I respect the Mondoweiss blog even though his point of view is the opposite of mine. He’s a leftist and therefore he does not see important differences based on religion and race. I see culture and nation as the product of race. I see culture as much more of a racial construct than race being a cultural construct.
I love Israel and I see it as an example of what a determined and intelligent people can achieve when they pursue their self-interest in a hostile region.
A nation’s first task is to survive and the best way to do this is get as strong as possible. The more cohesion, the more strength. I am glad that Jewish Israel puts its survival and unity before consideration of Western democratic values and the like.
Jewish values, just like Japanese values and American values, should mean first and foremost what is good for their group.
If Israel were 25% kinder to Palestinians, it would probably perish. If Israel were 25% tougher on Palestinians, it would suffer severe repercussions.
I see Shaked’s Jewish nationalism as an excellent model for all people. They should first develop their own cohesion and strength and outsiders should only be allowed in according to what is good for the host group. Orthodox Judaism makes conversion difficult. That’s a good model to follow for nations as well.
On the other hand, and this is where writers Philip Weiss, Kevin MacDonald and Albert S. Lindemann are particularly valuable, Jews and other groups should face the problems they create for others when they put their own interests first.
Last summer, about a week before Israel invaded Gaza and just one day before settlers in East Jerusalem kidnapped and murdered Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir, Israeli politician Ayelet Shaked took to Facebook to call for the genocide of Palestinians. Quoting an unpublished article by a settler activist, she wrote:
What’s so horrifying about understanding that the entire Palestinian people is the enemy? Every war is between two peoples, and in every war the people who started the war, that whole people, is the enemy…They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.
Even in the fiercely nationalistic environment of Israeli politics, the far-right firebrand recently described in the Daily Beast as “The Scariest Politician in Israel” managed to stick out…
As it turns out, drawing on Jewish tradition to challenge Ayelet Shaked is a losing battle as well. Whenever Stone tried to broach the subject of “Jewish values,” it became evident that Shaked had no interest in such values, at least in the traditional religious sense of the term. Liberty, nonviolence, justice – to her and the Jewish Home party, all can be readily sacrificed to the overarching mission of ethnic and religious homogeneity. The ideology of Naftali Bennett is hostile to any interpretation of Judaism that would place greater emphasis on these values than on settlement expansion, wars of aggression, and the jailing of innocent refugees.
The more Stone tried to bring the discussion back to the topic of values, the more the two women talked past each other. Shaked claimed that Israel – unlike the U.S. – was simply not a country of immigrants, and that the refugee crisis must be addressed with proper consideration for the so-called demographic threat posed by a sudden influx of non-Jews.
There is something almost refreshing about Shaked’s bluntness, the shameless ease with which she warns of the demographic threat posed to Israel’s Jewish character by “infiltrators” and the bill she passed to stop them. The African immigrants she speaks of, many of whom arrive by foot, are fleeing horrific circumstances and are trying to make Israel their home. They have no intention to destroy the country or attach its inhabitants. Yet to Shaked, they are menaces nonetheless, solely by virtue of their not being Jewish. This is Zionism unvarnished, free of any mitigating factors – compassion, mercy, acceptance – that secular humanism might provide. Speaking at length about the conflict between Israel’s Jewish character and its supposed commitment to democracy, Shaked said there are three kinds of Israelis: those who see Judaism and democracy as equally important, those who prize Judaism over democracy, and those who want to be “democratic but not Jewish.” The very idea of a secular democratic state elicited a chuckle from someone behind me.
There are echoes of Trump in Shaked’s fear-mongering about “infiltrators” – to the Israeli right (and arguably to the Israeli public at large), Palestinians and Africans play the same role as Mexicans do to the American white nationalist crowd. What was striking about the event was just how nakedly Shaked played on fears of The Other – even using the phrase “the other” to describe those who fall outside the purview of Jewish self-interest. This Other includes refugees, asylum seekers, Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, and Arab citizens of Israel.
Posted inIsrael, Nationalism|Comments Off on Mondoweiss: The refreshing bluntness of Ayelet Shaked
Steve Sailer writes: The most striking statistic in human biodiversity studies was, to the best of my knowledge, first pointed out by Runner’s World editor Amby Burfoot in an article in the spring of 1992. He noted that in both the 1984 and 1988 Olympics, all eight finalists each time in the men’s 100 meter sprints were black. When you considered that people of substantial sub-Saharan descent only make up a modest fraction of the world’s population, then 16 out of 16 was extraordinary.
Typically, over 64 sprinters enter the Olympic 100m dash, from a huge range of countries around the world. To make it to the finals, you have to survive the octofinals, quarterfinals, and semifinals. So just making the Olympic finals is a major career accomplishment.
Astonishingly, however, the same thing has happened six more Olympics in a row since Burfoot’s observation, for a running total of 64 blacks out of the last 64 finalists.
You can see this stat for yourself in motion: for the record, here are videos of the last eight Olympics’ mens’ 100 meter finals.
1984 Olympics, Los Angeles
1988 Olympics, Seoul
1992 Olympics, Barcelona
1996 Olympics, Atlanta (only 7 men actually finished the 1996 final because 1992 gold medalist Linford Christie was disqualified for false starting).
* Sprinting is the general factor of athletic ability.
* The meaning of the term “athleticism” has changed somewhat over my lifetime. It used to be associated at least somewhat with eye-hand coordination, but that has largely been dropped. Golfer Phil Mickelson or baseball slugger Miguel Cabrera might have been considered athletic 50 years ago, but now they are seen as being at the opposite pole from “athleticism.”
Now, pretty much like intelligence being whatever it is an IQ test measures, athleticism means whatever an NFL cornerback does.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the ability to run fast backwards correlates even higher with the current meaning of athleticism than the ability to run fast forwards.
Anyway, the NFL Draft combine collects a lot of data on college football stars, so it would be interesting to see which subtests correlate best with success at cornerback in the NFL.
In contemporary discussions of athleticism, eye-hand coordination is now treated a little bit like psychometricians treat 3-d cognitive skill: something more striking for being more orthogonal to the g-factor than most other cognitive skills.
What about eye-foot coordination? Soccer player Lionel Messi has unbelievable eye-foot coordination, but I don’t know enough about American responses to soccer to say whether that is treated as evidence of athleticism or of something else.
In other countries, what Americans call “track & field” is called “athletics.”
But my impression is that Americans don’t really think of track & field as being the definition of athleticism anymore. It’s too cut and dried, pre-planned. Americans tend to associate “athleticism” with basketball and playing defense on football. That puts a high premium on reacting quickly, the ability to move your feet not necessarily in a straight line forward.
There’s a high correlation between sprinting speed and what an NFL cornerback or NBA guard defender does, but it’s not 1.0.
Sometimes, for example, you see running backs who are very fast in a straight line but aren’t that shifty. Herschel Walker, for example, was unbelievably fast going forward for his size, but he wasn’t particularly elusive like Barry Sanders was.
A big question is that we have a very spotty the history of steroids in American sports before, say, the 1980s. We have weird bits and pieces of knowledge, like that the coaching staff of the 1963 San Diego Chargers handed out steroids at training camp. But then what happened? We have other evidence that suggests that steroids did not systematically sweep the major American spectator sports until later.
