Posted by Bach's anti-Semitism on Sat, 11 Mar 2017 04:40 | #

Cleveland Symphony Orchestra

wbur, “In Cleveland, Bach’s ‘St. John Passion’ Sparks Conversation About Anti-Semitism”, 10 March 2017:

Recent stories of vandalism and bomb threats against Jewish religious sites and organizations are part of a history of anti-Semitism. In music, one long-standing controversy involves a 200-year-old symphonic work composed by a giant of the classical music world.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s “St. John Passion” has been the subject of protests and boycotts over the years. As the Cleveland Orchestra prepares for a rare performance of the famous composition, David C. Barnett (@DCBstream) from Here & Now contributor WCPN Ideastream explores its problematic past.

This story aired on March 10, 2017.

       
        St. John’s Passion by Bach

Ideastream, “Examining Antisemitism and Bach’s ‘St. John Passion”, 8 March 2017:

Franz Welser-Möst says no one should expect easy answers about troubling art

Examining Antisemitism and Bach’s ‘St. John Passion’ from David C Barnett on Vimeo.

Recent stories of vandalism and bomb threats against Jewish religious sites remind us of the history of antisemitism - in the U.S. and around the world.  One long-standing controversy involves a 200-year-old symphonic work composed by a giant in the world of classical music.  Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. John Passion has been the subject of protests and boycotts over the years.  This famous composition with a problematic past gets a rare performance by the Cleveland Orchestra this weekend.

A Passion is a musical work composed for Good Friday church services, for the purpose of illustrating the last days of Jesus Christ.  As a prominent musician and composer based in Leipzig, Germany, in the mid-18th century, Bach wrote numerous Passions.  But, the St. John Passion carries some cultural baggage. 

“Many people these days don’t know the Bible all that well,” says Bach scholar Michael Marissen. “And very few outside of Germany know German, so they’re not listening to the details of the story, they’re just listening for the general magnificence of the piece.”

And so, they may miss the part where Roman governor Pontius Pilate asks an angry Jewish crowd if he should set the recently arrested Jesus free. The mob says: “Away with him. Crucify him.”

The St. John Passion is Bach’s retelling of the biblical gospel of St. John which Marissen says is even more controversial.

“A key moment in the gospel is in John: 8, where Jesus is depicted as saying that Jews are liars and killers by nature,” Marissen says.

While Bach’s language never gets that blunt, he says Jews are still cast as villains.

“I think we have to make a distinction here,” says Cleveland Orchestra music director Franz Welser-Möst. 

He argues there’s a difference “between the person Johann Sebastian Bach and the genius Johann Sebastian Bach.” 

He also says that Bach and his work need to be seen in the context of their times.

“And when you look at the history of Leipzig, it’s very likely that Bach never met a Jew in his life,” he says.

Case Western Reserve University music scholar David Rothenberg says there are numerous examples of antisemitism in western classical music—- Richard Wagner being one of the most prominent examples.

“He did not like Jews,” Rothenberg says. “He did not like what they did to music, and we have writings of his - penned under his name - about this.  So, it’s a very clear-cut case with Wagner.  And it’s problematic, because he wrote this music that is in many ways great - he was a great dramatic musician.”

In advance of this weekend’s concert, the Cleveland Orchestra organized a panel discussion about the issues raised by the St. John Passion.  Rabbi Roger Klein of Temple-Tifereth Israel suggests such conversations can help modern audiences balance the musical beauty with the sometimes troubling text.

“Look, the first thing to re-affirm is that there are some problems in this piece,” says Klein.  “The piece itself tells us the truth, the greatness and the glorious truth of our world, and the deep and intractable problems.  We count upon our artists to tell us the way things are, and not to cover over the parts of the truth which seem problematic to us.” 

Welser-Möst says he’s personally grown-up with a problematic truth that can’t be covered-up.  And that experience has reinforced his belief that we must confront and talk about art that reflects some of humanity’s darker impulses.

“With the history of the 20th century, having had the Holocaust - where my home country, Austria, played a big part - that’s baggage we won’t get rid of,” he says.  “But, it cannot mean that, automatically, out of politically very understandable reasons, we discard great art.”

The Cleveland Orchestra continues the cultural conversation this weekend.  It will be the first time the Orchestra has played the St. John Passion in over 30 years.

Hear the whole panel discussion online.

Posted by 3 D's of "anti-Semitism" adopted by S Carolina on Sat, 11 Mar 2017 05:10 | #

The (((Cohencidence))) is that this is Nikki Haley’s state, where anti-semitism laws are being test run and she has been groomed for (((duties))) as US ambassador to the UN and then possibly higher offices.

Observer, “South Carolina Bill Breaks Barriers on Fight Against Anti-Semitism” 10 March 2017:

Legislation unties the hands of state institutions to confront growing epidemic.

After a passionate speech on the House floor by Republican State Representative Alan Clemmons, South Carolina lawmakers passed H. 3643 by a margin of 103 to 3. The legislation adopts the State Department definition of anti-Semitism, providing educators and administrators with a clear definition of anti-Jewish bigotry.

“Senator [Tim] Scott encouraged me, along with Senator [Lindsey] Graham, as you can see in the letter on your desk, to move this bill forward in South Carolina, to give our educators a tool for defining anti-Semitism, to take the guesswork out of it, have a uniform definition, which is where we must start to push back on anti-Semitic behavior or any type of bigotry,” Clemmons told the South Carolina House.

“The bipartisan bill codifies the State Department definition of anti-Semitism. It cites “the three Ds” of anti-Semitism as it relates to Israel: demonizing Israel, double standard for Israel and delegitimizing Israel,” explained Peggy Shapiro, midwest director for the Israel education group StandWithUs.

“The State Department definition specifies that ‘criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.’  It’s meant to track unprotected behavior (harassment, vandalism, threats) and treat anti-Semitism as other forms of hate speech.

Joseph Sabag, national U.S. director for the Israel Allies Foundation, noted that this legislation could not be more timely, given the recent targeting of Jewish schools and community institutions across the country.

“Anti-Semitic incidents are on the rise across America and especially on our college campuses. I believe this is an overdue and appropriate response that will strengthen our state’s preparedness to deal with acts of anti-Semitism,” explained Sabag.

Posted by Israeli Apartheid Week on Sat, 11 Mar 2017 05:53 | #

Jerusalem Post, “South African university plagued with antisemitism during ‘Apartheid Week” 10 March 2017:

Earlier in the week several brawls broke out and property belonging to the SA Jewish Union of Students (SAUJS) was thrown around, physically pulled from their hands

       
Students hold a Hezbollah flag during a demonstration at Wits University during ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’

WITS UNIVERSITY was marred by several antisemitic and violent incidents this week during the annual Israel Apartheid Week (IAW).

Some of the alarming incidents included BDS and anti-Israel supporters emulating Hitler in a the Nazi goose-step, flying flags of terrorist organizations and advocating for the death of Jews and Israeli-Arabs.

On Thursday, a video emerged of a Muslim student using his finger to gesture a mustache while performing a Nazi salute and a goose step around the campus as he was egged on and congratulated by his friends in front Jewish and pro-Israel students.

Later in the day a second video surfaced of a BDS activist at Wits advocating that “people want to kill Jews because Jews don’t behave when they are visitors in other people’s countries”.

A flag belonging to internationally recognized terror organization Hezbollah was also prominently displayed during a tense stand-off between BDS and pro-Israel students on Wednesday with some witnesses stating that a Hamas flag was also showcased by the pro-Palestinian lobby at Wits.

Jewish students sang Israel’s national anthem Hatikvah and Hebrew songs of peace during the stand-off and also held up an Israeli flag to counteract the situation.

Earlier in the week several brawls broke out and property belonging to the SA Jewish Union of Students (SAUJS) was thrown around, physically pulled from their hands while posters were torn and threats made by anti-Israel supporters and BDS members.

An event hosted by SAUJS was also disrupted by pro-Palestinian supporters who cut the wires to the sound system and stormed the stage. Police and security were called in to prevent further violence from taking place.

A visiting Israeli-Arab delegate from education organization StandWithUs was also told by pro-Palestinian students that he would be “the first to be killed when they (Palestinians) take over (Israel)” while Jewish students were also threatened that their throats would be cut.

Jewish students sang Israel’s national anthem Hatikvah and Hebrew songs of peace during the stand-off and also held up an Israeli flag to counteract the situation.

Earlier in the week several brawls broke out and property belonging to the SA Jewish Union of Students (SAUJS) was thrown around, physically pulled from their hands while posters were torn and threats made by anti-Israel supporters and BDS members.

An event hosted by SAUJS was also disrupted by pro-Palestinian supporters who cut the wires to the sound system and stormed the stage. Police and security were called in to prevent further violence from taking place.

A visiting Israeli-Arab delegate from education organization StandWithUs was also told by pro-Palestinian students that he would be “the first to be killed when they (Palestinians) take over (Israel)” while Jewish students were also threatened that their throats would be cut.

Despite the continued threats and intimidation, SAUJS stood strong and continued to run their events.

At one point they even danced around the Wits Palestinian Solidarity Committee (PSC), singing Am Yisrael Chai, as the PSC members chanted “Free Free Palestine”.

SAUJS National Chairman Gabi Zollman said that they had seen a lot of antisemitism, physical violence, pushing, shoving and tension between students.

“It’s extremely uncomfortable and we are concerned. Israel Apartheid Week is a time when antisemitic comments can be made freely.

                   

“We can’t understand why IAW is still allowed to happen on university campuses across the world because it gives rise to antisemitism,” he said.

Posted by Unions behind Oxford antisemitism on Sat, 11 Mar 2017 06:03 | #

The Jewish Chronicle, “Exclusive: Unions were behind Oxford antisemitism probe cover-up”, 10 March 2017:

A JC investigation has uncovered new information on how Labour’s NEC ignored a recommendation by its Compliance Unit over repeated antisemitic acts.

CBPYYW All Souls College seen from above. Oxford, UK

Three members of the Unite union with close links to Len McCluskey and Jeremy Corbyn “ran rings around the room” at a Labour National Executive Committee hearing into claims of antisemitism and bullying at Oxford University’s Labour Club.

A JC investigation has uncovered new information on how Labour’s powerful NEC disputes committee came to ignore a recommendation by Labour’s Compliance Unit to issue formal warnings to two students who were accused of engaging in repeated antisemitic acts.

The decision, taken in January, led Baroness Royall, the Labour peer who initially investigated claims of antisemitism at Oxford, to conclude it risked “confirming a widely held view that we don’t take antisemitism seriously”.

Internal documents sent to all 35 members of Labour’s NEC confirm the investigation into one male student, who had close links to both the Labour leader and Mr McCluskey, the Unite general secretary, involved “serious complaints” over “alleged antisemitic incidents linked to OULC”.

