Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

The Trial Of The Century

Posted on February 6, 2016 by Luke Ford

* Nah, the Fatty Arbuckle trial was just as big – if not bigger – back in the 1920s. It sold vast forests’ worth of scandal sheets.

There was no doubt that Arbuckle savagely raped that woman (with, among other things, a champagne bottle and a long, jagged piece of ice). He tore her insides apart – ruptured her bladder. She died the next day.

Despite his denials, there were numerous witnesses who testified that he got her drunk, then dragged her up to his hotel room to have his way with her. (They were at a crowded party at a hotel.) He’d been going after her for some time, and he finally got her.

The first two juries deadlocked; the third returned an acquittal after a few minutes’ deliberation and then lined up for autographs.

Television news was once a lot more serious-minded and professionally-presented (whether it was “better” depends on your ideological perspective) than it is now. But that was not meant to last.

The Cronkite-Huntley/Brinkley era of the ’60s and ’70s was an aberration – the high-water mark of “serious” mainstream American journalism. The two networks were a virtual monopoly, gorging on a smorgasbord of national advertising revenues. (ABC was not fully competitive, especially in news, until the mid- to late-’70s.) They could afford to maintain vast worldwide news-gathering organizations.

Paley and Sarnoff took pains not to come across as stereotypical money-grubbing Jews – they wanted to make gobs of money, yes, but they also wanted to show off how classy they were. They also wanted to keep the FCC – one of whose commissioners famously denounced the prime-time landscape as a “vast wasteland” – off their backs. The easiest way to do that was by putting Cronkite on the air every night and saying, “See, we’re as respectable as anybody!”

They were utterly unlike someone like Larry Tisch, who took over CBS and dismembered it in the late ’80s. Tisch destroyed the news division and nearly destroyed the sports division, as well – during his tenure, CBS lost the rights to the NBA, the MLB, and, most disastrously, the NFL.

(Shortly after Fox outbid CBS for the NFC contract, ending 40 years of the NFC on CBS, Rupert Murdoch bought an independent company that owned a number of big-city CBS affiliates – all NFC markets. This double-barreled punch – losing pro football *and* many high-rated local stations that provided powerful lead-ins – was a staggering blow that left the network an also-ran for years. Even after CBS snagged the AFC away from NBC in ’98, it took a few more years – and new shows called CSI and Survivor – for the prime-time ratings to show any signs of life.)

Everyone remembers the hard-hitting Murrow documentaries of the ’50s*, but the nightly news back then was typified by easygoing John Cameron Swayze’s cheerful “Let’s go hopscotching around the world for headlines!” It wasn’t until the ’60s, when CBS and NBC expanded their evening newscasts to half an hour, that the daily news operations became something more than a joke.

*Even Murrow did Person to Person, a frothy interview show.

* It’s often pointed out that Nicole Brown was in life everything a middle class black woman would hate. Well. Nicole was not going to be liked by middle class white women either.

Something not often mentioned is that O.J. was still married to his first wife Marguerite when he took up with Nicole and Marguerite was pregnant with her and O.J.’s third child.

Woman I know always tell me any woman stupid enough to go with a married man deserves what happens, maybe not being murdered, but it won’t turn out well.

And Nicole’s parents encouraged her to go with the married O.J. Simpson. The Browns weren’t looked upon with much sympathy by white people in my experience. They still wanted Simpson found guilty.

* For Nicole’s parents, its always been about the money. OJ was their meal ticket and he set a number of them up quite comfortably post-NFL retirement in various endeavors.

Even when he was found guilty in the civil trial, they fought tooth and nail to get their hands on the millions of dollars to get whatever money they thought was due them. Remember, it was Nicole’s parents who tried to talk her out of divorcing OJ because they saw their gravy train coming to an end when she left.

So basically Nicole supported her family during her life, and if they ever do receive the money from the civil case, she will be supporting her family in her death. At least Denise has stopped attempting to go on TV every chance she can get to try and get her hands on the money because its not going to happen. OJ doesn’t have that kind of money anymore, so the extended Brown family will have to get honest paying jobs and not use their dead sister as a ploy to get money.

If they truly had cared about Nicole, they never would’ve encouraged their daughter/sister to go with him.

* O.J. was enormously popular with the sports media. He was always cooperative and willing to be interviewed and this had a lot to do with his favorable public image. The one thing known for sure about his relationship with teammates is that by 1977 the Bills players were glad to see him gone.

This is according to Larry Felser, long time Buffalo writer and Sporting News columnist. The Bills probably enjoyed the reflected glory of playing with the Great O.J. Simpson for a while but something like that eventually wears thin.

* Some impressions:

* Federal welfare reform was passed soon after (the GOP’s last act off assertion before full-on cuckservatism set in); wonder if black misbehavior in so jubilantly celebrating the verdict hardened some hearts
* distinctly remember a struck jury member- professional-looking black guy- having a small, adopted white child on his arm while talking to reporters
* Howard Stern (God bless ‘im) for years after ran a schtick where he or one of his ambush reporters would ask a black celebrity if they though OJ did it; I cannot recall a single one willing to admit OJ’s guilt, though several were so visibly discomfited it was obvious they were caught in a lie
* liberalism was still not SJW-overrun, and some outposts (NEW REPUBLIC, which of course had pre-existing bones to pick with black activists over quotas, Israel, Crown Heights riots, etc.- but several others as well, I think) had the decency to be embarrassed by the outcome
* LUV, LUV, LUV how sh!tlibs keep telling us- but always retroactively!- how we deserve to be outlaws in our own country, and any violence or crime directed at us is always just retaliation for the sins of our society, but in the meantime are more than happy to partake in all the amenities of said exploitative society; like how America had it coming to it on 9/11, but on 9/10 were more than happy to rub shoulders with all those New Yorkers later burned, crushed, or blown to death while going to see Lion King on Broadway.

* Christopher Caldwell wrote a terrific review of Bugliosi’s book and brought out two legal points I remember.