My suspicion is that a lot of the iconic Southern California superstars of my late 1960s childhood were on the juice, such as The Juice and Wilt. O.J. was part of a record-setting sprint relay team at USC, and we know Olympic field guys were using steroids from the later 1950s onward. Wilt was a Muscle Beach regular soon after he was traded to the Lakers around 1968 and became the first NBA player to become ripped. O.J. was massively publicized at USC in 1967-68. There was a sort of sense at the time that he was the Football Player from the Future, and maybe he was.
One way to test the theory that blacks respond better to steroids is that we have a decent knowledge of baseball’s steroid history. No doubt some players had been quietly experimenting for years, but it seems pretty clear that Jose Canseco was the primary evangelist for steroids among big leaguers in the 1986-1992 era.
During this period, we see a general decline in the number of African-American ballplayers, so that would be a strike against the theory. On the other hand, when the best African-American ballplayer, Barry Bonds, decided to get seriously into steroids, he hit 73 homers.
It also seems likely that the over-the-counter availability of steroids in some Latin countries, especially the Dominican Republic played a role. It would seem like a great topic for some sabermetrician to research — steroid sales in the D.R. from 1970-2000 — but the stat guys seem amazingly averse to researching the general topic of What Just Happened?
My impressions is that this era saw the end of the stereotype of the wiry Latin banjo hitting utility infielder to be replaced by the stereotype of the Dominican slugger, who tended to be very black, much blacker than Dominicans in general.
Another subtest of what we think of as “athleticism” today in America is how high above your height you can get a hand. Being able to slam dunk is a proxy for this. One interesting aspect is that long arms are considered athletic, even though they are a fixed asset.
A future famous Southern Californian who started using steroids when he was 17-years-old in 1964 or 1965 is Arnold Schwarzenegger.
My guess is that way back in the 1960s it usually took initiative and individuality to get into steroids, and Arnold, OJ, and Wilt would qualify under those categories.
* Then they’ve been performance enhancing for a lot longer than 1980. I’d say a more plausible reason is that the Caribbean countries needed more time to build up their sports program–and blacks needed to be welcome emigrants in European countries in order to dominate their sprinting programs.
The last white winner of the 100 in a fully competitive Olympics was Valeriy Borsov in 1972, and it’s pretty well-acknowledged that he wouldn’t have won if the US coach hadn’t used an old schedule. Only one of the Americans showed up at the quarterfinals, thanks to that screwup. The two favorites missed their event. The two who didn’t start were the ones favored to win; our 3rd best candidate came in second place. Valeriy wasn’t a slouch; he came in 3rd in 1976 to two black Caribbean runners.
Allan Wells, the 1980 winner and the last white winner of the 100 in any Olympics, is the FloJo of his time; that is, people who don’t believe he wasn’t doping are just kidding themselves. The guy was originally a jumper who switched to sprinting late in his career and started beating everyone. And whispers of his doping have been going around for a while.
Leaving aside those exceptions, black men have been dominating the Olympics despite fewer opportunities in America and far fewer predominantly black countries having the money for sports programs. 1968 looks like an all black final. 1964 was the year of Bob Hayes; according to Wikipedia, a Pole and a German were the only nonblacks in 1964 (I didn’t look them up, but am assuming).
You’re correct that the three white guys swept the 1960 event, but Ray Norton and Frank Budd had beaten Sime in the trials. Norton was the overwhelming favorite and his fold during the finals is one reason that day is dubbed Black Thursday, an unexpectedly catastrophic day for US track & field at the Olympics. Norton had been considered the dominant US sprinting star for two or three years by that time. Frank Budd set the world record the next year; his poor performance is generally considered a case of nerves, as he’d never been in a major event before.
But you can go back further. In 1956, the only black guy in the field, Ira Murchison, was also expected to win that year but also seemed to have a bad year. 1952, the winner was a white American, but bronze and silver went to black men. 1948 had black men going 1-2-3,two Americans and a Panamanian. And of course, 1936 had Jesse Owens and Frank Metcalf.
In America, 100 meter Olympic finals have been all or mostly black for a long time. Here’s a special on Valeriy Borsov, and at the 4:14 mark there’s a clip from the US Olympic finals. I don’t see a white guy in it. Here’s a clip of the 1964 Olympic 100 finals, also just a couple whites.
So no, I’m unconvinced that the explanation is anything other than some genetic fast-twitch thing, because from the moment they were given any opportunity at all, blacks dominated.
* Steve, remember when NBC aired a “White Paper” about black athletic superiority around 1987? The then-track coach for Stanford was interviewed, and he vowed to find the Great White Sprinter. I sent him a letter saying “good luck with that,” and he sent it back to me with a handwritten imprecation to “crawl back under the rock you came out from.”
* One interesting theory that has been put forward by a commenter (unfortunately, I have forgotten his monicker) is that perhaps men of West African descent tend to respond more strongly to performance-enhancing drugs than do men of other races?
That’s also the armchair scientific theory in professional bodybuilding. From reading various sources, professional body builders also need to have a natural ability to gain muscle easily (so they get early positive feedback for their efforts) and the ability to handle the massive amounts of foreign substances without breaking down. Occasionally HDB slips out and people talk about the advantages that blacks have.
* Blacks are more sensitive to androgens since they average fewer CAG repeats on the androgen receptor gene, so the performance-enhancing drug hypothesis seems plausible. East Asians and Hispanics have longer repeats and are rarely competitive.
* It sometimes seems to me that white kids these days spend all their time shuffling along staring at rocks in their hands. I sometimes think I’m living in a world of monks who have taken vows of silence. Exertion would probably break their meditations.
* When I was looking at the runners in the videos to which you’ve linked, I was surprised that the runners all looked so large. I would have expected them to be thinner and have less bulky bodies (I do not follow track). Also, it’s a little hard for me to tell decisively, but the runners in the 1960s video appear to be of slighter build than the runners in the videos of more recent races.
* My opinion is that basketball is the be-all end-all of athletic sports. Since the NBA was founded in 1946, no other sport has seen the level of athleticism so conspicuously evolve. Watch a Bob Cousy highlight reel then an Allen Iverson highlight reel, or an Oscar Robertson highlight reel then a Michael Jordan highlight reel. Those are starker visual differences than even football has seen in terms of what we can only call athleticism, as though the NBA started out with mechanical dummies. And so the first thing I would say about a possible athletic g factor is that you know it when you see it. Which may suggest the key idea literally.
No one ever mentions this, but learning how to play basketball well has less to do with good coaching or good competition than with endlessly and intensely watching the pros on TV and film, and being able to then go out and imitate their physical nuances. The stylistic innovations that have accentuated athleticism in the NBA are, I would argue, a matter of binging on game footage, a matter of mimicry and incorporation, and not a matter of fundamentals being better taught as has been the NFL’s evolution. And indeed it’s probably the intuition of this that explains why NBA practices among all pro-sports are notoriously non-intense. Perhaps, maybe, the athletic g factor then is the ability to internalize motion, and to demonstrate this internalization by aping it down to subtle rhythms, and moreover doing so without being able to gauge your own accuracy, since you don’t practice in front of a mirror.
