Goy Philosopher tells me: Yes and that’s such a rare experience, feeling that you’ve been heard and truly heard the other person. And especially rare for people with our outsider beliefs and attitudes. One reason why I like your blog. I have lost a lot of friends over the years. I am always being told that I’m ‘extreme’, that my ideas are ‘disturbing’ or ‘menacing’, symptoms of some mental problem. ‘Why are you so angry all the time?’, ‘Why do you always focus on the negative?’, ‘Why do you hate so many people?’, and so on. Even close long-time friends and people who are fairly tolerant and open-minded will usually eventually end up saying things like that. I don’t know how to respond. As far as I can tell, I’m just right, basically, about what is going on. I didn’t make the world, and I can’t help caring about myself and my descendants and the cultural world that my ancestors created. My whole civilization and race are dying, and no one cares. I wish someone could convince me I’m wrong about this. I’d love to never think about these topics again. But no one has anything convincing to say. So how else am I supposed to be? Anyway, I’m grateful that there are some like-minded people out there.
Posted inPersonal|Comments Off on It Is Good To Feel Heard
All of the major Jewish groups, such as the ADL, the SWC, the SPLC, and the Jewish Federations, pursue the opposite values from mine, the opposite values from the Torah I learned, so when I hear that Donald Trump is not creating communication channels with them I am glad. These groups want things such as multiculturalism, immigration amnesty, importation of more Muslims, more Syrian refugees, more Africans, more gay marriage, tranny rights, black rights, civil rights, etc.
Few of the Orthodox Jews I know are thrilled with the mainstream Jewish groups aka organized Jewry pushing for immigration amnesty and civil rights.
Friend: “Amazing that despite all the Jews already recruited by Trump, it’s not enough; and no mention of the hostility of the ADL toward him. Why should be bow down to the ADL under those circumstances?”
Forward: Donald Trump’s popularity is rooted in his outsider status, and that’s left Jewish and pro-Israel groups a bit stumped.
After all, it’s standard operating procedure for any advocacy organization come election season: Forge relationships with candidates for office from both parties in order to guarantee access and influence regardless of who wins.
Jewish and pro-Israel groups have a long tradition of networking from the grassroots to the highest level, but they have few channels to The Donald. The Anti-Defamation League, concerned about Trump’s white supremacist following, has not been able to reach him.
“You always want to be one phone call away from the candidate, so when the day comes and you need something, you’ll have someone to answer your call,” said Dan Arbell, a former deputy chief of mission at Israel’s embassy in Washington who was involved in similar efforts in the past. “With a candidate like Trump, it’s more difficult, because he has less of an organized campaign,” he added, noting that while Hillary Clinton’s campaign has had a Middle East team in place for months, Trump lacks such an infrastructure.
“It’s harder to identify, with him, who are the people surrounding the candidate or who will potentially be part of a future administration,” Arbell added.
True, Trump boasts a “Tree of Life” plaque from Jewish National Fund, and likes to mention that he was the grand marshal of the Fifth Avenue Celebrate Israel Parade in 2004.
And he has a Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, real estate developer and owner of the New York Observer newspaper. Kushner has served as Trump’s unofficial liaison to the Jewish community at key moments.
Kushner sat down with Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, before Trump spoke in March at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the largest pro-Israel lobby in the United States . What Dermer told Kushner presumably helped Trump shape his narrative on Israel as presented in the speech.
The celebrity rabbi Shmuley Boteach also decided to embrace Trump after speaking to Kushner, whom, Boteach said, is a friend and “rock solid” on Israel.
At AIPAC, the audience received Trump’s address warmly, but the leadership publicly rejected it, taking both Trump and his listeners to task for their disrespectful attitude toward President Obama.
In the months since, AIPAC has yet to forge deep ties to the candidate, although at least two the aides running his convention operation have worked there. Trump’s deputy campaign manager, Michael Glassner, who was recently put in charge of planning for the Republican nominating convention, worked as a regional director for AIPAC in the past. Brian Jack, who until recently was a political analyst at AIPAC, now manages Trump’s delegate efforts.
