Monsieur Hulot and the Flynn Effect

Posted on October 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: Here’s a photo from 1966 of my father and I trying to recreate the famous poster shot from Mon Oncle on my dad’s new Honda 90:

honda-90

For decades, this photo and the uncharacteristically carefree expression on my worrywart dad’s face were vaguely associated in my mind with the words “French comedian.”

COMMENTS:

* That’s colossally depressing but largely true. That old Paris is not completely dead, but dies a little more every year.

It is really painful to see photos of great western cities during the West’s long 1880-1970 peak. We’ve got better phones and better TV shows, but living in a safe central city among your own people is something we no longer can do.

Western whites no longer engage in the big building projects we once did. So many grand marble buildings in cities like Detroit, built to last 300 years, had to be abandoned after about 30-40 years. Now we know better, that building houses and schools that will be useful for hundreds of years by our descendants is a waste. They will be nice places for a few decades, then on to the suburb another 8 miles away from the growing underclass dominated city and older suburbs.

My parents certainly could not have sent me to the public schools they went to and their parents paid very good money to build.

I watched a few French language movies recently. Almost all the movies I watch are historical dramas involving war or politics, including all of these:

1. The Battle of Algiers – Great movie, I think this was the third time I watched it.

2. Army of Crime – Good recent movie about a Resistance cell in Paris that engages in some successful terrorist attacks before they are all caught, tortured and executed. Also based on historical events. It had a fairly big budget and has some great sets showing working class Paris in 1940-41, complete with plenty of chicken and horses, as well as portraying the relationship between the public, French collaborators, and the German army in Occupied France. Lots of fun chases, explosions, capers, gunfire, etc.

3. Au revoir les enfants – Great movie too, probably too pro-((())) for many iSteve readers. But hey, you can always just root for the Nazis. I know I was rooting for the French army in the Battle of Algiers against the filmmakers’ intentions! It is interesting to see that an upper-class boarding school’s conditions were pretty primitive compared to a lower class school today.

4. Le Roi Danse – A recent big-budget movie about Louis XIV’s earlier years. I quit watching about 2/3 of the way through. It wasn’t horrible and had some good moments, and lots of expensive and pretty sets, but kind of slow paced and lacking in any action.

5. Danton – Great movie with a young Gérard Depardieu as the lead.

6. The Dreamers – Rated NC-17 for good reason. Partly in English. Not for everyone, but I liked it a lot, nobody makes movies like it in the USA. The basic plot during the near-revolution in 1968 an American student in Paris becomes friends with some weird French twins who may or may not be in an incestuous relationship with each other. The twins’ large and slightly shabby Paris mansion and literary icon father are right out of Wes Anderson’s Royal Tennanbaums and Squid and the Whale.

The next movie I will watch is also foreign, this time Swedish, the big budget multi-part Arn, about some crusaders.

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Full monologue: Donald Trump roasts Hillary Clinton at Al Smith charity dinner

Posted on October 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

RUSH LIMBAUGH: “I must, by the way, change. I said everybody looked like they were wearing a corset last night. Other than Maria Bartiromo. The rackage on display there obviously was not constrained by a corset.”

TMZ: While Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton went HAM on each other during the NYC roast/charity dinner … they were also getting upstaged by a pair of famous boobs that were expertly placed.
The Internet was rightfully distracted by Maria Bartiromo’s cleavage, which was in every shot behind the candidates at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner. Organizers of the event tell us it was no mistake the FOX Business host was umm … prominently displayed.
We’re told the 70 people on the 5-tier dais were assigned seats to balance out people from politics, media, business and philanthropy. Obviously, Maria checks the media and business boxes.
Despite all visual evidence, we’re told she did NOT get the prime seat due to her fame, or her dress. Sooo … we just got lucky.

COMMENTS AT STEVE SAILER:

* Hillary of course got through her speech with nothing more than silence at lame jokes, while midway through the Trump speech the liberals start booing. In every context they prove their intolerance, and their inability to relax even for a second and not politicize everything.

