A Brooklyn-based Jewish newspaper apologized for a column that was sharply critical of the haredi Orthodox community and fired its author.
The Jewish Press dismissed Yori Yanover, its Israel-based online editor, after he published an article Monday with the headline “50 Thousand Haredim March So Only Other Jews Die in War.”
Yanover was writing about a mass prayer rally of haredi Jews in Manhattan on Sunday against a proposed Israeli law to draft yeshiva students.
“They flooded downtown Manhattan with the anti-draft for Haredim message: everybody else is welcome to get themselves killed,” Yanover wrote. “What was even more astonishing was their honesty regarding the bankruptcy of their entire school of faith and study.”
The Jewish Press removed the article from its website. The paper’s publishers, Jerry Greenwald and Naomi Mauer, issued a statement saying the paper “apologizes to its readers for the unfortunate Op-Ed article, along with its incendiary and insulting headline.”
According to the statement, the article “was posted without authorization and approval of The Jewish Press newspaper” and “the sentiments expressed in the article and headline do not represent these of The Jewish Press, its officers, editors, and staff.”
In a letter to The Jewish Press posted Tuesday on his Facebook page, Yanover said he had authorization to publish the article.
Posted inYori Yanover|Comments Off on Yori Yanover Launches The Jewish Independent
Why is this story getting so much media attention? Because it is compelling. It is great human drama and it exemplifies a way of thinking that half of society regards as evil — racism.
Steve Sailer points out how the New York Times wants to paint Donald Sterling as “Southern” rather than as “Jewish”:
… For decades it was perfectly acceptable to let him run his team like “a Southern plantationlike structure,” as the former Clippers general manager Elgin Baylor once charged in a lawsuit. …
That suit also accused Sterling of running his franchise with the mentality of a Southern plantation owner, as a man who preferred a team of “poor black boys from the South” who were “playing for a white coach.”
Baylor lost the lawsuit, but among the most shocking parts of it — just like the most shocking aspect of the most recent accusations against Sterling — was how long Baylor put up with “the Southern plantation” mentality before standing up for himself.
I suspect that half of society has sympathy for Donald Sterling’s remarks, whether or not they are conscious of it. Very few whites and asians, despite their protestations to the contrary, will live near many blacks and latinos and they do not want their kids to go to school with many black and latino kids and they do not want to socialize with many blacks and latinos and they do not want to work around many blacks and latinos. That’s the way whites and asians around the world choose to live their lives and the tiny number of whites and asians who operate differently in this regard are statistically insignificant.
Race is an open sore in America because we have so many races here. Whenever there are multiple races in one area, there is conflict and tragedy. The races don’t get along. They never have. When multiple races are in one area, they compete until one race comes out on top and sets the rules for the rest who lump it or leave.
This Donald Sterling story is delicious because we get to talk about things that are of visceral interest to most people but are not acceptable to talk about in public such as not wanting blacks around in your real life because they commit so many crimes.
This conflict is so Jewish. I’ve met many Jews who are just like these characters Donald Sterling and Siamak Ebrahim Nehoray. Many Jews I’ve known worry much less about public propriety than do the WASPs I’ve known. When you look at those who get arrested for adventurous tactics on Wall Street, it is rarely WASPs. About half the time, in my memory, it is Jews and the rest are often Indians and other minorities.
Sterling made much of his money as a trial lawyer, another Jewish occupational specialty. He apparently gives away vast sums. Jews are generous people. And he wants to be noticed for his charity, another Jewish trait. (Yes, most people want to be noticed for their good deeds, but Jews tend to have less shame in pursuing this than non-Jews, particularly WASPs.)
Most Jews are nothing like Donald Sterling, but about 10% of the Jews I’ve met remind me of him in their shamelessness (while no WASP I’ve known has reminded me of Donald Sterling). Why are they shameless? Because they don’t care what the goyim thinks of them. Hostility to the majority culture has helped keep Jews intact as a unique group for thousands of years.
I don’t think Sterling is a horrible person. I think he’s crude and a self-made over-achiever who, at times, makes my skin crawl. His taped remarks splashed all over TMZ, however, don’t make me think any worse of him, just as I don’t necessarily think badly of anyone who says extreme things in private while in great emotional distress.
