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Why Jews Welcome Moslems
My article, “Why Jews Welcome Moslems,” has been published at FrontPage Magazine. I’m reproducing it here. (It is an expansion of a much shorter article of the same title that was posted at VFR in the fall of 2002.)
Lawrence Auster
That’s what Steinlight is telling them. But will they listen? As he explains it, immigration to the U.S. in the early 20th century was literally a life or death matter for Jews—life for the immigrants, and death for those who stayed behind in Europe or who were closed out of America by the restrictive immigration policies of the 1920s and 1930s. For Jews, he says,
the immigration debate pits the heart against the head. In their gut, many feel that substantially reducing immigration betrays the legacy of their parents and grandparents. But a growing number believes that maintaining this policy betrays their children and grandchildren. The danger arises because mass immigration means importing mass anti-Semitism….Yet, despite the dangers Moslem immigration poses to their security and their whole way of life, Jews have for the most part maintained their support for open immigration, and Steinlight by the end of his article does not seem very hopeful that they will change their minds—or at least that they will do so before it’s too late to avoid disaster. Loyalty to their ancestors’ immigration “legacy” hardly seems a sufficient explanation for Jews’ adherence to a policy that, as Steinlight puts it, spells the ultimate eclipse and ruin of Jewish life in this country, not to mention the ruin of America itself. After all, Jews in many cases betray without hesitation their grandparents’ orthodox religious beliefs, and in other cases their grandparents’ socialism, so why should their grandparents’ immigrant history be so sacred to them? If we are to have any chance of converting the Jews from their open borders ideology, we must understand their own reasons for believing in it. From the following discussion, two basic perspectives on this problem will emerge, one pessimistic, the other optimistic. The real object of Jewish fears First of all, as crazy as it may sound, there is something that many American Jews fear in their heart of hearts even more than they fear Moslem anti-Semitism, and that is white Christian anti-Semitism. Steinlight himself pointed to this phenomenon at a recent panel discussion hosted by the Center for Immigration Studies:
Every high profile Jewish institution, whether it’s a national organization or a major synagogue, is surrounded by concrete barriers to prevent car bombs exploding too close to the buildings. If you go through the lobbies into those buildings you have to pass metal detectors and double-doors of bulletproof glass. You are then frisked by security guards, mostly retired New York City police or Israeli agents, and then are scanned again with metal detectors.Jews’ risible obsession with non-existent evangelical Protestant anti-Semites, combined with their obliviousness to actual mass murdering Islamist anti-Semites (whom, moreover, the Jews’ favored immigration policies have allowed into this country) is an amazing phenomenon that we should not dismiss as simply a bizarre ethnic idiosyncrasy. It expresses, rather, a central preoccupation of a significant number of Jews, namely their corrosive apprehension of what they think the goyim might one day do to them—a fear they entertain despite the fact that, apart from some social exclusions and other ethnic prejudices that existed up to the end of World War II, Jews have never faced serious anti-Semitism from the white Christian majority in this country. Just the other week I was telling a secular, leftist Jew of my acquaintance, a man in his late sixties, about my idea (which I’ve proposed at FrontPage Magazine) that the only way to make ourselves safe from the specter of domestic Moslem terrorism is to deport all jihad-supporting Moslems from this country. He replied with emotion that if America deported Moslem fundamentalists, it would immediately start doing the same thing to Jews as well. “It’s frightening, it’s scary,” he said heatedly, as if the Jews were already on the verge of being rounded up. In the eyes of this normally phlegmatic and easy-going man, America is just a shout away from the mass persecution, detention, and even physical expulsion of Jews. Given the wildly overwrought suspicions that some Jews harbor about the American Christian majority who are in fact the Jews’ best friends in the world, it is not surprising that these Jews look at mass Third-World and Moslem immigration, not as a danger to themselves, but as the ultimate guarantor of their own safety, hoping that in a racially diversified, de-Christianized America, the waning majority culture will lack the power, even if it still has the desire, to persecute Jews. The self-protective instinct to divide and weaken a potentially oppressive majority population may have served Jews well at certain times and places in the past when they truly were threatened. Under current circumstances—in America, the most philo-Semitic nation in the history of the world—it both morally wrong and suicidal. Not only are the open-borders Jews urging policies harmful to America’s majority population, but, by doing so, they are surely triggering previously non-existent anti-Jewish feelings among them. The tragedy is that once a collective thought pattern gets deeply ingrained, as is the Jews’ historically understandable fear of gentiles, it takes on a life of its own and becomes immune to evidence and reason. This element of the Jewish psyche is further illumined by Norman Podhoretz in his memoir, My Love Affair with America:
[M]y own view is that what had befallen the Jews of Europe inculcated a subliminal lesson… . The lesson was that anti-Semitism, even the relatively harmless genteel variety that enforced quotas against Jewish students or kept their parents from joining fashionable clubs or getting jobs in prestigious Wall Street law firms, could end in mass murder. [Emphasis added.]While the idea Podhoretz expresses here is certainly familiar, it is familiar more as a parody of Jewish fears than as something Jews themselves have openly stated. For years, it’s been a running joke among traditionalist conservatives, including those of Jewish background such as myself (and there are more right-wing Jews than people realize) that “any criticism of Jews is equated with Auschwitz.” The complaint, I confess, had always seemed a just a tad hyperbolic. But if Podhoretz’s portrayal of Jews’ beliefs is correct, then the old parody, “Any criticism of Jews is a potential Auschwitz,” turns out to be what the Jewish community has believed all along. What this means is that in the minds of Jews, any desire on the part of gentiles to maintain an all-gentile country club, or any statement by a Christian, no matter how mild and civilized, that shows any concern about any aspects of the cultural and political influence of secular Jews in American life, is an expression of anti-Jewish bigotry that could easily lead to mass extermination, and therefore