http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/feb/01/legacy-of-grandmas-war
“German discussion of their own suffering has also been taboo. The fear that to acknowledge it would appear sympathetic to the Nazi cause”.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24626-inside-the-minds-of-the-jfk-conspiracy-theorists.html
To believe that the US government planned or deliberately allowed the 9/11 attacks, you’d have to posit that President Bush intentionally sacrificed 3,000 Americans. To believe that explosives, not planes, brought down the buildings, you’d have to imagine an operation large enough to plant the devices without anyone getting caught. To insist that the truth remains hidden, you’d have to assume that everyone who has reviewed the attacks and the events leading up to them – the CIA, the Justice Department, the Federal Aviation Administration, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, scientific organisations, peer-reviewed journals, news organisations, the airlines, and local law enforcement agencies in three states – was incompetent, deceived or part of the cover-up.
Note this at the top of the article:
- For similar stories, visit the Mental Health Topic Guide
The biggest mistake in this article is using the term “conspiracy theorists” for 9/11 truthers. As the truthers point out, ad nauseam, the official story of September 11th, 2001, is a conspiracy theory. But “9/11 truth” isn’t a theory at all. It’s not subject to falsification. If the authorities could do that, they can do anything, and cover it up. This means that any evidence against the 9/11 truth “theory” can be explained away by the “theory” itself. It is self-insulating against disconfirmation.
There’s a lot of faux “anti-racism” in football. Players are obliged to hold up signs saying “No to racism” before games. English fans can be arrested for using the traditional word ‘yid’ for Tottenham supporters, even if they are Tottenham supporters. Nicholas Anelka of West Bromwich Albion is being called “anti-semitic” for making the “quenelle” gesture.
But there is one kind of anti-racism which is not encouraged by the football authorities – opposition to the racial oppression of the Palestinians: http://mondoweiss.net/2014/01/palestinian-incident-semitism.html
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/13127#.UuWsVPbTnZt
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/01/24/blasphemy-in-secular-france
I have had several articles published on the radical website Dissident Voice, including a critique of Noam Chomsky’s views on the Israel Lobby, and an examination of the idea that nations are “imagined communities”: “Invention, Imagination, Race and Nation“.
Recently, I wrote “Probing Max Blumenthal’s Goliath” i for Dissident Voice and Kim Petersen, one of the site’s editors, responded with “Is the West Comparatively Racism-Free?” ii.
This is my reply – Dissident Voice wouldn’t publish it because they say my thesis is ‘weak’.
I’m grateful for Kim’s response, as it forces me to clarify my – tentative – hypothesis. He asks me
In what universe can a person – seriously and meaningfully – argue that the West is critical of its racist history when it still carries out the racist policies?
My answer is, that the racist policies have declined, while the criticism of them grows louder and shriller. I think one can defend the hypothesis that
Western societies, with the exception of Israel, are currently among the least racially prejudiced on earth.
Still, there is no way in an essay I can fully justify this claim, for it would require studying hundreds of different societies. All I have time to do here is offer some examples of my reasoning.
I don’t think Kim understands the concept of falsification, for I’ve tried out my “look at how differently the West treats Israel in contrast to South Africa” argument on him (private communication), and he didn’t agree. I spell it out below.
You can’t show the West is especially “racist” by listing examples of it. You can’t prove anything by accumulating evidence for it. What you have to do, is ask the following:
1. If this hypothesis were correct, X would be the case.
2. Is X the case?
For example:
1. If white racial supremacy were more dominant in the Western countries than Jewish racial supremacy, the Western countries would have boycotted Israel before they boycotted apartheid South Africa.
2. Did this happen? No, the exact opposite happened. Western countries persuaded South Africa to give up apartheid, but Israel is supported to the hilt – for example, the USA gives it over eight million dollars a day iii.
It follows that the implicit claim of the anti-racist left, that white supremacy is more powerful than Jewish supremacy, is false. It’s a lie of omission – they don’t mention Jewish supremacy at all. They simply assert that Israel is an asset of American imperialism, without trying to test this claim. And they try to make it impossible to doubt that Israel is an ally, and that support for it is a product of the power of the Jewish lobby, by calling that argument “anti-semitic”.
