May 19, 2016 The Arab Takeover Of Latin America Luke Ford No sacred cows.

The Arab Takeover Of Latin America

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: “As we all know, we have to allow massive immigration from Latin America since nobody could possibly make a living there. Except … all sorts of people have moved to Latin America and many made a killing. What does this say about the people we are getting from Latin America and what does it say about the people who are dumping their unwanted populations on us?”

Donald Templar writes:

The Comparison of Mean IQ in Muslim and Non-Muslim Countries

The present research found that the Muslim country mean IQ of 81 is half a standard deviation below the mean IQ of non-Muslim nations and is not related to strength of Muslim culture as defined by the percentage of Muslims in the country. The mean IQ of 84 in Arab countries is not associated with per capita income and is incompatible with the intellectual achievements of the golden age of the Muslim Empire. Possible explanations for this decline include hybridization with sub-Saharan Africans, dysgenic decrease in the more educated Muslims employing birth control as suggested by Meisenberg, the Muslim religion not fostering critical thinking, and the intellectual contributions being both exaggerated and made by non-Muslims.

1. Introduction

The purpose of the present study was to compare the mean IQs of Muslim and non-Muslim countries. The great intellectual achievements of the Muslim Empire from the 7th to the 12th century have been written about by numerous authors (e.g., Bloom & Blair, 2000; Lyons, 2009; Masood, 2009). These achievements have been especially noted in science, mathematics, architecture and medicine. However, the contemporary Muslim world is underrepresentated in highly creative contributions published in prestigious scientific journals. Lynn (1991) presented the total number of Nobel Prizes in science, literature, and economics combined with the Fields award in mathematics as a function of five major categories of ethnic origin. Europeans had a total of 541, North East Asians 23, South Asians and North Africans combined 10, Africans one (in literature), and Southeast Asians none. It is apparent that the predominantly Muslim countries are in the bottom three categories. Such a dearth of superlative scholarly achievement is consistent with the Lynn & Vanhanen (2006) Table 6.5 listing of mean IQs of the world’s countries. Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, has a mean IQ of 87. If the standard deviation in Indonesia is 15, two standard deviations above the mean is only 117, which probably is not a high enough IQ to obtain a Ph.D. in physics from prestigious universities in high mean IQ countries. Even if mean IQ differences between two countries are modest, the disparity of extremely gifted persons can be huge.

The IQs of the Muslim populations in non-Muslim countries tend to be lower than those of the majority population (Lynn, 2008a). In the Netherlands, the mean IQ of Turks is 83, of Moroccans 81, and Indonesians 94 (Lynn, 2008a). Mackintosh (2007) reported that in the United Kingdom Pakistanis score 4 to 6 IQ points below the Indians. It is unlikely that this can be attributed entirely to minority status. The Chinese are a minority in many countries of the world and yet obtain higher mean IQs than the majority populations. They generate and/or control over half the wealth in Southeast Asian countries. In Indonesia the Chinese constitute 3.8 % of the population and generate/control 73% of the wealth. In Malaysia they constitute 28% of the population and generate/control 69% of the wealth (Lynn, 2008a). Caution should be employed because of the possibility of selective migration.

Special attention is given here to the Arab countries for two reasons. One is to examine the role of the great variation in per capita income. At the high end are Kuwait with $25,314, Qatar with $20,987, and the United Arab Emirates with $20,585. At the low end areYemen with $2,588 and Syria with $2,892. The second reason is to raise for consideration an incongruity between the achievements of the past and the state of the present. The Muslim Empire began in the Arabian Peninsula and the Arabs played a dominant role in its expansion and rise to greatness. Islam did not become established until the 15th century in Indonesia and in what is now Pakistan. The 16 countries regarded as Arab are Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

COMMENTS TO STEVE SAILER:

* In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

* Lebanese Christians are largely descended from the native people who go back to the Phoenicians, while the Muslims have much more ancestry from nomads from the Arabian peninsula. The Lebanese that we get in the West are largely from the Christian community.

* I’m more than a little surprised that the professional media don’t seem to have bothered to look at Trump’s own writing. I’ve listened to bits and pieces of two of his books in audio format at YouTube and they’re really content rich for anyone curious about his views. The book he co-authored with Robert Kiyosaki is very expressly political, despite its self-help title. I found it at YouTube under: “1. Why We Want You To Be Rich (Audio Book) Trump & Kiyosaki”.