Somehow, it seems like athleticism must have essentially been born from dancing. The fact that children will dance to music by sheer instinct before they can even walk would seem to say something fundamental about human motion and thus athleticism. And of course dancing in the purest sense is just mimicking the rhythm of the music by your movements. Thus would dancing be the general factor of athletic ability if I had to guess. And as musical ability does not correlate with IQ, perhaps athleticism does not correlate with strength, so that sprinting ability is misleading insofar as the speed is a matter of leg strength.
* Maybe it’s mirror neurons?
A sense of rhythm seems to be crucial both to most sports and most performance arts, and certainly other arts, such as poetry, and maybe even painting. I have no sense of rhythm so I just skip over all the parts in literary criticism and the like that are devoted to praising the writer’s rhythm.
A decade or so ago it was a big surprise when some beat-up retired black athlete like heavyweight champ Evander Holyfield would go on Dancing with the Stars and excel. But now it’s expected.
Are there any famous black athletes who can’t dance? No doubt there are some who have kept it hidden, but I can’t think of any, and I’ve had it in the back of my mind for decades to remember any anecdotes about black teammates who can’t dance.
Posted inBlacks, Olympics, Running|Comments Off on Steve Sailer: Videos of the Last 8 Olympic 100 Meter Dash Finals Show 64 Out of 64 Were Black
I think all strongly identifying in-groups have similar messages to their kids — that outsiders are dangerous. I don’t think there is anything unique here.
Christians learn from their religion negative teachings about Jews and Jews learn negative teachings about Christians from their Judaism and Muslims learn negative teachings about Christians and Jews from Islam.
If you strongly identify with your religion, other religions appear wacky if not evil. If you are a sincere Christian, then Jews look bad. If you believe in Judaism, then Christianity looks like idolatry.
Jews have a lower crime rate than whites, latinos and blacks, so I don’t think that these Satmar kids are a threat to grow up to kill goyim.
Chaim Amalek: “The Brits are too weak to touch them. A race that invites in Paki men to rape their daughters and then looks the other way when confronted by their cries is not going to bother doing anything about this.”
“If English goyim had thought about outsiders the way the Satmars think about goyim, perhaps their daughters would not have been subjected to decades of rape at the hands of Paki men in Rotherham.”
British three-year-olds have been told “the non-Jews” are “evil” in a Kindergarten worksheet handed out at ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools in north London, it can be revealed.
Documents seen by The Independent show children are taught about the horrors of the Holocaust when they are still in kindergarten at the Beis Rochel boys’ school in north London.
A whistle-blower, who wished to remain anonymous, has shown The Independent a worksheet given to boys aged three and four at the school. In it, children were asked to complete questions related to the holiday of 21 Kislev, observed by Satmer Jews as the day its founder and holy Rebbe, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, escaped the Nazis…
Independently translated from Yiddish for The Independent, the worksheet’s first question reads: “What have the evil goyim (non-Jews) done with the synagogues and cheders [Jewish primary schools]?” The answer in the completed worksheet reads: “Burned them.”
Another question asks: “What did the goyim want to do with all the Jews?” – to which the answer, according to the worksheet, is: “Kill them.”.
“It doesn’t explicitly refer to the Holocaust,” the source said. “It’s a document that teaches very young children to be very afraid and treat non-Jews very suspiciously because of what they did to us in the past.
“It’s not a history lesson – you can’t say that. It’s a parable that is actively teaching the children extremism, hatred and a fear for the outside world.”
A spokesperson for Beis Rochel said that the worksheets would be amended and apologised for any offence. However they argued the phrase “goyim” was not offensive and accusations that they were indoctrinating children were “without basis”. “The language we used was not in any way intended to cause offence, now this has been brought to our attention, we will endeavour to use more precise language in the future.”
Mondoweiss: If they were anti-Zionist because of a concern for the rights of Palestinians, then yes, that would be important. If the opposition is for some religious reason and they couldn’t care less about the rights of Palestinians, then no, it’s not important.
Here’s a fascinating piece in Haaretz on Satmar Jewish attitudes, stemming from the recent murder of a Brooklyn landlord named Menachem Stark, 39, who is said to have been generous inside the Satmar community but ruthless outside it, treating tenants and others with contempt. (The New York Post angered many in the Satmar community by headlining a piece on Stark, “Who wouldn’t want this man dead?”) The Haaretz reporter is Debra Nussbaum Cohen:
Sources say that in fact there is no contradiction between the role Stark played in his Satmar community of Williamsburg, and how some tenants and legal documents say he behaved outside it.
“What you do to the goyim is not the same as what you do to Jews,” said Samuel Heilman, an expert on Hasidic communities like Satmar. Heilman, author of “Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry” and a distinguished professor of sociology at Queens College, is currently at work on a book about succession battles in Hasidic courts.
That attitude stems from days when Jews were actively persecuted, he said. “Part of the collective mind-set in the crucible of history when this part of Jewry was formed, the outside world was filled with anti-Semitism and persecutors. The whole understanding of that was that you need to keep a distance from them, that they are a different level of human being,” Heilman told Haaretz.
According to Samuel Katz, who was brought up as a Satmar but later became secular, boys in the community are taught that non-Jews aren’t quite human. Speaking from Berlin, where he is doing biomedical research on a Fulbright fellowship, Katz explained that growing up in such a community, “you don’t see commonality with people who aren’t Jewish. There is a completely different taxonomy of people. There are Jews and then there are non-Jews, who don’t have souls.”
When the messiah comes, “every boy is taught that the bad goyim will be killed and the good gentiles will have the privilege of serving us, of being our slaves,” he told Haaretz. “The way Stark dealt with tenants is part of that world view… It’s not taking advantage of them, [rather] that is the world order you’re taught to expect.”
“It informs your moral compass. Like all good people Stark was benevolent and generous to the people who he saw were like himself,” but not to other people, added Katz. “There’s an empathy ‘blind spot’ that imbues the Haredi outlook.”
P.S. I generally avoid pieces about nutty Orthodox teachings because I think all religious fundamentalists are crazy; but as Tolstoy said, every family is unhappy in its own way, and one Jewish issue I struggle with here is exceptionalism, superiority. Also note that one of Max Blumenthal’s alleged sins in his landmark investigation, Goliath, was the chapter title, “How to Kill Goyim and Influence People” describing an Orthodox tract in Israel laying out the circumstances under which it is permissible to kill non-Jews.
Posted inHaredi|Comments Off on Three-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jewish children told ‘the non-Jews’ are ‘evil’ in worksheet produced by London school
The United States of America is Israel’s big brother and really loves us. Israel does not have and apparently will not have another friend like it. According to a recent Congress report, Israel is the country that has received more cumulative American aid than any other country since the end of World War II.
Since it began in 1962, American military aid to Israel has amounted to nearly $100 billion. For the past decades the United States has been regularly transferring aid of about $3 billion annually. In recent years, the aid has been solely for defense purposes. Additionally, the U.S. has been giving Israel generous military aid for projects that are important both to it and to Israel.
