Why Doesn’t Trump Change His Accent?

Steve Sailer writes:

One of the polarizing aspects about Donald Trump is that he doesn’t codeswitch much, the way Obama spoke to black preachers in his black preacher accent while he spoke to whites in his flat Kansas accent (a state he barely has visited, but whom he claims to be from due to his mother having been born there and Kansas seeming particularly non-foreign) rather than in his prep school accent. Hillary has used many accents as well.

Trump talks like a guy from Queens, which he is. Many people, often ones not normally fond of New Yorkers, find Trump’s accent reassuringly authentic. Other people find it alarming. Does his failure to upgrade the class associations of his accent demonstrate that he is defective? Or does it imply that he rejects much of America’s class system? If he doesn’t have the decency to modulate his accent properly, what other social conventions might he not value? Clearly, many people with classier accents find Trump’s accent highly unsettling.

Comments:

* I think that fully half of the horror which the liberal middle classes feel toward Donald Trump is not just from his political views but is engendered by his working class diction. They hated Jesse Ventura for the same reason and Arnold Schwarzenegger too. Conversely those three guy’s manner of speaking was seen as a sign of authenticity by less elite voters.

* I think the anti-Trumpers are more offended by Jeff Session’s accent. He speaks like a nice southern gentleman, which is probably the worst thing you could be in Obama’s America.

* RP sounds evil because it’s exclusive, neo-colonialist and über-white in the minds of liberal and mostly Jewish Hollywood writers. It reeks of privilege and old pre-WWI Europe.

* RP is a young accent in linguistic terms. It was not around, for example, when Dr Johnson wrote A Dictionary of the English Language in 1757. He chose not to include pronunciation suggestions as he felt there was little agreement even within educated society regarding ‘recommended’ forms. The phrase Received Pronunciation was coined in 1869 by the linguist, A J Ellis, but it only became a widely used term used to describe the accent of the social elite after the phonetician, Daniel Jones, adopted it for the second edition of the English Pronouncing Dictionary (1924). The definition of ‘received’ conveys its original meaning of ‘accepted’ or ‘approved’ — as in ‘received wisdom’. We can trace the origins of RP back to the public schools and universities of nineteenth-century Britain — indeed Daniel Jones initially used the term Public School Pronunciation to describe this emerging, socially exclusive accent. Over the course of that century, members of the ruling and privileged classes increasingly attended boarding schools such as Winchester, Eton, Harrow and Rugby and graduated from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Their speech patterns – based loosely on the local accent of the south-east Midlands (roughly London, Oxford and Cambridge) — soon came to be associated with ‘The Establishment’ and therefore gained a unique status, particularly within the middle classes in London.

* Many of the famous TV anchormen of the past were from west of the Mississippi river but east of California: Cronkite from western Missouri, Brokaw from South Dakota, Rather from Texas.

Brinkley was from North Carolina, however, as was Murrow (but he grew up in Washington state).

My vague impression is that a slightly country accent was helpful in the TV business a couple of generations ago. It seemed to me as if the famous national newscasters generally had less neutral accents than were then common in Los Angeles.

* Tom Wolfe has a great bit in The Right Stuff where he talks about the Chuck Yeager Voice:

Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot… coming over the intercom… with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself… the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because ‘uh, folks, it might get a little choppy’… 

Who doesn’t know that voice! And who can forget it, – even after he is proved right and the emergency is over. That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian in origin. It originated in the mountains of West Virginia, in the coal country, in Lincoln County, so far up in the hollows that, as the saying went, ‘they had to pipe in daylight.’ In the late 1940s and early 1950s this up-hollow voice drifted down from on high, from over the high desert of California, down, down, down, from the upper reaches of the [Pilot] Brotherhood into all phases of American aviation. It was amazing. It was Pygmalion in reverse. Military pilots and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl, or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.

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Richard Spencer Assaulted 3x At Inauguration

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President Trump

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* I thought that Trump’s inaugural speech was terrific.

