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

[artemesia]

"It was actually the Jewish industrialist Rathenau who had kept the German military-industrial machine functioning, in the face of the British naval blockade."

When Bloomberg announced his candidacy, I thought of Rathenau. "International Jewry" had a fraught relationship with him, many thinking him insufficiently concerned with what "is good for the Jews."

As regards Rathenau keeping "the German military-industrial machine functioning," in The Transfer Agreement, Edwin Black implicitly blames Rathenau for the starvation-deaths of 800,000 German civilians. In a chapter titled, The Weapon Hitler Feared, Black wrote:

" Before the blockade was lifted, 800,000 malnourished German civilians perished. Actually, the blockade created less of a food shortage for Germany, which was 80 percent food self-sufficient before the war, than did the short-sighted policy of pulling Germans off the farms to fight without compensating for reduced food production."

If it was Rathenau who "kept the military-industrial machine running," then it was Rathenau who influenced that "short-sighted policy" that caused starvation.

Be that as it may, the starvation was real, and as Black explains in detail, within a very few weeks of Hitler's chancellorship and at least five years before the hair on the head of a single Jew had been harmed, "International Jewry" met, decided, published and implemented a program of economic war against Germany, intended to pose a threat to Germany's economic existence, but also, as the chapter's title suggests, deliberately playing on the present memory of many German people of having been starved to death. Jews deliberately used the psychological terror of starvation against an already fractured and demoralized people.

That scenario is being repeated this very day.

Mike Pompeo declared that Iran's

"leadership has to make a decision that they want their people to eat. . . . that they want to use their wealth to import medicine and not use their wealth to fund Qasem Soleimani's travels . . .",

to which Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif responded at Astana Conference:

"“Today the Secretary of State of the United States says publicly: ‘If Iran wants to eat, it has to obey the United States.’ This is a war crime. Starvation is a crime against humanity."

The British imposed the WWI blockade that cost the lives of 800,000 German civilians. Chaim Weizmann played a major role in prolonging that war in order to squeeze out of the British sponsorship of "a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine." In his autobiography, Trial and Error, (read it online) Weizmann cavalierly dismisses the charge that he "prolonged the war by two years" after detailing his maneuverings to derail a peace-keeping mission of Henry Morgenthau, Sr.
In June, 1917, before the Balfour declaration was sealed, Morgenthau, former ambassador to Turkey, thought he could persuade the Turks to quit the war. Louis Brandeis alerted Weizmann to this plan, whereupon Weizmann, in consultation with Felix Frankfurter, concerned that such an outcome "would compromise the Zionist project," arranged to divert Morgenthau from his planned meetings: "It was no job at all to persuade Mr. Morgenthau to drop the project. He simply persuaded himself, and before long announced his intention of going to Biarritz instead of Egypt."
Weizmann, Brandeis and Frankfurter had, indeed, been responsible for prolonging the war, for the benefit of the zionist project.

We, the American people supported the blockade that, as Lesley Stahl reminded Madeleine Albright, cost the lives of half-a-million Iraqi children.

Since 1995, when AIPAC agents drafted the D'Amato Sanctions legislation, we the American people have provided the enforcement muscle behind the Jewish desire to economically destroy Iran. In 2007 Ed Royce, then-representative from heavily-Iranian Jewish Orange County, CA, stated that the goal of sanctions was to so rile the Iranian people that they would riot and overthrow their government.

That is no different from the tactics Jewish leaders used against Germany in 1916-1919, and again 1933 -1940. When collective punishment by threat of starvation of civilians did not work, British and USA resorted to a campaign of terror bombing.

Is that what's next for Iran?

Never again?

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I disagree with several other elements of Habakuk's narrative, but that's for another day.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Hey, you won't ever get me to say anything bad about Armenians: many were my classmates in Alborz Highscool and many more served honorably in Engineering units during Iran-Iraw War. A few were martyred. In Iran, in Lebanon, or in Syria, Armenians are not the ones who aim to destroy the state; Sunni Kurds are.

[Babak Makkinejad]

I agree, sensitivity training as you describe it is foolish. And its indulgence by Americans indicates, quite patently, the intellectual failure of the Enlightenment Tradition; where such distinctions were supposed to have been obliterated by the Cult of Reason.

[Babak Makkinejad]

But Sally Henning's treatment was another indication of the shortcomings of the Enlightenment Tradition; marrying her would have socially destroyed Jefferson. And a similar situation obtained in France and in England. I think intermarriage is the only way forward, then and now.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Lastly, I think Italy is the greatest country on Earth, without a doubt, and the most civilized. I feel sorry for where they are, perennially choosing bad leaders since before Mussolini. I confess that I do not know why, they are a great people.

[JP Billen]

In the Iran-Iraq War tens of thousands of Kurds, both Sunni and Shia, were martyred fighting for Iran.

But lately, it appears that ordinary Shia Persians are trying to destroy the state. They have burned over 700 banks (many owned by the IRGC), gas stations, and government sites in Tehran and throughout the country. 4000 arrested. It is being blamed on outside influence. The leadership apparently believes that life is so wonderful in Iran that all citizens are content an everything would be fine if only the Pahlavis, the CIA, the Saudis, and the Gulfies would leave them alone.

[turcopolier]

JP Billen

I was a participant in that war. I would say that the northern Kurds fought for themselves, not for Iran. The great makority of them were Sunni and had no particular adherence to Shia causes.

[Babak Makkinejad]

JP Billen

2500 Revolutionary Guards were killed by Kurds to restore - again for the hundreth time - the writ of the central government in Western Iran.
Hey, you guys started this long war and cannot expect it to be a picnic for Iranians.

[Leith]

You are right about the Peshmerga in northern Iraq. With Iranian support they liberated Sulaymaniyah and came within an inch or two on the map of liberating Kirkuk. But they fought for themselves and NOT for Iran and the Ayatollahs. Ironically they fought under the command of General Shirazi, the man who had butchered as many Kurds as Saddam had. But there were many Iranian Kurds conscripted into the Regular Army and even some into the Basij. I was speaking of them.

I for one and I think most here would like to hear of your experiences during that war.

[JJackson]

"Once the current state of israel let's its inhabitants become true neighbours with all other peoples among which they live ..."
That seems wildly optimistic and highly unlikely to happen. The Israeli voters are not going to resolve the problem with their neighbours without giving up much of the occupied territories and with about a tenth of the electorate now living there suggesting such a thing would be political suicide.

[turcopolier]

leith

My memoir is at DoD for security review. We will see what they will let me publish about that.