* I have a kind of ridiculous theory that the world’s 2 preeminent transnational market minorities have divided Earth into 2 basic spheres of commerce. Our good friends the Jews get the big, important countries like the USA, France, Germany, Russia, England and the developed white world in general. They have their eyes set on China and India too, of course. They handle the big, big, big money.

The Lebanese are in charge of setting up shop in little, less important countries like Haiti (hehe), African countries (with the exception of South-Africa back in the day), south and central american statelets etc. There are middling countries like Brazil and Argentina where the 2 spheres of influence overlap.

* Hayek was not a Jew. In fact, he probably didn’t care for them:
“I don’t have many strong dislikes. I admit that as a teacher—I have no racial prejudices in general—but there were certain types, and conspicuous among them the Near Eastern populations, which I still dislike because they are fundamentally dishonest. And I must say dishonesty is a thing I intensely dislike. It was a type which, in my childhood in Austria, was described as Levantine, typical of the people of the eastern Mediterranean. But I encountered it later, and I have a profound dislike for the typical Indian students at the London School of Economics, which I admit are all one type—Bengali moneylender sons. They are to me a detestable type, I admit, but not with any racial feeling. I have found a little of the same amongst the Egyptians —basically a lack of honesty in them.” (Nobel Prize-Winning Economist: Friedrich A. von Hayek, Regents of the University of California, 1983. p. 490).

* There are Jews in Brazil too. The richest banker in the world is a Brazilian Jew, Joseph Safra.

* Having spent decades working the Middle East scene, I’ve had lots of dealings with Lebanese as immigrants to America as well as native Lebanese “marketing” the Middle East. My take: they can “out-Jew the Jew” when it comes to financial scheming, which suggests that the stereotypical behaviors we attribute to the Jews are not religious based but rather endemic to the culture of tight, clan-based international traders. The Lebanese are better at this game than the Jews.

Most of the Lebanese I’ve dealt with claim a Christian heritage. They spoke English, French, and Arabic. The cross-cultural perspective gave them an advantage in international deals. As one Lebanese told me, their objective is to become a millionaire by the age of 30. If you haven’t made it by age 35, your family and clan consider you a failure.

I considered one a close friend until it became clear that I was nothing but a potential source of revenue. He said that if I ever needed any money laundered or needed to spirit large amounts of cash into the United States, let him know; they had the process wired. (I had no need of either … I was a “techie” not a businessman and both were also illegal.) When I announced I was relocating back to the United States, they threw a “going away” party for me. I naively took my wife and son. It turned out to be a “hot hand-off” to their Lebanese business partners in the United States. It was embarrassing. Yes, the clan pursued me in the United States in the hope that they could become involved in one of my high-tech company’s international business deals.

The Lebanese business model (one they share with the Jews) was clear. You find out where the cash flows are among the elite in targeted countries and you stand in the middle. You scheme as an obstructionist. The hope is that the other parties will realize that the deal won’t go through until you get your cut … so, you get your cut to go away. A variation on this theme is to collect indigenous business partners to force the parties at the receiving end of a cash flow out of the game and own the deal. (Carlos Slim?)

It is also clear that, in this business model, the Lebanese obstructionists bring no value added to the table. The business model is a form of wealth extraction or looting based on family connections, shady business deals, and exploiting local politics among corrupt ruling classes.

Damn, am I describing the evolving business model in the United States?

* You can’t drink tap water in Shanghai. The press is government controlled and it’s a police state. There is probably a cancer epidemic in Shanghai, but we don’t know for sure. Chinese who migrate are not considered residents and have no say with the local party chiefs. The minimum wage is less than $200 per month. They cannot afford to buy the stuff they make. There are no public golf courses in or around Shanghai. There are no birds (other than sparrows), squirrels, rabbits. I could go on.

* Vietnam is where Chinese expansionism, one of the biggest forces in human history, finally met an immovable object.

Henry Kissinger talks about his first secret trip to Hanoi in early 1973. He asked to visit museums. They all turned out to be war history museums. Damn, he thought, we sided with the less nationalist side.

* Nasser, for all his failings (and there were many) was a great politician. Compare him to Hillary – it’s like day and night. You see him up on the stage relaxed and confident and comfortable and joking and in command of his audience, convinced that history is on HIS side and that his opposition is just a bunch of hypocrites who do not practice what they preach. He’s not shrilly haranguing his audience in dictator style. Trump (and I mean this as a compliment) is more like Nasser than Hillary but Nasser was much better. Despite hating 99% of Nasser’s beliefs (his opposition to radical Islam was good) you just have to like the guy and his style.

