Kevin MacDonald

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Elena Kagan Gets the Nomination

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It’s great to be Jewish in the year 2010. The latest evidence is the appointment of Elena Kagan as the third Jew on the Supreme Court. Philip Weiss puts it this way:

The Kagan appointment means that we have entered a period in which Jews are equal members, if not actually predominant members, of the American Establishment. Obama’s two closest political advisers are Jewish, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, and are said to be his foreign-policy braintrust. The economy is supervised to a large degree by Jewish appointees, Larry Summers and Fed Reserve Board chair Paul Bernanke (Time‘s man of the year last year, a selection overseen by Rick Stengel, the Time magazine editor, who is also Jewish).

Of course, that’s just scratching the surface on Jewish representation among the elites in politics, law, the financial world, the media, and personal wealth. Weiss goes on to take the standard line that Jews have achieved so much because of their bookish culture. But if there’s anything that stands out about Kagan, it’s how utterly ordinary she is in terms of scholarly accomplishment or anything else that would qualify her for the court–very few publications, no experience as a judge, little courtroom experience — the Harriet Miers of the Obama administration. (I stole that one from someone on the Rachel Maddow show, maybe Maddow herself. But it shows the depth of her inaptitude that even liberals are sensitive to it. For example, Paul Campos writes on the Daily Beast, “if Kagan is a brilliant legal scholar, the evidence must be lurking somewhere other than in her publications. Kagan’s scholarly writings are lifeless, dull, and eminently forgettable. They are, on the whole, cautious academic exercises in the sort of banal on-the-other-handing whose prime virtue is that it’s unlikely to offend anyone in a position of power.”  Here’s my version: “When she received tenure at the University of Chicago in 1995, she had exactly two scholarly articles published in law journals — a record that would ordinarily not get her tenure even at quite a few third tier universities much less an elite institution like the University of Chicago.”)

Her only talent seems to be getting really prestigious jobs without any obvious qualifications apart from her ethnic background. And her appointment is a sure thing for the left: Whereas Republicans have been disappointed several times by nominees who converted into liberals (like John Paul Stevens), Kagan’s ethnic identity ensures that she is on the side of all things multicultural.

My take (see also here) is that this is an affirmative action appointment of someone who has benefited greatly from Jewish ethnic networking and has dangerous views on the First Amendment that are in line with the views of the ADL, the SPLC, and the rest of the organized Jewish community. (See also Patrick Cleburne’s post at VDARE.com.)

It’s amazing to see liberals expressing doubts about Kagan. (In fact, one wonders where these people were before her nomination was a done deal. Kagan’s name has been floated since the Sotomayor nomination, but suddenly we see all these doubts about her — mainly from liberals feigning concern.) She is clearly on the left, perhaps with some neocon tendencies regarding executive power. But that is hardly reassuring. Put these tendencies together and you have someone who could be very dangerous to an incipient racialist movement: Anti-“hate speech” and comfortable with using government power to suppress political action that conflicts with the aims of the regime.

Another thought that crossed my mind was that Obama and his advisers may have wanted to court Jews [bad pun] because of the fallout from the tensions with Israel. Despite the fact that, as John Mearsheimer recently noted, the confrontation with Israel was won hands down by Israel, a recent poll shows that American Jews are defecting from Obama in droves, with only 42% saying they would now vote for Obama (down from 83% who voted for him in 2008). A recent visit to the White House (“Obama Tries to Mend Fences with Jews“, NYTimes, May 4, 2010)  by Elie Wiesel indicated shows that Obama sees a need to placate the Jewish community:

The lunch meeting between Mr. Wiesel and Mr. Obama came three weeks after Mr. Wiesel took out a full-page advertisement in a number of United States newspapers criticizing the Obama administration for pressuring Mr. Netanyahu to stop Jewish settlement construction in East Jerusalem, where Palestinians would like to put the capital of an eventual Palestinian state.

