“Extending the franchise to voters who are subject to monthly bouts of hysteria was the beginning of the end for Western Man and Western Civilization.” (Chaim Amalek)
More than a decade ago, I dated this ex-porn star and she simply voted for every woman on the ballot.
Most women personalize their decision process on election day to such a degree that they seem to be voting more in response to what happened to them in middle school than to actual political conditions.
Chaim Amalek:
A woman should be so consumed with thoughts of how best to raise her kids and please her husband that she has neither time for nor interest in political matters. Let the men deal with those things.
No one can argue with the following, not even feminists: women voting has feminized politics. Can this genie ever be stuffed back into the bottle and the bottle plugged up?
I stand ready to stuff a cork into the neck of any bottle whose emanations threaten Western interests. Ladies, if you are in need of my corking services, “he-nay-nee” (here I am).
Posted inFeminism|Comments Off on The End Of Western Civilization
I went to http://www.wiesenthal.com/ and put “Communism” in the search box and found 30 results. I then put in “Nazi” and got 1479 results.
Only two of the results for “communism” contained the word in the headline. Those press releases blasted attempts to equate Nazism and Communism because it should be obvious to all right thinking people that the Nazis were infinitely worse, even though the Communists murdered far more people.
In other words, the Simon Wiesenthal Center cares little about the murder of tens of millions of people for Communism. Why? Because Jews played a significant role in many of these genocides and that is inconvenient to the Narrative about Jewish victimhood.
I wouldn’t care that the Simon Wiesenthal Center was the high IQ Jewish equivalent of the ethnic activism of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton if the SWC would only admit who they are and drop their pose of caring about universal morality.
In 1969, Jewish sociologist Nathan Glazer published an essay “The New Left and the Jews” in the Jewish Journal of Sociology (11:120-132), estimating that about one million American Jews were socialists or members of the Community Party of the USA prior to 1950.
Jerusalem, July 16, 2009
Wiesenthal Center Blasts Baltic Campaign to Equate Communism and Nazism; Calls for International Effort to Thwart Initiatives That Distort Holocaust History
The Simon Wiesenthal Center today blasted the current campaign conducted by the Baltic countries of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to grant Communist crimes equal recognition to the crimes of the Holocaust . In an op-ed article featured in the Israeli English-language daily Jerusalem Post, the Center’s Israel director Holocaust historian Dr. Efraim Zuroff severely criticized the recently-intensified campaign by the Baltic republics and other post-Communist governments to mark August 23 as a joint remembrance day for the victims of Nazism and Communism, and to establish an “Institute of European Memory and Conscience” as a museum, research and educational center on totalitarian crimes in order to “reunite [European] history [and] recognize communism and Nazism as a common legacy.”
According to Zuroff:
“While one can sympathize with the legitimate desire of the victims of Communism for recognition, there is nothing innocent about this declaration which clearly seeks to undermine the current status of the Holocaust as a unique historical tragedy and relativize it to divert attention from the extensive collaboration of Balts with the Nazis and the abysmal failure of all their governments since independence to adequately deal with these issues.
“It is clear that the time has come to start paying attention to this insidious campaign being conducted primarily by Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to alleviate their guilt for Holocaust crimes and displace the Shoa from its unique status. If not, we are likely to soon find ourselves facing the cancellation of the numerous important achievements of the past decade in Holocaust commemoration and education and forced to fight an uphill battle against a new and distorted World War II historical narrative.”