* The “elite” in that room can go ahead and be shocked but Trump’s “no f**ks given” style is the sort of thing men said back when they wore such clothes unironically. Charles Stewart Parnell and Lord Randolph Churchill would have said equally lively things in their white tie and tails. So would FDR, JFK and perhaps even John Foster Dulles if they’d been presented with Hillary Clinton and Anthony Weiner’s peer group. They’d be cheering on the scrappy guy from Queens with the cabbie’s accent if they were in that room last night. Hillary, Obama and their fans want to destroy everything those white ties, silk gloves and jewelled crucifixes represent.

If Trump is ruining anything, he’s ruining the evening of a pack of cultural saboteurs and Judases try to have their cake and eat it too. Trump was simply bringing back the realness. This is what politics looks like when it’s real. Trump is the Great American Vermifuge just working his way through the system.

* Madame went through the gamut of her facial expressions: the frozen smile, the cheeky-faced pursed lips and, of course, the ever-present smirk.

If you look carefully there are outlines of “The Joker” in some of her expressions.

* When you compare Juanita Broaddrick’s description of her encounter with Hillary (far more relevant now than the one with Bill) with California’s apparently strict current law covering “dissuading a victim”, presumably stricter than Arkansas’s in 1979, it seems she expertly walked right up to the legal line on intimidation without technically crossing it.

A textbook case of plausible deniability.

Any legal minds here?

* What did Trump say? Beautiful big-boobed Bartiromo was too damn distracting!

Isn’t it funny how Trump goes for that Eastern European look rather than that dark, Mediterranean look. I mean, Melania’s beautiful, but look at 49-year old Bartiromo! On Stern a few years ago Trump talked about all the 10′s from Latin American countries. But as a young man (going for Ivana) to an older guy (going for Melania) his tastes have stayed the same. My tastes went from blond Scandinavian in my teens to dark/Asian in my 30′s.

* Our Masters are not amused. Look at their faces when he speaks the truth. This is devastating.

* Trump calling out the Pharisees in the Temple. Pretty amazing.

* I saw that too, but only because I am excessively dirty-minded.

That visual would never happen anyway, because Hillary is homosexual. I have read enough by now to be 99% certain of that. Almost all media is ignoring this fact, for what I think are a variety of reasons, such as:

1) Many voters would be turned off by it, and therefore they would refuse to help make her media-assisted coronation happen.

2) “Mrs.” Clinton’s fellow lesbians, and most others in her LGB XYZ EE I EE I OH community would be very upset that she had remained in the closet all these years while many of them bravely came out.

3) It would make it painfully obvious to everyone that Bill has just been her beard all these years (which is why she always has tacitly approved of his extracurricular activities).

* I’m sure Trump keeps a Hillary lesbian sex-tape or other type of lesbian evidence in case he needs to go full nuclear on Dems, or save his life and businesses in case he loses.
In any case the “intelligence community” must have all the goods on Huma Abedin. Thus far we only got to see his husband’s weiner. No need to explain why.

* She wasn’t the least grotesque physically earlier in her life. Just a basic bitch with an irritating voice. It’s the attempt to make her look 45 when she’s a poorly preserved 68 that has made her, as you describe, a thing of horror.

* I realize that the crowd turned him once he really started in on her, and he got boos or very muffled applause thereafter, but I think this was one of his most effective public speeches yet. It doesn’t matter what the people at the dinner thought, it matters what the people watching thought. And he did two really good things in that respect. First, he made it memorable, so it will get lots of air time (have any of you actually watched the entire dinner before? I haven’t). Second, he landed some solid hits:
“Pardon me”
“How corrupt do you have to be to get kicked off the Watergate Commission?”
“here she is tonight, in public, pretending not to hate Catholics”
“And all of the jokes were given to her in advance of the dinner by Donna Brazile.”

* I’ll believe there’s genuine animosity between Donald and Hillary when Ivanka and Chelsea break up.

* Somebody has posted an edited version of the Red Dinner on Reddit, I foresee plenty of memes coming…

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Can America Buy Israel Another 40 Years?

Posted on October 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

Posted in America, Israel | Comments Off on Can America Buy Israel Another 40 Years?