Between the establishment of the state and the first decade of this century, the economic aid the United States gave Israel was modest. Its civilian aid to Israel began in 1949 – less than a year after the establishment of the state, when Israel was in terrible economic distress – with help in purchasing food and absorbing the mass immigration of Jewish refugees. The amount of the aid was small, $100 million, and some of the money went towards purchasing basic foodstuffs, such as grains.
In the 1950s, America gave Israel only civilian aid, for economic purposes, and this was doled out in loans and small grants. In 1951 the United States refused to help Israel advance the reparations agreement with Germany, which was signed the following year and gave Israel some economic breathing room.
The change began during Lyndon Johnson’s administration (1963-1969), when the United States began transferring more significant civilian aid to Israel, which increased over the years. Between the establishment of the state and 1962, the United States under Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower imposed a total arms embargo on Israel. The first president to lift the embargo was John Kennedy, who in 1962 allowed Israel to pay in full for surface-to-air Hawk missiles. In 1965 America sold offensive weapons – Patton tanks – to Israel for the first time. In the 1960s, France was Israel’s major arms supplier, until the turnaround after the Six-Day War, when the United States became its main supplier.
In 1984 the Cranston Amendment stopped loans to Israel while increasing the grants in order to put an end to past debts. From 1985 on, in the framework of the plan to stabilize the economy, American aid was pegged at a grant of $3 billion annually. In that year Israel also received another grant of $1.5 billion. One of the negotiators between the countries in 1985 was Professor Stanley Fischer, who later became the governor of the Bank of Israel.
The largest amount of American aid in grants and loans in a single year came to $15.7 billion in 1979, when Israel signed the peace treaty with Egypt. Cumulatively, American aid to Israel between 1950 and 2013 amounted to about 3% of Israel’s GDP during that period.
For about the past 20 years, under the American-Israeli agreement, the grants from the United States are used for the purpose of purchasing arms and other security equipment (for example fuels) that Israel needs for propelling its war machine. One of the most expensive arms deals in the history of Israel’s defense forces – the purchase of 20 F-35 fighter planes for $2.7 billion – will be financed entirely by aid money. The deal was signed towards the end of 2010 and the first planes are slated to be delivered to Israel next year.
Hellfire
Last weekend, in the context of Operation Protective Edge, it was learned that the White House had ordered the Pentagon, the Defense Department and the Army to hold back a shipment of Hellfire missiles for Israel’s Apache helicopters. Both the helicopter and the missiles have been in use in Israel since 1990. Depending on the model, each missile costs between $25,000 and $65,000.
This is a localized and insignificant incident, not even a light tap on the wing. The move is somewhat reminiscent of the temporary suspension of flights to Israel during Operation Protective Edge. Does anyone still remember that?
However, the Hellfire incident is not the first in which the United States has used an embargo, a delay, or threats of an embargo to obtain something from Israel or to send it a message. To the big brother’s credit, it must be said that it does not do this very often.
The most outstanding incident of this sort occurred during the first days of the Yom Kippur War, when America’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger delayed Israel’s requests for the provision of weapons systems and ammunition for the purpose of applying diplomatic pressure. Later in the war, the United States provided an unprecedented airlift, even though most of the rest of the international community made things difficult for Israel by refusing to grant American transport planes landing rights for stopovers. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan, who was friendly towards Israel, halted the provision of F-15 fighter planes after the bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor.
Diplomatic circles in Jerusalem assess that the Hellfire missile issue will be resolved in the coming days, if it has not already been resolved, in discreet talks between Washington and Jerusalem.
A bumpy start
Relations between Israel and the United States are now at a peak, but their start was bumpy. On November 29, 1947, the United States supported United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 to recognize Israel, but in March of 1948 it leaned towards passing a General Assembly resolution aimed at rescinding 181 because of Israel’s condition on the battlefield and pressure from hostile Britain and the Arab world.
During the first decades of the state’s existence, American economic aid to Israel was modest and confined to civilian aid.
Under a special agreement, the United States maintains in Israel caches of $1 billion worth of emergency munitions, including rockets, artillery shells and armored combat vehicles. The project is operated by the European Command of the U.S. Army. In the Second Lebanon War and in Operation Protective Edge, the United States sold Israel armaments from these caches.
The United States has also helped Israel over the years with joint military and defense projects essential to both sides. For example, the United States helped and is helping Israel develop its multi-layered defense system that includes Iron Dome, Magic Wand and the Arrow. The cost thus far has been about $3 billion, including more than $1.3 billion for Iron Dome.
In May 2010 President Barack Obama asked for and received a special allocation of $205 million for the Iron Dome project above and beyond the regular American military aid. Subsequent requests for funding for the project have also been approved, including $351 million that Israel requested for purchasing additional Tamir interception missiles for Iron Dome in the third week of July, during Operation Protective Edge.
A week later, both houses of Congress approved, with President Obama’s backing, a special additional aid package for Israel of $225 million for purchasing more Tamir missiles. Only two weeks intervened between the time the request was submitted and its passage – which shows that the case of the Hellfire missiles is localized and should not lead to any far-reaching conclusions. A possible explanation for the difference in attitude is that the Tamir missiles are for defensive purposes whereas the Hellfire is an attack missile.
Posted inAmerica, Israel|Comments Off on Haaretz: U.S. Military Aid to Israel Exceeds $100 Billion
On February 28, 2015, Jewish Community Watch (JCW), added Levitansky to their Wall of Shame. “Multiple victims came forward and revealed to JCW that they had been abused by Levitansky,” the online posting reads. “After an investigation by JCW’s investigative team that spanned 18 months and following a review by JCW’s board, it was determined that public exposure was warranted and necessary.”
JCW is a grassroots organization that supports victims of sexual abuse and conducts comprehensive investigations aimed at “combatting child sexual abuse (CSA) in the Jewish Community.” Since 2011, they have conducted dozens of investigations and have been sought out by hundreds of victims, leading to the arrests of perpetrators. In 2012, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes awarded the organization for “tireless service and dedication to the community.”
Levitansky, a Sherman Oaks resident, allegedly met his victims, who were 15 and 16 years old at the time, while working at the Living Torah Center/Chabad in Santa Monica, states a press release from the SMPD Chief of Police Jacqueline Seabrooks.
The center, which has been operating since 1992, is currently one of 2,500 branches of today’s largest international organizations involved with Jewish education and outreach. According to their website, the organization aims “to serve the spiritual and physical needs of each Jew regardless of affiliation, wherever he or she may be, with understanding and with love;” they operate under a mission statement of “Ahavat Yisrael,” meaning “love for a fellow Jew.”
According to JCW, Levitansky previously served as director of Jewish Hospitality/Congregation Bais Avraham. Levitansky is also the son of Rabbi Avrohom Levitansky, founder of the Chabad in Santa Monica. This Levitansky family Chabad is reportedly the site where many of the abuses occurred.
