Habakkuk on "incitements to anti-Semitism"

I find this comment by DH to be so striking that I have made it a post. There will be complaints about a lack of paragraphing.  If DH wants to revise it I will re-post it.  pl

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I had not looked back at this thread, so had missed your response.

There will, I think, be better occasions to take up the issues you raise, which are very important ones.

For now, a few remarks.

In the interests of clarity, I should perhaps say that insofar as I am ill at ease with the ‘Hobbits’ of Tolkien’s ‘Shire’, it is because of forefathers who were ‘dwarves’ in the coalfields and smelters of South Wales.

My possessing the name of an Old Testament prophet betokens Calvinist origins, not Jewish. But then, radical Protestants have commonly been philo-Semitic.

There is a figure called Kevin Macdonald, whose writings on Jews as an ‘hostile élite’ you may well know.

(See https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/2068070204_Yuri_Slezkine .)

As it happens, I do not much like him. His reference to ‘the Germans, from Wagner to von Treitschke to Chamberlain and Hitler’, disliking the irony of Heine, seems to me to demonstrate an inability to grasp that groups, be they Germans, Jews, Muslims, or whoever, are rarely monolithic wholes.

That said, an important part of the background to his writing – as of the piece by Lawrence Auster to which you link, which seems to me far superior to Macdonald’s writing – is that very many of the most influential American Jews seem to be queuing up for starring roles in versions of the ‘hostile élite’ drama.

Quite a few of them appear to be doing their level best to persuade people who place any value on the traditional ‘Anglo’ culture of the American Republic that they are something close to an ‘existential threat’ to it.   (editor bolding) 

In Britain, also, ‘tribal’ Jews – ‘ghetto Jews’ sometimes seems to me an appropriate term – have claimed the right to speak for some kind of coherent ‘Jewish people.’

So, for example, concluding his May 2015 article ‘We never forget Jerusalem’, our former Chief Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, wrote:

‘We have had the privilege to be born in a generation that has seen Jerusalem reunited and rebuilt. We have seen the Jewish people come home. ‘

Today God is calling on us all to be Guardians of Zion. Never has this been more important. We must all stand up for the one home our people has ever known and the one city our people has loved more than any other. We are all shagrirey medinat Yisrael (ambassadors for the State of Israel) and we must all make Israel’s case in a world that sometimes fails to see the beauty we know is here. Let us all take on that task. With Hashem’s help, we will succeed and we pray may the world make its peace with Israel so that Israel and Israel’s God can bring peace to the world.’

(See http://rabbisacks.org/we-never-forget-jerusalem/ .)

As it happens, I think this is an ‘open-and-shut’ case of ‘incitement to anti-Semitism.’

That there are some Jews who have their ‘home’ in this country – and are more than temporary residents – seems to be beyond our former Chief Rabbi’s capacity to imagine.

That he cannot see the possible implications of implicitly defining all Jews as ‘resident aliens’ is, I think, indicative of extraordinary stupidity and recklessness.

It also completely obscures the fact that, for many Jews here, their history is one of lost homes, and the equally important fact that very many of them had long abandoned the Jewish religion.

I mentioned Peter Ganz, for whom ‘home’ had clearly been Mainz: clearly not a Jew, in Rabbi Sachs’s definition.

What then can I say about Peter Stern, who likewise made it over here just before the outbreak of war, leaving relatives who died? He also ended up as a professor of German, having been a sergeant in His Majesty’s Armed Forces.

Again, the comparison with Maxwell is interesting, in that like him Stern came from Czechoslovakia – he served in No 311 Squadron, the Czech bomber squadron in the RAF, hunting U-boats over the Atlantic.

I well remember two fingers clawed around a pipe, a relic of one of the ultimate lucky escapes, when the Wellington bomber in which he served as ‘tail gun Charlie’ was shot down by Ju-88s, and the survivors were picked up, by pure fluke, after fourteen hours in the water.

While Peter Ganz was an agnostic brought up as a Lutheran, Peter Stern was brought up a Catholic, and remained a kind of ‘Jewish Christian’ to the end of his life.

Like so refugees from ‘assimilationist’ families, both completely failed to maintain the concern for group survival which Macdonald appears to think a Jewish characteristic, marrying out.