The white boycott of apartheid was started by Australia in 1971: “this was the first time a predominantly white nation had taken the side of multiracial sport, producing an unsettling resonance that more “White” boycotts were coming.” iv , and grew from there.
Another example:
1. If Britain is a fundamentally racist society, the government would not have produced a report falsely accusing the police of “institutional racism” as a result of its failure to prosecute the murderers of a black teenager. The failure was in fact the result of, duh, lack of evidence against the suspects. The government would not have implemented an inquiry whose proceedings “bore some resemblance to the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s” v, making use of the circular argument that doubt about racism is evidence of racism. In short, it would not have implemented the politics of the p.c. anti-racist left.
2. In fact, as this report, “Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics” (PDF) demonstrates, that is exactly what happened. The police are now obliged to investigate any allegation of racism, with the definition of “racism” being left entirely to the imagination of the plaintiff.
Another:
1. If the USA were fundamentally white racist, George Zimmerman, accused of the murder of black teenager Trayvon Martin in February 2012, would never have been prosecuted, since there was not enough evidence for a prosecutor to argue in court that he was guilty. Furthermore, the media would not have bombarded us with the implication that Martin’s death had anything to do with race, since there was never a shred of evidence that Zimmerman was racially motivated – the only racially hostile comment was made by Martin vi.
2. Zimmerman was in fact charged with murder, after a Facebook campaign (!) influenced the legal system. Fortunately, despite the efforts of the media, that system still follows the principle that you cannot be convicted of a crime unless your guilt is proven beyond reasonable doubt, and he was acquitted.
My final counter-example is the Duke university lacrosse case of 2006, in which three white students were falsely accused of rape by a black woman, the D.A. and eighty-eight academics at their university, and most of the national media leaned toward hinting strongly that the suspects were guilty. If any institution embodies “white privilege”, you might think it would be an elite southern university. But again, the facts falsify the hypothesis – see, for example, the book “Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case” vii.
Stephen Miller, in the Duke university student newspaper, has done my work for me: “Imagine that Collin, Reade and David had been black students, accused of raping a white girl and that they faced a witchhunt led by a prosecutor re-elected thanks to the overwhelming support of the white community. Then imagine this witchhunt was supported by hordes of student protesters, prominent white activists and a large portion of an elite campus faculty, many of them affiliated with the European Studies Department. Imagine also that the University president suspends the almost all-black sports team of which these students are members and fires their black coach. Further imagine that the accuser in the case has continually changed her story from the first night, that there is no evidence against the players, that they’ve cooperated with the police and passed polygraphs and that extensive evidence exists to prove their innocence. You think that scenario would have lasted for a year? Try a week.” viii
In each of the above cases, I have proposed two alternative sets of events. One of these alternatives, had it occurred, would have been correctly seen as falsification of my hypothesis that Western societies are comparatively racism-free. In each case, the converse happened.
I have not the space or time to aggregate the evidence of other societies and compare them with North America, Australasia and Western Europe. But, briefly, as far as I know, the only societies which champion a negative view of themselves are Western ones. Chinese universities don’t teach their students about “Han Chinese privilege”, nor to feel guilty about the treatment of Muslims in Western China. But in Western societies, fraudulent “anti-racist” academic work, such as the output of Theodor Adorno, Stephen Jay Gould ix, Richard Lewontin x, et. al., has been influential since World War II. And this influence extends beyond academia, into the media and politics. What has happened in Britain, where you are investigated if someone claims you said something “racist”, should be seen as a warning, and we should try to prevent it happening anywhere else.
We – in Canada, Britain, the USA, etc. – live in among the least racially prejudiced societies known. We are anti-racist to a fault. We tend to believe even the most ridiculous stories of white racism told by professional minority campaigners. The judicial system still mostly adheres to concepts like presumption of innocence and color-blindness, but there are attempts to undermine this. The only substantial kind of racial oppression in the West is the state of Israel. Exposing the falsehoods – especially those from the left – which make this oppression possible should be a priority.
x http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780394508177-4
P.S. (January 2015) My assertion, above, that ‘the definition of “racism” is left entirely to the imagination of the plaintiff’ in UK law was an understatement – the organization in charge of major criminal prosecutions in England and Wales defines “Racist Incident” as “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”: http://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/prosecution/rrpbcrleaf.html
I promote Gilad Atzmon’s ideas and recently helped organize a reading group followed by a talk by him in Portland. However, I don’t agree with everything he says.
