Ramzpaul: Should Passover Denial Be Illegal?

Ramzpaul (who has a Jewish girlfriend, Ashley Rae Goldenberg) tweets:

* Part of a heritage is shared myths and stories. No, most Jewish archaeologists don’t believe God parted the Red Sea.

* I could become a Japanese citizen, but I will never be Japanese. The people are a shared heritage and blood.

* Most non-Whites are tribal by nature. And that is OK. It is natural. We should do the same.

Haaretz: Were Jews Ever Really Slaves in Egypt, or Is Passover a Myth?

Josh Mintz writes: Here’s a question for you: what do actor Charlton Heston, DreamWorks animation studios and Former Prime Minister Menachem Begin all have in common? Well, they’ve all, at one time or another, perpetuated the myth that the Jews built the pyramids. And it is a myth, make no mistake. Even if we take the earliest possible date for Jewish slavery that the Bible suggests, the Jews were enslaved in Egypt a good three hundred years after the 1750 B.C. completion date of the pyramids. That is, of course, if they were ever slaves in Egypt at all.

We are so quick to point out the obvious lies about Jews and Israel that come out in Egypt – the Sinai Governors claims that the Mossad released a shark into the Red Sea to kill Egyptians, or, as I once read in a newspaper whilst on holiday in Cairo, the tale of the magnetic belt buckles that Jews were selling cheap in Egypt that would sterilize men on contact – yet we so rarely examine our own misconceptions about the nature of our history with the Egyptian nation.
We tend, in the midst of our disdain for Egyptian, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, to overlook the fact that one of the biggest events of the Jewish calendar is predicated upon reminding the next generation every year of how the Egyptians were our cruel slave-masters, in a bondage that likely never happened. Is this really so different from Jaws the Mossad agent?
The reality is that there is no evidence whatsoever that the Jews were ever enslaved in Egypt. Yes, there’s the story contained within the bible itself, but that’s not a remotely historically admissible source. I’m talking about real proof; archeological evidence, state records and primary sources. Of these, nothing exists.
It is hard to believe that 600,000 families (which would mean about two million people) crossed the entire Sinai without leaving one shard of pottery (the archeologist’s best friend) with Hebrew writing on it. It is remarkable that Egyptian records make no mention of the sudden migration of what would have been nearly a quarter of their population, nor has any evidence been found for any of the expected effects of such an exodus; such as economic downturn or labor shortages. Furthermore, there is no evidence in Israel that shows a sudden influx of people from another culture at that time. No rapid departure from traditional pottery has been seen, no record or story of a surge in population.
In fact, there’s absolutely no more evidence to suggest that the story is true than there is in support of any of the Arab world’s conspiracy theories and tall tales about Jews.
So, as we come to Passover 2012 when, thanks to the “Arab Spring,” our relations with Egypt are at a nearly 40 year low, let us enjoy our Seder and read the story by all means, but also remind those at the table who may forget that it is just a metaphor, and that there is no ancient animosity between Israelites and Egyptians. Because, if we want to re-establish that elusive peace with Egypt that so many worked so hard to build, we’re all going to have to let go of our prejudices.

Posted in Jews | Comments Off on Ramzpaul: Should Passover Denial Be Illegal?

2016 Top Democratic Donors Are Almost All Jewish

From Mondoweiss:

The scene was a J Street panel Sunday night about the 2016 election at the Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, and the dialogue began when Roger Cohen of the New York Times asked J.J. Goldberg of the Forward (at 44:00) to explain the importance of “funding” to pro-Israel politics.

“Funding?” Goldberg gave a little uncomfortable laugh then said:

Up until recently I was under the impression that the Democrats had to go to Jews. You ask a Democratic fundraiser, where do you get the money from? “Well from trial lawyers, from toys, from generic drugs, from Hollywood. From Jews.” Those are all essentially Jewish industries… When you are raising money, you need to find rich people who are not right wing, and there are not– pardon me for saying this, there are not many rich goyim who are not right wing. Forgive me for saying that.

