Jews’ idiotic (and wicked) anti-nationalism

Asked by the General Social Survey if immigration improves America, 52 percent of Protestants, 61 percent of Catholics, and 90 percent of Jews said yes. Matthew Yglesias, a Jew who works for The American Prospect, explains why Jews support immigration so much more than other groups, and Steve Sailer offers effective replies.

One of Yglesias’s points is: “Second, as a historical matter, nationalism has been Bad For The Jews.”

Yglesias is certainly correct that this is the Jewish view of the matter. But how truly idiotic and despicable a view it is. Jews have always lauded America for defeating Hitler. Would America have been able to defeat Hitler if it hadn’t existed as a nation and been a strong nation? Would it have been better for the Jews if Britain had had a weak sense of nationality and compromised with Hitler, instead of, as was the actual case under Churchill, a strong sense of nationality and stood up to him? Would Ann Frank’s family have had to hide in an attic for two years and then been arrested and sent to concentration camps where they died horrible deaths, if the Netherlands, instead of being a weak nation that was easily overrun by the Germans, had been a strong nation that was able to prevent the Germans from conquering the Netherlands and capturing all its Jews?

Also, most Jews are thankful for the fact that America, the strongest nation on earth, stands almost alone against the world-wide movement to destroy Israel. Will a weak and divided America be able to perform that function?

To say that nationalism is bad is like saying that the human hand is bad because sometimes it is used to hurt people. Jews are supposed to be the highest IQ group. The leftist idiocies embraced by far too many Jews prove that intelligence has nothing to do with wisdom and understanding. IQ is simply the ability to process information. But the ability to process information can be used as easily to advance false arguments as true arguments. Intelligence is like nationalism. It can serve good purposes, or bad.

There’s another point to be made about Jews’ open avowal of anti-nationalism. If it had been known in 1885 or 1900 that the grandchildren of the Jews then being admitted en masse into America (an influx that included my own grandparents) would dedicate themselves as a group to the undermining of the American nation via open borders, would the America of that time have let in all those Jews? Of course not. As I wrote in Huddled Clichés:

The uncompromising pro-immigration stand of various ethnic organizations presents an even more pungent irony. If all descendants of immigrants, particularly non-Western, ethnically diverse immigrants, have a hereditary obligation to crusade for open borders, then as soon as a nation lets in any diverse immigrants at all, it has spawned a domestic pro-immigration lobby that will (1) work incessantly to expand the numbers and power of its own group; (2) agitate to expand immigration generally; and (3) deny the society any moral right to restrict immigration in the future. If those are the rules of the game,—if by admitting immigrants a society automatically loses its right to control future immigration—then what rational society would want to admit any immigrants? The “my-grandparents-were-immigrants” crowd do not seem to realize that in their strident open-borders moralism, they are making the definitive case against immigration, including the immigration that brought their own grandparents here.

If more writers would start making these kinds of arguments, instead of just me, that might snap the Jewish community out of their self-absorption and make them realize that the things they are saying are offensive to other Americans, which in turn would lead them to change their behavior. But as long as Jews are never criticized by responsible mainstream opinion-makers, they have no reason to restrain themselves.

(I make a similar point about Mexican illegals here.)

The Jewish American civil religion

In the discussion thread following Matthew Yglesias’s blog entry on why Jews support open immigration, a commenter, who is presumably Jewish (since he speaks for Jewish feelings and attitudes), writes:

Ellis Island isn’t the shrine. The Statue of Liberty is the shrine. Every American Jew learns this as a child and believes it unquestioningly. It is the Jewish American civil religion. It is the very heart, for Jews, of what it means to be an American:

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Ok, so there’s a Jew who regards as “the very heart, for Jews, of what it means to be an American,” the Statue of Liberty’s poetically beautiful but practically insane invitation to all the poor and oppressed people of the world to come to America. And notice that he doesn’t use the common term, the “American civil religion,” but instead speaks of the “Jewish American civil religion.” So Jews have their own civil religion for America, separate from the general civil religion, and they seek to impose their civil religion on the rest of us.