Posted in Arabs, Latino | Comments Off

Divide & Conquer

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* What have puzzled me is that the Bernie people still don’t get that what the dissident right (libertarians, nationalists, traditionalists, paleo-conservatives and national-conservatives) go against are the same enemy they go after. The Bernie people just don’t seem to grasp it. Instead they have created some weird unrealistic alt-globalization communist ideology which basically is about “everything to everybody”. I think it is a matter of time until more of these Bernie people (just like the Paul people) will turn more nationalist. There is some evidence that it is possible. You see it in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Scotland.

* You know, in my youth as an orthodox liberal I always wondered why the paleocons and nationalists (no alt-right back then) didn’t realize the rich people they loved so much were playing them for fools. If only the black and white working and middle classes would unite instead of fighting over social issues they could get rid of the rich and shut down globalization and bring back the unions and a less-racist version of 1950s America.

My answer to you is my answer to my old self: the divide-and-conquer scheme is too effective. Identity politics is natural to humans because we’re made to get into tribal wars with people who look, speak, or act different. So once you have a multiracial working and middle class, they’ll spend all their time going after each other instead of the man on top. There’s always some black guy who got shot by a cop or some white guy who got mugged by black kids (yes, these are real problems, I don’t deny that and that’s why this is so effective), and bang, off we go again.

We’ll see what Trump does in 2016. At this point I’m past hoping for a better world and just that immigration runs slow enough for assimilation to occur.

MORE COMMENTS:

* I was surprised to see that Zuckerberg actually sat down with a bunch of conservatives to hear their issues with Facebook.

Today’s google doodle is about an obscure Asian-American radical who’s main claim to fame seems to be that she cradled Malcolm X as he lay dying, which is pretty typical for a google doodle. But you’ll never see Sergey Brin apologize for Google’s effort to drive the culture leftward.

* Transfer of population has been going on since Roman times (and before). The Visigoths started out on the Black Sea and ended up in Spain. Millions of Greeks had lived in Turkey for thousands of years and then after 1923 they didn’t. Millions of Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe at the end of WWII. These things usually seem unthinkable until they happen and then they are not. Usually these movement happen by force (although a relatively small # of killings can panic the rest to flee) , but maybe they could be accomplished by peaceful means.

Most of the Arabs living in the West Bank don’t have deep roots in the area – even many of those that fled Israel in ’48 had migrated from other parts of the Arab world quite recently, attracted by the Jewish economic development of Palestine. If you read Twain’s Innocents Abroad, he describes Palestine as being mostly empty – think of Arizona, which had 122,000 people in 1900 and 6 million today. There was never any such thing as a “Palestinian” nationality – the identity of the people in the area was just “Arab subject of the Ottoman Empire” and there were no barriers that prevented people from moving around. Arafat himself was born in Cairo. They already share a religion and culture with the rest of the Arab world, so the obstacles to relocating them are mostly political. That being said, there are a lot of vested interests in keeping things the way they are, and a whole mythical “Palestinian” identity has been constructed (keeping in mind that to some extent all national identities are myth based) so the idea of transfer of population will meet fierce resistance, be labeled genocide, etc.

* I think I’m going to have to start using Yahoo search. A Google doodle honoring Yuri Kochiyama. Yes, truly an honorable American. What does a search into this Great American worthy of note on the home searchpage by the biggest US search engine turn up? A loudmouthed rabble-rousing activist with all the boilerplate stereotypical ideals you’d expect from a 60s far-left liberal. But while most of the rest of the people from that era grew up, she continued on with it through to the present day. She praised Osama bin Laden for the attacks on 9/11, and even went on record thanking Islam for Osama. She supported a number of other violent attacks on the US and Europe. In a sane world, Google would put out a doodle honoring the day she pushed up the daisies, instead of her birthday.

* I think it’s clear that some Jewish nationalists and some defenders of Jewish nationalism want the land between the Jordan and the Med but not the people living on it. That’s cold, even if that’s what we did in the US when we settled here, but let’s not forget that same justification was used by Goering at the Nuremberg Trials (using the American example.)

You just aren’t going to get much traction for population transfers of this kind in today’s world. The underlying idea is that you cannot have a pure ethno-state for one group of people unless you get rid of everyone who isn’t a member of the group. It is extremely ironic that any Jew would argue like that, which is why Ben Gurion did not endorse expelling all Arabs in 1948. And the idea that one cannot remain a democracy unless you expel approximately 50% of the people living on the land you control is extremely funny, if you stop to think about it. It’s far easier and much less morally problematic to just stop being a democracy, without declaring it so.