The Compliance Unit memo adds that the individual, who is a leading member of hard-left Momentum group, accepted “the language used in some of his online content which had caused offence to party members meant that his ‘meaning was not clear’ and confirmed he would ‘not phrase them that way again’.”

But after a review of all the evidence the memo concluded there was “no case to answer on the counts of antisemitism” but that the student, who now holds a senior role at the National Union of Students, “should receive a warning reminding him of the standards expected of Labour Party members and the importance of due care when discussing sensitive issues”.

A second student, who also holds a senior position in Momentum, was the subject of two charges following complaints about his conduct at OULC.

In the memo, Labour’s NEC were told that on the first count the individual was alleged to have taken part in “abuse and bullying online and in person”.

On a second count he was accused of “instances of antisemitism towards other members”.

Again, Labour’s Compliance Unit confirmed there was “no case to answer on the counts of antisemitism” but concluded he should “receive a warning over his conduct to other members based on his contrition in relation to unreasonable comments”.

On January 17, Labour’s disputes committee gathered at the party’s HQ in central London to decide, among other matters, whether to implement the recommendations from the Compliance Unit.

The JC has learned that around 20 people turned up for the meeting — including three Unite reps, Jennie Formby, Jim Kennedy and Martin Mayer, as well as NEC chair Ann Black, Unison rep Keith Birch and Young Labour’s Jasmin Beckett.

Others in attendance included GMB union rep Cath Speight and Unison president Wendy Nichols.

A source who was present at the NEC meeting said there was clear evidence of co-ordination among the three left-wing Unite members to over-rule the Compliance Unit’s recommendations.

“The three Unite reps ran rings around the rest of the room,” confirmed the source. “They had co-ordinated their response very well.

“At one stage Jim Kennedy suggested ‘these two gentlemen have been through enough’. Martin Mayer actually went so far as to say ‘these two need an apology, not a warning’.

“It was as though they were offering personal character references for the two individuals accused.

“At one point, it was suggested that ‘these two boys, they’ve been dragged through the press, and are now worried about their job prospects’. It was quite shocking to be honest — it just sounded like excuses.”

According to a further source, Unite’s pre-planned intervention caused much confusion in the room.

“Only Keith Birch went really strong on it, speaking in favour of issuing warnings against the two individuals. “Afterwards, he was quite upset about the way it had gone. There was a vote, but it was a weird situation, where people didn’t really know what they were voting for.

“Unite had done a good job, they had confused the issue so much there was no real clarity on what was being voted on. In the end, after Ann Black laid out a few options, there was a lot of talking. It was very problematic.”

Ms Formby and Mr Mayer have been vocal critics of Israel in the past. Ms Formby was behind the attempt to cut Labour’s links with security giant G4S — and left Labour NEC members in shock when she complained that Baroness Royall was not the right person to investigate claims of antisemitism at OULC because she had previously visited Israel.

Martin Mayer also provoked fury after he sent an email claiming the “Israel lobby” had manufactured the antisemitism crisis.

In it he complained that “Labour’s Blairite right wing have used the smear of antisemitism to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership”.

The decision not to issue warnings to the two individuals, which was revealed first by the JC, provoked a furious response from Jewish organisations, with the Union of Jewish Students branded the decision “disgraceful”

Baroness Royall arrives at Downing Street in London, for a Cabinet meeting.

The JC has also seen a copy of the initial Labour Students report into claims of antisemitism at OULC.

Labour Students launched its investigation in February 2016 following the resignation of the club’s co-chair Alex Chalmers in protest at what he described as “intolerant tendencies” towards Jewish members.

After conducting oral interviews with 17 OULC and JSoc members, Labour Students identified six individuals who they accused of “numerous examples of serious, repeated and potentially criminal antisemitism over a sustained period of time”.

The evidence against the six was passed to Labour’s Compliance Unit for investigation. The two individuals cleared of all charges by the NEC have repeatedly denied the allegations, including claims they sang about rockets over Tel Aviv. But in one admission, one of the two accused OULC members admits to using the word “Zio” to refer to Jewish students.

In his admission he says: “I had presumed the word ‘Zio’ was a contraction of the word ‘Zionist’ and had simply used it as such. I apologise unreservedly for this — when I was informed of history and usage amongst far-right and racist groups, I desisted from using it immediately.”

The other student accused of antisemitism is shown to have tweeted support for a “purge” of pro-Israel Jewish members seen of a Facebook group.

In further evidence against the same individual, an article he wrote for the Oxford Student was produced in which he wrote: “Antisemitism is a tired old accusation from Zionists, retreating behind mendacious slurs when losing the arguments.”

A Unite spokesman said: “This matter was decided upon overwhelmingly by Labour’s NEC. Any further questions are a matter for the Labour Party.”

Posted by Swiss Parliament votes to defund "anti-Semism" on Sat, 11 Mar 2017 06:14 | #

JTA, “Swiss parliament lower house votes to halt funds to groups promoting anti-Semitism” 9 March 2017:

BERLIN (JTA) — Switzerland’s lower house of parliament voted to halt public funding for organizations that promote anti-Semitism and hatred.

Submitted by Christian Imark of the right-wing populist Swiss People’s Party, the bill passed Wednesday by a vote of 111 to 78, with all center-right mainstream parties in support. Voting against the measure were the Social Democratic, Green and Green-Liberal parties.

According to a report on the parliament’s website, the motion aims to change Swiss law to ensure that public funds don’t flow to NGOs that act in ways deemed provocative by other groups or states.

The matter now goes to the Council of States, Switzerland’s upper house of parliament, which reportedly will consider the bill in May.

According to the Swiss Basler Zeitung newspaper, Imark, whose party is known for its anti-Muslim stance, introduced the bill out of concern for millions of dollars in Swiss funds that ended up in the hands of Palestinian organizations that call for violence, expulsion of Jews and destruction of the State of Israel. The payments came from Switzerland’s Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, led by Didier Burkhalter of the liberal FDP party.

Posted by Instruction in Shakespeare's anti-Semitism on Sat, 11 Mar 2017 06:22 | #

WHSV3, “American Shakespeare Center hosts anti-Semitism conversation, 9 March 2017:

STAUNTON, Va. (WHSV)—Many showed up on Thursday night to the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton.

Rabbi Joe Blair, of Staunton, explained how William Shakespeare’s play, ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ revolves around some of the anti-Semitist acts going on in the world today.

“That entire concept is not just something from the past,” said Blair. “It’s something that’s current and live today and that we’re living with as it stands.”

Since January, there have been more than 100 incidents around the country labeled as anti-Semitist, including bomb threats, vandalism of cemeteries, and more.

Jeffrey Botwell was one of many who came out Saturday, and he said it’s something communities really need to get a hold of.

“The anti-Semitism events that have been going on are just one small part of the animus among many people in this country towards people of color and different religious persuasion,” Botwell said.

While the conversation continues in Staunton, Rabbi Joe Blair hopes other communities join in as well.

“This is stuff that goes back to the Bible and forward into our future, I’m afraid,” Blair said. “And we all need to be active in responding to it.”

Posted by Southern Nevada under threat of anti-Semitism on Sat, 11 Mar 2017 06:32 | #

Nevada Public Radio, “Reports Of Anti-Semitism Rise In Southern Nevada, 7 March 2017:

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department K-9 officers search[ed] the Jewish Community Center of Southern Nevada after an employee received a suspicious phone call that led about 10 people to evacuate the building on Feb. 27. Jewish institutions across the nation have received more than 120 bomb threats in the past two months

Anti-Semitism is on the rise.

Across the country, we’ve heard of bomb threats and graveyard vandalism; and unfortunately, Nevada is not exempt.

“I don’t think Nevada is immune to some of the incidents we’re having around the country,” Jolie Brislin the regional director for the Anti-Defamation League told KNPR’s State of Nevada.

“It’s domestic terrorism. Domestic terrorism at its finest,” she said.

Larkin said many people associate terrorism with an overseas group trying to hurt Americans, but in reality she said groups and individuals from inside the country are responsible for terrorism.

“Jewish institutions and individuals they’re usually targeted by racial separatists or extremists – both black and white – homegrown violent extremists and international terrorists all alike,” she said.

From bomb threats to graffiti, they’re all designed to instill fear in the community.

Brislin said while the threats and swastikas drawn on synagogues have all made local headlines, there are incidents at schools that have not.

“We definitely have kids who are being bullied because they’re Jewish,” she said. “We have kids who are being harassed because they’re Latino. We have kids who are being harassed because they’re gay, because they’re black. We’re definitely having these incidents around our community.”

While bullying based on religion, skin color or ethnicity is not new, Brislin believes people are feeling more “emboldened” to say what they haven’t said in the past.

She also pointed out that hate is learned. So, when children hear hateful things at home they’ll bring them to school.

Larkin says parents need to know what their children are reading and watching. She said kids can be indoctrinated easily by watching or reading hate speech online.

Brislin says all the anti-Semitic threats and graffiti has actual sharpened the resolve of many communities to stand up to hate.

Posted by UN discusses anti-Semitism on Sat, 11 Mar 2017 06:51 | #

TimesOfIsrael, “UN rights chief says US not doing enough against anti-Semitism”, 8 March 2017:

Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein says ‘greater and more consistent leadership’ necessary to combat ‘surge’ in Jew hatred

               
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein gives a speech on the opening of a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council on February 27, 2017 in Geneva, Switzerland

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said on Wednesday that US President Donald Trump needs to do more to combat anti-Semitism and racism in the US.

“Greater and more consistent leadership is needed to address the recent surge in discrimination, anti-Semitism, and violence against ethnic and religious minorities” in the US, he said at a meeting of the Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Zeid’s comments were made a day after a number of Jewish community centers and Jewish institutions received threats in the sixth such an incident since the start of the year.

At least three Jewish cemeteries in the US have also been desecrated over the past month, with vandals toppling hundreds of headstones.

While the White House has condemned the anti-Semitism, Jewish leaders have called for action to back up the words.

n addition to condemning the lack of movement over the recent swell of anti-Semitic and racist incidents, Zeid also singled out Trump’s policies on immigration, saying they may violate international law.

“Expedited deportations could amount to collective expulsions and refoulement, in breach of international law, if undertaken without due process guarantees, including individual assessment,” he said.

“Vilification of entire groups such as Mexicans and Muslims, and false claims that migrants commit more crimes than US citizens, are harmful and fuel xenophobic abuses,” he added.

Zeid said he was worried about the revised executive order issued Monday banning travelers from six Muslim-majority countries, while also adding that he was “dismayed” by “attempts by the [US] president to intimidate or undermine journalists and judges.”

