Congratulations are due to John Podhoretz, chosen to become the next editor of Commentary in 14 months. Nonetheless, the appointment is shocking. Podhoretz is famous on the internet as a gadfly and horse’s ass; once he sent me a note, "We know where you live" when I was talking about neocons… Google him and you come up with a lot of impish invective. Commentary is supposed to be a serious publication.
Neal Kozodoy is the current editor of Commentary. He scores in my book because he has run a challenging and completely absorbing magazine that stands for something, even though I disagree with just about every word. When he was a young man at Harvard, Kozodoy did an important thing: he helped Jacob Katz translate into English (I believe from Hebrew) a historical classic, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770-1870. A beautiful book, beautifully written. Kozodoy’s failure was in not applying the lessons of Katz’s book to the present day, for not understanding that leaving the ghetto has had its reiteration in our day in the ascension into the American power structure of Jews. Of course he’s hardly the only one, but he had the intellectual preparation to recognize the theme. Instead of chronicling assimilation and documenting and explaining the Jewish rise–important journalistic responsibilities–he has chosen to make the magazine a tribune for the Zionist summons, including the work of Ruth Wisse and Hillel Halkin (whose columns J.J. Goldberg also runs, again in a place where he might be chronicling assimilation). On the upside, there is Gabriel Schoenfeld, who is always compelling, and Norman "World War IV" Podhoretz, who has managed to make Islam as diverting as Stanley Kubrick made Communism in Strangelove.
I wonder whether young Podhoretz will grasp the nettle, and assign someone (me?) the important task of coldly describing assimilation and documenting the great sociological rise of American Jews. Somehow I doubt it.
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the Brutal Bargain:
I believe that it was Norman Podhoretz who referred to assimialation as the "brutal bargain." It was brutal to give up ones's culture or most of it and act like an imitation WASP– the level of assimilation that America used to demand of all immigrants when WASP's ran it. In exchange for assimilation, Jews were allowed to rise pretty much unfettered.
But today, people forget the brutal bargain: a country can only cohere if its people love it and have no second loyalty to another country or a transnational group. In recent days we have witnessed the debacle of the resolution regarding Armenian genocide. It matters not a whit to me what you call that massacare. What matters to a goyim like me are my three relatives fighting in Iraq. Therefore, we cannot afford to antagonise a key ally like Turkey.
Similarly, Jews need to understand that they are America's elite. They need to act like the WASPs of the 20th century and figure out how to make this country work again. And the U.S. aint functioning. Hollywood is destroying the culture and Wall Street incentivises companies to offshore jobs and careers destroying communities.
Yet our elite, 51% Jewish according to the Jerusalem Post, is so self absorbed in their own money-making schemes and backing Israel that they rarely if ever contemplate what is going on and their own role in it.
Remember, the brutal bargain: to get the benefit of the bargain–a great country to live in, you gotta give more than a lot. You gotta give your heart to it. And you cannot give your heart to Israel, or a transnational identity and these (formerly)United States.
Come on people! show us your leaders who loves America like an Eisenhower, a Macarthur or George C. Marshall.
"Similarly, Jews need to understand that they are America's elite. They need to act like the WASPs of the 20th century and figure out how to make this country work again."
John… You've missed the point.
WASP America is like Chief Seattle's, Native-American, America, the project of one tribe that is passing into history.
WASPs may dress up like Indians sometimes, and dance around a campfire but they never become real Indians. And the Indians are the only people with a real claim to this land like a Frenchman has to France or an Englishman to England. The rest of us… ALL of the rest of us, are just their uninvited guests.
It is in America that the WASPs discovered who they were and played themselves in a film written and directed by themselves. Now it is the Jews turn.
What Indians did, they did according to their nature-loving natures. What WASPs did, they did according to their own thin-lipped, tight-assed natures. And what the Jews are doing and will do, they will do according to their natures and thus will define their natures over time. They will have no excuse. There are no obstacles in America to their complete self-expression through action. It is in America and not Israel where Jews will discover who they really are, what their values really are, what their true measure is. Humanity and history will be their judge.
Chief Seattle and his people, when America was theirs, expressed themselves and left spirituality, legends and poetry… now they run casinos.
The WASPs of Lincoln, Emerson, Edison, Ford and the Wright Brothers discovered themselves: created a world power, killed, enslaved, wrote great books, thought noble thoughts, created fantastic machines and invented new ways of working. Now they shop.