it must be ruthlessly suppressed. Please do not misunderstand me. I am not saying, as today’s anti-Semites are constantly saying, that concerns about anti-Semitism are nothing but political correctness. Though it is still largely a fringe phenomenon, anti-Semitism and Israel-hatred in today’s America are terribly real, having grown by leaps and bounds in some parts of the political spectrum since 9/11, as I have discussed at length at FrontPage Magazine (see here and here) and at my website, View from the Right (see here and here). Yet we must also note a tendency on the part of more than a few Jews to decry as anti-Semitic virtually any rational criticism of Jews, or any normal manifestations of gentile ethnocentrism, or even any strong expression of Christian religious belief. Think of the wild charges that were leveled against Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” by such prominent Jewish commentators as Charles Krauthammer, who characterized the movie as “a singular act of interreligious aggression … spectacularly vicious … the pre-Vatican II story of the villainous Jews,” and William Safire, who said that audiences would leave the theater with no other thought than to look for Jews to punish for the death of Jesus. There was also the disturbing fact that Commentary, which in the past had always defended Christians and Christianity from false charges of anti-Semitism, approvingly reviewed James Carroll’s virulently anti-Christian book, Constantine’s Sword, which argues that the Christian religion is inherently anti-Semitic and the ultimate cause of the Nazi Holocaust. The significance of the Jewish belief in a lurking anti-Semitism among white Christians is made clearer by another passage in My Love Affair With America:
“Acting on the principle that ‘all bigotry is indivisible,’ Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, whose purpose was to defend Jews against discrimination and defamation, joined enthusiastically in the civil-rights movement, of which individual Jews were for a long time leaders and funders.”The principle that all bigotry is indivisible implies that all manifestations of ingroup/outgroup feeling (if we’re speaking about the feelings of a gentile majority ingroup, that is) are essentially the same—and equally wrong. It says that if you’re against one outgroup, you’re against all outgroups. This denies the important truth that some outgroups (e.g., Mideastern Moslem fundamentalists) are much more different from the ingroup (e.g. America’s Anglo-Protestant majority culture), and hence much less assimilable, and hence more legitimately excluded, than other outgroups (e.g., Italian Catholics or Ashkenazi Jews). The belief in the indivisibility of all bigotry makes it impossible to distinguish between degrees of bigotry or ethnocentrism. It makes it impossible to distinguish between immoral bigotry, meaning the desire to hurt some other group, and the legitimate defense of one’s own people, their identity, and their interests. To erase such distinctions is the essence of political correctness, the reduction of all moral questions to a choice between “inclusion” and “hate.” Now, when Jews put together the idea that “all bigotry is indivisible,” with the idea that “any social prejudice or exclusion directed against Jews leads potentially to Auschwitz,” they must reach the conclusion that any exclusion of any minority group, no matter how alien it may be to the host society, is a potential Auschwitz. So there it is. We have identified the core assumption that makes many liberal and neoconservative Jews keep pushing relentlessly for mass immigration, even the mass immigration of their mortal enemies. As these Jews see it, any immigration restrictions against Moslems would release a latent ethnocentrism in the white American majority that would then turn instantly against the Jews. To state this thought process in the baldest terms, these Jews believe that if philo-Semitic white gentiles exclude Jew-hating Moslems from America, it would lead those same gentiles to commit another Jewish Holocaust. Even if they don’t take it to the absurd point of envisioning a Jewish Holocaust or some other anti-Jewish persecution in this country, various Jewish writers and spokesmen have continued to express a deeply suspicious attitude towards white Christian America. In the cover article of the November 1999 issue of Commentary, entitled “California and the End of White America,” Ron Unz predicted that if the current non-European immigrants fail to assimilate, the danger will not be an uprising of unassimilated immigrant cultures, but an eruption of white nationalism. “[W]e face the very real threat of future movements along the lines of Proposition 187, each worse than the last, and on a national scale,” Unz wrote. “There are few forces that could so easily break America as the coming of white nationalism.” [Emphasis added.] Amazing. Multiculturalism and minority group-rights movements are tearing apart America’s once unitary, individual-rights-based polity, as Commentary itself has been lamenting for years, while America’s declining white majority has been reacting with what can only be called pusillanimous passivity in the face of this systematic attack on their country. But now it turns out that what Commentary most fears is not the minority group-rights movement, but any possible resistance by white Americans to it, a resistance Commentary demonizes as “white nationalism.” In other words, open-borders Jews fear a totally non-existent white defense of America more than they fear the actual realities of mass legal and illegal immigration, multiculturalism, Mexican irredentism, Moslem jihadism, and all the rest of the forces that are threatening our country. For anyone who shares this view, it follows that the quicker America’s white majority is reduced to a minority by continued mass immigration, and the quicker America’s majority culture is pushed aside by immigrant cultures, the better off America will be. A more hopeful view While the disturbing attitudes I have been describing constitute a definite strand in the American Jewish sensibility, as well in the sensibility of liberals generally, I find it hard to believe that most Jews or even most politically active Jews are so paranoid about white gentiles’ potential for committing anti-Jewish oppression that they are driven to the insane expedient of supporting mass Moslem immigration in order to forestall that oppression. There is a more moderate—and more hopeful—way of explaining the Jews’ attachment to Third-World immigration. The Jewish experience in the modern world could be understood as a series of attempts by Jews to free themselves from the historic burden of Jewishness, the fierce social disabilities that had been imposed on them for centuries. As Paul Johnson writes in his History of the Jews, the Jewish Communists of the 19th century (“non-Jewish Jews,” as he calls them) saw in Communism the end of national and ethnic identities for all mankind, and thus the end of the Jewish ethnic identity, and thus the liberation of the Jews from the age-old curse of anti-Jewish