I don’t think Jews are better or worse than other people. I think Jews are different. In some ways, they are different good and in other ways they are different bad.
Donald Sterling discriminated in housing? So what. Almost all whites and asians discriminate in housing in that they won’t live around many blacks and latinos. All Jewish communities in the non-Jewish world are built with deliberate housing discrimination wherein Jews won’t sell to non-Jews in a particular neighborhood so that it can stay dominantly Jewish.
The more religious you get in Jewish life, the more negative the view of blacks (in general, individual exceptions). The more traditional you get in any way of non-black life, the more negative the views of blacks.
One overlooked aspect of the remarkably tawdry Clippers Brouhaha is its personal injury/divorce lawyer flavor. That’s how Donald Sterling got his start, and he maintains the bulletproof ego of a sleazeball lawyer who knows it pays to advertise, no matter how badly. When he first bought the Clippers, he put up hundreds of billboards featuring a giant portrait — not of his best player, but of himself. He constantly runs poorly Photoshopped ads in the Los Angeles Times of himself accepting awards from civil rights organizations and other charities.
Via Kevin Drum, here’s Sterling’s latest of countless self-congratulatory LA Times ad.
Sterling’s mistress’s lawyer isn’t exactly Charles Evan Hughes, either.
Siamak Ebrahim Nehoray is a graduate of Memphis State (maybe he met some ballers there?) and the University of Laverne College of Law. He was suspended in 2004 by the state bar association for playing fast and loose with a small amount of a client’s funds.
Most Jews are not sleazy like these guys but there’s a shamelessness to their behavior that few WASPs could pull off.
If you give your typical Protestant a compliment, they will try to shrug it off. Oh no, not me, I’m a big sinner. Give a Jew a compliment, and he’ll ask for another one. Jews tend to feel great about themselves while Protestants believe they’re full of sin. I haven’t met many Jews who feel they are full of sin.
Jews tend to have more sex partners than do non-Jews (see the 1994 University of Chicago sex survey, the most comprehensive ever) and speak more matter of factly about the great human passions such as sex, money and the desire for honor and power.
Listen to the way Sterling talks about a hooker during a deposition. This is the type of frankness I’ve encountered among a significant number of Jews (a minority of all Jews, but still a large enough number to make an impression on me).
In my experience, Jewish life is 100x more likely to honor such sleazy characters as Donald Sterling than people who expose them through journalism, because journalists are poor and sleazy characters are often rich.
Talkshow host Larry King has been married eight time, often to non-Jews, and was honored by an Aish HaTorah banquet (while Aish HaTorah kicked me out in 1998 for blogging about the sleazy Jews of the porn industry). The lay leader of Aish HaTorah, Richard Horowitz, signed a few weeks ago an embarrassing consent decree with the SEC for wrongdoing. He still leads Aish HaTorah and his son Michael leads Adas Torah (despite an ongoing SEC investigation). You won’t lose most communal honor in Jewish life if you do white collar crime just so long as you donate lots of money to Jewish causes.
On his radio show today, Dennis Prager tells a self-described Torah-observant black non-Jew about Donald Sterling: “He’s a Jew, but he isn’t Jewish. He was born into a Jewish family. It’s not like he leads a Jewish life, not even talking morally, religiously, ethnically, anything. If he observes Torah, I will broadcast from your house for the next year and I will write a Torah with you.”
As first reported in these pages, Sterling initially denied under oath having an affair with Castro, but subsequently admitted to paying her for “sucking me all night long.” Sterling described Castro as a “total freak” and “piece of trash” whom he paid $500 per “trick.” Describing his relationship with Castro, Sterling testified, “It was purely sex for money, money for sex, sex for money, money for sex,” adding that the couple would have sex “all over my building, in my bathroom, upstairs, in the corner, in the elevator.”
A review of Sterling’s testimony offers further details of how, according to the wealthy businessman, he was victimized by a predatory, sex-crazed younger woman. Deposition highlights included:
* Sterling testified, “All this woman did was call me every other day and asked me if she could suck me, if she could come in and give me a trick or if she could lick me.”