Now it is the Jew's turn to step up as the WASPs step down. Its their turn at the wheel, to define themselves through action. If they screw up they won't be able to blame it on the goyim, because now THEY are the goyim.
"Beyond the Melting Pot"
_________________________
I just re-read 'Beyond the Melting Pot – The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City' by Nathan Glaser and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The M.I.T. Press, 1963.
The authors say on Jewish assimilation:
- "Intermarriage, an important sign of integration, remains low among Jews. The 1957 sample census showed that about 3.5% of married Jews were married to non-Jews, and the proportion is possibly even lower in New York …"
- "The religious institutions are so strong because they serve the social desire to remain sepearte to begin with."
- "A good deal of this Jewish togetherness is simply frightened and unimaginative, and its only purpose is to maintain separateness."
I wonder how this has changed during the last 40 to 50 years.
Glenn Greenwald (once again) did a skilled fileting of the neo-con nepotism that poisons our cultural debate "Nepotistic tough guys and their coddling parents." A must read. (I wish Glenn hadn't referred to him as "JPod." It's an insult to both A-Rod and Ipods.)
Under boy's reign, I predict Commentary will cease to exist. NR used to be a serious mag, but is no longer–nowadays it's a piece of frat-boy dreck, despite the skilled wordsmithing of Derbyshire (who someday will awaken to the fact that he is in league with sewer-trout).
I used to subscribe, now I wouldn't want to give them the click-through (which, holding my nose, I just did: the title of Buckley's piece "Is Rudy Catholic? Does it Matter?" confirms my disgust). These people aren't credible: they're propagandists for mass-murder and Empire, no better than Goebbels.
NR nowadays adheres with devotion to their master's thinking:
"Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct."
"Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths."
"the principle— which is quite true in itself — that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility."
Or this Hitler quote:
"But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success."
They are filth on the bootsoles of our country, all of them. May they rot in hell.
But unlike the goyim, they hold a right of return; let's see where they are taking us ever since the full impact of the Immigration Act of 1965.
WASPs built a great civilization.
Hyphenated this and that is now in the process of destroying it. Anyone else wondering what next week's meaningless Congressional Resolution will be?
Mukasey's confirmation hearings are going on right now, being live-narrated by (my hero) Glenn "bring 'em back alive" Greenwald. Read the short excerpt below, and ask yourself: on what planet, in what universe, does this administration imagine itself to be protecting Americans?
"But worse, as Feinstein pointed out, Hamdi was detained on a battlefield in Afghanistan, not on U.S. soil. So she asked again:
would you advise the President that he has the power to detain American citizens on U.S. soil with no charges? This time, forced to answer, Mukasey gave a disturbing, evasive non-answer: he said, in essence, that he is not sure that there is legal authority now to do so given the Second Circuit's reversal of his decision.
To Mukaskey, then, it is an open question whether the President can imprison U.S. citizens, arrested on U.S. soil, with no charges of any kind. Shouldn't that be a rather significant hurdle to his becoming Attorney General, to put it mildly?"
Watch the crap-artists at NR, the puke-spewers at the Weakly Standard leap to Mukasey's defense. Unlike enablers of alcoholics, these people know exactly what it is they are doing; aiding and abetting the rape of the U.S. constitution.
Phil Dick was right: the empire never ended.
so zionism is the opposite of assimilation?
Schoenfeld has a dark side.
I quote him via Commentary in http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/07/updating-ajc-attacks.html .
"…in the judgment of the political scientist Peter Skerry, we may now be witnessing the emergence of a new force in American politics. Writing in Time, and citing a whole range of such convergent interests, Skerry calls this a 'Muslim-liberal coalition' (more accurately it might be called a Muslim/Arab-liberal coalition). If he is right, and if this coalition can be organized to act with any degree of coherence, it could indeed end up, through sheer numbers alone, wielding a disproportionate influence on American politics [my emphasis], to the clear detriment of the interests of American Jews."
In theory the USA is supposed to be a democracy. Normally, a political group, whose power comes from sheer numbers alone, is described as wielding a proportionate influence on American politics. Schoenfeld and those American Zionists that agree with him have a clear anti-democratic un-American agenda.
