Sailer compares Iranian nuclear attack on Israel to baseball, or, The enemy of my enemy doesn’t exist

Continuing his stunningly fatuous treatment of the Iranian threat, Steve Sailer says that since Iran is not advanced in tanks and warplanes, a fact he demonstrates with detailed tables, the worries about Iran are misplaced. He acknowledges that the Iranians are developing nuclear weapons and delivery systems, but adds that the only reason they could want those capabilities is to deter attack—from you know who, Israel, and maybe the U.S., with its Neocon Occupied Government. In another blog entry, he says the concerns about Iran are sheer fantasy, driven by boredom, since “the world is going through a dull patch of relative global peace right now.”

The reality, of course, is that the leaders of Iran have repeatedly stated their desire and intention to use nuclear weapons to destroy Israel. They have not made this threat by way of saying, “If Israel attacks us, we will destroy Israel.” No, they have said that they want to destroy Israel, period. Sailer can’t acknowledge this well-known fact, because, being a bigot against Israel, he is incapable of acknowledging any information that would lead him to take Israel’s side.

And this is the guy who at the top of his web page quotes Orwell: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” Doesn’t look like Sailer is putting up much of a struggle, does it?

But it gets worse than that. Sailer does, very indirectly, acknowledge the threat that Iran poses to Israel, but only by way of saying that for us to care about what Iran does to Israel would be like the New York Yankees, which is in the American League, worrying about whether one National League team beats another National League team. That’s right. A crazed Islamic fundamentalist regime launching nuclear war is as significant as a baseball game.

Underneath Sailer’s easy going and affable persona (easy going, that is, except when the subject is Israel and neocons) there is a human being devoid of moral sense, devoid of soul. But, after all, isn’t that what you might expect of someone who reduces all human values to the level of genes and personal desires?

If only the mullahs would hire some black American athletes for their army, or start an interracial dating service, maybe Sailer would start to take Iran seriously.

- end of initial entry -

Reader EG writes:

Sailer is also promoting a book by one Alon Ziv which promotes racial mixing.

LA replies:

Sailer didn’t seem to be actually promoting racial mixing in his comments on the book.

EG replies:

No, but he promotes the book, and then makes a mild rebuke, missing obvious comments about outbreeding depression and ethnic genetic interests.

He has no center, nothing traditional to stand for, and he is carefully politically correct when it suits him—he could have criticized the Ziv book harshly, but chose not to do so.

But he will attack Levitt’s abortion-crime connection in the most minute detail.

LA:

I see. He only criticizes it on the micro issue of whether additional hybrid vigor results in individuals born of interracial mating, not on the larger question of the impact of racial blending on society and civilization as a whole. In fact, Sailer says of the book: “I’ve read it and it’s an extremely lively book. Plus, it’s got a great quote from me, and my influence is evident on a lot of pages.” The overall message is one of warm approval for a book that promotes interracial marriage and the superiority of interracial individuals.

As for Ziv himself, he is in all likelihood a liberal, who thinks that any kind of racial, ethnic, or cultural exclusiveness or discrimination is evil, yet at the same time he touts the genetic superiority of his own favored racial type, people who are racially mixed. I discussed this liberal attitude—this liberal attitude with which Steve Sailer has no problema—in my speech at the 1994 American Renaissance conference.

Asher M. writes:

I believe your view of Mr. Sailer is far more negative than warranted. He may have no morals, but one cannot fairly determine that from his writings (with his discussion of Israel possibly excepted). He writes and cites mostly facts on the issues—populist preaching is not his strong suit. You yourself tend to mix facts and rhetoric, for an effect that would alienate much of Sailer’s audience (say, those at Gene Expression). Again, with the issue of Israel excepted, you seem to take the absence of his personal views in his writings as evidence that he has no personal views, ie. morals. For instance, Sailer failed to mention his thoughts on interbreeding independent of such technical issues as hybrid vigor. And yet he opposes it—see here. It’s like getting mad at someone for saying Stalin killed millions without condemning it in the same sitting—practically Abe Foxman behavior. Sailer may be playing to (the intelligence of) his audience, which doesn’t want to be told what to think, but would rather have the facts themselves.