As for the demographics, that’s the way it goes. Anyone who is a student of history knows that borders, and nations, rise and fall and change their composition over time. Israel is not likely to be any different. The entire 20th Century is just a snapshot in recorded human history, and the history of the USA, which comprises about 2-3 snapshots, has changed radically from what it was in the 240 years of its existence, particularly in terms of ethnicity, culture, and demographics. Concerning our future, sure, I’d like to see a European resemblance in America for the future. But based on current global demographic and migration trends, I doubt it. We just have to hope that the best parts of our culture survive.

Posted in America | Comments Off

RENT TO CRIMINALS — OR ELSE

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

FrontPageMag: Welcome murderers, rapists, and thieves as your tenants or you will face huge monetary penalties, the Obama administration said in a new threat aimed at the nation’s landlords.

Among convicted criminals, only drug dealers and drug manufacturers will be excluded from special protection as tenants under the administration’s novel interpretation of housing law.

“The fact that you were arrested shouldn’t keep you from getting a job and it shouldn’t keep you from renting a home,” Obama’s far-left Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Julian Castro, told the annual meeting of the National Low Income Housing Coalition this week.

This is part of the campaign by the most radical left-wing president in American history to de-stigmatize criminality itself. The Left views criminals — especially minorities — as victims of society, oppressed for mere nonconformism. Lawbreakers, they believe, should be treated the same as law-abiding citizens.

Obama’s policies strike at the very heart of the criminal law system. Removing the stigma of a criminal record undermines the system and respect for the law and attacks the underpinnings of civilization itself.

Of course, a criminal record carries with it a degree of social stigma, as it should. Removing or watering down that socially beneficial stigma reduces disincentives to commit crimes and hinders the marginalization of the antisocial. Without stigma and social ostracism, society would eventually collapse.

But this administration treats criminals as a protected class. It wants felons’ voting rights restored. It supports legislation “banning the box,” that is, banning employment applications that ask if the applicant has a criminal record. It wants to empty the prisons and afford illegal aliens special protection by frustrating law enforcement in so-called sanctuary cities.

Refusing a prospective tenant is now fraught with danger in the Obama era. Since minorities are over-represented in America’s criminal cohort, landlords are automatically deemed racist if they balk at housing criminals.

“The Fair Housing Act prohibits both intentional housing discrimination and housing practices that have an unjustified discriminatory effect because of race, national origin, or other protected characteristics,” said the enforcement directive issued by Castro.

“Because of widespread racial and ethnic disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system, criminal history-based restrictions on access to housing are likely disproportionately to burden African-Americans and Hispanics,” the document states.

It may be true that, as the HUD guidance states, “African Americans and Hispanics are arrested, convicted and incarcerated at rates disproportionate to their share of the general population,” but that’s only because African-Americans and Hispanics commit crimes at rates out of proportion to their numbers in the United States.

Ignoring a black would-be tenant’s criminal history amounts to what David Horowitz calls “black skin privilege.” The African-American lawbreaker gets a free pass because of the color of his skin.

That’s not what America is supposed to be about.

The legal memorandum continues, “While the Act does not prohibit housing providers from appropriately considering criminal history information when making housing decisions, arbitrary and overbroad criminal history-related bans are likely to lack a legally sufficient justification.”

The guidance laments that “When individuals are released from prisons and jails, their ability to access safe, secure and affordable housing is critical to their successful reentry to society.”

It continues, “Yet many formerly incarcerated individuals, as well as individuals who were convicted but not incarcerated, encounter significant barriers to securing housing, including public and other federally-subsidized housing.”

Cue the violins.

Posted in Crime | Comments Off

‘Dr Death’ Psychiatrist Charged With Murders

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

News: A Georgia psychiatrist dubbed Dr Death has been charged with murder in the overdose deaths of three patients.

Thirty-six of Dr Narendra Nagareddy’s patients died while he was prescribing them painkillers, court documents allege.

Twelve of them died of prescription drug overdoses, post-mortem examinations confirmed.

The doctor could face further charges for at least 30 other deaths, the Henry Herald reports.

Posted in Immigration | Comments Off

‘Yuri Kochiyama was a Marxist, Maoist Asian Black Nationalist & Muslim convert who loved Osama bin Laden. Thx Google!’

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Source.

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* “By now, Google is as well-known for its snarky, anti-white male celebrations and doodles as it is for its search functions.”