More Than 250 Female Rabbis Condemn Trump For Hate Speech

Posted on October 20, 2016 by Luke Ford

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WP: Washington’s foreign policy elite breaks with Obama over Syrian bloodshed

Posted on October 20, 2016 by Luke Ford

The only member of Obama’s foreign policy team in his first term who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq was Barack Obama himself. There’s little difference between liberal interventionism and neo-conservatism. All sides of America’s political establishment like to meddle overseas. They just use different rhetoric to justify it.

Donald Trump is against America intervening overseas unless it is in America’s national interests. He doesn’t want to nation-build and launch wars for democracy.

Washington Post:

There is one corner of Washington where Donald Trump’s scorched-earth presidential campaign is treated as a mere distraction and where bipartisanship reigns. In the rarefied world of the Washington foreign policy establishment, President Obama’s departure from the White House — and the possible return of a more conventional and hawkish Hillary Clinton — is being met with quiet relief.

The Republicans and Democrats who make up the foreign policy elite are laying the groundwork for a more assertive American foreign policy via a flurry of reports shaped by officials who are likely to play senior roles in a potential Clinton White House.

It is not unusual for Washington’s establishment to launch major studies in the final months of an administration to correct the perceived mistakes of a president or influence his successor. But the bipartisan nature of the recent recommendations, coming at a time when the country has never been more polarized, reflect a remarkable consensus among the foreign policy elite.

This consensus is driven by broad-based backlash against a president who has repeatedly stressed the dangers of overreach and the limits of American power, especially in the Middle East. “There’s a widespread perception that not being active enough or recognizing the limits of American power has costs,” said Philip Gordon, a senior foreign policy adviser to Obama until 2015. “So the normal swing is to be more interventionist.”

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Common Republican Misconceptions About Donald Trump

Posted on October 20, 2016 by Luke Ford

A friend says: One of the bigger misconceptions among the Republican critics of Trump is the assertion that had the Republicans nominated anyone other than Trump that candidate would be cruising to victory over Hillary Clinton.

Aside from the scandals that may have been uncovered regarding any of the other Republican aspirants, the fact remains that with the sole exception of Cruz, who is unelectable for other reasons, the remaining candidates hewed to the neo-conservative foreign policy and military adventurism that was discredited by Bush – Cheney, and refused to take a hardline on immigration, arguably the most important issue within the Republican primary. Mickey Kaus consistently stated that if the Republican establishment wanted to defeat Trump all it had to do was embrace an enforcement first immigration policy and rule out amnesty. However, the Republican establishment wouldn’t give on this issue.

Cruz is the darling of the “constitutionalists” and the religious right, but those make up perhaps 25% of the Republican voters and an even smaller percentage of the national electorate. Aside from his personal issues (no one who works with him in the senate can stand him) his reputation as an opportunistic grandstander, his actual policy positions, especially on social issues, are way outside the mainstream of the U.S. today and perhaps even outside the mainstream in Eisenhower’s America.

Trump, on the other hand has done something that no other Republican (with the possible exception of Reagan) has done in terms of rallying white working class, lower class and middle class Americans who are feeling displaced by the actions of the Democratic party in its unbridled pursuit of identity politics. Trump has also taken social issues off the table despite the Democrat’s success in labeling him misogynistic. He hasn’t spoken out against same sex marriage. He hasn’t even opposed transsexual’s using the toilets of the sex they supposedly identify with and he has cast his opposition to Muslim immigration as one that protects gays. He has done this without alienating his religious right backers. His position on trade, protectionism, and immigration are widely popular. The reason he is losing in the majority of polls (there are two groups of polls: IBD, Rasmussen and the L.A. Times have the race tied; the rest of the polls have Clinton ahead from just outside the margin of error to double digit leads) is because he has been successfully tarred as an irresponsible, hot head, who is a racist and woman groper to boot and the Clinton campaign has successfully diverted attention away from the revelations of James O’Keefe and Wikileaks and others about her and about her positions, where the respective policy positions remain in the background (although last night’s debate did point out some of the differences.)