As for Israel, he seems to take an isolationist/indifferent attitude. But even in his misleading comments on Iran, his readers know more than they did before. His failure to mention Iran’s nuclear capabilities is wrong, but he couldn’t say much about them anyway. You’ve repeatedly recognized the threat it poses, and castigate others for not doing so, but have not suggested anything. If Sailer didn’t have anything to contribute, he doesn’t say anything. His lambasting of Iran is pointless considering the numerous others who do so, and the precious few who do work similar to Sailer.

In conclusion, sermons are soporific if not irritating, and Sailer knows this.

LA replies

I was actually more mild than he deserved. A person who looks at the Iranian regime developing and threatening the use of nuclear weapons to destroy a country and kill millions of people, and who dismisses the situation by comparing it to a baseball game that is taking place in a different league from one’s own and therefore not of interest to oneself, is not just lacking in moral sense. He is morally depraved.

You write:

> For instance, Sailer failed to mention his thoughts on interbreeding independent of such technical issues as hybrid vigor. And yet he opposes it—see here. It’s like getting mad at someone for saying Stalin killed millions without condemning it in the same sitting

If that’s what I did, it would be wrong. However, you’re mixing up different issues. I did not say he lacks a moral sense because of his warm response to the Ziv book; I said he lacks a moral sense because of his treatment of the Iranian threat.

Also, the example you link of Sailer opposing interbreeding is very mildly stated, compared to his warm welcoming of the Ziv book.

You write:

> As for Israel, he seems to take an isolationist/indifferent attitude.

I disagree with you 100 percent. This is an excuse/defense that I have shattered a hundred times, yet it keeps returning, because it’s the ONLY defense the anti-Israelites and their excusers have. The anti-Israelites will say, “I am neutral, I think we should be hands off on the Mideast,” then they turn around and blast Israel as an oppressor and as the source of all the problems and attack its very existence. Then they turn around again and whine, “If we just criticize Israel, we’re called anti-Semites.” People who call their demonization of Israel “criticism” are liars.

Sailer himself accused Israel of “intriguing” to gain control over the U.S. at the moment Israel was being attacked by Hezbollah. That was not an “indifferent” attitude. That was a statement of someone who automatically takes a negative, unfair view of Israel in each situation, i.e., of someone who is a bigot against Israel.

Further, even if it were genuine indifference, indifference to the prospect of a country being targeted for a nuclear destruction is morally depraved. Has that occurred to you? Or are you so infected by the moral relativism of the paleo right that you can’t recognize that?

You write:

> His lambasting of Iran [would be] pointless considering the numerous others who do so, and the precious few who do work similar to Sailer.

I never said he must lambaste Iran. I was criticizing the actual statements he has made dismissing the Iranian threat. The point about “precious few who do work similar to Sailer” is utterly irrelevant to this point.

Finally, since you admit that Sailer may have no morals with regard to Israel, and since my criticism of him for lacking morals is based on the way he talks about Israel, what’s your beef?

Also, this may be a good time to mention that I always balanced my previous criticisms of Sailer by underscoring that he did valuable and interesting work in addition to the things I disapproved of. I have read Sailer’s site fairly regularly and corresponded with him on various issues, though not on a familiar basis. Some of those exchanges have been quoted at VFR. But he crossed a line in the last month, with his low swipes at Israel when she came under attack from her enemies and his depraved indifference to the Iranian nuclear menace, and so I have dropped my previous accommodating tone regarding him. From now on, when and if I criticize him, I will simply do so without adding that I also find some of his writings worthwhile.