* “I don’t think it’s impossible that the Google Doodle is all just, as the biologists say, protective coloration. The company knows perfectly well that the abilities it needs among employees aren’t evenly distributed across populations, but supporting Black Girls Code and putting Maoist not-quite-revolutionaries on its Doodle are public obeisance to the dominant ideology to stop interference with the things it really cares about- hiring the smartest dozen programmers to come out of Stanford each year, or whatever really makes a difference.”

Malcolm X Was “Gay-for-Pay,” New Book Says

* That Mr. Strong Black Man himself, Malcolm X, was a gay prostitute is pretty funny. And a good hate-fact to troll Black Racists with.

* Malcolm X pro-tip: most gay prostitutes are gay
kinda like how regular prostitutes are straight

* Malcolm X really was gay, though. They’re still easing blacks into it. Like, he was just gay for pay. Didn’t like it just did it for $. Ok.

* Fun fact: Malcolm X was a gay prostitute. He worked the pole. He was gay for pay. The down low brother joe! #suckit

* “D.C.’s Metro Catches Fire More Than Four Times A Week”

In totally unrelated news, 97% of Metro employees are Black.

Posted in Blacks, Google | Comments Off

Options = Instability

Posted on May 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

From the Chateau:

A Chateau maxim as universal and relevant to life satisfaction as the famed CH aphorism Diversity + Proximity = War. The O=I theory was introduced in this original press post:

Where you have options, you have trouble sticking by one person. A man dating a girl (or girls) will feel on top of the world and suddenly all those single women traipsing around the city look like much easier targets to approach. His loins will quiver with excitement. A woman transplanted from a less populated region of the country to the big city will become enthralled with all the extra attention from men who are probably much better at playing the game than the men she left back home. Her ego will quiver with expectation.

…and fleshed out here, with accompanying scientific confirmation:

[T]here is an inherent sex difference in the destabilizing force of increased options. A man with more options than his partner is a less destabilizing force to his relationship than is a woman with equally more options than her partner. This phenomenon results from the greater hypergamous drive of women, who are less satisfied than are men with sub-par lovers, and from the biological reality that risk of female infidelity is a graver threat to relationship harmony than is risk of male infidelity for which there is no chance of “reverse cuckolding”.
Think of the relationship permutations this way:
Man with options + woman with fewer options = man with peace of mind and wandering eye + happy but anxious woman + lovingly prepared home-cooked meals.
Woman with options + man with fewer options = unhappy woman with wandering eye + happy but anxious man + microwaved dinners.
Man with options + woman with options = stable relationship. Both are happy and infidelity or rupture risks are minimized.
Man with few options + woman with few options = stable relationship. Both are unhappy yet infidelity or rupture risks are still minimized.

I don’t need my knob slobbed by ¡SCIENCE!, but I won’t turn down a freebie blowie if ?SCIENCE? just can’t get enough of my Renaissance Meat. So once again, to the lab-coats (via VIP commentator chris):

Scientific proof that options creates instability.
In the interests of weeding out the mathematical complexity, there were three values calculated. Assuming you were taking the survey, they would correspond to (1) how well your actual partner matched your ideal (2) what percent of possible real mates out in the world are better overall fits, and (3) how much more or less desirable you are to others, relative to your partner. These values were then plugged into a regression predicting relationship satisfaction. As it turned out, in the first study (N = 260), the first value – how well one’s partner matched their ideal – barely predicted relationship satisfaction at all (ß = .06); by contrast, the number of other potential people who might make better fits was a much stronger predictor (ß = -.53), as was the difference in relative mate value between the participant and their partner (ß = .11). There was also an interaction between these latter two values (ß = .21). As the authors summarized these results:
“Participants lower in mate value than their partners were generally satisfied regardless of the pool of potential mates; participants higher in mate value than their partners became increasingly dissatisfied with their relationships as better alternative partners became available”

Implied in the CH Options = Instability formula is the premise that the available options are desirable; options don’t mean much if what you have now is decidedly better than the alternatives. Few people will trade up from a filet mignon to a burger, so the existence of millions of attainable burgers doesn’t register as a menu of options to our subconscious minds if we’re currently dining on filet mignon. (If you’ve dated a really pretty girl, you’ll know that, at least for a while, the world of women outside her presence seems to recede into invisibility. Some call that love.)