prejudice. To seek to overturn entire societies in order to get rid of one’s own ethnic identity may seem a rather drastic approach to solving the Jewish problem, yet it reflects, in a uniquely exacerbated and destructive form, Jews’ recurrent pattern of forming some global ideology for reasons relating to their particular situation as Jews. (Let us note that this tendency, while it can take negative forms as in the current example, is natural for a people whose tribal history and beliefs became the basis for all of Western civilization.) In America, Jews discovered a more reasonable approach to the Jewish problem: liberal individualism. Under liberal individualism, only the individual and his rights matter and each person’s ethnicity is irrelevant, or, in any case, as irrelevant as he wants it to be. As Milton Gordon wrote in his important 1964 book Assimilation in American Life, mid-twentieth century American society combined cultural assimilation, in which people of all backgrounds participate as individuals in a common public culture (the workplace, the schools, political life and so on), with structural pluralism, in which people tend to organize their residential patterns and social and religious lives along ethnic lines. This unique American arrangement allowed Jews a measure of social belonging, economic and professional success, and “at-home-ness” that they had not experienced since the destruction of the Second Temple, or perhaps ever in their history. But starting in the 1960s, Jews, and liberals generally, took the good idea of liberal individualism too far. The very idea of a common culture, which they had previously seen as the pathway to success and belonging in America, started to seem discriminatory to them, since it implied that some peoples and cultures could fit into the common culture while others couldn’t. A common culture also implied the existence of common standards of behavior, derived from America’s declining WASP majority, to which people were expected to conform; and Jews in particular, after having eagerly adopted those standards in previous generations, began, in the liberatory afflatus of the Sixties, to find them stifling. Jews and other liberals thus turned from the moderate tolerance of mid-twentieth century America to what might be called tolerance absolutism, an attitude that delegitimized any notion of a common American culture or moral tradition (other than the tradition of liberalism itself), because shared cultural allegiances and moral norms would place limits on the individual self or the ethnic group. This radicalized liberalism made Jews feel even safer—and freer to express themselves as Jews—than before. Having realized the model of “pure-non-discrimination-and-individual-rights-without-a-majority-culture” as the very basis of their unprecedented success, freedom, and happiness in America, Jews saw that model as not only advantageous to themselves personally, but as advantageous to everyone—indeed, as the highest political truth. It didn’t occur to them that the radical individualist model worked so well for them because they are a uniquely high-achieving people operating in a still intact Western society. It didn’t occur to them that the model might not work so well for less capable or less assimilable people in a society without a cohesive common culture, such as America was now becoming due to the tolerance absolutism that was supported by the Jews themselves. It didn’t occur to them that both the intactness and the liberalism of the society would be threatened if the liberalism were taken too far. Their belief that radical individualism is true for all mankind is thus for liberal secular Jews a crux of faith, an emotional prop to make sense of the world, and a key component of their identity as a people. More than any pragmatic calculus, it is the reason they bitterly resent any criticism of the liberal ideology and voraciously crave attempts to vindicate it, whether by assimilating Third-World immigrants, democratizing Moslem countries, or liquidating traditional values founded upon the restraint of individual desire. (Consider, for example, the Jewish community’s extraordinary degree of support for homosexual marriage, far more extensive than that of any other ethnic or religious group—a uniquely ironic outcome for the first major people in history who saw homosexuality as an abomination to God.) What the Jews need to see—what they can’t help but see under the encroaching reality of jihad in America—is that, like any good idea, the good idea of non-discrimination can be carried too far. The moderate non-discrimination that allowed Jews to thrive in America did not have to be taken to the point of absolute non-discrimination, which required us to open our borders and our culture to unassimilable and hostile aliens, which in turn must result in the disarming and destruction of the society itself. Notwithstanding the horrific problems created by the open-immigration ideology, I call this the optimistic view of Jewish support for open immigration because it assumes, not an endemic Jewish oppositionalism to America’s majority culture, but a correctable misperception stemming from Jews’ unique history. Having experienced the liberal paradigm of individual rights and non-discrimination as the recipe for their own earthly salvation after centuries of misery and persecution, Jews have, understandably though mistakenly, carried that ideology to an extreme where it threatens the very country that provided the Jews those protections and benefits in the first place. This is so patently irrational from the point of view of the Jews’ own self-interest that they cannot help but eventually see it, if it is clearly and firmly pointed out to them. No permanent victory So, while Stephen Steinlight is to be applauded for his efforts to convert his fellow Jews to a sane immigration policy, he needs to recognize that they are bound to their belief in open borders by a larger set of emotional and political attachments than a reluctance to “betray their grandparents.” He also needs to recognize that even if, under the pressure of immediate fears of Islamism in America, Jews back off from their open borders ideology, their conversion is unlikely to be very deep. A full and principled abandonment of modern liberalism by liberals and especially by Jews is not to be expected. Just as the Israelis will fight remorselessly against the Arabs when absolutely necessary, and then, as soon as the fighting briefly subsides, instantly turn back once again to the utopian hopes of the “peace-process,” American Jews in the face of an imminent Islamist threat may support some kind of tightening of immigration laws, only to revert to their accustomed liberalism the moment that the immediate sense of intolerable danger is past. It is unrealistic to expect any final victory in this area. Liberalism is the organizing ideology of modern society, but for secular Jews (and the great majority of American Jews are essentially secular), it is a sacred trust toward which they feel the same zealous devotion that their religious brethren feel toward their covenant with God.
