Hillary Held Hostage

Steve Sailer writes:

As we saw this weekend, however, Muslim terrorism is a more worrisome problem for Hillary. I would imagine that she has friends in the Persian Gulf who have assured her that they’ve directed their efforts to export their domestic troublemakers away from the U.S. through Nov. 8.

But America now has a more-than-adequate supply of angry young Muslims. And the more the terrorier.

Hillary and her allies in the news media are adamant about keeping voters from noticing that more Muslim immigrants means more terrorists. Correlation doesn’t prove causation! But that kind of pro-stupidity argumentation gets tiresome.

Since this weekend, Mrs. Clinton has been furiously trying to signal to the Potential Muslim Terrorist community that they’re just helping Trump. But the Allahu Akbar crowd tends to respond to its own erratic internal urges, so it’s by no means clear if she can talk all of them into delaying their next acts of butchery until after the election.

Or maybe she can convince voters that immigrant Muslim terrorists are false flags that are part of the vast Putin-Trump conspiracy?

In my new Taki’s Magazine column, “Hillary Held Hostage,” I point out that Hillary has put herself at the mercy of events by her refusal to moderate her pro-BLM and pro-Muslim immigration stances.

Tonight, events don’t seem to be flowing in Hillary’s favor in Charlotte in the key battleground state of North Carolina. Or then again maybe Hillary knows best and this kind of looting will turn out her black base?

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Google & Our Brave New Diverse World

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* This is my biggest fear, coming to life incrementally: To wit, “He who controls the programmers, controls the future.”

And right now, our evil leftist overlords control the programmers.

Mucking up history to come up with a ridiculous list of black nobodies to assuage the infinitely delicate sensibilities of “African Americans” may seem relatively innocuous, but to me it is a very foreboding sign of things to come.

What happens when they start automating judges? Policemen (think Robocop)? Legislation? College applicants? Job applicants? Immigration/refugee applicants? Think Diversity™ is bad now? Wait until Disparate Impact has been hard-coded into the black-box algorithms mandated by the (((lefties))) at FedGoogle Inc. At least now we have some humans involved who might show some better judgment in the face of pressure to hire/find innocent wildly unqualified/guilty POCs instead of competent/innocent white guys. But when AI’s dictating these things?

Consider Google’s response when accused of manipulating auto-suggest results unfavorable to Hillary Clinton: “You silly goys with your crazy conspiracy theories–you’re just too stupid to understand the pure, unbiased logic of our super advanced algorithms. What are you, anti-science?”

Think this situation is going to improve, get worse, or stay the same as we move forward into our Brave New Diverse World?

* In another fifty years, the great Sudanese-American inventor, Ahmad Muhammad from Texas will top Google’s alternative reality rankings (generated using oppression-free weights). He faced much persecution as a teenage Muslim inventor. He suffered great ignominies such as being marched to the police station after one of his great inventions triggered a bomb scare precipitating a self-imposed exile in Qatar. Ibtihaj Muhammad, the great fencer, will be remembered for generations while Michael Phelps will barely deserve a mention. Allah is indeed great. He has made the Dhimmi immensely stupid.

* According to family, Minnesota Somali stabber was just going to the T-Mobile in the mall in St. Cloud to get an iPhone. They don’t know what set him off at the mall.

I’m guessing it was racist whites who started it and poor Adan was just a victim of intolerant whites. There’s gotta be a lawsuit initiated!

* Well, by 2020 you’ll be able to buy all those black inventions, and a George Washington Carver peanut butter sandwich, with a Harriet Tubman $20.

Another decade or so and the Ministry of Truth will have airbrushed American history to the point where the only whites in it will be Klansmen.

* I think part of it is the attitude of fear not just of what one’s peers will think, but rather of starting a conflict with another ethnic group who take refutation of the faith as fighting words.

We can see this clearly in Hilary being able to amazingly claim that Trump is the reason America is at risk from Islamic terrorism. (As if the ability of Muslims to translate ‘disrespect’ into political terrorism doesn’t give impetus to Trump’s message)

People know it’s nonsense, but what a person believes has always been a combination of personal reflection, experience and social and hierarchical pressure. People are perfectly capable of knowing that being ethnically displaced is bad and ultimately won’t do much for the world, but at the same time know to say or think that marks one as bad.

People know that Putin is just another authoritarian Russian leader, not Satan and that what he’d like the US to stop doing in the Middle East is what most Americans would like too. But they also know, like Jennifer Epstein, that he is unspecifably evil and global in his ambitions. Jennifer Epstein went to Princeton, you know?

That’s why so many in establishment in Britain, even those who argued against it, didn’t nuke Brexit and seem fairly contented with it. They desperately wanted somebody to make the decision for them, they wanted somebody to end the beginning. The tension is killing them, like everyone else.