On March 22, JCW hosted a CSA advocacy and awareness event at Congregation Shaarei Tefila on Beverly Boulevard. Sima Yarmush, now 27, spoke in front of 350 members of the Jewish community about the two and a half years of sexual abuse she endured, allegedly perpetrated by Levitansky.
“He would tell me, he would scare me, by telling me that if I told anybody what he does to me, he would take his gun to his head and kill himself,” said Yarmush “And I knew he had a gun.”
At the age of 18, Yarmush told her parents and a social worker and four Los Angeles Rabbis were assigned to her case for a beit din, a rabbinical court hearing. Yarmush says that she did not immediately press charges for many of the same reasons that survivors of sexual assault do not seek help from the police.
“I was 18, unmarried, and terrified of the public finding out I was sexually abused,” said Yarmush. “The idea of fighting a legal battle with a man who repulsed me was terrifying.”
After listening to her relay her experience in detail for four hours, the Rabbis told Yarmush they would “take care of everything.”
“My family got absolutely no backing or support from the Rabbis to show our community that the allegations were true,” asserted Yarmush. “An esteemed Chabadic Rabbi said to my parents that they had absolutely no moral, legal, ethical or halachic reason to say anything about the abuse to anybody.” Levistansky was then quietly sent to therapy, resigned from his position and went on to practice in a different Jewish community.
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In the aftermath of reading The Israeli Mind by Alon Gratch, I watch the 2015 movie True Story. Twenty three minutes in, the protagonist, disgraced New York Times journalist Mike Finkel, says he doesn’t know why he invented stuff.
Watching the movie, I get a shameful feeling that he may have put success above honesty.
I Google “Mike Finkel Jewish” without the quotes and find this article about him on Observer.com:
“I always fancied myself an outdoorsman, even though I’m a Jewish guy from the East Coast,” he said.
So without knowing much, I suspect that the reasons Mike Finkel cut corners to get ahead are the same reason many people cut corners to get ahead — because it’s easy, the payoffs are big, and the odds are good that they can get away with it.
About 80% of American Jews are descendants of Eastern European Jews, who for centuries lived in an atmosphere of mutual loathing with the goyim. These Jews survived by their wits and their superior brains often outfoxed their competitors (increasing hatred of Jews). Such Jews did not always honor the gentile’s rules.
I grew up a Protestant and while many Protestants cheat, none I knew boasted about it.
* [My father] started out working in an uncle’s appliance store, but business was so slow that pretty soon the uncle needed an out. He set the store on fire, collected insurance, and used that money to open an insurance agency himself.
* Israelis don’t particularly value general norms of conduct. They have a basic disrespect for plans, rules and procedures.
* Judaism has always had two competing trends: a loving, forgiving one, and a separatist, combative one; one seeking to please the gentiles and one hostile to them. (Hugo Bergman)
* An Israeli driver was arrested for driving while talking on two cell phones…
* Israel’s attitude towards its Arab minority and the Palestinians in the territories reveals another facet of Israeli narcissism, namely the Israeli mind’s paucity of empathy…
* Though most times it doesn’t come to blows, this clash of narcissistic entitlements is omnipresent in Israeli daily life. …During their training in El Al, flight attendants are told that when Israelis purchase an airline ticket, they believe they buy not only the ticket but also the plane, the pilot and the flight attendants.
* The Israeli mind’s failures at empathy, its lack of regard for reality, and its relentless drive for success, all produce a predilection for cutting corners, bluffing, and lying.
* A New York-based Israeli locksmith describes how he makes his living. When called at night by a customer who had locked himself out, he fiddles with the lock as if to gain entry. He then “inadvertently” breaks it, which leaves the customer with the options of spending the night in an unlocked home or having a new lock installed on the spot for double the normal cost.
* European associates perceive the Israelis they work with…as liars, thieves, and untrustworthy manipulators.
* The second pattern related to the Israeli proclivity to push the envelope, by hook or by crook, is the culture’s permeable attitude toward boundaries.
* David Grossman’s To the End of the Land: Suddenly he starts crying that he doesn’t want to be Jewish anymore, because they always kill us and always hate us, and he knows this because all the holidays are about it. And the adults look at one another, and a brother-in-law mumbles that it is kind of difficult to argue with that, and his wife says, “Don’t be paranoid,” and he quotes “that in every generation, they rise up against us to destroy us” and she replies that it’s not exactly scientific fact, and that maybe we should examine our own role in the whole “rising up against us business…”
* Israeli psychologist Ofer Grosbard likens Israel, the country, to the psychotherapy patient who insists in the initial consultation that nothing is wrong with him. The problem, he tells the therapist, is that he is so talented, so exceptional and so successful that everyone else is simply envious and hateful toward him.
Luke: “I haven’t spent much time in Brooklyn. What are the characteristics of people [Orthodox Jews] who grow up in Brooklyn and Flatbush that you don’t care for?”
Reuven: “There’s a cookie-cutter element where there’s not a lot of personality. They go to school. They’re taught one thing. They have a specific mentality about what they want to do and who they want to associate with. There seems to be a serious lack of character, of interests. They seem to like the same things, to dress the same way. There’s this bizarre attitude where if you talk to them socially or you are friendly to them in any way, they feel like you’re proposing to them and they’re very off-put. They’re offended almost when people reach out to them socially, which is a common trait and makes almost any conversation awkward. They’re looking for very specific things and they’re comfortable in a very specific world and anything that’s slightly askew from that, they’re confused by.
“I had one instance that is legendary. We took summer classes. At Brooklyn College, because it is so insular, a lot of the teachers we took, we’d have their old tests. Masorah is what it is called.
“There were a bunch of Jews in the class. They were a little bit friendly. It was super competitive. One of the Jewish girls had a lot of the old tests. We had some but we didn’t have all of them. We approached her casually, ‘Hey, can you help us out?’ And she totally jerked us around.
“We went all out. We wanted to make sure we got this to cover our asses and she blew us off. It turned out that there was another guy in the class who wasn’t Jewish at all who heard us talking and he totally bailed us out. He gave us the stuff that we had. I was really upset. I was really pissed off. I think it taught me a lesson. Frankly, I gave it to her afterwards. I’ve always been of the mind that you help each other out if you’re Jewish and religious. I was shocked. I was taken aback that somebody who was not Jewish would go above and beyond to help someone.”
Luke: “Does a yeshiva education make a person any less likely to cheat in college?”
Reuven: “Absolutely [more likely to cheat]. There’s a lot of pressure. I grew up with a lot of pressure. There’s this, ‘You know you have to succeed whatever it takes.’ If it takes cutting some corners, you’re going to do it. It’s expected that you are going to do well. You’ve got to answer the bell.”
Luke: “So a yeshiva education makes you more likely to cheat?”
Reuven: “I think so.”
In an essay published in his personal journal Ultimate Issues (Winter issue, 1986-1987), Dennis Prager wrote: “When I taught at Brooklyn College it was privately acknowledged by faculty members that students coming from Jewish schools were more likely to cheat on exams.”
Luke: “What do you think your yeshiva teachers would say if they were given evidence that this was true?”
Reuven: “The more religious you get, the more likely you are to cut corners. That’s the way they’re taught. The mentality is you do what you can, this is the secular world, the rules don’t count.”