He also criticized Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, condemning recent settlement building and accusing Israel of using disproportionate force against rocket attacks.

Zeid’s criticism of the US came after Politico reported last month that the US is considering cutting its ties with the Human Rights Council in protest of the body’s actions in general, and specifically its treatment of Israel.

“There’s been a series of requests coming from the secretary of state’s office that suggests that [Secretary of State Rex Tillerson] is questioning the value of the US belonging to the Human Rights Council,” a former official was quoted as saying.

Citing two well-connected sources, the report said that one of the main reasons behind the US entertaining the option of leaving the UN body was its treatment of the Jewish state, which US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley has described as unfair.

         

After her first meeting at the UN Security Council in February, Haley called out the Human Rights Council for “breathtaking double standards” and “outrageously biased resolutions” against Israel.

In a speech earlier this month before a session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, US envoy Erin Barclay called on the body to drop its “obsession with Israel,” which she described as “consistent, unfair and unbalanced.”

“No other nation is the focus of an entire agenda item… The obsession with Israel… is the largest threat to this council’s credibility,” she said. “It limits the good we can accomplish by making a mockery of this council. The United States will oppose any effort to delegitimize or isolate Israel.”

         

Posted by Antisemitism and aliya on Sat, 11 Mar 2017 07:34 | #

Jerusalem Post, “Candidly speaking: Antisemitism and aliya”, 8 March 2017:

Despite rising tensions in the US following the recent uptick in antisemitic acts, the prediction of a wave of aliya American Jews in response is nonsensical.

Police at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City in Overland Park, Kansas (File). (photo credit:REUTERS)

Political correctness still seems to impel us to continue chanting the mantra that we are prohibited from relating to antisemitism as a cause for settling in Israel and insisting that the only motivation for aliya today is to enable a committed Jew to lead a truly Jewish life in his homeland.

Without disputing this, it is now high time for Diaspora Jews in many parts of the world to shake off their denial and confront the reality. They must acknowledge that all indicators predict that their situation is only going to worsen and that in some countries a call for aliya in the face of rising antisemitism is warranted.

Posted by Officials vow to fight anti-Semitism in NYC on Sat, 11 Mar 2017 07:42 | #

New York Post, “Officials vow to investigate increase in NYC anti-Semitism”, 7 March 2017:

       

Police outside a Jewish Community Center in New York after a bomb threat. AP

SEE ALSO

FBI probes bomb threats against Jewish community centers

There were five more anti-Semitic incidents reported in New York City Tuesday alone — and Jewish centers in Manhattan and Brooklyn received hate-filled voicemails this week, authorities said.

Mayor de Blasio vowed a crackdown on what he called an unprecedented spike in threats against the Jewish community “that hasn’t been seen in decades.”

A man called the East Midwood Jewish Center at 1625 Ocean Ave. at 4 p.m. Sunday and left anti-Semitic messages such as, “You k–e take a hike.’’ Around midnight Tuesday, a man reported several swastikas — about 1-foot-by-1-foot — scrawled onto a fire exit in the hall of his Bensonhurst building.

The director of the Orthodox Mount Sinai Jewish Center in Washington Heights also reported six threatening voice-mail messages Wednesday.

Officials say there’s been a 113 percent increase in hate crimes this year through Sunday compared to the same period in 2016.

Posted by Anti-Semitism in South Florida on Sat, 11 Mar 2017 08:03 | #

CBS12, “Combating anti-Semitism in South Florida”, 7 March 2017:

BOYNTON BEACH (CBS12) —

The uptick in threats against Jewish communities across the nation, is taking center stage right here in South Florida.

On Monday, religious leaders, law enforcement officials and a local congresswoman gathered to talk about how to combat anti-Semitism.

“As a Jewish community we are really no stranger to the consistent threat of anti-Semitism,” said Joe Sharp, Executive Director of Katz Hillel Day School of Boca Raton.

He came out to the Mandel Jewish Community Center in Boynton Beach to express his concerns over the more than 120 bomb threats made to Jewish community centers and schools across the U.S. - including one at the Mandel Jewish Community Center in Palm Beach Gardens.

“It’s something we are always vigilant about and the recent wave has just awakened our resolve to want to address these threats,” Sharp said.

In South Florida we’ve also seen cases of hate crimes. Specifically, in Boca Raton where someone spray-painted a swastika on a car door that was parked in a predominantly Orthodox Jewish community.

U.S. Representative Lois Frankel, who hosted Tuesday’s roundtable discussion, explained what religious leaders suggested behind closed doors.

“They asked us as members of Congress to put more money in homeland security grants,” Representative Frankel said.

For Sharp, he tells me he learned communicating with other constituents is key in fighting this growing problem.

“So they know what’s going on and what to expect and how we will respond if god forbid there is any particular threat,” Sharp said.

Frankel said law enforcement agencies in South Florida are being proactive.

There is a $2,000 reward for information to find the person who drew a swastika on a car in Boca Raton.

Posted by etc. on Sat, 11 Mar 2017 08:06 | #

etc., etc.

Posted by $20,000 for reporting anti-Semitic crime on Sat, 11 Mar 2017 22:45 | #

CBS New York, “Cuomo, De Blasio Up Reward Following Spike In Anti-Semitic Hate Crimes”, 10 March 2017:

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — New York officials are raising the reward amount for information leading to an arrest and conviction for a hate crime following a rash of recent bomb threats against Jewish institutions.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio said the joint state-city reward is now up to $20,000 from the state’s current $5,000 reward.

“We have zero tolerance for intolerance and I encourage all New Yorkers to report any instance of hate, bias or discrimination,” Cuomo said in a statement. “We will continue to aggressively work with our federal and local partners to hold those responsible accountable to the fullest extent of the law, keep our communities safe, and uphold our core values of diversity and inclusion.”

“The recent spate of threats against our Jewish community are threats against all of us,” de Blasio said in a statement. “I’m proud to join forces with the governor as we work with our local, state and federal partners in law enforcement to see that the perpetrators are swiftly brought to justice.”

Evan Bernstein, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, described the ADL as “thrilled” that the state and city have acted together to up the reward money, WCBS 880’s Rich Lamb reported.

“It makes you feel really proud to be working in New York, to be part of a state that has leadership like Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio that are going to step up for their people,” he said.

Overall, hate crimes are up 113 percent this year in New York City, officials said earlier this week. There have been 100 incidents so far this year compared to 47 in the same period last year.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 12 Mar 2017 00:00 | #

This Disqus thread (sort comment order by Best) will throw some light on the nature and hopes of the kind of people apparently involved with the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism.

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/24000-for-a-tweet-what-a-dark-day-for-free-speech/19550

Posted by Jorjani's anti-Semitism on Mon, 13 Mar 2017 01:10 | #

Reason and Revolt: JacobinMag, “Aliens, Antisemitism, and Academia”,

Alt-right conspiracy theorists have embraced postmodern philosophy. The Left should return to the Enlightenment to oppose their irrational and hateful politics.

Jason Reza Jorjani.

scandal is brewing in academia. The photo accompanying a recent Atlantic article depicts Jason Reza Jorjani, who received a PhD in philosophy from Stony Brook University, embracing Richard Spencer, the white nationalist who coined the term alt-right back in 2010.

Jorjani, the article details, has become a prominent leader in the movement. He now works as cultural editor for altright.com and serves as editor-in-chief of the New Right publishing company Arktos Media. Last November, he spoke alongside notorious white nationalists Spencer, Jared Taylor, and Kevin MacDonald at the National Policy Institute (NPI) conference in Washington, DC. While Spencer leading the crowd in a “hail Trump” chant may have captured the most headlines, Jorjani’s speech most clearly revealed the alt-right’s perverse philosophical logic.

Jorjani’s writings, political activities, speeches, and media appearances have drawn charges of antisemitism and Islamophobia. In one instance, he suggested that Yahweh and Allah were actually space aliens who enslaved their believers and tricked them into committing genocide. He has openly characterized certain high-ranking Nazi officials as akin to supermen with psychic powers. While Jorjani has vehemently denied the charges of bigotry leveled against him, his public statements do make you wonder.

All of this has drawn uncomfortable and occasionally hostile attention toward his alma mater.

Stony Brook’s philosophy department, famous for its pluralism and progressive politics, seems like an unlikely context for this scandal. Many of the department’s students and professors identify themselves as leftists and liberals. Their focus on Continental philosophy includes research on critical theory, feminism, post-colonialism, and queer and critical-race theories. It came as a great shock, then, that one of Stony Brook’s newest alums had become the self-appointed spokesperson for “Aryan Imperium.”

Jorjani wrote an open letter to the department after he discovered that an attendee at a faculty meeting suggested reviewing his dissertation research. Although there’s no evidence that the department is conducting such an investigation, it has nevertheless elicited a flurry of articles from Inside Higher Ed and industry blogs like Leiter Reports and Daily Nous, which highlight questions of censorship, the revocability of degrees, academic freedom, and the role of dissertation committees.

The institutional embarrassment certainly stems from Jorjani’s reactionary views on culture, which he outlines in Prometheus and Atlas, the book based on his dissertation. But the parade of oddities that appear in the book — including, but not limited to, sorcerers, precogs, ancient aliens, telepathy, and the sunken city of Atlantis — are equally disconcerting.

To defend against charges of antisemitism, Jorjani cites his occasional references to Jewish philosophers like Leo Strauss, brags that there were Jewish attendees at the NPI conference, and reminds readers how even Mussolini enjoyed the support of some Italian Jews, however briefly. His book is even dedicated to Jeffrey Mishlove, a Jewish parapsychologist and media personality.

This evidence doesn’t suffice to overturn the charges, however. After all, the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger dedicated his magnum opus, Being and Time, to his slighted Jewish mentor Edmund Husserl.

We also attended Stony Brook’s philosophy department, where we were contemporaries of Jorjani. We know that some in academia would prefer that we not give this story any more attention. Jorjani, they say, is a morbid curiosity not worthy of earnest critique. This mirrors those liberal pundits who warn against “normalizing Trump” by taking his inflammatory rhetoric and oddball proposals too seriously.

Comforting as this dismissive stance may be, it fails to recognize the place Trump’s and Jorjani’s ideas have in contemporary culture. Calls to ignore these figures are based on the faulty premise that they are lone cranks, aberrant blips on the radar with no real connection to broader trends in politics or philosophy. If only this were true.

Although the alt-right remains on the fringes in the United States, it has come within proximity to real power and is trying to position itself as court philosopher. Figures like Richard Spencer see themselves as the Trump movement’s organic intellectuals, guiding the president’s followers, whom they characterize as a directionless “body without a head.”