I’d say a non-trivial number of people can’t bring themselves to vote for Trump out of self-identity and conscience, but secretly hope he wins. They can’t pull the trigger themselves, but they hope somebody does.

googlesalon

* The reason you get these skewed results is because of something we might call educational frontlash.

In other words, we all know in real life that there’s a dearth of positive contributions by minorities and women in most fields. But if we re-write history so that all the really important stuff was done by minorities and women, that may serve as an inspiration for more women and minorities to go out there and make the next big innovations, and become part of the educational and economic elite. Thus, in the end, we will achieve equality of results.

The underlying idea is that the “real world” shortfall in accomplishments by the designated groups is due to a number of factors: hatred, discrimination, lead paint, lack of educational opportunity, lack of money, and androcentric science. And we can address all of those in due course. But the lack of role models is also important, and we have to have these role models out there so that members of the designated groups will be encouraged to follow their footsteps.

I personally think the idea is nonsense. The great innovators are usually obsessed about X, Y, or Z. They are generally asocial awkward and keep to themselves. Not because they are “nerds”: the name comes only after they follow their inclination, which is to spend all of their time obsessing over X, Y, or Z, and never mind the social consequences. And that’s why the project fails. I mean you can either watch Monday Night Football or you can work on your abstract obsession. By definition, 99.9% of people are going to watch the game. You just can’t teach people to be this way.

BTW, I always admired George Washington Carver. The guy came from a tough background, was raised by his (I believe Swiss German) adoptive parents, and worked really hard to develop his intellectual abilities in life. Actually, I don’t believe he accomplished very much, although he had a variety of talents.

* The project to dumb down our schools and universities to try to improve the self-esteem of Blacks students piggy backed on the original Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in 1954. As an ideological assumption, Blacks suffered from a deficit of self-esteem due to lifetimes of oppression by Whites and their intimidating European culture. If they had better self-esteem, it was assumed, Blacks would be better prepared to mainstream American (a.k.a. European) culture and its schools.

The solution was to PRETEND that Blacks have always been in the mainstream; that is, great scientists, great mathematicians, great inventors, etc., in the European tradition. In fact, we’ll teach that in the schools. Rest assured there will be no issues affecting the self-esteem of White students upon learning that Whites made only marginal contributions to Western civilization because White children, as we all know, are born with high self-esteem. This comes with what they now call White Privilege.

Progress? Years ago, the Washington DC school system decided that low self-esteem was a major factor in the dismal performance of students in its schools. So, they passed out “A”s like candy under the assumption that, if the students felt really good about themselves, it would create a better environment for learning — the Power of Positive Thinking or something like that. The opposite occurred. “If I’m already getting “A”s”, the students reasoned, “Why study?” As of 2015, the Washington DC school system was ranked as the second worst school system in the United States.

* Look at ESPN. It used to be nothing more than an apolitical sports highlight reel; then it jettisoned its ex-jocks like Kurt Schilling. Hired a bunch of women who know nothing about sports. And are not even funny and working class like Ring Lardner or HL Mencken. ESPN is nothing but SJW lecture fests all the time. As the NFL has more and more women working there and influencing the owners, it has gone full SJW and Colin Kaepernick all the time.

The list of Black achievement outside music and sports is non-existent. But White women particularly the Upper Class are all in with investing in the fantasy, not the least of which is their anger at the feminized, placating, pedestalizing, appeasing nature of their male peers. The fantasy of Black scientific and mathematical and engineering achievement means too much to White women. They feel that their defacto alliance with Blacks, Muslims, Gays etc. is marching forward and their personal wealth and security won’t be at risk since Clock Boy and George Foreman are more than proper replacements for the Wrights, William Shockley, etc.

* Google is just following the long trend. In university, we’d hear on one hand how the awful the Greeks were for ushering in western civ and on the other how wonderful the Islamic world was for saving Aristotle. Many of the people who are looking for African inventors probably spent a lot of their time complaining about destructive technology.

* There’s been a slow but steady trickle of articles about how “algorithms be racist and sheeeit”. It’s not crazy to think that some of the reality-based, bayesian rationalist careful thinkers at google have taken it upon themselves to actively steer the algorithms to output “socially desirable” search results.

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The Goyim In Jewish Jurisprudence

Torah law makes no provision for non-Jewish citizenship in the Jewish state. Generally speaking, a goy cannot serve as a valid witness in a Jewish law court. Texts written by gentiles are rarely cited in the Torah tradition. It is rare today to hear an Orthodox rabbi quote a gentile from the pulpit. In other words, goyim seem to play the same role in Jewish jurisprudence as Jews would play in Nazi jurisprudence.

This is not surprising. Jews and gentiles are different peoples with different genetics, different norms and different aims in addition to similar genetics, similar norms and similar aims. They sometimes have different interests and sometimes similar interests.

I’ve spent about seven years of my life in daily Talmud classes. It is rare that a goy is quoted as authoritative in a discussion of Jewish law.