But there is no other Republican who would have been more popular than Trump. The only question is whether that Republican would have made it as easy to demonize him as Trump did and whether if the candidate were anyone other than Trump, the media would have spent more time critiquing Clinton. I don’t think it would have mattered and in the case of some of the Republicans, such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, would they have governed substantially different than from how Clinton might govern? I don’t think it would have made much difference on foreign or domestic policy. I think each would have weakened immigration laws more than Clinton will be able to because there will be resistance to her. There might be some marginal differences in Supreme Court appointees and in staffing of cabinet positions, but certainly no significant changes in direction.

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The Third Debate

Posted on October 20, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: “In summary: both candidates were pretty good.

Trump was much better than in first debate, and was helped by moderator who wasn’t out to get him. Hillary was mostly running out the clock, bobbing and weaving. She didn’t land much in the way of heavy punches on Trump, but managed to distract him from too many knock out blows.

I imagine Wallace will hear a lot of “You’ll never work in this industry again” denunciations from his media colleagues for being pretty fair.

Give Trump back the first half of the first debate and he probably won the debates overall, but Hillary did a good job of getting Trump talking about himself in the second half of the first debate. She didn’t have to win the series of debates overall, just keep from losing badly.”

COMMENTS:

* My FAVORITE part of the entire debate was Trump telling the moderator that he’d keep him in suspense as to how Trump would act aghast the elections.

* The MSM is already going ballistic over that. Pretty funny — if there is obviously massive fraud, they expect the Donald to just roll over and play dead rather than go to the courts as Bush II did?

Yeah, I guess they do expect him to roll over and play dead — after all, Nixon did.

Personally, I would have just blandly said, “Of course, I’ll accept the results.” Which just shows that I am not as fast on my feet as the Donald: no sane person would just accept the “results” even if obviously fraudulent.

I think there is no way to predict how this will play out: could be a 55/45 Hillary victory, could be a 55/45 Trump victory (I’m excluding third-party votes).

* Trump’s answer is a Rorschach test of sorts. If you like him, it means legal challenges and recounts are on the table. If you don’t, it means he’s storming the White House with guns blazing.

* To put more simply: they were trying to bait Trump into saying “No recounts,” in so many words. Trump demurred.

They don’t want Trump to be president, and they certainly don’t want to go through 2000 again, so they’re pretending like Trump’s the one who’s baiting. As if out of the blue he said, “I win, or we go to the mattresses.”

Because, surprise, surprise, the media is deceitful. Trump didn’t give the best possible answer, or really even a good answer. He gave a politician’s answer. But there wasn’t any way out of the trap except to be deceitful himself. So I give Trump credit for being honest. Relative to other politicians, that is.

* What the party elites and the MSM (Wallace included) want him to say, at least by implication, is that he won’t legally challenge the results in the manner of Gore. That’s why they’re hammering him on it. They want to back him into a corner.

He could have handled it better, which is true of virtually everything he’s handled this election. But there’s no reason to infer a devious plot to overthrow the Sacred Process on his part. That’s bad faith on the part of everyone who would turn this into a Thing.

What’s rely at stake issue is his status as an outsider, and the damage such an amateur politician/loose cannon can do to the Establishment’s prestige. They rely on their prestige. We live in , a world of massive deception, and reputation is paramount. If people stop believing in the Democratic Process, they could start believing in anything.

* Exhibit A on why women should not be allowed to vote. It was a disaster. Women operate on feelz, and WANT a high inequality society.

Think, where do women go to Eat-Pray-Love? Switzerland, with its stunning natural beauty that inspired Tolkien to write Lord of the Rings? Japan, home to ancient traditions and samurai? New Zealand, home to beauty to rival Switzerland?

Nope. To some of the highest inequality, High GINI coefficient nations on the planet. In Africa, in places like Thailand, in India, in Latin America. That’s where your average UMC woman goes to Eat-Pray-Love. And they’re all voting Hillary.

Heck Hillary’s Open Borders and Dynastic Rule sounds thrilling to most women. Where Game of Thrones is a “hot” fantasy and they all want to be the Dragon Queen luxuriating in the approval of various poor, non-White hordes. Even better a society of the miserable poor and a few high Upper Class means any White man with success MUST be an Alpha and not some nerdy pretender.