It was philosophically precise, coherent, and deep, and presented a clear and compelling vision.

Once again, I’m struck by how much sense Trump’s views in aggregate make — with a few exceptions — given how anti-intellectual he seems to incline. What it suggests is that the first impulses of common sense in matters of moral and political value — which Trump embodies — are the most reliable. Abstraction seems to be the enemy of the Good.

* What I liked about it was that it boiled class warfare rhetoric down to the Washington class versus everyone else, which is how it should be. That, and repeating the phrase “America first!” Which triggers goodthinkers.

Like most all political speeches it was vague and largely beside the point. A series of sounds to make us feel good. But if he’s serious about being Action Man, and us judging him by what he does instead of what he says, oh, happy day.

* Trump articulated a clear vision (America First) and discussed concrete things he plans to accomplish.

I thought it was beautiful in its directness and simplicity.

The people on TV said it was terrible because it wasn’t “soaring.” Something tells me they never worked in a factory and probably don’t know anyone who does.

* 1. Christianity given priority in the public square.

2. Melania Trump is really, really good-looking.

3. Very pugilistic, populist tone in his inaugural speech. He is bearding the lion in his den. No wonder the US Deep State (such as it is) hates him so much.

4. This is not just the second, but the third Act in Donald Trump’s American life. Pretty astounding.

* It’s the first inaugural address I’ve ever heard that has ever touched me in any way, and it touched me deeply. I honestly never before felt like politicians gave a damn about working American families, and it sounded to me very much like he did. I also didn’t anticipate that having someone in power who will look out for people like me and mine would actually make me feel any different, but it does. It’s a potent mixture of gratitude and hope.

He set a very high bar for himself.

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Don’t Let Women Set Public Policy

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Sane men do not allow women into positions of major authority or influence in society.

From Nancy Pelosi to Madonna to Michelle Obama to Ruth Bader Ginsberg to this authoress Livingstone we can detect a pattern of estrogen fueled insanity.

The first female billionaire made her money on a body shaping girdle design that fools men into thinking that older women are much younger/healthier than they actually are… ’nuff said.

* Drudge pic top center of Ryan, Melania and Trump and the big view of DC in the background is funny. Trump is staring at his new hotel which is clearly visible (hotel tower is second highest structure in DC).

We only see the back of Trump’s head in the pic but we know what he’s thinking. The two phallic symbols on the skyline are worrisome for Trump. His hotel tower does not measure up… what is to be done?

* Well, you have to remember that entire departments of the major universities have been retrofitted to teach the primary skill of being offended. The first major wave of students are coming out and writing for major periodicals.

We’ve never seen a cohort so broadly and skillfully adept at finding offense that to laymen like you or I would find boringly innocuous. We’re talking the greatest minds of our generation spending a decade or more in training at being offended. It’s no wonder the state of the art in the field is so advanced.

* How many feminists are into feminism these days because it’s like a magical, invisible choke collar that works on about 50% of the men in the West and makes them sit and roll over on command?

Those men who kowtow to feminists think that by doing so they will make the women less angry and more agreeable. Instead, it just makes the women more angry and demanding to them—because the women have realized that acting like a feminist just got them power over the kowtowers, and they want to push it to the limit.

You never see feminists getting away with this routine on non-feminist men. They make a go at it, but after they’re laughed/shouted down they either run away or magically start acting much more pleasantly and coquettishly.

If men collectively stopped kowtowing (impossible, I know), then women suddenly find much more pleasant methods of getting things out of them. Those PUAs and old tests aren’t wrong when they both agree that the way to have a happy wife/lover is to give her no quarter and have a firm hand.

P.S. this is much like how blacks have learned that merely yelling “racism” gets them a bunch of free gifts and sympathy. If we all collectively stopped jumping when they screamed “discrimination!”….