Instability follows from options when the options are instinctively perceived as worthwhile substitutes. From this truism, we can deduce the effectiveness of a powerful Game principle: Dread. If you are a man who is, or is subjectively perceived to be, lower in sexual market value than your girlfriend/wife, then you can help stabilize your relationship and increase the happiness of you and your partner if you ACT LIKE you are a man with many desirable and attainable options you’d trade up to if circumstances allowed.

That is, it’s sexy to act more like an untrustworthy man than a trustworthy man. Why? Because women LOVE LOVE LOVE men who are loved by other desirable women. And an untrustworthy man signals his desirability to many beautiful women. This principle is why it’s so common to see physically unattractive men dating hot babes “out of their league” strut like a cuntquistador who could drop his current lover on a dime if she ever gave him trouble. Platitudists may not appreciate this facet of human sexual behavior, but it’s real and it works.

CH Maxim #77: If a man acts as if his life is full of willing women, then women will be more willing company.

Posted in Marriage | Comments Off

Jewish Journal: ‘Melania Trump: Ioffe ‘provoked’ anti-Semitic abuse’

Posted on May 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

If Julia Ioffe didn’t provoke the anti-Semitic abuse, how did it end up coming her way? Pure chance?

If people hate you, there is probably a reason for it. You have probably done or said something that provoked the hatred. It’s not complicated. Hating takes energy. Large numbers of people don’t expend that sort of energy for no reason.

I’m not arguing right or wrong here. I’m arguing that it is useful to look at these disputes in terms of who – whom? Who did what to whom? What are the group and personal interests that conflict?

The slur “anti-Semitic” has become so over-used that it has lost all meaning.

Jewish Journal:

Melania Trump, the wife of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, on Tuesday suggested that journalist Julia Ioffe “provoked” the anti-Semitic abuse she faced from Trump fans after publishing negative profile about her.
“I don’t control my fans,” Melania said in an interview with DuJour. “But I don’t agree with what they’re doing. I understand what you mean, but there are people out there who maybe went too far. She provoked them.”
Ioffe, who is Jewish, received calls from people playing Hitler speeches, told that she “should be burned in an oven”, “be shot in the head,” and was sent photoshopped images of her in a concentration camp uniform.

Posted in Anti-Semitism | Comments Off

Trumpkins & The Jews

Posted on May 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

Jennifer Rubin blogs at the Washington Post:

To some degree Trump’s problem with Jewish voters is not unlike his problem with women, Hispanics, African Americans, college-educated voters and the chunk of the GOP that voted for other candidates. Many voters, regardless of religion, object to his bigoted and misogynistic language, extreme positions, ignorance on policy issues and penchant for lying about matters large and small.
Two other factors aggravate Trump’s standing with Jewish voters. First, Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, his mass rallies evoking a cult of personality (complete with oath-taking), threats to punish the media and infatuation with Vladimir Putin and other international strongmen evoke strong images in the minds of many Jewish voters of the European fascist movements of the 1930’s and, more recently, South American tin pot dictators. Trump’s nativism and xenophobia make him toxic with a good deal of the American Jewish community for whom such sentiments have invariably been associated with governments hostile to Jews.

Since when has bigotry, misogyny, extreme positions, ignorance on policy issues and a penchant for lying dissuaded voters?

Jews are no more averse to authoritarian leaders than non-Jews. Throughout their history, Jews have rarely been popular, so they have to rely for protection on ruling elites, who were usually authoritarian.

Jews tend to love their rabbis. How is this less a cult of personality than what Trump has going? “Cult of personality” is a put-down when you don’t have a strong argument against a popular leader.

Max Blumenthal writes:

As a leader of the neoconservative faction that formed in the defense of and in alignment with Israel’s right-wing Likud Party, Kristol himself has been a prime promoter of the “Renegade Jew” smear, presiding over campaigns to brand left-wing and liberal Jews as anti-Semitic apostates and demanding they be treated as pariahs by the community in which he and his ideological fellow travelers claim to be the authorities.

Kristol’s Weekly Standard magazine and the Washington Free Beacon online tabloid edited by his son-in-law, Matthew Continetti, have functioned as key vehicles for these smears against “Renegade Jews,” especially targeting liberal supporters of Israel for diverging from the Likudnik party line. Ethnically charged attacks against liberal Jews by Kristol’s media apparatus are so frequent and numerous that compiling them all might drive a researcher to exhaustion. A brief round-up is enough to demonstrate how zealously and routinely Kristol and his cadres have resorted to the “Renegade Jew” smear.

