Parasha Naso (Numbers 4:21–7:89)

This is the longest Torah portion and typically falls on the first Sabbath after Listen here.

* The Torah has no problem with different peoples having different gifts. “The Gershonites had the duty, under the direction of Aaron’s son Ithamar, to carry the cloths of the Tabernacle… The Merarites had responsibility, under the direction of Ithamar, for the planks, the bars, the posts, and the sockets of the Tabernacle, and the posts around the enclosure and their sockets, pegs, and cords.” The Levites duty is to guard. There hasn’t been a white starting cornerback in the NFL since 2004.

* Who rightly succeeds Mohammed? Are the Sunnis or the Shia the good guys?

* Lefty prof Justin Murphy: The psychology of prohibiting outside thinkers

* I wanted to watch some Australian TV and stumbled on the soap A Place To Call Home, which turns out to be about a woman moving to outback Australia in 1953 after she converted to Judaism in Europe just before WWII. The show was created by a gay guy and could easily be called, “Poofters in the Outback” because of all the gay stuff. It’s not fair. I know outback Australia. There are no poofters there. Believe me.

* How gay is soccer? “US Soccer to Wear Rainbow Numbers During Pride Month Friendlies” The poz is deep and wide.

* This week’s Torah portion deals with the Sotah (woman suspected of adultery). A civilization must police women’s sexuality more strictly than men’s because most men will never turn down sex from attractive woman. Men’s sexuality is generally fixed while women’s sexuality is more fluid. Women are the sex gatekeepers. We need to know who the father is or civilization collapses. I suspect many marriages would be helped by a Sotah-like ritual so men could cease suspecting their wives of adultery. In Jewish law, adultery only occurs when a married woman has sex outside of wedlock. A faithless wife is a much more serious problem than a faithless husband just as a promiscuous single woman is more of a problem than a promiscuous single man. “The unfaithful wife is a recurring prophetic image for Israel’s infidelity to God.” (Milgrom)

* Num. 5:13: “Although capital punishment may not be imposed on the basis of the testimony of a single witness (Num. 35:30), this verse implies that the case of an adulteress is an exception.” (Milgrom)

* I had some GFs cheat on me, while my own behavior in this regard has been as pure as the driven snow. I would really liked to have seen them go through the sotah ritual and have their bellies distend with the bitter waters!

* KC: “So boring! I wanna talk about the inversion of values and my own coming of age in a world that had recently shifted its definition of morals… how my strength has always been my weakness. Nietzsche. The Jews. Etc.”

* Torah is our road map to life. Everybody wants to rule the world, but you need Torah to change the world for the good.

* Jacob Milgrom: “For Israel, about to set out on its march through the wilderness, nothing was more vital than the assurance of God’s Presence, which depended on the strict maintenance of the purity of the camp.”

This reminds me of 12-step programs where sobriety depends upon the maintenance of a spiritual program, which entails drawing up a comprehensive moral inventory, making amends, asking God to remove your character defects (selfishness, self-seeking, fear, inconsideration, dishonesty), and developing your constant contact with God. It also means working hard, keeping your side of the street clean, keeping your home and car and office clean and organized, tracking your spending and earning and how you spend your time, and living as much of your life as possible in top-line behaviors.

SLAA: “Top Lines: Replace Behaviors with Healthy Ones: Break the habit pattern. We can’t get sober in a vacuum. We can’t simply stop destructive behavior. We have to replace it with healthy new activities. Often we have to be as compulsive for a time about sobriety as we were about acting out. Try taking creative actions you’ve never taken before. Prove to yourself you are capable of healthy actions by taking them. “In maintaining my sobriety, I find it more useful to keep in mind what I call my top line rather than my bottom line. My top line is what I do want for myself, my program goals. I want to integrate myself physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually; to relate to others from a state of wholeness; to live making decisions from a place of freedom and clarity rather than compulsion and confusion; to feel sufficiently safe to stay open enough to find the little realities of life moving, rather than needing to get dropped off a cliff to get a thrill. I want to be present, see things the way they are, and be glad to be alive. These things are beginning to happen for me.” — ©1986 Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous p. 270

Some guys can’t go to sleep without watching porn. A healthier substitute is to watch Mayday: Air Crash Investigations. They are documentaries, they’re exciting, but not so exciting that you can’t get to sleep afterward. And you don’t feel dirty the next day.