1. Garcetti threw the case by ruling out the death penalty for political reasons. This eliminated the incentive for the Juice to plead guilty. Also, jurors in capital cases can be rejected if the D.A. can raise doubts about their willingness to implement the death penalty. That is an important method that prosecutors use to get the church ladies off the jury.

2. Barry Scheck was playing with fire by basing the defense on doubts about D.A analysis since he has made it his life’s work using DNA evidence to get the wrongfully convicted out of jail. I guess, fortunately for Project Innocence, DNA is so overwhelmingly useful for prosecutors that they never raise doubts about exonerations based on decades old DNA evidence.

* Dr Bennet Omalu, portrayed in the movie “Concussion”, has stated that it’s his firm belief that OJ has CTE and that much of his volatile behavior was due to that. Also, OJ was paying his ex-wife $10,000 p/mo in child support which might have set him to thinking about how to remove this burden upon him, particularly in view of the fact that she was dating other men freely, all on his dime.

* I remember at the time of the trial wondering if this was a case of “‘roid rage”. At the time Simpson was involved in making an exercise video and it is also known that the suffered from arthritis, so he might have been taking some steroidal anti-inflammatory drug for it. I know that even the relatively mild and common steroid prednisone can cause mood changes and behavior changes. (I have had to use the drug myself.). If not that, then perhaps cocaine, or an admixture.

* Ken Kesey said it sounded like cocaine and steroids.

* The cocaine/steroid angle sounds right. My brother was a prosecuting attorney for 12 years. He said that he could sense cocaine-fueled crimes because they so often involved senseless and extreme violence … absolutely over the edge. I would appear that the OJ case was one of these … manic RAGE!

* There could’ve been post-concussive brain trauma as well. Odds are that he has it, to some degree. Makes a lot of people paranoid, impulsive, and potentially violent.

* Several years ago then Philadelphia Assistant District Attorney (and now defense attorney) Jack McMahon (who is a very colorful character) gave a taped seminar to the office’s younger Assistant District Attorneys to explain the strategy of jury selection for prosecutors:

It is naturally full of real talk. It caused a bit of a row when a subsequently elected District Attorney (Lynn Abraham) released the video.

It probably tracks with Bugliosi’s views but McMahon holds that you don’t want intelligent or educated people because they try to apply their intelligence to legal concepts like “reasonable doubt” and therefore tend to be riskier.

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Israel’s Unwanted African Migrants

Posted on February 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Kathy Harcombe, BBC News, February 3, 2016

For nearly a year Israel has been offering African migrants cash and the chance to go and live in what is supposed to be a safe haven in a third country–but the BBC has spoken to two men who say that they were abandoned as soon as they got off the plane. One was immediately trafficked, the other left to fend for himself without papers.

Adam was 18 when he arrived in Israel in 2011. Attackers had burned down his home in Darfur at the height of the genocide, and he had spent his teenage years in a UN refugee camp in another part of Sudan. With no prospects in the camp and no sign of an end to the conflict in Darfur, he made his way north through Egypt and the lawless Sinai peninsula to Israel.

But Israel–which has approved fewer than 1% of asylum applications since it signed the UN Refugee Convention six decades ago–has not offered asylum to a single person from Sudan. It turned down Adam’s application, and last October, when he went to renew the temporary permit allowing him to stay in the country, he was summoned to a detention centre known as Holot, deep in the Negev desert.

This was no surprise for Adam. As most Sudanese and Eritreans in Israel know, it’s just a matter of time before they get the call to Holot.

The government calls Holot an “open-stay centre”, but it’s run by the prison service and rules are strict, including a night-time curfew, which, if broken, will land you in jail.

It’s in such an isolated area that there’s very little to do and nowhere to go.

I talked to Adam and a group of his friends just outside the gates of Holot, where, at that time, they spent most of their day playing cards or snooker, and eating and cooking in makeshift restaurants.

They told me they took turns to make the hour-long bus ride into the nearest town, Beersheva, where they bought food. The meals served in Holot were insufficient, they said, and contained little meat or protein.

Most of the men there were young–in their 20s or early 30s. Some had been teachers, activists or students in their own countries.

“We are wasting our youth here,” Adam says. “If someone lives in Holot, they have no future . . . You find many people here go crazy.”

Since I visited Holot, those makeshift restaurants and game areas have all been demolished on the orders of the government, leaving those inside with even fewer ways to pass the time.

Adam will be held in Holot for 12 months. Then he is likely to face a stark choice:

Go home to Sudan
Stay in Israel, but be imprisoned indefinitely
Accept departure to a third country
The Israeli government has deals with two countries in Africa to host its unwanted migrants.

It promises that people who take the option of “voluntary departure to third countries” will receive papers on arrival that give them legal status in the country.

As an extra incentive, they’re given $3,500 (£2,435) in cash, handed over in the departure lounge of the airport in Tel Aviv.

Israel refuses to name the two African countries but the BBC has spoken to migrants who say they were sent to Rwanda and Uganda.

One is Tesfay, an Eritrean who was flown to Rwanda in March 2015, and he told me that far from being offered legal status, a home and the chance of a job in Rwanda–as he had been promised in Israel–he became a victim of trafficking.

His identity papers–a travel document and a single-entry visa to Rwanda, both issued in Israel–were immediately confiscated at Kigali airport, he says.

Then, along with nine other Eritreans, he was taken to a “guest house”. None of them was allowed out. It would be dangerous without papers, they were told. Then, two days after arriving, the men were told it was time to leave.

“You are going to Uganda. But before you go, you need to pay $150,” said a man who introduced himself as John. “Then from the border to Kampala you need to pay again.”

Crammed into a minibus, they made the six-hour journey to the Ugandan border, where they were told to get out of the bus.

“When we crossed the border, that’s when I understood that we were being smuggled,” Tesfay says. “We went on foot, silently. We were being smuggled from one state to another.”

As promised by “John”, they had to pay another $150 to continue their journey to the Ugandan capital, Kampala.

But inevitably, having entered as illegal immigrants, they were arrested on arrival and put behind bars–after police had relieved them of about half the cash in their pockets, Tesfay says.