Fifty years ago, when Jews were concerned with being seen as Americans first, Jews second, rabbis often quoted gentiles from the pulpit.

German political philosopher Carl Schmitt saw Jews in Europe as primarily constituting a political nation that tended to have different interests from the gentile nations. Schmitt saw the friend/enemy distinction as the organizing point for a nation. Fundamentally, Jews and gentiles were in conflict. What was good for the Jews was often bad for gentiles and vice versa.

If you turn around the Carl Schmitt speech below and imagine an Orthodox Jewish rabbi is talking about the role of gentiles in Jewish jurisprudence, it’s a nice intellectual and moral challenge.

When Schmitt says, “What is needed is to determine, as accurately as possible, who is Jewish and who is not,” that concept is taken for granted by identifying Jews. The Jew-gentile distinction is the foundation of their lives.

When Schmitt says, “it is no longer possible to quote a Jewish writer just as any other writer,” that is also taken for granted in Jewish jurisprudence. You don’t quote a goy the same way you quote a yid.

When Schmitt says, “A Jewish writer is for us no source of authority,” that concept is also taken for granted in Jewish jurisprudence. You don’t quote a goy like you quote a Jew.

Let me take a few sentence from Schmitt and simply switch a few words around: “For us, a gentile writer, even when he is quoted at all, remains a gentile author. The adding of the word and the designation ‘gentile’ is not an external characteristic, but something essential…”

I told a Jewish friend that I just read a biography of Carl Schmitt. He replied: “Biographies about goyim are for goyim. We Yidden have our Torah.”

Life often comes down to the question — whose side are you on? Can Jews expect gentile law to treat them as just folks when Jewish law makes sharp distinctions between Jew and gentile? What happens when there are sharp conflicts of interest. Should not the goyim side with their own kind?

Two quotes come to mind:

* “American Jews want to maintain a distinct identity and on the other hand want to be fully integrated into broader society and don’t want the distinctiveness to come at a price.”

* “Anti-Semitism is as natural to Western civilization as anti-Christianity is to Jewish civilization, Islamic civilization and Japanese civilization.”

Tanya is clear that Jewish and gentile souls are different. This is obviously a question of faith. There is no empirical way to test the quality of someone’s soul. I am not bothered when confident gentiles assert that their people’s soul is of a different quality than other souls.

You will sometimes find in parts of traditional Jewish life that the purpose of gentiles is to serve Jews. I’m not ashamed and appalled by these sentiments. I think they’re normal and not unique to Jews. You find these same thoughts in other traditional cultures. Parts of Chinese and Japanese thinking regards the purpose of the rest of the world is to serve them. The more you identify with your own people, the more likely you are to have negative views of outsiders.

According to Schmitt: “Jewish opinions, with their intellectual content, cannot be put on the same level with the opinions of German or other non-Jewish authors.” Jewish jurisprudence takes the same attitude towards gentile opinions.

According to Schmitt: “It is a sign of the lack of training in the study of race and hence in the National Socialist thought to overlook this and to assume that there is a more substantial problem behind this, such as some Jews speaking and writing in nationalist terms, some in internationalist terms — that they can advocate at a moment’s notice conservative, liberal, subjective, or objective theories.” Jewish jurisprudence never makes this mistake with the goyim. We don’t expect them to seek our welfare. We don’t look to them for wisdom.

Schmitt regards Jews “as a weapon aimed at us.” It is normal in Jewish jurisprudence to regard goyim as a weapon aimed at us.

There is nothing more malicious in this Schmitt talk about Jews than is to be found about gentiles in part of the Talmud.

I’m not arguing that either Jews or gentiles are the good guys or the bad guys. They are just different people with different norms and different aims and different interests. As a convert to Orthodox Judaism, I believe that the Jews are God’s Chosen People. That is my faith statement.

“While resisting the Jew,” said Adolf Hitler, “I fight for the work of the Lord.”

Resisting the gentile in some times and places makes the Jew feel that he is fighting for the work of the Lord.

Short of a miraculous Messianic age, Jews and gentiles will often be in conflict.

Carl Schmitt gave this closing speech at a conference held in Berlin, Germany, on October 3 and 4, 1936 (translated by Tom Sunic):

As all presentations have demonstrated, Jewish law appears to be redemption from chaos. The polarity of Jewish chaos and Jewish legalism, of anarchic nihilism and positivistic normativism, of coarse sensualist materialism and abstract moralism, appears so clearly and so vividly before our eye, that we can use this fact — similar to the studies of racial psychology — as a scientific finding in our meetings for our future work. Therefore, in the capacity of German guardians of law and professors of law, for the first time we have made a contribution to the significant research already carried out in the realm of race studies. In this teamwork of ours, over the last two days, we have arrived at the initial conclusion which preserves the honor of our science in conjunction with other accomplishments, and which, as was rightly pointed out by Dr. Falk Ruttke, are accomplishments that can serve us as models.