Then Goldberg said he had just read something “that knocked my socks off.” The Center for Responsive Politics issued a list of the top 50 donors to 527’s and super-PACs, and eight of the 36 Republican bigs were Jewish, and of the 14 Democrats, only one was not Jewish.

There was one non-Jew who was giving big money to the Democrats. That’s gigantic in the terms of American politics. If Bernie Sanders sets a new model, then this may change, and the weight of Jews in the political system may go down.

Goldberg’s candor about the Jewish “weight” on the Democratic side liberated the one person on the panel who I don’t think was Jewish, Stephanie Schriock of Emily’s List, the pro-choice group. She said “the money… is a big piece of this story and cannot be overlooked at all.”

She works with 50 federal candidates a year, most of them coming out of state legislatures or new to politics, with little foreign policy experience; and when the Iran deal came up they all had a lot “of angst” about taking a position. For the first time in her career, Schriock said, she was able to tell these candidates they could buck the Israel lobby group AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, was telling them to do: kill the deal.

As someone who has been doing this now for two decades, I realized that I had freedom as an operative, as a strategist to say to some of our candidates, which I, in fact, did: do what you feel is right here…. Because I think there’s enough energy around all of it now [meaning, all sides] than there used to be. So if you decide to be against the deal, there’s going to be folks that are going to be with you. If you’re going to be for the deal, there’s going to be folks that are going to be with you.

Folks means donors. Schriock concluded, “That was the first time I went, Wow, there’s really a change.”

She then explained how congressional candidates’ views on Israel are determined by the need to raise money from pro-Israel Jews.

I started as a finance director. I worked for candidates in the 90’s as their finance director. And I would come on a congressional race, I am a twenty-something kid who also knows nothing beyond the state borders, let alone overseas, and you thought about where you are going to go to raise the money that you needed to raise to win a race. And you went to labor, you went to the choice community, and you went to the Jewish community. But before you went to the Jewish community, you had a conversation with the lead AIPAC person in your state and they made it clear that you needed a paper on Israel. And so you called all of your friends who already had a paper on Israel – that was designed by AIPAC – and we made that your paper.

This was before there was a campaign manager, or a policy director or a field director because you got to raise money before you do all of that. I have written more Israel papers that you can imagine. I’m from Montana. I barely knew where Israel was until I looked at a map, and the poor campaign manager would come in, or the policy director, and I’d be like, ‘Here is your paper on Israel. This is our policy.’ We’ve sent it all over the country because this is how we raise money. … This means that these candidates who were farmers, school teachers, or businesswomen, ended up having an Israel position without having any significant conversations with anybody…

The papers were the same? Cohen asked.

“Very similar. Incredibly similar.”

For a country with 300 million people, that’s a cornering of the market, Cohen observed.

It’s astounding. And when I look back at it, it’s shocking. [Someone in audience applauds] Thank you. I agree. Jeremy Ben-Ami [of J Street] and I had the great pleasure of meeting each other during the Howard Dean campaign and one of the conversations we had was, ‘Oh my gosh. Is there really only one foreign policy on this?’ Because it felt like it. And that was the case.

Now, she said, there is more than one position on Israel. J Street opened up the conversation, though she hinted that others are now permitted into the discussion, too. She exclaimed about how undemocratic this process has been:

It’s incredibly important. Yes: this country had one very clear unmovable set of policies, and it wasn’t driven by voters. It wasn’t driven by voters.

Cohen asked what would happen if a candidate didn’t take the AIPAC position on Israel?

You thought that the money was going to be gone.

Just going to dry up? Cohen said.

“Yes,” Schriock said. These are candidates, she said, who “really have to get those $5000 PAC checks from the pro-Israel PAC in St. Louis.”

A few comments. The silence in the synagogue was about the unspeakable being spoken: the disdain on the part of the Israel lobby for popular opinion and the lobby’s use of money to dismiss the public by essentially bribing politicians.