These would-be-Rasputins have a plethora of modern antecedents to follow, including interwar intellectuals like Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jünger in the Third Reich, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in fascist Italy, and the Anti-Dreyfusard Charles Maurras in France. Ideas, even incoherent ones, often amass significant political followings.

Second, Jorjani’s work participates in a significant philosophical tradition that combines antisemitism with occult beliefs. The long historical association between irrationalism and anti-Judaism suggests that they emanate from a common worldview. After all, the mystical, neo-pagan writings of Dietrich Eckart inspired much of the Third Reich’s racial policy. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Hitler’s friend and mentor, proclaimed that “every Mystic is, whether he will or not, a born Anti-Semite.”

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, perhaps the first instance of popular conspiracy theory literature, is riddled with images of demonic manifestation alongside Jewish treachery. And as far back as the eighteenth century, Counter-Enlightenment ideologues sought to denigrate reason itself as “Jewish” and political emancipation as a subversive Hebraic plot. Figures like Joseph de Maistre praised the Spanish Inquisition for rooting out the political and spiritual “cancer” of Jewry, and the conservative Edmund Burke compared the French Revolution to a cabal of Jewish bankers.

Criticizing Enlightenment thought has become fashionable across the political spectrum. For the past several decades, more and more academics have called reason into question, especially the sort of rationalist worldview that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This is especially true among left-leaning, postmodern, and post-structuralist thinkers. While it seems surprising that someone like Jorjani would come out of a self-consciously progressive department, suspicion of Enlightenment rationalism has become endemic to liberal philosophy programs like the one at Stony Brook.

This coincides with one of the Alt-Right’s primary tactics: adopting leftist rhetoric as cover for its racialist, nativist, and often misogynistic agendas.

Its appropriation of identity politics for its own chauvinist brand of white identity politics attests to this strategy’s success. If the Left wants to resist the alt-right’s growing power, it needs to return to the roots of Enlightenment rationality, which insists on the equality of all people and provides a strong theoretical basis for social transformation and universal emancipation.

Posted by Anti-Semitic Post Modernity on Mon, 13 Mar 2017 01:16 | #

Now take this all from the (((source))), this is not what I [DanielS] am doing with White Post Modernity, but what (((they))) say the Alternative Right is doing with Post Modernity.

Ibid:

Antisemitism and the Counter-Enlightenment

The alt-right descends directly from the Counter-Enlightenment. When the Enlightenment-era Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789), explicitly based on the principles of universal reason and equality, emancipated European Jewry, traditionalists from France to Prussia and beyond saw it as a violent overturning of the hierarchical worldview that had long ordered European political consciousness.

From its very inception, the Counter-Enlightenment belonged to the Right, quite often of the romantic, völkisch, and antisemitic Right.

At its most consistent, Enlightenment rationalism replaced pluralism with monism. It did away with the medieval conception of a stratified and enchanted cosmos, wherein each part of nature (planets, living things, inanimate objects) obeyed their own local laws. The probabilistic view of the world, which made room for all sorts of miracles and divine interventions, began to disappear. A properly universal conception of nature, subject to one intelligible and determining natural law, displaced the mystery and spirituality that defined the medieval period.

This new worldview elicited an updated view of humanity as well. The qualitative plurality of peoples gave way to a belief in one intelligible human nature, common to all, and commonly governed by our natural faculty of reason. Enlightenment principles thus opposed the subjugation of minority communities based on some supposedly innate difference from the majority.

Baruch Spinoza, a member of the émigré Sephardic Jewish community that fled the Portuguese Inquisition for Amsterdam, became the leading exponent of this “Radical Enlightenment” view. His community of ex-Marranos secretly held onto their Jewish identity after being forced to convert to Catholicism.

Spinoza’s universalism entailed that governments exercise tolerance toward minority communities and grant them political emancipation as citizens without requiring them to shed their particular religious and cultural identities. It also held that members of those communities should be able to freely assimilate, should they desire, into the broader European culture (as Spinoza himself did following his excommunication). Meanwhile, his rationalism empowered minorities to become critics of the dominant culture now open to them.

The alt-right, particularly Kevin MacDonald, has seized on this dynamic as proof of the “destructive Jewish intellect.” The Jew hides behind a mask of cosmopolitanism while trying to subvert and destroy Christian, Western culture. This belief also comes straight from the Counter-Enlightenment.

Late eighteenth century thinkers like Jacobi and Hamann found something suspiciously Jewish about European rationalism. In fact, for decades during this period, being called a Spinozist carried the same weight as being called a communist during the Red Scare of the 1950s.

Among the interwar right of the twentieth century, we find Martin Heidegger linking modernity to Judaism in his Black Notebooks. The Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt agreed, arguing that Spinoza’s Jewish intellect exploited the magnanimity of European liberties to destroy the Christian foundations of Western civilization. Hitler himself asserts in Mein Kampf that the belief that we can know and control nature is essentially a Jewish idea.

One may distill the elements of a right-wing epistemology from these ideas. First, the universe is fundamentally unknowable and mysterious; second, there is no universal human nature, but rather unbridgeable differences between distinct peoples; third, reason itself represents totalitarianism because it blots out essential differences.

From Hamann to Wagner to Heidegger, the idea that the rationalist Jew is the “murderer of common sense” persists.

Opposed to abstract reason, right epistemology instead aligns itself with a subjective, phenomenological approach — the earthy wisdom of ordinary folk. Heidegger calls the mathematical homogeneity of Cartesian space the “forgetfulness of being” because it ignores our lived experiences of the world. Hitler, in a political application of this same idea, characterizes Jewish consciousness as obsessed with “the mass of numbers and their dead weight.”

For this reason, the Jew “denies the value of personality in man, and contests the significance of nationality and race.”

Strange Bedfellows

Feminism, antiracism, socialism, and anticolonialism rank among the most radical fruits of Enlightenment thought, but these ideals could not guarantee human emancipation on their own. By mid-century, an impatient and demoralized Left increasingly threw the Enlightenment baby out with the bourgeois bathwater.

Thinkers blamed universalism, determinism, and what appeared as a deadening mechanical worldview for the mass slaughter of two world wars, the atrocities of the Holocaust, the horror of the atomic bomb, and the misery of industrial capitalism.

Thus began what Georg Lukàcs called the marrying of “Left ethics with Right Epistemology,” a project that tried to derive progressive politics and notions like freedom, equality, and solidarity from a more traditional view of existence akin to the Counter-Enlightenment. Understanding trends in today’s academic Left requires recognizing this crucial shift.

Much of this contemporary thought reinstates an enchanted view of the world that is inherently pluralistic. Drawing on figures like Nietzsche and Heidegger, Left thinkers learned to be suspicious of the rationality that once belonged to them.

This rejection of the Enlightenment was not always consistent or total. Some (Adorno, Horkheimer) retained a tension between the Enlightenment ideas of emancipation, on the one hand, and the Nietzschean critique of reason on the other. Others (Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault) resolved this tension more straightforwardly by moving unreservedly toward Nietzsche.

Outside of Continental thought, 19th century pragmatists such as William James, the exemplary American liberal, placed “the will to believe” over objective reality. That, in turn, gave him license to indulge in the then popular fads of spiritualism and séances.

Perhaps the most striking example of this marriage of Left ethics and Right epistemology appears in certain currents of postcolonial thought. These, as documented by Vivek Chibber, criticize reason itself as not truly universal to all of humanity, but rather as complicit in a Eurocentric project of domination.

The Fool and the Madman

The alt-right will always outflank the postmodern left because, in the words of Mike Pence, the former are “coming home,” while the latter are attempting to camp on alien territory. Jorjani’s book epitomizes this fact. Repeatedly, he uses leftist and progressive thinkers to make his own reactionary points. He can do so precisely because these thinkers have themselves imbibed Counter-Enlightenment thinking.

Jorjani’s case is worth our attention precisely because it is not unique, but typical. His work is the predictable, nearly mechanical consequence of a longstanding intellectual retreat from the legacy of the Enlightenment.

What he lacks in originality, however, he makes up for with consistency. John Locke’s maxim about the “fool and the madman” is helpful here: The fool cannot draw conclusions from even true premises, whereas the madman dutifully draws his conclusions from faulty premises.

Jorjani may be no fool, but we cannot vouch for his sanity. He derides postmodern thinkers like Derrida and Foucault not for their faulty premises — that is, not for their criticism of the Enlightenment — but instead for not allowing their deductions to lead them to disturbing conclusions. Jorjani has no such hesitation, celebrating his conclusions that openly conflict with democracy and egalitarianism.

Jorjani frequently draws on Heidegger and William James. The reliance on Heidegger is not particularly surprising, as he had explicit commitments to National Socialism and never completely managed to distance himself from Nazism. But William James may come as a shock, as his pragmatism is widely considered the paragon of American liberal philosophy.

From James, Jorjani takes the idea of radical empiricism, which rejects any rational standard for what counts as evidence apart from experience itself. James defines experience extremely broadly, as not just bare sense data but also the complex products of culture and spirituality. The latter specifically includes parapsychological phenomena such as Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis.

Against Enlightenment rationality, James’s radical empiricism validates these supernatural abilities as well as a plethora of religious experiences. When it came to revealed religion, however, he humbly maintained that the authors of the Bible were primarily grappling with their own “inner experiences.”

True to form, Jorjani insists on going further. He uses James’s empiricism to identify revelatory and miraculous experiences as real and historical, rather than as symbolic or allegorical. As a result, his reading of Exodus, Joshua, and Ezekiel treats the Hebrew God not as a hazy vision of some transcendent being but as a finite creature. Yahweh does not appear in the manner of an infinite God, but simply as “unknown,” in the sense of an UFO that hovers directly within our line of sight. Jorjani’s hyper-literalism transforms the Jewish God into an extraterrestrial intelligence that telepathically communicates with Abraham, Moses, Joshua, and Ezekiel.

Jorjani believes that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was an aerial attack and that Lot’s subsequent abandonment of the area indicates nuclear fallout. He thinks “some kind of anti-gravitational beam from out of the cylindrical object hovering over the [Red] Sea” destroyed the Egyptian chariots during the exodus.

The Arc of the Covenant “apparently acts as a pathfinder or guidance system” as well as a “sonic weapon” since it “interacts with vibrations of sound, possibly amplifying and concentrating the sonic waves before directing them at the walls of Jericho.” The descriptions of UFOs in Ezekiel line up comfortably with the worst daytime programming on the History Channel.

From Heidegger, Jorjani takes the idea that one’s historical culture matters more than objective reality. As opposed to the Enlightenment belief that time and space are uniform and measurable in some objective way, Heidegger claims that each group of people subjectively wills and shapes its own world and destiny. No common universe belongs to all; there is only a pluriverse of conflicting worldviews and forces. As Jorjani paraphrases Heidegger, each historical community struggles “to become more essentially what it is, or to perish in enslavement to another people and its world.”