What this means is that for at least this Jewish commenter, and presumably for many more Jews, the meaning of being an American is not love and appreciation of country; not identification with the American people and the American way of life; not knowledge of the American Founding and American history, and not devotion to the Constitution. No. For these Jews the meaning of being an American is support for open borders for all the poor and oppressed of the earth.

To the extent that the commenter’s characterization of the Jewish American civil religion is true, then Jews, not just as random individuals, but as a community, are devotees of American national suicide. This is a legitimate issue on which Jews need to be confronted in the public square.

—Comments—

Maurice writes:

>>If more writers would start making these kinds of arguments, instead of just me, that might snap the Jewish community out of their self-absorption and make them realize that the things they are saying are offensive to other Americans, which in turn would lead them to change their behavior. But as long as Jews are never criticized by responsible mainstream opinion-makers, they have no reason to restrain themselves.>>

Enjoy the blog.

The above won’t happen.

Two reasons: It IS hard to discern the line oftentimes between the anti-Semites and those who can make rational arguments as you are stating. We in the other 10 percent of the Jewish community who don’t happen to vote/agree on most of what the other 90 percent want, either religiously, culturally or any other which way, can’t get them to listen. Outside voices won’t either, and that’s because that 90 percent are LOST. They are beyond self-absorption. Instead, they are slowly dissipating, via intermarriage and distance from anything that strikes the rest of us as authentically Jewish (and one can quibble about theological things, but I would aver that Reform Judaism is liberal Christianity without Christ or a “do it if it feels good” movement vs. anything that even faintly resembles anything our grandparents would recognize as Jewish.).

This group is self-destructive. They will both draw the ire of the outside world, as they are doing already, and they will slowly disappear anyway. The story of Judaism is always of the hardcore small groups that continue on, not those who assimilated.

Now, having excoriated my own folk, I would also caution, though, that it is very difficult for outsiders to criticize Jews. I think it’s both because of the fear of the labeling as anti-Semites, but I would also suggest because of the terrible ignorance of many who might write; it would thus be easy to cross the line unknowingly into what appears to be anti-Semitic criticism.

BTW, my grandparents on my mom’s side were in that great wave of Russian Jewish immigrants. They LOVED this country, and they were AMERICANS. Until I read some of what you wrote, it never crystallized for me, but they did consider themselves as Russian or Polish Jews, by ORIGIN, and they were Jews, and, though not nominally religious, kept many traditions of the religion, but they were thoroughly American at the end of the day, and would never have considered themselves otherwise. They were NOT Russians or Poles, they adopted their home country and worked hard at BEING Americans.

My dad was a Holocaust survivor, and he too became an American. He was from Hungary, but he was not a Hungarian. He was an Hungarian Jew, and an American. Does that make sense?

One last bit about ignorance. I guarantee if you gave a quiz to Jews and ask them about Aztlan, about 1 percent or less would have a clue what that is. Few American Jews know anything about anything, unfortunately and I agree with your writing about how IQ doesn’t say anything about knowledge.

LA replies:

Re your comment on Aztlan, liberals/leftists stay as liberals/leftists by not reading any sources of knowledge outside the sphere of leftism. The essence of the left is to block out vast sectors of reality (e.g., the existence of evil and enemies; the existence of cultural differences, race differences, sex differences, ability differences; the realities power, etc.) and pretend that they don’t exist. So naturally these leftist Jews are ignorant of the most basic facts of immigration and Hispanics.

On Jews’ American identity in the older generation, of course that is true. They came to an America that had a strong identity, and they shared that identity. But as the identity has been undermined (partly by Jews themselves), then, in the absence of the older national identity, all the minority groups, including Jews, are asserting their pure minority agenda against whatever remains of America.

On your more troubling point, if you’re correct that the kind of rational criticism of Jews that I propose cannot and will not be made, that may not be a disaster. The anti-national leftism of the Jews, while it has some distinct “notes” from the anti-nationalism of the left generally, is not different in kind. The entire Democratic party, not just Jews, believes essentially in the open borders agenda and everything that that implies. So it may be enough to go after the general phenomenon of leftist anti-nationalism without focusing on the specifically Jewish aspect of it. However, I will continue to discuss this point and to urge that others do so as well, because I do think that it is true, and legitimate, and of central importance.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 07, 2006 11:38 AM | Send