The astounding ignorance and prejudice of the liberal elite

The Daily Caller reports:

A man who appears to be a National Public Radio senior executive, Ron Schiller, has been captured on camera savaging conservatives and the Tea Party movement.

“The current Republican Party, particularly the Tea Party, is fanatically involved in people’s personal lives and very fundamental Christian—I wouldn’t even call it Christian. It’s this weird evangelical kind of move,” declared Schiller, the head of NPR’s nonprofit foundation, who last week announced his departure for the Aspen Institute. [See my response to this below.]

In a new video released Tuesday morning by conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe, Schiller and Betsy Liley, NPR’s director of institutional giving, are seen meeting with two men who, unbeknownst to the NPR executives, are posing as members of a Muslim Brotherhood front group. The men, who identified themselves as Ibrahim Kasaam and Amir Malik from the fictitious Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC) Trust, met with Schiller and Liley at Café Milano, a well-known Georgetown restaurant, and explained their desire to give up to $5 million to NPR because, “the Zionist coverage is quite substantial elsewhere.”

On the tapes, Schiller wastes little time before attacking conservatives. The Republican Party, Schiller says, has been “hijacked by this group.” The man posing as Malik finishes the sentence by adding, “the radical, racist, Islamaphobic, Tea Party people.” Schiller agrees and intensifies the criticism, saying that the Tea Party people aren’t “just Islamaphobic, but really xenophobic, I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white, middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it’s scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people.” [see full Daily Caller article here]

To me what is most striking about Schiller’s unselfconscious outpouring of raw prejudice is his view of the tea parties as “fanatically involved in people’s personal lives and very fundamental Christian.” In reality, of course, the tea parties were formed for the purpose of opposing Obama’s and the Democrats’ ruinous government spending. The tea parties are not (to the discouragement of many social conservatives) social conservative, let alone “very fundamental Christian,” and there is not a single plank in their platform that indicates an intention to get “fanatically involved in people’s personal lives.” But in the ignorant demonology that occupies the brain pans of most liberals, particularly Jewish liberals with their consuming fear that abortion and sexual liberation are about to be ended in this country by legions of paramilitary Christians breaking into people’s homes, such distinctions cannot be grasped.

And to top it all off, the unregenerately know-nothing and biased Schiller is not just any old liberal, but a senior executive in a top level national news organization.

- end of initial entry -

LA writes:

I’ve just seen the YouTube, and while “Ronald Schiller” is a Jewish sounding name, Schiller is not at all Jewish looking. Which doesn’t change the point I made above. As polls have consistently shown, the commitment to the sexual freedom agenda, particularly abortion, is wider and deeper in the Jewish community than in any other U.S. ethnic group, and therefore the fear among liberal Jews of right-wing Christians taking away those freedoms is correspondingly deep and wide.

March 9

James N. writes:

You make an observation which has occurred to me many times, namely, that the Jewish community (in the U.S.) has many leaders and foot soldiers committed to the sexual freedom agenda. (In passing, I should note that this made dating Jewish girls a very popular thing, once upon a time). [LA replies: I won’t repeat the line from an old Woody Allen movie about dating a girl from NYU.]

You also correctly link a passion for abortion “rights” and that selfsame agenda.

It is curious, though, that such a small minority should embrace an auto-exterminationist position.

Do you have a theory about why young and not-so-young Jews should favor a policy which tends to lead to their further diminution and, if persisted in, may cause them to disappear altogether?

LA replies:

The intense Jewish support for abortion would appear to be based on two main—and very different—beliefs:

(1) freedom of abortion is a sine qua non of sexual freedom (and therefore any attempt to limit abortion threatens sexual freedom and must be fought to the max);

(2) poor urban blacks have far more abortions than other groups. It would be wrong and socially destructive to force young black girls to bring unwanted babies into the world who will be on welfare and likely be criminals. (As I remember, Steve Sailer has written a great deal about this side of abortion and on liberals’ support for abortion for this reason.)

As for your last point, I’m not aware that Jews themselves have abortions more than other groups. I don’t think abortion is a major factor in Jewish demographics.

Also, I just heard from a correspondent yesterday about an article (I haven’t yet seen it myself) which says that many New Yorkers, including, presumably Jews, have been having larger families since 9/11. The demographic doom and gloomers, e.g. Buchanan and Steyn, are (as I have said many times) mechanical thinkers glomming onto a too-simple, too-deterministic explanation for our troubles. They miss the fundamental and obvious fact that things always change.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 08, 2011 04:33 PM | Send