July 28, 2009
WIESENTHAL CENTER HARSHLY CRITICIZES ESTONIAN EFFORTS TO EQUATE COMMUNISM AND NAZISM AND GLORIFY ESTONIAN SS LEGION AT LAUNCH IN TALLINN OF RUSSIAN-LANGUAGE EDITION OF BOOK ON ANTI-SEMITISM IN HONOR OF SIMON WIESENTHAL
Tallinn-The Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a harsh criticism of recent Estonian efforts to equate Communism and Nazism and to glorify the fighters of the Estonian SS Legion which fought alongside the Nazis, at a launch here late yesterday of a new Russian language edition of Anti-Semitism, an anthology of articles published in honor of the late Smon Wiesenthal by the Russian Holocaust Center and edited by Ilya Altman, Shimon Samuels and Mark Weitzman. In a speech by Israel director Holocaust historian Dr. Efraim Zuroff, he noted that the prevalent tendency in Estonia to glorify those who bore arms in Waffen-SS units and to consider them as fighters for Estonian independence rather that Nazi collaborators was a distortion of World War II history. Zuroff also pointed to the recent gathering of SS veterans held this past Sunday in Estonia and which was attended by SS veterans from other Europan countries in which such events are illegal, as another example of a failure by the Estonian authorities to accurately identify the criminals and villains of World War II.
According to Zuroff:
“The consistent failure of the Estonian authorities to prosecute any local Nazi war criminals, in blatant contradiction to their enormous efforts to bring Communist criminals to justice, and the continuing glorification of Estonian SS veterans, combined with the recent campaign to equate Communism and Nazism make Estonia a leader in Holocaust distortion. As a member of both the European Union and NATO, it is incumbent upon Estonia to reassess its current policies in this regard and to restore historical accuracy to the presentation of the events of World War II. Only by facing its bloody Holocaust past will Estonia ever be able to truly overcome its record of collaboration with the Nazis and the active participation of numerous Estonians in the crimes of the Shoa both in Estonia and outside its borders.”
Posted inCommunism, Jews, Nazi, Simon Wiesenthal|Comments Off on The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Concern With The Victims Of Communism
Apparently, white wealthy and educated elites don’t like Christians, but the authors of this new book don’t say how many of those elites are Jews.
I don’t regard Jews as evil when they hate Christians and I don’t regard Christians as evil when they hate Jews and I don’t regard Muslims as evil for hating Jews and Christians and I don’t regard Jews and Christians as evil for hating Muslims. Different groups have different interests. The stronger your in-group identity, the more likely you are to hate out-groups. If you are a strongly identifying Jew, Christian, white or black, you are likely to have contempt for outsiders.
I don’t believe in the existence of such sins as racism, bigotry and anti-Semitism. Is America suffering from a mental illness when it competes with China for influence in Asia? Was America suffering from a mental illness when it subjugated the Indians and thrashed Mexico in war to take more land for itself? Are Mexicans insane for coming to America and remaking the country in their own image?
Here’s an interview with the author of a new book on hatred of Christians.
CP: Why did you, and co-author David Williamson, want to research and write about anti-Christian hostility?
Yancey: There is a lot of literature on hostility toward many different groups but just about none on hostility toward Christians. Yet when we collected qualitative data from cultural progressive activists we quickly saw some of the unnecessary vitriol and fears within many of our respondents. We also saw the social status of those who exhibited this hatred and many of them would be in positions that allowed them to at least subtly act on their anger and fears. That motivated us to take a more systematic look at Christianophobia and speculate on how this phenomenon influences certain social aspects in the United States.
Another aspect that drove me to work on this project was that while I consistently saw evidence of Christianophobia in other areas of my life and in our society, unlike other types of intolerances, those who exhibited Christianophobia do not tend to think that they are intolerant. Usually those who do not like blacks or Muslims admit that they are intolerant but simply try to justify their intolerance. Those with Christianophobia tend to deny that they are intolerant but rather that they are fairly interpreting social reality. Envisioning themselves as fair and free of intolerance allows them to blame those they detest rather than recognize how their emotions have distorted their intellectual judgments.
By documenting just how hateful some of the attitudes are toward Christians, and who tends to have such hateful attitudes, I hope to bring Christianophobia into the light so that we, as a society, can discuss this social problem and how we might address bigotry in all of its myriad forms.
CP: Demographically, you found that Christianophobes are mostly white, wealthy, well-educated and non-religious. Is the fact that this is mostly an elite group good or bad for Christians? In other words, given a choice, would you rather be hated by elites or non-elites?
