Luke Ford

I’m watching on Netflix this 2009 documentary, based on Alan Dershowitz’s 2003 book, The Case for Israel.

I haven’t read Dershowitz’s book, but I know that much of it is “plagiarized from From Time Immemorial, a book by Joan Peters.”

The first 49 minutes of the documentary make sense to me but then it turns when Alex Safian, associate director of CAMERA says: “Not only is Israel singled out for this labeling, for this tarring of it as a terrible human rights oppressor, as the worst human rights oppressor in the world, when you look at what goes on in Arab countries, in Syria for instance, in Saudi Arabia, even worse in Sudan and Darfur, true genocides going on, the idea of singling out Israel is truly surreal.”

The average Syrian IQ is 83, the same as the average Papua New Guinean. Is anyone surprised when Papua New Guineans eat people? No. The world yawns because it has no expectations for Papua New Guineans. Given the average IQ of Syrians, why should the world expect anything from them beyond savagery and incompetence?

The average Saudi IQ is 84. Why would the world expect anything from them beyond savagery and incompetence?

The average IQ in the Sudan is 71. Why would the world expect anything from Sudan beyond savagery and incompetence?

The average Mexican IQ is 87. It’s per capita GNP is around $8,000. Mexico, like Sri Lanka and the Sudan, gets little attention in the news because people have low expectations for Mexicans.

The documentary tries to make the case that if you hold Israel to a different standard, you’re being irrational, but the average IQ of Israelis is 95, with Arabs around 80 and Jews around 110. Jews are extraordinarily accomplished, influential and affluent people, in Israel and around the world, so being fascinated by them is normal and being bored by backward people such as Israel’s neighbors and enemies is also normal.

In matters of art and culture and science, the contributions, such as they are, of Syria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan get no world attention while the contributions of Israelis get great attention. Why? Because Israel makes enormous contributions while these backward countries contribute little to nothing. So an obsession with Israel and a lack of interest in its neighbors and enemies is overwhelmingly rational and not necessarily the result of anti-Jewish bias. On the contrary, it is a compliment to the Jews that the world cares so much about the Jewish state to constantly criticize it.

Gerald Steinberg, Israeli academic, says in the documentary: “Let’s look at the period of the Lebanon War [of 2006]. I don’t think Human Rights Watch did anything for two months except condemn Israel. There were no reports on Sri Lanka even though there were as many people killed in Sri Lankan bombings and attacks as in the Lebanon War. How do they pick their agendas? It can only be explained on the basis of emotion, political obsession, not on the basis of human rights.”

The average Sri Lankan IQ is 79. The world rationally has little interest in and few expectations for people with such low IQs. A score of 79 is just above the retarded level. The world is not terribly interested in the mentally retarded when compared with their interest in high achievers such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, etc. These natural inclinations are not some emotional irrationality nor anti-Jewish animus.

I don’t believe the people saying these stupid things in the documentary are stupid people. I believe they know that what they are saying is stupid but that they are acting deliberately obtuse because they believe that ignoring IQ is in the group interest of Jews because if the goyim realized we were, on average, much smarter than them, they would kill us.

Don* emails: “One thing that is always forgotten about Hitler is that he did not believe Jews were intellectually inferior. (Nazi principles held that Jews were morally degenerate and physically inferior.) He thought that on a fair playing field, they would dominate the professions, business and intellectual positions. His Nuremberg laws and initial anti-semitic actions, were designed to hobble the Jews, force them from these positions and wealth so that Aryans could then occupy them without fear of Jewish competition.”

Dennis Ross: “It is interesting that Israel is always the one being singled out.”

Why is that interesting? Jews are high-achievers with a way of life superior to all alternatives (see the statistics cited on the Jewish way of life in the book Why The Jews?) and with a modicum of freedom, they tend to outstrip other people in most of the important areas of life (income, accomplishment, education, charity, family life). And that’s been true for thousands of years. In essence, the Jews are the master race (using Steve Sailer’s exposition of race as partially inbred extended family, in the case of the Jews, it is a family anyone with self-discipline and a good IQ can join).

To wax poetic for a minute, and to channel my friend Chaim Amalek, “God chose the Jews to be the Master Race of mankind. However, He soon realized that this had cruel consequences for the less intelligent goyim of creation, so to protect them from the depredations of the Jews while still providing free will to one and all, he gave the Jews the Torah (both written and oral) by which they might be fenced in. Rest assured that those Jews who today live on the Torah Corral (like myself) are no threat to the gentle gentiles of the world. It is the secular liberal Jew, with his notions of Marxism, tolerance of the sodomite and the transgendered, creator both of socialism and feminism, who is the mortal enemy of the gentile world. I say this in the hope that when you goyim awake from your deep moral stupor (an increasingly unlikely event) and begin dealing with the Jew problem in your midst, you will leave me alone. I hope this clears everything up.”

How has humanity generally dealt with minorities who’ve excelled majorities? They’ve persecuted and killed them. Israel is not an exception to this pattern.