* When asked about a trip he took to Paris and Rome with Castro, Sterling replied, “For sex. I travelled with her for sex.” Though he could not always perform due to “all of these nine pills a day,” Sterling noted, “But whenever we traveled anywhere on the trip, she kept a record. And she told me how much I owed her, and I paid her. I paid her for every time we ever fooled around.”
* Recalling that, “We went to Paris to have sex,” Sterling testified that Castro wanted to tryst in an airplane bathroom, but “I wasn’t physically able to.” Sterling and Castro were joined on that European trip by Castro’s mother, who flew to Italy on the businessman’s dime. After spending time with his mistress and her mom, Sterling testified that he met up with his wife for the remainder of his overseas vacation.
* Sterling, then nearly 70, was apparently irresistible to Castro: “Every time that girl saw me she grabbed my body. She wanted to pull something and have sex.”
* Testifying about having sex at Castro’s Los Angeles apartment, Sterling recalled, “The minute I walk in, she has got a dirty video on the TV, the filthiest, dirtiest, ugliest video. That is supposed to get me hot.” Sterling added that Castro told him the video was a gift from boxer Mike Tyson, whom she previously dated.
* As to whether he had asked Castro to speak with a doctor “about whether she could become pregnant,” Sterling bristled. “Here a man is having a relationship, sex for money with a woman. He is quietly concealing it from the world…It is ridiculous. It is ludicrous.”* On the transactional nature of his dealings with Castro, Sterling said, “I paid her $500 a trick. Every time she provided sex she got $500.”
* Castro was insatiable, Sterling claimed. “The woman wanted sex everywhere. She wanted it in the alley, in her car, in the elevator, in the upstairs seventh floor, in the bathroom.”
* Sterling–an exacting customer–made it clear that cash he gave Castro was not a “gift.” He testified, “I was paying her. It was in exchange for sex. It wasn’t a gift. I wasn’t giving her money without her performing something for me. And if it wasn’t good, I wouldn’t give her anything. It was money for sex. How can you say it was a gift? If a man has an affair with a prostitute, is that a gift? It is not a gift.” (9 pages)
It sounds like there’s a much more interesting story going on with the Donald T. Sterling donnybrook than anybody has been investigating yet. I don’t know how far this story might go, but it just might go all the way from Magic Johnson to somebody really interesting.
For years, I’ve been pointing out that much of the hoopla over racism and sexism isn’t actually about blacks or women or whatever. Instead, it serves as a cover story for ambitious, clever men to get what they want. For example, I’ve long been fascinated by how mortgage lenders like Angelo Mozilo, Roland Arnall, and Kerry Killinger used the rhetoric of the War on Racist Redlining to blow up the housing bubble.
Obsess over racism; pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!
But in the Sterling Story, who is The Man?
I’ll offer a theory about why the man might be Magic Johnson, who desperately wants Donald Sterling’s NBA franchise now that the Buss family says they won’t sell his old Lakers. But Magic was the front man in the purchase of the Los Angeles Dodgers two years ago. So it might be Magic’s big money backers in Guggenheim Partners.
Donald Sterling is like a combination of all of the Jewish characters on the TV show Ray Donovan.
I’m reading this Los Angeles Times profile of Sterling and he reminds me of some Jews I know:
* Very talkative and open about the natural passions such as sex that most non-Jews keep quiet about publicly.
* Not afraid to tell you about what he does for his people and how others don’t do for their people.
* “Sterling’s business savvy, intermittent charm and charitable contributions had insulated him from the consequences of his eccentric behavior.”
* “Sterling had worked hard to create his own reality, spending millions on newspaper ads promoting his real estate empire, his charity work and himself — even as his Clippers were perennial losers and he was accused in lawsuits of discriminating against minority tenants whose rent payments helped make him rich.” King Solomon was also a huge philanthropist and self-promoter. It’s a Jewish thing.
* Jews are rarely afraid to tell you about how great they are. WASPs, by contrast, are more reticent while Catholics fall in between. “In his penthouse office in Beverly Hills, Sterling often showed visitors a Louis XIV desk, paintings by Rembrandt and Renoir and centuries-old Chinese antiques. He eagerly dropped celebrity names, bragging that he bought properties from Elizabeth Taylor and John Wayne, and once boasted of plans to buy an NFL franchise.”