With what was left, Tesfay managed to post bail. He was due to appear in court five days later and having already been warned he was likely to be deported to Eritrea–the repressive authoritarian state he had fled in the first place–he decided to take no chances. He paid another smuggler to get him into Kenya, where he is now seeking asylum.

Rwanda has never confirmed that it struck a deal to host Israel’s unwanted migrants. The Ugandan government, for its part, has denied outright that such a deal exists–it told the BBC it was investigating how migrants who claimed to have been sent from Israel were entering the country.

The BBC spoke to a man from Darfur who said he was flown to Uganda from Israel with seven others in 2014, before the third country policy became official.

For safety reasons, he asked to remain anonymous.

“None of the things I was promised were given to me,” he said. “No documents, no passport, no assistance–nothing. (Israel) just wants to take people and dump them.”

In October, Israeli immigration authorities said 3,000 asylum seekers had left Israel for a third country. But the BBC has learned that only seven have registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Rwanda, all of them Eritreans, and only eight, mostly from Sudan, in Uganda.

Meanwhile, there are about 45,000 Eritreans and Sudanese in Israel. The government won’t deport them–that would be a clear breach of the UN Refugee Convention, which it signed in 1954. Under the Convention, no-one can be forcibly returned to a country where they have a justified fear of persecution.

But if Israel treats them as refugees at least in this respect, why does it then refuse them asylum?

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Emmanuel Nahshon says the migrants threaten the security, and the identity, of the Jewish state.

“It’s obvious that we live here in a situation which is rather complex and complicated. And if you add this element of migrants who come here and who want to stay here–undoubtedly because this is a rich and prosperous country–then it could become also a challenge to our identity here in Israel.

“It’s not only about the 45,000 or 50,000 people that already are here in Israel, it’s about the potential. Because those people tell their friends and families back home–‘Look, this is a very nice place. Do come over.’”

And, of course, in Israel there is also the ever present issue of security.

“Open borders through which migrants can pass mean also open borders through which terror organisations can penetrate Israeli territory and commit terror acts,” Nahshon says.

But lawyers fighting against the Third Country policy in Israel’s Supreme Court argue that the country is in breach of its obligations under the UN Refugee Convention.

“[Migrants] are stigmatised as ‘infiltrators’ and then have their asylum application adjudicated in sort of a conveyor-belt system which rejects everyone,” says one of the lawyers, Anat Ben-Dor.

“And then the whole idea of asking them to give their ‘voluntary’ consent to something they do not know because this is a secret arrangement . . . Of course this is not voluntary because you are using the threat of putting them indefinitely in prison if they refuse to go.

“And then when they land in one of those two countries the lack of proper monitoring cannot really secure, in the necessary certainty, that those people would not end up either without [legal] status, or in prison, or–worst of all–being returned to places where they would face danger.”

Sigal Rozen, from the Israeli human rights group Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, says that the failure by Israel to guarantee the migrants’ security in Rwanda and Uganda means they are forced to risk their lives elsewhere.

“Some of them continue to South Sudan, others to Kenya, to Ethiopia, and many end up in Europe after they take the route through Libya and Italy. Unfortunately many others die on the way and we never hear from them again,” she says.

There’s a joke among the migrants, she says, that the Israeli government’s departing “gift” of $3,500 is just enough money to get to Europe.

But the Israeli government is adamant that it’s acting within the framework of international law and is offering a fair deal to the migrants.

But in Tesfay’s opinion, he did not get a fair deal.

“The Israeli authority–it’s not what they promised. I have no safety–I have no protection at all,” he says.

Posted in Africa, Israel | Comments Off

Trump’s Unwelcome Support: White Supremacists

Posted on February 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Scott Bronstein and Drew Griffin, CNN, February 5, 2016:

New Hampshire voters may be stunned to hear the latest robocall asking for their vote; it’s from white nationalists with a simple, disturbing message.

“We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, educated, white people,” according to the male voice on the calls, which began Thursday night and urge voters in New Hampshire to vote for Donald Trump.

{snip}

The American National Super PAC is funding the robocall effort, which is organized under a separate group called the American Freedom Party.

On its website, the American Freedom Party says it “shares the customs and heritage of the European American people.”

Hear the entire unauthorized phone call endorsing Trump at the American Freedom Party website. {snip}

Jared Taylor, online editor of AmRen, the media outlet of the white nationalist group called American Renaissance, is one of the voices on the robocall. {snip}

{snip}

Taylor said he prefers to be called a “white advocate” rather than a white nationalist or white supremacist.

“Most white people would prefer to live in majority white neighborhoods and send their children to majority white schools, and deep in their bones, they are deeply disturbed by an immigration policy that is making the United States majority non-white,” said Taylor. “So when Donald Trump talks about sending out all the illegals, building a wall and a moratorium on Islamic immigration, that’s very appealing to a lot of ordinary white people.”

Taylor added, “They will say that I support Donald Trump because he’s going to send away all illegal immigrants and build a wall and that he wants to put a moratorium on Islamic immigration, and I will say that what this means is that he wants immigrants who will assimilate to our Western values. And I’m all for that, and I think all of the people in New Hampshire are all for that, too.”

“And if a school and their parents and their kids wanted to be multicultural?” asked CNN’s Drew Griffin.

“God bless them, too. Complete freedom of association is what I stand for. And if people wish to mix it up, fine,” Taylor replied. “You’ll just find that when the government isn’t shoving them together, there just aren’t that many who wish to mix it up. But if they want to? Go right ahead.”

{snip}Contacted by CNN, the Trump campaign would not speak specifically about Taylor, his group, the robocalls, or the group’s white nationalist ideas.

“Mr. Trump has disavowed all Super PACs offering their support and continues to do so,” said Hope Hicks, a Trump campaign spokeswoman.

{snip}Taylor said there are only a handful of people involved in the effort. But he claims the movement he supports, white supremacy, is attractive to hundreds of thousands of Americans eager for a candidate to restore order.

Taylor added that of all the candidates, Trump “is the best man so far.”