A Jewish official with close ties to AIPAC said the lobby is in touch with Trump but does not have an extensive network of ties with his campaign.
“It’s a very different situation compared to Hillary,” said the official, who asked not to be named because he is not authorized to speak on behalf of his organization. Clinton’s Middle East advisers and campaign managers, he explained, have been “on everyone’s contact list for years.”
“We encourage all candidates for federal office to share their positions on strengthening the U.S.-Israel relationship,” AIPAC spokesman Marshall Wittmann said in a statement provided to the Forward.
The American Jewish Committee hasn’t met with him yet, either.
“AJC always seeks to meet with the Democratic and Republican candidates for U.S. president to discuss our priority issues and concerns,” CEO David Harris said in a statement. “In that spirit, and having already met with some of his aides, we would welcome the chance to sit down with Donald Trump.”
And while Trump did disavow the comments of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke when he blamed Jews for obstructing Trump’s efforts to “make America great again,” the candidate did not respond to previous requests by the ADL to distance himself from such white supremacist supporters.
“I think the bottom line, is we haven’t spoken with him,” said ADL’s national director and CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt.
COMMENTS:
* Well Republicans, like it or not, Trump is your man. He doesn’t need outreach contracts with Jewish groups, because–after all–his daughter and son in-law are Jewish. So what more does he need? Certainly, his support for Israel will be better than has ever been seen by a U.S. President. In fact, it will be yuuuuge!
And because of his Jewish relatives, aren’t we assured that he won’t treat us like he plans for Latinos, Asians, blacks, women, gays and the disabled?
Posted inAmerica, Jews|Comments Off on Forward: Donald Trump Puzzles Jewish Groups by Failing To Create Communication Channels
Washington Post: “AT THE heart of the Obama administration’s diplomatic engagement with Iran is the notion that the regime is divided among hard-liners who foment its terrorism and regional aggression and more moderate forces who are open to cooperation with the West.”
That’s nonsense. At the heart of any American regime relationship with another country is self-interest, other known as real politic. Who the good guys and the bad guys depend on circumstance. At what time, Stalin was our ally and then he was our enemy.
Right now, America tilts more towards Saudi Arabia than it does towards Iran, but that could change quickly.
Iran’s regime will mock the Holocaust as long as that is in its interest, as long as that shows it fighting the good fight against the moral claims of Jews and the Jewish state. If Jews make the Holocaust the moral crucible through which all foreign policy questions must be decided, then groups with different interests will have incentives to mock the Holocaust. For many, perhaps most, American Jews, the Holocaust is their primary religion.
Posted inIran|Comments Off on Washington Post Editorial: ‘Iran’s ‘moderates’ and the Holocaust’
The Jewish press can’t stop running anti-Trump pieces. The latest fashion is to get them from concern trolls all worried about the well-being of the Republican party.
Many Jewish conservatives are adrift, impotent and uneasy. Their intense opposition to Trump is not only based on policy but also the anti-intellectual, vulgar and angry culture he represents.
For many of conservatism’s most prominent Jews, the choice is already made. Over the last months, some of Trump’s most vocal and vociferous Republican opposition has come from Jewish figures. Writing in Commentary, Max Boot has labeled him “the single biggest threat to U.S. security” and announced that he “would sooner vote for Josef Stalin.” In the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens compared Trump to Mussolini and denounced those who reconcile themselves with him as “appalling” and lacking “mental maturity.” The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol’s Twitter feed has featured a storm of anti-Trump pronouncements that is positively Churchillian. Even the cautious and unflappable Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs and the GOP’s brightest intellectual, announced he “would never vote for Trump.” Instead, he is praying that “a serious conservative alternative emerges and makes it onto the ballot around the country.”
Over the course of the primary campaign, Trump made significant inroads into nearly every pocket of the Republican primary electorate. Despite his ideological fluidity and his playboy lifestyle, he won support from tea partiers, evangelicals, conservatives and moderates alike. Jews however, have remained — with near unanimity — implacably opposed.