Jorjani accepts this Heideggerian “war of worlds” and also embraces the philosopher’s belief that National Socialism possessed an inner greatness. Even here, Jorjani finds a way to push Heidegger still further, arguing that National Socialism represents the confrontation of modern man with the “spectral” essence of technology.

In Jorjani’s telling, technology is not simply mechanical or instrumental, but rather supernatural and world-forming. He recasts the essence of Nazism as an esoteric spectral revolution that started with the occult Thule (Atlantis) Society and ended with Himmler’s Ahnenerbe (ancestral research) institute, organizations obsessed with lost cities, ESP, and clairvoyance that deemed Hitler an actual superman with occult powers.

From these premises, Jorjani concludes that a liberal society based on privacy and equality is impossible. James’s radical empiricism allows him to posit the existence of a “psychic elite” that would require the sort of organic-corporate state that Hitler advocates, and Jorjani cites this approvingly in his Stockholm speech.

He synthesizes this insight with Heidegger’s world pluralism to imply that such a state must not only be internally homogenous but externally world-conquering. This echoes Hitler’s statement at the end of Mein Kampf that the purity of the Aryan race entails its potential to master the world.

Jorjani consistently subordinates theory to practice, science to techne, and evidence to will. As such, his bizarre views on ESP and aliens actually align with and support his racism. Jorjani can believe in ESP without evidence because he believes that the presence of skeptical minds suppresses its manifestation. Similarly, while Tom Davies correctly pointed out all the ways that Jorjani gets his Indo-European scholarship wrong, totally undermining his views on Aryan supremacy, Jorjani wouldn’t care. After all, it is not skepticism or objective evidence, but the sheer “will to believe” that can conquer the world.

The Other Continental Tradition

Nearly everyone seems to miss the point of this story. For the alt-right, the actual scandal of their worldview is often obscured by a fake scandal of their own making: their imagined persecution by liberal or Marxist elites.

Here again, Jason Jorjani’s case is wholly typical. The Inside Higher Ed story, which first set philosophy faculties on edge, discussed whether or not it was fair to revoke Jorjani’s doctorate in light of his recent political activities. Of course, only Jorjani himself suggested such an action was underway.

Likewise, the Leiter Reports misses the point by ham-fistedly criticizing Continental philosophy departments such as Stony Brook, as if the only Continental philosophies were Heideggerian or irrationalist. Other commenters wrongly laid the blame on a philosophical canon unjustly restricted to Western authors.

In truth, Jorjani does away with much of the traditional Western canon and draws heavily, if eccentrically, on Eastern thought, from Japanese Zen Buddhism and Taoism to contemporary anime. Jorjani’s idea of “Europe” is, in fact, decentered: he traces its cultural roots back to the Persian empire, which he emphatically insists was a white civilization before forced miscegenation by Muslim Arab and Mongol invaders. For Jorjani, the fate of “Aryan” Persia constituted what he, with much of the Alt-Right, refers to as a “white genocide.”

His book, Prometheus and Altas, emphatically refutes the claim that intolerance can be remedied by greater eclecticism, pluralism, and interdisciplinarity, all of which have become academic buzzwords. His work is extremely interdisciplinary, incorporating historiography, Biblical hermeneutics, techno-science, parapsychology, cultural studies, mythology, and deconstruction. All of this suggests that pluralism of method and worldview do not necessarily produce progressive thought.

We can avoid Jorjani’s madness, but we must start with the right premises. Jorjani’s utility lies in how, by attacking his philosophical enemies, he identifies the lineage of Continental philosophy best suited to establish a humane and antiracist politics.

From Descartes, Spinoza, and the French materialists to the French and Haitian revolutions to Hegel and Marx, we have a strain of thought that proceeds from an intelligible world to the full emancipation of humanity. We should return to this canon, if we want to effectively resist the rise of an irrational right.

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 13 Mar 2017 10:55 | #

No historiographical reading of the Western Canon that does not allow for Matthew 5:17:

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.

... will be entirely coherent.  Without it, the meaning of the word “universal” too easily slides into the prophets’ service as an “ism”, an ideological construct; and Man (as he is revealed by that fruit of the Enlightenment, Western science) is denied his truth.  Yes, certain laws apply universally.  The universal law applicable to living things is, however, fitness to environment.  In other words, Darwin didn’t just kill the Book of Genesis as a science of the world’s creation, and Man’s, but he killed that part of Enlightenment thinking which was vestigially Judaic in its false application of the universal.  Thus far, however, only the radical right has noticed the fact.

Posted by DanielS on Mon, 13 Mar 2017 11:10 | #

Only the radical right, however, has noticed the fact.

I don’t think that only the radical right observe that human ecologies are evolved in relation to specific environments.

Speaking of Baruch Spinoza, after all the clearing away of Brett Steven’s nonsense, (((Alternative Right))) has invited him once again to dump another filthy load of nonsense. Alternative Right - “INTRO TO THE ALT-RIGHT (5): BRETT STEVENS”, 13 March 2017.

The final paragraph poses this question to him:

Kierkegaard or Nietzsche?

Brett Stevens: Nietzsche, by a mile. I get my Christian fix from Meister Eckhart and indirectly from Baruch Spinoza. No disrespect to Kierkegaard, but Nietzsche took Kant to its logical conclusion and showed us the challenge of the next millennium.

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 13 Mar 2017 11:24 | #

Find me a Western politician, academic, lawyer, MSM journalist, or Third Sector artiste who does not, in respect to Man, mechanically apply universality as universalism.

Posted by DanielS on Mon, 13 Mar 2017 11:31 | #

Post Modernity (White Post Modernity if I may) is conceived precisely to stop such mechanical universal application from running rough-shod cross contextually: it would not say that there are no and can be no shared universals and (qualified, unmechannical) comparisons made on their basis.

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 13 Mar 2017 12:04 | #

But this tendency arises not in modernity but in Christianity.  It got into Enlightenment thinking not merely through Spinoza but through the fact that the Enlightenment thinkers were not irreligious men, not secularists, not anti-Christian in any way.  They opposed Church power, not Christian faith; and accordingly their advocacy of reason was always selective.

You cannot correct this vast error of the historiographical Mind merely by slapping a label on top and declaring that everything has changed.  Christianity itself has to be limited to the realm of the believing heart - it cannot be expunged therefrom without a new faith to succeed it.  At the same time, its intrusions into the public life must be washed away by a mighty flood of completely fundamental thinking.

Intellectually, European Man is acting today as if he is powerless over the process of world-making, and has nothing truly fundamental to say.  The last who stood up and tried was Heidegger.  But that was ninety years ago.  That article you quote demonstrates the historical resilience of Jewish thinking.  We have to be more resilient still, and not less historical in intent.

Posted by DanielS on Mon, 13 Mar 2017 12:40 | #

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 13 Mar 2017 13:04 | #

But this tendency arises not in modernity but in Christianity.  It got into Enlightenment thinking not merely through Spinoza but through the fact that the Enlightenment thinkers were not irreligious men, not secularists, not anti-Christian in any way.  They opposed Church power, not Christian faith; and accordingly their advocacy of reason was always selective.

I didn’t say that Enligthenment thinking came about merely through Spinoza. I don’t consider Spinoza significant in any way, certainly not exemplary of the enlightenment. I was afraid that when I put up the article of what a Jewish person says that modernity and post modernity is, because I was concerned that you might say, THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS AND THIS IS WHAT YOU MEAN BY IT, when that is not the case at all.

You cannot correct this vast error of the historiographical Mind merely by slapping a label on top and declaring that everything has changed.

That is what you have said that I am doing in the past and it has never been true. In fact, it is true of what you are doing when you say that “only the radical right can see the context dependence of adaptation.”

Christianity itself has to be limited to the realm of the believing heart - it cannot be expunged therefrom without a new faith to succeed it.  At the same time, its intrusions into the public life must be washed away by a mighty flood of completely fundamental thinking.

I believe that Christianity is being washed away by several means; your ontology project may contribute, you usually come up with some excellent ideas.

Intellectually, European Man is acting today as if he is powerless over the process of world-making, and has nothing truly fundamental to say.  The last who stood up and tried was Heidegger.  But that was ninety years ago.  That article you quote demonstrates the historical resilience of Jewish thinking.  We have to be more resilient still, and not less historical in intent.

The article that I quoted is absurd. Jews are resilient and determined but anyone who knows and sorts accurately the components of modernity / pot modernity can see right through its motivated Jewish distortions of the terms.

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 13 Mar 2017 13:55 | #

The article that I quoted is absurd.

The Judaic prescription for the gentile at the return of Moshiach can only be justified rationally from the standpoint of Jewish ethnic interests.  There is nothing rational in any other people giving up its natural life, its rights, its interests, its future for the greater glory of a tribal Zadok on steroids for all eternity.  Of course it’s all absurd.  How could the Judaic struggle ever be successfully pursued if it had to explain itself rationally to those over whom it sought suzerainty?

Ultimately, the struggle is over the perfectly rational and, indeed, perfectly irrational ... by any measure, perfect natural and necessary claim on Life of our people and all the manifold peoples of this world.  That is the universal aspect of our truth.  There is no contradiction which is moral or just ... nothing that can withstand the question “Why must these peoples cease, against their desire, to be who they are?” in all its humbling, unanswerable simplicity.

Daniel, it is my clear understanding that this universal will to life requires expression in the form of an holistic system of life philosophy, free of the false and conflicting thaumaturgies of Jewish thought, as it functions through the Enlightenment and its derived marxisms.  In purely moral terms (not that this is only a moral matter, of course), the war of thinking here is between the assignation of value to the human life as it is, in itself, today and the abnegation of value in that life, from which abnegation all humiliations may flow.

Posted by DanielS on Tue, 14 Mar 2017 04:23 | #

GW, have your ontology project: I never begrudged it nor saw it as mutually exclusive to what I’m doing - your ignoring the value of the many things that I’ve brought here (while invariably displaying that you haven’t read, considered and understood the value of what I am saying before inserting belittling and wholly misrepresentative straw men instead - such as proclaiming out of nowhere that I am unthinkingly placing terms willy nilly and post hoc over reality*), however, doesn’t make it the case of my articles and points being trivial and unsatisfying of vital requirements that you believe are to be satisfied only by your ontology project; nor does your ignoring these matters vindicate the picture that you seek in your ontology project as the only significant task.

