I don’t see anything shocking, appalling or horrible in the following story. All that happened is that four students got caught saying out loud what most people think (they make choices based on their group interests). It seems to me that self-interested Muslims are going to be anti-Jewish, just as self-interested Jews are going to be anti-Muslim. Jews are less likely to say this out loud because Jews have high average IQs and see more clearly the future consequences of their words and deeds.
I don’t think Muslims hate Jews any more than Jews hate Muslims but the groups tend to show their hatred differently. Jews don’t behead a lot of people or burn them in cages. Jews act more like the highly verbal group that they are and Muslims act according to their history, culture and IQ.
Different groups have different interests. Muslims and Arabs have strong incentives for hating Jews and vice versa.
I think it is axiomatic to expect that an identifying and ethnically active person is going to be more likely to vote in according with his group’s interests and to have less concern for outsiders and for the disinterested perspective.
As for the charge of dual loyalties, most American Jews are far more concerned about America than Israel. On the other hand, there are a minority of American Jews who are zealous about Israel. I think many American Gentiles wished that these American Jews had dual loyalties. For these Jews, there’s nothing dual about their loyalty to Jews and to the Jewish state. It is obvious that WASPs have a stronger relationship, on average, to loyalty oaths and to their nation state than do members of tribes in the diaspora. That doesn’t make Jews or Muslims or blacks perfidious. It just means minorities tend to have a more ambivalent relationship with a state than does the majority.
Adam Nagourney turns in a typical Adam Nagourney piece for the New York Times:
LOS ANGELES — It seemed like routine business for the student council at the University of California, Los Angeles: confirming the nomination of Rachel Beyda, a second-year economics major who wants to be a lawyer someday, to the council’s Judicial Board.
Until it came time for questions.
“Given that you are a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community,” Fabienne Roth, a member of the Undergraduate Students Association Council, began, looking at Ms. Beyda at the other end of the room, “how do you see yourself being able to maintain an unbiased view?”
For the next 40 minutes, after Ms. Beyda was dispatched from the room, the council tangled in a debate about whether her faith and affiliation with Jewish organizations, including her sorority and Hillel, a popular student group, meant she would be biased in dealing with sensitive governance questions that come before the board, which is the campus equivalent of the Supreme Court.
The discussion, recorded in written minutes and captured on video, seemed to echo the kind of questions, prejudices and tropes — particularly about divided loyalties — that have plagued Jews across the globe for centuries, students and Jewish leaders said.
My impression of UCLA student politics when I was there in 1980-82 was that it was basically ethnic politics with training wheels. An Asian named Sam Law was elected student body president, running largely, as I recall, on a platform of being Asian. I mean, what else is there to run on in student council elections?
…So this Jewish activist had her approval delayed by other ethnic and ideological activists for 40 minutes, and the other activists have been apologizing ever since … not exactly the Dreyfus Affair…
So, should Jews try to tone down black and gay victimist triumphalism, or try to top it by emphasizing their victimization?
Part of the ongoing liberal crack-up unleashed by the Democratic re-election campaign in 2012 and exposed by the Democratic defeat in 2014 is the increasing anxiety felt by the single most important swing group in the country: ethnocentric liberal Jews…
We hear a lot about swing voters, but it’s usually an overblown concept. Some Jews aren’t going to swing: Noam Chomsky won’t. But Jews with a healthy, natural regard for their ethnic group can and have swung before and may do it again as they sense that the winds blowing on the Left are not good for the Jews. Obviously, the number of votes is unimportant, but not money, media influence, and general argumentative intensity.
On the other hand, it’s not hard for Jews to get other Jews worked up into “anguished discussions” over how great-grandma couldn’t get into the snippy WASP sorority and great-grandpa couldn’t get into the Los Angeles Country Club, and the real enemy is, as always, Haven Monahan.
UCLA Students
Comments to Steve Sailer:
* Asking whether a Jew might favor other Jews = anti-Semitic Nazi Hitler
Assuming a white goy will discriminate against nonwhites and/or Jews = normal and good.
* The victimization Olympics were never about compassion in the first place. It’s about distinguishing oneself from the unwashed masses. The only way out is making wallowing in one’s victimization passe. This appears to be Steve’s strategy.
