Journalist Max Blumenthal is one of those Jews who claim to defend the Palestinians by “disavowing” Gilad Atzmon. Atzmon recently published on his website a video of Blumenthal being interviewed, denouncing Atzmon as “anti-Semitic”. Atzmon countered Blumenthal with his customary sarcasm (1).

Blumenthal is a leading member of the “hate industry”, a well-funded, Jewish-led movement which exploits the idea that Europeans are exceptionally xenophobic. White guilt has long been a weakness of the American left. Agents used allegations of “racism” against activists to undermine the movement against the Vietnam war. Covert Zionists are using similar techniques to undermine the campaign to persuade co-ops to boycott Israeli produce.

Blumenthal’s attempt to “clean out” the Palestine solidarity movement is part of the same strategy.

But he is at least more consistent than some of Atzmon’s supporters, who replace concern about “anti-Semitism”, with opposition to “Islamophobia”. Many of them believe that Islamic terrorist attacks are faked up by Western intelligence services to turn people against Muslims, and that violent conflict between Sunnis and Shi’ites is the result of Zionist manipulation. They employ victimology to give special rights to members of their favorite minority. An amusing example of this double standard can be found in a recent article by Shabana Syed on deliberation.info (2).

Blumenthal’s disavowal of “anti-Semitism” is consistent with his whining about “Islamophobia”. His writings classify ideas he disagrees with, rather than answer them (3). It’s an approach to evaluating ideas which was perfected by the Soviet Union, and is alien to Western skepticism: “this idea belongs to that category, therefore it can be dismissed out of hand”. An obvious example of this technique is labeling those who question the scale of German war crimes “holocaust deniers”.

The unanswerable allegation “Islamophobe” is just as much an attempt to stifle discussion as the use of the classification “anti-Semite”. It’s logically inconsistent to criticize Blumenthal’s attempts to politically correct the Palestine solidarity movement at the same time as endorsing his denunciations of “Islamophobes”. You can’t promote Soviet-style thought policing when you feel like it, then complain when it turns around and bites you.

Whether a viewpoint is “anti-Semitic” is irrelevant. Meaningful statements are more-or-less true or false. One cannot be concerned about their truth or falsehood at the same time as worrying if they might offend someone – if you encountered a concept which was both offensive and true, you would have to choose between these two approaches. The same applies to “Islamophobia”, etc..

1. http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/max-blumenthal-on-anti-semitism-neo-fascists-and-gilad-atzmo.html

2. http://www.deliberation.info/the-woolwich-terror-attack-exposes-saudi-and-israeli-collusion

3. http://www.councilforthenationalinterest.org/islamophobia/item/839-the-great-islamophobic-crusade

Nazir Ahmed was suspended from the Labour Party for claiming that a “Jewish conspiracy” was responsible for his conviction for dangerous driving.

This led another Muslim, Usama Hasan, to make a groveling apology in the Guardian for Muslim “anti-semitism”. He says he helps run charities which encourage dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians – on equal terms. He uncritically cites complaints of “anti-semitism” by the Community Security Trust. This organization includes in that category denying the right of Jews to ethnically cleanse Palestine, and the claim that the Israel Lobby is powerful.

The examples Hasan gives show how useless terms like “anti-semitism” are. He apologises for his former view that Jews are over-represented in the world financial system. He implies this analysis is similar to the views expressed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which range from alleging that Jews introduced democracy into Holy Russia, to alleging that they practice child-sacrifice.

I’ve just mentioned five “anti-semitic conspiracy theories”:

1. The Jewish media persuaded the courts to convict Ahmed of texting while driving

2. Jews are over-represented in the global banking system

3. Jews were responsible for trying to bring Russia into line with the other European countries

4. Jews sacrifice children

5. There is a powerful Jewish pro-Israel lobby

Some of these ideas are ridiculous. Some are reasonable. Some are libelous. One isn’t even critical of Jews, unless the reader happens to be a centenarian Tsarist aristocrat.

All the above claims have in common is they say things about Jews. Putting them together under the blanket term “anti-semitism” does not help evaluate them. The only reason anyone would claim they are in the same category is to try to discredit reasonable criticisms by amalgamating them with unreasonable ones.

Obviously, theory no. 4 is highly offensive. But I don’t reject it because it’s offensive; I reject it because it’s false; the evidence for it was manufactured by the Spanish Inquisition.

Hasan concludes “it’s time to ditch conspiracy theories that focus on blaming the other”. No, that’s not a valid criterion for ditching a conspiracy theory. The only valid reasons are that the theory has been falsified, or that it has been superseded by a more economical explanation of the known facts.

There is no need to apologise. I don’t apologise to Germans because I once believed the Allied version of world war II, nor to Ukrainians because I used to think the Russian Revolution had something positive about it. If Hasan thinks he’s made a mistake, he should simply say so. His craven apology is nothing more than obeisance to a more powerful sector of the community than the one he belongs to.

Christopher Dorner showed the Los Angeles Police Department to be an incompetent gang of cowardly murderers.

Brutality

After reporting police brutality and being dismissed from the force for doing so, he decided the only way to press his case was to write a manifesto on Facebook, and take out some scum. As always, the mainstream media described the manifesto as ‘rambling’. In fact, it’s completely coherent.

After their initial casualties, the LAPD started shooting at random, nearly killing two women. Dorner appeared in various places, wasting more pigs. The chief of police claimed to belong to a persecuted minority – “To be targeted because of what you are… that is absolutely terrifying”. Eventually, they tracked Dorner down to a cabin in the mountains, and deliberately burned him to death.

One of the many lessons to be learned from Dorner’s fight is a re-examination of the Waco massacre of 1993. The FBI claimed to have fired tear-gas into the buildings in a ‘compound’ occupied by a religious cult, the Branch Davidians. (‘Compound’ is a media term for buildings inhabited by people whom the police intend to murder). So how come the buildings burned down, killing seventy-six people, including twenty-two children? The authorities claimed the Davidians set the fire themselves. Following the murder of Dorner, we know the answer is that the tear gas canisters used by the US authorities cause fires. If they can cause a ski cabin in the snow to burn down, they can definitely incinerate buildings on a hot, windy, April day in Texas. The police know this – they refer to these canisters as ‘burners’, and they used them, on February 13, 2013, in their words, to “burn this motherfucker”.

Protest supporting Dorner outside LAPD HQ:
“As the protesters stood Saturday, drivers passing by honked, waved and gave thumbs up”

Racism

A hero can be mistaken. I said above Dorner’s manifesto is coherent, but that doesn’t mean it’s all true. His descriptions of brutality toward the poor, mentally disturbed and homeless, and the police lying about it, are correct. But ‘racism’ is a more difficult charge to prove.

He claims LAPD officers sang Nazi songs. Did they target Jews? No. So their use of slurs toward other minorities, though obviously unacceptable in public servants, does not demonstrate that their violence was driven by racial prejudice. A video of white cops beating up a black man does not prove racism. The evidence is just as compatible with the hypothesis that the role of the police is to keep the poor in its place, and the indubitable fact that minorities are over-represented in that sector of the population.