The advertisement, in which Mr. Wiesel wrote that “Jerusalem is the heart of our heart, the soul of our soul,” alarmed White House officials, in part because it came on the heels of similar advertisements from the World Jewish Congress and grumbling from members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, that Mr. Obama was pushing Mr. Netanyahu too hard.

Giving them yet another appointment to the Supreme Court certainly can’t hurt.

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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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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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Whites’ lack of empathy for other Whites

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There are doubtless a great many factors accounting for the general willingness of Whites to allow themselves to be pushed aside and to voluntarily become a minority amid a sea of non-Whites, most of whom hold historical grudges against them. My general view is that these cultural transformations are the result of a complex interaction between preexisting tendencies of Europeans toward individualism interacting with the rise of a Jewish elite hostile to the traditional peoples and culture of Europe.

The problem with individualism is that we have weak ties to other Whites and we don’t have a sense (yet) of common fate. In other words, we are low on ethnocentrism. We hear about a White person who was victimized by a Black criminal or denied a promotion or admission to a university in favor of an “underrepresented minority”, and we don’t feel empathy for the victims simply because they are White. We don’t feel any psychological pain when we hear that White working class men have moved out of an area because their jobs have been taken by illegal Mexican immigrants.

At a rational level, Whites may well think that victimization of Whites is morally wrong. Hence the finding that Whites support ending affirmative action and ending immigration (especially illegal immigration) as has been shown in California and other states. But I suspect that there isn’t any real gut feeling of empathy with other Whites. And it’s the gut feeling of empathy that in the end motivates the sort of behavior that can really begin to alter things politically.

This was demonstrated recently in a study that scanned the brains of Black and White subjects viewing Black and White victims of Hurricane Katrina (Race and Empathy Matter on Neural Level, Science Daily). Everyone reported empathy for the victims. This is a verbal judgment that reflects nothing more than conventional morality. People certainly would not want to tell the experimenter that they have callous disregard for suffering.

But the brain’s emotion centers told a different story. Black subjects had empathic responses to Black victims, and the more ethnocentric Blacks had stronger emotional responses. Whites on the other hand, did not show any empathic responses to people of either race.

It’s not that Whites are incapable of empathy. Images of family members would doubtless result in strong empathic responses among Whites — responses that would motivate helping family members. Indeed, all the research shows much stronger family bonds among Whites than among Blacks — bonds that are motivated at least in part by empathic concern for family. But in general, we just  don’t get emotionally aroused when we see Whites  suffering or victimized.

And it also suggests that the many Whites who do behave altruistically toward Blacks or other non-Whites are not acting out of an emotional imperative of empathy, but for some other  reason — quite possibly social approval. What better way these days to show you are a good person?  I thought about this today when viewing a photo of Sandra Bullock with her newly adopted Black baby. Of course, it may be misplaced maternal affection.


But this lack of empathy for other Whites is a problem for political action on behalf of Whites. People are motivated far more by emotions than by rational appraisals. The  empathy among Jews for Jewish suffering is legendary. As Walter Benjamin once said, Hatred and [the] spirit of sacrifice . . . are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren. (Illuminations, 1968, 262)

There is undoubtedly variation among Whites for ethnocentrism, implying that at least some Whites would be upset by the suffering of other Whites more than by the suffering of, say, Blacks. In other words, they would have the same pattern that Blacks show, only reversed.

Personally, I have found that I do have an emotional reaction to Whites being victimized. This could be because I am more genetically inclined toward ethnocentrism than most Whites. But it could also be influenced by living in Southern California where Whites are now a minority. Social psychologists have shown that members of majority groups do not have the same sense of an ingroup feeling as do members of minority groups.

The good news is that as Whites become a minority, ingroup solidarity–and empathy for other Whites–would be expected to increase. And getting involved in White advocacy with like-minded others doubtless has the effect of reinforcing and increasing those tendencies, especially when it is not at all difficult to imagine nightmarish scenarios of the future for Whites. Such nightmarish scenarios have a great deal of emotional impact, especially when they are graphically depicted. That is the reason why we will not see such depictions in the media.