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Are Jews commanded to “repair the world” or to repair the Jews?

Posted on February 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steven Plaut writes:

“The central mitzvah or commandment for our era is the mitzvah of Tikkun Olam. It is the defining mission of Jews to strive for the repair of the world by making society more just, fair, egalitarian, and sensitive. Judaism demands that we repair the world by striving for social justice. It is the mission of Jews in the Divine Plan for the universe to repair the world by repairing man, by improving and advancing mankind.”

The above paragraph is a fair representation of what has become the defining raison d’etre of Judaism as conveyed by non-Orthodox liberal Jewish organizations and synagogues in America. It is not a direct citation from any of them, but is an accurate paraphrase of what has become the canon of non-Orthodox Jewish liberalism in our time.

It is the “modernized” and contemporary “reinterpretation” of “Jewish ethics” as defined and inculcated by much of the Reform and Conservative movements. It is also the “theology” of Jewish radical leftist groups operating at the fringes of the Jewish community, including the “Renewal/ALEPH” movement, the “Eco-Judaism” groups, the “Tikkun community” of people and groups that are satellites to the magazine by that same name published by tikkun-activist Michael Lerner, and what remains of the “Reconstructionists.” Lerner, it should be added, discovers “repair of the world” even in LSD consumption.

What are we to make of “Tikkun Olam” proclamations?

The most important thing that must be understood about the Tikkun Olam catechism in the United States is that each and every sentence in the above proclamation is false.

First of all, there is no such thing as a mitzvah or commandment of “Tikkun Olam.” Jews are nowhere commanded to “repair the world.” In all the authoritative or traditional compilations of the commandments of Judaism, none list “Tikkun Olam”. The expression itself does not appear anywhere in the Torah or in the entire Bible.

Those assimilationist liberals who insist that the entire “ethics of the Prophets” can be reduced to the pursuit of “Tikkun Olam” have to explain why none of the Books of the Prophets use the term. “Tikkun Olam” is used sporadically in the Talmud, but as a technical term for resolution of certain judicial problems that arise before rabbinic courts.

The only place the expression appears in Jewish prayer is in the “Aleinu” and there it clearly has nothing at all to do with social justice. In the “Aleinu,” Tikkun Olam is explicitly explained in the prayer text itself as the quest to eliminate pagan superstition and to see God’s rule of the universe implemented. It is a theological concept, not a social, political or environmental one.

In Judaism, the world does not get repaired by redistribution of income and wealth nor by cutting carbon emissions, but by humans subordinating themselves to God’s will.

Secondly, “Tikkun Olam” does not mean that Jews are obligated to strive to make the earth a more just, clean, fair and equal place. Nowhere in Judaism are Jews commanded to restructure or re-engineer the societies of nations. Jews have a certain obligation to participate in the Jewish community and to assist other Jews, especially Jews living in hardship, including through charity. Even within the Jewish community, there is no religious imperative or justification for coerced schemes of income or wealth redistribution, aside from payments to the Levites and priests. And while there is no prohibition against Jews using their resources to assist the downtrodden among the non-Jewish nations, there is also no Judaic imperative to do so.

The Torah and the Prophets do speak out about the plight of Jewish widows, orphans, and converts, but in every single case where the matter is brought up, the concern is for protecting the rights of these weaker groups in the courts, assuring they do not face judicial discrimination. There is no official obligation to transfer resources to these disadvantaged groups except for the “tithe for the poor” collected out of agricultural produce in two years out of seven. (If you do the math, it averages out to about 3% of farm resources per year.)

The idea that it is somehow the religious duty of Jews to “repair mankind” is not only unfounded it is a manifestation of the ignorance of assimilationist Jewish liberals. The simple fact of the matter is that in actual Judaism, it is none of the business of Jews to fix or repair humanity. More generally, in Judaism it is the job of Jews to repair the Jews – a not inconsiderable task – not to repair the world.

Non-Jews are not in need of being “repaired” by Jews, at least as long as they observe the seven “Noahide Commandments,” the rules of living that Jews interpret to be conferred upon all humans, all descendents of Noah, by God. Beyond that, what the gentiles do and how they do it is none of the business of Jews, and Jews simply have no religious standing to interfere.

It is certainly not the job of Jews to instruct non-Jews about matters such as income and wealth distribution, abortion, environmentalism, health care provision, or discrimination. Only in matters of cruelty that negate the Noahide Laws are Jews commanded to interfere.

Indeed, the very notion that Jews are so ethically superior that they are entitled to instruct non-Jews in ethics is completely foreign to Judaism. The self-image of Jews in the Torah is that of a group of people awash in their own moral failures and foibles, from the Golden Calf to the paganism of the era of the kings of Judah and Israel. The moral imperative of the Torah is for the Jews to improve and reevaluate their own behavior, not to pretend to have the moral superiority to preach to the entire non-Jewish world.

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The Holocaust As White-On-White Crime

Posted on February 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Are Jews white? It depends. All groups respond to incentives and more intelligent groups respond to incentives more quickly and adroitly.

David Bernstein writes at the Washington Post:

In a recent post, I alluded to a Facebook post by a recent Oberlin alumna, clearly a political progressive herself, recounting what she described as various anti-Semitic incidents she experienced at the school at the hands of the SJW left. I noted that I found most remarkable her assertion that multiple students had dismissively referred to the Holocaust as “white on white crime,” as if the “progressive” students there found it impossible to conceive of horrific racist violence outside the parameters of paradigmatic examples of racist violence in the United States. What’s remarkable about the incidents recounted, which range from gross insensitivity to blatant anti-Semitism, is not that such attitudes exist, nor that they are necessarily serious compared with what other minority students may face at college, but that, if the Facebook post in question is true, some of the most purportedly progressive students, those who are the most acutely sensitive to and active against other forms of racism, ignore anti-Semitism, belittle it and, in some cases participate in it.