Condemning Goldstone as a traitorous snitch

There are few “Renegade Jews” that Kristol and his Weekly Standard loathe more than those who staff J Street, the liberal pro-Israel lobbying organization established to support the Obama administration’s negotiation efforts in Israel-Palestine. Back in 2009, when J Street was founded, the Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb described the group as “nothing more than a partisan, Democratic organization trying to provide Jewish cover to an administration that is hostile to Israel — they only stand with the [Iranian] mullahs because Obama stands with the mullahs.”

That same year, Goldfarb composed a satirical poem in the voice of two Jewish poets supposedly disinvited by J Street from the group’s first annual convention. The fake poem written by Goldfarb included the following line: “I write the names of the censored, the silenced, the forgotten the J Street capo has handed my name to the new Jew Gestapo I read my words distorted by neocon distorters.”

In 2010, following Israel’s brutal assault on the Gaza Strip, the United Nations appointed Richard Goldstone, a distinguished Jewish jurist from South Africa, to lead its fact-finding mission into alleged war crimes. Goldstone fell under immediate attack from the demagogic pro-Israel lawyer Alan Dershowitz, an attorney who has represented Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who is the major financial backer of both the Israeli Likud and US Republican Parties and has now pledged $100 million to the campaign of Donald Trump. Dershowitz engaged in character assassination against Goldstone, calling him a “moser” and an “absolute traitor.”

Drawn from Talmudic teachings, the condemnatory term “moser” refers to Jewish snitches that betray fellow Jews to Gentile authorities. The traditional punishment for moserim has ranged over the centuries from the severing of tongues and ears to execution. Faced with a torrent of pro-Israel threats, Goldstone was eventually prevented from attending his grandson’s Bar Mitzvah, a family event that Dershowitz accused him of “politicizing” through his mere presence.

The Weekly Standard eagerly signed on to Dershowitz’s campaign to brand Goldstone as a Renegade Jew. Leading the charge was Rachel Abrams. The late wife of the former Reagan official Elliott Abrams, who pled guilty for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, Rachel Abrams was an outspoken proponent of genocide against Palestinians, describing them as “child sacrificing savages” and “unmanned animals.” After denouncing Goldstone as the “favorite judge” of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (the horror!) during the dark days of apartheid South Africa, Rachel Abrams hailed Dershowitz’s screed against Goldstone’s report on Gaza as “a masterpiece of dismantlement.”

In the end, Goldstone felt the strain of the sustained campaign of vitriol and recanted key aspects report he oversaw, even disowning the co-authors who did the bulk of the research.

The family that smears together

The neoconservative movement is an incestuous enterprise that journalist Jim Lobe called “an extended clan of friends, spouses and children who have known each other for generations.” Rachel Abrams, a former board member of Kristol’s Emergency Committee for Israel, was the daughter of founding generation neocons Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, who are also the parents of New York Post columnist John Podhoretz and Ruthie Blum, a writer the Adelson funded, pro-Netanyahu daily newspaper Israel Hayom who lives in an illegal Israeli settlement.

This neoconservative hothouse has reflexively reverted to the “Renegade Jew” charge as a substitute for reasoned debate with critics of Israeli policies. When the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt published her famous essay on the Adolph Eichmann trial and the “banality of evil” in 1963, Norman Podhoretz led the crusade to publicly discredit her and bully her editors at the New Yorker into disowning her work. John Podhoretz has regularly re-enacted his father’s histrionics, albeit in much cruder form. He once took to Twitter to call me a “kapo,” or a Jewish guard in a Nazi concentration camp, then fired off the same insult against Eli Valley, a Jewish cartoonist whose send-ups of the pro-Israel political establishment have frequently appeared in the Jewish Daily Forward.

The next generation of character assassins

The son of first generation neocons Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, William Kristol founded the Weekly Standard in 1995. The magazine functioned as a farm system for young right-wing writers like Matthew Continetti, who broke into the conservative movement through a group co-founded by Kristol’s father, the Institute for Collegiate Studies. That organization provided Continetti with his salary when he went to work for the Weekly Standard. It was there that Continetti was essentially handed his first book deal by William Kristol, The K Street Gang, assigning him an editor to help write his proposal, and then helping arrange for its sale and promotion. (Continetti’s second book, The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star, was a defense of the Republican vice presidential nominee in 2008 who Kristol discovered during a Weekly Standard cruise to her home state of Alaska. Palin employed Michael Goldfarb as a spokesman on her 2008 campaign).

In 2012, Continetti married Anne Kristol, the daughter of his boss.