Another problem with the ‘racism’ charge is more practical. Suppose the police took notice of complaints of racism. They could do one of three things:

1.    Kill fewer black people

2.    Kill more white people

3.    Both

This is more than a hypothesis. In Portland, Oregon, in 2003, the filth shot dead a young black woman, Kendra James. Another African-American, James Perez, was murdered in 2004. There were large protests following both these killings. In 2006, cops jumped up and down on James Chasse, a homeless schizophrenic, in a police van, until he was dead. Chasse was white, and so are the Portland porkers, so it couldn’t have been a racist murder. Public reaction was more muted.

My point is not to deny that many of the police are racially prejudiced, in addition to their other undesirable attitudes. I am simply discussing what one can achieve by highlighting one of these traits rather than others. Only one thing is beyond debate: A.C.A.B.

Rest in peace, Christopher. Your inspiration lives on: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/02/07/18731591.php#18731595

On February 7, Omar Barghouti and Judith Butler defended the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) movement in front of an audience of over 200 at Brooklyn College. Far more than 200 people have heard about it, because the college’s decision to host the talk was publicly denounced by renowned lawyer Alan Dershowitz, and other Jewish supremacists, using their customary hyperbole. For example:

Hate orgy… second holocaust… hostility towards the vast majority of Jewish students at BC who identify with the Jewish state… the department’s sponsorship serves to condone and legitimize anti-Jewish bigotry… a hostile environment for Jewish students on our campus.

Jewish students oppose the meeting

As a result, it got a lot more publicity than if he’d left it alone. This led a columnist in Israeli newspaper Haaretz to complain about “the perils of pro-Israel overkill”:

Overzealous Israel defenders used a five-megaton bomb to swat a fly, and it blew up in our faces. But Brooklyn is only a harbinger of nasty things to come. (haaretz)

He’s accusing Dershowitz of making a tactical mistake. But, though the Dersh may be accused of many things, no-one ever said he is dumb. The columnist may not realize it, but I suspect Dershowitz does – over-the-top attacks benefit Zionism. They move Israel’s goalposts closer together, making it look as if people like Barghouti are militant opponents of Jewish supremacy, strengthening their effectiveness within the Palestine solidarity movement.

Now thousands of people have heard about Barghouti and Butler’s brave stand against censorship. What most of them haven’t heard about is the BDS movement’s quiet abandonment of the right of return for the Palestinians. Without consulting its affiliates, the movement changed the wording of its mission statement from demanding that Israel ends

• its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands

to

• its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 (al-awda-withdrawal-of-endorsement-from-bds)

This recognizes the legitimacy of the Jewish state within its 1967 borders. It means rejecting the right of return for all those expelled since 1948, and their descendants. It means accepting the fruits of the Deir Yassin massacre and numerous others. It means capitulation to Jewish racial supremacy.

Another thing many of those who have heard about the Butler/Barghouti Brooklyn BDS bash may not realize, is that Barghouti tries to stop them hearing what Gilad Atzmon and his supporters have to say. His claim “we are witnessing the rise of a new McCarthyism” is an example of the ethnic strategy known as chutzpah – hypocrisy so brazen it takes your breath away – and he’s Palestinian!

The BDS movement has become another racket, like “Jewish Voice for Peace”, “Jews for the Boycott of Israeli Goods”, and the rest

• by denouncing “the occupation”, which means Israel’s gains in 1967, which sneakily implies that ethnic cleansing up until then was legitimate
• by trying to stop discussion of Jewish power, the Holocaust, and everything else which makes them feel uncomfortable
• by spreading lies about more intransigent solidarity activists, trying to prevent them speaking, or get them fired

 

Palestinian students for free speech

The unanswerable allegations “Racism” and “Anti-semitism” have long been the coin of the realm among wannabe thought police; the term Islamophobia is a fairly recent addition to their vocabulary.

Is this Islamlophobic?

A Muslim commented on one of my articles for deliberation.info (1), complaining of Islamophobia in the British left. Perhaps she hopes this word will become as powerful as the word “racism”, and stop criticism within the left of opportunist alliances with conservative Muslims (2).

To be accused of racism is like being sprayed by a skunk”

– David Wilson, cited in False Charges of Racism and Anti-Semitism, in Crying Wolf – Hate Crime Hoaxes in America (3)

“Anti-Semitism is even worse. It conjures up images of concentration camps…”

– Laird Wilcox, in (3)

The Council for the National Interest is an American think tank. It posted my piece admonishing “hate studies”, and implicitly, the multi-million-dollar “hate industry”, for their failure to criticize Zionism (4). However, the CNI also publishes attempts to use hate industry techniques against Zionists, by accusing them of Islamophobia (5). But, if these techniques – selecting evidence, exaggerating conservative prejudice, and implicitly opposing freedom of opinion – are unacceptable when used to provide cover for Zionism, they are equally unacceptable when used to criticize it.

How much Islamophobia is there in America?

After the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, some pundits claimed it was probably an Islamic attack. When a white man – with right-wing views and an army haircut – was arrested, the anti-fascist left hi-fived, saying that this shows that only bigots believe Islamic terrorism is the main threat in America.

But that was before September 11^th, 2001, which appeared to be the work of Islamic extremists.

These atrocities produced some hostility to Muslims in general – but not as much as the hate industry predicted. On September 17th, president Bush spoke outside a mosque, calling Islam “a peaceful religion”. There was a vicious immigration crackdown after 9/11, and there have been some hate crimes, but Muslims have not been rounded up like the Japanese Americans were during world war II. The claim that “hysteria about Muslims in American life has gripped the country” (5) should be taken no more seriously than the hate industry’s invention of a continuous increase in racial violence (4).

Shouting the word Islamophobia in the context of foreign policy provides cover for the war crimes of the current administration; the “Islamophobes” singled out by anti-fascists are invariably Republicans (5). The Democrats drop bombs with less hate in them.

Back home, the FBI claims that “anti-Muslim crimes were a distant second to crimes against Jews” (6). This laughable claim is obviously the result of pressure from the Jewish Lobby, which the FBI once explicitly resisted (3). After J. Edgar Hoover’s death, that broke down, and the FBI now treats the Anti-Defamation League almost as another government department, taking its inventions seriously (7).

In contrast, the Muslim Council on American Islamic Relations honestly reports that complaints of anti-Muslim hate crimes declined in 2008 to 116 (8). This is less than one hundredth of one percent of violent crimes (9). In an article on what she calls “TV’s most Islamophobic show”, Laila al-Arian admits, “some may say these are hypersensitive complaints in a politically correct obsessed era…” (10). I couldn’t have put it better myself.

“Islamophobes” claim Islam is opposed to the “Western values” which Israel and the USA share (5). People who listen to this don’t listen to p.c. blackmail. They might listen to their interests. Though all Islamists oppose Israel, most harbor no animus toward the inhabitants of Western countries. It is in Israeli interests to amalgamate them all, but it is in the interests of the rest of us to divide those who target civilian aircraft from those who are not our enemies. The idea that terrorist attacks are “false flag” incidents, designed to stir up Islamophobia, makes this harder to do.

