![]() |
CAUSES OF HOSTILITY TOWARDS JEWS:A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW - PART 6 |
|
|
When Victims Rule. A Critique of Jewish Pre-eminence in America For those who even know about such a past, Jewish historiography these days tends to assert that communist and socialist Jews, in Russia and everywhere else, did not have any interest in a Jewish identity. This position asserts that such Jewish communist involvement was an investment in a secular universalism that leaves behind the traditional Jewish collectivist identity. In explaining away why so many Jews were secret police terrorists under the communist regime in Eastern Europe [see above links], Jewish author Michael Checinski writes that
This is a common Jewish apologetic tact today, to explain away the Jewish identities of so many communist terrorists by proclaiming that they had no connective identity with others in their work circles. Even here, Jewish consensus proclaims, even as Jews murdered others, Jews remain victims of anti-Semitism. [Much more about this in future chapters] But as Kevin MacDonald suggests, "surface declarations of a lack of Jewish identity may be highly misleading ... There is good evidence for widespread self-deception about Jewish identity among Jewish radicals ... [Bolshevism] was a government that aggressively attempted to destroy all vestiges of Christianity as a socially unifying force within the Soviet Union while at the same time it established a secular Jewish subculture." [MACDONALD, 1998, p. 60] Arthur Liebman notes this phenomenon in "the flood of Yiddish-speaking Jews" to America in the early years of the twentieth century:
As Jewish author John Sack notes about the many officials of Jewish origin in Poland after World War II who headed the repressive communist secret police system:
Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz puts her Jewish identity in a socialist context this way:
Jewish author Anne Roiphe, today an ardent supporter of Israel, addresses the same theme:
Rolphe's first hypocrisy was that she was born to wealth: "I am the product of the [economic] wits of my grandfather." [ROLPHE, 1981, p. 113] And despite an identity as a Marxist, Leftist, liberal, or whatever else she thought she was, Rolphe inevitably was drawn back to "this odd mystical connection to the Jewish peoplehood, " [ROLPHE, 1981, p. 182] writing an entire volume about it (subtitled A Jewish Journey in Christian America). "I thought," she wrote, "that ... I had asserted my ego as separate from the forced march of Jewish history ... I had thought I had cut out the roots of the tree that was causing too much shade in my garden ... [but] the tree without roots had surprised me with its staying power." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 180] Jewish communist Sam Carr was released from a Canadian prison in 1951 for spying for Russia. "Ironically," notes Erna Paris, "given the fact that he 'wasn't much of a Jew,' he did become the leader of the Unified Jewish People's Order after 1960." [PARIS, E., p. 176] In Argentina, Jewish publisher Jacobo Timerman was imprisoned by the ruling military junta in 1977. It was pointed out to him by his right-wing interrogators that he was a member of a "registered affiliate organization of the Communist Party" in his youth. Timerman denied that he joined it because of any interest in communism, but, rather, for how it could serve his other ideological interests: "I belonged to it as an anti-Fascist, a Jew, and a Zionist." [TIMERMAN, J., 1981, p. 116] "A number of Jewish socialists, particularly in the later stages of the [German] Wilhelhmine period," notes Adam Weisberger, "exhibited the phenomenon of returning to Judaism ... although admittedly often in secular or accentuated form. Joseph Bloch, for example, originally an ardent assimilationist and German nationalist, became perhaps the chief proponent of Zionism in the German socialist movement." [WEISBERGER, A., 1997, p. 98] In 1961, Jewish author Daniel Aaron criticized the shallow attachment many in radical movements really had to their left-wing postures: "Some writers joined or broke from the [Communist] Movement because of their wives, or for careerist reasons, or because they read their own inner disturbances into the realities of social dislocation. To put it another way, the subject matter of politics ... was often the vehicle for non-political emotions and compulsions." [WALD, p. 14] Sigmund Freud (although not a Marxist, his areligious work is often joined to Marxist theory) insisted that his psychological speculations applied to all people and tried to dismiss any evidence of his own special Jewish particularism. But he was always conflicted about it. As he once wrote about his connection to Jewish identity, "When I felt an inclination to [Jewish] national enthusiasm I strove to suppress it as being harmful and wrong, alarmed by the warning examples of the people among whom we Jews live. But plenty of other things remained to make the attraction of Jewry and Jews irresistible -- many obscure emotional forces, which were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of inner identity, the safe privacy of a common mental connection." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 180] (The clique that runs, and enforces, the psychoanalytic world, as we shall see later, remains overwhelmingly Jewish). Jewish messianic elitism in leftist "universalist" circles endures to this day. In 1992, Michael Lerner, prominent editor of the left-wing Jewish journal Tikkun, suggested remedies for curing anti-Semitism in leftist organizations. The cure? "Put[ting] self-affirming Jews in positions of leadership in your organizations" [LERNER, Socialism, p. 115] and indoctrination sessions to sensitize non-Jews to Jewish needs (Lerner's term is: "internal education programs.") Erna Paris notes the history of Jewish communism in Canada:
As Adam Weisberger notes this Jewish identity root in the profound historical influence of Jews in revolutionary communist and socialist movements that aimed to destroy the existing social order:
"After being nurtured by a culture that saw itself superior by virtue of its special relationship with God," note Jewish authors Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter,
