Luke Ford

And I believe in the Black Question and Muslim Question and a Latino Question and the Asian Question and that question is — is the majority better off hosting the strangers in their midst?

For example, why would Jews want Arabs in the Jewish state of Israel? Why would Muslims want non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia?

Every group, every individual, should ask themselves if they are a blessing to those around them. If you live a life of love and service to others, then you know you are a blessing. If you don’t know, then you’re not likely a gift to others.

Jews asking themselves the Jewish Question — are the non-Jews better off having us around — is a good thing. It wonderfully focuses the mind.

Accurate criticism is good for groups. It helps them to behave better.

MP3.

From Kirkus Reviews: “Rabbi Telushkin (An Eye for an Eye, 1991), rooted in the tradition of reverence for past learning, has gathered lots of hoary jokes and aged wisecracks, together with a few more recent japes, that make Jews laugh. To coreligionists, they’ll seem like old friends; to others, the gags and their elucidation may be more in the nature of revelation. Another book of ethnic gags? Hold the cry of “gevalt!” because Telushkin has an unstated agenda. True to his calling, he uses the funny stuff to instruct. In this collection (in which some bits are, naturally, funnier than others), everything stands for something else–but all of it carries explanations. The exegesis of the jokes becomes a little primer on a religion and a way of life mystifying to strangers and sometimes just as puzzling to nominal adherents. It’s a truism that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle applies to humor–observing and analyzing it alters it. That effect can be seen here as Telushkin trots out Jackie Mason and Sigmund Freud, as well as Leo Rosten and a host of Unknown Comics for a higher purpose. The tales of the wise rabbis, the fabled fools of Chelm, the anti-Semites, the schnorrers, and the big shots all serve to illustrate his lessons. Was the shtetl a forerunner of Catskills on Broadway? Why are comedians so often Jewish? Why are Jews so often comedians? Why ask questions? Just listen to the rabbi and his jokes. Fine, funny fare for Jew and non-Jew alike.”

Israel Shahak writes:

Not only is humor very rare in Hebrew literature before the 19th century (and is only found during few periods, in countries where the Jewish upper class was relatively free from the rabbinical yoke, such as Italy between the 14th and 17th centuries or Muslim Spain) but humor and jokes are strictly forbidden by the Jewish religion – except, significantly, jokes against other religions.

Satire against rabbis and leaders of the community was never internalized by Judaism, not even to a small extent, as it was in Latin Christianity. There were no Jewish comedies, just as there were no comedies in Sparta, and for a similar reason. [8] Or take the love of learning. Except for a purely religious learning, which was itself in a debased and degenerate state, the Jews of Europe (and to a somewhat lesser extent also of the Arab countries) were dominated, before about 1780, by a supreme contempt and hate for all learning (excluding the Talmud and Jewish mysticism).

Large parts of the Old Testament, all nonliturgical Hebrew poetry, most books on Jewish philosophy were not read and their very names were often anathematized. Study of all languages was strictly forbidden, as was the study of mathematics and science. Geography, [9] history – even Jewish history – were completely unknown. The critical sense, which is supposedly so characteristic of Jews, was totally absent, and nothing was so forbidden, feared and therefore persecuted as the most modest innovation or the most innocent criticism.

Steve Sailer wrote in 2013:

An example of broader, more long-lasting ethnic animus is the fascinating story of “Amalek: The Perpetual Enemy of the Jewish People” (to quote the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson).

The Amalekites were dwellers in the Sinai who attacked the vulnerable Hebrews during the Exodus. This earned them undying enmity, with later leaders such as Samuel, Saul, and David waging wars of extermination upon these unfortunates. In all, the Amalekites are mentioned in nine separate books of the Old Testament.

Yet the Amalekites were so hard to kill off completely that one survivor pops up centuries later in the Book of Esther as the bad guy Haman, the prime minister of Persia. (Some things never change.) Fortunately, Haman, his ten sons, and 75,000 followers were slaughtered in the counter-pogrom celebrated annually at Purim.

But all that smiting of the Amalekites wasn’t enough. To this day, three of the 613 commandments attested to by Orthodox Jews are:

• To remember the treacheries of the Amalekites.

• To never forget the perfidies of the Amalekites.

• To wipe out the descendants of the Amalekites.

Granted, the Amalekites may have had a very different point of view on these events. But their history hasn’t come down to us. Therefore, nobody cares.

If you want your version of history to be remembered better than that of the Amalekites, you have to recount it over and over again. And it sure doesn’t hurt to suppress dissident accounts.

…For example, in this era of Chaitian ancestral onus, how often is the Jewish role in the slave states recalled?

The first Jewish governor was David Emanuel in 1801 in Georgia. The first Jewish senator was David Levy Yulee in 1845 in Florida. The second was Judah P. Benjamin in 1853 in Louisiana. Benjamin later filled three top cabinet posts in the Confederacy (Secretary of War, Secretary of State, and Attorney General). Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street firm whose bankruptcy in September 2008 set off the Great Financial Crisis, started in the 1850s as a cotton broker in Montgomery, Alabama.