Podhoretz' comment "We know where you live" hits close to home because it has only been from Zionist sources that I have been harassed and threatened because I've offered my opinions on US foreign policy with regards to Israel. It's as if there's an army of freelance sayanim lying in wait to pounce on anyone (especially goy) who dares to refute the official narrative.
After 9/11 and in my capacity as the (one time) staff advisor to a campus student atheist group, I would venture into forums for different religious groups and try to further my understanding of their beliefs. Though in the ummah.com forum I had posters telling me my disbelief would put me in bad stead with Allah, no one ever threatened me personally or tried to harass me via the internet.
That changed when I commented at the LA Jewish Journal Forum. In addition to the harassment from a person who was later banned for making death threats against the forum moderator (DaveK – an ex-IDF US resident – who was then allowed back on with a new nick – mdanin), I was later banned for the somewhat innocuous statement that Israel has lied and murdered (as evidenced by the attack on the USS Liberty) and by my claim that it appeared that Israel had used radiological weapons in their previous attack on Lebanon. Though the last point might be debatable, the moderator declared that no anti-Zionist voices would be allowed (though the forum said it was for readers of the LA Jewish Journal, which I was – they later added to their guidelines that no one would be allowed to argue that Zionism = racism).
Much as baseball is a game of percentages, I think this illustrates how the discussion is shaped in a myriad of ways where the pressures against stepping out of line are sometimes subtle but ever-present. I am grateful to voices such as Phil's and the other posters here that further the discussion in commendable ways and often invite my tormentors to try to make their case in a venue where their disinformation is not taken as gospel.
Has anyone asked themselves how these guys became the "elites" Are they really more competent, look at the economy. Are they really more intelligent, look at the immoral corruption of due process? Are they really more defensive of American interests, we have never had lower standing in the world? And our kids are nothing but cattle or cannon fodder. Education is worse now than it has ever been, almost as if the country now requires stupid badly educated people who will never question or challenge the "elite's"
The jewish people are glorying in the unremitting power they have in America, yet how many of them are being honest enough to acknowledge that America has never been in such economic or social peril. The country is being destroyed, we're buying our kids and killing Arabs and the whole world has nothing but contempt for us.
Glenn Greenwald used the fairly inoffensive term 'nepotism'. God forbid that any one should speak of a 'cabal' here. He will be immediately listed as a co-author of the updated Protocols.
But information about just such a phenomenon at a specific time and place, pre-war France, can come from the most unexpected quarters
On the 18th of February 2003 a conference on "global anti-semitism" was held under the auspices of the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at Hebrew University.
One of the people who gave a paper there was Dr. Simcha Epstein, a collaborator at the Center and an expert on the French side of this story.
He provided an update on the nature of such anti-Semitim as exists today in France but he also did something else. He left a historical cat out of the bag that has, as far as I have been able to ascertain, only been allowed to reappear in the essays of Israel Shamir.
Shamir quotes him as follows (and he offers somewhere the taped words of Epstein as evidence):
"The pre-war anti-Semites said that the Jews of France organized a syndicate secretly bankrolling and subverting the press. And what did the Jews say at that time? They said: 'Of course not! No, it's a lie, of course not! We are not engaged in conspiracies!' And what did the historians and the Jewish historiography coming afterwards say? 'Of course not! It is anti-Semitic drivel!' But we know now from Jewish sources that before the WWII the Jews of France secretly financed the press.
"Since the end of 19th century, there was a secret Jewish organization, well financed, which bought and bankrolled newspapers. Sometimes it took over existing newspapers, which suddenly became pro-Dreyfus because they received Jewish subsidies. New papers were created especially by the Jews. Two very important papers of the period, one was called Les Droits de l'Homme, the Rights of Man, was financed by the Jews, and L'Humanité, which was the Socialist and then the Communist newspaper of France, was also financed by Jews. I say this on the authority Jewish sources of course.
"And this brings us to a dramatic dilemma of historiography. Saying this, saying what I said, is something horrible and unacceptable, because it means that the Jews organized a conspiracy and secretly bought the media, or part of the media. That was precisely what the anti-Semites said at that time, and what they still say today. And we know now from Jewish sources that the allegations were true, that there was a Jewish clandestine activity of bankrolling the press."
Over to Jeffrey Blankfort for the American version of this story.
Arie, help me here. Why can't Jewish people buy newspapers?
