Anti-Semites: the evil and stupid party

There is another pressing reason for Jared Taylor to exclude Nazis and anti-Semites that I have mentioned but not laid enough stress on: their sheer stupidity. When the Comments feature was active at VFR, I mostly would exclude people if they were irredeemably bigoted or hostile. But there were a couple of people I had to exclude, not because they had done anything bad, but because their statements persistently fell below the level of common rationality. The central assertion of the anti-Semites who have been posting at the American Renaissance website for the last week is that “Zionist Jews” (as distinct from non-Zionist Jews) are the main threat to Western culture. This idea is so moronic that anyone who says it should be excluded from a discussion forum on that basis alone.

The above thoughts were set off by the following e-mail from Carl Simpson:

While I obviously agree with you about the foolishness and ultimate short-sightedness of Jared Taylor’s refusal to deal with the Duke/Stormfront gang, there’s just not much left to say about a group of folks so aggressively stupid that they see “Zionist Jews” as the true enemy, while basically ignoring the kind of toxic suicidal liberalism that is present in both the Gentile majority and the Jewish minority in every Western country. (In Israel itself, liberalism’s poison has infected the Jewish majority.) Once in a great while, it’s possible to bring a thoughtful person trapped in this type of mass psychosis to his senses. My overall impression of these folks is that they’d much prefer to spend their energies denouncing Zionist Jews as the source of all sickness in the West instead of facing the liberal “balrog.” Nick Griffin’s blast at them was very much on the mark.

How do they explain the complete moral collapse of countries like Sweden and Norway, which have no Jews to speak of? The ruling elites of those countries are Gentiles who are inviting hordes of Muslims and Africans in to “diversify” their countries which were deemed to be too white. Neither country had colonies in the Third World, yet Sweden is as bad off as France, from all that I’ve read on the subject.

The worst part of it is that by refusing disassociate himself and AR from an utter charlatan like David Duke (who regularly gives speeches to Muslim enemies of the West), Taylor ensures that valuable works like The Color of Crime will be automatically dismissed by a lot of people who really need to be exposed to it. I expect that the result of Taylor’s big tent policy with regard Duke and the Stormfront gang will be the quiet exit of most of those who signed the letter. AR will end up as just another fringe organization, forever discredited in the minds of many, and ineffectual in bringing about any meaningful change in the direction things are headed.

A reader wrote me a longish e-mail which began as follows:

You are a funny guy. You conveniently label those you disagree with as “evil” and “stupid” and thus worthy of complete exclusion—a convenient way of not having to address the issues these people raise. You characterize ‘anti-Semites’ (yes, I use quotation marks because I believe your definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ includes people who have legitimate questions about Jews) as being crazy because they oppose so-called Zionist Jews. Why you ask, should anti-Semites be against those who support a Jewish national state in Israel?

My reply:

I read the first couple of sentences of your e-mail and stopped. To say that I label those I disagree with as evil and stupid is so stupid that it’s not worth replying to. I don’t label people I disagree with as evil and stupid. I label the EXTREME ANTI-SEMITES posting at AR as evil and stupid. Goodby.

To which the little anti-Semite gave the below reply worthy of his type. (By the way, one of the absolute proofs that someone is an anti-Semite is that he describes anti-Semites as people who are merely “asking questions” about the Jews, or who are merely “criticizing” Jews, and therefore it’s terribly unfair to call them anti-Semites. This is the parody of rationality I’ve often mentioned. When I talk about the difference between rational criticism of Jews and anti-Semitism, I’m talking about something real. When the anti-Semites try to do the same thing, they are merely playing their endless game of trying to get themselves legitimized.)

Of course … someone who takes the time to reply to your illogical assertions is “stupid” and not worth replying to. In other words, you reply to my assertion that you label those you disagree with as stupid, and hence not worth replying to, by calling my statement stupid and saying you will therefore not reply to it! I’m not surprised that you exhibit what MacDonald would call the “Middle Old World” mentality. After all, the Western mentality would be exhibited only by those people who are, after all, ethnically Western.

Naturally he missed my point. I called his statement too stupid to be worthy of a reply, because it was. Here I am, writing blog entry after blog entry, establishing exactly what it is about the anti-Semites at the AR website that makes them evil, stupid, and to be shunned. And this guy writes to me: “You conveniently label those you disagree with as ‘evil’ and ‘stupid’ and thus worthy of complete exclusion.” His misrepresentation of my plainly stated position is so gross that only a person operating on bad faith, or a person incapable of reason, would have made it, and that’s what I told him.

Second, I called his statement too stupid to be worthy of a reply, and he says this proves that I am ethnically non-Western, i.e., a genetically alien Jew who cannot participate in the true West. Well, to paraphrase Oscar Jaffee in Twentieth Century, this guy shuts the iron door on me, and I shut the iron door on him.