* Vox: “The Keepers has brought newfound attention to Sister Cathy’s murder, which might also bring the police new leads. Still, it’s possible we may never find out who killed Sister Cathy. But solving her murder isn’t the primary focus of The Keepers. What compels filmmaker White is the abuse that took place at Archbishop Keough and the voices of Maskell’s victims. That they are given the proper respect to tell their stories, which the church was so intent on ignoring, is the essence of the series.”

* Wikipedia: “Recovered-memory therapy (RMT) is catch-all psychotherapy term for therapy using one or more method or technique for the purpose of recalling memories.[1] It does not refer to a specific, recognized treatment method, but rather several controversial and/or unproven interviewing techniques, such as hypnosis and guided-imagery, and the use of sedative-hypnotic drugs, which are presently rarely used in the responsible treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and other dissociative disorders. Proponents of recovered memory therapy claim that traumatic memories can be buried in the subconscious and affect current behavior, and that these can be recovered. The term is not listed in DSM-IV nor is it recommended by mainstream ethical and professional mental health associations.”

* Num. 5:8. Restitution first goes to the defrauded (not God!), and if he’s not around, to the priest, not to royal eminent domain, and then you sacrifice to God.

You can choose the priest who receives your donation of meat and money. Charismatic leaders are a characteristic of Jewish life. The more followers you develop, the more power, influence and money you accumulate.

* Herman Wouke’s 1962 novel, Youngblood Hawke.

Posted in Adultery, Torah | Comments Off on Parasha Naso (Numbers 4:21–7:89)

Trump & The Montana Election

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* The goy in Montana who allegedly punched a hostile reporter has comfortably won his special election to the U.S. House. Magically the election has immediately ceased to be an Important Test For The Trump Administration.

Follow up on Montana from Jeff Bezos’ emo blog:

The darker forces that propelled President Trump’s rise are beginning to frame and define the rest of the Republican Party.

When GOP House candidate Greg Gianforte assaulted a reporter who had attempted to ask him a question Wednesday night in Montana, many saw not an isolated outburst by an individual, but the obvious, violent result of Trump’s charge that journalists are “the enemy of the people.” Nonetheless, Gianforte won Thursday’s special election to fill a safe Republican seat.

“Respectfully, I’d submit that the president has unearthed some demons,”

Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) said.
 

Where is that name familiar from? Oh right, he used to be governor and he got caught having an affair… Anyway. You might think that this pos is going to whine that Trump’s anti media rhetoric has encouraged violence against the media. But actually,

“I’ve talked to a number of people about it back home. They say, ‘Well, look, if the president can say whatever, why can’t I say whatever?’ He’s given them license.”



“There is a total weirdness out there,” Sanford said. “People feel like, if the president of the United States can say anything to anybody at any time, then I guess I can too. And that is a very dangerous phenomenon.”

 

The real danger according to this REPUBLICAN is that Trump might make people feel free to speak their minds and criticize their rulers…

* Trump isn’t a liar- he always means exactly what he says at the moment he says it. He always says exactly what he believes at the very second he believes it.

The problem is, like Mr. Toad of Toad Hall, he’s forever changing his mind about what he believes and what he values. Toad was being totally truthful and sincere when he declared that he wanted to spend the rest of his life in a gypsy caravan. He just moved on to something else (in this case, cars) in a hurry, and truthfully claimed, “The caravan? That was just a whim, a passing fancy. THIS is my true calling!!!”

Donald Trump was probably on the level when he said immigration is bad and that we should build a wall. He probably meant what he said. But he’s already lost his enthusiasm for the project, and is likely to move on to another fad shortly.

Which means anybody relying on Trump to do anything he promises is delusional.

* Trump is an enigma inside a riddle, wrapped in a mystery. I suspect he never took any of his policies too seriously to be honest, and I’m not expecting many huge victories on immigration. Anyone who still thinks we’re getting a big beautiful wall for example is dreaming. However, Trump’s near-superhuman election win against BOTH the Bush and Clinton machines was probably the greatest blow against the forces of crypto-communist political correctness I’ve seen in my lifetime. He proved to us they aren’t invincible, and for that he is a hero in my eyes.

* Trump seems to have a cultural affinity to many of his supporters. If he were a Texan he would be accused of telling ‘Texas Tall Tales’, aka being a ‘Cracker’. Not a ‘whip cracker’, or racist, but part of the cultural continuum from the Celtic fringe through appalachia and the south.