And, wasn't Dreyfus vindicated? Emile Zola, and all that? Was L'Aurore, where Zola published his famous 'J'accuse,' not owned by Georges Clemenceau? Wiki notes that on the 100th anniversary of Zola's article, the Roman Catholic paper La Croix apologized for its antisemitic editorials published during the Dreyfus affair. Had La Croix also been somehow suborned?
I'm not being argumentative, just wondering. Also, what is people's opinions of Israel Shamir? Crank, or prophet?
"Arie, help me here. Why can't Jewish people buy newspapers?"
Of course they can. But if we can believe Epstein this was not just a matter of individual Jewish people but of a collusion the existence of which was denied at the time. This amounted to an obvious attempt to prevent people from getting a more or less accurate picture of their sources of information.
It is the story of the lobby all over again. It is legitimate (at any case in the US) to have a lobby, as W.& M. have pointed out. But it is definitely against the rules that should prevail in a democratic society to deny that it exists.
Yes, Dreyfus was vindicated. Epstein obviously didn't make this remark to indicate that, on this particular point, something untoward had happened but that there had been a sudden change of ownership.
Shamir was just a mouthpiece here so what people think of him is, in this context, irrelevant.
But since you ask: I think he is a truth teller and a gifted stylist. That is why Zionists go out of their way to slander him in the most vicious fashion.
For Michael Neumann's more elaborate (glowing) opinion see Google.
One more comment about Dreyfus: the French-Jewish author Julien Benda once wrote that he became a 'Dreyfusard' not so much out of great concern with Dreyfus' personal fate but because he couldn't stand General Mercier trying to impose the 'truth' with his 'big sabre'. I believe that many in the anti-Zionist camp today are there for similar reasons. Concern with the fate of the Palestinians, yes. But also, and perhaps even stronger, the repugnance of and resistance against the attempt to force an authorized version of 'the truth' down our throats.I like to think that Benda, were he alive today, would be with us here.
Here is something we could talk about.
Numbers (meaning of):
From Wikipedia
"The most recent large scale population survey, released in the 2006 'American Jewish Yearbook population survey' estimates place the number of American Jews at 6.4 million, or approximately 2.1% of the total population."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews#Population
Then of course Vanity Fair has more than half of the list of "'the world's most powerful people,' 100 of the bankers and media moguls, publishers and image makers who shape the lives of billions." as Jewish.
Jpost quote.
The latest Reuters/Zogby poll says that less than 23 percent of Americans polled approve of the direction the country is headed, which would make 77 percent who disapprove.
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN1624620720071017?pageNumber=3&sp=true
So the question would be, with 2.1 percent of the population, 51 percent of the most powerful people and 77 percent dissatisfaction, How much of the blame is the American Jewish community willing to take for this whole mess?
24.29 percent (That's 51 divided by 2.1)?
Any at all?
None of the above?
I don't have the answer, I'd like to hear other people's comments.
Damn, David, that's a good question. Your suggested rhetoric (about 25%, viewing jews in a vacuem) is at least arguable. I was always taught that anti-semitism was rooted in scapecoatism, i.e., the non-Jewish elite of whatever country, at any time in history, used the jews within its realm to divert mass discontent from the arbitrary selfish results of the non-jewish elite rule (disconnecting themselves from the fact they used jews as an intermediary implemting national policy). Sartre incorporated this into a skewed notion of the anti-rational antisemite per se, sort of a goy talmud of why the world is at it is. It's no secret that throughout Jewish history, the poor jew got the shitty end of the stick from this entaglement of elite goys and elite (moneyed) jews, eventually. Tevye and the Cossock boy are both victims? If not, why not? Perhaps on a case-by-case basis, both are both victim and serial killer?.
Well precisely, if 51% of the most important people in America are Jewish despite being only 2.1% of the population, than there must be very little "dead wood" in the group. So we are not really talking about a mass of simple shtetl folk led by a few "court Jews". What we see is what we get.
If a large majority of Americans think that the USA is going to hell in a handbasket, then, How much of the blame are the Jews themselves willing to take? This is an invitation to self criticism under the "Pottery Barn Rule".
I think the blog owner here would agree. I can't wait to hear more even though I don't count since I'm not Jewish and only
pay taxes and furnish cannon fodder for USA foreign policy.
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