I gave up the phrase ‘anti-semitic’ years ago. My new year’s resolution is to drop ‘racist’ and ‘Islamophobic’ too. It’s impossible to work out whether a statement is meaningful, true or false, at the same time as worrying if it’s politically incorrect.

Is this racist?

1. Laura Stuart, March 14, 2012, comment on Zionist Bullying in the West Coast Co-op Movement: http://www.deliberation.info/zionist-bullying-in-the-west-coast-co-op-movement

2. Anne McShane, February 8, 2007, Respect: our new moral guardians, Weekly Worker: http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/659/respect-our-new-moral-guardians

3. Laird Wilcox, 1994, False Charges of Racism and Anti-Semitism, Chapter 8 of Crying Wolf: Hate Crime Hoaxes in America

4. Jay Knott, July 3, 2012, “Hate studies” ignores certain types of hate, CNI: https://masspsychology.wordpress.com/2012/07/03/the-one-sided-view-of-hate-in-hate-studies/

5. Max Blumenthal, September 2, 2011, The Creeping Islamophobic Threat to Democracy, CNI: http://www.councilforthenationalinterest.org/islamophobia/item/839-the-great-islamophobic-crusade

6. FBI: Blacks, Jews Most Likely Hate-Crime Victims, Campus Safety Magazine, November 24, 2010: http://www.campussafetymagazine.com/Channel/Public-Safety/news/2010/11/24/FBI-Blacks-Jews-Most-Likely-Hate-Crime-Victims.aspx

7. ADL Poll Finds Anti-Semitic Attitudes on Rise in America, Anti-Defamation League, November 12, 2011: http://www.adl.org/PresRele/ASUS_12/6154_12.htm

8. The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in the United States 2009, Council on American-Islamic Relations: http://www.cair.com/civilrights/civilrightsreports.aspx

9. According to the FBI, there were 1,382,012 violent crimes in 2008. 116 is 0.0084% of this figure. http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offenses/violent_crime/index.html

10. Laila al-Arian, December 15, 2012, TV’s most Islamophobic Show, Salon.com: http://www.salon.com/2012/12/15/tvs_most_islamophobic_show

Is this anti-semitic?

Jay Knott, December 31 2012

Gilad Atzmon and Lady Michèle Renouf

What do Gilad Atzmon and Lady Michèle Renouf have in common?

Both are featured in Rewriting History (1), a new free online PDF book by Britain’s Hope not Hate organization.

The book defends the double standard of support for Jewish supremacy, combined with hostility to any suggestion of white gentile identity, under the guise of liberal humanism. In short, anti-fascism.

“Rewriting History” adds to the evidence for the argument I put forward in my pamphlet that anti-fascism and Zionism are logically linked (2).

Hope not Hate is a “respectable” anti-fascist organization. That means it doesn’t openly advocate violence against people whose opinions it disagrees with. It prefers to use the technique of discrediting them by classifying them into ominous-sounding categories:

Categories of Holocaust denial

• Holocaust denial
• Holocaust revisionism
  • Right-wing revisionism, which seeks to rehabilitate the Third Reich
  • Left-wing revisionism, which is part of an anti-Israel discourse
• Holocaust relativism
  • Ordinary, everyday relativism
  • A “more sinister form” of relativism – the “yes, but syndrome”
  • “Double genocide” relativism – popular in Eastern Europe
• Holocaust negationism
  • Softcore negationism
  • Hardcore negationism
• Holocaust minimising
• Holocaust banalisation
• Holocaust trivialising

The book does not cite the arguments put forward by members of the above categories, and there are no references. Instead, it attacks their alleged motives. This should always arouse suspicion, since we cannot read other people’s minds. It uses its own conclusions to explain why some people reject them. Thus, in principle, these conclusions are not subject to falsification. This is the sign of a politically-motivated cult, not a group of serious researchers.

Another logical fallacy it employs is argument from authority. For example, “David Irving has no academic qualification“. History isn’t something you accept because of someone’s qualifications – it’s too politically charged to trust anyone on. You have to understand the methodology and do your homework.

These logical errors do not prove that the book is wrong, and the people it denounces are right, but it certainly raises a reasonable suspicion. If the authors of this book could refute the claims of the revisionists, why didn’t they do so?

Mark Weber was America’s leading revisionist.

Unlike Irving, Weber really did used to be a National Socialist. As “Rewriting History” explains, he gave that up, and became a mere Holocaust Revisionist.

Finally, after reading a scholarly analysis of why America supports Israel – The Israel Lobby by Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer – he abandoned revisionism and became primarily a critic of the Lobby and its influence.

Weber has climbed a mountain, all the way from supporting racial oppression, to opposing it. A consistent anti-racist would welcome this pilgrim’s progress.

But Hope not Hate isn’t anti-racist. It’s part of anti-fascism, which is not the same thing at all. I described it as a “hypocritical, self-righteous, discriminatory, racist perspective” (2) which provides cover for the only racial oppression left in the Western world – Zionism – by smearing and persecuting its critics.

1. Rewriting History, David Williams, Hope not Hate: http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/shop/rewriting-history.pdf

2. The Mass Psychology of Anti-Fascism, Jay Knott: http://www.pacificaforum.org/mass

During the recent attack on Gaza, which killed over 160 people, including 37 children (1), Jewish communities around America rallied to the defense of Israel. In Portland, Oregon, over 225 members of the community came together to show their solidarity with the fatherland. A congresswoman showed up to pledge unconditional support from the establishment, and all the other Oregon politicians sent their best wishes. A speaker said that Israelis are expected to conform to higher standards than the common run of humanity:

Israel’s actions seem to be judged by a different/higher standard – and much of that is based on what Israel expects of herself. Dr. David believes there will always be a gap between what is best for Israel itself and moral/Jewish values on what actions to take. (2)

Portland has an active “anti-fascist” brigade. They also do their best to police the left-wing milieu, trying to ensure criticism of Jewish power is kept ineffective. While the Israelis were murdering Palestinian families, these “anti-racists” prioritized harassing an obscure organization called “Oregonians for Immigration Reform”, which they claim harbors :

barely-coded racism to agitate against immigrant populations of color. (3)

This anti-immigration group isn’t overtly racist. But the racism of the Jewish Federation isn’t “barely-coded”. It unconditionally supports the ongoing project of ethnically cleansing Palestine of gentiles, in order to make way for Jews. It supports whatever American policies, whatever economic and military sacrifices are needed, to maintain Jewish supremacy in the Middle East.

Anti-immigration groups don’t bomb Mexico. They contribute a drop compared to the ocean of racism which pours out of America’s Jewish establishment daily. .

To be fair, anti-fascists sometimes oppose aspects of Zionism. Recently, Islamophobic posters appeared on buses, claiming Israel and America are allies against “savages”. Anti-fascists put stickers on them bearing the word “racist”. But they only criticize Zionism when it is allied with white gentile hatemongers. Liberal politicians are more important allies of Zionism than the knuckledraggers, who just lost another election. Anti-fascists leave the core of Zionist power in America untouched, and try to prevent others from even discussing it. It’s almost as if they are telling Zionists not to be so crude and obvious.