Arnold Eisen, in a discussion of Leslie Fiedler (who started out as a socialist) and other well-known Jewish American "intellectuals," notes the transformative essence of Jewish identity from traditional Judaism to modern political movements: "Here the entire language of chosenness -- suffering, witness, mission, reciprocity, exclusivity, covenant, and even repudiation of Christianity and idol worship! -- has been appropriated and hollowed out in order to endow the Jewish intellectual with the role of prophet to his own community and the world." [EISEN, p. 136] Salo Baron goes back further in time, but underscores the same Jewish identity foundation, which can, however incongruously, simultaneously straddle both "universalistic" communist movements and "particularist" Zionism:
David Horowitz recalls what it was like growing up in a New York City household with his communist parents, an environment still founded upon the Jewish religious myths of redemption:
Even the founder of Hadassah (the women's Zionist organization), Henrietta Szold, once wrote that "the world has not progressed beyond the need of Jewish instruction, but the Jew can be witness and a missionary only if he is permitted to interpret the lessons of Judaism as his peculiar nature and his peculiar discipline enable him to interpret them." [GAL, A., 1986, p. 371] How Zionism, the modern secular expression of traditional Jewish ethnocentrism, is supposed to "instruct the world that has not progressed beyond the need of Jewish instruction" is never explained. [Note Zionism's implicit racism and oppressive policies against non-Jews in the later chapter about Israel]. With the erosion of the New Left in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Israel's 1967 victory in its war with surrounding Arab states, distinctly Judeo-centric political configurations arose out of the Jewish universalistic left-wing community that, as Mordecai Chertoff notes, "affirm[ed] Zionism ... and Judaism ... as socialists and radicals." [CHERTOFF, p. 192] Such organizations included the Jewish Student Movement, the Jewish Action Committee, Kadimah, the Jewish Student Union, the Maccabees, American Students for Israel, the World Union of Jewish Students, Na'aseh, Jews for Urban Justice, the New Jewish Committee, the Jewish Liberation Project, the Youth Commitee for Peace and Democracy in the Middle East, and the Committee for Social Justice in the Middle East. Such organizations produced between 20 and 40 periodicals with a combined circulation of over 300,000. [GLAZER, NEW p. 192-193] "The extreme radical groups of the New Left came out officially in favor of the Arabs," notes James Yaffe, "but it generally conceded that there was much opposition from Jews in those groups. 'Jewish kids in the Movement,' one of them told me, 'have a double standard on Israel. A non-Jewish leftist is much more likely to condemn Israel than a Jewish leftist." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 193] "There are still those [Jews] who are impressed," wrote Nathan Glazer in 1971, "by what seems to be the New Left concern for all of mankind, but more and more ... are discovering ... that there is a limit to the number of trumpets one can respond. [Jews] are responding, in greater numbers to their own." [GLAZER, p. 196] "How many times," complained anti-Vietnam War activist Gabriel Ende in the same year, "have committed Jews joined with others in Vietnam and student power rallies, only to have their erstwhile companions stab them in the back with boorish anti-Israel remarks on the morrow?" [ENDE, G., 1971, p. 59] Traditional Jewish tendency to cluster and control is likewise evidenced in the opposite political field -- American conservatism. Pat Buchanan -- the outspoken conservative newspaper columnist and former candidate for the President of the United States (widely despised in Jewish circles as an "anti-Semite") -- has attacked the 'neo-conservative' movement of Irving Kristol and others (many Jewish), who Buchanan likens to "fleas who conclude they are steering the dog, their relationship to the [conservative] movement has always been parasitical." [SHAPIRO, Pat, p. 226] In more recent history, reflecting another popular angle of Jewish chauvinism under the guise of universalism (in a theme to be discussed at length later), Eli Weisel, the well-known semi-official spokesman for Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, wrote a formal report to the President of the United States about what the proposed $168 million United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC would be. While up to six million Jews were killed in the Nazi extermination programs (and over three times that number of non-Jews may have been killed, [MILLER, p. 253] depending upon how one defines "Holocaust," Weisel, true to Jewish particularist / univeralist form, noted that the museum would focus mainly on Jewish victims:
A poignant -- and current -- example of this worldview is the aforementioned Michael Lerner, a man who has been provided precious moments in the national spotlight by an influential admirer, Hillary Clinton. Incredibly, Lerner frames American universalistic ideals themselves as oppressors of American Jewry. "Jews have been forced," complains Lerner," to choose between a loyalty to their own people and a loyalty to universal ideals." [LERNER, p. 5] What moral person of any faith or ethnicity is not "forced to choose" -- by his or her own conscience -- between what Lerner cannot openly state: selfish, exclusionist self-interest club interests versus sacrifice for the common good? That Lerner imagines only Jews have faced such a dilemma in the American -- or any -- context is but evidence of the blind depth of Judeo-centrism. Lerner is enraptured, overwhelmed, by his own sense of Jewishness. True to form, "it is [a] hidden vulnerability," insists Lerner, "that constitutes the uniqueness of Jewish oppression." [LERNER, p. 65] Leftist, rightist, Orthodox, atheist, or anything else, the origins of Jewish incessant, undying obsession with their "uniqueness," "exceptionality," "difference," "messianism," et al is to be found in the Judaic religious record. As Adam Garfinkle sees it:
Causes of Hostility Towards Jews - Part 1 || Causes of Hostility Towards Jews - Part 2 || Causes of Hostility Towards Jews - Part 3 || Causes of Hostility Towards Jews - Part 4 || Causes of Hostility Towards Jews - Part 5 || Causes of Hostility Towards Jews - Part 6 || Table of Contents
Disclaimer - The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||



















What are stem cell enhancers? 