* Jews tend to be more physically demonstrative than non-Jews and to need less body space. They often don’t worry about such goyisha concerns as manners. “Some associates cringed at Sterling’s habit of invading their space.”
* Jews have a different relationship to blacks. “Sterling’s recent troubles began in April when his remarks about blacks became public.” On the one hand, they’ll be more likely to vote similarly to blacks and on the other hand, they’ll likely demonstrate more fear about the presence of blacks when walking down the street and they’ll move away more quickly if blacks take up residence in their community.
* Jews tend to be more open with their emotions than non-Jews and secular Jews in particular frequently demonstrate little shame about things that would appall the goyim. “Sterling never hid his infatuation with Stiviano, the personal assistant and caretaker he described as his lover. He stared at her. When they didn’t sit together, he waved. To some in the Clippers organization, the relationship created deep concern.”
* Jews are more verbally violent than non-Jews but less physically violent. “On a conference call in early June, Sterling threatened to “take out” his wife’s lawyer, Pierce O’Donnell. Hours later, Sterling left profane, threatening messages for the doctors who deemed him unfit.”
Posted inDonald Sterling, Jews|Comments Off on Steve Sailer: Sterling v. Nehoray: Battle of the lowlife lawyers
As part of Professor Jennifer Thompson’s American Jewish Experience, Introduction to Judaism, and Jewish Ethics and Society courses at CSUN, students conducted research on Jewish sites in the San Fernando and Conejo Valleys. The student projects involved historical research on the sites as well as in-person visits that allowed students to experience the sites first-hand. Besides the sources students discovered on their own, they consulted the chapter on Judaism from How to be a Perfect Stranger, and Bruce A. Phillips’s 2007 article “Faultlines: The Seven Socio-Ecologies of Jewish Los Angeles” in The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review (vol. 5).
You can learn more about the project and Jennifer Thompson from a March 2013 article in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal.
I notice Jews getting up in arms about John Kerry’s statements on Holocaust Memorial Day. I don’t see why the non-Jewish majority, even John Kerry, need to modify their behavior to accommodate any Jewish holiday or observance, including Holocaust Memorial Day, which traditional Orthodox Jews don’t observe anyway. So count me as non-offended.
I also don’t care about the statement that Israel is becoming an apartheid state. I don’t think it is an accurate charge, but I saw nothing evil in apartheid. It allowed for the most prosperous state in all of Africa.
It’s time the goyim buck up and stop worrying about minority sensibilities and instead pursue their group interest as passionately as Jews, blacks, Chinese and others tribesmen do. Jews, without shame, run a Jewish state of Israel and the goyim can lump it if they don’t like it. I think that’s great. I love Jewish nationalism.
I wish South Africans whites were as devoted to maintaining their white society as Jews are in carving out a Jewish state. I believe in nationalism for everyone.
Exclusive: Kerry Warns Israel Could Become ‘An Apartheid State’
The secretary of state said that if Israel doesn’t make peace soon, it could become ‘an apartheid state,’ like the old South Africa. Jewish leaders are fuming over the comparison.
If there’s no two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict soon, Israel risks becoming “an apartheid state,” Secretary of State John Kerry told a room of influential world leaders in a closed-door meeting Friday.
Senior American officials have rarely, if ever, used the term “apartheid” in reference to Israel, and President Obama has previously rejected the idea that the word should apply to the Jewish state. Kerry’s use of the loaded term is already rankling Jewish leaders in America—and it could attract unwanted attention in Israel, as well.
Sterling’s aged male ego was crushed by comments from other men, such as the Second Dennis, about how, when he’s not around, his girlfriend is sure seen a lot by herself in the company of famous studs like Matt Kemp. And, you know, Don, people will talk.
So, Sterling tells her to delete from her public Instagram various pictures of herself and some celebrity swordsmen in which he doesn’t appear.
At some point, maybe, she points out that all the guys Sterling is objecting to are black.
I have some thoughts on the news about Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team.