1. The necessary task regarding the bibliography is very difficult. What is needed is to determine, as accurately as possible, who is Jewish and who is not. The smallest errors in this respect may be blown out of proportion, lead to confusion, and help the enemies of National Socialism score cheap triumphs. Also, these errors could have a damaging effect in view of the fact that young students can be distracted from the main ideas by small inaccuracies, whereas on the basis of the false sense of justice — so common to our German way — they may readily be inclined to ponder over an isolated case of inaccuracy, instead of focusing on the big and just issue for which we are fighting.

2. Only when we have an accurate register can we continue working in the direction of library cataloguing and, by cleaning up the libraries, protect our students from the confusions that lie in these facts; on the one hand we keep pointing to the necessary fight against the Jewish spirit, yet on the other hand, at the end of 1936, a seminar library in legal studies looks as if the greater part of the legal literature is being produced by Jews. Only by cleansing the libraries will this monstrous suggestion disappear, a suggestion grounded in the fact that the works by Jews are still featured in legal seminars, virtually inviting students to carry on with the absorption of Jewish thought. All legal writings by Jewish authors belong, as Reich Minister Dr. Frank aptly remarked, without distinction to the library catalogue of the department “Judaica.”

3. Also crucial is the issue of the quotations. As a follow-up to this meeting it is no longer possible to quote a Jewish writer just as any other writer. It would be downright irresponsible to quote a Jewish author as an expert witness, or even as some sort of authority in the field. A Jewish writer is for us no source of authority — not even as a “purely scientific” authority. This finding is a starting point when considering the issue of the quotations. For us, a Jewish writer, even when he is quoted at all, remains a Jewish author. The adding of the word and the designation ‘Jewish’ is not an external characteristic, but something essential, given that we cannot prevent a Jewish author from using the German language. Failing this, the purification of our legal literature will not be possible. Whoever writes today, ‘Stahl Jolson’ will achieve much more in a clear scientific manner than by writing long exegeses against the Jews, which, in general, move around in abstract expressions and which in concreto do not affect a single Jew. [The person referred to by Schmitt as Stahl-Jolson is usually known as Friedrich Julius Stahl; by using ‘Stahl-Jolson’ Schmitt emphasizes Stahl’s Jewish background. Stahl-Jolson was a conservative Jewish German legal scholar and philosopher (1802–1861) who had converted to Christianity]

Thus, only when we solve the issue of the quotations, we will be able to remove the Jewish-infected literature [von Juden infiziertes], and attain, instead, German legal literature. The problem of the quotations is not only of a practical nature; it is a fundamental problem. One can recognize an individual writer by the way he uses quotations. I’d like to point to the brazen matter-of-factness of the Vienna School of the Jew [Hans] Kelsen, where everybody quotes each other, with other opinions being neglected — to us Germans an incomprehensible cruelty and insolence. The issue of the citations is not a trivial matter. There are today, as far as the Jewish question is concerned, no more trivial matters. Everything is very closely connected and intimate as soon as the real battle of worldviews starts.

The issue of the quotations will lead to necessary clarification regarding many other individual issues, such as the issue of quoting half-Jews and those closely-related to Jews. I’ll warn right at the beginning against putting in the center of attention fringe issues and interposed issues. This is a standard way of avoiding clear cut decisions. There are hundreds of cases where it is beyond doubt that they are full Jews [Volljuden]. It is a typical Jewish trick to divert the attention from the heart of the matter to the doubt- related issues, to the fringe issues and to the interposed issues. Authors, with who there is no doubt that they are full Jews (Volljuden), will be in the future in our German legal literature, referred to as Jews. When, for an objective reason it becomes necessary to quote Jewish authors, this will be done only with the addition of the word “Jewish.” By the mere mentioning of the word “Jewish” a healing exorcism will start.

4. The last practical goal is related to the issue of scientific research, particularly regarding dissertations. A lot of good material for doctoral dissertations has emerged from the presentations of these two days. I do not think it is necessary that still 70 to 80 percent of hundreds of doctoral dissertations, which see the light today in Germany, continue to be written ​​in the same old style of civil code and penal code dissertations. Again, this is a serious matter, considering how much talent and intellectual potential exists among German youth and what it means when German law professors in charge of the education and the scientific training of these young Germans, steer these young people to distracting topics and away from the daily life of the German people. Here we have a professional task of first-rate importance. If one keeps in mind what has been concluded in this conference on the dissertation themes alone, concerning the legal historical and constitutional historical approaches — as well as the research into the Jewish mind and its influence on German intellectual life in its “intersection” with the German mind, as was very clearly remarked by one of the speakers — it does not seem to be difficult to draw the attention of a young student to the influence of Lasker, Friedberg, and Johann Jacoby [19th-century German-Jewish liberal legal thinkers and politicians] on German legal developments, or better yet encourage a student to study the rise of the civil procedure code and penal procedure code, as well as other laws in relationship to Jewish influence, or have the student focus his attention on the issue of “Jews and the concept of the rule-of-law-state.” There is no lack of dissertation themes and it would be the most stupid negligence if these new themes were not addressed.