There is, of course, one notable breach in this wall: Sheldon Adelson. Already months ago, Adelson signalled he could support Trump if he became the nominee. In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, Adelson and some of his associates — including Ari Fleischer — seem resigned to doing just that. But the contemptuous response they have elicited, and the eccentric magnate’s biographical similarity to Trump, simply highlight that Sheldon-land is the exception that proves the rule.
So what explains Jewish Republicans unyielding, overwhelming antipathy to the GOP’s presumptive nominee? In part, it is a matter of policy. The Jewish community’s leading conservatives are overwhelmingly foreign policy hawks. Many gravitated to the Republican Party inspired by Reagan’s confrontational stand against Communism. And many stayed because of the modern GOP’s continued commitment to American global leadership, a morally-grounded internationalism, and strong support for Israel. This is not the diplomatic vision of Donald J. Trump.
But the special opposition of Jews goes deeper than policy. Trump is not an ideological candidate; he is a cultural phenomenon. And the culture he represents — anti-intellectual, vulgar and angry — is not a Jewish one.
Jews are relative late-comers to the Republican Party. It was not until the 1960s, with William F. Buckley’s purge of the anti-Semitic Birchers, that the GOP could become a conceivable political home for even a significant minority of American Jews. Those who swung right during this era — including, most famously, many so-called “neo-conservatives” — were political converts; but they were never cultural assimilators. So Jews have, somewhat awkwardly, tried to find their place among wealthy Mayflower patricians, evangelicals and Second Amendment activists. But the coalition has always been a strange one, and I wonder whether Jews have ever felt fully at home. In a campaign that is about identity instead of policy, Jewish conservatives are left adrift and uneasy.
That unease is compounded by Trump’s independence. This nominee has burst onto the political stage fully formed. He is beholden to no one, and has no record to which he can be held. To a community that counts on its relationships with those in power, this is particularly disconcerting.
It is a feature of our political system that institutional leaders and prominent donors spend years educating and feeling out candidates on the issues that matter to them most. By the time politicians reach real power, interest groups know who they are, where they stand, and to whom they turn for advice and expertise. Within conservatism, those concerned with Israel and Jewish issues have been among the most successful at building such relationships.
The up-and-coming generation of conservative politicians — Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, and Ted Cruz, for instance — have each counted the support of prominent Jewish backers. But with Trump, the Republican Jewish establishment finds itself strangely impotent. The candidate does not need them…
It is that public that, channeled by Trump, has stirred up old Jewish insecurity and fear. For at least a generation American Jews have happily buried their eternal feelings of political vulnerability. But Trump’s candidacy has unleashed a wave of aggressive populism that includes a non-trivial anti-Semitic element. As Jamie Kirchick, a younger Jewish conservative implacably opposed to Trump, has written: “He is the candidate of the mob, and the mob always ends up turning on the Jews.”
And we should also be proud. Jewish skepticism of the mob is not simply a product of self-interest. Jewish conservatives, no less than Jewish liberals, have adopted a politics of moral commitment born from the lessons of Jewish history. For the left, those commitments are to a certain vision of social justice; for many Jewish conservatives, it is to “never again.” We were all once strangers in the land of Egypt. For some, the lesson is to support Black Lives Matter; for others, it is to demand American intervention in the Syrian slaughter. But for none of us is the vulgar vilification of Muslims and Mexicans an acceptable method of political mobilization. For we have borne that burden too.
…The real focus will shift to protecting the core of the party whose values Jews can share. Energy and dollars that would have once been spent on the presidential campaign will flow to vulnerable long-time community allies, like John McCain and Mark Kirk. The struggle is no longer simply against Democrats, but to preserve an alternative vision of what the GOP should stand for. And despite the miracle of America, after millennia of diaspora, Jews are still experts of political triage. If the White House is already lost, perhaps the party can still be saved.
Here is the key phrase: “He is beholden to no one.” That’s what makes elites so uneasy. They are used to political candidates that they control. They do not control Donald Trump. He does not need their money. He does not seek their edifying education and guidance.