His recent article “We better move on” makes good points. He reiterates many of his insights into identity politics, links the failure of the Palestine solidarity movement to its domination by “anti-Zionist Jews”, etc..
It’s also funny. He’s good at taking the piss.
John Smith, an English bus driver from Liverpool is proud to be English and ‘as an Englishman’ he opposes the war because John actually believes that peace is patriotic. Can he join an anti-war protest and, while he’s at it, carry a Union Jack to demonstrations? I leave the answer to you.
Tony is a ‘Jewish Socialist’ – certainly not religious but an ethnic Jew who identifies ‘as a Jew’ racially and ethnically. And by the way, Tony also operates politically within Jews-only anti-Zionist groups. Now Tony is hugely welcome at most Left and progressive gathering. But can the same be said for Franz who identifies as an ‘Aryan socialist’? Again, I leave the answer to you.
Gilad points to some of the inconsistencies of the left – you can be a Jewish socialist but not a self identified white socialist. But he’s wrong to accuse the left of excluding Muslims.
Left-wing kowtowing to Islamic reactionaries goes back to the Baku conference of 1920.
Since then, there have been numerous marriages of convenience between left-wing progressive intellectuals and reactionary Muslim godbotherers.
Britain’s largest left-wing party, the SWP, has been in an alliance with Muslims for ages. it was the basis of the Respect coalition, which succeeded in electing a leftist politician for the first time since the sixties. These leftists join forces with Koran literalists to police the morals of London East Enders, and turn a blind eye to homophobic violence and the exploitation of girls. Richard Seymour’s “Lenin’s Tomb” blog is as fond of making excuses for the worst aspects of islam as it is of making inaccurate attacks on Gilad Atzmon. Both errors are products of political correctness.
Any attempt to question this opportunist pro-Islamic policy is dismissed as ‘racism’. It uses the same p.c. techniques to defend its alliance with Islamic reaction as the Jewish left does to weaken Palestine solidarity.
Muslims don’t necessarily reciprocate the left’s support. Lynne Stewart, a leftist lawyer who defended Islamic murderers, was recently released from prison in the USA. As Counterpunch pointed out: “Some Muslims may quietly admit that Lynne was their champion during the 1990s; yet they remained silent and few US Muslims joined the long, hard campaign to free her. Note: I have yet to see any announcement from a US Muslim organization welcoming Stewart’s release.)”.
No, the left generally supports Muslims. But Islam, like any religion, is infinitely opportunist. To genuine Muslims, their leftist supporters are unbelievers. Logically, their attitude toward secular leftists must be analogous to the Bolsheviks’ attitude to moderate socialists: they regard them as useful idiots. The “9/11 Truth Movement”, which tries to defend Muslim terrorists by claiming their attacks are really carried out by Western governments, is perhaps less useful, but no less idiotic.
Arguing that the Western countries are the biggest terrorists, and that Islamic terror is to some extent a reaction to this, is a completely different argument to the view of the truthers, that Western governments actually carry out the Islamic extremist war crimes. Drone attacks by the US-led coalition on wedding parties in Afghanistan is no excuse for Muslims trying to blow up transatlantic airliners, but it is a major part of the explanation of Islamic hate and violence.
Yes, the West does far more damage to Muslim countries than the other way round. But this is no excuse for advocating even more tolerance of religion.
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
Leonard Zeskind’s 2009 Blood and Politics – the History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream (1)
In Boise, the defense successfully turned the deaths of Vicki and Sam Weaver into a prima facie case of government wrongdoing
– Leonard Zeskind, chapter 33, “Inferno at Waco and Randy Weaver Wins at Trial”
One of the most revealing characteristics of this, and other anti-fascist works, is their contempt for the lives of people with whom they disagree. Randy Weaver of Idaho attended meetings of the Aryan Nations. He never translated whatever he heard at those meetings into violence, but for Zeskind and his colleagues in the “hate industry”, his apparent openness to “Aryan” views is enough to make it debatable whether the murder of his wife, his friend, and his 14-year-old son, were examples of “government wrongdoing”.