Lawrence Auster is the author of Erasing America: The Politics of the Borderless Nation. He runs the weblog View from the Right. Comments
As a Jew myself, I’ve thought a lot about the relationship between Jews and their sick embrace of liberalism and other suicidal philosophies. I, too, am pessimistic about Jews’ wholesale redemption because the sickness is buried deep in our psyche. The idea that the powerless, poor, and oppressed are the noble and the good while the powerful and rich are the evil ones is called, in the “Genealogy of Morals”, the ultimate revenge of a high people being oppressd by a more powerful high people. This idea helped sustain Jews through periods of constant humiliation in the distant past. It so happened that at that time, most of the oppressors were Christians. It could have been any other group, the principals apply universally. Marxism was one of the first efforts to rid themselves of the box they were in. Marx gave this reversal of rank in life an analytical form. It produced an avenue in which Jews could unite with other groups to overthrow the “evil, rich, Christian capitalists.” Thus, the hatred and fear of Christians is a derivative and a negative impulse. The affirming impulse is the eternal belief and constant liberation of the low from the high. Of course, this does not address the issue of desirability. It is the ultimate act of revenge from a people who only have their intellect to fight back. After Communism proved to be an economic disaster and could not be sustained, this ideal had to be transformed into a more acceptable and relevant goal. Western workers were substituted by women, homosexuals and minorities. The Jewish impulses were redeemed. Communism might have been a disaster, but we have new people to liberate. They could once again fight on the side of the oppressed. Not a thought about the consequences or the desirabililty or even how it affected them. If asked, they responded that these are the truly good ones and any bad actions from the oppressed is really a result of the actions of the powerful. When the oppressed get power, they will be wonderful and wise. Of course, this belief is based on no prior proof or actual experience. Althought the consequence of these beliefs will be a total ruination for them and higher man, the Jews will at least have beauty and meaning for the moment. Look at South Africa: How many Jews supported one, man, one vote? How many Jews are left in South Africa? I believe that in their heart of hearts Jews do not want to be a destructive people, but they cannot change until they understand their unconscious and destructive impulses. Posted by: susie on June 22, 2004 3:44 PMWe all have difficulty changing and trusting, and I have never heard one of Jewish peoples’ many uncommon talents is to the contrary. I sympathize with Jewish mistrust. Who could have predicted the low Israeli birthrate and the American immigration disaster for Jews, that is, Muslim immigration with its essential anti-Semitism (and anti-Christianity)? So I am not sure trust is an answer. It seems calculated risk is the best way to proceed, considering we cannot predict the future. Who knows what some Catholics or Protestants or Communists or Liberals will one day do to Jews or to traditionalists or to one another? England, with a devout Henry VIII Catholic, turned his coat and devastated the Catholic Church in England, which of course also resulted in much Protestant devastation at the hands of Catholic nations. Are Catholics and Protestants then to plot endlessly against one another, as some Jewish people want to do against Christians? Could religious wars happen again? Certainly. But people want to believe there is some strategy guarantees their safety and security, and Jews are people. I believe in freedom of association, which seems the best of all political principles. If you don’t fit in here, you will fit in better there. No one ever fits in perfectly anywhere; we, with our sinful natures, fight with people we love deeply. Susie’s remark on South Africa is interesting in that the Afrikaner regime (also White Protestant) was quite pro-Israel as to foreign policy. Jews in South Africa were not under any major restrictions that I’m aware of. There were Jews in the Parliament and in high-level positions in the private sector. Then there was Joe Slovo and all of the others who worked ceaselessly on bringing down the South African government and replacing it with the Marxist ANC. The whites are now being destroyed, the country is rapidly dengenerating to another murderous African kleptocracy, and Israel lost its sole ally in the region. Just how did Jews benefit from this? Posted by: Carl on June 23, 2004 12:00 AMSusie’s wonderfully written reply to Mr. Auster’s detailed and thoughtful piece shows me that all is not lost! Every one of my father’s side of the family, the Jewish side—aunts, counsins, their children, etc.—are liberals. As the only conservative in the Levin family, I have wanted for years to find out how they feel about “conservatism, open borders and the death penalty”. I think I know most of their answers already, but maybe I would be surprised, even pleasantly surprised. I think that multiculturalism and the suicidal belief that “a melting pot is okay, even if it is made up of millions of Arabs/Arab Americans who hate us” are part of the whole “liberal guilt” many Jewish and non-Jewish Americans have—the feeling that “we are so blessed with money and success and others are not blessed with”. If we let in enough of the destitute, no matter how unassimilating they are, we will have done something good to God and our fellow man. Mr. Auster is right. If only Jews, particularly American Jews, were not so “afraid of Christian white America”, would see that their support for open borders and homosexual marriage is going to hasten the end of this nation, perhaps we could turn some of them around. Sounds like Bush 43 is in real trouble with American Jews. You would think they would support him for helping to rid the Middle East of Israel’s enemy, Saddam Hussein. Posted by: David Levin on June 23, 2004 5:10 AMI had not heard the good news Bush is in trouble with American Jewish people. Anyone know why? Posted by: P Murgos on June 23, 2004 9:00 AMI just “sense” that Bush is in trouble with American Jews. But so would most GOP leaders. American Jews, while Mr. Auster is right about more becoming conservatives, vote Democrat. Of course, Bush is in trouble with a lot of Americans—and quite a few from his own party. Posted by: David Levin on June 23, 2004 9:40 AMBush 41.1 has never had much Jewish support at all. Moreover, as far as I can tell, there is surprisingly little Jewish support for the Iraq war. The obvious insanity of the farther left, with its overt hatred of Israel, and suspicions of the sort of paleocon criticism of the war manifested by the Buchananites rather discourage overt or strong Jewish opposition to the war, but there was never any enthusiasm for it, and there is increasing anger at the Administration and afeeling that it is inept. Which is exactly how many non-Jews feel —- with considerable justification. Posted by: Alan Levine on June 23, 2004 3:23 PMWho are Bush 43, Bush 42, and now Bush 41.1, and what do the numbers mean? Posted by: P Murgos on June 23, 2004 4:22 PMBush 41 = GHW Bush, 41st President (alas). Mr. Murgos, the numbers refer to the number of their presidencys. For example, George Washington was the first (1) president; Lincoln was the sixteenth (16); Reagan the fortieth (40); and George W. Bush the forty-third (43). To call George W. Bush 41.1 is to imply that he is merely an upgraded version of the 41 model. Posted by: Joshua on June 23, 2004 6:06 PMHere is another voice affirming — sort of — what Mr. Auster has written on this subject, Ben Shapiro: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38991 Posted by: Joel LeFevre on June 23, 2004 6:38 PMInteresting. Shapiro makes a number of points that are very similar to my own. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 23, 2004 7:16 PMOver a year ago, Mr. Shapiro described those who want to restrict immigration as “silly old white men.” Has Mr. Shapiro changed on this issue? Posted by: David on June 23, 2004 8:14 PMThanks to David for pointing that out. In this recent column Shapiro scores against Jews for supporting leftists who support Moslem radicals. But he has not a word to say against the immigration laws that have let those Moslem radicals into this country and the rest of the West. Someone ought to write to Shapiro and point this out to him. (You can find his columns at TownHall and send a comment to him from there.) This unreality—of separating the “bad” Moslem belief system from the “good” Moslem immigrants who happen to carry that belief system—cannot last forever. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 23, 2004 8:46 PMTake a look at Shapiro’s Townhall column of 1-14-04 on illegal immigration. He goes around in circles and never gets anywhere. In other pieces, he says that California is being destroyed but never gives the reason for this collapse. In a column on Schwarzenegger, he writes that only a liberal Republican can win in California. Why then, did California used to be the key to the GOP Presidential Lock? Why doesn’t Shapiro tell us what has changed in California that conservative Republicans can no longer win the state? Posted by: David on June 23, 2004 8:56 PMI recommend that anyone who is interested in this write a polite e-mail to young Shapiro via TownHall asking him these sorts of logical questions and demanding an answer: If Moslem radicals are so awful, why do we keep allowing immigration of Moslems, a majority of whom are religiously committed to imposing Sharia on America and who support Jihad and many of whom support terrorism? What does he suggest doing about Wahhabi mosques? He says all these terrible things about Islam, but what should we _do_ about it other than complain about it? Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 23, 2004 9:02 PMA most interesting article. Imagine a future in which the Arab armies and Where would would they go? Japan, Brazil, Mexico, So, our immigration policy, I feel, is in part, Xenophon writes: “So, our immigration policy, I feel, is in part, Imagine a future in which the Saudi Arabia falls to Al Quida. Where would would rich oil ticks go? Japan, Brazil, Mexico, So, our immigration policy, per Xenophon, is in part, Does Xenophon also feel that floods in Bangladesh controlled, in part, by Israel? Posted by: Mik on June 24, 2004 2:08 PMWhere would the oil barons go? To Switzerland, Britain, and France. Of course.
Oh, you forgot to call me an anti-semite. Posted by: Xenophon on June 24, 2004 3:54 PMI am sorry if I sounded like a “computer geek” when I referred to the present occupant of the White House as Bush 41.1. I merely intended to suggest that he was only a one-tenth addition to his already undistingushed father, and did not deserve a whole separate number…Recent observation suggests I should have stuck a zero rather than a one afterr the decimal point. Posted by: Alan Levine on June 24, 2004 6:15 PMMr. Auster’s article is brilliant. With some reluctance, I offer the following criticisms and qualifications: On the positive side, I think it is an exaggeration to say that Jews, or any large group among them, “welcome” Muslims. They may be scared of the consequences of keeping them out, but that is not the same thing. In my observation, there is little positive sympathy for immigrants, even, surprisingly, Jewish ones, even among people who think that if immigration is restricted, the golliwoggles will get them. Posted by: Alan Levine on June 24, 2004 6:26 PMAn additional point is that on immigration many irrationalities, not just the ethnic ones, converge. What other subject could get environmentalists favoring population growth? Economists and labor advocates favoring sweat shops and bellowing in favor of cheap labor? Fanatical anti-racists who prate about blacks demanding more competition for the blacks, and installation of Latin American caste system here? Urban reformers who want more people in slums? Posted by: Alan Levine on June 24, 2004 6:34 PMYes, you get all those and more. A disabling fear, or cowardice in the face of being called anti-immigrationist by traitorists, gives also; 1-ASPCA veterans for animal sacrifice………2-Public health activists who want new diseases imported, and more infectious disease generally…………3- Child welfare advocates for more child labor…….4-zoning activists appearing to want more boardinghouses in their neighborhood………….5-feminists for wife-beating and arranged marriages…………6- educational minimum standards advocates for rapidly increasing the youth illiteracy rates………….7-MADD women for greatly increasing the number of uninsured drivers…………8-transit riders spokesmen for more crowded public transit…………9- fiscal conservatives for greatly increasing the scale of the welfare establishment…………..and 10- pacifists for importing terrorism, though this is a lot less contradictory, than it might sound. Posted by: John S Bolton on June 24, 2004 9:49 PMThanks to Mr. Levine. Now he raises a really good question. Clearly my explanation does not fully account for the increasing Jewish paranoia about Christians. But I have a possible answer, similar to another discussion here recently when people questioned my idea that it was the Civil Rights movement that turned whites against the historical America. I threw out several alternative explanations, among which was, almost as an afterthought, “the Sixties.” Then someone said that _that_ was it. It was the Sixties that made the Civil Rights movement not just a big reform, but part of this turning against America itself. So I would suggest the same possibility here. The Sixties, with its delegitimization of America and the historic America as such, also affected Jews in ethnic-specific ways, making them more suspicious and paranoid about America’s historic majority ethnic group. Now of course this is just one article, and we’re dealing with a huge subject with many facets. The article obviously does not claim to be exhaustive or definitive. It offers some angles on the problem. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 24, 2004 10:06 PMHere is another big example of the above: egalitarians for redistribution of income towards the rich. Should I mention conservatives for a larger liberal percentage in the population? It has to mean that the advocates of such positions must be insincere and unprincipled power-seekers, for whom their causes are just a cover. Posted by: John S Bolton on June 24, 2004 10:08 PM“For one thing, Jews seem to me to be far more paranoid about Christians than they were in the 1950s and 1960s; and as far as I can tell, they are far more so than their immigrant forefathers.” Could this be because of the increased political involvement of the “Religious Right”, and the consequent hysteria and fear-mongering on the political Left, which is far from limited to the Jews? As others have noted on other threads, some people are convinced that we are one step away from imposing a Religious Right theocracy in America. Obviously, this is absurd, but the Left uses this scare tactic in their voter drives and fund-raising letters. Yes to Mr. Coleman; that’s a possible answer, too. The major paranoia about Christians began, I think with the election of Reagan and the rise of a much more aggressive and politically articulate Protestant evangelist movement, symbolized by the Moral Majority. This made liberals flip out. Naturally Jews flipped out even more than the average liberal. Same with the liberal and Jewish paranoia about whites as distinct from Christians. The rise of political resistance to immigration and so on in the ’80s and ’90s, though it was utterly powerless in the mainstream, made liberals and Jews feel that a white nationalist movement was threatening America. In both cases, the liberals were utterly blind to the role their own politics had played in the rise of the “far-right” movements they feared. They radically secularized America, including Roe v. Wade, and then they acted like Christian resistance to that was some horrible, untoward thing. They basically wanted Christians to be potted plants. If they showed more animation than potted plants, that meant they were a totalitarian Christian movement threatening to take over America. Similarly, the fact that a tiny handful of race-conscious whites plus a larger number of non-race-conscious conservatives were not potted plants with regard to the whole anti-white, pro-minority tendency of society, meant that a white nationalist movement was threatening America. To sum up, liberalism became radical and anti-American in the ’60s and early ’70s. This naturally gave rise to conservative resistance to this radicalism. And the liberals see this resistance to radicalism as an evil force threatening a presumed, nice, liberal all-American consensus! The liberals fail to see that this evil force for the most part simply consists of normal people reacting to the evil radicalization of America by the liberals themselves. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 24, 2004 10:27 PMThe disjuncture of the Auster thesis has explanatory capabilities; especially when one observes that the more patriotic commentators are those who do not believe in the premisses of the racial project of ‘64 and later. Yet this was also the exact monent of the appearance of the new left, at the Berkeley castroite obscenity festival. The pattern of later years was set at that time; anyone who doesn’t want this leftist outrage or the next, is to be said to be only motivated by racism. They are to be threatened, and treated to obscenities, but not to be given any rational argument. Would Bell’s ‘end of ideology’ have set the stage for this degeneration. …………Regarding the Jews, as the new left put race and ethnicity over class and ideology; mightn’t this allow for a regrowth of traditional fears? Posted by: John S Bolton on June 24, 2004 10:36 PMThis is an interesting discussion about the rise of the new left and its takeover of the civic liberalism that first rose to prominence in the 1930s. The 1960s appear to have been the time when liberalism made a shift to become leftism - which is what all those who are referred to as liberals today really are. The rump faction of the older civic liberalism became what is known today as neoconservatism. During this shift, the one white group whose ethnic identity was allowed to stand separately from other whites were Jews. Presumably leftists did not count them as part of the white oppressor/üntermensch due to the persecution suffered at the hands of the Nazis, along with the fact that Jews were heavily involved in leftism generally - especially in the civil rights movement. The problem for the left was that Jews were distinctive more as a religion than an ethnic group. If religion is abolished and replaced with atheism (a leftist goal), how would a Jew be any different than an Italian? Remove the religious aspect, and they become merely another subset of the white oppressor. After thier victory in 1967, the Israelis - and their Jewish supporters - began to be viewed as colonizers for the white man’s evil empire planted in the midst of the oppressed Muslims. Even so, Jews were granted a reprieve for a while - possibly for the reasons stated above. The grace period (to rid themselves of the silly religious (= superstitious) notion of a distinct identity is now over. With their great success in American society, Jews no longer qualify as an oppressed group. Hence the tremendous rise in anti-Semitism on the left - the traditional political home of American Jews. The violent anti-Semitism in evidence on campuses (all of which are run by leftists) across the Western world emanates from the alliance of leftsts and Islamists. To remain true to leftism nowadays, a Jewsih person must renounce any notion of separate ethnic identity and oppose Israel. Not surpisingly, examples abound - Noam Chomsky, Rachel Corrie, etc. Messrs. Levine and Bolton highlight the schizophrenia of immi-enthusiast liberals. Could it be that their cognitively dissonant positions stem from total confusion about what America (or a country generally) ought to be? Also, in classic liberal fashion, they want to eat their cake and have it too, ignoring that to have all the things they want is impossible. While it should be self-evident that an environmentally pristine, animal-friendly green nation with zero population growth can never be combined with throwing that same nation open to everybody from anywhere, most of whom are in the habit of having many children, thanks to religious commandments and infant mortality at home, and who are not in the least green or animal-friendly, liberals believe that because both things are good and because they want them, with enough funding extracted from the evil whites who just happen already