The ‘anti-fascist’ groups greatly exaggerate white racism, while trying to prevent discussion of the far more powerful phenomenon of Jewish supremacy, calling such discussion “anti-semitic activism”. Their net contribution is in defense of Zionist power.

1. Precise figures are hard to come by. The number of 160+ comes from the al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, Gaza, 21 November:

http://www.mezan.org/en/details.php?id=15744

2. Portland Jewish Federation Blog, 30 November: http://www.jewishportland.org/blog_post.aspx?id=6281

3. Rose City Antifascists, 5 December:

http://rosecityantifa.weebly.com/1/post/2012/12/oregonians-for-immigration-reform-to-host-bigoted-anti-immigrant-speaker.html

Eric Hobsbawm has just died. As the article below (1) says, he was a giant of the Left, with all the good and bad things that implies. He was a member of the Communist Party when Josef Stalin was still head of the world communist movement, and his view of history reflected this. He was soft on Soviet crimes such as the ‘Holodomor’, the deaths of millions of Ukrainians in the 1930’s.

Still, when he gave talks, he was not besieged by angry mobs trying to shut down the meeting for ‘Holodomor denial’.

David Irving might also be accused of allowing his politics to influence his view of history. For example, he has sometimes underestimated Nazi war crimes. When Irving speaks, he is besieged by angry mobs trying to shut down the meeting for ‘Holocaust denial’. Whereas Hobsbawm was a member of the movement responsible for the Holodomor, Irving has never been a member of the movement responsible for the Holocaust.

Why these two great historians are treated so differently I will leave as an exercise for the reader.

1. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/9602136/Eric-Hobsbawn-was-a-giant-of-the-Left-who-took-my-teenage-mind-to-task.html

The following paper was submitted to The Journal of Hate Studies at Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA, USA, on March 14, 2012. It was rejected without explanation. My paper criticizes the approach the discipline of Hate Studies had taken hitherto. It argues that Hate Studies has over-estimated the extent of white racism in the USA, and neglected Zionism as a source of hate. It backs up these criticisms with evidence, and a rigorous approach to evaluating it.

Abstract

The Journal of Hate Studies asks for “cutting-edge essays, theory, and research that deepens the understanding of the development and expression of hate”. The following submission for the 2012 issue of the journal (Call for Papers, Tsai, R.L., 2012) is all of the above. It argues that Zionism  generates hate, and that hate studies writers have neglected it. Further, it produces evidence that hate studies researchers have exaggerated the amount of racism in white gentile America. In the process, it examines the methodologies which have led to this miscalculation, and suggests a more balanced approach.

I. Introduction

In his paper Hate, Oppression, Repression, and the Apocalyptic Style, (2004), one of the founders of hate studies, Chip Berlet, defines the field as “inquiries into the human capacity to define, and then dehumanize or demonize, an ‘other,’ and the processes which inform and give expression to, or can curtail or combat, that capacity”. The current paper argues that Zionism includes examples of the above “human capacity”, but that no contributor to hate studies, until now, has noticed them.

Noel Ignatiev’s contribution to the Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, (2007, pp. 240–244), describes the Zionist state of Israel as a “racial state, where rights are assigned on the basis of ascribed descent or the approval of the superior race”. Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, (2006), shows how Israel was initiated by the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people from their homeland, because they were not Jewish. I therefore argue that Zionism is a valid subject of hate studies.

However, a survey of the current publications of hate studies reveals a lack of concern with Zionism, in contrast to an emphasis on anti-Semitism and white racism. I illustrate this below with citations from the major works of hate studies, analyzing examples of alleged hate incidents to suggest a more scientific approach to the evaluation of hate. I cite the recommended works which allege there is an “epidemic” of hate crimes, and the one book currently in print which directly falsifies this hypothesis, Hate Crimes – Criminal Law & Identity Politics (Jacobs, J.B. & Potter, K., 1998). I make use of Steven Pinker’s recent work on the decline of violence, including hate crimes, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Pinker, S., 2011), and a number of newspaper and online reports of alleged hate crimes.

II. Inadequate attention to Zionism

The Zionist justification for expelling Palestinians has included expressions of “the human capacity to define, and then dehumanize or demonize, an ‘other,’” (Berlet, C., 2004). When Zionist leaders  recognize the Palestinians’ existence, they sometimes refer to them as “devil’s spawn” (Rachel Abrams’ weblog; 2011). Other representative epithets include “drugged cockroaches”, “two-legged animals” and “Arab scum” (according to the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, 14 January 2002, citing The New Statesman, June 25, 1982). Some Zionists go so far as to say it would be justified to kill gentile babies “if they would grow up to harm us” – Rabbi Shapira, reported by Roi Sharon in Maariv, 2009. The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, in a book about self-deception, The Folly of Fools, the logic of deceit and self-deception in human life, (2011), in a section entitled “False Historical Narratives”, contrasts the Zionist myth with the reality:

a racialist (and then racist) country was shoehorned into the Middle East, so that Jewish people (half and quarter also) from around the world can immediately claim citizenship to this land but none of those who were so recently expelled could do so. (p. 236).

Nevertheless, only one of the papers for hate studies’ most recent conference mentions Zionism, and not to criticize it for racism, but to ask at what point criticism of it becomes racist – “Not every criticism of Israel and Zionism was viewed as antisemitic, but on many occasions such comment served to mask antisemitism” – Michael Whine, The Community Security Trust – Best Practice in Combating Antisemitic Hate, (2011), Journal of Hate Studies (vol. 9, p. 114).

Kenneth Stern, a founder of the discipline of hate studies, vigorously defends Zionism against the “racism” charge. In his first pamphlet on anti-Semitism for the American Jewish Committee, Anti-Zionism, the Sophisticated Anti-Semitism, (1990), Stern wrote: “This anti-Semitic slander – that Zionism was racism – first appeared at the United Nations in the early 1960s” (p. 6). Even the Jewish Agency for Israel says, of the right of return for Jews, “It has been suggested that an immigration policy which explicitly gives priority to one ethnic or religious group cannot be justified in liberal democratic terms” (2004). But Stern has consistently argued that describing the Law of Return as racist, is itself racist (Stern 2006). In an extensive survey of the literature, I have been unable to find anything recommended by the hate studies department at Gonzaga University’s Bibliography of Hate Studies Materials (Thweatt, E., 2002), which agrees with the United Nations that Zionism as a form of racism.

As well as the United Nations, Stern’s complaints about “anti-Semitism” are directed at rural political movements, known as “militias”, in the USA. In 1996, Stern wrote an article for USA Today entitled Militia Mania, a Growing Danger, and published a book called A Force Upon the Plain, subtitled The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate, claiming that anti-Jewish attitudes are central to these movements’ ideologies (p. 246). Concern about militias is a recurrent theme in the hate studies literature (Dees, M., 1997; Berlet, C. & Lyons, M, 2000; Thweatt, E., 2002).