* Think of the three bumps in the middle, far side of the Potomac River. Roslyn, Arlington, Virginia. Due West is Tyson’s Corner in Fairfax, Virginia. Between the two, Trump will one day have a tower on the far side of the river and he’ll see THAT from where he’s pictured. The Old Post Office will not change. But Trump will own the tallest of the tall in the DC region before it’s over. No one in the region will deny him and besides, he already owns an enormous golfing spread in Loudon County, Virginia, probably to be his Washington home course. No Andrews AFB for Trump. In any case, Trump is a man who, unlike Obama, will not find himself closed out by the bigs in this country. He will play Augusta National, Congressional, Pebble, he will be welcome wherever he goes. And his tower in Virginia will be the tallest in the land.

Off topic even further, it’ll be good to have a pair in the White House for once, instead of a Madcap W or lately, this cardboard cutout masquerading as a clean and articulate rent-a-black. Obama is going to find himself a very lonely guy in DC, an annoying rock in the collective shoe of DC. He’s picturing himself as a broker or kingmaker of some sort, certainly an earner in the speechmaking bizz, but I think not. He has no influence to sell, his intellect small, his hallucination over, this, a disservice done by the liberal party and press to puff him up only to use him and leave him behind for the next big thing. And then Obama will know it was all an illusion, it was handed to him, he isn’t nearly as large as presented or pictured.

* A key tenet of multiculturalism is that no culture is better than another, despite the rather glaring evidence that this is patently absurd. So any verbiage about encouraging groups with less successful cultural practices to adopt those of more successful ones must be denounced…unless it’s progressives insisting that the only thing minority children need to succeed is to be able to live and go to school with more white children. That’s about magic dirt, not the way white people live their lives.

* Being a weed grower in Mendocino County it pays to be a bit aware of the racial component. Many folks with fabulous tans are the vast majority of home invasions up here. Too lazy to grow it themselves. Very labor intensive in the outdoors. so yeah, weed growers in wine country probably aren’t real aggressive in cultivating a relationship with the brothers.

* Websites like The New Republic don’t allow comments on their articles because they’re too civilized to soil their forums with commentary from the unwashed, uneducated lower classes. That, and they know that dimwit ditzes like Joe Livingstone are incapable of writing defensible screeds.

* More of the White Civil War. Its choose a side, all the time. No place or group will be exempt. None.

Look at Jews — the price of being accepted into Leftist groups is anti-Israel, anti-Trump. Trump is quite likely to move the embassy to Jerusalem today. Just to make a point. And if he does so, the journey of Leftist Jews into overt anti-Israeli sentiment will be complete. Which btw shows how bankrupt anti-Semitism really is — the most important thing to Leftist Jews is being part of Leftism and the career advancement nepotism it offers, Israel, their relatives, their heritage mean nothing. Just as those WASPy leftists like Hillary or Elizabeth Warren behave.

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Should Incompetent Pundits/Teachers Get Fired, Good Ones Rewarded?

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The Meaning Of A Landsman

Harvey Rachlin writes:

It was my first job out of college and I wasn’t exactly thrilled when my boss told me: “You’re going to Nashville.”

I was working for a small New Jersey-based music publisher. It was my job to get artists to record and labels to release songs owned by the company so that the songs could earn money for both the company and the writers of the songs.

After having given me a week to listen to and familiarize myself with the bulk of the company’s catalog of songs, the boss handed me a list of New York City buildings that were filled with offices occupied by music companies. He told me to knock on every door of every company that could record and release songs from our company’s catalog and then try to meet with those companies’ producers and executives to pitch our songs.

“Start on the top floor,” he said, “and work your way down to the first floor.”

And so I did, from top to bottom, building to building. Getting appointments with producers and music executives was challenging, to say the least, so you had to be super-aggressive and use your full powers of persuasion to get in. As an aspiring songwriter, I felt that learning the art of pitching songs could be beneficial – but it required me to be pushy to the point that it made me feel uncomfortable.

So when my boss asked me to go to Nashville, I welcomed his order with about as much enthusiasm as I would a pickle and mustard sandwich. If cold solicitation in New York City had been no picnic, what would it be like in a southern city?