Here are the most incendiary of his comments to his girlfriend according to TMZ:
— “It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you’re associating with black people. Do you have to?” (3:30)
— “You can sleep with [black people]. You can bring them in, you can do whatever you want. The little I ask you is not to promote it on that … and not to bring them to my games.” (5:15)
— “I’m just saying, in your lousy f******* Instagrams, you don’t have to have yourself with, walking with black people.” (7:45)
— “…Don’t put him [Magic] on an Instagram for the world to have to see so they have to call me. And don’t bring him to my games.” (9:13)
* This should not be a news story. If people were honorable, they would not create news about a private conversation. Very few of us have not said things in private that are every bit as ugly as these comments sound.
If you listen to the recording, you hear that they come out of a painful romantic situation, that Sterling is being set up, and that he has nothing against blacks, he wishes everybody well, he just doesn’t want his girlfriend posting photographs of herself posing with blacks and he doesn’t want blacks at his games and he probably doesn’t want blacks living in his apartment buildings.
On July 14, 2010, I blogged:
On his radio show Monday, Dennis Prager says: “Mel Gibson is a troubled man. I have more pity to him than hate. I don’t think he is a danger to the country.
“I think there’s a larger issue than what a man thinks about minorities in his private conversations.
“Privacy. The notion that a man ranting at his girlfriend is now played for the world is very disturbing. The vast majority of human beings in the midst of terrible anger, particular in a relationship, say terrible things. It’s none of my business.
“Americans on the left are keen on the right to privacy when it comes to extinguishing the life of an unborn human but when it comes to the right of privacy of what you say privately in a phone call to your lover, then the left is thrilled to violate the most primal notions of privacy.”
“It’s a terrible thing that these private phone calls were recorded and then placed on the internet.”
* I’m not upset by Donald Sterling’s remarks. I would not be upset if he said the identical things about any other group including Jews, Muslims, Latinos, WASPs, Seventh-Day Adventists, etc. It is normal, perhaps even healthy, to prefer those who are genetically similar to you. If Sterling said we should lynch blacks or Jews or any group, that we should act with criminal malice against any group, then I would be upset with him and would want him punished.
* Whether it rests easy or not with our consciences, blacks (and to a lesser extent, latinos) overwhelmingly live on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum and so blacks (and to a lesser extent, latinos) will generally be viewed as low on the socio-economic scale until these facts of life change.
* Whether it rests easy or not with our consciences, blacks (and to a lesser extent, latinos) overwhelmingly have higher rates of social dysfunction (including out of wedlock births, crime rates, STD rates, low educational and economic and social achievement) than do whites and asians and hence whites and asians, despite their protests to the contrary, will usually choose to live in areas with few blacks and latinos and will prefer to socialize with few if any blacks and latinos.
* Just because most whites, latinos and asians don’t get caught making these kind of statements in recordings does not mean that they don’t live their lives according to everything Donald Sterling said in this nine minute recording.
* The reality is many, perhaps most, whites, asians and latinos are not going to be thrilled when their girlfriend (who’s trying to pass as white or latin) posts pictures of herself with black guys. Many, perhaps most, whites, asians and latinos feel outgunned by black men and their greatest nightmare for their girl is that she will get raped by black men (who rape white women at a rape more than 1000x time the rate that white men rape black women, which almost never happens).
Yaki emails: “Sterling is Jewish, and contributes to many Jewish causes, including Orthodox institutions like Yeshivah Gedolah. His real name is Tokowitz; Sterling is a name that he made up for himself.”
A successful Jew/schvartze hybrid would totally dominate the planet. It would bring about the final enslavement of the White Race.
Yiidden and shvartzes. A History. Someone should write that book. Yidden love colored folk who can dance, sing, punch, or throw a ball. I think it is because they complete us as we seldom can do any of those things.
Political scientist Robert Weissberg explained “The Relationship Between Blacks and Jews” in a year 2000 talk at the American Renaissance conference:
If you looked around our cultural landscape and tried to find two groups with different values that venerate different things, who worship at different altars, it is hard to find two groups more different than blacks and Jews. Jews are obsessed with education, blacks destroy it. If you’ve gone to school in the inner city, you know that not only do they hate the idea of learning, but they assault their teachers and physically destroy their schools.