This election is about identity. Jewish identity is different from white gentile identity. Different peoples have different interests. That’s why Jews for 200 years have largely sided with the coalition of the fringe against the core. Donald Trump reflects America’s white gentile core.
This essay also mentions Jewish fears of populism. Jews have rarely been popular. They’ve relied upon alliances with elites to protect them from the mob. Yishai Schwartz is right that “Jewish skepticism of the mob is not simply a product of self-interest.” It is just 99% a product of self-interest. Neither the left-wing or right-wing concerns that the author mentions are part of Judaism’s concerns. They are simply tactical concerns of the various facets of organized Jewry.
As for the sentiment about saving the Republican party, saving it for whom? For the Jews? The Republican party should be the tool of Jews? If the Republican party should be saved for the preservation of universal human values or of conservative values, these sentiments are meaningless. There are no universal human values, unless you subscribe to a particular religion, and then those “universal human values” are simply the dictates of your particular religion.
“The Jewish community’s leading conservatives are overwhelmingly foreign policy hawks. Many gravitated to the Republican Party inspired by Reagan’s confrontational stand against Communism. And many stayed because of the modern GOP’s continued commitment to American global leadership, a morally-grounded internationalism, and strong support for Israel.”
Because Israel. That’s shorter, more truthful and more to the point. Because Israel.
“Trump is not an ideological candidate; he is a cultural phenomenon. And the culture he represents — anti-intellectual, vulgar and angry — is not a Jewish one.”
Because anti-intellectualism, vulgarity and anger are rare among Jews? Give me a break. The culture Trump represents that repels many Jews is gentile America, and yes, that is not a Jewish culture. The more you identify as a Jew, the more likely you are to find non-Jewish culture distasteful, even frightening just as the more you identify as a Christian or a Muslim, the more likely you are to find culture outside of that distasteful, even frightening.
This is basic social identity theory.
“Those who swung right during this era — including, most famously, many so-called “neo-conservatives” — were political converts; but they were never cultural assimilators.”
Yes, if a Jew assimilates, he ceases to be a Jew. As long as he identifies with his Judaism in any way, the Jew stands apart. He’s a stranger to his non-Jewish society. And not even angels like strangers.
“So Jews have, somewhat awkwardly, tried to find their place among wealthy Mayflower patricians, evangelicals and Second Amendment activists. But the coalition has always been a strange one, and I wonder whether Jews have ever felt fully at home.”
As long as you identify as a Jew, you will only feel at home in Jewish culture and religion. As long as a Muslim identifies as a Muslim, he won’t feel at home in the West. The West is largely the product of white gentiles of Christian origins.
“He is beholden to no one, and has no record to which he can be held. To a community that counts on its relationships with those in power, this is particularly disconcerting.”
Bingo! Bingo! Bingo! Jewish survival and prosperity has long depended upon cutting deals with the elites to protect Jews from the mob.
“For at least a generation American Jews have happily buried their eternal feelings of political vulnerability.”
Not really. If American Jews were so secure, why would they make the Holocaust their primary religion?
Posted inDonald Trump, Jews|Comments Off on Haaretz: Can anti-Trump Jews Save the Republican Party?
Ann Coulter has been a reliable friend of the Jewish state of Israel for as long as she has been in public life. I can’t think of any pundit who has been demonstrably more pro-Israel over the past 20 years. If you are going to call her anti-Semitic, then the term has no meaning.
On the other hand, I do not think Cathy Young is totally out to lunch here. I do think Ann has increasing and understandable hostility about organized Jewry’s multiculti agenda for the diaspora.
Cathy Young’s arguments largely consist of put-downs such as “extremist” and “rabid” and “hater.” There are only two honorable forms of arguments — to dispute facts and logic.
The term “anti-Semitic” is just a slur. The exact term should be “anti-Jewish,” but that doesn’t sound as horrible. It does not have the mystical overtones of “anti-Semitism.”
How come you never hear the term “anti-gentile”? Just as gentiles can be anti-Jewish, so too Jews can be anti-gentile.
How come you never hear someone labeled “anti-white”?