We recognize the braggadocio and the blarney, and don’t take him literally. We don’t take it as deep seated dishonesty, as was the case with Hillary. And we think he is on our side, which we never suspected Hillary of being, or Obama after at most the first year.

* Trump’s supporters take him seriously but not literally. Trump’s enemies take him literally but not seriously.

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Did The PC Cause PC?

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* When you have non-PC stats to report, you describe them in extremely dry language and do not draw any conclusions, letting the reader to so if he wants.

Pew Hispanic Trust, for instance, reports a lot of unflattering stats about hispanics. But they do not get witch hunted because they either put no spin on them, or give them a PC spin.

Better to report the data carefully like this than not report it at all.

* PC is about denying ideas a PUBLIC. Nobody cared, or cares, what loners say to their friends. PC is necessary because it keeps getting easier for non-millionaires to spread their ideas around. Mimeograph, xerox, vcr, internet. Any ruling elite can afford to be laid back when disagreeing with them means taking out a second mortgage.

* Resistance to biological realities–including population genetics, which is far more accurate and predictive of human group behavior than “social” “science” ever was–may be starting to crumble, at least around the edges. Thanks to the constant gentle lapping of intellectual tides deftly guided by people like our host.

As an IPM entomologist friend once told me, in treating crop pests, you don’t need to obliterate every bug in the ecosystem. You just have to figure out how to make enough (minimum) members of the target species lose their tenacious hold on the steep upthrusting wall of biological/ecological survival. More like making five of them lose footing than all of them drop dead.

Or maybe more like, if you want to raise a 100-ton pylon, you don’t lift the damn thing, you counterweight it then wash out the sand under it so it drops erect into the ready pit.

Posted in Computers | Comments Off on Did The PC Cause PC?

Steve Sailer: Portland Burrito Truck Shut Down After Being Accused of Culturally Appropriating Burritos

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* I find this story endlessly entertaining. The piece on it in The Portland Mercury is truly amazing. It’s hard to tell if it’s high level satire, or the most cucked out piece of self-hating anti-white propaganda you’ve ever read. It’s the second. Surprise!

Welllllll, turns out the author, one Jagger Blaec, is a chubby white guy who looks gay, who is married to a large black woman. So there you go. I guess he makes his living being in a state of constant SJW outrage against whites. He’s kind of a white Tennessee Coates. Pity they closed the comments on that story before I got there.

In the bigger picture, what is really hilarious is that this is about appropriating… burritos. As if burritos were some complex food item that was unique to highly talented Mexicans; as if this were some kind of industrial espionage. When in fact burritos are nothing but slop in a tortilla that you could teach a 12 year old to make in a couple of hours. And in fact, the best tacos/burritos I’ve had have inevitably been at shops run by white hipsters where the ingredients and quality control were high. All the ones from Mexican vendors are basically cheap slops in a tortilla. The cheapest crap they can get. This myth of the magical hands and mystical spice mixtures of the withered abuelita is just that, a myth. Really, any idiot can make a good burrito.

But the mania for “authenticity” among the SJW and SWPL types is limitless. What’s a little gang crime and sex grooming when it means you can get a nice curry.

* So, serious question if the notion of businesses/cultures having intellectual property rights is taken to its natural conclusion – does Wal-Mart owe Woolsworth money for stealing the idea of distribution centers? Who had the first major distribution center chains? Do Japanese companies using Total Quality Control techniques owe Americans money because of John Dewey? Can I bill the world for using Chinese paper money?

Who were the first firemakers and do all campers owe their descendants something?

* What madness is this? Whitey invented the entire modern world. Are Mexicans supposed to stop watching TV and stop driving cars now?

Posted in Portland | Comments Off on Steve Sailer: Portland Burrito Truck Shut Down After Being Accused of Culturally Appropriating Burritos

LAT: ‘A look at the decline in refugees entering the U.S. under Trump’

Los Angeles Times:

Courts may have stymied President Trump’s efforts to restrict travel from six majority-Muslim countries and ban all refugee resettlement, but that has not stopped the number of refugees entering the United States from sharply declining.

Monthly refugee arrivals have plummeted in all but four states in the current fiscal year, according to a report published Thursday by the Pew Research Center.

The study, based on analysis of U.S. State Department data, shows a decline in refugee arrivals from 9,945 in October to 3,316 this April.