Compare / Contrast the amount of ultra hot women and kids had by same of say, Z-lister Kevin Federline, and King of the Nerds Steve Jobs, worshiped by millions (of nerds only though). Yes women will vote Team Woman and sink the nation in a sea of the Third World mass immigration. Because Trump was mean or something.

* Trump blew it. The debates were his opportunity to substantively destroy Hillary on policy grounds and show he could be a good President. Unfortunately his ego, indiscipline and deformed personality kept getting in the way.

All the debate chatter has been about him insulting Miss Universe, boasting about sexual assault and refusing to accept the election result. It’s been very painful to watch all the own goals.

* I think Trump started off slowly, so I was bumming for a while there, having tuned in anticipating a debate like the second one, with “the silverback gorilla” throwing combinations all over the place. I felt high all day the day after that second debate! But this one wasn’t on that level.

Nonetheless, I think he won, and I’m very glad he brought up those “Rigging the Election” videos. If I were in charge of things, I’d have a very obvious, easily found, “can’t miss it” entire section right on the Trump website that has those videos in it, direct links to the WikiLeaks material, “Clinton Cash” embedded, links to all manner of things that show Clinton for what she is. Let her go on all she wants about how “when they go low, we go high”; all that stuff speaks for itself and shows just what she means by that phrase — i.e., when they tell too much Truth, we’ll ignore it and talk about how important it is that homosexuals get to play house while possessing a “marriage” license.

* Except women really do not like it when other women support husbands who are seen to be sexual predators, so that issue is not really a winner for her. And even the lowest-information of low-information voters think they know that she could not refrain from laughing after getting a good deal for a client who was convicted of criminally assaulting a female child. Saying she gets the support of women because she says nice things about how hard it is to be a woman is like saying Clarence Thomas is beloved by African-Americans because he has said nice things about how hard it is to be an African-American.

* Kudos to Chris Wallace. I’m glad someone finally pointed out that Hillary’s plan to jumpstart the economy and create millions of new jobs is exactly the same as Obama’s plan back in 2009. That plan cost nearly a trillion dollars and mostly went to connected green energy “entrepreneurs” and government workers. There was no jumpstarting whatsoever. The infrastructure was not fixed, as promised. “Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected, heh heh,” chuckled Obama.

If she’s elected, I’m sure a lot of Hillary’s trillion–or more–will end up in the hands of contractors who contributed to the Clinton Foundation. Boy, did she lie about the Clinton Foundation! It spends 90 percent of its funds on charitable purposes? It gets the highest ranking from watchdog groups? As someone in the Wikileaks said, “She doesn’t know what planet she’s on.”

Hillary talked about the hard work and difficult decisions Obama had to make to get our economy back on track. I’m not clear on what those were. Can anyone explain them to me? I’m serious. My impression that all Obama did as far as getting the economy back on track was to pump several trillion dollars of quantitative easing into it. The economy he’ll be passing to the next president will be even less sound than the one he inherited.

* Mr. Trump’s answer was partly deliciously subversive of the present $ellout Regime, and was mostly masterful politics of the Keep ‘Em Guessing school.

His answer proved that he’s a superb politician, way above Hillary’s bush league boilerplate recitation-regurgitation, because Mr. Trump adroitly didn’t answer the question.

Recall the line that Arthur Kennedy, portraying reporter Jackson Bentley, says to Omar Sharif’s Sherif Ali in Lawrence Of Arabia:

“You answered without saying anything. That’s politics!”

In short, Mr .Trump just gave the chattering chowderheads of Enemedia-Pravda and the Know-It-All snobs of the punditocracy a NON-issue to keep them busy chasing one another’s tails from now until the morning of November 9th.

Brilliant!

* As long as he remains advised by Bannon, Miller & Sessions, we should be fine. That Florida speech he gave last week was all we needed to hear to know he is on track. Immigration patriots don’t have the luxury of quibbling over stylistics – we are 20 years too late for that. It is all hands on deck time. Do or die.