And then, what can I say of a lifelong friend of my mother’s from schooldays, the daughter of a secular Jewish lawyer, who herself ended up as a pillar of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Kensington?

I vividly remember their house, with the walls covered in prints of the St. Petersburg which the father had left in the Civil War, leaving his coat on the door, before finally making it over here through Crimea.

My ‘few remarks’ have got longer than I intended.

What is important is that the kind of ‘tribalism’ which Macdonald sees as a general Jewish characteristic is found among some Jews, but not others.

An obvious fact is that ‘assimilationist’ Jews tend over time to disappear.

However, a situation where the ‘tribal’ Jews who do not want to ‘assimilate’ attempt to shape the fate of non-Jewish polities is, quite patently, fraught with potential for disaster.

That however, does not provide good reason for accepting the simplicities either of Sacks or Macdonald – who agree on a ‘totalitarian’ vision of all true Jews as essentially the same, but simply differ on whether the largely mythical identity in which they believe should be given a ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ sign.  DH

Comments

[JP Billen]

J -

Armenians are still being persecuted to this day by the Turkish invasion of Northeast Syria. Their churches in Ras al-Ayn have been desecrated - along with many others in villages of that region. Their priests are being murdered. These people currently being subjected to ethnic cleansing are descendants of a few survivors of the Turkish genocide from over a century ago.

[Babak Makkinejad]

It is illegal, within her legal structures and codes, for the United States to enter any kind of instrument of peace with either the Russian Federation or the Islamic Republic of Iran. The time for them was 2002.

[JerseyJeffersonian]

Thousands of ours killed/maimed, trillions blown on Israel's wars, subversion of the US culture/politics. Steely Dan nailed it: I don't wanna do your dirty work no more.

[artemesia]

O/T: When were the Volga Deutsch expelled from the lands they had been invited to settle? Were they ever repatriated or recompensed?

Half a lifetime ago I worked for a very fine attorney named Wolgemuth -- I'm guessing he was Volga Deutsch.

[English Outsider]

I don't know the frequency of reporting on the various terrorists/freedom fighters he meets. I see material sometimes on meetings with the IRA -

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/survivor-of-enniskillen-remembrance-day-bombing-labels-jeremy-corbyn-sympathiser-for-terrorism-38677585.html

But the Guardian fights back, though Tribal Conservatives don't read the Guardian. Come to think of it that'll be one of the things they do get right.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/20/corbyn-terrorist-sympathiser-double-standards

Above I should have put "bombing brown people" in quotation marks. And I'm not sure anyway if people still remember George Carlin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHZtQsKQg7c

I suppose Corbyn gets an amazingly hard time from our neocon equivalents simply because he isn't one. He's weird all right - how else does one get let into the House of Commons? - but not that sort of weird.

[artemesia]

I wonder if I'll be able to look upon the world from whatever post-life state I'm in, to see how zionist Israel is getting along, the later-comers having decided that the traditions, statues, monuments, governing institutions of the zionists who created the place in the early 20th century are "supremacists" and need passionately to be overthrown and replaced with _____ ? (Who will be zionist Israel's millennials in 2119? Palestinians? Syrians? Iranians !! )

[Babak Makkinejad]

I will let your stupid insults to me, as a commentator here, pass. But to call "irrelevant" the on-going religious war, first declared through Balfur Declaration, over the disposition of Palestine is even more stupid.

[Babak Makkinejad]

I am Beige and not Brown.

[Babak Makkinejad]

You are not American else you would have known that neither Italians, nor Jews, nor Armenians, Poles, Romanians, Spaniards were considered "White" in the United States not too long ago.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Zionists are not holding anybody hostage, almost every Jew the world over believes and accepts Zionism: a Jew being against Zionism is like an American being against Democracy & Freedom. I doubt you know any Jews.

[ex PFC Chuck]

Are these the same Samaritans who were discriminated against by other Jews as related in the incident of the Good Samaritan in chapter 10 of the Gospel of Luke?

[Fred]

Catherine,

You sure pumped out a bunch of propaganda in guise of a "snippet". Do you get paid by the word?

[fanto]

Peter Scholl-Latour mentions in one his books that the Israeli flag was originally two vertical blue strips, idealized two rivers, Nile and Euphrates, but it was changed to horizontal ones, divided by white . Relata refero.