First, I had heard that Nashville was extremely cliquey. If you weren’t in country music’s inner circles the doors were basically closed to you. Second, I wondered how I would fare there since my accent and looks pretty much marked me as a New York Jew.

With a bit of trepidation I traveled to the capital of country music and found it just as I’d imagined. It seemed very insular and I felt like an outsider.

As I did in New York, I knocked on doors on the city’s Music Row – which was essentially based on streets lined with houses where record labels and other companies had their offices.

I got absolutely nowhere. I couldn’t even get past the reception areas, which seemed to be guarded by the most unpersuadable people I’d ever met. Time and again I was told the producers weren’t taking appointments and wouldn’t even listen to dropped-off demos.

As a 22-year-old neophyte in the music business I really didn’t know all that much about it, so I sometimes knocked on doors of companies involved in other aspects of the business but not looking for songs.

One day my ignorance led me to one such door, and after I introduced myself the owner seemed to look at me with a glimmer of recognition.

“Are you a landsman?” he asked.

Having never heard the word before, I thought for a second. Landsman? What’s that? Like a Baptist, a Lutheran, an Episcopalian, or a Methodist?

“No,” I said. “I’m not.”

“Well, you certainly look and sound Jewish,” he replied, sounding almost disappointed.

My face lit up. “Oh, but I am!”

And then, after pausing for a moment, I asked, “What’s a landsman?”

“A landsman’s a fellow Jew,” he told me.

With a common bond now established, we struck up a friendship and I told him of my difficulty getting appointments in Nashville.

“Let me make a phone call for you,” he said.

He called the head of a major music licensing organization in town and made an appointment for me to see him. When I went to his office I was greeted by a man with long blond hair. Wearing cowboy boots. And sporting a very gentile-sounding name. He obviously wasn’t Jewish.

I told him about the songs in my company’s catalog and he was as nice as could be, working the phone and lining up appointments for me with some of country music’s top record producers. These were not second- or third-tier apparatchiks, mind you, but men with hits at the very top of the country music charts – powerful men who would never have given me the time of day had it not been for the fellow with the long blond hair and the cowboy boots.

But there was only one reason I’d been able to meet that fellow in the first place: the kindness of the Jewish man who made it all possible because he recognized me as a fellow Jew.

From that time on, I have never forgotten the meaning of the word landsman.

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Bernard-Henri Lévy: Jews, Be Wary of Trump

From the New York Times today:

… There is a law that governs the relations between the Jews and the rest of the world. That law was articulated in one form at the time of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, when the great Jewish thinker Gershom Scholem faulted Hannah Arendt for falling short of “ahavat Israel” — for showing insufficient “love of the Jewish people.”

This love is precisely what is required of an American president in dealings affecting Israel. …

I cannot claim any knowledge of Donald Trump’s “heart” or of the sincerity of his commitment to the Jewish state. But there have been indications going back decades.

One was provided by John O’Donnell, a former chief operating officer of Trump’s Atlantic City casino, who, in his 1991 book “Trumped!” quoted Trump as saying: “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”

More recently, there was a 2013 tweet storm in which, desperate to show that he was “smarter” than the “overrated” Jon Stewart, Trump saw fit to rip off the mask behind which stood Jonathan Leibowitz, the Jewish name Stewart was born with.

And then, in mid-campaign, there was the meeting in which Trump told donors from the Republican Jewish Coalition: “I know why you’re not going to support me! It’s because I don’t want your money.”

These statements suggest, to say the least, a certain contempt.

More precisely, they reflect that well-known variety of contempt that, according to Freud, serves to anticipate and defend the ego against the presumed contempt of the other.

Whether the original disdain is real or imaginary matters little.

Whether Jon Stewart or the Jewish Republican donors disdained the kitschy builder with his flamboyant hair, his money, his bling and his properties, including the now world-famous Trump Tower, is obviously not the question.

The essential thing is that President Trump thinks they did, that he seems to see Jews as the caricature of the New York establishment that, for decades, took him for an agreeable but vulgar showman.