When blacks move into a neighborhood, the first people out are Jews. Jews did not invent white flight but we perfected it. As far as intermarriage and social exchange, there’s almost zero. They just don’t mix. Jews are not into crime. The sorts of things that blacks specialize in — muggings, assaults, rapes — are not a Jewish predilection.
How Jews really relate to blacks is something Jews hardly talked about except when they are amongst themselves. When Jews get together in a safe place and talk about blacks, they will use the term “schvartze.” When you go to Leo Rosten’s Joys of Yiddish, he’s very careful in what he says. With “schvartze”, he becomes tight-lipped. “A black person, a negro.” That does not begin to depict what the term means among Jews. There may be a degree of affection, as in, ‘I hear Mrs. Schwartz got a new schvartze.’
It is not necessarily a negative word. It’s not the same thing as nigger. If you inserted the word ‘nigger’ to achieve some lexiconic variety, Jews would be genuinely offended. There can even be a degree of affection in schvartze. As in, ‘Ahh, I heard Mrs. Schwartz got a new schvartze. Oh, how nice.'”
When you use the term ‘schvartze’, it always implies cognitive inferiority. The mental picture of a stupid black embedded in the term schvartze is true even with pro-civil rights [liberal] Jews… Adding the phrase ‘dumb schvartze’ is superflous, reserved only used for the most egregious stupidity. Invisible baggage likewise includes gullibility, emotional excitability, and a weakness for here-and-now conspicuous consumption. Violence, especially inter-personal, alcohol-induced mayhem, is also associated with schvartze. The image that comes to the mind with Jews when you say ‘schvartze’ is simple-minded, impulsive, easily seduced by trinkets. This is extremely close to the traditional Southern image of blacks, almost identical to what many Southerners would privately say about blacks… This is continually reinforced by daily experience, such as in integrated public schools.
We had a procession of cleaning ladies [in New York]. Growing up, I honestly believed that all black people come from a thing called The Agency. We’d hire black cleaning ladies and invariably they’d steal and drink the liquor and my mother would come back and say, ‘I’m calling up The Agency and getting another.’ Very few Jews of my generation had any other contact. We had a procession of handymen and cleaning people come to my house.
It was always believed that any Jew can ultimately out-smart any schvartze except save being confronted by a demented gunman. Despite immense cultural chasms, Jews held themselves as innately capable of finessing blacks thanks to their superior wits, verbal talent, and a mastery of black psychology. The unmatched success of Jewish ghetto merchants and Jewish civil rights leadership positions proclaim this truth. Even today Jews may secretly brag about their success in beguiling blacks in contentious interpersonal relationships. People sometimes ask me, ‘What did you do when they showed up as a demonstration to your office?’ This happened to me one time. A bunch of angry young blacks came to my office… I said, ‘I just relied on the wisdom of my ancestors. I gave them a little rope-a-dope. I moved around. I said this, I said that. Within half an hour, they were fine. I sold one a suit and several new jewelry and they were happy. They got a deal from Mr. Weissberg.’
Where personal manipulation might fail, the storehouse of survival tactics sufficed exceedingly well. Black pathologies were bearable, especially since most black mayhem was self-inflicted. Jews might even profit from these disorders as merchants or nanny state therapists. Threatened Jews can flee deteriorating neighborhoods, enroll their children in private schools, hire security guards, co-opt black leaders financially, or otherwise escape.
Jews see no conflict between righteously defending black criminals as political prisoners and living in fortress-style buildings.
On the one hand, Jews dread blacks physically. When Jews see blacks walking down the street, they feel tremendous fear. Yet they dutifully pay the danegeld (extortion money).
For most Jews, it is the white goyim who pose the most threat. Contrary fact-based argument fall on deaf ears. Like the schvartzes, the Chinese [and Japanese] are never called goyim.
Blacks are incapable of such well-organized horror [as the Holocaust] unless directed by nefarious whites… A full-scale pogrom is beyond their capacity. Can you imagine blacks systemically rounding up thousands of Jews or even keeping tabs on Jewish neighborhoods? Assess enemies by capabilities, not intentions… The schvartze pose minimal risk. They’re too stupid.