III. But most importantly, what turned out in these past days to be the definitive conclusion, is that Jewish opinions, with their intellectual content, cannot be put on the same level with the opinions of German or other non-Jewish authors. We all became aware with the greatest clarity as to this supposed difficulty, such as when there are Jews expressing national and patriotic views, as was the case with the famed Stahl-Jolson. Over and over again in our conference we have come to realize that the Jew is sterile and unproductive for the German type of spirit. He has nothing to say to us, however shrewdly he may keep deducing [kombinieren], or even eagerly wishing to assimilate himself. Of course, he may play around with his enormous mediation and mercantile skills — but as far as the substance is concerned he creates nothing. It is a sign of the lack of training in the study of race and hence in the National Socialist thought to overlook this and to assume that there is a more substantial problem behind this, such as some Jews speaking and writing in nationalist terms, some in internationalist terms — that they can advocate at a moment’s notice conservative, liberal, subjective, or objective theories. Even the much vaunted skills of criticism of the Jew are the product of his mismatch to everything essential and genuine. It is a completely different concept of criticism from the one used by German law professors acting in a genuine teamwork, criticizing each other or promoting each other. Nor is it correct to depict the Jew as a very logical, very conceptual, constructive, or rational person. It is not so much his “care-free logical sharpness” [unbekümmerte logische Schärfe] — what we ourselves mean by logic, but a weapon aimed at us; it stems from the disproportion concerning the topic and the matter.

The relationship of Jewish thinking to the German spirit is of the following kind: the Jew has a parasitic, tactical and mercantile relationship toward our own intellectual work. Through his mercantile skills he has often a keen sense of the authentic; with great ingenuity and quick flair he knows how to target the authentic. This is the instinct of a parasite and of a genuine tradesman. As little as this skill has been demonstrated by the Jews in the art of painting, Jewish art dealers can, nevertheless, faster tell a genuine Rembrandt than German art historians. Likewise, in the field of jurisprudence, this cannot be a proof that with his skills the Jew can very rapidly recognize good authors and good theories. The Jews quickly spot German substance and it is to this that they are attracted. We must not give them credit for this – only to warn us to switch on our inhibitions. It is simply due to the overall situation of the Jew, in his parasitic, tactical and mercantile relationship toward the German intellectual heritage. Even such a horrible, sinister mask swapping, which underlines the whole life of Stahl-Jolson should no longer distract us. Whenever it is ceaselessly emphasized that this person is “subjectively honest,” — as true as this may be — yet, I must add that we cannot glimpse into the soul of the Jews and that we have no access into the inner character of the Jews. We only know the discrepancy between our kinds. Whoever has grasped this truth — also knows what race is all about.

Furthermore, it is necessary to realize how differently the Jews have behaved at different stages of history. Heinrich Lange [NS German legal scholar, 1900–1977] has explicitly pointed to that in his excellent essays. The most significant turning points in Jewish behavior during the last century were the years 1815, 1830, 1848, 1871, 1890 — Bismarck’s dismissal, the beginning of the Wilhelminian era — 1918, 1933. It is, therefore, unacceptable to put on the same level a case of Jewish appearance on the scene in 1830 with that in 1930. Here again we have the Jew Stahl–Jolson, who still exerts influence on the denominational and ecclesiastical opposition against the National-Socialist state. It is completely false to portray him as an exemplary, conservative Jew in contrast to other belated Jews that could have unfortunately never become that. In this fact lies a dangerous failure to recognize the essential insight, i.e., that with every change in the overall situation, with each new period in history, and so quickly that we can only grasp it with utmost attention, a change occurs in the overall Jewish behavior, a mask swapping of demonic subtlety [von dämonischer Hintergründigkeit] where, by contrast, the issue regarding individually involved Jews, is fully irrelevant. Indeed, the great adaptability of the Jews has been carried to extremes over several thousand years of their history by specific racial characteristics whereby the virtuosity of mimicry has been even more fostered by long practice. We can see it, but we cannot comprehend it. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that there is Jewish virtuosity.

I repeat again and again the urgent plea to read every sentence on the Jewish question in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and especially his comments on “Jewish dialectics.” What has been put forward at our meeting by experts in many scientific papers and in outstanding speeches is told in simple language to every national comrade [Volksgenosse] in a fully comprehensive manner. Do refer our law students always to those sentences by the Führer.