Luke: “Do you think someone with a yeshiva education is more or less likely to be ethical in business?”
One of the most prominent Orthodox rabbis of our time, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, chief rabbi of Efrat, related the following story in the July 12-18 issue of the International Jerusalem Post:
“Let me tell you a true incident which for me is a metaphor of our times. A young man attended a yeshiva in Safed.
“The first morning, he arrived a bit late for breakfast and there was no milk left for his coffee. He went to the grocery, purchased a container of milk and placed the container in the yeshiva refrigerator with a sign, ‘Private property.’
“The next morning, the container was gone.
“He bought another container, on which he added to the previous sign, ‘Do not steal.’
“The next morning, that container, too, was missing.
“He purchased a new container, adding to the sign, ‘Questionable gentile milk’ (halav akum). This time no one took his container; he left the yeshiva.”
A year and a half ago in this column, I recounted a similar story that Rabbi Riskin had told me many years ago. It was about 10 candidates — handpicked talmudic scholars — he interviewed for the position of rosh yeshiva (head of yeshiva). Nine of them said that they would not return an extra electric shaver accidentally sent to them by a non-Jewish-owned department store. They contended that the halachah — one does not return a lost item to an idol worshipper — forbade them from doing so…
Nevertheless, the ethics problem within Orthodoxy is real.
I first confronted this dilemma when I was a student at a prominent yeshiva high school.
My classmate Joseph Telushkin and I conducted a survey and found fewer than five students among the 120 students in our grade whom we could identify as not cheating on tests.
When I later taught at Brooklyn College, I was told by Jewish and non-Jewish faculty that graduates of yeshiva high schools were the students most likely to cheat on tests.
A non-Jewish listener once called my radio show to ask me if Orthodox Jews are permitted to speak on the Sabbath. I asked him why he asked such a question. He told me that he lives in an Orthodox Jewish area of Los Angeles and that on Saturday mornings, when walking his dog, he would say “Good morning” to Jews wearing black hats walking to synagogue. They just don’t respond, he told me, and that’s why he wondered if speaking on the Sabbath is forbidden to Orthodox Jews.
In Israel, the ultra-Orthodox Charedi community comprises about 9 percent of Israel’s population and receives about half of the country’s welfare payments — despite the fact that the recipients are nearly all healthy and young.
Charedi men who serve in Israel’s armed forces are increasingly humiliated, ostracized and even beaten when they return to their Charedi communities (see the Jerusalem Post, for example).
Emissaries from the Yishuv deliberately concentrated Jewish survivors in the American Occupation Zone of Germany so that the United States would be led to demand that the British allow them into Palestine. Recruitment for illegal immigration was shifted to relatively intact Jewish communities so that the Yishuv could be reinforced while the DP camps would keep up the pressure. Overall, illegal immigration was only secondarily meant to help survivors. In the words of the Israeli historian Anita shapira, it was “first and foremost a theater in the battle for the Jewish state.” And it was to a great extent a public relations battle. The voyage of the Exodus, loaded with survivors who eventually were returned to Germany, was the greatest triumph of this battle. The captain of the ship believed it would be possible to land the passengers of the shores of Palestine, but he was overruled by the senior Mossad representative on board: the goal was to “show how poor and weak and helpless we were, and how cruel the British were.”
…Inside the DP camps, emissaries from the Yishuv organized survivor activity — crucially, the testimony the DPs gave to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry and the UN Special Committee on Palestine about where they wished to go. The results were gratifying to the proponents of a Jewish state. In response to a UN survey, more than 97 percent said that Palestine was their goal. Many wrote down, “First choice, Palestine. Second choice, crematorium.” …The Jewish Agency envoys reported home that they had been successful in preventing the appearance of “undesirable” witnesses at the hearings. One wrote to his girlfriend in Palestine that “we have to change our style and handwriting constantly so that they will think that the questionnaires were filled in by the refugees.”
In general, Jews do not differ in any appreciable way from Gentiles in the things they value, with one exception: They have a greater desire to achieve economic and social success, that is to say, they are high in “achievement motivation.” Professor Lynn suggests that, like many personality variables, this may have a partly genetic basis “brought about through having been selected by eugenic customs, persecution, and discrimination.”
Richard Lynn writes in his 2011 book The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement: “There are only two values in which Jews are significantly different from others. These are honesty, which Jews desire in their children less than do others, and judgment, which Jews desire in their children more than do others.”
Later in the book, Lynn writes: “There are eight values in which Jews are significantly different from others. Jews attach less importance to cleanliness, honesty, manners and obedience, but they attach more importance to considerateness, interest in how and why things happen, judgment and responsibility.”
Paul Gallico from the New York Daily News argued that Jews made good basketball players because Jews are basically sneaky, conniving people.
Gallico wrote: “Curiously, above all others, [basketball] appeals to the temperament of the Jews. While a good Jewish football player is a rarity. . . Jews flock to basketball by the thousands, because it places a premium on an alert, scheming mind. . . flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart aleckness.”
A Jewish sports editor wrote: “No other sport so required the characteristics inherent in the Jew; mental agility, perception, imagination and subtlety.”
And as the Reverend Reggie White would say, “Whites are good at making money and Indians are good at sneaking up on people.”
Later, the documentary discusses the role of Jewish players accepting bribes to manipulate college basketball scores vis-a-vis the point spread (such as at City College of New York). This practice was widespread in the Catskills aka the Jewish Alps.
Teams “with Jews and negroes” were regarded as particularly susceptible to bribery.
The drive to succeed has a bright side and a dark side.
In May 1998, Lane — then editor of The New Republic — had made the same trip with Stephen Glass, a young rising star at the magazine. At 25, the Jewish Glass was drawing attention with juicy stories such as the “First Church of George Herbert Walker Christ.” But Lane had begun to worry that the writer’s outrageously colorful pieces were too good to be true…
The filmmaker — an avid newspaper reader from age 8 — understands something about his subject. Both he and Glass grew up in affluent, heavily-Jewish suburbs (Ray in Encino; Glass in Highland Park, Ill.) where parents expected children to succeed.
“My family talked a lot about how Jews have always used education as their ticket,” the director said. “The mindset is that you have a responsibility to yourself, to your family and to the Jewish community at large to achieve, to bring pride and certainly not to fail.”
…Despite Ray’s reportorial technique, the film veers in some ways from real-life. There are composite characters, and “Star Wars'” Hayden Christensen plays Glass, prompting one columnist to note, “Only in Hollywood can Jewish nebbishes get played by WASP hotties.”
But Lane, who is Jewish, feels the onscreen Christensen eerily resembles Glass.
One place the real Glass found comfort was the Jewish community; several months after his disgrace, he anxiously ventured to High Holiday services at his childhood Conservative synagogue. “People knew all about the horrible sins that I had done, and here I was and what would they think of me?” he said. “[But] no one said a negative word.”
Glass said he began reading Torah commentary and met with rabbis who described how a transgressor can rebuild his life. In “The Fabulist,” the main character also seeks solace from a rabbi and reconnects with his religion. But observers such as Charles Lane, Glass’ former editor, believe the novel isn’t so apologetic.