Yancey: Obviously all things being equal, an elite individual can do more damage to a person than a non-elite individual. But this does not mean that Christians have it worse than all other groups. We also have to factor in the number of people with Christianophobia. For example, more people have hostility toward atheists than toward Christians, but those individuals do not tend to be white or highly educated. Thus, they do not have the level of per-capita power of those who do not like Christians.
So is a group worse off if more people do not like them or if those who do not like them have a lot of social power, but there are fewer of them? Context matters to answer such a question. If you want to get elected to political office, then atheists are at a disadvantage since more people do not like them. But if you want to get a higher education, then you will run into a lot more people with power who hate Christians than who hate atheists.
Posted inChristianity|Comments Off on Does Anyone Care About Hatred Of Christians?
In my experience, Elisa Albert was furious before she ever gave birth. Having a baby was just one new way for her to claim victim status.
WP: “By immersing us in Ari’s bottomless need and pain, Albert creates a deeply resonant and empathetic reading experience, even as Ari’s toxicity dares us to care about her. The novel, with its claustrophobic focus on the corrosive workings of Ari’s mind, is exhilarating and exhausting in equal measure. Albert is virtuosic in capturing and maintaining barely concealed fury. In its unremitting coarseness and ferocity, her language takes the sentimental platitudes that all mothers are fed (lies!) and spits them back with purifying fury.”
Rage seems to be the underlying theme of Elisa Albert’s ouevre.
Posted inFeminism|Comments Off on WP: A mother’s fury: ‘After Birth,’ a novel by Elisa Albert
I’d like to think that my blog does the same thing as the rebbe in this story. I suspect that the ADL, SWC and SPLC in this situation would have put out press releases and agitated to have the anti-Semites lose their jobs. The Hasidic approach was different. Here’s a selection:
In the midst of this exuberant and elated singing and dancing, which carried everyone present to the heights of joyous ecstasy, the rebbe suddenly called out, “The time has come. Let’s go!” He got up and led the Chassidim and the musicians outside the synagogue, and they all piled into wagons and started riding through the streets—with the musicians playing and the Chassidim singing—right into the gentile neighborhood.
Dinov was a tiny town; they reached the gentile neighborhood in a few minutes. The rebbe had them drive right up to the tavern where the anti-Semites were doing their plotting, and the Chassidim climbed down from the wagons and followed the rebbe into the tavern, all of them singing and dancing in joyous abandon.
The peasants were by this time a little drunk and had begun to curse the Jews. But just then Rebbe David walked in the door, holy and pure and shining like an angle of G‑d. He walked right up to the leader of the anti-Semites, took his hand, and started to dance with him. Then each chassid took the hand of an anti-Semite, and they all began to dance in great joy. The whole room became filled with holiness and sweetness.
Posted inAnti-Semitism, Chabad|Comments Off on When the Chassidic Rebbe Danced with the Antisemites
What grabs my attention here is that I have always thought of the pro-Israel crowd as the good guys and the anti-Israel crowd as the bad guys. So while I still think of Israel as the most advanced country in the Middle East, and the one I most identify with and care about, I am currently enjoying reading perspectives I’ve previously ignored.
I started college hating communism, and then I tried out a flirtation with Marxism for a couple of years, before finally finding Judaism as my worldview. I have a personality that sometimes enjoys looking at things from the other person’s point of view.
Mondoweiss (2006–present) is a news-centric blog that is co-edited by journalists Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz. It is a part of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change.[6] According to the editors, Mondoweiss is “a news website devoted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective”. They also state that they “maintain this blog because of 9/11, Iraq, Gaza, the Nakba, the struggling people of Israel and Palestine, and our Jewish background”. Its founder describes himself as a progressive and anti-Zionist.
Many Mondoweiss readers care about events in Israel/Palestine because they are Palestinian or Jewish, or are consistently engaged in activism for social change there. While I too hope fervently for developments in the region that will result in greater freedom, rights and security for all residents, I value Mondoweiss in another way as well: as a scholar of U.S. foreign policy.