But beyond the Jewish problem let us not forget the German side of this question. For example, in a direct application of what Dr. Falk Ruttke said, we could mention the case of Karl Marx and the impact he had, as represented by the case of Friedrich Engels, or Bruno Bauer, or Ludwig Feuerbach, or perhaps even Hegel. Here lies a tragic problem. How was it possible that a German from Wuppertal, such as Engels, fell prey to the Jew Marx so completely? How was it possible that thousands of decent and honest national comrades [Volksgenossen] could over decades succumb in such a way to the Jewish mind? From where comes this non-resistance of many German men and from where comes weakness and the darkening of the German style at such a historical moment? The examination of this issue belongs to our scientific self-awareness as well as to the armor for the new struggle.

We have recognized all this in this workshop with greatest scientific clarity. Compared to the blindness and ignorance of earlier times, these are revolutionary insights. If equipped with it ​​we can enter into the struggle whose new phase has begun. Let us not deceive ourselves about the seriousness of this struggle. The speeches at the Nuremberg Party Congress left no doubt about it. Judaism is, as the Führer notes in Mein Kampf, not only hostile to everything that is hostile to Jews; it is a mortal enemy of any real productivity of any other people. Its world power does not tolerate national productivity because otherwise its own kind of existence would be refuted. Jewish interest in the real productivity of other nations, the speed with which the Jewish artist or the intellectual merchant collide with the German artist, poet or scholar — and by means of giving him a pension or tenure [Rente] harness [einspannen] him for themselves — are not virtues and they are not qualities that should distract us from the essential. We are dealing with the Jews not for their own sake. What we are looking for and what we are fighting for is our own authentic nature and the unspoiled purity of our German people. “While resisting the Jew,” says our Führer, “I fight for the work of the Lord.”

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The Jewish Question

Jews have been in Europe for more than a millenia but they remain a distinct people. So why should anyone expect Muslims to integrate into the West? That’s naive. There’s no reason to expect that Arabs will become normal citizens in the Jewish state.

Japanese-Americans and Chinese-Americans are also distinct groups. Races don’t assimilate except in the most superficial of ways. Instead, they act out their genetic imperatives.

Wikipedia:

The Jewish question is the name given to a wide-ranging debate in European society pertaining to the appropriate status and treatment of Jews in society. The debate was similar to other so-called “national questions” and dealt with the civil, legal, national and political status of Jews as a minority within society, particularly in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The debate started within societies, politicians and writers in western and central Europe influenced by the Age of Enlightenment and the ideals of the French Revolution. The issues included the legal and economic Jewish disabilities (e.g. Jewish quotas and segregation), Jewish assimilation, Jewish emancipation and Jewish Enlightenment.

The expression has been used by antisemitic movements from the 1880s onwards, culminating in the Nazi phrase “the Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. Similarly, the expression was used by proponents for and opponents of the establishment of an autonomous Jewish homeland or a sovereign Jewish state.

The term “Jewish Question” was first used in Great Britain in around 1750. According to Holocaust scholar Lucy Dawidowicz, the term “Jewish Question”, as introduced in western Europe, was a neutral expression for the negative attitude toward the apparent and persistent singularity of the Jews as a people against the background of the rising political nationalisms and new nation-states. Dawidowicz writes that “the histories of Jewish emancipation and of European antisemitism are replete with proffered ‘solutions to the Jewish question.'”[1] The question was next discussed in France (“la question juive”) after the French Revolution in 1789, before arriving in Germany via Bruno Bauer’s treatise “Die Judenfrage” – The Jewish Question.

From that point hundreds of other tractates, pamphlets, newspaper articles and books were written on the subject, with many offering solutions including resettlement, deportation and assimilation of the Jewish population. Similarly, hundreds of pieces of literature were written opposing these solutions and have offered solutions such as re-integration and education. This debate however, could not decide whether the problem of the Jewish Question had more to do with the problems posed by the German Jews’ opponents or vice versa: the problem posed by the existence of the German Jews to their opponents.

From around 1860 the notion took on an increasingly antisemitic tendency: Jews were described under this title as a stumbling block to the identity and cohesion of the German nation and as enemies within the Germans’ own country. Antisemites such as Wilhelm Marr, Karl Eugen Dühring, Theodor Fritsch, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Paul de Lagarde and others declared it a racial problem unsolvable through integration, in order to make their demands for the “de-jewifying” of the press, education, culture, state and economy, plausible, along with their demands for the condemnation of inter-marriage between Jews and non-Jews. They also used this definition to oust the Jews out of their supposedly socially dominant positions.

By far the most infamous use of this expression was by the Nazis in the early- and mid- twentieth century, culminating in the implementation of their “Final Solution to the Jewish question” during World War II.

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Trump & The Jewish Question

I thought “The Jewish Question” was whether Jews could be full citizens of gentile countries while retaining their membership in the worldwide nation of Jewry.

Rabbi Avi Shafran writes:

One needn’t be a supporter of Mr. Trump, though, to recognize that the anti-Semitism charges against him are seriously, forgive me, trumped up. In fact, they’re nonsense.

