House of Representatives, June 6, 1938, and the passage from Jefferson is the nucleus of my “Jefferson and/or Mussolini.”

Douglas’ proposals are a sub-head under the main idea in Lincoln’s sentence, Gesell’s [Silvio Gesell] “invention” is a special case under Jefferson’s general law. I have done my best to make simple summaries and clear definitions in various books and pamphlets, and recommend as introductory study, apart from C. H. Douglas’ “Economic Democracy” and Gesell’s “Natural Economic Order,” Chris. Hollis’ “Two Nations,” McNair Wilson’s “Promise to Pay,” Larranaga’s “Gold, Glut and Government” and M. Butchart’s compendium of three centuries thought, that is an anthology of what has been said, in “Money.” (Originally published by Nott).

Rapallo, Italy.

Ezra Pound.

These are the ideas that brought Pound 12 years in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Angleton deserves a lot of credit for publishing them in 1939.

Furioso has double significance. Pound returned to the US briefly in 1939 in order to dissuade influential Americans from letting us enter another war. He tried to get an audience with hawkish President Roosevelt, but ended up talking with senators, congressmen and literary personalities. Pound’s trip to visit Angleton at Yale allowed him to publish his ideas in the US —  a paper ambassador that could still speak once he had gone.

After Yale, life moved quickly for James Angleton. He married Cicely, tried a stint at Harvard Law and was eventually recruited for X-2 by Prof. Pearson in 1943.

Angleton ran X-2’s Italian desk, which meant he would scour local sources for information about enemy spies. Pound’s Italian broadcasts would have certainly come to his attention. These radio readings contained the same views that Angleton had published at Yale four years previously and were the immediate cause of Pound’s persecution.

What Pound said cut close to the bone for financiers and their minions like Franklin Delano. Biographer David Martin claims Angleton visited Pound while he was being held in Genoa. If this is true, it seems to be the last time they met. Pound would be imprisoned without trial for over a decade.

American Cages at Pisa

Angleton’s job in Italy involved ferreting out enemy informants and developing a spy network for the Americans. He worked with mafioso figures to do this and was part of re-instituting the corruption that Mussolini’s regime had got under control. Biographers of Angleton describe him as a polished anglophile who by day ran American mobsters over Italy looking for Fascists; and read Pound in the dark of night.  (See Ezio Costanzo, The Mafia and the Allies: Sicily 1943 and the Return of the Mafia.)

This must have been a tortured time for Angleton. The “liberation” of Italy had dubious results and the government he served was persecuting a poet he respected. Angleton must have rationalized the situation to himself: bad methods would serve America’s greater good.

Angleton had some sort of breakdown in 1947. He had abandoned pregnant Cicely to work in Italy in ’43, but returned to her parents’ home in January 1948 to recuperate for six months. In July James was called back to Washington to work in the newly-formed CIA’s counterintelligence division — despite deep depression. His 25-year career in DC would not be glamorous.

Tom Mangold, another of Angleton’s biographers, quotes a “Last Will and Testament” that Cicely Angleton says her husband wrote at this time:

“Life has been good to me and I have not been so good to my friends,” he [Angleton] confessed. He further requested that “a bottle of good spirits” be given to Ezra Pound, e e cummings, and other poet friends from Furioso days.”

One bottle wouldn’t have helped much. In 1947 Pound had been captive in St. Elizabeth’s for a year under the care of OSS contractor Dr. Winfred Overholser. But Angleton had not lost faith in “the greater good.”

Angleton’s new job with the Agency required him to root out communist spies inherited from the “Oh So Social” days of the OSS. CIA and MI6 intelligence on the Soviet Union was very poor after the war, while the Soviets seemed to be able to penetrate Western agencies easily: Kim Philby was the crowning example. (See David C. Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War’s Most Important Agents.)

Angleton was less effective in his new role: His career relied on patronage from Allen Welsh Dulles and Richard Helms. James saw the potential for communist infiltration everywhere and this hindered the Agency’s ability to recruit Soviet defectors. Many historians have come to the conclusion that Angleton’s paranoia — and a total lack of oversight from his superiors — undermined the Agency’s ability to counter the Soviet threat.

Angleton’s obstructive behavior stemmed from his obsession with Soviet strategy. He focused on researching things like Bolshevik “black ops” which particularly irked some of his colleagues in the Soviet Department. His trust of Anatoliy Golitsyn, a very clever Soviet defector, sent CIA, MI6 and French counterintelligence services into tailspin. However Angleton wasn’t squeezed out until 1974, ostensibly because he was investigating people in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. (This operation was called MH-CHAOS.)