Tom S. writes:

Your comments with regard to Steve Sailer are right on. He has always had a streak of both immaturity and amorality in his writings—his referral to our war in Iraq as the “Iraq Attaq” has always struck me as being pretty lame, seeing as how thousands of our young men and women have died in it—and his latest outburst takes the cake. His hatred of the Neocons has led him to wander into a moral wasteland, and until he chooses to come to his senses and finds his way out, I question the value of anything he has to say on our current crisis. Saying, “Well, he’s an immature amoral anti-Semite who compares nuclear genocide to baseball, but he’s sound in other areas,” simply will not do this time around. “Live not by Lies” indeed—try, “Doctor, Heal Thyself!”

P.S. The New York Yankees, huh? See, I TOLD you Sailer would try to find a sports angle to this!

LA replies:

I have never called Sailer anti-Semitic. I think the evidence is plain that he has a bigotry against Israel and neocons, as I’ve explained.

Carl Simpson writes:

Sailer’s problem is that he is indeed amoral—one who reduces everything to materialist (in the broad sense) terms. Thus, he is fundamentally incapable of comprehending the idea of culture and its profound importance in understanding the world that actually exists.

Hence Sailer—the ultimate materialist man—is actually being unworldly! Surely he lives within the confines of an ideological fantasy. I would contend that this is why he views Israel the way he does. It’s not anti-Semitism. but a refusal to acknowledge the existence of an alien culture which shares no moral currency with his own culture. [LA asks: Is Carl referring to Iran or Israel here?]

Sailer simply cannot “get it” about the Arab-Israeli conflict because—like Sowell—he attempts to explain the whole thing in liberal, Western terms. Islam speaks for itself boldly, but many millions of ears in the West remain deaf—refusing to hear its message.

Roger writes:

Your critique of Steve Sailer was decent and commendable. However I fear you don’t see the complete picture and can’t take it to its logical conclusion. You even say, “I have never called Sailer anti-Semitic. I think the evidence is plain that he has a bigotry against Israel and neocons, as I’ve explained.” So he has no problem with Iran having the capacity and intent to murder another six million Jews, and when the democratic Western country of Israel is brazenly attacked by an Islamic terrorist group he sees the Israelis as the aggressor; he has a bigotry against the state of Israel which just happens to be the one Jewish state in the world; his sympathies lie more with Hezbollah a group that has expressed its goal of killing all Jews everywhere on earth [LA adds: I’m not aware of Sailer expressing sympathy for Hezbollah], and you would not call him anti-Semitic? In other words one can accept and even promote genocide against the Jewish people and one can see Jews as aggressors when they are clearly the victims of stark aggression, and one can sympathize with a group whose avowed goal is the destruction of the Jewish people, but as long as one is clever enough to talk about Israel and neocons without actually using the term “Jews” then no one could call them anti-Semitic? I don’t know Steve Sailer and don’t care to know him, but I’m sure he is a person with a fairly high IQ. Yet despite his high IQ he thinks that Israel was the aggressor and the terrorist group Hezbollah was the victim. [LA: Again, I don’t know that he ever said that.] How can such an intelligent person have such a catastrophic failure in the perception of reality? I will tell you why. It is because emotional factors are completely overriding his intellect. And the emotional factor that accounts for this is hatred of Jews that is anti-Semitism. [LA: How does Roger know that the factor overriding rationality in this case must be hatred of Jews and not some other factor?]

So allow me to complete the picture that you cannot yet see. Virulent anti-Semitism is an incredibly intense pathological hatred which acquires an obsessive and prominent hold over the whole personality. The very last thing people like this are is indifferent to the fate of Jews and to the fate of the State of Israel. Their most fervent desire with their pathological hatred of Jews is to see Israel destroyed. They want Iran to acquire nuclear weapons and kill millions of Jews. If tens of millions of other people die in this nuclear war it’s worth the price. If Iran gives nuclear weapons to terrorist groups that may be used to destroy American cities even that risk while not desired is worth it for the sheer satisfaction of seeing millions of Jews killed and the Jewish State destroyed. They likely will not admit this to others and may not even admit it to themselves, but it is the logical conclusion of their pathological hatred and their psychological dynamics. Here we see one facet of how dangerous a threat anti-Semitism is to the Western world. To anyone who can see, it is clear that the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran would pose a mortal threat to the Western world. But anti-Semites including those in positions of power in the EU and the UN will to a man do everything possible to make sure that Iran is not stopped. If they are successful and they might be then it is almost inevitable that millions of people will die and the rest will live in permanent fear. (If I had to bet I’d say that the one thing Pat Buchanan is more passionate about than immigration is that Iran not be stopped in its pursuit of nuclear weapons.)