An example is Public Eye journal – “Researching the Right for Progressive Changemakers” – edited by hate studies pundit Chip Berlet. In her article for the journal, The Montana Human Rights Network, (2005), Abby Scher claims the following statement, from a leaflet produced by a militia in Montana, is an example of an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory: “George Bush… cynically used the tragedy of September 11th to silence dissent and to launch the war for Israel his Zionist neocon handlers wanted.” Arguments for the claims that the neoconservative movement is overwhelming Zionist, and that it was instrumental in persuading the US government to attack Iraq in 2003, include scholarly ones such as those of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (The Israel Lobby; 2007). Deciding how much truth there is in this view is beyond the scope of the present essay – my point is simply that classifying this analysis as “anti-Semitic” may tend to discourage us from asking legitimate questions.

III. The influence of pseudo-science

The field of hate studies has made use of the evolutionary approach in understanding ethnic conflict, for example in publishing Harold Fishbein’s The Genetic/Evolutionary Basis of Prejudice and Hatred (2004), and James Waller’s Our Ancestral Shadow: Hate and Human Nature in Evolutionary Psychology (2004). However, less scientific ideas have also been given credit. For example Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt’s Hate Crimes, (1993), which is recommended in hate studies’ bibliography (Thweatt, E., 2002), and referenced in several papers in the field, relied on a 1950 treatise on hate and prejudice, The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, T., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J., & Stanford, R.N., 1950): “Decades ago, the authors of The Authoritarian Personality recognized that prejudice satisfies a deep-rooted psychological need to protect or enhance self-esteem” (p. 48).

In The Authoritarian Personality, Theodor Adorno and his colleagues claimed to have found “quantifiable relations” between conservatism and anti-Semitism via the “Politico-Economic Conservatism” scale, the “Ethnocentrism” scale and the “Anti-Semitism” scale (p. 49).

The above diagram illustrates the general principle. If person A believes P and Q, and person B believes P, the likelihood that person B also believes Q is greater than the occurrence of belief Q in the general population. This is as true of any one class of beliefs as of any other. Yet the Frankfurt School believed it could derive “the determination of the potential fascist in childhood” (Adorno et al. 1950, p. 56) from this statistical banality.

The authors claimed that a German who joined the Nazis “can apparently never quite establish his personal and masculine identity; he thus has to look for it in a collective system where there is opportunity both for submission to the powerful and for retaliation against the powerless” (page 370); they did not apply this psychological explanation to Communist Party recruits of the same period.

The Frankfurt School’s approach still has influence. As a contemporary example of the use of psychoanalysis to reinforce political, and possibly racial, bias, consider Naomi Klein’s recent article about climate change for The Nation, Capitalism vs. the Climate (2011). She argued that “conservative white men” tend to disbelieve the theory of unprecedented anthropogenic global warming “because it threatens to upend their dominance-based worldview”.

Though work such as The Authoritarian Personality is taken seriously by some contributors, hate studies has also made some use of a truly scientific approach, such as the papers by Harold Fishbein and James Waller in The Journal of Hate Studies, (2004), which rely on evolutionary psychology. But no contributor so far has referenced Professor Kevin MacDonald, whose Separation and its Discontents – toward an evolutionary theory of anti-Semitism, (2004) locates the genesis of anti-Semitism in genetic interests:

An evolutionary perspective is also highly compatible with the falsity and contradictory nature of many anti-Semitic beliefs. Evolution is only concerned with ensuring accuracy of beliefs and attitudes when the truth is in the interests of those having those beliefs and attitudes. (pp. 18-19).

Steven Jacobs may be right to say, in The Last Uncomfortable “Religious Question”? in The Journal of Hate Studies, (2008), that MacDonald’s work has “been almost universally condemned”, but, since science is not a democracy, this is hardly relevant to a scholarly evaluation of his work.

IV. An unscientific approach to hate crime claims

At the hate studies founding conference, in his paper Hate, Oppression, Repression, and the Apocalyptic Style, (2004), Chip Berlet claimed there was “chronic underreporting” of hate crimes. There is evidence for this hypothesis. As The Leadership Conference states in the introduction to its Confronting the New Faces of Hate: Hate Crimes in America, (2009), some victims fail to report hate crimes. For example, illegal immigrants are concerned about deportation. People of color may not trust the police. Lesbian and gay victims may not want to “come out” to family members and co-workers by publicizing a homophobic hate crime.

But the scientific approach looks for refutation as well as confirmation. There is also over-reporting of hate crimes, which, if uncritically accepted, exaggerates the amount of hate in our society. I identify five variants of this phenomenon, and give examples below:

1. protected speech is sometimes listed with violent crimes under the broad label “hate incidents”;

2. the degree of hate involved in some actual crimes is exaggerated;

3. there are claims of hate crimes which didn’t happen;

4. there are “hate crimes” committed by the alleged victims themselves;

5. there are unsubstantiated assertions that hate crimes are on the increase.

As an illustration of type 1. above, consider Oregon’s Coalition Against Hate Crimes. This organization claims, on its website, to support the United Nations “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, which declares that “everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression”. But the Coalition contradicts itself immediately; its list of “hate incidents” equates real crimes like the murder of an Ethiopian immigrant, with a talk by a “holocaust denier” (2010). In Hate Crimes (chapter 4; 1998), James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter found that the term “hate incidents” has been used by a number of organizations interchangeably with “hate crimes” to exaggerate the incidence of the latter.

Hate crimes happen. For example, in Texas in 1998, African-American James Byrd was dragged behind a truck by three white men, motivated by racial hatred, until his head came off.

Other notorious cases, such as the murder of Ethiopian Mulugeta Seraw by neo-Nazi skinheads in Portland, Oregon in 1988, and of gay student Matthew Shepard in Wyoming in 1998, were not quite what subsequent political campaigns made of them. According to Elinor Langer’s book, A Hundred Little Hitlers, (2003), the Seraw case was not a premeditated lynching. Had the skinheads murdered Seraw in Florida rather than Oregon, it would not have been a hate crime: the Florida Supreme Court explicitly excluded from that category “arguments over a parking space, which escalate into fist fights accompanied by racial or other slurs” – which is exactly what the Portland case was, except a baseball bat was used (Hate Crimes, Jacobs, J.B., & Potter, K., 1998; p. 32). An investigation by Elizabeth Vargas for the ABC News program “20/20” on December 3, 2004, described by Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times, found the assumption that the murder of Matthew Shepard was homophobic to be unsubstantiated.

Another illustration of type 2., exaggerating the amount of hate in real crimes, is the 1996 panic about “black churches” being set on fire. President Clinton said “racial hostility” was behind the crimes. But according to statistical analysis in an article about the scare by Michael Fumento in Commentary magazine, (1996), confirmed in Hate Crimes (Jacobs, J.B. & Potter, K., chapter 4; 1998),

1. the number of torched churches nationally was below average,

2. the ethnicity of the buildings had no effect on their risk of arson, and

3. there was no inverse correlation between convicted arsonists’ race and that of the churchgoers.