I found the entire Facebook post of great interest, not just as a troubling sign of emerging hostility to Jews and Jewish concerns among self-proclaimed social justice advocates on left-wing campuses, but as an equally troubling sign of the degradation of intellectual discourse at such campuses more generally, as reason, compassion and just plain old decent manners are replaced with shrill sloganeering based on which group can most successfully proclaim itself to be a victim. Nor is there any indication, despite the purported focus on multiculturalism, that the students who engage in these antics have received anything resembling a sound education in world history and cultures, or much of anything else, as everything is shoehorned into simplistic ideological categories that bear no apparent relation to context and reality. (I also find it interesting that the Jewish students who find themselves the targets of anti-Semitic discourse by SJWs remain committed to the broader “social justice agenda,” as if it’s a mere coincidence that its advocates are also so often tolerant or even indulgent of anti-Semitism, but perhaps that’s a topic for a future post.)

The author of the Oberlin post, Isabel Storch Sherrell, has given me permission to reprint her post in full, and I do so, unedited, below:

WARNING: RANT ALERT
I don’t want to make it seem like i hated my time at oberlin. it was a mixed bag and i got a great education and was blessed to learn from amazing professors. But i think being out of that environment has given me a chance to breathe and process everything that i learned/ encountered/ unlearned at oberlin. i learned about the historical context of anti black racism and its current manifestations and through that learning process was able to better frame and identify my own community’s struggle. However i quickly learned that process was to be kept personal and did not blend into the campus atmosphere or the collective fight for justice at oberlin. Because at oberlin, and indeed in the US overall, Jews are viewed as white and privileged (sometimes even above the avg white privilege, since yaknow, were all superrich and stuff) therefore our struggle does not intersect with other forms of racism and bigotry and ignorance that are so tenaciously fought against on campus. As a part of my processing and letting go of the pain I experienced, I will list a few memorable antisemitic moments/incidents here-
Obies feel free to read. But this is actually intended for all my friends and family outside of that circle…
1. The multiple times the Holocaust was referred to as “white on white crime” by my POC peers and hip white Jewish peers, (erasing the fact that ashkenazi jews were NOT seen as white and were being killed in the name of eugenics and white purity and also erasing the fact that blacks, Roma, and north african Jews were also killed in the camps.)
2. That time a Jewish person made a comment on fb saying “the only reason people care about the Holocaust is because it happened to white people” and got tons of likes from white and POC friends alike (Erasing the fact that the western world only decided to care a few decades after the fact, when it wasnt as fresh, and theyd had the time to really work out the details of how they were going to frame it and make it look like the US were the heroes liberating the camps after the US government knew what was being planned by Hitler, knew waht happening while it was happening, and did nothing. Not to mention sending Jewish immigrants trying to escape before the war broke out back to Europe to die in the gas chambers.) This is just one example of Jewish obies stepping all over their ancestors memory in order to climb the white-ally-social-ladder-of-justice-and-excellence i cannot understand it as anything other than self hatred masked by love of “the other”..
3. That time Kosher Halal Co Op was told it couldnt serve “ethnic” food because Jews are white not “ethnic” (erasing identities of Mexican Jews, Asian Jews, etc)
4. That time SFP brought in a Jewish lady to talk about her work with electronicintifada and tell all the Obies that Zionism/Zionists “should burn at the stake” — (After that spectacle who could argue that antizionism has any crossover with antisemitism — “but that lady is jewish and she said xyz so i can say xyz and its not antisemitic or even violent or problematic at all hooooorayyyyy!”
5. That time I was told I should be ashamed for what my people are doing to the Palestinians, by someone I didn’t even know, upon learning I was Jewish. (Imagine a Alawite student at Oberlin being told “you should be ashamed for what your people are doing over there in syria” — yeah, it wouldnt fly. Or a Nigerian Muslim student being shamed for whats going on in their country… never literally would never happen. But Jewish kids? Jewish country? Fair game.)
6. That time my African Studies professor had an antizionist jewish south african man come in to talk to the class about jazz and resistance. During Q&A she praised a Jewish student for their anti Israel comments relating Israel to South African apartheid. The prof then made funny faces and funny eyes when I spoke up and tried to make the point that we should try to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within its OWN historical context and that its unfair to both Israelis and Palestinians to rely only on shaky comparisons. It was clear, in that classroom, who was the good Jew and who was the bad Jew, in that professors’ eyes. I was bad. My concern for anti black racism came into question because I didn’t write anti zionist across my forehead. After that class she literally had me come into her office and asked me ,”why are you here” and i was so shaken with so many emotions i just cried and wasnt able to talk to her and therefore my final paper suffered as a result. This professor also cut ties with the Hillel Rabbi because he, too, did not brand himself an antiZionist.
7. Those times antiblack and antisemitic incidents occurred simultaneously, and then the uproar followed but the antisemitism was essentially ignored by the campus at large. And if I brought that up I was told “dont derail the real issue here.”
8. That time a Jewish girl walked into her dorm room to find glass shattered all over her bed and floor because someone decided to throw a rock through her window, where she had hung an Israeli flag.
9. The fact my Mizrahi Jewish friend has had her identity policed on multiple occasions and was told she is white.
10. The fact that so many Jewish students are bullied into silence, whether its about their own ethnic identity, (PSA: you can identify as ethnically Jewish while still acknowledging your white privilege) their relationship to Israel, or their concern about antisemitism in general/ on campus.
11. The intense and unrelenting vilification of Israel out of proportion to any other nation on the planet where terrible shit happens // People literally refusing to talk to me because I identify as a Zionist.
12. When I overheard someone say “Islamophobia is like the anti-Semitism of our time” as if anti semitism is over/ started and ended with the Holocaust/ has been replaced by anti-muslim racism
13. When a self-identifying “radical” friend posted a picture of Neturei Karta holding anti Israel signs at a protest – “Look! There are Jews who arent monsters!” They have those funny outfits and everything! I’m not tokenizing an extreme minority faction of Orthodox Jews whose views i literally no nothing of in order to prove how not anti semitic my antizionism is!”
14. How inevitably during discussions about the establishment of Israel, people would say “the Jews decided to make Palestinians suffer for the crimes the Germans committed against them” while failing to understand that Zionism is way older than the Holocaust as is the need and the yearning for a Jewish homeland. How Israel is called “colonial and Imperialist, Britain gave it to the Jews” even though we had to FIGHT the imperial army to gain independence. (Revoking agency of Jews that fought for Israel’s independence// Rewriting history so that you would raise your eyebrows in disbelief when I told you my relatives were forced to stay in a DP camp in Cyprus for years after the war ended and that British navy vessels opened fire at ships full of Jewish refugees from Europe and North Africa attempting to make it to Palestine. We did not waltz right in. And we did not come there with an expansionist agenda.
15. Generally antisemitic ideas floating around such as Jews are milking the Holocaust for their own gain// everything is as bad as the Holocaust except for the actual Holocaust which wasnt as bad as people say it was// Jews only care about themselves (another AAST professor told me, “your people really take care of each other” at first i thought it was a compliment but when i told my mother about it she explained that it was not)
16. That time someone posted flyers depicting the Israeli flag with a swastika replacing the star of David and a derogatory slur for jews as a caption
17. Hip white activists boosting their radical resume by denouncing Israel’s right to exist and a handful of Ashkenazis on that bandwagon saying shit like “I hate my right to Israeli citizenship. Israel isn’t my country. It shouldnt even be a country” (Kay well thanks to your white privilege and your lofty rejection of nationalism you are erasing what Zionism means for so many Jews who do NOT share your privilege, such as Yemen’s remaining Jewish population who have recently been told by Houthi rebels that they will lose all their protection under law unless they flee or convert to Islam)
18. Having my own ethnic identity policed. Being told I was simply European and Judaism is a religion not an ethnicity/ or that I am a descendent of Khazarian converts to Judaism and therefore have no right to claim any sort of indigenousness in the Levant. (There is DNA evidence that the VAST MAJORITY of Jews have Middle Eastern genetic markers (yep even us whities) they can even tell what time period we originated there and started mixing with other populations and it lines up with our own historical narrative yet somehow anti-Jewish polemics still get the mic)
Wow, 18. Chai. Life. WOOSH. That felt great to put it all out there. Also please know that I am not tryin to generalize any specific community at oberlin for antisemitism. It is a complex form of institutional “othering” that is upheld by everyone who is not Jewish.. it manifests on racial grounds, cultural grounds, religious grounds, etc. And it kills, it doesnt just hurt.
I am blessed to believe that within myself I carry the capacity to care deeply about the freedom and wellbeing of all peoples. I believe I have the brainpower and the heartspace to continue educating myself and speaking out against ALL FORMS OF RACISM AND HATE INCLUDING ANTISEMITISM