LA replies:

It’s possible that Sailer’s amoral indifference to the fate of Israel is the expression of an “incredibly intense pathological hatred [of Jews] which acquires an obsessive and prominent hold over the whole personality.” But this is supposition and inference, not knowledge. To charge a person with having an incredibly intense pathological hatred of Jews is a serious charge, and such a serious charge should not be made on the basis of inference. There are many people in the world who openly express an incredibly intense pathological hatred of Jews, and we do and can legitimately call them anti-Semites. To call a person an anti-Semite who has never expressed hatred of Jews is simply wrong.

Sailer’s hostility to neocons and Israel can be explained on the basis of other factors than Jewishness. Again, Roger’s view may be correct. But for him to assert dogmatically as knowledge that which is only inference is wrong.

EG writes

Your reader defending Sailer from the charge of supporting racial interbreeding [see Asher’s comment above] should see this Sailer article at vdare.

Yes, somewhere in the middle he does say, maybe we shouldn’t all merge into a shade of beige (his usual immature view of race), but that is followed by his positive assertion that intermarriage is a good way for America to reduce “racial tensions” and that we should be against high rates of immigration—because it may impede intermarriage!!

He also stupidly equates inter-ethnic white intermarriage with inter-racial marriage (as does Ziv), and, earlier, seems to suggest that maybe Korean-black tensions in LA would be less if there were “half-breeds” to act as “lightning rods.”

Yes, I’m sure Koreans think interbreeding with blacks is their American Dream, Steve.

As to the idea that criticisms of Sailer may alienate readers of GNXP, why should any pro-Western traditionalist want supporters from that site?

Ron L writes:

While I greatly respect Mr. Sailer’s work on certain issues, his ignorance vis-a-vis Iran is far worse than you think. Mr. Sailer should have done a little more research before he started to speak of Iran’s conventional forces.

Iran has produced some indigenous weapons systems. The Azerkash is a larger and more powerful derivative of the US F-5F . It uses Iran-produced radar. This week, Iran announced the successful test firing of a “stealth” missile, the Kosar. Iran produces other weapons including upgraded anti-tank weapons and anti-ship missiles, which it supplied to Hezbollah. However, even if Iran did not produce many weapons, it is buying a lot of Russian and Chinese weapons.

A second fallacy is that Sailer completely discounts non-Western modes of combat. With its proxy in Lebanon, Iran has been working on what William Lind calls Fourth Generational Warfare.

I find it amusing that while Sailer’s friends are declaring US military failure as a reason for us be chastened, Sailer thinks that American power is so overwhelming that we are simply hyping threats to build our military-industrial complex. This is right out of the left’s playbook from Vietnam onwards.

Sailer’s comment calling Israel and Iran National League teams is rather telling. Sailer views everything through race. Hence he does not care what those people in the Middle East do to each other. (That Iranians are racially Aryan and Israel culturally Western is lost in his one-dimensional thinking.)

PS. If you want to see some real anti-Israel lunacy, pick up the latest edition of The American Dhimmi (LA note: that’s Ron’s whimsical name for Scott McConnell’s magazine The Anti-Israeli Leftist). They have Anders Strindberg, a “journalist” so embedded with the Palestinians that he able to say that Israel attacked Hezbollah first and mean it, claim that Israeli aims will help Al Qaeda.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 25, 2006 10:16 AM | Send