“This decline has been felt by 46 of the 50 states, and only four states had a higher number of refugees in April 2017 than they had in October 2016,” said Phillip Connor, a Pew research associate. “What is significant here is that we had a decline nationally for the first five months straight of the fiscal year, which is the longest consecutive decrease on record.”

…The decline in the number of refugees is also negatively affecting organizations that assist the newcomers. “A lot of NGOs have had to lay off a significant number of staff,” said Gottschalk.

At least 300 personnel working for such resettlement agencies have been laid off nationwide, according to humanitarian officials.

Zogg said World Relief had suspended its resettlements in Orange Count and Catholic Charities had closed their offices in San Bernardino.

Posted in Immigration | Comments Off on LAT: ‘A look at the decline in refugees entering the U.S. under Trump’

Paul Gottfried: “Multiculturalists do not value all tribal identities equally.”

Paul Gottfried writes:

Not all non-American societies are wracked by internal tribal conflict. Many are made up mostly or entirely of one ethnic group. Presumably Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, China, and Japan do not fit Tucker’s parochial picture of “elsewhere.” Tucker’s comments remind me of American immigrants whom I met as a kid who would tell me that everyone outside the United States was starving. One had to wonder how many inhabitants of the rest of the world these acquaintances of my parents had met.

It’s also ridiculous to claim that tribal identities had nothing to do with American politics before the current left came to monopolize our media and universities. I recall when party tickets for municipal officials in mayoral races in New York City were expected to include an Irishman, Italian and Jew. When the late Mayor Daley ruled over Chicago, he selected ward heelers on the basis of their ethnic identification with the Chicago neighborhoods to which they were assigned. Not only were the Poles, Italians, Jews, Irish, and Lithuanians given ethnically compatible liaisons with the mayor’s office. Black politicians in Chicago also got their start as ethnic representatives in the very expansive Daley-machine. Naturally the top posts went to Daley’s fellow-Irish but that’s the way American ethnic politics operated back then in the Windy City. Politics were much more tribal than, to use Tucker’s preferred state of mind, ”ideological.” But pardon my own preference: I didn’t mind the way Daley cut the municipal pie. It was sure better than having “ideological” warfare—or seeing the white working class shortchanged as in Hillary’s version of “inclusiveness.”

I’m also utterly puzzled by Tucker’s fear that we’re all becoming tribal. Does this apply to white Southerners who are watching Confederate monuments—celebrating the heroes under whom some of their ancestors fought—being torn down? Are these Southern “tribalists” receiving the same recognition as Black Lives Matter or do they enjoy the same respect as black politicians who say they’re offended by Confederate symbols? One might think, following Tucker’s logic, that in a society where all tribes are contending for power, Southern whites who valued ancestral symbols would be receiving the same encouragement as those on the other side. But of course this is not the case, because Tucker’s view of our present problem misses the point. Although tribalism has had serious historical consequences, it is not the same thing as multiculturalism. Tucker would do well to understand that the kind of tribalism permitted by multiculturalists is extremely selective and is not handed out to all groups in the same measure.

For years I’ve read and heard establishment Republican and neoconservative commentators warn that if we give in to the demands of black and Latino nationalists, we’d be opening the door to right-wing white tribalism. This has not happened to any significant degree; and where it has, the phenomenon has not resulted from following the multicultural ideology promoted by the left.

Clearly multiculturalists do not value all tribal identities equally. In fact they happily divide us into victimizers and victims. Presumably white Southern male heterosexual Christians are not intended to enjoy the same collective right to an historical identity as, say, a black lesbian or a Muslim gay activist.

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Tyler Cowen Interviews Raj Chetty

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Chetty is a bouncing betty bullshit artist in regards to race and ancestry. These non-European clowns are never going to understand the historic American nation. That is why over-educated apes like Chetty want to destroy the historic American nation with mass immigration.

The United States is a European Christian nation-state. The ancestral core of the United States is European Christian. Chetty and his obtuse, anti-White crap is getting annoying. Someone ask Chetty why he supports mass immigration. I have noticed that these celebrities of the ruling class like Chetty don’t like to be asked about their support for mass immigration when they are in public and the cameras are on.