For some reason, this pattern doesn’t come up much.

Yet Jewish participation in American slave economies was not out of character. There was much money to be made off of slavery in the New World, and ethnic Jewish businessmen (whether religious, covert, or irreligious but endogamous) had played an important commercial role for centuries, especially in establishing Brazil‘s slave-powered sugar industry. Paul Johnson wrote in A History of the Jews:

Jews and marranos were particularly active in settling Brazil; the first governor-general, Thomas de Souza, sent out in 1549, was certainly of Jewish origin. They owned most of the sugar plantations.

Far more than cotton, much less tobacco, sugar was the great killer of slaves. (Recall Jim’s fear in Huckleberry Finn of being sold down the river to Louisiana.) With the sugar industry’s constant demand for new slaves to replace those worked to death, it was the main driver of the transatlantic slave trade.

Even post-Civil War immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe were not free of any role in the economic suffering of American blacks. In a famous 1895 speech, Booker T. Washington pleaded with white industrialists to “Cast down your bucket where you are”—in other words, to hire black American citizens. But they were elbowed aside by the vast influx of Ellis Island immigrants.

In Britain the chief impresario of imperialism was Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, a master showman who excited the British over painting the map red.

The ensuing Scramble for Africa proved relatively profitless. A major exception was South Africa with its immense deposits of diamonds and gold. By the 1890s, half of the biggest mining companies in Johannesburg were Jewish-owned. According to Johnson:

But Jews had always been involved in precious stones (especially diamonds) and bullion, and they played a notable part both in the South African deep-level mines and in the financial system which raised the capital to sink them. Such men as Alfred Beit, Barney Barnato, Louis Cohen, Lionel Phillips, Julius Wehrner, Solly Joel, Adolf Goertz, George Albu and Abe Bailey turned South Africa into the world’s largest and richest mining economy.

In 1917 South African Ernest Oppenheimer founded the Anglo-American company and soon took over the fabulous De Beers diamond monopoly. The mining interests did oppose apartheid, seeing it as a Boer union conspiracy to raise miners’ wages.

COMMENTS AT TAKIMAG:

* Wiping out Amalek applies only to the enemy nations of the Jewish people who threaten the Jews with annihilation. An example of such genocidal enemies would be the German people during WWII (not anymore, obviously) and many Muslim nations today (judging by the statements of their leaders and imams on TV). It doesn’t apply to petty conspiracy-theorizing Jew-hating individuals like Sailer, Buchanan, et al., or small groups thereof.

In the Old Testament the wiping out of Amalek appears both as a positive commandment and as a promise that God makes to the Jewish people, so it can be interpreted either as something that the Jewish People should do, or as something that will happen even if the Jewish people do not take any action.

That Sailer, Buchanan and their ilk choose to focus on the “Jewish Problem” more than on the 800-lb Islamization-of-the-West gorilla in the living room is unfortunate. That their writings attempt to link indirectly ignorant, liberal, Democrat proclivities of many Jewish-Americans with their Jewish ancestry or the Jewish faith is downright misleading and hypocritical. Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jews as a group are staunchly paleo-conservative.

Either way, an examination of history will reveal that Jew-hatred on a national scale is a curse in and of itself. Nations preoccupied with hating their Jews have been too busy with that endeavor to care for the interests of their citizens. It is not Jews who now gang-rape Scandinavian women and threaten the West with subjugation and the imposition of sharia law.

In the post-Biblical period, when did Jews commit or attempt to commit genocide against any people?! Christians and Muslims on the other hand… Israel has nuclear weapons but never used them. Arab Muslims don’t have them, yet, but already issue genocidal threats against Israel of using them once obtained. If Buchanan is not a Jew-hater, who is. Sailer’s Jew-hatred is a side gig, he seems to be obsessed more with IQ and genetics, but since Jews statistically have on average high IQ’s, he can’t disparage them in terms of IQ, so he resorts to the “global Jewish cabal” conspiracy theories of manipulating and weakening the high-IQ indigent White Western societies while at the same time empowering their darker enemies by liberal brainwashing via academia and the media, legal intimidation and supporting immigration from the Third World, thereby increasing crime, displacing indigent White workers and, worst (as far as Sailer is concerned), lowering the collective IQ of Western societies. Buchanan, Sailer, and clearly you, Sir, view Jews as the Trojan Horse, the root cause of all Western social and economic ills, the main force that holds indigent Westerners back from dealing with their problems (e.g., combating degeneracy and immorality, deporting all their belligerent Third World welfare colonists, asserting nationalism and rejecting membership in the EU and U.N., etc.). And when Enoch Powell’s horrific civil war vision of his “Rivers of Blood” speech materializes due to current European inaction, you will blame the Jews all the more earnestly. It is what it is.