That same year, Continetti helped found The Free Beacon with help from Kristol, who served as a board member of the Goldfarb-run shell organization whose sole function was presiding over the newborn magazine’s funding and publication. Vowing in the Free Beacon’s founding manifesto to conduct ruthless “combat journalism,” Continetti — the son of Catholic parents — proceeded to deploy the “Renegade Jew” smear with reckless abandon.

“Hughes Drops Jews,” the Free Beacon headline blared in January 2013. Chris Hughes, a Silicon Valley tech baron, had just purchased The New Republic, provoking an exodus of writers that included several unpaid contributing editors who had contributed almost nothing to the magazine for several years. Although only five of the twelve writers happened to be Jewish, the Free Beacon accused Hughes of leading the digital media equivalent of an anti-Semitic pogrom in collaboration with another person the Free Beacon considered a Renegade Jew: The New Republic’s then-editor-in-chief Franklin Foer.

One of the most recent targets of a Free Beacon-crafted Renegade Jew smear was Simone Zimmerman, a founder of the left-wing Jewish protest group, If Not Now, and former campus activist for J Street. When she was appointed this year as Jewish outreach director by Senator Bernie Sander’s presidential campaign, Zimmerman came under ferocious attack from a host of right-wing pro-Israel organizations. The campaign culminated when Noah Pollack, the director of Kristol’s pro-Likud Emergency Committee for Israel, publicized a Facebook post in which Zimmerman wrote, “Fuck you, Bibi, for daring to insist that you represent even a fraction of Jews in the world…” Posted during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military campaign against the Gaza Strip in 2014, Zimmerman’s item led to her suspension from the Sanders campaign.

Declaring Jewish liberalism a form of apostasy

A Free Beacon review of a diatribe against Jews who criticize Israel perfectly captured the magazine’s mindset. Headlined “The Enemies Within,” the review provided fulsome praise for “Jews Against Themselves,” an obscure book that described both J Street and the left-wing Jewish Voice for Peace as “internal enemies” and accused them of embracing “the ‘sissy’ Jewish school of thought.”

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Airbnb Sued, Accused of Ignoring Hosts’ Race Discrimination

Posted on May 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

The sharing economy, operated by apps like Uber and AirBNB, only works when it is among people worthy of trust.

Bloomberg: Airbnb Inc. was accused in a civil-rights lawsuit of ignoring a black man who complained that his reservation request with the online room-rental company was rejected by a host because of his race.

Gregory Selden, 25, sued Tuesday in federal court in Washington, D.C., claiming violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other statutes. He’s seeking class-action status to represent what he says are thousands of other people who’ve had similar experiences with San Francisco-based Airbnb. Title II of the act bars discrimination in places of public accommodation, such as hotels, restaurants, movie theaters and sports arenas.

The suit adds to Airbnb’s growing list of legal challenges. The company has sparred with governments over the taxes its hosts pay, and it’s been sued over other alleged misdeeds of its hosts, including one incident involving a hidden camera in a rental.

Nick Papas, a spokesman for Airbnb, said that while he can’t comment on individual cases, the company does prohibit content that promotes bigotry, racism, hatred or harassment.

“We strongly believe that racial discrimination is unacceptable and it flies in the face of our mission to bring people together,” Papas said in an e-mailed statement. “We are taking aggressive action to fight discrimination and eliminate unconscious bias in our community.”

Company’s Challenge

While the claims haven’t been proven in court, the lawsuit shows the challenges companies like Airbnb face in policing the behavior of users who aren’t typical employees and who aren’t managed by anyone on the ground, said Todd Solomon, a lawyer with McDermott Will & Emery LLP in Chicago.

“It’s hard enough to instill corporate culture even with face-to-face contact, so there’s a special challenge here,” said Solomon, who isn’t involved in the case. “They have no idea if somebody who registers a rental home has any interest in sharing their core values or whether they even know about their core values.”

Selden, of Virginia, claims an Airbnb host in Philadelphia identified only as Paul turned down his request in March 2015. But Paul, whom Selden refers to as an Airbnb agent, representative or employee, continued to advertise the property as being available on the requested date, according to the suit.

‘Same Listing’

“Soon after and on the same day he was rejected by the Airbnb agent or employee, Mr. Selden stumbled across the same listing,” according to the complaint. “This is despite the fact that the Airbnb agent or employee told Mr. Selden that the accommodation was not available.”

Paul then accepted the same request made by using two phony profiles for white men named Jessie and Todd, Selden said.

When Selden complained to the company, “his cries to Airbnb would fall on deaf ears,” according to the suit.

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