Posted in Anti-Semitism, Holocaust | Comments Off

The Orthodox Jew On Top Of Glenn Beck’s Empire

Posted on February 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

The movement to diversify Hollywood is a movement to drive out Jews. Hollywood is a Jewish industry. Making it more diverse makes it less Jewish. It’s not whites who run Hollywood so much as Jews who run Hollywood.

From the Daily Beast:

Then there was the sudden appearance in the fall of 2014—from Israel, via Miami—of a slightly-built, bald-pated Beck “superfan” who spouted the slick jargon of Silicon Valley, chain-smoked a vaporous e-cigarette (holding it in his right hand that is missing two-and-half fingers, the result of a childhood accident with a meat grinder), and somehow networked himself into Beck’s inner circle.
Beck apparently became infatuated with Jonathan Schreiber, who has been regularly spotted in Beck’s expansive, glass-walled office, sometimes entangled in a hug with the boss, and whose Orthodox Judaism apparently meshes well with Beck’s ardent religiosity as a Mormon convert.

Last April, Schreiber was named president of Beck’s privately held umbrella company, Mercury Radio Arts—of which The Blaze is a subsidiary, along with a diverse collection of enterprises including a publishing imprint at Simon & Schuster, a clothing line, a movie studio, and a guide to trustworthy real estate agents.
Schreiber, a native of Florida who graduated with a marketing degree from Yeshiva University, is a 41-year-old tech entrepreneur whose arrival coincided with the exit of nearly everyone who had steered Beck’s career and built him into a national brand and wildly successful radio personality.

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The Distinctiveness Of WASP Ethics

Posted on February 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

I grew up a WASP. All of my family and friends were WASPs. I took WASP morality for granted. There was no concept of an in-group vs out-group morality in WASPville. If you cheated, you kept quiet.

I didn’t develop non-WASP friends until I went to UCLA in the fall of 1988. I was 22. I loved the Jews and Asians on my quiet floor at Rieber Hall but I learned there was something different about their ethics. Later, I would learn about the terminology of in-group vs out-group morality.

All the Asians I knew at UCLA were refugees from South-East Asia. America had been very generous to them but they felt little if any gratitude. They had a sort of contempt for America. Their generosity was primarily directed towards their own group.

Growing up as a WASP, I took for granted my full membership in my host nation. The Asians I knew at UCLA felt a more attenuated relationship to America.

I got a Chinese girlfriend in my 20s. She’d tell me about little tricks she’d pull that no WASP I knew would countenance — such as hanging out all day at the all-you-can-eat Souplantation or taking most of the tips left for the waitress.

I didn’t realize in the fall of 1988 that all of the world but WASPs had a tribal morality. I didn’t realize in the fall of 1988 the concept of social trust. I didn’t realize in the fall of 1988 that I was witnessing the decline of America.

I fell in love with Jews and Asians at UCLA — the two groups seemed to have more in common with each other than they did with the whites I had known — because I saw that they had virtues that WASPs lacked — fierce loyalty to their group and to their families, they lived with more passion and esprit de corps, and they worked and studied harder and enjoyed more success because their groups put more value on socio-economic success and less on honesty than did WASPs. They were master races. My race in comparison seemed mediocre and in decline.