I have spent 35 years studying American foreign policy: doing research, reading and writing in an effort to understand what leads to war and its human cost. The information available through Mondoweiss is vital in illuminating how over several decades, U.S. policy in the region has served neither American interests nor those of Israel—let alone Palestinian sovereignty or even basic human rights.
The United States has a “special relationship” with Israel that has no parallel in modern history; which means those two countries matter greatly for each other’s foreign policy. Mondoweiss is enormously important to me—and many thousands of other people as well—because it is one of the few venues where Israel is discussed openly and critically.
As I can tell you from personal experience, it used to be nearly impossible to publish anything in the mainstream media that was even mildly critical of Israeli behavior or America’s relationship with Israel. And if you did, some of Israel’s supporters would immediately slander you as an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew. This well-orchestrated silencing effort was not only antithetical to liberal values; it also did great harm to US foreign policy and did Israel no favors either.
Criticizing Israel or its American lobby is mortal combat for intellectuals, journalists, and policymakers. We have all paid a serious price for doing so. Some valiant individuals have even lost their jobs, others their reputations. Mondoweiss has been one of the few places where one could speak the truth despite the professional risks. It was the first serious web site that evaluated Israeli policy in an open-minded and often critical fashion, discussed the Israel lobby’s influence, and challenged the reigning narrative about Israel. Other web sites followed in its wake, but Mondoweiss cleared the way.
And it has not stood still over the years. In fact, Mondoweiss’s coverage gets better every year, which is why it is now an indispensable source of information for anyone who wants to understand US-Israeli relations. It has also brought ideas into the mainstream media that were otherwise marginalized. If there were no Mondoweiss, public debate on these vital matters would be much the poorer.
As I have argued elsewhere, the United States is in deep trouble in the Middle East and has a serious terrorism problem in good part because of its unconditional support for Israel’s policies in the Occupied Territories. Anyone who cares about improving America’s standing in the Middle East must be deeply grateful to Mondoweiss’s editors for all they have done—and continue to do—to encourage honest and open discourse on these critical issues.
Academic freedom, journalistic freedom and fact-based policy analysis are fundamentally intertwined. If you value the pursuit of truth as a tool in developing rational, humane policy, please join me in supporting Mondoweiss. We must provide the resources to keep this site performing its essential public service.
Sincerely,
John Mearsheimer
R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, the University of Chicago
Tragedy begins with a forceful denial of perpetual peace in favor of perpetual struggle, with great powers primed for offense, because they can never be sure how much military capacity they will need in order to survive over the long run. Because every state is forever insecure, Mearsheimer counsels, the internal nature of a state is less important as a factor in its international behavior than we think. “Great powers are like billiard balls that vary only in size,” he intones. In other words, Mearsheimer is not one to be especially impressed by a state simply because it is a democracy. As he asserts early on, “Whether China is democratic and deeply enmeshed in the global economy or autocratic and autarkic will have little effect on its behavior, because democracies care about security as much as non-democracies do.” Indeed, a democratic China could be more technologically innovative and economically robust, with consequently more talent and money to lavish on its military. (A democratic Egypt, for that matter, could create greater security challenges for the United States than an autocratic Egypt. Mearsheimer is not making moral judgments. He is merely describing how states interact in an anarchic world.)
…States take up human rights only if doing so does not contradict the pursuit of power.
…“To argue that expansion is inherently misguided,” Mearsheimer writes, “implies that all great powers over the past 350 years have failed to comprehend how the international system works. This is an implausible argument on its face.” The problem with the “moderation is good” thesis is that “it mistakenly equates [so-called] irrational expansion with military defeat.” But hegemony has succeeded many times. The Roman Empire in Europe, the Mughal Dynasty in the Indian subcontinent, and the Qing Dynasty in China are some of his examples, even as he mentions how Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Adolf Hitler all came close to success. “Thus, the pursuit of regional hegemony is not a quixotic ambition,” though no state has yet achieved regional hegemony in the Eastern Hemisphere the way the United States achieved it in the Western Hemisphere.
The edgiest parts of Tragedy are when Mearsheimer presents full-bore rationales for the aggression of Wilhelmine Germany, Nazi Germany, and imperial Japan.