Type 2 is also illustrated by the one alleged anti-Semitic lynching in US history, which occurred in Georgia in 1915. It resulted in a boost in membership for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which had been founded two years earlier. The victim, Leo Frank, had been convicted of child-murder, but his death sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment; a mob abducted him from prison and hanged him from a tree. His conviction allowed the other suspect, who was black, to walk. The Anti-Defamation League’s evidence for the theory that it was an anti-Semitic lynching, in its People v. Leo Frank Teacher’s Guide, (2009), such as shouts of “Hang the Jew” from the mob, is necessary, but insufficient, to prove it. If a convicted child-killer who was not Jewish would also have been murdered, anti-Semitism had no part to play.

The Anti-Defamation League is consulted by the federal Departments of Education and Justice, the California Probation, Parole and Correctional Association, and other government bodies, according to Hate Crimes (Jacobs, J.B. & Potter, K., chapter 4; 1998). An example can be found on the Department of Justice’s web page about the Sacramento “Hate Crimes Task Force” (2010). Some years ago, the ADL was found by the San Francisco DA to have spied illegally on dozens of people and organizations, fed information about South African dissidents to the apartheid regime, and committed numerous other violations of trust (Blankfort, J., 2002).

A comprehensive survey of examples of type 3. above, completely invented hate crimes, would be beyond the scope of this paper. A small sample can be found in the appendix, Hate Crime Hoaxes, along with some examples of type 4., fake hate crimes committed by pseudo-victims.

Type 4. was discussed by Gabriel Winant in an article for Salon.com, Fake hate crimes: not just for liberals anymore, (2008). She argued that the majority of fake hate crimes consist of minority persons manipulating sympathy for personal and political gain. She suggests this is why there is an epidemic on college campuses – in this milieu, a fake hate crime victim may find sympathy even after her hoax is exposed. In San Diego, a program was announced to “address diversity issues” after a “minority student” admitted hanging up a noose and a white hood in the library at the University of California in February 2010, an example of type 4. The program, entitled Racism – Not In Our Community, includes statements like “hurtful incidents” and “ensuring diversity”. The hypothesis that racism is a problem was so strongly entrenched that evidence known to be fabricated was used to attempt to confirm it (University of California at San Diego, 2010).

Some hate studies research falls into type 5. above, the allegation that hate crimes are increasing. Mari Matsuda wrote that “a marked rise of racial harassment, hate speech, and racially-motivated violence marks the beginning of the 1990’s” in Words That Wound (1993; page 44). Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt’s Hate Crimes complained of “a rising tide of bigotry and bloodshed” at that time (1993; p. xi). Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, wrote a book entitled Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat, in 1997. Kenneth Stern’s article Militia Mania, a Growing Danger, (1996), claimed that local officials in rural America were being intimidated by right-wing terrorists – “According to the Rural Organizing Committee, elected officials on the local level have been forced by armed militia members who pack their meetings to enact ordinances they know are illegal, under threat of death”. The National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence alleges there is an epidemic of “ethnoviolence” in higher education facilities, but its definition of the term includes any “perceived expression of insensitivity”, including denial of tenure to an Asian-American academic, and a piece critical of affirmative action in a campus newsletter (Hate Crimes, Jacobs, J.B. & Potter, K., 1998; p. 49).

In fact, the incidence of hate crimes in the USA declined during the 1990s, continuing a century-long trend. Steven Pinker’s history of violence, The Better Angels of Our Nature, (2011; p. 385) used a chart from James Payne’s A history of force, (2004), which shows how racist lynchings declined steadily from 150 per annum in the 1880s to close to zero by the end of the 1960s. Another graph in his book covers racist murders, 1996-2008 (p. 386), using statistics from the FBI. Most of these murders were of African-Americans. The chart shows a decline from five victims per annum in 1996, to one in 2008. One is less than 0.006 percent of the total number of murders in the country per annum, approximately 17,000. James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter, in Hate Crimes – Criminal Law & Identity Politics, (chapter 4, Social Construction of a Hate Crime Epidemic; 1998) also studied the evidence, and analyzed the politics, of the “rising tide” hypothesis:

This chapter explains how the hate crime epidemic has been socially constructed. We identify the leading proponents of the epidemic claim – advocacy groups, the media, politicians, and academic commentators – and show that this claim lacks any empirical basis. (p. 46).

The alarmist claims of Levin, McDevitt, Stern, Matsuda, et. al. (Levin, J. & McDevitt, J., 1993; Stern, K., 1996; Matsuda, M., et. al., 1993), cannot survive the gauntlet of attempted falsification by scientific methods. Examining why they are part of the hate studies canon is beyond the scope of the current paper, but I intend to return to that question in further research.

An opportunity to subject the beliefs of some hate studies writers to scientific scrutiny occurred at Duke University in North Carolina in 2006. When a black woman accused three white students of rape, the DA said it was a “hate crime”. Stuart Taylor Jr. and K.C. Johnson’s Until Proven Innocent: political correctness and the shameful injustices of the Duke lacrosse rape case, (2007), explains the political assumptions behind the credulity which greeted the woman’s claim. As the article Duke’s Reign of Terror by local journalist Arch T. Allen, in Metro magazine, (2007), explains, with few exceptions, the local and national media were biased against the accused. The rush to judgement of some of the faculty, students and outside activists, based on nothing more than the accused students’ sex, race, and alleged class, is a valid subject of hate studies research.

Angela J. Hattery and Earl Smith, in African American Families, (2007), said the case was about how “the class and race dynamics of the individuals involved (affluent white men and a low-income African American woman) shaped this incident differently from how it would have been shaped had they been absent”. The case does reinforce that view, but in the opposite direction to the one these theorists believe. Instead of doing empirical research into the difference between how the Duke three, and black students accused of similar crimes, were treated, they assumed that “members of the team are almost perfect offenders in the sense that Kimberlé Crenshaw writes about – the exemplars of the upper end of the class hierarchy, the politically dominant race and ethnicity, the dominant gender, the dominant sexuality, and the dominant social group on campus”. Inspired by these words, and similar analyses (Matsuda et. al. 1993; Fish, S., 1994; Crenshaw et. al. 1996; Berlet C., & Lyons, M., 2000), eighty-eight academics signed a statement implying the students’ guilt by saying something “happened to this young woman”, but carefully avoiding saying what it was. The document in which they made this allegation subsequently disappeared, without explanation, from the African and African-American Studies website.

After the students’ lawyers uncovered the truth, the DA was dismissed, and his replacement said the students were “innocent”, rather than just “not guilty”, their academic accusers had an opportunity to reflect on the flaws in their methodology which led to their mistake. Instead, after the case, “I am less interested in trafficking through declarations of guilt and innocence in the case”, wrote one of the eighty-eight professors who had “trafficked” in the declaration of guilt (Taylor & Johnson, 2007).

I argue that hate studies should insist that a theory’s claims are subject to testing and reevaluation, and changing its predictions when they are falsified ought not to be acceptable.

V. Conclusion: a consistent and rigorous approach to understanding hate

“Whenever an ideology justifies baby-killing – even at the fringes of the fringes – that is an especially strong danger signal” – Kenneth Stern, A Force Upon the Plain. (1996, p. 249).