* This little tempest in a teapot has “upended” UCLA. How many students at a big state U pay attention to student government? How many even know the names of the people running for student council? This sounds like an exercise in ego-stroking by self-absorbed narcissists.
Student councils, by the way, seem to attract the busy-body activist mentality – parasites-in-training who will go on to occupy the various political-commissar jobs that now abound in government agencies and large corporations.
* As a Jewish American, I’ve often — carefully and very gently — suggested that we Jews should stay out of the American Victim Sweepstakes because it’s demeaning and immoral. I have a feeling that a lot of Jewish Americans agree with me, but — to purloin one of Steve’s phrases — we don’t “control the megaphone.”
(For self-preservation, I pretty much kept my mouth shut about that Netanyahu idiocy in Congress this week.)
Campus politics haven’t changed much anywhere. In college, I ran for student government president on the platform of dissolving student government and refunding student activity fees. The handful of libertarian students voted for me. The black candidate ran on the platform “I’m black,” which got him the support of the few black students who voted. The winning candidate ran on the platform “I’m a Delt,” which garnered him all the Delta Tau Delta votes. Current American politics seems to be campus politics writ large, with an extra dash of corruption from Wall Street and a hobby of blowing stuff up all over the world.
* Roth is Swiss-German and an international student from Switzerland.
I doubt she thought she was being politically incorrect or uncouth. Germans tend to be very blunt and matter of fact when speaking compared to Americans and Anglophones.
Most American students, of whatever background, in that sort of environment would hesitate to be so direct because it sounds rude to American ears.
* The names of the 4 that voted against the Jewish girl, from their “apology” letter:
Manjot Singh
Sofia Moreno Haq
Fabienne Roth
Negeen Sadeghi-Movahed
2 seconds…is the amount of time it will take the average iSteve reader to answer the following question:
Which one of those names was mentioned in the NY Times article?
Those four names are the story.
* UCLA and other public universities in California are a perfect storm: Muslims driving hard-left stuff against Jews. There is no place for Jewish students with any visible part of Jewish identity: names, Sabbath Observance, etc. without constant harassment. Muslims like their Jihad very, very much, and while they may not go full Chechen they are quite adept at lower levels of jihad.
There are a lot of Jews in the entertainment industry, and increasingly those Jews are going to be coming full Titanic/Iceberg encounter with the force of Muslims in the Universities feeding into entertainment. For example, lets say a Muslim producer on a TV show (there as part of Diversity outreach) vetoes publicly (because that’s what Muslims do — they like a public Jihad not smoke signals in the lands of the Kuffar) hiring a Jewish actor — because he’s Jewish.
What can Jews do? According to PC and Diversity Dogma, discrimination by say, Muslims cannot and does not exist. Anymore than White working class pre-teen girls in Rotherham or Oxfordshire ever get raped and forced into prostitution. Officially you can’t notice.
Anti-Jewish UCLA/UC sentiment is driven 100% by Muslims. Whatever quotas great-grandpa faced by WASPS (which in fact did exist, FWIW) 70 years ago is irrelevant to not getting hired because a Muslim producer is on jihad again, or a mid-level Hollywood Jewish entertainment figure has his kid harassed at UC for being Jewish. [Muslims trump Jews in Diversity and PC status hierarchies, just as Blacks and Hispanics do.]
* I wish my Southern brethren would stop offering to pony up billions in spending and fight Israel’s wars for them, so Israelis wouldn’t have the distasteful experience of having to acknowledge such icky, tacky people. It must be so unpleasant for them.
We are in no position to defend the student council for its conduct, but Nagourney undermines his credibility by going on to the following astounding assertion:
“The session… has served to spotlight what appears to be a surge of hostile sentiment directed against Jews at many campuses in the country, often a byproduct of animosity toward the policies of Israel.”
Let’s repeat that phrase: “what appears to be a surge of hostile sentiment directed against Jews at many campuses in the country.” That’s a very large claim, and the piece offers no evidence for “a surge.” None. If there really is “a surge” of Jew-hating bigotry, why isn’t the Times sending its army of correspondents out nationwide to track down this awful trend?
The Times does not cite any other example of alleged hostility against Jews besides the UCLA case.