“The German decision to push for war in 1914 was not a case of wacky strategic ideas pushing a state to start a war it was sure to lose. It was … a calculated risk motivated in large part by Germany’s desire to break its encirclement by the Triple Entente, prevent the growth of Russian power, and become Europe’s hegemon.”
As for Hitler, he “did indeed learn from World War I.” Hitler learned that Germany could not fight on two fronts at the same time, and he would have to win quick, successive victories, which, in fact, he achieved early in World War II. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was a calculated risk to avoid abandoning the Japanese empire in China and Southeast Asia in the face of a U.S. embargo on imported energy and machine tools.
…Mearsheimer is no warmonger or militarist. His job as a political scientist is not to improve the world, but to say what he thinks is going on in it. And he thinks that while states rightly yearn for a values-based foreign policy, the reality of the anarchic international system forces them to behave according to their own interests.
…Mearsheimer tells me that the U.S. was right to enter World War II very late; that way it paid a smaller “blood price” than the Soviet Union. “Before D-Day, 93 percent of all German casualties had occurred on the eastern front,” he says, adding that the devastation of the Soviet Union helped the U.S. in the Cold War to follow…
Truly, Mearsheimer’s theory of international relations allowed him to get both Gulf wars exactly right—and he’s one of the few people to do so. As a good offshore balancer, Mearsheimer supported the First Gulf War against Saddam Hussein, in 1991. By occupying Kuwait, Iraq had positioned itself as a potential hegemon in the Persian Gulf, justifying U.S. military action. Moreover, as Mearsheimer asserted in several newspaper columns, the United States could easily defeat the Iraqi military. This assertion made him something of a lone wolf in academic circles, where many were predicting a military quagmire or calamity. The Democratic Party, to which most scholars subscribed, overwhelmingly opposed the war. Mearsheimer’s confidence that fighting Saddam would be a “cakewalk” was based in part on his trips to Israel in the 1970s and ’80s, when he was studying conventional military deterrence. The Israelis had told him that the Iraqi army, mired as it was in Soviet doctrine, was one of the Arab world’s worst militaries.
But Mearsheimer’s finest hour was the run-up to the Second Gulf War against Saddam, in 2003. This time, offshore balancing did not justify a war. Iraq was already contained and was not on the brink of becoming the hegemon of the Persian Gulf. And Mearsheimer felt strongly that a new war was a bad idea. He joined with Harvard’s Stephen Walt and the University of Maryland’s Shibley Telhami to lead a group of 33 scholars, many of them card-carrying academic realists, to sign a declaration opposing the war. On September 26, 2002, they published an advertisement on the New York Times op-ed page that cost $38,000, and they paid for it themselves. The top of the ad ran, WAR WITH IRAQ IS NOT IN AMERICA’S NATIONAL INTEREST. Among the bullet points was this: “Even if we win easily, we have no plausible exit strategy. Iraq is a deeply divided society that the United States would have to occupy and police for many years to create a viable state.”
Mearsheimer opposed not only the Iraq War, but also the neoconservative vision of regional transformation, which, as he tells me, was the “polar opposite” of offshore balancing…
During the buildup to the Iraq War, Mearsheimer and Walt began work on what would become a London Review of Books article and later The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. (The Atlantic had originally commissioned the piece, only to reject it owing to a profound disagreement between the editors and the authors over its objectivity.) In some respects, The Israel Lobby reads as an appendix to The Tragedy of Great Power Politics—almost a case study of how great powers should not act. Many of those loosely associated with the lobby supported the Iraq War, which Mearsheimer saw as a diversion from the contest with China. The so-called special relationship between the United States and Israel, by further entangling the United States in the problems of the Middle East, contradicted the tenets of offshore balancing. And proponents of the special relationship have routinely justified it by citing Israel’s status as a stable democracy in the midst of unstable authoritarian states—but that internal attribute, in Mearsheimer’s view, is largely irrelevant…
Nevertheless, The Israel Lobby contains a fundamental analytic truth that is undeniable: the United States and Israel, like most states, have some different interests that inevitably push up against any enduring special relationship, especially because their security situations are so vastly different. To start with, the United States is a continent-size country protected by oceans, while Israel is a small country half a world away, surrounded by enemy states. Because the geographical situations of the U.S. and Israel are so dissimilar, their geopolitical interests can never completely overlap in the way that Israel’s most fervent supporters contend. (Iran’s nuclear program is a far more acute threat to Israel than it is to the United States.) “The fact that Israel is a democracy is important,” Mearsheimer tells me. “But it is not sufficient to justify the terms of the special relationship. We should treat Israel as a normal country, like we treat Britain or Japan.”