That he has an Orthodox-converted Jewish daughter and a Jewish son-in-law (and three grandchildren, whom he often refers to as his Jewish progeny), with all of whom he is close, should itself be enough to put the charge to rest.

If more is needed though, well, the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer, Steve Mnuchin, and general counsel, Jason Greenblatt, are both observant Jews. The latter, who has worked for Trump since the mid-1990s, is one of the candidate’s top advisers on Israel and Jewish affairs. And another top Trump adviser has said that Trump backs an Israeli annexation of all or parts of the West Bank. The candidate once received an award from the Jewish National Fund and served as grand marshal of the New York Israel Day parade.

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Satmar: Do They Take Us For Fools?

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein writes:

I was puzzled by the anguished responses of some of my friends to the videos of children at two Satmar camps being indoctrinated in the fine art of hatred of Zionists. Publicized on Yeshiva World News, the leaked videos showed children chanting slogans like “A Jew is not a Zionist,” and at one of the camps, all of them pelting a vehicle they were led to believe contained PM Netanyahu with eggs.

Sure, I was disgusted by this on many levels. How many enemies of our people would argue that Jews are no better than Hamas, whose summer camps teach thousands of children in Gaza to murder Israelis? (To be fair, in the Hamas camps, the kids are throwing grenades, known to be unsafe to humans and other life forms. Satmar’s eggs could probably, at worst, elevate cholesterol levels for a short period of time.) How many more Satmar kids will be taught not that they are proud bearers of their communities banner, but that they are the only authentic Jews! How unthinking of the organizers of these activities not to take into account how they embolden those whose intentions are nothing less than genocidal!

But was this really the worst that we’ve seen from Satmar? What about public demonstrations at the Israeli Consulate in NY – at a time that Israel was under intense pressure in the world community – in front of the watchful eyes of the world?

…Was there no worry that such a statement would intensify all the pushback against Satmar’s refusal to provide minimal education to their children? No concern that the camp activity would convince people that living in enforced isolation from the rest of us was the incubator of attitudes that they saw in the videos? That somehow Jews who lived with some degree of connection with the external world developed more tolerance?

Did the author of those lines take us all – the State, and the rest of us non-Jewish Jews – for utter fools? Or, perhaps he knows that Satmar, as one of the last groups with guaranteed bloc voting, has enough influence with politicians that it can say or do anything it wants? In which case our confidence in the American political system – complete or limited – actually does make us fools?

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Illusions of Objectivity

Rabbi Avi Shafran writes:

Some American journalists assigned to the political beat are having a hard time. Their dilemma is named Donald Trump, a man they don’t feel they can cover objectively.

Those troubled are reporters with a liberal bent, and that, of course, means most of the profession. The vast majority of mainstream print and electronic media personnel are well entrenched on the left end of the political spectrum. To be sure, one needn’t be a social or political liberal to regard the Republican presidential candidate with concern – many in Mr. T.’s own party are distancing themselves from him – but “progressive” citizens have a particular revulsion for the controversial candidate.

And so, while the intrepid reporters soldier on in the quest for fairness, impartiality and objectivity, they are finding it hard to maintain their professional standards, or even the façade of neutrality.

Jim Rutenberg, the New York Times’ “media columnist,” lamented his and his colleagues’ predicament.

“If you’re a working journalist,” he wrote, “and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes… you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career.”

“You would move closer,” he continued, “than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.”

Mr. Rutenberg’s honest confession of discomfort is commendable. But it’s also somewhat amusing, because, while Mr. Trump may be an outsize (one might even say yuuuge!) challenge to the media’s objectivity, the notion itself of journalistic impartiality is more veneer than substance. There are other fairness challenges that reporters routinely face and fail.

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The Ellul Challenge

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein writes:

“If they understood the effect the chiming of the church bells had on the Jewish soul, they would never stop them.” So observed a Torah sage of a different generation, when the grandeur and power of the Church further demoralized an impoverished and persecuted European Jewry. If the Pew Research Center is correct, today’s worry should be the growing silence of those bells. In this we find a challenge as Elul is upon us, and as we look towards the yemei ha-din…

Not so long ago, Jews would pithily observe, “Vi es christelt zich, azoy yidelt zich.” The translation loses all of the flavor, but the meaning is something like “whatever is happening in the Christian world, is going to happen in the Jewish world.” We would not be amiss if we modernized that to “Vi es un-christelt zich, azoy yidelt zich” – whichever way Christianity is unraveling, Jews will follow suit. And follow suit we certainly will, unless we act less like the Fiddler on the Roof shouting one word slogans at questions, and more like the am chacham v’navon we are supposed to be.