Steve Sailer writes:

From the Washington Post:

This year, we are all Esther in America’s own Purim story

By Danya Ruttenberg February 26 at 6:00 AM

Danya Ruttenberg is rabbi-in-residence at Avodah and author of “Nurture the Wow: Finding Spirituality in the Frustration, Boredom, Tears, Poop, Desperation, Wonder, and Radical Amazement of Parenting.”

How can I finish Pinker’s book when I realize that Nurture the Wow is out there unread?

The deadline President Trump has set for the passage of legislation to adjust the status of hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children by their parents is March 5, just days after Jews worldwide celebrate the festival of Purim. During Purim, which begins Wednesday night, we read the Book of Esther, which tells the story of a vain, corrupt leader willing to sell out a vulnerable people for his own convenience — and invites us to consider the obligations of those not targeted to those who are.

In the story, we meet Ahasuerus, king of Persia — who may or may not be modeled after Xerxes I. He was quick to anger, easily bribed, and fond of displaying the “vast riches of his kingdom and the splendid glory of his majesty.”

His top adviser is a vicious despot named Haman.

Haman, the bad guy, was prime minister of Persia, so some things never change. Also, Haman was an Amalekite, so other things never change either.

When Mordechai, a Jew, refuses to bow down to Haman, the aide decides to “do away with all the Jews” in the kingdom as revenge. …

For this to happen so close to Purim is evocative for anyone who knows the story of the holiday; the book of Esther, at least, has a happy ending. Ahasuerus’s second wife, Esther, was a closeted Jew. As Haman’s plot came to light, Mordechai visited her to persuade her to lobby on behalf of her people. …

We, all of us documented American citizens, are Esther right now. … And yes, many other Americans came without paperwork — tired, poor, yearning to breathe free. For those of us who are secure in our citizenship status now, this is our time to speak out. Who knows but that we have not come to our position for such a time as this? …

Esther was willing to step up and even act “contrary to the law” on behalf of her people. And at the end of the Purim story, the Jews were saved. As part of this happy resolution, Esther sent a dispatch throughout the land with words of truth and peace.

And what about us? How will we intercede to change the lots that have been cast?

The rabbi lady, however, left out of the Purim story the details of the happy ending. From the King James Bible:

5 Thus the Jews smote all their enemies with the stroke of the sword, and slaughter, and destruction, and did what they would unto those that hated them.

6 And in Shushan the palace the Jews slew and destroyed five hundred men. …

12 And the king said unto Esther the queen, The Jews have slain and destroyed five hundred men in Shushan the palace, and the ten sons of Haman; what have they done in the rest of the king’s provinces? now what is thy petition? and it shall be granted thee: or what is thy request further? and it shall be done.

13 Then said Esther, If it please the king, let it be granted to the Jews which are in Shushan to do to morrow also according unto this day’s decree, and let Haman’s ten sons be hanged upon the gallows.

14 And the king commanded it so to be done: and the decree was given at Shushan; and they hanged Haman’s ten sons.

15 For the Jews that were in Shushan gathered themselves together on the fourteenth day also of the month Adar, and slew three hundred men at Shushan; but on the prey they laid not their hand.

16 But the other Jews that were in the king’s provinces gathered themselves together, and stood for their lives, and had rest from their enemies, and slew of their foes seventy and five thousand …

So, what we are we up to by now in the Purim story, about 75,810 dead bodies?

And that’s why Senator Booker (D-NJ) and Rabbi Boteach (R-Clown Suit) celebrate Purim:

COMMENTS:

* I would suggest a different analogy. The dreamers are still the Jews in Persia, but Trump is Xerxes’ son Cyrus, and just as Cyrus let the Jews return home to the Land of Israel, so verily shalt Trump return the dreamers to their homelands where they may flourish in their own way.

* America is not a Jewish nation, nor any type of theocracy, so is not bound by the Book of Esther. Perhaps Rabbi So-and-so should take her little lecture to the one country in the world that is a Jewish nation and tell them how it obliges them to admit massive numbers of immigrants into their country.

* Ancient Jewish writers had a habit of wildly inflating numbers (the Talmud’s even worse at this), so even if these massacres happened, the numbers of dead were in all likelihood much smaller.

But still, it’s the fact that these incidents are deemed worthy of celebration that is the problem. Where is the moral outrage, the denunciation, the lamenting of man’s inhumanity to man? None that I can see. Instead we’re told that these goys were nasty to Jews, so therefore Jews were justified in massacring them.

What would Jews think if Europeans decided that, you know what, Jewish influence really has been instrumental in the policies that are wrecking our countries, we’re going to start celebrating the Holocaust? It’s not very nice, is it. Well what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Even if goys historically haven’t always behaved humanely towards Jews, celebrating the slaughter of these goys is just a bit much, you know.