Posted inDonald Sterling, Race|Comments Off on Donald Sterling’s Private Comments To His Mistress
I think I post so much because I am still trying to prove to my early caregivers that I am worthy of attention.
Whenever someone raises his hand around me, I cringe because I fear I’m about to get hit. Employers often note I have the personality of a beaten dog. You know how when you adopt a dog who was abused, they are skittish? I’m still like that at age 47.
This section from Daniel Siegel’s book Mindsight is like a stake through my heart (about my first five years in foster care and the shame that has haunted my life since):
Shame is the belief that the self is defective. From the point of view of survival, “I am bad” is a safer perspective than “My parents are unreliable and may abandon me at any time.” It is better for the child to feel defective than to realize that his attachment figures are dangerous, undependable or untrustworthy. The mental mechanism of shame at least preserves for him the illusion of safety and security that is at the core of his sanity.
…Because he hadn’t integrated these reactive states of humiliation and rage into his narrative, he was as helpless in dealing with them as he had been when he was a little boy and his mother entered his room with a grim face and a belt.
The shame-based conviction that we are defective can sabotage us if it remains unconscious. Though it can compel us to succeed, our ancient feelings of being damaged goods are likely to surface at any hint of stress or failure and we may become highly reactive to keep others at a distance. We need to prevent them and ourselves of becoming aware of our shadowy past and hidden truth of our rotten self. The closest others come to our real self, the more vulnerable we feel and the more alarmed we are that the secret truth about our defective nature may be revealed…
He engaged in this conquest-acceptance-repulsion cycle as if his life depended on it. In some ways, his life as a child did depend upon him convincing his parents that he was worthy of their love and attention. This drive to prove the nearly unconvincable remained his familiar place even in adulthood. He’d find the challenging symbol of his mother, his difficult to get girlfriends, and woo them to prove his worth, striving to assuage a feeling of shame of which he was not even aware, but as soon as a woman became affectionate, the game to prove was won and the real danger began. There was nowhere to hide and nothing to do but run or get the woman to leave. The isolation he felt as a child was disastrously recreated as an adult. His alternating states of attraction and repulsion had driven him to a dead end.
Posted inDaniel Siegel|Comments Off on Like A Stake Through My Heart
In late 1991, Dennis Prager launched the Micah Center for Ethical Monotheism. He wrote then:
The purpose of the activist educational center is to have “a place of activity” devoted to his life’s mission of spreading ethical monotheism through every available means. One of its first programs will be “Dinners in Black and White” to combat racism on a grassroots level by allowing otherwise unacquainted blacks and whites to eat in each other’s homes. Other aims are to develop ethics curricula for parochial and private schools; to defend Western culture against the “lies” propagated by multiculturalists; to battle religious extremism – as evinced by Khomeini-like Islamic fundamentalism; and to counter “secular extremism…”
On July 19, 2013, Dennis Prager said: “Years ago, I wanted to start something called ‘Dinners in Black and White’ where people from different races got together and had dinner. One of the reasons that I didn’t go forward with the program was that I was warned by lawyers that if something happened at one of these homes, I, the organizer, would be sued. Law has been a vehicle for the decline of our society. If somebody tripped, if somebody had food poisoning, if somebody got into an argument, I, the organizer, might’ve been sued into bankruptcy.”
Posted inBlacks, Dennis Prager, Whites|Comments Off on When Will Whites And Blacks Discover Their Common Humanity?
Dennis Prager often says that America is the least racist country in human history. Presuming this is so, and it does seem that way to me, why is this true? Is it because the divine touched this country in a way He’s done nowhere else? Perhaps our founding fathers had superior morals and wisdom? Or perhaps it is quirk of our genes and our geography? Or are our values and our ethics simply superior to the rest of humanity?
I was never clear about this until I read the following essay in American Renaissance:
Why are continental Europeans more racially aware and much more resistant to the destruction of their heritage than whites from countries that were founded by the British?
There are many differences between the two groups of nations that influence their views and behavior about race. The most obvious difference is geographic. Because Britain, North America, Australia and New Zealand are geographically isolated, they have not been the victims of conquest by alien invaders, whereas the history of continental Europe is the story of endless conquests, often by savage Asiatic and Middle-Eastern tribes such as the Huns, Mongols, Tatars, Arabs and Turks.