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The Trump Tallis and Outsider Journalism

Rabbi Yitzhok Adlerstein writes: When a black pastor in Detroit draped a tallis around the shoulders of The Donald, Jewish tongues started clucking with disapproval. “Cultural appropriation!” “He’s an anti-Semite!” Notably, the vehemence, as best as I could tell, all came from Jews on the left – politically and religiously. Perhaps their real discomfort was in the realization that Donald Trump wears a tallis more often than they do. The rest of us were mildly amused (if anything about this strange campaign can be said to be amusing), and wanted to know more about the pastor and his church. (Hint: It is a Pentecostal church. There are lots of black Pentacostal churches, full of people who are pro-Israel, certainly more so than the elites in Haaretz who were quick to condemn the incident.)

The real cultural appropriation came from Jewish circles, which had to scramble to figure out what a tallis was, why the benighted religious Christians believed that Jesus wore one, and why they had to be wrong. Savor this, from an article in The Forward, authored by a “soferet” and designer of the famous Tefillin Barbie:

“In the religion known as rabbinic Judaism, rectangular garments are required to have knotted tassels on the corners, following the Torah. According to the scholar Dafna Shlezinger-Katsman, in Jesus’s era, people in the eastern parts of the Roman Empire routinely wore a rectangular thing called a pallium, and therefore people who wanted to observe rabbinic Judaism probably put tassels on their pallia. …A tassel-equipped pallium is what the early rabbis were probably referring to when they said “tallit.” …The tassels on the religious Jews’ pallia probably stood out to those in the know, but those who weren’t savvy to the significance wouldn’t have cared especially…Jesus may or may not have worn a tallit, depending on whether he was the type who wore pallium and whether he was inspired to mark himself as part of the rabbinic in-group by attaching tassels to it. …Quite possibly Jesus, too, thought there were more important issues to focus on. …Having a special rectangular garment with tassels that you wear during prayer seems to have been a late medieval development, according to scholars like Elisheva Baumgarten.”

Except that it wasn’t. Unless we assume that the Babylonian Talmud is of late medieval development. I can’t tell you how much a tassled Roman pallium would set you back on Ebay in fourth or fifth century Iraq, but they seemed to know about it and its role in davening:

“R. Yochanan said, “Were a verse not written, it would be impossible to say it. This teaches that the Holy One, Blessed is He, wrapped Himself in a tallis like a prayer leader and demonstrated to Moses the order of prayer.” (Rosh Hashanah, 17B)”

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Conservatism In Crisis

Rabbi Avi Shafran writes: The alt-right’s “intellectual godfather,” in many eyes, is Jared Taylor. Although he characterizes himself as a “white advocate,” he strongly rejects being labeled racist, contending that his “racialism” is “moderate and commonsensical,” a benign form of belief in the “natural” separation of races and nationalities. He contends that white people promoting their own racial interests is no different than other ethnic groups promoting theirs. He has said, “I want my grandchildren to look like my grandparents. I don’t want them to look like Anwar Sadat or Fu Manchu.”

Pointing to the homogeneity of places of worship, schools and neighborhoods, he insists that people “if left to themselves, will generally sort themselves out by race.”

Certain of Mr. Taylor’s beliefs may resonate with some Orthodox Jews. We may rightly eschew racism (seeing black Jews, for instance, no different from white ones), but we tend to be less than enamored of some elements of various minority cultures; we deeply value ethnic cohesion, preferring to live in neighborhoods among “our own kind”; and we have serious problems with certain elements of “progressive” western civilization and multiculturalism.

Mr. Taylor, in fact, welcomes Jews. He has said that we “look white to him.”

That sentiment though, is not typical among others under the alt-right umbrella.

Even a nuanced rejection of non-western cultures inevitably attracts genuine racists and haters, and devolves into rejection of the eternal “other”: Jews. The American far right has always embraced, inter alia, one or another form of Jew-hatred. More balanced members of the alt-right refer to their “1488ers” – a reference to two well-known neo-Nazi slogans, the “14 Words” in the sentence “We Must Secure The Existence Of Our People And A Future For White Children”; and the number 88, referring to “H,” the eighth letter of the alphabet, doubled and coding for “Heil Hitler.”

And even Mr. Taylor has permitted people like Don Black, a former Klan leader who runs the neo-Nazi Stormfront.org web forum, to attend his conferences. He may or may not endorse Black’s every attitude, but neither has he rejected his support.

Back in the 1960s, the John Birch Society, then dedicated to the theory that the U.S. government was controlled by communists, was condemned by the ADL for contributing to anti-Semitism and selling anti-Semitic literature. The brilliant and erudite William F. Buckley Jr., the unarguable conscience of conservatism at the time, recognized the group’s nature, and the threat its extremism posed to responsible social conservatives. In the magazine he founded, National Review, he denounced and distanced himself from the Birchers in no uncertain terms, contending that “love of truth and country call[s] for the firm rejection” of the group.

It is ironic that it has fallen to the Democratic presidential contender to make a distinction between responsible Republicanism and the current loose confederacy that includes haters.

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