Ron Guhname writes: WASPs rule! I wrote in a recent post that I was getting the sense that Americans with Protestant European backgrounds were the best behaved. So I decided to sum all my prior post numbers that dealt with ethnicity and moral behavior to assess this idea systematically. I followed the simple strategy of assigning a rank for each behavior for each of the 8 ethnic groups with sufficiently large sample sizes. Jews were often ignored in previous posts since one must turn to the religion rather than the ethnicity variable to get estimates, but I wanted to include them, so I calculated numbers and then ranks for them.

I included all variables that I have posted on–here’s a list of them: okay to cheat on taxes; drinks too much; ethnocentric; dirty house; frequents prostitutes; promiscuous men over 30; feel that infidelity is not wrong; gay; lesbian; husbands and wives who cheat; fathers divorcing mom; women arrested; and promiscuity for men and women and under. I realized that I had not posted on drug abuse so I added that to the rest. I ranked group so high numbers indicate more bad behavior, then I simply summed the 16 rankings for each ethnic group. Here are the totals:

Bad Behavior Index

Blacks 106
Mexicans 85
American Indians 85
Italians 70
Irish 67
Jews 64
Germans 56
English/Welsh 47

My hunch was correct. This pattern coincides with that feeling that goes way back among nativists that the moral quality of the country was slipping with the mass immigration from Catholic, southern and eastern European countries, and more recently in concern over immigration from Mexico.

Posted in Asians, Personal, WASPs | Comments Off

Facebook’s War on Freedom of Speech

Posted on February 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Douglas Murray writes:

Facebook is now removing speech that presumably almost everybody might decide is racist — along with speech that only someone at Facebook decides is “racist.”
The sinister reality of a society in which the expression of majority opinion is being turned into a crime has already been seen across Europe. Just last week came reports of Dutch citizens being visited by the police and warned about posting anti-mass-immigration sentiments on social media.
In lieu of violence, speech is one of the best ways for people to vent their feelings and frustrations. Remove the right to speak about your frustrations and only violence is left.
The lid is being put on the pressure cooker at precisely the moment that the heat is being turned up. A true “initiative for civil courage” would explain to both Merkel and Zuckerberg that their policy can have only one possible result.

It was only a few weeks ago that Facebook was forced to back down when caught permitting anti-Israel postings, but censoring equivalent anti-Palestinian postings.

Now one of the most sinister stories of the past year was hardly even reported. In September, German Chancellor Angela Merkel met Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook at a UN development summit in New York. As they sat down, Chancellor Merkel’s microphone, still on, recorded Merkel asking Zuckerberg what could be done to stop anti-immigration postings being written on Facebook. She asked if it was something he was working on, and he assured her it was.

At the time, perhaps the most revealing aspect of this exchange was that the German Chancellor — at the very moment that her country was going through one of the most significant events in its post-war history — should have been spending any time worrying about how to stop public dislike of her policies being vented on social media. But now it appears that the discussion yielded consequential results.

Last month, Facebook launched what it called an “Initiative for civil courage online,” the aim of which, it claims, is to remove “hate speech” from Facebook — specifically by removing comments that “promote xenophobia.” Facebook is working with a unit of the publisher Bertelsmann, which aims to identify and then erase “racist” posts from the site. The work is intended particularly to focus on Facebook users in Germany. At the launch of the new initiative, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, explained that, “Hate speech has no place in our society — not even on the internet.” She went to say that, “Facebook is not a place for the dissemination of hate speech or incitement to violence.” Of course, Facebook can do what it likes on its own website. What is troubling is what this organization of effort and muddled thinking reveals about what is going on in Europe.

The mass movement of millions of people — from across Africa, the Middle East and further afield — into Europe has happened in record time and is a huge event in its history. As events in Paris, Cologne and Sweden have shown, it is also by no means a series of events only with positive connotations.

As well as being fearful of the security implications of allowing in millions of people whose identities, beliefs and intentions are unknown and — in such large numbers — unknowable, many Europeans are deeply concerned that this movement heralds an irreversible alteration in the fabric of their society. Many Europeans do not want to become a melting pot for the Middle East and Africa, but want to retain something of their own identities and traditions. Apparently, it is not just a minority who feel concern about this. Poll after poll shows a significant majority of the public in each and every European country opposed to immigration at anything like the current rate.

The sinister thing about what Facebook is doing is that it is now removing speech that presumably almost everybody might consider racist — along with speech that only someone at Facebook decides is “racist.”

And it just so happens to turn out that, lo and behold, this idea of “racist” speech appears to include anything critical of the EU’s current catastrophic immigration policy.

By deciding that “xenophobic” comment in reaction to the crisis is also “racist,” Facebook has made the view of the majority of the European people (who, it must be stressed, are opposed to Chancellor Merkel’s policies) into “racist” views, and so is condemning the majority of Europeans as “racist.” This is a policy that will do its part in pushing Europe into a disastrous future.

Because even if some of the speech Facebook is so scared of is in some way “xenophobic,” there are deep questions as to why such speech should be banned. In lieu of violence, speech is one of the best ways for people to vent their feelings and frustrations. Remove the right to speak about your frustrations, and only violence is left. Weimar Germany — to give just one example — was replete with hate-speech laws intended to limit speech the state did not like. These laws did nothing whatsoever to limit the rise of extremism; it only made martyrs out of those it pursued, and persuaded an even larger number of people that the time for talking was over.

The sinister reality of a society in which the expression of majority opinion is being turned into a crime has already been seen across Europe. Just last week, reports from the Netherlands told of Dutch citizens being visited by the police and warned about posting anti-mass-immigration sentiments on Twitter and other social media.

In this toxic mix, Facebook has now — knowingly or unknowingly — played its part. The lid is being put on the pressure cooker at precisely the moment that the heat is being turned up. A true “initiative for civil courage” would explain to both Merkel and Zuckerberg that their policy can have only one possible result.

Douglas Murray, a British writer, journalist and commentator, is based in London, England.