This is a perfect example of the self-defensive contempt that has so often fed anti-Semitism, with the Jews appearing, once again, as representatives of an elite that patronized him and against whom he can, now that he is in power, quietly take his revenge.

It reminds me of a story from the Talmud that illustrates this logic well.

It is the story — part history and part “aggadic” embellishment — of Rabbi Yehudah Nessia, one of the foremost figures of Jewish thought of the third century.

Rabbi Yehudah ran a school that a young Roman swineherd would pass by nearly every day. The students at the school, their heads full of knowledge and a sense of their own superiority, never missed a chance to mock and beat the pig farmer.

Years later, Rabbi Yehudah was summoned to the distant city of Caesarea Philippi, to appear before Roman Emperor Diocletian. It seemed that the emperor was full of consideration for his guest. He sent to him one of his most distinguished ambassadors and ordered that a sumptuous bath be provided to allow his guest to cleanse himself after his dusty voyage.

But Diocletian also sent his ambassador on a Friday, so that Rabbi Yehudah would be forced to travel on the Sabbath, violating the most important of commandments.

The emperor also heated the baths to such a degree that the rabbi would have been boiled to death — a fate from which the rabbi was saved by the last-minute intervention of an angel, who cooled the waters.

When the rabbi appeared before Diocletian, he recognized the former swineherd, who said to him with spite, “Just because your god performs miracles, you think you can scorn the emperor?”

I cite this story because it provides a good metaphor for the West today, where, as in ancient Rome, the triumph of nihilism can enable a pig farmer — anybody — to become emperor.

It is a good example, too, of Jewish wisdom, which responds to the situation as follows: “We had contempt for Diocletian the swineherd, but we are ready to honor Diocletian the emperor provided he, like Saul — who, before becoming king had tended donkeys — heeds the prophecy, rises to his office, and becomes a new man.”

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Such terrible contempt; when everyone knows that Jewish lobby groups are the only lobby groups to donate money purely as an act of charity and with no desire for inluence. They even prove it by funding each side in equal meausure.

* Shorter Levy:

Worship us Jews, just don’t notice us.

* If you had Trump’s billions, would you not want your accountants to be skilled and trustworthy? To interpret his statement as reflecting contempt turns its intention inside out. It may be crude and blunt, but it actually conveys a kind of respect.

* Perhaps Trump could present BHL with some of his old shirts that haven’t lost their top three buttons?

It’s the least America could do, what with Lafayette and all.

* So Jews want to be able to “mock and beat” working class white gentiles, while also manipulating our president. That’s quite an article to write.

Apparently Jews also think that white gentiles are on the level of pig farmers. Levy even mentioned that he’s angry that “anybody” (including pig farmers) can become president.

* He is also an avid proponent of European population replacement.

Of course Jewish nationalism is the one form of nationalism that is entirely kosher.

* I think French universities must teach a long winded and indirect style because their authors seem to all suffer from these defects. Sartre is also painfully bad to read.

* It’s surprising he seems so comfortable admitting that the Jews in his parable actually feel superior and never miss an opportunity too ‘mock and beat’ a passing pig farmer.

He thinks it’s a great moral lesson of Judaism — a Jew will change his opinion if that Pig Farmer rises to the challenge of being a great Emperor. A Jew is apparently willing to alter his opinion and will actually accept the Emperor – if he proves worthy.

It’s kind of a warpy lesson from a man with warpy morals.

The Pig Farmer and the Emperor are the same person – you would hope both the Farmer and Emperor are inherently worthy of respect. Niether deserves to be mocked and beaten.

If this is the ‘morality’ of ‘one of the foremost figures of Jewish thought’ – I think I’ll take a pass.

* 21st Century version of this story: “The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we’re seeing now,” – Anthony

* There must be an increasing disconnect going on between the majority of Jews and the official position of Jewish interest groups on Islamic immigration. I doubt the majority of Jews are any more keen on Islamic immigration than the majority of blacks or Hispanics, but Jewish elites seem intent on defending the rights of Muslims to come to the West.