* Trump doesn’t need to win women. He only needs 35-40% of women to win the election. Nothing that happened in this debate will drop him lower than that and he may have boosted himself a little.

* …even if Trump loses, take heart. It could be similar to Goldwater in that it was a rebirth. I’d much rather live in an America with a “woke” 30% white population than a 75% white America full of deracinated boobs. And there will be secession possibilities in the future. Who’s gonna stop the white supermajority from seceding? A bunch of trannies, single moms, dindus, and Tiny Duck?

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Steve Sailer: The Unanswered Question: Would Hillary Accept Defeat or Would She Blame Russian Hackers?

Posted on October 20, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: Would Hillary peacefully accept the verdict of the polls or would she demand that Obama strike back at Russia for rigging the election?

COMMENTS:

* Another Unanswered Quesion: Why do liberals say they’ll move to Canada, rather than Mexico, if Trump wins? Why do they so strongly prefer our northern neighbor?

* A even more interesting question is whether the military would obey the orders of a lame-duck President acting on behalf of a defeated candidate, especially if Donald Trump countermands the order? More likely, Hillary will not accept the electoral results and will challenge votes in swing states. Trump might do the same thing. I wonder if we might have the spectacle of rival electoral college results and rival inaugurations–whose orders will the military and police follow then?

* It’s about time we questioned the legitimacy of American electoral politics, is it not?

How legitimate is a result brought about by the importation of millions of foreigners against the will of the majority?

* If Russia wants to decide the outcome of US elections, it should do it the honest way, i.e. buy up the American media and Hollywood.

Steve Sailer writes from Unz.com: “Right as the Presidential debate ended, we got hit with what appears to have been a major Denial of Service attack.

It must have been the fault of those hackers of Putin that Hillary is always warning us about.”

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Hillary Brings Up Alicia Machado Yet Again

Posted on October 20, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes:

From the Third Presidential Debate:

“CLINTON: … In the 1990s, I went to Beijing and I said women’s rights are human rights. He insulted a former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, called her an eating machine.”

As I may have mentioned once or twice over the years, Sailer’s First Law of Female Journalism is: The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.

Hillary seems to be running on the not-quite-articulated platform that electing her President will make overweight women hotter looking.

COMMENTS:

* I could only stand watching half the debate. The Donald was subdued for this debate while Hillary looked great (muted), I had to mute her. With the sound off I can see what TV viewers are subliminally absorbing. She looked fantastic for a nearly 70 year old woman. All done by optimized lighting and makeup and her Docs pumping her up for this performance. Include the botox and beautification Docs here. This is why she has been laying low for a week.

If appearances are 90% of the television game then Hillary did great. Of course when I look at her actual words in the transcript they are the usual crap and evasions and the woman has done nothing useful in the last thirty years, make that her entire life. If she gets elected it will be round two of dealing with a President who has never actually done anything. A zero record of delivery and accomplishments same as the 2008 Obama.

* In choosing to bring up her bestie Alicia Machado at the debate, Clinton dodged a bullet. Earlier this week, Mexican judge Vicente Bermudez Zacarias did not.

Newly-minted US citizen Machado is the baby mama of El Indio, who’s a C-level executive with the Beltran-Leyva narco cartel. In marked contrast, Judge Bermudez fell afoul of El Chapo, the top dog of the Sinaloa cartel.

So there’s no connection, and this is not another illustration of Clinton’s judgement, character, or priorities. If there were any lessons to be drawn, the prestige media would have pointed them out by now.

* I don’t think Mrs. Clinton is very good at this debating and making convincing arguments stuff.

I would have expected better. After all, she did go to law school at the alma mater of Pauli Murray.

I went to China and said A.

He called Miss Universe B.

Therefore…what?

She was better at destroying a twelve-year-old rape victim in Arkansas.

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Are U.S. Jewish Organizations Hypocrites on Immigration?

Posted on October 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

I tackled this topic here.

Allison Kaplan Sommer wrote for Haaretz in 2012:

While the violence was condemned, organizations have stayed away from the hot button of Israel’s immigration policies, even as it has moved into active mass deportation of South Sudanese refugees.