“There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us” – “The complete guide to killing non-Jews” – Yitzhak Shapira and Yossi Elitzur, rabbis in the Od Yosef Hai yeshiva, Yitzhar, near Nablus, reported by Roi Sharon in Maariv (2009).

The influence of Zionism extends beyond Israel. Consider Rachel Abrams, who is married to Elliot Abrams, an influential advisor to the US government, who served under presidents George Bush Senior and Ronald Reagan, describing, in her weblog, the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit from captivity by Hamas in October 2011:

Celebrate, Israel, with all the joyous gratitude that fills your hearts, as we all do along with you. Then round up his captors, the slaughtering, death-worshipping, innocent-butchering, child-sacrificing savages who dip their hands in blood and use women — those who aren’t strapping bombs to their own devils’ spawn and sending them out to meet their seventy-two virgins by taking the lives of the school-bus-riding, heart-drawing, Transformer-doodling, homework-losing children of Others — and their offspring — those who haven’t already been pimped out by their mothers to the murder god — as shields, hiding behind their burkas and cradles like the unmanned animals they are, and throw them not into your prisons, where they can bide until they’re traded by the thousands for another child of Israel, but into the sea, to float there, food for sharks, stargazers, and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose. (2011).

Hate studies would be enriched by studying how the influence of Zionism can produce this kind of hate. It would have more credibility if claims of the prevalence of white racism were evaluated more scientifically. It would also benefit by examining examples of hoaxes by which resentful members of minorities, encouraged by academic exaggerations of the extent of white privilege, contributed to a positive feedback loop, which appeared to confirm the hypothesis that the USA is suffering from a rising tide of bigotry and hate.

Appendix – Hate Crime Hoaxes

Associated Press (1998, November 22). Conviction in Phony Hate Mail Case. Sunday Star-News. NC: Wilmington.

Associated Press. (2004, April 20). Colleges perfect milieu for hate crime hoaxes. San Diego Union Tribune. Retrieved  2012, January 29. http://legacy.signonsandiego.com/news/state/20040420-0247-ca-hatecrimehoaxes.html

Bensen, Jackie. (2010). Jewish student caught painting swastikas on her own door then claiming anti-Semitic attack. NBC News4. Retrieved 2012, January 29. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLt5U7VcHw8

Boyd, C. (2001, June 12). Woman Who Claimed to be Victim of Hate Crime Accused of Stealing Van. MN: St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Delgado, R. (1999, May 8). Man Admits Inventing Racist Assault in San Francisco. San Francisco Examiner.

Eskenazi, J. (2004, May 21). Arson at Chabad House. Jewish Weekly. Retrieved 2012, January 29. http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/22706/arson-at-chabad-house

Kansas City Star. (2001, December 12). Linda Man, Woman Pleads Guilty to Harassing Other Black School Bus Drivers.

Leinwand, D. & Alexander, A. (1993, December 30). Swastika scrawling thieves staged insurance scam, police allege. Highbeam Business News. Retrieved March 12, 2012. http://business.highbeam.com/4331/article-1G1-14690014/crime-swastikascrawling-thieves-staged-insurance-scam

Perez, M. (2003, November 20). Fake hate crimes not new: colleges experience recent rash of bogus hate incidents. Golden Gate Express.  Retrieved 2012, January 29. http://xpress.sfsu.edu/archives/news/000424.html

Register-Guard. (2003, May 27). Coast Guardsman Admits False Report of Racism. OR: Eugene.

WBAL. (2008, October 7). Police ID 3 Charged in Synagogue Vandalism. WBAL TV. MD: Baltimore. http://www.wbaltv.com/news/17646190/detail.html

References

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Allen, Arch T. (2007). Duke’s Reign of Terror. Metro magazine, Raleigh, NC, 2007, November. Retrieved  2012, January 29. http://www.metronc.com/article/?id=1448

Anti-Defamation League. (2009). People v. Leo Frank Teacher’s Guide. Retrieved 2012, January 29. http://www.adl.org/leofrank/The-People-v-Leo-Frank-Teachers-Guide_ADL.pdf

Berlet, C. & Lyons, M. (2000). Right-wing populism in America: too close for comfort. New York: Guilford Press, 2000

Berlet, C. (2004, March). Hate, Oppression, Repression, and the Apocalyptic Style. Chip Berlet. Paper presented at the Conference to Establish the Field of Hate Studies. Journal of Hate Studies, 3. WA: Spokane.

Blankfort, J., Poirier, A. & Zeltzer, S. (2002, February 25). The ADL Spying Case Is Over, But The Struggle Continues. Counterpunch. Retrieved 2012, January 29. http://www.counterpunch.org/2002/02/25/the-adl-spying-case-is-over-but-the-struggle-continues

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Fishbein, H. (2004, March). The Genetic/Evolutionary Basis of Prejudice and Hatred. Journal of Hate Studies, 3. WA: Spokane.

Fumento, M. (1996, October). Politics and Church Burnings. Commentary magazine.

Group of 88. (2006). The “Listening” Statement. Duke University, Department of African and African-American Studies. Retrieved 2006, November 10, but no longer available: http://www.duke.edu/web/africanameric/listening.pdf

Hattery, A.J., and Smith, E.. (2007). African American Families. Sage Publications.

Heffernan, V. (2004, November 27). ‘20/20′ investigation challenges Shepard murder’s hate-crime label. New York Times, reprinted in the San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 2012, January 29. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/11/27/DDGUEA1PVL1.DTL

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Journal of Hate Studies. (2011). Table of Contents. Retrieved 2012, January 29. http://journals.gonzaga.edu/index.php/johs/issue/view/18/showToc

Klein, N. (2011, November). Capitalism vs. the Climate. Naomi Klein. The Nation. Retrieved 2012, January 29. http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate?page=full

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Levin. J. & McDevitt. J. (1993). Hate Crimes. De Capo Press.

MacDonald, K. (2004). Separation and its Discontents: toward an evolutionary theory of anti-Semitism. Praeger Publishers.

Matsuda, M.J., Lawrence III, C.R., Delgado, R., Crenshaw K. (1993, June 4). Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment. Westview Press

Mearsheimer, J. & Walt, S. (2007). The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Pappe, I. (2006). The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld publishing.

Payne, J.L. (2004). A history of force: Exploring the worldwide movement against habits of coercion, bloodshed, and mayhem. ID: Sandpoint. Lytton publishers.

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Taylor, S. Jr. & Johnson, K.C. (2007). Until Proven Innocent: political correctness and the shameful injustices of the Duke lacrosse rape case. St. Martins Press.

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Waller, J. (2004, December). Our Ancestral Shadow: Hate and Human Nature in Evolutionary Psychology. Journal of Hate Studies, 3. WA: Spokane.

Whine, M. (2011). The Community Security Trust. Best Practice in Combating Antisemitic Hate. WA: Spokane. Journal of Hate Studies, 9.