The bad news is that even with empathy for other Whites, there are still huge barriers for Whites to really get involved in White advocacy — barriers such as losing one’s job and social ostracism. The power of the left to inflict economic pain is huge, as recently shown by the burgeoning movement to inflict economic sanctions on Arizona for having the temerity to enact a law aimed at getting rid of illegal aliens.

But having empathy for other Whites would certainly be a great first step in the right direction–and probably a step that is necessary if we are going to see really intense commitment by Whites to change the current regime.

My view is that these cultural transformations
are the result of a complex interaction between preexisting deep-rooted
Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 23
tendencies of Europeans (individualism, moral universalism, and science)
and the rise of a Jewish elite hostile to the traditional peoples and culture of
EuropeMy view is that these cultural transformations
are the result of a complex interaction between preexisting deep-rooted
Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 23
tendencies of Europeans (individualism, moral universalism, and science)
and the rise of a Jewish elite hostile to the traditional peoples and culture of
Europe..

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Jews Embarrassed by Jews: Slumlords — and Goldman Sachs

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Jill Jacobs writing in the Forward presents an interesting comment on Jewish ethics  (“When the Slumlords Are Us”). She essentially corroborates Edmund Connelly’s work on “The Culture of Deceit”:  Not only are sharp business practices common among religious Jews, they are encouraged in the sense that Jews with a well-deserved reputation for unethical business behavior are welcomed into the highest reaches of the Jewish community: “Some of these offending landlords have more than Jewish names. At least a couple have been accorded positions of leadership and prominence in their Jewish communities because of the money they give to Jewish groups and causes.”

That’s the important point. It’s certainly the case that all religions have their bad apples. But with Judaism, being a bad apple is quite compatible with being a pillar of the community, as long as you continue to donate generously to communal causes.

Because she has such a strong sense of being Jewish, she feels personally embarrassed because of the behavior of her landlord: “One day, the landlord himself dropped by the building. I shuddered when I saw his long black coat, black hat and bushy beard. Would the other tenants, mostly Latino families, think that all Jews treated others with such neglect?”

Yes, they probably would. That’s how human stereotyping works. The fact is that most people who develop negative attitudes about Jews probably do so as a result of personal interactions with Jews, not by delving into Jewish history or ruminating on the causes of our current malaise. Jacobs notes that she could talk all she wanted about lofty Jewish ethical principles, but it didn’t do much good when reality was so at odds with the lofty theory:

Inevitably, heartbreakingly, someone would say to me, “Jill, you’re telling us that Judaism says all of these great things about how landlords should treat their tenants. So why is it that my landlord, a religious Jew, won’t turn on the heat?” Or worse: “You’re the first Jew I’ve ever met who’s not a slumlord.”

Anti-Semitism among Blacks has often been the result of similar negative personal experiences during the period when Jews owned the stores and apartment buildings in Black communities. Jews have mainly moved on to higher callings than running stores and apartments in Black areas, their places taken by newer arrivals. Similarly, a survey conducted by the Jewish Labor Committee in 1945 indicated that the attitudes of working class Americans were shaped by actual experience with Jews. They saw

the Jew as a cheating storekeeper, a merciless landlord or rental agent, an unscrupulous pawn-broker, or an installment salesman and insurance collector who will take away the collateral or let the insurance lapse at the first delinquency. To this is added the idea that the Jews own all business and that at least most Jews are in business. All this is so because the Jews are money-crazy, selfish, grabby, take advantage of others, cheat, chisel, lie, are ruthless, unscrupulous, and so on. (See here, p. 50).