There’s probably an element of urban elite desperation going on here. Strongly liberal Jews know most Jews are becoming more anti-Islamic and apathetic about defending open borders, so they are trying to make up for lack of popular support by being increasingly histrionic. It’s a bit like the why liberal urban whites tried to shame rural and suburban whites into not voting for Trump.

It’s a similar story with the Jewish neoconservatives, most Jews (being urban white collar workers) oppose increased defence spending and an aggressive foreign policy, hence the neoconservatives have to make up for their lack of popular support among fellow Jews by being more fanatical than their opponents.

* Levy really picked the wrong fable to extol Jewish virtues. Most people reading this story would concur that the swine-herd and his friends should have come back to the little shul and beat the crap out of those spoiled boychiks for mocking, stoning and beating a poor, beaten-down swineherd. Does give an insight, though, into how the warped mind of Levy works.

* “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”

How is this an insult? It’s an indication that he regards Jews as more trustworthy than for example big tall Swedish German blonde guys like Trump’s late brother, who might decide that they want a little taste of that casino cash themselves to spend on booze and whores. It’s “heads I win, tails you lose”. Supposed Trump had said “the only kind of people I want counting my money are big tall blonde guys” – that would have been bad too. Somehow whatever Trump says is bad either way – you might begin to think that Levy doesn’t like Trump and has prejudged him already.

In Yiddish, if you want to say that you regard someone as highly trustworthy, you say “I would trust him with uncounted money”, which is exactly what Trump was saying.

Also I don’t buy the idea that it’s insulting to attach a positive stereotype to a race. What people who take offense at that are saying is that you aren’t supposed to “notice” anything about any race, good or bad – if you notice that Jews are good with numbers, next thing you might notice that blacks aren’t and we can’t have that – you have to be really stupid and PC and hire Buddy Fletcher as your money manager in order to show your open mindedness (but vice versa is not true – no one says that you have to get short guys with yarmulkes to play on your NBA team).

* If French Jews want to combat anti-Semitism, they should read BHL as a guide of what not to do and say in a gentile country.

* The point of the original story is twofold – first of all that you respect the office, not the man. Diocletian the Emperor is entitled to deference because he is the Emperor.

Levy adds his own twist and changes the story to mean something completely opposite – Trump has to rise to his office. The stories in the Talmud are meant to be instructive to the Jews – they aren’t telling these stories so that Diocletian (Trump) will learn from them. The real moral of the story is “be careful of who you disrespect on your way up because you might meet them again on your way down.” Or in Leftist terms, “Don’t punch down.” Yehudah ended up literally in hot water because his underlings had been disrespectful to someone who later rose to a position of power. The lesson is to treat everyone with respect because you don’t know where they will end up someday. This is a story which Obama should have perhaps listened to before he kicked the swineherd Trump at the Correspondent’s dinner.

But Levy COMPLETELY misses the point of the story and twists it to mean something totally different.

* I’m beginning to see signs of “Jew Fatigue” complicating my already bad case of Negro Fatigue. Jews seem to want to be accepted unless they’d rather be exceptional. And it’s always their option. They’re not afraid to ask: “Is it good for the Jews.” Isn’t it time that white people asked: “Is it good for white people, whether or not it’s good for Jews, blacks, Mestizos, etc.

* I don’t have to remind you that the bigger (and more blameworthy) Jews have tended to be more isolated from the repercussions, than the little (and less blameworthy) Jews. It’s really long past due that the little Jews give the big Jews their walking papers.

* My theory is that Jews have more animus against Christians because Christians were more tolerant. It sounds perverse, but it makes sense. Muslims didn’t give Jews as much room to move amongst them as Christians did. Muslims let Jews in as advisers here and there, but as a broad social matter, there was never a promise of assimilation, of being accepted as equals. The Muslim caste system never gave Jews the idea that they could rise to the top. They could get as rich as they liked, but they would still only be Jews, on the other side of the wall. Christians, on the other hand, gave Jews more breathing room, and as a consequence, showed vulnerability to Jewish gaming. Jews got it into their heads that they were owed something by Christians.