Steve is a Jewish boy from the posh Chicago suburb of Highland Park with pushy Jewish parents who insisted on the usual (doctor, lawyer). When they urged him to go to law school, they probably had Supreme Court appearances in mind, not, as the firm boasts, a $2.1 million settlement for a homeless man hit by a garbage truck. But Paul Zuckerman, the partner who hired Steve and has become his mentor, considers this development to be a sign of grace. “You were on track to be an asshole,” he told Steve when I was there. “The best thing that ever happened to you in your life is that you fell flat on your face.”
Jewish white collar crooks play the lead role in the 1992 book “Den of Thieves” by James Stewart.
[Ivan] Boesky never recovered his reputation after doing a stint in prison, and paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and compensation for his Guinness share-trading fraud role and a number of separate insider dealing scams. Later, Boesky, who is Jewish, embraced his Judaism and even took classes at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America where he had been a major donor; however, in 1987, following the fallout from his financial scandal, The New York Times reported that “after Ivan F. Boesky had been fined $100 million in the insider-trading scandal, the Jewish Theological Seminary, acting at his request, took his name off its $20 million library.”
Alan Dershowitz, one of Milken’s lawyers, has mounted a campaign to discredit “Den of Thieves” as “a vicious anti-Semitic diatribe”–in part because the four “thieves” are Jewish. Stewart calls the charge “totally spurious,” and he’s right; there’s no evidence of bias in the book.
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NPR: “The New York Police Department is rolling out a new policy to record officers’ use of force. The strategy has already been implemented in L.A. and Seattle. Advocates say it’s an effective way to limit force; but cops say it’s burdensome bureaucracy, and causes them to lay off potential criminals.”
This reminds me of various 12-step programs. Debtors Anonymous has you track all of your spending and earning. Underearners Anonymous has you track your time. Food addiction program have you track what you eat.
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From Wiesenthal.com: September 25, 2015 (CHICAGO)- The Simon Wiesenthal Center has been in contact with Larry Wert, President of Tribune Broadcasting and Greg Easterly, General Manager of WGN-TV Chicago following the recent incident where a staff member of WGN-TV Chicago chose a symbol of Nazi Germany to acknowledge the Jewish Day of Atonement during a news broadcast.
In addition to their heartfelt apology to the community, Tribune Broadcasting and WGN-TV are taking proactive steps by working with the Simon Wiesenthal Center to provide Holocaust education and tolerance training for their employees. Alison Pure-Slovin, Director of the Midwest Region for the Simon Wiesenthal Center said, “While we understand that there was no malicious intent in using the yellow star, this incident highlights the ever-growing need for Holocaust education in in both historic and contemporary contexts throughout the Chicagoland area and beyond.”
”We appreciate the thoughtful feedback we are receiving from the Chicago Jewish community. It speaks volumes to the character of the community we live in that those we may have offended most are the first to help us turn this very unfortunate mistake into a teachable moment,” said Greg Easterly, General Manager of WGN-TV Chicago.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center will continue to monitor the situation and will also remain in close contact with the leadership of Tribune Broadcasting and WGN-TV to ensure that an error of this magnitude will not happen again.
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People don’t assimilate except in the most superficial of ways (language, etc). They behave according to their genetics.
William Kilpatrick writes: Europe’s embrace of mass immigration can be explained in part by guilt from the Nazi era. It’s no coincidence that Germany, which has the most guilt to deal with, has pledged to take in the most refugees.
But other European nations are not free of guilt. Some of them collaborated with the Nazis, and even those who didn’t feel a need to expiate for the sin of European anti-Semitism.
The irony is that Europe’s current welcoming policy toward immigrants and refugees seems destined to bring about the very fate it is intended to avoid. European governments have decided that the best way to expunge any trace of racism or xenophobia is to invite into their midst people who are as far removed from European culture and tradition as it is possible to be. The reasoning seems to go as follows: if Europeans persecuted the Jews for their “otherness,” they can make up for it by accepting millions of “new Jews”—not actual Jews, but people who by reason of their otherness can stand in as proxies for the Jews.
The problem is that the “new Jews” are on the whole decidedly anti-Semitic. Europe’s atonement for its past anti-Semitism is to invite into the continent the most anti-Semitic people on the planet. It’s no secret that the majority of the refugees and immigrants now pouring into Europe are Muslims. What’s more, many of these Muslims are from the Middle East and North Africa (“MENA”), the most anti-Semitic portion of the Muslim world.
According to a 2014 poll conducted by the Anti-Defamation League, 74 percent of those polled in MENA had anti-Semitic attitudes. The top ten in the ADL Global Index are:
• West Bank and Gaza— 93 percent of the adult population holds anti-Semitic views.
• Yemen— 88 percent
• Algeria— 87 percent
• Libya— 87 percent
• Tunisia— 86 percent
• Kuwait— 82 percent
• Bahrain— 81 percent
• Jordan— 81 percent
• Morocco— 80 percent
In short, the “new Jews” are reminiscent of the old Nazis. In fact, Hitler is considered a hero in many of the MENA countries, and Mein Kampf is a popular book. In a 2009 statement, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the most popular and influential spiritual leaders in the Muslim world, called the Holocaust “a divine punishment” of Jews, and prayed that the “believers” would finish the job started by Hitler.
For a continent which is dedicated to the proposition that what happened to the Jews must “never again” happen, it seems odd to lay out the red carpet for people who are dedicated to finishing Hitler’s work. Here it seems appropriate to add the obligatory qualifier and note that of course not every Muslim hates Jews. But, then, neither did every German in the Nazi period hate Jews. And certainly many of them never endorsed the final solution to the “Jewish problem.” Still, as the German experience showed, a dedicated minority can wreak havoc if the majority are willing to stand by and look the other way. Given the results of the ADL poll, a large number of Muslims might be willing to avert their eyes. And in Germany, Muslims already outnumber Jews by about forty to one.
There might be less to worry about if Germany took pains to assimilate its growing Muslim population. But the guilt hangover from World War II mandates that the multicultural other be given special treatment. And one way of showing respect for the other is to absolve him of any duty to assimilate. To ask the other to assimilate implies that you think your culture is better than his—which, of course, would be a major social blunder. As a result, in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, parallel Muslim cultures with separate rules and institutions have grown up alongside the native cultures.
What’s happening is not a Germanization of Islam, but an Islamization of Germany. As Germany braces to receive some 800,000 refugees and migrants this year (a four-fold increase over 2014), very little is being done to acquaint them with Western standards of behavior. Instead, Muslim have turned urban areas into de facto “no-go” zones, polygamy is commonplace, sharia courts operate in all big cities, and churches are being turned into mosques. Moreover, rather than undertake the difficult task of integrating young people into Western society, Germany, according to one report, is “handing over the religious education of the next generation of German Muslims to Islamist radicals.”