[catherine]

''Among the many very well considered and researched thoughts here one very important is missing: jews, their history, religion and their entire many faced existence are now completely hijacked and misused by the governments which are using the current state of israel as their stronghold/outpost among the people and cultures seeking emancipation and recognition.''

What governments are using Israel as their stronghold/outpost and for what purpose?

[Vegetius]

Odd that someone who wanted to escape from the Judaic tradition would surround themselves with Jews.

[Vegetius]

Haman wanted to, but yeah: it's almost like the Persians make a distinction between Zionists and Jews.

Strange this is never reported in the press. I wonder why.

[Vegetius]

>we MAY see the true face and feel the true soul of the modern jewry

We ARE seeing the true face of modern jewry: the mask is slipping and this is why mistrust, fear an loathing of Jews is rising all over the world.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Don't look at me, I had nothibg to do with it.

Likely, like Einstein or Freud, she only felt comforted with other Jews.

[Babak Makkinejad]

It is not reported because fot the first time in 2500 years Yehud have harmed Iran.

[catherine]

''You sure pumped out a bunch of propaganda in guise of a "snippet". Do you get paid by the word?''

I see you are still hanging on my every word....I 'am flattered, but seriously you should find a commenter more on your particular wave length to engage with.

[Kilo 4/11]

Yes, we had high standards once.

[johnf]

Yes, they are.

[sova]

Thanks for confirming my most important assumption: you ARE confusing the face and soul of jewry imposed on it by their current govenment with the one we MAY see if it was free to show itsef! The most accurate and profound messages from otherwise excellent discussion in this entire tread is that thie face and sould are NOT monolitic - the abusers did their best (as DH points out MILDLY) to hide it and place instead an adversarial front. BUT this is only the front of face and soul of that abuser!! Wake up please and look further around - there's lots more to see.

[sova]

On stupidity & insults:
I wish this didn't have to go through the entire thread as it's personal - it would appear I need to be enlightened: which words from my comment were stupid and insulting to you?? I honestly do not see them and would appreciate education! I would appreciate this education because none of insulting stupidities were not intentional even if it's only you who see them.. sincerely!
On religious wars: Thanks again for confirming my original thesis: religious wars have always been started and used as means by religious entities. NOT religious individuals (like those discussing the matter here). Those (individuals) have mostly always accepted recruitment by one or the other parties in the war. IN this discussion I see many who ARE NOT AT WAR. IF you really want to be honest you could tell us to which warring sides you belong so we all can be placed more accurately on the map of this discourse..

[English Outsider]

And I'm brownish because I work outside a fair bit. Come on Babak - we're in danger of sinking into broad stereotypes that don't match the reality.

I don't like Carlin. Not constructive and he went in for an easy and fashionable dissidence that gets us nowhere and that often throws the baby out with the bathwater.

But when a man you don't like makes a valid point that point is all the stronger.

We cringe when someone uses the "wrong" term to refer to this or that group or race. "Brown people" is of course an offensive term - it presupposes that the vast differences that exist between cultures and nations can be boiled down to the accident of skin colour. It suggests a derogatory or condescending attitude to those who live in the ME. And you will cause great embarrassment at an Islington dinner party if you use such a term.

So we pride ourselves on an acute sensitivity to the feelings of those who are "brown". We take great pains, often use the most convoluted periphrases, to demonstrate how liberal and free from prejudice we are.

And then bomb the hell out of them without a second thought. Or cause entire swathes of their countries to be wrecked on a scale not seen since the mayhem on the Eastern Front in the Second World War.

That is the crazy set of double standards Carlin is exposing to view, and dislike his style and approach as much as we may he is right to do so.

.

As for all this talk of Jews, most of it's beside the point. One does not run the Americans down because the neocons are at the helm at present. Nor my own country because we have a set of neocons running things who are in my view even more objectionable. The Likud coalition in Israel is about as nasty as you could get. They remind me of nothing so much as those Right Sector activists who seized control of the Verkhovna Rada. They talk in much the same way and do much the same if they can.

Appalling people all. They do appalling things. But are we to tar entire populations with that brush? Of course not.