Different groups have different interests. We are all competing for scarce resources. People will naturally hate those outsiders who are getting in their way and doing them harm. When all of the major Jewish groups in America push for immigration amnesty and for import of thousands of Syrian refugees, they are lobbying on behalf of policies that help some people and hurt others (such as whites who are increasingly strangers in the country they created). It would be natural and healthy for those hurt to react against those who are hurting them.
There are many factual and logical problems in Cathy’s essay. For one, the double standards argument does not originate with Kevin MacDonald. It’s been used against Jews for thousands of years.
Cathy writes: “But there’s an even more bigoted—and, well, deranged— subtext of nefarious Jewish conspiracy.”
That’s hardly an argument. That’s just the retailing of slurs. The so-called Jewish conspiracy she’s railing against is simply noting that like most groups, Jews tend to organize in their self-interest. What makes Jews special is that they are so smart and energetic. Thus they are formidable opponents.
Cathy writes: “McDonald argues that Judaism is a collective evolutionary strategy by which Jews seek dominance, and that, where they have minority status, this strategy is to subvert and weaken gentile majority culture…”
MacDonald argues that all groups and individuals and living organisms seek to maximize their interests. Jews understandably fear a gentile society unified by race, religion or nationalism because such identities will usually exclude Jews. Jews will be seen aliens. On the other hand, the individualist societies created by WASPs treat Jews well because Jews are primarily seen as individuals, not as members of a group. If Jews practice nationalism while the gentiles practice individualism, Jews will tend to have a competitive advantage. Group strategies tend to out-compete individualist strategies. Cohesive groups, when all else is equal, will out-compete multi-cultural groups.
A friend says: “Regarding Young’s smear of Coulter, this looks like a paid for hatchet job. The Daily Beast is anti Trump and anti Coulter and it is her way of proving her chops. Coulter is like an elephant and Young is like a pesky fly buzzing around trying to get a rise out of the elephant.”
In her heart, I think Ann Coulter looks at the world in a similar fashion to Steve Sailer.
The Trump cheerleader shares his habit of promoting ethnic nationalists and their ugly ideas.
The white nationalists of the so-called alternative right, an extremist movement that rejects mainstream conservatism as too gutless and too infected with liberal thinking, have been getting a lot of attention lately as Donald Trump’s most rabid fan base. While the alt-right is a fringe, its virulent bigotry is openly embraced by Trump’s biggest cheerleader—and, arguably, ideologue-in-chief—from mainstream conservative ranks.
That’s uber-Trumpista Ann Coulter, who caused a stir last year when she tweeted, “How many f—ing Jews do these people think there are in the United States?” during a Republican debate she found too Israel-centric. It wasn’t an isolated comment.
These days, Coulter—who didn’t respond to emails asking for comment on the company she keeps—is remarkably upfront about her alt-right sympathies. On May 3, for instance, she retweeted a paean to herself from VDARE—a leading alt-right website that styles itself an “outlet for patriotic immigration reform.” (Coulter links to it from her own site.) Its founder and editor-in-chief, Peter Brimelow, has denied that it is racist or white nationalist, while conceding that it publishes white nationalist authors such as Jared Taylor.
Yet a look at the site—which rewards donations with a “Patriot pack” of Confederate flags, a rather quaint idea of American patriotism—leaves little doubt about its leanings. One recent VDARE blogpost mocks Jack McCain, Sen. John McCain’s son, for tweeting photos of himself and his African-American wife as a rebuke to people who objected to a mixed-race couple in an Old Navy ad; it also gripes about the “force-feeding” of interracial marriage to the American public. Meanwhile, an article celebrating Trump’s “nationalist revolution” argues that the American right can only survive if it embraces a “nationalist, identitarian future” (“identitarian” is the preferred term of alt-righters who realize that “white nationalist” goes over better with polite euphemisms) and warns that nationalism will “become more imperative as the country becomes increasingly ‘diverse’ aka non-white.”