While Angleton struggled during his first decade at the Agency, Pound’s case became a cause célèbre  for American literati. Former Furioso contributors like William Carlos Williams and Reed Whittemore lambasted Pound in the pages of The New Republic — which seems to have been a premiere literary outlet for writers close to CIA leadership. Archibald MacLeish even had the gall to ask “What happened to American literature?” from its tony pages. [1]

Angleton was forced out of the Agency in 1974. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s the CIA had been surreptitiously testing drugs on Army personnel and college students, funding the Frankfurt School’s re-emergence in Germany and the US, and pushing the anti-Stalin socialist scene around the world. [2] To borrow Ezra’s words — the Agency was “pseudo-pink.”

Angleton may not have appreciated what he was taking on when he joined the counterintelligence division of the CIA — though a peak at Dulles‘ business contacts would have summoned ghosts from Rapallo. Personal failings aside, James Angleton wanted to save his country from international socialism. Both he and Ezra tried.

Carolina Hartley (email her) is a student of aesthetics and social history, though not from the orthodox perspective.

[1] Books & Comment: Changes in the Weather, Archibald MacLeish. The New Republic, July 2, 1956.

[2] To read more about these programs, see: Search for the Manchurian Candidate: CIA and Mind Control, John Marks. The Dialectical Imagination, by Martin Jay and The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, Francis Stonor Saunders.

William Colby fired Angleton in 1974. Both protégés of Richard Helms, they had disagreements since the 1950s when Colby supported working with the non-Stalinist left in Italy. Angleton thought that such collaboration was dangerous. Colby probably leaked Angleton’s involvement in CHAOS to Seymour Hersh to facilitate Angleton’s removal. Angleton’s replacement, George Kalaris, wanted out of the role after only two years- but not before he had burned many of Angleton’s files.

Jewish groups oppose Arizona-type laws–except in Israel

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Finding examples of Jewish double standards and hypocrisy vis-à-vis their attitudes about Israel and the US is like shooting fish in a  barrel. But their posturing on the Arizona immigration law is particularly egregious. Not surprisingly, the organized Jewish community has unanimously come out against the Arizona law (“New Arizona law brings renewed attention to immigration reform.“) We’re talking about all the major Jewish organizations:

The new law has been criticized by an array of Jewish groups, including the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, Simon Wiesenthal Center, National Council of Jewish Women and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a public policy umbrella group comprised of the synagogue movements, several national groups and scores of local Jewish communities across North America.

As usual, Gideon Aronoff , head of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, leads the moral posturing by stating,

“Are most of the Latinos who suffer from this law Jewish? The answer is no, but we look at this through the oral commandment of ‘welcome the stranger,’ ” … “We are all Americans, we are all our brothers’ keepers. We have an obligation not to stand by when legislation so harmful is put through.”

The reality is that Jewish support for legal and illegal immigration is hardball ethnic politics where Jews see themselves as part of the emerging non-White coalition. It is motivated by their fear and loathing of the traditional people and culture of America.

The photo accompanying the article likens the Arizona law to (what else?) National Socialist Germany:

The horrors!

But wait. It turns out that Israel enforces laws that allow police to ask people for their papers.  Writing in Mondoweiss, Azaff Oron’s article is titled “Israel has been ‘Arizona’ all along.”

In Israel, laws like the Arizona one – and worse – have been in effect ever since independence. No, I’m not talking about the Occupation, but inside Israel proper.

Any resident sixteen years of age or older must at all times carry an Identity card, and present it upon demand to a senior police officer, head of Municipal or Regional Authority, or a policeman or member of the Armed forces on duty.

And guess against which ethnic group this requirement is enforced most often….

The answer would be: anyone looking like a Palestinian:

The vast majority of their effort is spent profiling, questioning and strip-searching a single target group: Palestinians. Most other security services have more “suspect” ethnic groups to deal with, or they must intercept risks not immediately evident from appearance or other profiling.

It’s a system that works well. Security, even at airports, is lax for people who are obviously Jewish, but is considerably tougher for anyone else.

Perhaps now that the word is out that their favorite country also requires everyone to carry papers, Jewish organizations will decide to back the Arizona law. On the other hand, maybe people like Gideon Aronoff and Abe Foxman will start to put pressure on Israel to change its laws.

And if you believe that, you are living in an alternate universe — one in which the mantra “Is it good for the Jews” has ceased to be the key to understanding Jewish ethics.

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