* At the risk of sounding maximally ignorant, I look at this guy, I look at Zakaria, I hear that guy on NPR’s TED program talking about how we should give up on schooling altogether and let kids play with computers (literally just googling it as an answer to everything), and I ask:
does it make more sense that India cranks out high-IQ naifs, or does it make more sense that India cranks out Machiavellian tribalists, arguing, in bad faith, for the weakening of a target population?
India is not a paradise of tolerance, it’s a race riot fixed in equilibrium by clearly defined boundaries. Indians do very well here in part because they devote all their time to making a lot of money in a short period (often through fraud), not because they outperform natives in all-things-equal situations. It’s comparable to the way legacy creeps like Jeb pal around with elite Mexican patrone-figures, and think they want the US to be more like a former Spanish colony because they take for granted that their American rank would transfer, but really, person-to-person, the elite of the Spanish-speaking world are incomparably competitive and would eat a Bush alive.
If so, then how is Raj “attacking”?
Well, what would an Indian know about setting up neighborhoods in terms of ethnicity given their history?

* Would wager a small fortune Chetty’s analysis would even break down in large northern cities that are internally segregated. It’s why otherwise goodwhite Park Slope and Upper West Side parents freak out when the NYC Board of Ed dares to suggest introducing nearby project dwellers to their magic dirt public schools. Recall goodwhite supposed comedian Samantha Bee turning into a Southie shanty Irish harpy at the mere suggestion her little darlings might so co-mingle with lower socioeconomic types who happen to be black and brown. The left will not ever deal honestly with race.

* After reading, it looks like Chetty uses integrated to mean socio-economic integration. His Iowa example is suggestive–all the kids go to the same schools, and the adults have limited social activities that they all participate in.

* Fascinating details about the Manchester attacker and his family from the Anglosphere Tabloid of Record

Long story short, the whole family is crazy and at least one brother knew about the attack a month in advance.

Also, this seems like a real failure for British counter terrorism- the kid trained in Libya AND Syria, had contact with ISIS recruiters in the U.K., and they’d received warnings about him years back.

* Trained in Libya and in Syria.

Libya wasn’t a hotbed of terrorist activity until a few years ago. What changed? Oh, yeah. We overthrew Gadaffi and then left the country in rubble. Then terrorism and ISIS began to flourish.

Syria wasn’t a hotbed of terrorist activity either. Not until two things happened. First of all, the chaos in Iraq (another country that wasn’t involved in terrorism until we violently destroyed it back in 2003) spilled over the border. Second of all, the U.S. began to arm ISIS and other Islamic groups in Syria.

In conclusion, Libya, Syria, and Iraq used to be secular nations with no terrorism. Then America violently destroyed these secular regimes. Now there’s massive terrorism and extremism. This British Muslim suicide bomber trained in both Libya and Syria. 2 countries he wouldn’t have been able to train in a few years ago – before America destroyed two secular regimes. America was assisted in all these military campaigns by many countries, such as the UK.

* I think the main problem is that real estate prices are insanely high. Since status-striver Americans don’t want to marry and have kids unless they can have a reasonable-sized home in a nice neighborhood, a large fraction of Bay Area people are locked out of the marriage market. Perhaps the more marriage inclined go live in Sacramento – or just get out of California completely.

I can guarantee you if home prices were reasonable, fertility rates would be higher.

The problem is that foreigners keep buying property in America, pushing up coastal real estate prices. They do as as investment and also, if they ever immigrate, they can use these properties as a second home. The same is happening in Canada, Australia, NZ, and the UK.

The solution is to kick out the foreign home buyers. Make it illegal for them to own property here. Another solution is to put a massively huge tax on their property, which makes them sell. Once the foreigners stop buying, real estate prices will fall.

I also think a national daycare system, as they have in France, would be helpful too.

* The thing is, Chetty is never going to Notice the things that Steve does because Chetty would like to have a lucrative career, be respectfully interviewed on mainstream outlets and give TED talks.
I don’t know to what extent he is actually Noticing the same things Steve does and is stifling himself, or is Crimestopping himself from even thinking things, but there is no upside for him in becoming a Noticer and finding himself working as a blogger asking for donations in order to provide for his family.

* Raj Chetty is pretty smart, and I bet he is privately noticing all of the same things. As an aside, his dad is also a heavy duty data-driven statistical economist, and the older Indians I’ve met from India are not particularly pc—quite the opposite. Chances are that opinions about minority groups in the United States were not stifled at the dinner table during young Raj’s upbringing, but I speculate.