* I am not sure if you are aware of the vast disservice you perform in this contentiousness. You totally fail to see and understand what’s going on in the broad view of human systemic maintenance, the mistakes that purported White advocates are making, what we are up against, and how important these corrections are by contrast. What you are doing in this contentiousness is an obstruction to helping people to get these vital theoretical matters right by contrast.

Posted by Andrew Joyce, PhD on Turner case on Wed, 15 Mar 2017 01:33 | #

TOO, “Free Speech, Jewish Activism, and the Trial of Jeremy Bedford-Turner”, 12 March 2017:

When I was younger, and first learning to play chess, the part of the game I found most difficult was learning to interpret the intentions of my opponent and anticipate his course of action. Like most novices, my focus was on moving pawns out of the way in order to bring more powerful pieces into play. It was only as time progressed that I realized the importance and inherent power of the pawns themselves, and with that realization came an appreciation for my opponent’s opening strategy.

I was very recently reminded of this learning curve by the slowly unveiling strategy of one of Britain’s Jewish ‘charities,’ the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism (CAA), which has placed free speech in check and threatens mate at any moment. In a case that will have devastating repercussions for free speech in Britain, CAA has proven itself even more influential than the government’s Crown Prosecution Service, which has now capitulated to the Jewish group and granted a judicial review into its earlier decision not to prosecute Jeremy Bedford-Turner, known among colleagues as Jez Turner, for a 2015 speech.

When I was younger, and first learning to play chess, the part of the game I found most difficult was learning to interpret the intentions of my opponent and anticipate his course of action. Like most novices, my focus was on moving pawns out of the way in order to bring more powerful pieces into play. It was only as time progressed that I realized the importance and inherent power of the pawns themselves, and with that realization came an appreciation for my opponent’s opening strategy.

I was very recently reminded of this learning curve by the slowly unveiling strategy of one of Britain’s Jewish ‘charities,’ the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism (CAA), which has placed free speech in check and threatens mate at any moment. In a case that will have devastating repercussions for free speech in Britain, CAA has proven itself even more influential than the government’s Crown Prosecution Service, which has now capitulated to the Jewish group and granted a judicial review into its earlier decision not to prosecute Jeremy Bedford-Turner, known among colleagues as Jez Turner, for a 2015 speech.

The Historical and Political Context

Context is crucial, and it is important to note that the Turner case is the culmination of a strategy that long precedes even the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. This strategy, which in Britain can be traced back to the 1910s, concerns repeated and consistent attempts to bring about the criminalization of ‘anti-Semitism,’ or in other words, to make criticism of Jews illegal.

Although the precise nature of these attempts have fluctuated slightly over time, Jews have been remarkably prominent in the introduction of laws, or influencing the interpretation of laws, that negatively impact on free speech. Following the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946, Jewish delegates attempted to pass a resolution “outlawing anti-Semitism” at that year’s annual Labour Party Conference. [1] However, the bombing immediately cost the Zionists a great many non-Jewish friends within the Labour movement, and the proposal was emphatically crushed. Following the notorious Sergeant’s Affair, in which Jewish terrorists murdered British soldiers in barbaric fashion, another explicit proposal to outlaw anti-Semitism was introduced in the House of Commons, but was rejected at its first reading in 1948.

[...]

Further attempts to achieve such legislation were attempted through stealth, in that they concerned race more generally rather than Jews explicitly.These measures were also introduced, though unsuccessfully, with the assistance of willing White M.P.s with a track record of assisting Jews. Bleich notes that “a small number of individual Labour Party Members of Parliament repeatedly proposed antidiscrimination laws. In the early 1950s, Reginald Sorensen and Fenner Brockway each introduced ‘color bar bills’ designed to prevent discrimination against blacks on British soil.”

[...]

Since 1945, the Board of Deputies of British Jews had also been working on drafting a “group libel law” that it eventually hoped to get passed in Parliament. [5] Efforts to further tighten libel laws were made in 1952 when Jewish M.P. Harold Lever, introduced a Private Members’ Bill modifying Britain’s libel laws for the first time in over fifty years. However, Lever’s efforts were later mauled by a hostile Parliament to such an extent that by the time his Bill became an Act of Parliament, his provisions were not extended, as he and his co-ethnics had hoped, to cover groups.[6] Britain’s first legislation containing any such provision as prohibiting ‘group libel’ was introduced in Parliament by Frank Soskice, the son of David Soskice — a Russian-Jewish revolutionary exile. Scholars Mark Donnelly and Ray Honeyford state that it was Soskice who “drew up the legislation” and “piloted the first Race Relations Act, 1965, through Parliament.”[7] The Act “aimed to outlaw racial discrimination in public places,” though it was soon felt, in Jewish circles, that it hadn’t gone far enough. Crucially, the 1965 Act created the Jewish-led ‘Race Relations Board’ and equipped it with the power to sponsor research for the purposes of monitoring race relations in Britain and, if necessary, extending legislation on the basis of the ‘findings’ of such research.

In 1985, another Jew moved to criminalize expressions of White racial solidarity when M.P. Harry Cohen introduced a “Racial Harassment Bill” to Parliament. Scholar Rob Witte reports that Cohen’s attempt only failed because of “lack of parliamentary time.”[8] The following year, Cohen made a second attempt, which failed, only for Jews to return to more stealthy methods when racial elements were included with the much broader Public Order Act (1986). The Public Order Act had been introduced to Parliament by Leon Brittanisky (renamed Leon Brittan) and supported primarily by Malcolm Rifkind, a descendant of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. It was another clever piece of work. Brittan’s team had been tasked with drafting a White Paper on Public Order to deal with a series of miners’ strikes and demonstrations. Although issues of race were not remotely related to the events provoking the White Paper, Brittan saw that the government was eager to pass legislation restricting the miners as soon as possible and, sensing that the wide-ranging bill would endure little opposition, he ensured that additional elements were included, such as the criminalization of “incitement to racial hatred.”[9] It is Brittan’s clever little addition which has posed problems for more vocal racial nationalists in Britain today, and which is being used in part in the CAAs war on Jez Turner.

The Turner Case

On July 4th 2015 Jez Turner, along with fellow patriots, staged a static protest in Whitehall, opposite Downing Street, in protest at the development of the Shomrim, a Jewish ‘defense’ group that possessed all the trappings of an illegal religious police force. During the protest, it has been alleged that Turner gave a speech in which he stated that that “all politicians are nothing but a bunch of puppets dancing to a Jewish tune, and the ruling regimes in the West for the last one hundred years have danced to the same tune.” Turner is also reported as having stated that Jews played an influential role in the French Revolution and both World Wars, before concluding that England was a content and successful nation during the period of the expulsion (1290–1656), and adding that we should “free England from Jewish control.”

Although the initial report to the police was made by the more senior Jewish organization, the Community Security Trust (CST), Gideon Falter, head of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism,[10] was the most vocal and ardent pursuer of the case. The police, in accordance with established process for ‘hate crimes,’ passed footage of the speech to the Crown Prosecution Service’s counterterrorism division. It was here that Falter began to encounter difficulties, and why a further Jewish campaign to hinder free speech in Britain has acquired momentum in the last twelve months. While Leon Brittan’s inclusion of an ‘incitement to racial hatred’ clause in the 1986 Public Order Act was an important hit on free speech, it was not all-encompassing, and it did not come close to making ‘anti-Semitism’ illegal. The Crown Prosecution Service’s policy guidelines on cases involving ‘incitement’ under the 1986 Act clearly state that the language employed by a defendant must have been “threatening, abusive or insulting. These words are given their normal meaning but the courts have ruled that behavior can be annoying, rude or even offensive without necessarily being insulting.”

Moreover, further comment from the CPS has made it clear that the language employed by the defendant must have been “grossly abusive or insulting” or moved beyond reasonable “criticism” of a group, for a prosecution to be valid, since “it is essential in a free, democratic and tolerant society that people are able robustly to exchange views, even when these may cause offence.” At some point in the aftermath of Falter’s report to the authorities, the CPS made the decision that Jez Turner hadn’t said anything illegal and ceased legal action against him.

Five months after the speech, Gideon Falter approached the Chief Crown Prosecutor for London with a view to discovering the charging decision in the case. He was informed by the CPS that Turner was entitled to free speech and hadn’t broken any laws. Falter then attempted to request a Victim’s Right to Review, a request that was declined on the basis that Turner hadn’t mentioned Falter and therefore Falter couldn’t claim victim status. Falter then used his influence to obtain meetings with both the Chief Executive of the CPS and the Director of Public Prosecutions, both of whom informed Falter that Turner simply hadn’t broken the law. At that point Falter, who has previously boasted of “holding the government’s feet to the fire,” issued legal proceedings against the CPS in his effort to make ‘anti-Semitism’ illegal, with or without legislation..

Continued at TOO

Posted by Greetings from Jez and the Dawn on Wed, 29 Mar 2017 14:43 | #

Remember folks our Cause is just, our Cause is true and WE ARE NOT ALONE!

All across the globe patriots are engaged in the same struggle against the same dark forces of globalism that we are fighting against, and all are keen to know how we are faring in Britain and wish us well. Fraternal greetings from The Golden Dawn!  Never give up, never give in, and despite the odds WE WILL WIN!

Posted by Jez talks with Patrick Slattery on Thu, 20 Apr 2017 16:20 | #

Jez talks with Patrick Slattery about his tangle with the YKW

Posted by Youtuber Chabloz blocked in UK on Thu, 03 Aug 2017 16:06 | #

Forwarded from Alison Chabloz

Dear all,

Apologies for the mass email once again, and apologies to those of you who took the time to respond to my previous updates and have yet to receive any personal reply. My bail terms and accompanying inconveniences limit my Internet usage to mobile-only, but I promise to try and sort through my messages and respond as time and data allowance permit.

Today and yesterday I received yet more email notifications from YouTube regards ‘action taken’ on my videos following ‘legal complaints’. Please see below YouTube’s updated list of countries where my videos are now blocked:

Like Amazon, YouTube is ignoring UK law, no doubt following pressure from the Israel Lobby. This now brings the total of potential viewers blocked from viewing my songs and other videos to well over 300 million.

If Gideon Falter of the Campaign Against Antisemitism had not brought a private criminal prosecution against me for (((Survivors))) at the end of 2016, it’s reasonable to think that my video would still be floundering around the 6,000 view mark. Instead, the grand total is now over 30k. As plenty of other users have noticed, YouTube also regularly culls the number of views. For this particular video - the total is now frozen at 30,666 !

To celebrate, I have uploaded two songs to Vimeo which are available with a password. One is an old number of mine ‘Social Media Queen’ updated for 2017 - I’m now banned from so many online platforms, would the enemy be trying to force an early abdication?