Conquest and oppression in Europe lasted throughout the 20th century. European ethnicities suffered endless turmoil that is forever etched in their collective memories, whereas the last successful invasion of an Anglo-Saxon nation was in 1066.
These different experiences resulted in different attitudes toward alien intruders. While Europeans are instinctively suspicious of foreigners that have brought them so much horror over the centuries, Anglo-Saxons, who did not experience the same fate—but were often conquerors themselves—have not developed that same defensive traits.
Continental Europeans have a profound knowledge of their neighbors, who are often traditional adversaries. Americans, who do not have a similar historical experience, have relatively little knowledge or interest in either Canadians or Mexican re-conquistadors.
Thus, when Americans see millions of Mexicans streaming across the border, the alarm does not go off, as it would for continental Europeans. White Americans see intruders as people who are “like us,” just looking for a better life. The invading Mexicans, on the other hand, see their misguided hosts as people who “stole” the Southwest from their fledgling nation in the 1840s. While Mexicans dream of recapturing the mythical Aztlan, their white hosts see no further than the fact that Mexicans do inexpensive yard work. For most whites that is all that matters.
The European nations that are the most ethnically aware are those that were most savagely conquered most recently, such as the Balkan nations that were victims of the Ottoman Empire, Mediterranean nations that were targeted by Arabs, and, of course, the Eastern Europeans, who were in the path of Asiatic hordes, the German war machine, and the brutal Soviet Union.
There are other differences between Anglo-Saxons and continental Europeans. For example, land is plentiful in sparsely populated North America and Australia. White settlers took over vast tracts of land that they put to good economic use, but to which they had limited emotional attachment. Consequently, Americans respond to the influx of nonwhites into their neighborhoods and communities by moving to the suburbs, exurbs, countryside, or out of state. The territory they are giving up to alien races is not important to whites as long as they are able to find some other place where they can live in peace.
Europeans have a completely different attitude toward their ancestral lands, where families and communities may have lived for centuries. In densely populated parts of Europe, ownership of as little as a few acres of farmland meant the difference between surviving as a family and dying from starvation. Centuries of often bloody battles between indentured peasants and their feudal landlords forged emotional ties between white Europeans and their land. That’s why they have much lower tolerance for alien people who take treasured real estate that generations of their ancestors may have died to protect. Also, because many Americans move often during their lifetimes and live in several different states, this weakens the ties to their family roots.
Americans often do not know the names of their ancestors beyond their grandparents. Families often represent a mix of several European ethnicities, which complicates efforts to maintain family traditions. American family histories are often fuzzy, sugarcoated stories, often involving Ellis Island, and occasionally an elusive Indian princess. Not surprisingly, white Americans often have little interest in maintaining family traditions once their ancestral Irish, Polish, or Italian family ties weaken through assimilation.
Posted inDennis Prager, Race|Comments Off on Why Is America The Least Racist Country In Human History?
From Dennis Prager’s website description of his radio show today: “Three American doctors at the CURE hospital in Kabul were murdered by an Afghani policeman who was assigned to protect them. It’s very hard for us to understand the evil behind Islamism.”
It’s not hard for me to understand. Many Afghans, perhaps most Afghans, want to keep on being Afghans and they are not interested in assimilating into Western culture. To defend their own culture, they seek to stop people who try to make Afghans less Afghani. It does not seem that complicated to me.
The pure altruistic motives attributed to CURE International don’t make it any less of a threat to the Afghan way of life. When Westerners go to backward countries and help them, it generally just embitters the recipients of help. American doctors curing Afghans makes many perhaps most Afghans feel lousy about themselves. They’d prefer to see their fellow citizens suffer rather than see them relieved of pain by Americans.
Do Afghans have the right to their own culture? Do Muslims have the right to be Muslim? If so, then we shouldn’t be intervening in their affairs. We shouldn’t send them money or doctors or food or medicines unless it is in our interest to stop the Soviets, etc. If you must intervene, send them your prayers and leave it at that.
Dennis: “There are times when you can only answer evil with good. I would like for their income to double as a result.”
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