“It wasn’t driven by voters.” This is the obvious story that our press has failed to do for the ten years since the Israel lobby was declared fair game in Walt and Mearsheimer’s expose of the power over policy of the lobby, an expose the Atlantic killed so it had to be published in England. Schriock said the power of the lobby began to weaken in 06– surely in some measure because of the Iraq war and Walt and Mearsheimer. As J.J. Goldberg also said, the Iraq war left the “Jewish neocons” with their pants down as a bad influence on the United States, and the Jewish community, which had opposed the war largely, was not happy about being put in that light. J Street formed in part to be the lobby of anti-dual loyalty Jews who would support the Iran deal even if Israel said, No way.

And that’s why J Street was so vilified. Because it shivered the monolith; and as soon as the Jewish community failed to speak in one concerted voice on Israel, it gave Democratic politicians an opening to conclude, as Schriock says, that if they took a position opposed to AIPAC they could still get “folks” on their side.

But again, Where is the press? Embarrassed. (Even Jewish Insider, which beat me on this story, softened her comments. And Roger Cohen mentions Jewish funding in a column on Israel policy today, but doesn’t dare say what Goldberg and Schriock just told him.) The financial role that Goldberg and Schriock are describing is mirrored in the Jewish role in the media. We’re all over the media because of education, wealth, and culture; but to speak of Jewish donor influence is to broach the fact that Mort Zuckerman owns the Daily News, or the Times is Jewish owned, or that Comcast is led by Jews, or that and all these folks are sympathetic or ardently supportive of Israel. People are afraid to say the truth. And P.S. Time Warner executive Gary Ginsberg wrote speeches for Netanyahu.

Did Schriock know what she was saying? Yes; she spoke intentionally. A dam had burst; Goldberg gave her permission. And she, like so many others, is deeply offended by this corruption. “It wasn’t driven by voters.” That’s starting to change. There are now non-Zionists lobbying on Capitol Hill. Some day one of em may even get a column in the Times.

COMMENTS:

* Goldberg left out unions, or are they all “Jewish money” too?

Sounds likes Clinton’s DLC sprint away from representing the interests of working people left the Dems little choice. Glad Sanders is changing that back to a more distributed funding base.

* You’re cleverly leaving out a bit of J.J.’s comment and adding a lot of stuff that isn’t there. J.J. said that there was a PERCEPTION that some neocons who were Jewish advocated for the Iraq War. This perception led some (clearly he’s thinking of people like you) to suggest that Jews were dually loyal, which hadn’t been heard since “Father Coughlin.”. Your response is to tall about how the Jews own the media, and you mention that the New York Times is owned by a (heavily, heavily assimilated) Jewish family, as if this proves that the Times editorial line, which is indistinguishable from a number of other liberal newspapers that are not owned by Jews, is somehow what it is because it’s owned by a Jew.

Your type of poison is exactly the reason why Jews can’t speak out about these things. You contribute, dishonorably, to our vilification.

I think that readers here think the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a work of non-fiction and that they’re primed to believe any conspiracy theory someone spins about the American Jewish community.

Jew baiting is wrong. Emulating Father Coughlin is wrong. Speaking about the fact the the owner of the NY Times is Jewish, as if the fact of his Jewishness proved anything, is wrong.

* Have you ever read the Protocols? I have. It is easily the dullest, most repetitious thing I have ever read, containing virtually no useful information. I forced myself to keep reading because of the continued reference to “the Protocols.” I needed to confirm that, in spite of a worthless beginning, there wasn’t anything interesting toward the end. The current primary function of the Protocols is as a perjorative label used by Zionist propagandists such as you to avoid any empirical evaluation, relying instead on proof by labeling. Pablo Christiani, blood libel, Protocols, Father Coughlin, conspiracy theory, etc. You throwing mud doesn’t alter the empirical reality.