One could counter that it’s not easy for the government to oversee what’s being taught in the madrassas, but Vijeta Uniyal, the author of the report, isn’t talking about madrassas, he’s referring to the public schools. In a number of German states, the Islamic Studies program has been given over to the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB). The organization, which has close ties to Turkey’s Islamist party, the AKP, oversees the writing of textbooks, the selection of teachers, and the content of the curriculum. Given the anti-Semitic leanings of the AKP leadership, one wonders how their friends in the DITIB deal with such a sensitive topic as the Holocaust.
Or will they have to address the subject at all? In the state of Bavaria, it’s been proposed that Muslim students should be exempt from mandatory visits to former concentration camps. The stated reason is that children from Muslim families have no connection to the German past. Yet one of the chief architects of the final solution—a man who worked closely with Eichmann and Himmler—was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and one of the most prominent and influential Muslims of the time. Moreover, as the ADL poll shows, anti-Semitism is still very much alive in the Middle East. In short, the students who are likely in most need of Holocaust education are the ones least likely to receive it.
In the prevailing climate of political correctness, policies are too often driven by emotional arguments rather than sober analysis, a reality currently playing out in the debate over the mass influx into Europe of migrants from the Middle East and North African (MENA).
While the issue strikes a deep humanitarian chord, over the past two decades Europe has failed miserably at integrating these populations. Nevertheless, the EU is now doubling down on a failed strategy, promising to take in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people over the next few years, many of whom are, in actuality, asylum- seekers – with no intention of returning to their home countries – or economic migrants.
Yet nobody seems to be asking the question: Is this good for the Jews? The answer is a resounding “no.”
European Jewry is currently enduring the most intense wave of anti-Semitism to sweep the continent since World War II, and the cold, hard truth is that Muslim immigrants and their poorly-assimilated offspring are fueling it.
In France – which already has Europe’s largest Muslim population, and whose government has vowed to take in an additional 25,000 – more than 500 anti-Semitic acts were recorded over the first five months of 2015 (of which 23 percent were classified as violent), an increase of 84% over the corresponding period last year. While the denominational breakdown of the perpetrators is difficult to ascertain, the Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive (SPCJ), which compiled the report, made note that the incidence of attacks on Jews rose dramatically in the wake of January’s horrific massacre at the Hypermarche kosher shop, perpetrated by the radicalized son of Muslim immigrants.
The trend holds across of much of Europe, including the UK, which has promised to take in an additional 20,000 MENA migrants. In Britain, anti-Semitic incidents rose by more than 50% in the first half of 2015 compared to last year; this, on top of the more than 100% increase (to 1,168 acts) in 2014.
It is tragic, then, that Jewish leaders in Europe are not raising the alarm. To the contrary, many are advocating on behalf of those who are liable to hurt their communities.
Take the greatly respected former chief rabbi of Britain, Jonathan Sacks, who last week penned a moving albeit short-sighted article in support of the EU’s decision to absorb hundreds of thousands of additional people.
“Now is a unique opportunity to show that the ideals for which the European Union and other international bodies such as the United Nations were formed are still compelling, compassionate and humane,” Sacks contended.
While these words resonate profoundly with many Jews (themselves essentially refugees for more than 2,000 years, exiled from their land), they do not take into account the predictable fallout for Europe’s Jewish community.
Sacks justifies his position by quoting the biblical axiom, “Love the stranger because you were once strangers,” but ignores another commandment which overrides all others: Pikuach Nefesh, which demands that no policy be enacted which endangers life. And make no mistake, support for mass immigration from war-torn, destitute, traditionally anti-Semitic countries places Jewish lives at risk. Sacks also makes the typical mistake of universally applying the Jewish ideal of Tikkun Olam – repairing the world – without acknowledging that Western values are foreign to many MENA migrants.
Another common rationalization employed by Sacks invokes the lead-up to the Holocaust. “One of the dark moments in [world] history occurred in July 1938,” he writes, “when representatives of 32 countries gathered in the French spa town of Evian to discuss the disaster that everyone knew was about to overtake the Jews of Europe wherever Hitler’s Germany held sway…. Yet country after country shut its doors.”
The flaw in this argument is glaring; namely, that there is no concerted genocide taking place in Syria, Iraq or Libya, but rather Sunni-Shi’ite proxy wars. Some minority populations are, in fact, being systematically targeted – such as the Yazidis, for example – but they are not primary among the young, single and mainly Muslim migrants currently being absorbed into Europe (according to the UN’s refugee agency [UNHCR], 70% of the nearly 450,000 immigrants that arrived by sea to Europe this year are men, compared to just 13% who are women and 18% children).
This is why comparisons to the Holocaust are invariably blanketed by emotional fluff – “wars that cannot be won by weapons can sometimes be won by the sheer power of acts of humanitarian generosity,” according to Sacks. But taking in millions of migrants will not end the war in Syria or anywhere else; by contrast, it will simply import the root causes – Islamic fundamentalism and tribalism – to the West. (A representative example is the Greek island of Kos, where thousands of migrants have caused utter chaos for local residents, with violent riots erupting between competing ethnic groups).
Moreover, it is wishful thinking that those pouring into Europe can be properly vetted. Consider figures released by Italian authorities (Servizio di Polizia Scientifica) which show that only two-thirds of the more than 120,000 migrants who entered the country so far this year have agreed to be identified (while EU rules stipulate that migrants apply for asylum in the countries in which they arrive, many are electing not to in hopes of moving on to other, more hospitable member states). This means that some 40,000 people effectively remain unaccounted for.
And that’s in only one country. The same dynamic is playing out in Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia and Hungary, from which tens of thousands of immigrants have crossed into Austria and then Germany.
It is no surprise that the influx into Germany – which temporarily broke EU law by waiving the requirement that migrants register in the country of their arrival – has already resulted in the arrest of an Islamic State (IS) terrorist, who happened to be in possession of boxes of fake Syrian passports. IS has alleged that it smuggled some 4,000 members into Europe along with the migrants. Overall, the masses flooding into Germany have overwhelmed the system, leading authorities to restore proper border control procedures. But one can only imagine how many people slipped through the cracks.
Another fully predictable outcome of the migrant influx is growth in support for the European far Right. This was already taking place in countries like France, with the rise of Marine Le-Pen’s National Front, as well as in countries like Greece and Hungary, where the Golden Dawn and Jobbik parties, respectively, have made political inroads.
In Germany, anti-immigration groups like PEGIDA have likewise gained a groundswell of public support.
And who always seems to get caught in the crossfire, if not deliberately targeted first? The Jews.
Just days before Sacks published his article encouraging more immigration to the UK, four Jewish males were attacked at a train station in Manchester, England, one teen sustaining a fractured skull. This is but one example of the many violent anti-Semitic attacks already occurring with alarming frequency throughout Europe, and taking in more people from MENA countries will only add to the crisis.
The remaining question is whether Jewish leaders will take ownership now, or feign surprise and outrage the next time a European Jew is severely beaten – or worse – by someone they advocated on behalf of.
I notice that Israelis tend to have a more realistic understanding of what Islamic immigration means.
I take issue with the writer’s criticism of Europe’s failure to assimilate Muslims. No country has ever successfully assimilated large numbers of Muslims nor blacks.
Posted inEurope, Immigration, Islam|Comments Off on Should Europe Take In Muslim Migrants?