The second is one of my most recent rants ‘Too extreme for the BNP’. Clearly, I AM too extreme for Twitter and YouTube, but for the BNP as well ? (*rolls eyes).

Mark my words, they’ll be going after my PayPal account next..

Social Media Queen 2017

Too extreme for the BNP

Patriotic wishes to all,

Alison Chabloz.

Posted by Compare Jez case to Agobard of Lyon on Fri, 03 Nov 2017 04:45 | #

Occidental Observer, “Agobard of Lyon and The Origins of the Hostile Elite”, 2 Nov 2017:

Andrew Joyce, Ph.D.

As part of the introduction to my forthcoming volume of essays, Talmud and Taboo, I’ve included an overview of key developments in the historical relationship between Jews and Europeans. During the course of this overview I emphasize the historical suppression of European responses to Jewish group behavior, an important and perennial aspect of Jewish-European interactions. This suppression/taboo, as a thing in itself, tends to be less explored and understood when compared to the attention devoted to more obvious manifestations of Jewish influence (e.g. assertive action in influencing immigration control), but consideration of it is crucial to a complete understanding of Jews as a hostile elite. A working theoretical definition of what is meant by “Jews as a hostile elite” is of course also necessary, and is taken here as the implication not only that Jews have historically been opposed/hostile to the interests of the European masses, but also that Jews have had direct access to political power, or significant levels of influence over European elites in possession of it. While writing the introduction to Talmud and Taboo I was primarily concerned with the origins of the Jewish acquisition of this power or influence in Europe, the mode of its expression, and its evolution over the course of centuries. Due to restrictions of space in the introduction to Talmud and Taboo, I want to take the opportunity here to expand on one such example.

To date, our best understanding of modern Jewish political strategies in the context of the “taboo” can be found in Chapter 6 of Kevin MacDonald’s Separation and Its Discontent: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, titled “Jewish Strategies for Combatting Anti-Semitism.” One section deals with “Political Strategies for Minimizing Anti-Semitism.” MacDonald notes that Jews have been flexible strategizers in the political arena, buttressed by an IQ substantially above the Caucasian mean, and argues that the foundations for Jewish influence are wealth, education, and social status.[1] Today, Jews apply this influence in order to stifle negative discussion of their group, and at times to stifle any discussion of Jews at all. MacDonald points out that this is normally done via extensive communal support for “self-defense committees,” which are a feature of every Diaspora population. These committees invariably lobby governments, utilize and influence legal systems, produce pro-Jewish and pro-multicultural propaganda, and fund pro-Jewish candidates or initiatives. Another of their vital functions has been to monitor and expose “anti-Semites,” and to use legal systems in order to exact individual punishments, thereby making an example of individuals and thereby imposing a deterrent atmosphere on the rest of the population.

It almost goes without saying that in the modern era Jews have been very successful in making anti-Semitism a disreputable and unsavory enterprise. Perhaps more than any other shaming device, accusations of anti-Semitism can be socially and professionally devastating. Academic studies which argue that anti-Semitism has a rational and understandable basis, such as MacDonald’s work, are monitored and excluded from scholarly discourse in an unceasing effort to maintain Jewish control over narratives concerning their group and deflecting antagonism to it. A foundational idea underpinning the creation of this most modern taboo is that anti-Semitism is a personal flaw indicative or psychiatric disorder and a social aberration, epitomized by the writing of the Frankfurt School of Social Research. Despite achieving an almost monolithic position in the public mind of most European populations, it is particularly noteworthy that such conceptualizations of anti-Semitism as an irrational and inexplicable form of psychosocial illness are extremely recent, having been developed only in the last sixty years by a cast of Jewish intellectuals—particularly those at the nexus of psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School.

This reframing of European understandings of anti-Semitism has been due not only to Jewish influence in academia, the media, and the development of social policy, but also to a general ignorance among Europeans of the historical experiences of their ancestors. Europeans cannot come to terms with the issue of Jewish influence purely by confronting its contemporary manifestations – they must engage with the experiences of their forebears, and understand how and why they viewed Jews as a hostile elite.

All of these considerations led to me to one question: when and how did this “hostile elite” begin? Although Jewish influence was noted during the life of the Roman Empire, I excluded this period from my deliberations for a number of reasons. The first was that I wanted a close contextual proximity to present conditions; in other words, as a bare minimum I felt it necessary that I should find an early example of Jewish influence that still mirrored enough features of the modern experience to be broadly valid in comparison. Despite a proliferation of expatriate communities, during the Roman Empire, or at least until the sack of Jerusalem by Titus in AD 70, Jews could be considered as predominantly a national people rather than a Diaspora. It could thus be argued that relations between the Roman Empire and Jewish populations could on some level be understood within the framework of traditional diplomacy and power relations.

It was only after Rome’s demolition of the Second Jewish Commonwealth in the first century that the Exilic period ushered in significantly novel forms of Jewish political activity. These political activities also became uniform, with Amichai Cohen and Stuart Cohen noting of the new Diaspora: “Notwithstanding variations dictated by vast differences of location and situation, all Jewish communities developed and refined a remarkably similar set of broad [political] strategies.”[2] The second reason is related to the first in the sense that this set of Jewish political strategies had to be present in a broad geographical area of Europe. This breadth of geographical dispersion, and the subsequent extension of Jewish interactions with European populations, only occurred after the fall of the Roman Empire. A third and final reason for omitting the period of the Roman Empire was that my precondition of close contextual proximity required that the nation states of today, at least in their prototypical form, should be broadly recognizable. Finally, the Jews of Visigothic Spain, although wealthy, powerful, and incredibly hostile, have been discounted due to their failure to establish a relationship with Visigothic elites. This failure most notably resulted in the Jews providing assistance to a replacement elite — Muslim invaders.[3]

The set of “broad political strategies” referred to above requires further elaboration. Lacking a state, and insistent on remaining apart from their host nations, Diaspora Jewish populations developed an indirect and at times highly abstract style of politics in order to advance their interests. In Jewish sources it became known as shtadtlanut (“intercession” or “petitioning”), and represented a personal and highly involved form of diplomacy or statecraft that, in the words of the Cohens, “prioritized persuasion.”[4] In the modern era we are familiar with such shtadlans as the Anti-Defamation League, and AIPAC. These bodies claim to represent all Jews, and the interests of all Jews, and do so when interacting with, interceding with, or “persuading” host nation governments or other arms of the White elite. However, the shtadlan as a large formal body or committee is a relatively modern development, and was a necessary response to the end of absolute monarchy at the beginning of the nineteenth century (and the corresponding rise of parliamentary democracy and the modern state). Prior to c.1815, Jews often pursued their interests via a small number of very wealthy and “persuasive” individual shtadlans who would form personal relationships with a king, prince, or other powerful members of the European elite. This was most pronounced during the Early Modern period when Hofjuden, or Court Jews, negotiated privileges and protections for Jews with European monarchs. An excellent example is that of Daniel Itzig (1723–1799), the Court Jew of Kings Frederick II the Great and Frederick William II of Prussia, who used his wealth and influence to persuade these monarchs to abolish many restrictions on Prussian Jews and grant them a succession of privileges. Put simply, the concentration of power in individuals meant that Jewish interests could also be negotiated by individuals.

Continued….

Posted by Comparing Jez case to Agobard on Fri, 03 Nov 2017 04:49 | #

Ibid:

However, although we may still see echoes of the old shtadlans in individuals like George Soros or Sheldon Adelson, the dispersal of political power following the collapse of the absolute monarchies required a greater number of Jewish “persuaders,” thus necessitating the development of the modern Jewish “diplomatic” organization. Of course, the majority of these modern bodies vigorously deny their “diplomatic” or political function, preferring to style themselves as “self-defense” bodies or similar abstractions. Writing on the subject of shtadtlanut Samuel Freedman has argued that Jews have “become wedded to a “crisis model” in community-building, in which either Holocaust commemoration or opposition to anti-Semitism are the raison d’etre for the largest communal organizations, from the Simon Wiesenthal Center to the American Jewish Committee.” This masking of deeper political interests should be seen as combining deception (of Europeans) and self-deception (among some Jews) in the broader Jewish strategy, or at least as a device designed to boost the recruitment of “persuaders.” Jews (at least those not consciously engaged in deception) and Europeans are thus led to believe that such bodies are necessary to defend and protect a vulnerable community in crisis, when in fact their primary function is to advance the interests of an extremely wealthy, culturally invulnerable, and politically powerful community — a hostile elite.

In searching for the origins of the hostile elite I was therefore looking for the earliest possible example of a Diaspora Jewish community in which shtadtlanut was in evidence — the obtaining of privileges and protections from a European elite, contrary to the interests of the masses of a given European population. Although I would very much welcome further suggestions from readers, the earliest convincing case that I have come upon concerns that of the Carolingian dynasty during the lifetime of Archbishop Agobard (c. 779–840).[5] Agobard was a Spanish-born priest and archbishop of Lyon during the Carolingian Renaissance. A fearless controversialist, Agobard gained fame and notoriety during his lifetime — and a place in posterity — by expressing his opposition to Jewish political influence in the Frankish kingdom.  Agobard’s Spanish origins are important. Bernard Bachrach notes that Agobard would have been very much aware of the scale and impact of Jewish influence, writing that “Agobard was born and raised in the Spanish March and Septimania where the Jews were extremely powerful. … He was aware of the power that the Jews of the Narbonnaise had exercised for centuries.”[6]

The Frankish context in which Agobard found himself also contributed to an inevitable clash at Lyon. Although some of the early Carolingians had passively tolerated the steady expansion of Jewish economic activity in the Frankish kingdom, Emperor Louis the Pious (778–840) “systematized” a “pro-Jewish policy” by eliminating or disregarding earlier restrictions on Jews, and issuing a charter granting them a number of privileges and protections.[7] Kenneth Stow remarks that “the charters of privilege that Louis the Pious granted to Jewish merchants were the forerunners of all others the Jews in medieval Europe would receive.”[8] Essentially, what we see here is the birth of the formal, symbiotic relationship between Jews and self-interested European elites. The charter of Louis the Pious enacted laws that protected Jews and also developed an administrative apparatus to enforce his policies — mainly via the office of the magister Judaeorum. Louis encouraged Jewish economic activity in the belief that he would be personally enriched by doing so.