Winant, G. (2008, October 24). Fake hate crimes: not just for liberals anymore. Salon.com. Retrieved 2012, January 29. http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2008/10/24/crime_hoax

This billboard helps the Palestinian cause – Detroit

The Western countries encouraged South Africa to abandon apartheid, but their unquestioning support for Israel ensures the continuation of this crime against humanity. Might it have happened the other way round? Could the USA and its allies have decided to pressurize the Jewish state into granting the right of return to the Palestinians, while supporting a nuclear-armed white apartheid state in southern Africa?

If it had happened the other way round, there would be non-stop wailing that Western Europeans once again abandoned the Jews, while continuing to defend their racist cousins. But it didn’t. This is not a coincidence. The political atmosphere encouraged the West to abandon white power, and reinforce Jewish power. This is something the current anti-racist approach has difficulty comprehending.

Palestine solidarity in Western countries has tended to assume that, since Zionism is a form of racism, it can be defeated in the same way apartheid in Africa and segregation in America were defeated. Like the anti-apartheid movement, Palestine solidarity has been dominated by the left. Unlike the anti-apartheid movement, it has been unsuccessful.

Not everyone is a liberal. Rather than pointing out that Israel is “Islamophobic”, it might be more effective to raise the wider truth that Zionism ethnically cleansed the Palestinians because they are not Jews, not because many of them are Muslims. Lauren Booth’s phrase “we are all Palestinians” is a teeny bit exaggerated (Booth, L.; 2012). But it is true that Jewish supremacy is harmful to most of us, over 95% of the inhabitants of the Western world, rich and poor. Exposing Israeli anti-gentilism and Christophobia might be more persuasive to most of this population than the left-wing anti-racist argument that Zionism is an offshoot of their own racist, imperialist, Western attitudes.

The post-world war two academic left-wing consensus includes

• the Franz Boas school of anthropology, which lied about the peaceful nature of hunter-gatherer life in contrast to European civilization
• scientists Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and others, who slandered academic rivals, who tried to apply the Darwinian approach to human beings, as “racists”
• the “critical race theorists”, who excoriate and exaggerate white ethnocentrism, but give Zionism a pass

For example, Mari Matsuda, in Words That Wound, (1993; p. 40), says: “I reject the sweeping charge that Zionism is racism”, and goes on to claim that Jews can only be racist if they identify themselves as white. Stanley Fish agrees with former president George Bush senior, that to equate Zionism with racism is to twist history, which tells us that Jews have always been persecuted (1994; p. 60).

Not all of these theorists are self-identified Jews, but many, if not most, are. They say things like

it’s hard to see racism when you’re white”

while denying that “race” is a meaningful concept, and relying on the taboo against mentioning their Jewishness. In their introduction to Alas, Poor Darwin, Steven and Hilary Rose approve of Boas’s 1950 claim that “the concept of race is not science but pseudo-science” (Rose & Rose; 2000). Richard Lewontin concurs, on the grounds that there is approximately seven times as much genetic diversity within human populations as there is between them (cited in Frank Salter, Genetic Interests, 2007; p. 92).

But, regardless, it is in every one of your genes’ interests to influence you to favour individuals with copies of itself over those without. Of the genes you don’t share with the whole of humanity, there are, on average, more copies of those genes in individuals whose ancestors lived in the same area as yours than there are in people whose ancestors have not.

Frank Salter explains that, if everyone in the world were cousins, altruism would not be adaptive at all. It’s the difference between our relatedness to each of two individuals which makes us prefer one over the other. Of the genes which differ between individuals, those in our parents, children, and siblings, are more likely to be copies of our own. This is why we are altruistic to our relatives. Evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane worked out that it makes genetic sense to die for two or more brothers or sisters, or eight or more cousins, but not fewer (cited in Connolly, K., and Martlew, M., 1999; p. 10).

But what about choosing to help someone from the local population, rather than another person taken at random from the world population? The percentage increase in selective advantage is just as great as that in choosing your relatives over random individuals in the local population. I am inclined to spoil my granddaughter rather than nearby children who look similar to her. My genes also code for favouring those nearby children over children from far away who look different to them. But we’re taught that the first of these indulgences is a grandparent’s privilege, whereas the second is a symptom of white privilege.

A rough measure of the explanatory power of a theory about society is how infrequently it uses the word “ideology”. Racial identity isn’t ideology. It is the result of the workings of natural selection. Perhaps even ethnic hostility is genetic. There is evidence of inter-tribal massacres during the Stone Age (Keeley, L.; 1996). Given its adaptive character, it would be surprising if genes failed to code for ethnic identity; it is no great leap of faith to suggest that xenophobia may have a biological basis too.

Given the genetic basis of race, what needs explaining, is not white identity, but its relative absence. Yet we are supposed to believe that this identity is strongly entrenched, uniquely malevolent, and invariably xenophobic.

Some readers will think, mistakenly, I’m advocating white self-awareness to counter Zionist influence. But that misreading only illustrates my point; we are always on the lookout for “racism”.

It could be wrong – that’s the nature of scientific theories – but the evolutionary approach at least helps us steer clear of anti-white attitudes. It also avoids hatred toward Zionists; we can understand why Jewish xenophobia exists – because it works. Whether or not the Jewish people were “invented”, any group which intramarries, homogenizes. Ethnic cleansing can be adaptive too. There might be payback, but genes have no foresight. Throwing away our Rose- (and Gould-) coloured glasses, enables us to understand Zionism, rather than moralizing about it, which can be dangerous; it might lead you to try to blackmail the driver of an Israeli bulldozer, by standing in front of it.

In the co-op movement on the American west coast, crypto-Zionists undermined the campaign to boycott Israeli goods by slandering Palestine solidarity activists as “racists”, who needed to “unlearn oppression”. Similar things happen in universities. White guilt has also begun to influence the workings of mainstream society. Minnesota is having a campaign against white privilege, featuring highway billboards of a blonde, blue-eyed girl with anti-racist messages written all over her face (Unfair Campaign, 2012), and a sermon by Jewish critical race theorist Tim Wise.

Palestine solidarity in Australasia, North America and Western Europe would be more effective it it

• emphasized the differences between Jewish and gentile interests
• proclaimed the virtues of Western tolerance in contrast to Israel
• exposed covert Jewish ethnocentrism, and
• unceremoniously junked Jewish-dominated left-wing anti-racist pseudo-science

This billboard doesn’t help the Palestinian cause – Duluth

References

• Booth, L., 2012. We are all Palestinians now. Lauren Booth, January 12, 2012.
• Fish, S., 1994. There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing, Too. Oxford.
• Keeley, L., 1996. War Before Civilization – the myth of the peaceful savage. Oxford
• Haldane, J.B.S., cited in Connolly, K. and Martlew, M., 1999. A Book of Quotations. BPS Books
• Matsuda, M., 1993. Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment. Mari Matsuda et. al.. Westview Press.
• Rose, S., & Rose, H., 2000. Alas, Poor Darwin. Steven and Hilary Rose. Harmony publishers.
• Salter, F., 2007. Genetic Interests, Frank Salter. Transaction publishers.
• Unfair Campaign, 2012.