In short, I think Jews in the Muslim world never got as much reason to get uppity. They knew their place. Iranian Jews today are instructive. They mind their business, and live in their little walled-off Jewish world. Jews in Christendom were walled off, but more by their own choice, and they got the impression “hey, we could actually run the show from here.” Ultimately it proved a false dream, but they usually managed to make substantial progress before being put back into their place.

Animus against Christians has more strategic value for Jews, than animus against Muslims. Critique of Muslims gets them little, and is seen as feeding into some political strains that Jews want stamped out in diaspora territory. Critique of Christians legitimizes their rule and prevents those political strains. Though this dynamic has been altered by the Israeli colonial project (notice how almost all Jewish criticism of Muslims is centered around or motivated by Israel).

* It’s exactly like the endless retailing of gang-rape fantasies among feminists. You’re no one–no one!–unless you can tell a bigger, better story of oppression than your compatriots. Eventually the fantasies begin to beg credulity, which is when the big guns come out to enforce compliance.

That the feminists claiming the gang-rapes are generally among the last creatures on earth ever to be chosen for gang rapes is somehow seen as a feature.

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Orthodox rabbi’s anti-Trump prayer causes a stir

As I wrote May 1, 2016: “Do social justice and scandal go together? It would be funny if the rabbi did something unethical. Reading between the lines, it sounds like some sort of financial problem. I wonder if YCT moved in, paid money all over the place and had articles removed from the web to save him as he is one of their biggest stars.”

(JTA) — Jews have been praying for the welfare of the governments they live under for hundreds of years.

But what happens when they lose faith in the individuals elected to lead those countries?

That’s the dilemma faced by Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, an Orthodox rabbi who is president and dean of Valley Beit Midrash in Phoenix and founder and president of Uri L’Tzedek, an Orthodox social justice organization. Saying he “cannot pray for the success of this President,” Yanklowitz has written a new text that, without naming President-elect Donald Trump, prays to “Guide the incoming leader of this country away from his basest instincts, thwart his plans to target certain groups and strengthen white supremacy.”

The idea of a Jewish prayer for a successful government harks all the way back to the prophet Jeremiah, who advised the Jews who were taken by the Babylonians: “Seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you and pray to the Lord in its behalf; for in its prosperity you shall prosper” (Jer. 29:7). The first official Jewish prayer for the welfare of the state and its governing officials was introduced in prayer books in the 14th century.

The prayer currently found in most Orthodox prayer books calls on God to:

bless The President, the Vice President, and all the Constituted Officers of Government of this Land. The King who reigns over Kings in his mercy may he protect them from every trouble, woe, and injury, may he rescue them and put into their hearts and into the hearts of all their councilors compassion to do good with us and with all Israel, our brethren.

The Conservative prayer book, Sim Shalom, includes a prayer for the government that includes a request for “blessings for our country — for its government, for its leaders and advisers, and for all who exercise just and rightful authority.” Mishkan T’filah, a Reform siddur, includes a Prayer for Our Country that reads, in part: “Grant our leaders wisdom and forbearance. May they govern with justice and compassion.”

The Jewish Virtual Library points out that over the centuries Jews have adopted different prayers for the governments of the countries in which they have lived in over the centuries, and clearly the prayers have been adapted to suit the situation of the Jews in these countries.

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Forward: ‘European Jews Alarmed by Israeli Outreach to Anti-Semitic Far Right’

This strikes me as Jewish purity spiraling. If you want to insist on a purity test before you’ll talk to somebody, you won’t talk to many people.

There are no permanent friends or allies in the world. Different groups have different interests that sometimes align. There are no good guys or bad guys unless you look at things through the lens of faith. Otherwise, there are just different forms of life trying to survive.

Israel seems more pragmatic about these things.