This “encouragement” involved some very dark aspects. In particular, it involved turning a blind eye to the incredibly hostile and often illegal behavior of the Jews in his realm. Bachrach describes the Jews of Lyon as “militant, aggressive, and powerful,” and notes that Louis and his officials “apparently ignored gross violations of the law by Jewish slave traders who bought and sold Christian slaves and kidnapped and castrated Christian youths for the Muslim markets in Spain.”[9] Jewish slave trading was of course nothing new, nor was it unusual for European elites to permit Jews to trade in slaves. Pope Gelasius (reigned 492–496) had formally allowed Jews to bring slaves into Italy from Gaul, and Charlemagne had also allowed Jews to engage in slave trafficking during the middle of the eighth century.[10] The Spanish Jews of the tenth century made most of their wealth selling Slavonian slaves to the Caliphs of Andalusia.[11] William Phillips argues that by the time of Louis the Pious, Jews “predominated” among the slave traders supplying Muslim Spain.[12] What truly set this period apart from earlier tolerances, however, was the fact that it had become common knowledge that Jews under Louis were actively kidnapping, castrating, and selling Christians with impunity — something that was not only nominally illegal in Frankish lands, but throughout Christendom. And it is here that Agobard enters the stage.

According to Jeffrey Cohen, around the year 822 Agobard began a campaign in Lyon against the Jews based on his “horror over indications that Jews enjoyed a social status superior to that of Christians.”[13] His primary focus from the start was the issue of Jewish trading in Christian in slaves. In a letter titled “On the Insolence of the Jews,” sent to Louis the Pious in 826/7, Agobard explained:

  A certain man from Cordoba arrived, fleeing from Spain. He said that he had been stolen as a little boy by a certain Jew of Lyon 24 years before and sold, and that he had fled this year with another boy from Arles who had been likewise stolen by a Jew six years earlier. When we sought out those known to the man who was from Lyon and found them, some said that others had been stolen by this same Jew, others bought and sold, and that this year another boy was stolen and sold by a Jew. At that moment it was discovered that many Christians are sold by Christians and bought by Jews and that many unspeakable things are perpetrated by them which are too foul to write.

Agobard goes on to stress that his campaign involved preaching “to Christians that they should not sell Christian slaves to [Jews]; that they should not allow these Jews to sell Christians to Spain nor to possess them as paid domestics.”

Agobard and his associates apparently also began to purposefully seek out and baptize Jewish slaves in order that they may come under the nominal protection of the law and be freed from Jewish slavery.[14] Agobard’s crucial error was in believing that the law would be enforced. Although aware of Jewish wealth and power, he was confronting something very new — the birth of the hostile Jewish elite. Jews had forged an alliance with Louis the Pious via a prototypical form of shtadtlanut, and their immediate response on hearing of the commencement of Agobard’s campaign (and in particular that Agobard had baptized and was protecting a slave belonging to a Jew) was to turn to their royal ally. Louis, fearing that the economic basis of his mutual arrangement with the Jews would be undermined by the renegade priest, readily obliged, and dispatched the magister Judaeorum to bring Agobard into line.

Agobard’s difficulty in coming to terms with the spiritual and ethnic treason of the emperor is evident in his letter, and for some time he seems to have sought multiple explanations for the failure of Louis to side with his own people. Reading this recently, I became quite emotional upon reflecting that we Europeans still struggle to come to terms with the scale of treason among our elites over a thousand years later — Agobard’s words read as both tragically naive and ominously prophetic. Beginning with his incomprehension that Louis would issue the Jews a formal charter, Agobard writes:

  When the Jews first arrived, they gave me a message in your name and another one to the man who rules the district of Lyon in place of the court; [this message] ordered him to offer aid to the Jews against me. We absolutely did not believe that such messages as these issued from your judgment, although they were read out in your sacred name and sealed with your ring. The Jews began to rage with a certain odious insolence, threatening that we would be afflicted with every sort of injury by the agents whom they had obtained to take vengeance upon Christians. After them, Evrard [the magister Judaeorum] arrived and repeated the same thing and said that your majesty was truly angry with me because of the Jews. Then the aforementioned agents arrived, holding in their hands a tax code(?) (stipendialis tractoria) and a capitulary of sanctions which we do not believe exists by your command. [Emphasis added].

Unfortunately for Agobard, he was summoned to the Court at the instigation of the Jews. Bernard Bachrach comments that “The Jews…were forcefully represented by a powerful advocate. They also had influential friends at court. … The court not only found against Agobard, but the emperor added the personal humiliation of dismissing him from the palace in a preemptory manner. Louis provided the Jews with a diploma bearing the imperial seal that bore witness to their victory.”[15] Persisting in his conviction that the emperor couldn’t possibly side with the Jews over his own people, Agobard continued to deliver sermons against Jews and to write to Louis explaining himself (as seen in the above extracts from one such letter). He insisted that Louis had been misinformed or that the edicts bearing his seal were forgeries.[16] Bachrach writes that Agobard believed Louis and other elites at court “were either pawns of Jewish interests or acting from a misunderstanding of the situation.”[17] What he failed to consider was the possibility these figures were willing accomplices of the Jews, together comprising a hostile elite.

The patience of the hostile eventually wore thin. As the missi dominici [envoy of the ruler] set off for Lyon “with a plethora of pro-Jewish documents and a plentitude of power to enforce government policy, Agobard fled.”[18] Agobard noted from his exile “the Jews were made joyful beyond measure.” He added that many of his associates “fled or hid or were detained.” Priests loyal to him were threatened by Jews and royal agents, and, as a consequence, “did not dare to show their faces.” Subsequent efforts to confront Jewish influence in the Frankish lands were forced into more abstract and indirect forms rather than “opposing imperial policy overtly or by attacking the Jews directly.”[19] Jeffrey Cohen remarks that, in the end, Agobard utterly failed to alter Carolingian Jewish policy, or prevent its further evolution.[20] Despite this failing, Agobard entered the Jewish consciousness as an emblematic hate figure, with the nineteenth-century Jewish activist and historian Heinrich Graetz comparing him to the “villainous Haman” of the Book of Esther.[21] He was only dislodged from the bitter expanse of Jewish memory when the twentieth century provided Jews with a new “Haman,” and a new chapter in their lachrymose self-authored history.

The story outlined here is important in the history of the Jewish Question for a number of reasons. The first is that is a very early Western European example of non-religious clashes of interest, by which I mean that although we see two religious communities in confrontation the basis for that confrontation is not rooted in the spiritual. As Jeffrey Cohen concedes, Agobard’s “well-known complaints regarding the Jews hardly amounted to a systematic theological exposition.” Rather than theology, his complaints “address an array of specific, practical issues.”[22] These “specific, practical issues” concerned Jewish hostility towards Europeans, the abuse of Europeans by Jews, and the extent of Jewish wealth, privilege, protections, and political influence in European societies.  These issues, more than the putative “prejudices,” “neuroses,” or “religious pathologies” posited by Jewish intellectuals, have been the perennial elements underpinning the Jewish Question for more than a thousand years. They provoked an entirely rational response — European efforts to fight back, or, as it would eventually come to be known, “anti-Semitism.”

Perhaps the most important aspect of Agobard’s tale is that it exposes the origins of one of the most uncomfortable aspects of Jewish influence — its reliance on cooperation with our own elites. Only by engaging in a symbiotic relationship with our own corrupt rulers can Jews gain full access to power and an impunity when wielding it. As such, we should grow in the understanding that answering the Jewish Question will by necessity involve a reckoning with the issue of how we govern ourselves and by what qualifications we select our elites. If Whites possess a weak sense of ethnocentrism and high sense of individualism (certainly when compared with Jews and other non-Whites), then this should provoke a discussion on how to tie the fate of our rulers or governments to our people. In ancient times, both Celtic and Nordic societies took this idea to an extreme, sacrificing their kings in times of famine or hardship (see for example, the Ynglinga Saga). The fate of the king was quite literally tied to the people — if the people suffered, the king would suffer more than anyone. As time progressed, kings became ensconced in their hierarchy, their palaces ever larger and ever more distant. Then came the parliaments and the politicians, they too ever more distant from the needs of the masses and the direction of their interests. Accountability in all instances was reduced to nothing.

To conclude, as I write this news arrives from Austria. The boy wonder Sebastian Kurz issues a statement: “The battle against anti-Semitism and our policy of zero tolerance against all anti-Semitic tendencies is very important to me. It is a clear pre-condition for the formation of any coalition under my leadership.”

Oh Agobard, my brother from centuries past, I would share your feelings of disbelief, had I not seen the same treachery played our for a thousand years and more.

Posted by The trial of Jez on Mon, 28 May 2018 19:44 | #

The Trial of Jeremy Bentham Turner

Posted by Alan Dershowitz' hypocritical chutzpah on Mon, 13 Aug 2018 16:56 | #

A later, 30 minute segment from (((Frame Games))) longer discussion of the push for universal criminalization of anti-Semitism.

In this part, he examines Alan Dershowitz’ hypocritical chutzpah:

Posted by Dershowitz on Mon, 08 Oct 2018 08:24 | #

The Wire, On Sunday, Harvard Law professor emeritus and legal scholar Alan Dershowitz appeared on “Fox & Friends” with host Pete Hegseth to discuss the possibility that Democrats, should they take the House in the November midterm elections, would attempt to investigate or impeach Justice Kavanaugh:

Alan Dershowitz Says He Will ‘Fight Within The Party’ Against Radical Democrats.

[...]

Look, for the sake of the American people, we have to move forward. The Democrats have to stop trying to have these revenge inquisitions. Let Justice Kavanaugh sit; let him serve as a justice; let’s evaluate him as a justice.

[...]

DERSHOWITZ: Well, I want to see checks and balances on the three branches of government, and I think having the Democrats control the House is a good thing for America, but I will fight tooth and nail against -

HEGSETH: But you wrote a book about not impeaching the president and that’s what they’re gonna try to do.

DERSHOWITZ: They shouldn’t do it, and I will fight them on that. That’s what [democracy is all] about.

Dershowitz is going to pretend that he’s all about democracy, checks and balances…..

Ibid:

DERSHOWITZ: Well, I want to see checks and balances on the three branches of government, and I think having the Democrats control the House is a good thing for America, but I will fight tooth and nail against….

Against anyone who would opposed his Jewish supremacist agenda.

Anyone the least bit familiar with Dershowitz knows that his primary concern is not democracy, checks and balances. His primary concern, rather, is “is it good for Jews?”

With that, he will defend Zio-Trump and Trumpstein’s appointment of right-wing corporatist sell outs to the Jewish agenda of merging White and Jewish political and genetic interests…

Such that a drunken, right-wing, corporatist sell-out, Kavanaugh, can impede choice, and with it, our agency; and increase the brown blending of the gentile masses that they can then preside over in their own Jewish/White blend…

Further, he would enhance their capacity to thwart our unionization against their hegemony…. while myopically polluting our ethnonational environs in order to increase their profit in international corporate-Jewish alliance at our expense.

And finally, to maintain the practice of torture, as Dershowitz likes, in order to pre-emptively quell radical opposition to this supremacism and hegemony.