Fifty nine minutes in is the part of the documentary that jolts me. Alan Dershowitz says: “When you make criticisms that partake of Jewish stereotyping and talking about Jews controlling the media, and Jews controlling politics, and Jews being selfish, that begins to go over some lines.”

So if you make criticisms that “partake of Jewish stereotypes” you are going over some lines? How about if I say that Jews tend to complain more than non-Jews, particularly more than WASPs. Did I cross the line to unacceptable speech? If I point out that Jews such as Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, and Roland Arnall pioneered and perfected many of the risky financial instruments that have driven our economy over the past 30 years, is that crossing a line? If I say that Jews, because they have a religion and culture centered around law tend to be better than average at lawyering and politics and exercising influence and dealing with laws and working the system, is that crossing a line?

Historian Jonathan Sarna says in the documentary: “I taught in my class the accusations of Henry Ford against the Jews in the 1920s. Henry Ford wrote a series of books, first published as articles, called ‘The International Jew.’ And what is striking about those volumes is that there is nothing which he doesn’t blame on Jews. Contemporary music, which he hated, he blames on Jews. The problems of cities, he blames on Jews. Hollywood? He blames on Jews. Troubles on the American farm, he blames on Jews. Now, in each case, he was able to find, if you look far enough, he found one Jew here and one Jew there to make it look persuasive, but of course historians studying the material today understand that Henry Ford’s International Jew tells you much more about Henry Ford than it tells you about Jews.”

I have not read the works of Henry Ford, but I suspect Jewish influence on contemporary music and Hollywood is far more than “one Jew here and one Jew there”.

As Steve Sailer, a Roman Catholic, wrote:

To quantify the statement that “Jews are a small group, but influential in their areas of concentration,” in 2009, the Atlantic Monthly came up with a list of the top 50 opinion pundits: half are of Jewish background.

Over 1/3rd of the 2009 Forbes 400 are of Jewish background, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency’s reporter who covers Jewish philanthropy.

Joel Stein of the LA Times found in 2007 that people of Jewish background hold a large majority of the most powerful positions in Hollywood.

This is not to say that influential Jews are at all united in what they favor. On the other hand, it is more or less true that Jews hold something of a veto over what topics are considered appropriate for discussion in the press, Jewish influence itself being the most obvious example of a topic that is off the table in polite society.

If you like or dislike the modern world, it seems to me you would have rational basis to inquire into the Jews for their disproportionate role in creating the modern world. If you are interested in the development of psychiatry, nuclear weapons, Marxism, communism, socialism, the labor movement, the peace and animal rights movement, the white slave trade, feminism, the mass media, pornography, pop music, gangster rap, mass illegal immigration, etc, you’d probably like to see the influence of Jews discussed as openly and rationally as we talk about Christians and Mexicans and Saudis.

Professor Sarna responds to my email inquiry:

If you read Ford’s INTERNATIONAL JEW you will get some sense of his method. My brief remarks were an inadequate summary of the brilliant article by Leo Ribuffo “Henry Ford and International Jew,” American Jewish History 69 (June 1980), 437-477. So far as I know, Ribuffo was not Jewish.

It is, of course, true that Jews have been disproportionately influential in some areas of culture and industry and disproportionately disengaged from others. Why this is so, and the implications of this fact, are certainly legitimate avenues for research. Some of this research has in fact been done (see David Hollinger’s work, for example). I cannot encourage you to believe that Henry Ford’s articles in The International Jew (articles that he did not actually write) were models of such dispassionate and objective scholarship.

A leading Orthodox rabbi tells me: “The question of Jewish influence is fair as is the discussion, however anti-semites will always hear an ‘Elders of Zion’ type of conspiracy, as if all these Jews are working together.”

Israeli ambassador Dan Gillerman says 66 minutes into the documentary: “Iran is the biggest, most vivid real threat to world peace and security.”

If so, how come Iran only has the world’s 31st biggest military budget? How come they’ve had a nuclear program since the 1950s and have yet to build a bomb? How threatening can Iran be when it has an average IQ four points below Mexicans? Muslims are simply too incompetent to be a significant threat to the world. They can only be a nuisance unless we allow large number of them to immigrate into our countries.

Dan Gillerman: “We’ve paid a great price for thinking world leaders [such as Hitler] were crazy and disregarding what they were saying. Had we listened more carefully in the 30s, maybe we could’ve avoided the Holocaust?”

Germany had the world’s second biggest economy prior to WWII. Iran’s economy is the world’s 32nd biggest. Germany had a frightening reputation for waging total war. Iran has a record of gross incompetence in waging war. German average IQ is 102. Iran’s is 84. These are significant differences.

Dan Gillerman: “This man [ Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] denies the Holocaust while diligently preparing the next one.”

Iran is too incompetent to carry out a Holocaust.

Dan Gillerman: “We cannot live with a nuclear Iran.”

Iran has had a nuclear program since the 1950s.

Israel’s Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu: “When you have a crazy ideology bent on world conquest, that fire will soon spread to other peoples and other countries and ultimately to the entire world.”

As Steve Sailer points out, “Muslims, for all their obnoxiousness, are simply too incompetent to be an existential threat to America.”