to live here they can both come true. What is remarkable is that no amount of evidence changes their minds. I think Messrs. Coleman and Auster are right about the over-reaction of many Jews to the ascendancy (far more apparent than real) of Christian conservatives in the aftermath of President Reagan’s first election. Surely Mr. Auster has another tour-de-force article coming about that? It goes beyond wanting white Christians to become potted plants. I think the hard-core immi-enthusiasts, not only Jews by any means, want us to miscegenate ourselves into oblivion. At a conference in 2002, convened by Mr. Auster’s estranged friend Patrick Buchanan, I heard both Michael Barone (RC) and Stephen Moore (dunno, maybe Jewish but I doubt it) say that racial conflict will disappear in America because all Americans will eventually be ethnic mutts. Needless to say, for both these “conservatives” ‘tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. Unlike the liberals above, Jews in America are doing a pretty good job of eating their cake and having it too, and the memory of the Holocaust (even though it didn’t happen in America, Americans didn’t do it and it wasn’t done to Americans) is the moral blunderbuss that makes it possible. Despite being very successful and thoroughly in the mainstream (of the establishment, anyway) American Jews get away with playing the ethnic minority victim card. When Jewish spokesmen such as Foxman cite their fears of persecution as a reason to extirpate Christianity from American public life, most Americans knuckle under, no matter how preposterous Foxman’s premise is. Another, maybe more controversial, observation of mine about affirmative action, based on university and professional experience: Jews rarely seem to end up on the wrong end of it, which indicates to me that those administering preferences have decided that (even though none of the rationales Mr. Auster cites in his superb Grutter article apply to Jews today) Jews are an ethnic/religious minority who should not bear the burden of affirmative action. Let it fall on gentile whites and, to a much lesser extent, Orientals. My observation seems especially true of ivy league schools, which are fanatically devoted to discrimination against white Americans and very largely Jewish-run. Needless to say, if one carved out another distinct set of whites in the same way (Italians, Irish or, God forbid, WASPs) there would be no end of howling from the liberals. I think Carl is confusing anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. American Leftists (many themselves Jewish, like Chomsky) do not hate Jews for being Jewish, they hate Israel because they see it as a white, Western imperialist outpost in the non-white historically oppressed Middle East that is (worst of all) an American pawn. That view is totally wrong about Israel (not a Western nation), the Middle East (not oppressed) and the United States (not calling Sharon’s plays), but then it is in the nature of liberalism to believe what is not true. Incidents on campus and elsewhere of insulting Jews for being Jews are almost always the work of Moslems, either Middle Easterners we should never have let in or addled black American converts. To the extent there is pervasive anti-Semitism in America, I believe it is found among blacks and our hispanic and Moslem guests, not among ordinary white Americans and certainly not among American Jews, no matter what their politics. HRS Posted by: Howard Sutherland on June 25, 2004 9:14 AMAll right, here’s a theory that may explain the mystery of the appearance of previously non-existent Jewish fears of an American holocaust. This will go back to Gregory Curtis’s 1990 essay, The Essential Liberal, which I’ve referred to in the past. As Curtis put it, what made the Sixties the Sixties was that liberals, who had previously believed in both liberal progress toward equality and freedom AND in basic American values and institutions, thinking that American institutions were compatible with liberal progress, decided in the Sixties that basic American institutions were the obstacles to liberal equality and freedom. This made them radicals, anti-Americans. Ok. But now the next step. With the rise of the conservative movement, of evangelical Protestant activism and so on in the ‘70s and ‘80s, of talk radio, and then the Republican takeover of Congress in ‘94, it was as if this bad old America, which the left had decided in the Sixties had to be overcome, was not just passively existing there waiting to be overcome, but was actively striking back and seeking power. For the already alienated sensibility of the left, this was the moral equivalent of a “Second Sixties.” The first Sixties was the conception within liberals of hate for America, as an intrinsically mean, nasty, anti-human, anti-egalitarian society whose whole history was no good. The second Sixties was when this nasty mean America became, as the liberals saw it, not just an old bigot ineffectually sitting there waiting to be thrown aside by the enlightened liberals, but a competent force attacking the liberals. The liberals had previously thought of America’s traditional politics and culture (and its majority population) as something that was on the way out, something to be despised and manipulated and shown the door; now they suddenly saw it as a terrifying _threat_, threatening to bring America back into that horrible darkness which, according to the first Sixties revelation, all American history prior to the Sixties had been. This was what drove liberals completely over the edge, making them see Republicans not as more or less fellow Americans and fellow human beings but as an evil force outside (liberal) America, as Nazis, and thus justifying any lie, any inhuman action (such as the attempt to destroy Clarence Thomas) that they might use against them. This two-stage rise of liberal alienation and fear of America explains the rise, in the ‘80s and ‘90s (well before 9/11) of a previously non-existent Jewish paranoia about a proto-Nazi holocaust lurking under the friendly appearing surface of white gentile America. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 25, 2004 9:55 AMThere is so much is made out of an irrelevant fact that Nahum Chumpsky was born to a Jewish mother. The insane policies he advocates are indistinguishable from a hard-line anti-American anti-semite. He might or might not hate a random Jewish person for being Jewish. So what? Many German nazis had Jewish friends, for others anti-semitism was a useful tool, nothing personal. Posted by: Mik on June 25, 2004 1:36 PMMr. Sutherland writes: “… observation of mine about affirmative action, based on university and professional experience: Jews rarely seem to end up on the wrong end of it, which indicates to me that those administering preferences have decided that (even though none of the rationales Mr. Auster cites in his superb Grutter article apply to Jews today) Jews are an ethnic/religious minority who should not bear the burden of affirmative action. Let it fall on gentile whites and, to a much lesser extent, Orientals. My observation seems especially true of ivy league schools …” Well, this assertion, Jews are not subject to a reverse discrimination, can be easily tested against actual data. If Jews are not discriminated in, say, Harvard admission and other whites are, then the average SAT score of non-Jewish white freshmen must be higher than Jewish freshmen SAT. Does Mr. Sutherland have actual data that supports what he is asserting? I would love to see it. Posted by: Mik on June 25, 2004 2:03 PMBut Mik, isn’t it fair to say that Chomsky is the ultimate self-hating Jew? He rejects everything that makes a Jewish person Jewish and replaces it with the religion of nihilism. Barry Lynn is a similar case. Even though he is a clergy member in the ultra-liberal United Church of Christ, he rejects everything that defines a Christian as such and works day and night to destroy Christianity. Case studies in nihilism. Posted by: Carl on June 25, 2004 2:34 PMTo Mik, I confess I do not have hard data, which is why I characterized what I wrote as an observation. It is based on knowing and working with many white gentiles and Jews, mostly able people with advanced degrees. My personal sample is largely lawyers, investment bankers and other Wall Street types in New York, because of the nature of my work. A very high percentage of the Jews have ivy league degrees. Surprisingly few of the gentiles (at least the ones below the age of fifty) do. There is no evident intelligence gap to explain the disparity. That tracks who was and wasn’t getting into such schools when I was applying to college 30 years ago. As Mr. Auster writes in his Grutter article, the affirmative action game is all about proportional representation for blacks and hispanics. The proportion of Jewish undergraduates in such universities is far larger than their proportion of society at large, while the proportion of white gentile undergraduates is far smaller. Somehow, none of the diversity-mongers think this disproportional representation is a problem. If we had truly merit-based admissions to American universities, Jews would be over-represented, on a proportional basis, at the best ones, but not to the extent that they are today. That is not the system we have. In the system we do have, the disproportion between the representation of white gentiles and Jews is so great that I find it hard to believe that, as between them, there is not an institutional thumb on the scale in favor of Jewish applicants. HRS Posted by: Howard Sutherland on June 25, 2004 2:35 PMMr. Sutherland writes: “If we had truly merit-based admissions to American universities, Jews would be over-represented, on a proportional basis, at the best ones, but not to the extent that they are today.” Any hard or at least semi-hard evidence to support this assertion? And now it is my turn to make an assertion without any hard data. I would guess that a relative over-representation of Jews at elite colleges is due to a high value Jewish parents place on education in general and value of elite school in particular. In my experience successful Gentiles, doctors, lawyers, etc, have a more relaxed attitude to their offsprings studies and schools they attend. In practical terms Gentiles are probably right. It doesn’t really matter if one gets BS in Botanics from Stanford or Chico State in order to get into a medical school, at least an average one. But one can have much more fun at Chico, save money and take easier classes. For whatever reason many Jews seem to hold an opinion different from mine.
To Carl, I don’t really know definition of self-hating Jew, but it sounds appropriate when applied to Chumpsky. My point is different. I don’t really care how Chumpsky got to be what he is. Did his rabbi beat him, did girls in Hebrew school made fun of him - I don’t care. Currently he is a hard-line anti-semite and anti-American and is a useful idiot for people who would in a different place cut his head in a second. When a previously excludable or ethnocentric group comes more into private social contact with other groups, attitudes will be expressed more freely and in greater detail. During the riots of the Johnson years, mercantile minorities’ businesses were disproportionately wiped out, as is the custom during race riots. A population with an enhanced ethnic perspective, stimulated also by the New Left emphasis on race during the same period, is the more likely to become fearful of its future. Regarding moslems as viewed by Jews, mightn’t there be a psychological investment that many Jews (not to mention the middleman minorities, as T. Sowell calls them) have in disadvantaged minorities being morally unaccountable? Posted by: John S Bolton on June 26, 2004 12:52 AMA belated thanks to John Bolton for adding to my list of elements perversely obsessed with promoting immigration. The suggestion by some above that Jews have mainly been reacting,albeit insanely, to the rise of the Religious Right and the Reagan election is not too plausible. For one thing, quite a number of Jews, especially the leaders of community organizations, were well aware of and hardly displeased by the fact that the Moral Majority types were supporters of Israel. For another, it seems to me to be too late to correlate with the developments Mr. Auster and others have described, which were visible before 1980. Ties to the general radicalization of the 1960s and 1970s seems mre reasonable. Posted by: Alan Levine on June 26, 2004 2:24 PMMy own thinking is that the Jews are not exhibiting an independent form of insanity as much as an ethnic variation on a general one. An ideological and psychological factor that may explain some of the peculiarities of the Jewish mode is the development of the obsession with the destruction of the European Jews that arose in a particular form in the 1970s. Before I go further, let me stress that that destruction is NOT directly responsible for Jewish derangements. In fact, the immediate reaction to it among Jews was to become more pro-Western, in general,and more patriotic (among American Jews) in particular. However, the obsessive discussion — it was obsessive compared to the way the subject was dealt with earlier — instead of making it either a particular manifestation of a general evil (eg totalitarianism) or a results of a German peculiarity blamed it on the West in general and also narrowed the whole issue, as far as possible, to make it simply an episode of tradtional anti-Semitism, distancing atrocities against Jews from those against Slavs etc. So you began to hear whining about how the Americans “abandoned the Jews” or how the Poles were co-responsible with the Nazis, etc. This was unknown, or at least rare, earlier. Posted by: Alan Levine on June 26, 2004 2:32 PMI am sorry about my mistake in dispatching my post of 2:19 more than once and clogging things up. I do not understand what happened. Posted by: Alan Levine on June 26, 2004 2:39 PM |