As you say, he can’t go there, without losing his livelihood and being ostracized from his professional cohort. It takes a lot of guts for an immigrant kid to choose the path of being a loner with ornery and unpopular opinions. I don’t’ know of any. Even Dinesh D’Souza chose that path as a brown-skinned conservative novelty at Dartmouth during the Reagan era purely as a career move.

* You ought to see Indians bullshit their way around an IT company. From the outside looking in (like the Jews), they become better than the natives at the lingo and at exploiting corporate and cultural values for their own benefit.

As the saying goes, “If the camel once gets his nose in the tent, his body will soon follow.” Hire one Indian in a management position, and soon you notice Indians start to sprinkle throughout the corporate cubes. They stick together and act together in ways totally foreign to the natives as the Indians climb corporate ladders … together.

Is this now Satya Nadella became the head of Microsoft and Sundar Pichai the head of Google? I’m suspicious.

The most extreme case I’ve seen is an Indian (naturalized citizen) low-bid and win a major IT contract with the U.S. Department of Defense and then outsource the labor to family and friends in India. How did he win the contract? The contract was awarded on the recommendation of the Defense Agency’s CIO … who was also Indian. Soon after the contract award, the Indian-owned company was awarded another contract to make up for its inability to execute under the original low bid.

Hence, it does not surprise me to see Chetty systematically confuse and obfuscate the meaning of the term “diversity” to support racial and cultural diversity in the United States as the “scientific principle” driving the upward mobility and economic prosperity of White people… as a subtle way of supporting the increased immigration of Indians and others from equally alien cultures and religions.

* Indians are by far the schemiest schemers who ever schemed. Their feigned docile ingenuousness and affability make them all the more formidable; the archetypally inscrutable Oriental of eastern Asia is a rank amateur in comparison. I expect it’s to do with the cacophony of ethnicities, tribes, languages, religions, castes, and so on all crammed into the subcontinent and adopting a hyperdense agrarian and urban lifestyle from time immemorial, unhelped by its location at the nexus of east and west along the Silk Road. These factors all combined to select for some really Byzantine politicking, passive-aggression, backstabbing, and the long con to negotiate the horror-show since seldom was a large enough, homogenous enough contingent around to just kill the other fellow honourably. From Alexander’s time to the British Raj, they were betrayng each other to wholly alien outsiders in exchange for privileges as the running dogs of the conquerers, so despicable and selfish are they. It’s interesting to compare their history to that of the Hellenic city-states to see what rôle geography and a sparse population played in making the latter an honourable people: pastoral, thassalocratic, pastoral, motivated by honour (vs. shame) – just as you say, this Chetty clown will never understand it because it is not in his DNA the way it is ours, and even if he does intellectually understand it, he’ll never admit it because he is not interested in science, knowledge and truth, but rather in his own scheming careerism, true to form for an Indian. Q.E.D.

* It’s true they lack the altruistic cohesion you suggest on any large scale, but exactly the granular infighting and backbiting you describe is why they will handily strike opportunistic bargains with each other (or even outsiders) in the same way, say, two narcotraficantes or mafiosos might to get a leg up over The Man or The Other Fellow. Like thieves, there is no honour among them, but there are plenty of rackets and conspiracies. They also engage in these behaviours with each other more than with outsiders for the same reasons criminals will deal with each other regarding their illicit deeds but not, often, virtuous people: only the equally selfish fellow with his own nefarious agenda can be relied upon not to spill the beans or violate the terms let it bring things crashing down upon him as well….

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Who’s an anti-Semite?

Dennis Prager writes:

The Jewish left has been calling conservatives “anti-Semites” — not to mention “fascists” and “racists” — for as long as I have been alive.Yet, outside of the Muslim world, virtually all anti-Semitism and Israel-hatred comes from the left. Of course, to most left-wing (as opposed to liberal) Jews, Israel-hatred is not the same as anti-Semitism. One can even help those who wish to destroy Israel — through supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, for example — and still be honored by Jewish institutions. Two local examples: Ed Asner was just given a lifetime achievement award at the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival. and Cornel West was invited by the UCLA Department of Jewish Studies to give a keynote address.

But no matter how destructive the left is — not only to Jews and Israel, but to civilized society as demonstrated by the intolerance and violence at our left-wing universities — it’s the right that frightens most American Jews.

Which brings me to an advertisement in the May 12 edition of the Jewish Journal by a Jewish leftist attacking Ann Coulter as an anti-Semite and me for defending her against that charge.