Two days later, Coulter followed up with another retweet from VDARE’s twitter account, this one also touting two other sites: RadixJournal, which peddles unabashed white supremacism, and /pol/, a notoriously anti-Semitic 4chan board—have the dubious merit of making VDARE look moderate. It is also worth noting that immediately before this, Coulter retweeted a Trump-cheering tweet from “Ricky Vaughn,” one of the undisputed stars of alt-right Twitter and a rabid Jew-hater.
Coulter’s book, Adios, America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole, published in June 2015—and credited with shaping the anti-immigration theme of Trump’s campaign—channeled familiar alt-right rhetoric about the peril of immigration by the wrong ethnic minorities; but it also invoked a standard alt-right anti-Semitic trope which was quickly recycled back into a Twitter meme…
Those familiar with the alt-right will recognize one of its favorite talking points: Israel supporters—particularly Jews—are hypocritical if they support immigration into the U.S., since they don’t advocate large-scale non-Jewish immigration into Israel or the Palestinian right of return. (It is invoked, for example, in an unabashedly anti-Semitic primer on “How to Argue with Neocons” on an alt-right blog.) Regardless of what one thinks of immigration to the United States, or of Israeli policies, this is a remarkably bad analogy.
Israel was founded as an ethno-state (though it is worth noting that a quarter of its citizens are not Jewish); the United States of America was not. Israel is surrounded by hostile neighbors; the United States is not. A Palestinian right of return would mean forcing a nation of eight million to accept as many as four to five million immigrants many of whom are hostile to its statehood; proportionately, that would be analogous to an influx of 150 million into the U.S. If such a proposal were on the table, Coulter and Trump certainly wouldn’t be the only ones to oppose it.
The “double standards” argument has blatantly anti-Semitic overtones, since it invariably invokes Israel and never other small nations, like Finland, that limit immigration and grant automatic citizenship on the basis of ethnic background. But there’s an even more bigoted—and, well, deranged— subtext of nefarious Jewish conspiracy.
This argument originates in the writings of Kevin MacDonald, a now-retired California State University-Long Beach psychology professor who has something of a fixation on Jews. In his 2003 book, The Culture of Critique, McDonald argues that Judaism is a collective evolutionary strategy by which Jews seek dominance and that, where they have minority status, this strategy is to subvert and weaken gentile majority culture—such as destroying Russia by engineering the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. In America, MacDonald believes, one of the chief Jewish strategies is to undermine white culture via unrestricted immigration.
>MacDonald is a regular contributor to VDARE—where, it should be noted, he is far from the only one pushing outlandish ideas about Jewish subversion; one of the site’s regular bloggers, Steve Sailer, has suggested that Jews “use their influence over the media” to “demoralize and divide” other groups. MacDonald is also the founder and editor-in-chief of The Occidental Observer, a “white identity” website that has some nice things to say about Nazi Germany—and where topic tags include “Israel Lobby,” “Holocaust Industry,” “Jewish aggressiveness,” “Jewish influence,” “Jewish wealth,” and “Historical anti-Jewish writings.” One of the largest tags, with over 50 articles, is “Jewish hypocrisy and double standards on immigration and multiculturalism in Israel versus the Diaspora.”
Coulter’s accusation of hypocrisy in the passage from Adios, America! is not overtly directed at the Jews; but the implications of her taunt are unmistakable. Nor does she propose a “white homeland” or a right to self-determination for American whites as a group, as do many alt-rightists; she is simply quite explicit in her view that massive immigration should be opposed for racial reasons—because it “changes America’s ethnicity.”
Coulter has a long history of saying odious things, often sneaking them in under the cover of she-can’t-really-mean-that edgy humor. (Writing about Adios, America in The Daily Beast, Lloyd Grove wondered if she was “merely engaging in perverse, albeit attention-getting, performance art.”) But now, Coulter doesn’t really bother to hide the fact that she does mean it—and her brand of odiousness is fueling the revolt that has made Donald Trump the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
Posted inAnn Coulter, Anti-Semitism|Comments Off on Cathy Young: ‘Ann Coulter’s Anti-Semitism Runs Deeper Than You Know’
"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)