* Because saying that the owner of the NY Times is Jewish as an argument for why the NY Times takes the editorial position that it does is an empirical evaluation, right? See, that’s the problem. You talk about an empirical evaluation. That’s not what’s going on at Mondoweiss. What goes on here is polemical extremist, not dispassionate science.

“Pablo Christiani, blood libel, Protocols, Father Coughlin, conspiracy theory, etc. You throwing mud doesn’t alter the empirical reality.”

What mud? Yoni said that Pablo Christiani, who advocating making Jews wear badges, forced Jewish audiences to listen to him give pro-conversion speeches and to pay him for the privilege, told the Pope to burn Jewish books, and used the force of both monarch and Church to do all of it, was not a Jew-hater. This is the level of dreck we have here.

And I bring up Father Coughlin because J.J. referenced him, and Phil cleverly left that out of his summary; J.J. said that people hadn’t spoken of Jews in the way some speak about them now since Father Coughlin. That’s why it’s a conspiracy theory. When you use someone’s religion as an explanation of all you find disagreeable, and you go further than that to suggest that people of that religion work together to subvert the country, that’s a conspiracy theory, not an empirical case. And it’s the very definition of bigotry.

Posted in America, Jews | Comments Off on 2016 Top Democratic Donors Are Almost All Jewish

Steve Sailer: People with normal American names — except Deedee — don’t really get the concept of being generous toward politicians. In contrast, other cultures seem to find American politicians to be bargains.

Link: Names with high donation medians
Below: Per name, the median of per-individual median amounts donated. Includes only names with at least 40 individuals. Excludes the candidates themselves.
Name Median donation
Akram $1000
Chaim $1000
Chana $1000
Dov $1000
Judah $1000
Mayer $1000
Mendel $1000
Mordechai $1000
Moshe $1000
Murat $1000
Navin $1000
Rivka $1000
Shlomo $1000
Shoshana$1000
Vishal $1000
Yehuda $1000
Javad $950
Ling $875
Meir $875
San $875
Zvi $850
Deedee $825
Jian $750
Kyung $750
Mehmet $750

Comments:

* I think there is a more pragmatic explanation than bribery.

$1000 isn’t going to get you much more than a picture with a presidential candidate after all. But for entrepreneurial immigrant strivers in the US, that’s just fine as it can be marketed to the bumpkins back home as quite an accomplishment. Just think of the bragging rights mom and the mother-in-law would have!

This snapshot of a local immigration attorney’s webpage demonstrates the point.

The site had remarkably amateur web design and was prole as all hell, but I’m sure these pictures worked just as intended.

* There is no greater honor in America than to be a victim of white racism. That’s why there are so many made up incidents. You counterfeit things that are valuable.

Adopting a black child is a loophole to the rule:

But, we knew, especially in the South, that a white couple with non-white children would draw a myriad of different reactions. There will always be the older white woman in Walmart who stared at us with sheer disgust, or the African-American mother who looked at us and just shook her head

Of course they did knew. I can only hope their racial victimization was as wonderful as they were hoping, planning, and expecting.

There is something beautiful and enriching being the only white face sitting and chatting with some of my African-American friends as my son gets his hair cut on a Saturday morning. There is also something wonderful in the relationship that is built as my wife asks a black friend on Facebook how to care for our little biracial daughter’s hair.

Some of your African-American friends? You have multiple? There is no way a white person can ascend any higher.

* The desire to be cool by being a white with a black baby was parodied by Absolutely Fabulous in 2004.

* My God.

This is a beautiful example of the truth in the kind of work people like Steve do. Could there be a data set that proves our gut feelings and stereotypes any more than this one?

These are the things you see when you take the red pill.

* These are not ordinary American Jewish names but names associated either with being ultra-Orthodox or being Israeli or both. Non-Orthodox American Jews (the great majority) give their kids typical white suburban names – Isabella, Madison, Alexander, Michael, etc.

* “Kate has been associated with feminist women since Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.”