What particularly exasperates Mearsheimer and Walt is the lack of conditionality in the special relationship. They admit that making American support for Israel “more conditional would not remove all sources of friction” between Arab countries and the United States; nor do they deny “the presence of genuine anti-Semitism in various Arab countries.” But they cannot condone a situation in which the U.S. has, over the decades, given Israel more than $180 billion in economic and military assistance, “the bulk of it comprising direct grants rather than loans,” and yet can barely achieve modest negotiating goals such as getting Israel to stop expanding West Bank settlements for 90 days, let alone dismantle them, even though the Palestinians have been willing at times to make major concessions. (And the U.S. has been willing to throw in major sweeteners in the form of advanced military hardware.) Mearsheimer and Walt repeatedly say in their book that they believe the U.S. should militarily defend Israel if it is in mortal danger, but that the Israelis must be much more cooperative in light of all the aid they get. But, as they also argue, the reason the Israelis are not more cooperative is that in the final analysis, they don’t have to be—which, in turn, is because of the pro-Israel lobby.
… Within media ranks, The Israel Lobby has delegitimized Mearsheimer. Inside the service academy where I taught for two years, in the think-tank world where I work, and in various government circles with which I am acquainted, Mearsheimer is quietly held in higher regard because of familiarity with his other books, but the controversy (and its echoes last fall) has surely hurt him.
Posted inIraq, John J. Mearsheimer|Comments Off on Are Democracies More Likely To Be Peace-Loving?
LA TIMES: Huntington Beach city leaders have imposed a 45-day moratorium of new massage parlors in the beach town after the number of massage business skyrocketed from eight to 74 in a five-year span.
The moratorium approved this week takes effect immediately and is designed to give the city and its police department time to develop a new massage parlor ordinance and crack down on crime sometimes associated with the businesses, such as prostitution and human trafficking.
How long will our government stay silent about the shocking disparity? It’s larger than the male-female earnings gap.
Haaretz: “According to that survey, 46 percent of American Jews had household incomes of more than $100,000, and 12 percent take in $75,000-$99,000 a year. Only 18 percent of U.S. households had incomes of more than $100,000, and an additional 13 percent showed incomes of $75,000-$99,000.”
Why does the black-white achievement gap get so much attention when the Jew-goy gap is just as large?
David Tainsh: “Does the Jewish community fully accept you Luke or would they rather you convert to something else as you decrease the average Jewish income?”
According to Wikipedia: “As of 2009, the median weekly wage for African American and Hispanic workers was about 65 percent and 61 percent that of White workers, respectively. Asian workers’ median wage was about 101 percent that of white workers.”
This gap can be accounted for by racial differences in average IQ and reflects universal patterns. There’s nothing uniquely American about America’s race problems. They simply reflect what’s happening everywhere with the different races. There’s no country where blacks achieve more in school and at work than do asians and whites. In every country in the world with large numbers of different races, Jews earn more than Asians who earn more than whites who earn more than Latinos who earn more than blacks. In every country where there are a lot of blacks, they have more crime and less family stability than do non-blacks.
Posted inAmerica, Blacks, Crime, Jews, Race|Comments Off on What About The Earnings Disparity Between Jews & Gentiles?
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.
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.
Posted inAnti-Semitism, Islam, Israel, Jews|Comments Off on NYT: In U.C.L.A. Debate Over Jewish Student, Echoes on Campus of Old Biases
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