I don’t know what prompted the ad, since none of the allegations against Coulter is recent. The issue is gone and largely forgotten. My best guess is that precisely because there is so much Israel- and Jew-hatred emanating from the left, the man who took out the ad felt it necessary to find a prominent right-wing example of anti-Semitism. And since it is so rare, he revived the Coulter issue.

The irony is that even if Ann Coulter were an anti-Semite, this lone voice would hardly come close to matching the anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism coming from the left that permeate Western universities, intellectual life and the media.

But even that irony doesn’t apply, since Ann Coulter is strongly pro-Israel. But, again, neither matters to most Jews on the left, since, as far as these Jews are concerned, being pro-Israel doesn’t make you a friend of the Jews and being anti-Israel doesn’t make you an enemy of the Jews.

Posted in Ann Coulter, Anti-Semitism | Comments Off on Who’s an anti-Semite?

UCLA Professor: What’s Wrong with Jews Being a Minority in Israel?

David Suissa writes for the Jewish Journal:

Professor Makdisi based many of his arguments on universal values such as fairness, equality, justice, and so on. Focusing on those values helped him finesse the Achilles Heel of the BDS movement– the fact that they don’t recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state. Promoting the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees to Israel, for example, means the effective end of the Jewish state, what a panelist on the Pearl side called “national suicide.”

Makdisi took that word — suicide — and ran with it, almost ridiculing it as an example of needless hysterics from the Zionist side. You could see where he was going. What kind of just society would treat the arrival of Palestinians as a national suicide? Sure, there may be a great number of Palestinians who want to return to Israel, but what’s wrong with Arabs and Jews living side by side, in full equality, in the same state and under the same government?

Then, he got carried away and blurted out these words:

“What’s wrong with Jews being a minority?”

There was a gasp among some pro-Israel members of the audience. Pearl himself made a grimace, and commented that minorities are not treated very well in the Middle East.

I have a feeling Makdisi regretted his words as soon as he said them.

Why? Because he’s no fool. He’s a knowledgeable professor, and he surely knows what’s wrong with Jews being a minority in a country of the Middle East.

He knows that, for centuries, Jews in Arab and Muslim countries were treated as second-class citizens, or Dhimmis. He knows that many of those Jews were persecuted and expelled after the birth of Israel in 1948.

He knows that there are 50 Muslim countries in the world, but only one Jewish state.

He knows that in many of those 50 countries, non-Muslim minorities are routinely persecuted and oppressed.

He knows that the Arab minority in Israel has more rights, freedom, legal protections and economic opportunities than Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East.

He knows all of that.

So, when he said, so innocently, “What’s wrong with Jews being a minority?” he probably forgot who was in the audience. Maybe he thought he was talking to a Students for Justice in Palestine crowd, for whom a Jewish minority in the Jewish state would be like manna from heaven.

But he wasn’t. There were some proud Zionists in the audience, and I was one of them.

I’m a Jew who was born in an Arab country, where my ancestors were a minority for centuries. The stories I heard were not of human rights and equality. They were stories about surviving by behaving — by keeping our heads down and our mouths shut. My grandparents in Morocco never got to fight for their rights. They couldn’t.

That’s why for 1900 years Jews from all over the world dreamed and yearned to return home to Zion and Jerusalem. That’s why the Zionist movement fought so hard for the rebirth of the Jewish state. Because the Jewish experience of being a vulnerable minority in a hostile land is certainly not one we want to relive.

For Makdisi to suggest that it’s OK for Jews to become dhimmis again, well, if you ask me, that’s not very moral.

It sucks being a minority. I don’t enjoy that whites are a minority in Southern California. I don’t like it that whites will be a minority of the population by around 2042.

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Yes, Virginia (Dare) There Is a Cultural Marxism–And It’s Taking Over Conservatism Inc.

Paul Gottfried writes: Not only does Cultural Marxism exist, but it now appears to be taking over Conservatism Inc. Thus even with Paris burning, National Review was still attacking the Right. In the second round of the French election, Tom Rogan urged a vote for Emmanuel Macron on the grounds Marine Le Pen is insufficiently hostile to Vladimir Putin and is a “socialist” because she “supports protectionism.” Macron’s actual onetime membership in the Socialist Party, and his view that there was no such thing as French culture, apparently was not a problem [French election: American Conservatives Should Support Macron, April 24, 2017].