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The Rubio Menace

Posted on February 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Mickey Kaus writes:

Marco and the K St. Restoration: I went to see Marco Rubio’s town hall this afternoon in Salem, New Hampshire. It was only a few miles from my hotel–I really had no excuse. I wanted to find out: Was Rubio really as slick and insubstantial in this setting as John Edwards? Answer: No. He’s slicker. He’s slicker, in part, because he at least seems a bit spontaneous,** with a slightly goofy, human quality. I admit this is hard to judge seeing him once — maybe he always lets his 8-year-old son sit on his stool during his stump speech. But it’s hard to deny the appeal.

When it comes to substance, Rubio draws on an inventory of well-prepared rhetorical modules, with just enough policy to sound sophisticated, that can be inserted where necessary to handle, say, the how-would-you-handle-ISIS question (Sunni ground army!) or disability benefits (get rid of phony claims!). There’s not much sacrifice involved in any of Rubio’s proposals — even avoiding budget apocalypse, which he claims to be very concerned about, is just a matter of raising the retirement age and slowing benefit hikes for the well-off. Nothing that hasn’t been floating around Washington for years. There’s a heavy emphasis on electability. Big, difficult questions (like robots taking everyone’s jobs) are ignored. Tellingly, however, Rubio has added a Trump Module, where he alludes to anger at stagnant wages.

He’s got an immigration module too. It ignores Rubio’s “Gang of 8” amnesty push while adopting what seems to be an Enforcement First framework, in which “nothing” happens, amnesty-wise, until the border is “secure.” Everything depends on what “nothing” and “secure” mean, of course. But those crucial seams are effectively buried. Rubio prefaces all this with a digression on ISIS, and how it’s changed the immigration debate: Because our top priority has to be to “keep ISIS out of this country.” It’s an absurd, transparent attempt to put off confronting the Gang of 8 and the effects of a low-skilled influx on living standards. But the audience loves it. The ISIS digression gets the biggest applause of the day.

All of this is mildly terrifying. If Rubio’s a “robot,” as many have charged, he’s a sophisticated new model robot with simulated humanistic elements and a charm algorithm. And if he still seems insubstantial–which he does–it’s a higher level of insubstantial than you expect: You don’t get the impression he’s actually thought through these problems, but he knows his modules. He’s the ideal choice for Student Body President of America, the best band at Band Camp. And–as those who remember Gary Hart’s 1984 post-Iowa surge know–that may be good enough for Rubio to do very, very, well in New Hampshire, unless someone rudely interrupts him.

Why isn’t that someone Trump? Trump’s been attacking Ted Cruz lately, and leaving Rubio alone. Why? Cruz isn’t going to win New Hampshire. Rubio has a chance–certainly a chance to come so close he’s proclaimed the winner by the press. And Cruz isn’t going to destroy the nascent, effective populist insurgency that anti-amnesty activists and trade skeptics, led by Sen. Jeff Sessions, have built over the past three year–and that Trump is demonstrating has substantial, intense support among voters of both parties. Rubio will. Electing Rubio, after killing the Gang of 8 bill, is like marching against the Vietnam War in the 60s and winding up with Richard Nixon running things.

This is a more difficult case to make than, say, arguing against Jeb Bush. Bush is explicit about his support for mass immigration and amnesty. Rubio has now effectively wormed his way into a position where championing mass immigration and amnesty would involve breaking what seems to be an explicit policy pledge. But anyone who has followed Rubio knows that’s exactly what he’ll do. a) He’s done it before, having opposed amnesty when seeking his Senate seat only to become its front man on arriving in Washington; b) He dissembled when necessary to push the Gang of 8 bill, why not dissemble now? c) The GOP establishment thinks that’s exaclty what he’ll do; d) His retreat from the Gang of 8 has been grudging and weaselly, always giving as little ground as he thinks he can get away with until he discovers he has to give a little more; e) He still hasn’t repudiated the bill, let alone apologized for it; and most important, f) actually achieving an Enforcement First solution would mean standing up to the Democrats, who will demand quick legalization, and the bulk of the GOP Congressional caucus, who will be happy to settle for a fig-leaf of enforcement they can try to sell their voters (not unlike the fig leaf added to the Gang of 8 by the for-show-only Corker-Hoeven “double the border patrol” amendment). The current flash mob of GOP representatives streaming into Rubio’s camp suggests they recognize him as someone who won’t make their lives difficult — when that’s exactly what is required.

Rubio’s not going to drive Jeff Sessions from the capital. But you can count on the combination of President Rubio and Speaker Ryan to quickly pass an amnesty bill that (like the Gang of 8) contains only the most chimerical guarantees of new enforcement measures. You can also expect them to promote and defend trade, including “trade in services” that involves foreign workers performing those services on American soil. And what about the Sessionsesque suggestion that immigration levels actually be lowered? “We have a better chance of discovering time travel than getting Rubio-Ryan to take up immigration-reduction bill,” one Senate immigration advisor told me. Corporate lobbyists will be in the saddle, and the promising Sessions movement will have effectively been defeated — probably permanently, given how mass immigration creates ethnic lobbies for more mass immigration. Historians will get tenure trying to explain how this happened so suddenly. Was it similar to what happened to the Bimetalists? Maybe Trump can become a columnist for the Washington Examiner. Dave Brat will be a trivia question.

In short, for the Sessions movment–and a particular vision of America, in which even unskilled, non-bright citizens can work a full day and earn a respectable living–Marco Rubio is a state-of-the art K-Street kill shot, a sudden existential threat. We may have only a few days to recognize this.

____

** — There was a snowstorm in the forecast yesterday. After some lame joking by Rubio about how he was not responsible for the weather, an audience member suggested it was Trump’s fault. “Make America Snow Again,” Rubio giggled. If that was pre-planned, then I really am a total patsy in the hands of stage managers.

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I’m sure Palestinians would do the same for Jews

Posted on February 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

The more religious the Jew, the less likely he is to engage in pathological altruism.

Israelis angels and their Palestinian passengers

In the midst of a terror wave which has deepened the divide and hatred in the country, some Israelis give renewed hope for a better future – they go into Palestinian territories in their private cars, pick up Palestinian civilians and bring them to Israel for medical treatment.

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