Forward:

Jews in Europe are voicing increasing consternation about Israel’s budding engagement with surging far-right European parties that have anti-Semitic histories.

In Poland, Austria and the halls of the World Jewish Congress, among other places, Diaspora activists are raising sharp questions about the morality of Jerusalem’s foreign policy.

“We should not abandon our heritage and cut deals with the devil,” said Avi Primor, a veteran diplomat who was Israel’s ambassador to Germany from 1993 to 1996 and keeps in close touch with Europe’s Jews. In a phone interview. Primor, who is currently chairman of the European Studies department at Tel Aviv University, added, “I am afraid we are losing our ideals more and more.”

The rising concern is one that Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, shares, as reflected in a December 20 letter he wrote to leaders of Vienna’s Jewish community that was released earlier in January.

“We generations close to the Holocaust must be very clear that no interests of any kind can justify a shameful alliance with groups or individuals who fail to recognize responsibility for the crimes of the Holocaust,” Rivlin wrote to Viennese Jewish leaders.

Rivlin warned, too, against Israeli ties with groups that “envisage re-creating such crimes against any foreigner, refugee or migrant who dares to, in their view, ‘contaminate’ their living space.”

The letter appeared to be an implicit rebuke of recent outreach by Israeli officials to far-right parties in Europe. Among them were Austria’s Freedom Party, led by Heinz-Christian Strache.

Rivlin’s letter was also a response to a letter released publicly in November by WJC’s vice president, Ariel Muzicant, and by Oskar Deutsch, head of Vienna’s Jewish community, complaining that “certain politicians in Israel are willing to meet populist parties of the European extreme right,” including Austria’s Freedom Party. The letter beseeched Israeli leaders “to draw a very clear red line between us and those who represent hate, neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism.”

In Poland, another Israeli overture to the far right took place September 7, when Israel’s ambassador to Warsaw, Anna Azari, hosted an hour-long meeting with Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, head of Radio Maryja. The station, a Polish radio and television network, was branded by the U.S. State Department in 2008 as “one of Europe’s most blatantly anti-Semitic media venues.” In a 2011 report, Poland’s own Broadcasting Authority condemned the station for disseminating “nationalistic racism.”

According to Israel’s Polish Embassy Facebook page, Azari and Rydzyk talked about building a Polish-Jewish dialogue. Rydzyk is quoted with glowing words about his trips to Israel: “Multiculturalism is beautiful and causes great enrichment and diversity of Israeli society.”

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Millenial Woes In 2016: Doxxing Should Be Illegal

On Dec. 22, 2016, just before he was doxxed ten days ago, Millenial Woes said to Jared Taylor 24 minutes in: “One thing that should be illegal is doxxing. If someone is posting your details in public, the website should have to be by law delete that immediately.”

Jared: “What’s the difference between that and investigative journalism? Someone like you and me are public figures. We make our views known to the world.”

Mirror: Racist vlogger who became global YouTube sensation unmasked as jobless ex-student who lives with dad

Extremist Colin Robertson, 34, from Linlithgow, has amassed 20,000 followers who soak up his pathetic white supremacist views as he promotes hatred of black people, Jews and women

A vile racist whose ­hate-filled videos have made him a global YouTube sensation has been unmasked as a jobless ex-student who lives with his dad.

The extremist has amassed 20,000 followers on his “video blogger” channel – where he spouts pathetic white ­supremacist views and promotes hatred of black people, Jews and women.

The sick ‘unknown’ discovered notoriety via his ­Millennial Woes blog – and has gone to great lengths to hide his identity.

But today The Daily Record named him as Colin Robertson, 34, from Linlithgow in Scotland.

He ­broadcasts his vile rants from a bedroom of his dad’s ­semi-detached house situated in a quiet street in the town.

And he even delivered a speech at a US rally where far-right ­extremists shouted “Hail Trump” and made Nazi salutes.

Neighbours in the Scottish town in West Lothian last night spoke of their shock over the racist living next to them and branded his outbursts as “despicable”.

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