Conservatism Inc. goes along because these goals are partially achieved through corporate capitalists, who actively push Leftist social agendas and punish entire communities if they’re insufficiently enthusiastic about gay marriage, gay scout leaders, transgendered rest rooms, sanctuary cities etc.. Wedded as it is to a clichéd defense of the “free market,” the Beltway Right not only won’t oppose this plutocratic agenda, but instead offers tax cuts to the wealthiest and most malevolent actors.

It is because Cultural Marxism can co-exist with our current economic and political structure that our so-called “conservatives” are far more likely to align with the New Left than the Old Right. The behavior of our own captains of industry shows the rot is deep and that multiculturalism is very much part of American “liberal democratic” thinking, even informing our bogus conservatism. “Conservatism” is now defined as waging endless wars in the name of universalist values that any other generation would have called radically leftist. And Cultural Marxists themselves now define what we call “Western values”—for example, accepting homosexuality

The takeover is so complete, we might even say “Cultural Marxism” has outlived its usefulness as a label or as a description of a hostile foreign ideology. Instead, we’re dealing with “conservatives,” who are, in many ways, more extreme and more destructive than the Frankfurt School itself.

Many conservatives seem to believe Cultural Marxism is just a foreign eccentricity somehow smuggled into our country. Allan Bloom’s “conservative” bestseller The Closing of the American Mind [PDF] contended that multiculturalism was just another example of “The German Connection.” This is ludicrous.

Case in point: unlike Horkheimer, or my onetime teacher Herbert Marcuse, leading writers within Conservatism Inc. are sympathetic to something like gay marriage.

These include:

Indeed, homosexual liberation is so central to modern conservatism that the Beltway Right’s pundits urge American soldiers to impose it at bayonet point around the world. Kirchick complains we haven’t pressed the Russian “thug” Vladimir Putin hard enough to accept such “conservative” features of public life as gay pride parades. [Why Putin’s Defense of “Traditional Values” Is Really A War on Freedom, by James Kirchick, Foreign Policy, January 3, 2014]

Another frequent contributor to National Review, Jillian Kay Melchior, expressed concern that American withdrawal from Ukraine might expose that region to greater Russian control and thereby diminish rights for the transgendered. [Ukrainians are still alone in their heroic fight for freedom, New York Post, October 8, 2015]

If that’s how our Respectable Right reacts to social issues, then it may be ridiculous to continue denouncing the original Cultural Marxists. Our revolutionary thinking has whizzed past those iconoclastic German Jews who created the Frankfurt Institute in the 1920s and then moved their enterprise to the US in the 1930s. Blaming these long-dead intellectuals for our present aberrations may be like blaming Nazi atrocities on Latin fascists in 1920. We’re better served by examining those who selectively adopted the original model to find out what really happened.

At this point we should ask not whether the Frankfurt School continues to cast a shadow over us but instead ask why are “conservatives” acquiescing to or even championing reforms more radical than anything one encounters in Adorno and Horkheimer?

ORDER IT NOW

Admittedly, Conservatism Inc. has drifted so far to the Left that one no longer blinks in surprise when a respected conservative journalist extolls Leon Trotsky and the Communist Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Yet it’s still startling to see just how far left the Beltway “Right” has moved on social issues. Even more noteworthy is how unwilling the movement is to see any contradiction between this process and the claim they are “conservatives.”

And let’s not pretend that Conservatism Inc. is simply running a “Big Tent.” Those who direct the top-down Beltway Right are eager to reach out to the Left, providing those they recruit share their belligerent interventionist foreign policy views and do nothing to offend neoconservative benefactors, while purging everything on their right.

This post-Christian, post-bourgeois consensus is now centered in the US and in affiliate Western countries and transmitted through our culture industry, educational system, Deep-State bureaucracy, and Establishment political parties.

The Beltway Right operates like front parties under the old Soviet system. Like those parties, our Establishment Right tries to “fit in” by dutifully undermining those to its the Right and slowly absorbing the social positions and heroes of the Left.

Occasionally it catches hell for not moving fast enough to the Left. But this only bolsters the image of Conservatism, Inc. as defenders of traditional America against the Left—an image that it won’t lose even as it veers farther in the direction of its supposed adversary.

Posted in Conservatives, Paul Gottfried | Comments Off on Yes, Virginia (Dare) There Is a Cultural Marxism–And It’s Taking Over Conservatism Inc.