* That’s odd, since Taming of the Shrew is one of the most anti-feminist works in our common culture. Is this a case of feminists not getting the joke? I’m guessing the logic is as such: Shakespeare is good, and feminism is good, ergo Shakespeare is feminist.

mBbEGDHl

Posted in America | Comments Off on Steve Sailer: People with normal American names — except Deedee — don’t really get the concept of being generous toward politicians. In contrast, other cultures seem to find American politicians to be bargains.

The Rise Of Trump Studies

Politico: There’s a measure of irony in that Trump’s candidacy—grounded in an anti-elite message and regular bashing of the political correctness “crap” rooted on college campuses—is such a boon to professors. Though Trump flaunts his academic bona fides—the degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and an exceptional vocabulary (“I know words. I have the best words.”)—his almost proud indifference to detail and accuracy has made him perhaps the least popular candidate among the American professoriate in recent memory. None of the two dozen professors and student researchers interviewed for this story signaled they were a Trump supporter…

By research standards, the Trump phenomenon is still young, but fields are littered with the certainties it’s already shaken. For political scientists, Trump’s primary and caucus victories challenge the reigning belief that a strong party institution is the ultimate key to electoral success. For communications pros, his freewheeling use of social media and a penchant for saying things that alienate different segments of society shatter assumptions about what should kill a presidential campaign. Trump has even put his own imprimatur on the conspiracy theory playbook that typically targets powerful people and institutions. He has dropped the Obama birther shtick he peddled in 2012 in favor of a rhetorical dog whistle the size of a tuba that attacks far more vulnerable populations like Mexican immigrants and Muslims.

Trump’s candidacy is also a cannonball aimed straight at perhaps the most influential book on electoral politics in the past decade: The Party Decides, which argues establishment insiders ultimately determine who wins a presidential nomination, despite the primary voting process. Martin Cohen, the James Madison University political science professor who co-authored the book, has found his work the subject in recent months of an intense online debate over whether its findings hold up—or whether Trump’s success, in blunt defiance of his own party’s elders, is undercutting the entire idea. “Certainly, he’s had an impact on the way we think about politics and how they are supposed to work,” Cohen acknowledged, while still insisting that more study needs to be done to assess whether Trump is just an aberration who doesn’t change the fundamental findings spelled out in his book’s thesis…

Of course, academics like MacWilliams aren’t shying away from revealing some of their early findings. After all, the media beast is hungry and the opportunities for self-promotion are abundant while Trump’s campaign is still at the center of the political world. And there are numerous outlets hungry for their kind of analysis, from the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog to Vox, Huffington Post and Politico Magazine.
“I feel like a prostitute,” said Restad, the Oslo-based professor who earlier this month wrote an essay for the London School of Economics’ website about how American exceptionalism has returned with a force via the Trump candidacy. “If you put Trump in a title people will click on it.”

…Obviously, nobody knows what will happen at the conclusion of the 2016 election, but some are already focusing on what would be the ultimate research bonanza: a Trump presidency, perhaps the strangest and least predictable political development in American history. Last month, for example, University of Virginia law professor Michael Livermore published a commentary predicting Trump “would face huge challenges in effectively overseeing the executive branch and pursuing a coherent policy agenda.”
But the very thing that makes Trump so interesting from a scholar’s standpoint also makes him impossible to pin down conclusively: He keeps producing a steady stream of surprises.
“The way I like to describe it to my friends is to imagine we were astrophysicists and there’s this weird blob of ectoplasm that seems to defy all laws of time and space,” Oliver said. “We’re desperately trying to get our instruments out to measure it while it’s going on.”

Posted in Donald Trump | Comments Off on The Rise Of Trump Studies

How To Find The Right Rehab

Here is one of the questions on paperwork hospital routinely hand out to those seeking recovery from addiction:

* Does the treatment program also address sexual orientation and physical disabilities as well as provide age, gender and culturally appropriate services?

Posted in Addiction | Comments Off on How To Find The Right Rehab