American Jewish organizations have loudly applauded President Obama’s decision to issue an executive order, allowing law-abiding, school-attending young illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children to remain in the country to apply for two-year deferrals of deportation and for work permits.

JTA reported on the long list of groups praising the move:

– “This is a major success for advocates around the country, including many from the Jewish community, who have been pressuring the Administration and Congress to take action on this issue for over a decade,” said Mark Hetfield, Interim president and CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society …

– Rabbi David Saperstein, president of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, emphasized in a separate statement that “the law-abiding young women and men who were brought to the United States by undocumented parents will now have the opportunity to thrive in the country they know as home without the looming specter of possible deportation.”

– Nancy Kaufman, CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), stated in a press release that the administration’s “new policy will end the inhumane and mindless practice of deporting young people who came to the US as children, have grown up and been educated here, and who are already or soon will be productive members of our society.”

– The Anti-Defamation League called the decision “an appropriate exercise of prosecutorial discretion” and “a responsible and important step in the right direction toward comprehensive immigration reform.

– National Jewish Democratic Council president and CEO David Harris and chair Marc Stanley cast the decision as one having special Jewish resonance. “American Jews — as descendants of immigrants, if not immigrants ourselves — understand profoundly what it means to have a shot at success in America. The provisions announced by the President today provide that opportunity.”

And yet, by contrast Israel’s policy decisions on illegal immigration – culminating in today’s airlift of South Sudanese back to their homeland – has resulted in a resounding silence from the same organizations.

Even before the Obama announcement, Dan Sieradski, a leftist self-described ‘new media activist,’ a high-profile Jewish participant in “Occupy Wall Street,’ creator of “Occupy Judaism” and professional thorn in the side of the American Jewish establishment, pointed this out in a June 8 blog post entitled It’s the hypocrisy, stupid!

Over the past several days, Sieradski’s Twitter stream has been a non-stop barrage of criticism and frustration, pointing out that the organizations that have historically lobbied the U.S. government in the direction of liberal immigration policies in the United States, are not exerting the same kind of political pressure when it comes to Israeli treatement of refugees and economic migrants. Here is just a small sample of Sieradski’s tweets:

Daniel Sieradski‏@mobius1ski

Same Jewish orgs that took 48 hours to respond to anti-African violence in Israel all had same-day press releases about the DREAM Act

Daniel Sieradski‏@mobius1ski

i think u.s. jewry’s afraid to speak out against israel’s treatment of africans b/c if they tug at the thread of racism all will unravel

And in his characteristic flair for the dramatic, he added, (referring to Jewish Federations of North America)

Daniel Sieradski‏@mobius1ski

i’d self-immolate in jfna’s lobby if i thought it’d make a difference. but they’d just cover their eyes and ears, pretend nothing happened.

It was Sieradski who first attacked American Jewish organizations on Twitter for not quickly condemning the attacks on the African migrants in South Tel Aviv and the inflammatory remarks by when they began in late May. Later the same day, journalist Peter Beinart made the same criticisms a blog post entitled The Sound of Silence. Over the next few days, condemnations were, in fact, issued by the organizations. Would they have happened without the online pressure? Who knows?

But while the violence was condemned, generally, the organizations have stayed away from the hot button of Israel’s immigration policies, even as it has moved into active mass deportation of South Sudanese refugees, and the construction of large-scale detention centers. This leads us into the all-too- familiar territory of how and when American Jewry should intervene, criticize, or even comment on internal Israeli policies. If a group takes a stand on what the U.S. government should do about immigrants – who aren’t even political refugees – especially when they invoke their own immigrant history, as the National Jewish Democratic Council did, should they not also grapple with what is happening in Israel?

There are probably a few reasons why they are steering clear of the issue. Besides the obvious problem of coordinating their domestic U.S. position with their view of how the Israeli government is behaving, there’s also the question of publicity. Right now, the Israeli deportations are not a story in the United States, and it is likely the organizations fear that issuing statements on the subject would be an invitation to unflattering coverage of the story in the media. American Jews have enough headaches in the area of race relations without pictures of Israelis shipping planeloads of Africans back to their strife-ridden homelands.

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