Now sit back for a moment and try to imagine the frustration of these anti-Semites. They are in possession of the one truth that explains all the ills of the world (the Jews are doing it) and that would cure all the ills of the world (kill all Jews in the world), but no one will listen to them! Instead, they are despised, called names, excluded, utterly shunned. Which only proves to them that the Jews are not only destroying the world, but are successfully repressing the only people who can save the world. Which shows how demonically evil and powerful the Jews really are.

It’s always useful to remind ourselves of the mentality of these people. Here is another perfectly innocent, sincere, rational, “seriously inquiring” person, Nelson W. by name, who feels that the facts have not been established that David Duke is an anti-Semite, and insists that I supply them. He writes:

Greetings. I would appreciate hearing a straight answer from you as well. As long as “anti-Semitism” is a main focus of life in predominantly Christian countries, why can’t we have a definition for it? Those are not “scare quotes” of mine, by the way—they’re quite legitimate since the term in question has no precise meaning, is used exclusively as a brickbat against anybody who even challenges Jewish power abuse, and is an absurd misnomer to begin with.

What indeed is “anti-Semitism,” Sir? And what went on at the American Renaissance conference that qualifies as such? People like you do no end of violence to basic freedoms in this country by shouting down free inquiry and (in many cases) having your opponents jailed or financially ruined.

You have accused someone—evidently David Duke, or others at the AR conference?—of “openly hating Jews and wishing harm to Jews as Jews.” Please give proof. Did your mother ever spank you, and did you protest that she was being a Nazi?

Perhaps it’s the end of the AR piece that stings you—a remark by one Michael Matthews, “Are you a Jew? I don’t think you should be here.” Don’t you agree, though, that if Jews can’t be happy or even feel safe or at home in a country after 300 years there, it’s not meant to be?

I don’t say that that’s necessarily my position, but it would seem in terms of basic logic to be the conclusion of your arguments—not more demands that everybody else rearrange their life and thinking to accommodate your people.

This is a serious inquiry. Please give a serious answer without further name-calling and mud-slinging.

Yes, it’s a serious inquiry alright. Here is what Nelson W. is really saying. It’s wrong to call people such as David Duke who consider the Jews to be the cause of all the ills in the West “anti-Semites,” because anti-Semite means something bad. In fact, Jews are responsible for all the ills in the West, therefore the so-called anti-Semites are not bad people but truth-speakers and should honored instead of shunned. If we would simply accept the truth they have to tell us, everything else would fall into place.

Nelson’s demand that I provide him with “evidence” for Duke’s anti-Semitism, which Nelson insists has not yet been provided, encapsulates the anti-Semites’ modus operandi. It doesn’t matter how manifest the anti-Semites’ anti-Semitism is, how frequently and unabashedly they’ve expressed it. No. The charge of anti-Semitism is always an attack out of the blue, completely unfair, based on nothing but the Jewish desire to prevent honest men from “asking questions” about the Jews. In their unending insistence that the “real evidence” be finally presented for something that is as grossly palpable as anything can be in this sublunary sphere, the anti-Semites remind me of what has been said about ghosts.

According to certain Eastern teachings, the souls of persons who have died suddenly, “before their time,” remain in this world, not knowing that they have died, and so continually seeking the satisfaction of the same desires that they had in life. But they cannot satisfy these desires because they no longer have physical bodies with which to pursue and experience them. The anti-Semites are like that. They have ceased to live as human beings, and all they have left is the single obsessive desire, never satisfied, to get themselves recognized by normal people as legitimate participants in the discussion, and to have the chance—at last!—to prove that the Jews really are the source of all the ills of the West. They keep wanting to be recognized as “real people,” but nobody will give them that recognition, because, though they don’t realize it, they’re no longer alive as humans, having been eaten up by their anti-Semitism the way the Ring-Wraiths in The Lord of the Rings have been eaten up by their respective Rings.

Which is not to say that they couldn’t come back to the land of the living, if they grasped the state they’re in, and gave up the false evil obsessive beliefs that have turned them into Ring-Wraiths. A man once told me that he had been a convinced believer for several years in the idea that the Holocaust was a hoax, and that it was a state of darkness that he had been living in, until he gave it up. Of course it’s a state of darkness. To believe that one of the largest events of history was a hoax orchestrated and managed by a particular people to enable them to gain power over everyone else, would naturally put one in a paranoid condition, and worse. But this person abandoned his belief in Holocaust denial and came out of that dark place, just as the anti-Semites can come out from their anti-Semitism, if they want to.

In any event, I think have given more than enough attention to this issue for quite a while. Jared Taylor has written his relativistic, non-judgmental response to the anti-Semitic behaviors at his conference and to the larger anti-Semitic movement of which they were an expression, the anti-Semites at the AR website—whom Taylor refuses to criticize—have spoken, the anti-anti-Semites at the AR website have spoken, and I’ve commented on all this at length. The lay of the land is pretty clear, and it is time to move on to other subjects.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 22, 2006 01:45 AM | Send