Jacobs recounts some attempts to make such unethical behavior unaccaptable within the Jewish community. She mentions some successes, but such efforts are up against the particularist, ingroup morality that has always characterized Jewish behavior and is clearly spelled out in Jewish religious writing: One moral standard within the group, and a completely different standard outside the group. Beginning with the Enlightenment, Jews put in a great deal of intellectual work inventing a universalist ethics for Judaism as a “light unto the nations” — a moral exemplar for the rest of humanity. But it was always a sham and continues to be so in the contemporary world. As reported by Haaretz, just recently, a rabbi on the West Bank wrote about how it’s permissible for Jews to kill pretty much any non-Jew even if they are not responsible for threats to Jews:

“It is permissable to kill the Righteous among Nations even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation,” he wrote, adding: “If we kill a Gentile who has sinned or has violated one of the seven commandments — because we care about the commandments — there is nothing wrong with the murder.”

Several prominent rabbis, including Rabbi Yithak Ginzburg and Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, have recommended the book to their students and followers.

The result of this Judeocentric ethics is that, apart from the efforts of Ms. Jacobs, there is far more concern about molding public perceptions than about altering Jewish behavior. This came up with the Bernie Madoff affair:

As in the [Michael] Milken case, the default  strategy is to proscribe any mention that a person like Madoff, who feeds into all the negative Jewish stereotypes, is Jewish. Indeed, some voices within the Jewish community are bemoaning the fact that Madoff’s Jewishness is so central to the media coverage. For example, in a letter to the New York Times, David A. Harris, Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee wrote, “Yes, he is Jewish. We get it. But was this relevant to his being arrested for cheating investors, or so key to his evolution as a businessman that it needed to be hammered home again and again?”

It’s well known that when the financial meltdown first hit, the ADL was concerned about “a dramatic upsurge” in anti-Jewish messages on Internet discussion boards devoted to finance and the economy in reaction to the huge bailout of Wall Street. The ADL press release is predictable in its attempt to characterize such outbursts as irrational hatred against Jews: Abe Foxman complained darkly that in times of economic downturns, “The age-old canards [the ADL’s favorite word is ‘canard’] about Jews and money are always just beneath the surface.”

The recent indictment of Goldman Sachs for security fraud is doubtless causing similar angst in Jewish circles. Yesterday’s front page headline in the LA Times screamed “E-mails show Goldman traders rushed to bet against the mortgage market as crisis spread.” [Addendum, headline for 4/27, print edition: Senate Evidence Mounts against Goldman; online: Goldman Played Key Role in Mortgage Meltdown, Senate Investigators Say] Based on documents released prior to Senate hearings this week, the article and the impending Senate hearings are sure to once again place Goldman and  Jewishness front and center in the public’s mind as the main villain in the meltdown — whether this is deserved or not. After all, despite the fact that any mention of the Jewishness of the key figures is verboten in the MSM, Goldman Sachs is an icon of Jewish financial power. Everyone knows that its basically a Jewish firm. It certainly doesn’t help that Lloyd Blankfein heads Goldman and is its publicly visible face. Nor does it help that the deal that brought the charges netted the firm of another Jew, John Paulson, $1 billion. (Paulson is worth $12 billion and is #45 on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans.)

Nor does it help that another firm that is being prominently mentioned as engaging in practices that exacerbated the mortgage meltdown is Magnetar whose principals, including founder Alec Litowitz, are all Jewish.  According to this article, Magnetar actively sought to include the worst possible mortgages into its CDO’s, then managed to get them rated as AAA investments, and then bet massively against them, leaving large financial institutions holding the bag.

Given the enormity of the repercussions of the economic crisis, it is only natural to seek the culprits. The fact that Goldman is  the most prominently featured firm and that other Jews also profited so greatly from the crisis while engaging in questionable practices will naturally feed into the stereotype of Jewish financial perfidy — a stereotype that goes back at least to the 19th century. (See Edmund Connelly’s discussion of Albert Lindemann’s historical research.)

But one thing we can be sure of, if anyone breathes a mention of Jewish involvement in the financial collapse in the mainstream media, the ADL will come out with its guns blazing. Truth is no defense.