The jury in the Randy Weaver trial disagreed:
But the image of mother Vicki’s head blown off while she was holding her ten-month-old baby could not be erased by any mountain of testimony about her belief in a final battle between good Aryans and evil race mixers.
You, dear reader, may think it’s reasonable to ignore a woman’s beliefs when judging whether or not it was justified for the police to blow her head off. So does the US legal system, but Leonard Zeskind demurs. His book is another contribution to anti-fascism, another attempt to
exaggerate the danger of white nationalism
downplay the danger from government acceptance of this hype, and
make Jewish nationalism look better
Zeskind’s first error is in his subtitle. White nationalism has not traveled from the margins to the mainstream. It has been traveling in the opposite direction for over a century. The ‘white’, Western countries are among the least ethnically-oriented ever recorded. Explicit racial discrimination is barred, ‘racism’ is one of the most damaging charges one can make, and president Obama was re-elected.
His second mistake is in the first sentence of the Preface – he begins “As the last century ended and the year 2000 began”. In fact, the last century ended when the year 2001 began. Zeskind’s poor mathematics leads him to his third miscalculation; he claims that, in 2000, “thirty thousand men and women form the hard-core populace” of the white nationalist movement, and “another two hundred thousand” support it by giving money and attending meetings.
“Blood and Politics” is another example of the shoddy scholarship and fearmongering which characterizes what cynics call “the hate industry” – a well-funded collection of organizations and academic departments which, as I showed in my article “The One-Sided View of Hate in Hate Studies” (2), stirs up fear of white extremism and downplays the importance of Zionism.
I also showed, from evidence presented by Steven Pinker in his recent “The Better Angels of our Nature – why Violence has Declined”, and other sources, that racialist violence has declined even more steadily than the other kinds. So much so, that a continuous stream of hate crime hoaxes is needed to prop up the myth that white supremacy is traveling “from the margins to the mainstream”.
Another prop anti-fascists depend on is the “amalgam technique”. Zeskind shamelessly uses this technique to “link” the views of hatemongers like William Pierce with prescient patriots like Willis Carto who warned of the danger of the Jewish Lobby. After all, Zeskind points out, Carto’s “wife was a German”. On the grounds that some people who oppose Jewish supremacy support white supremacy, Zeskind wants to make us think the correlation is logical and inevitable. In fact, it is possible to oppose Jewish supremacy on the grounds that all forms of racial one-upmanship are obstacles to peace and prosperity. That is the position of the current writer.
But his approach could lead a reader to the opposite conclusion to the one he intends. Instead of “white nationalist politics is wrong, white nationalists condemn Jewish power, therefore the condemnation of Jewish power is wrong”, the reader might think “the condemnation of Jewish power is right, white nationalists condemn Jewish power, therefore…”. After publication of Mearsheimer and Walts’s meticulously researched The Israel Lobby, ex-Nazi Mark Weber gave talks saying ‘told you so’, using the public interest to distribute Holocaust revisionist and similar material.
Sometimes Zeskind gives us an insight into what politics was like before people like him told us what we can say. During World War II, Congressman John Rankin addressed Congress thus:
Mr. Speaker, I hesitate to use the word Jew in any speech in this House for whenever I do a little group of Communistic Jews howl to high heaven. They seem to think it is all right for them to abuse gentiles and to stir up race trouble but when you refer to one of them they cry ‘anti-Semitism’ or accuse you of being pro-Nazi.
It is true that Rankin was in favor of segregation for African Americans. It is true that this is evil. But still, he makes a fair point about the hypocrisy of Jewish political correctness. It’s the same today, except you won’t find anyone in politics with the balls to say it.
At one point, Zeskind contrasts what he says is the Jewish view of Satan with what he says is the view of him in the “Christian Identity” movement. Satan is “a second-rate, subordinate character” in Hebrew scriptures, but a first-rate one for white Christian extremists. He says the Christian Identity movement regards Jews as Satanic. This belief is offensive as well as completely irrational, but how is it less rational than any other religious viewpoint? I don’t understand how one can defend one religious view of the world against another on the grounds that the former gives you a warm fuzzy feeling. A church in Portland was picketed by anti-fascists because, in addition to all the other nonsense in the Bible, it taught homophobia. Why pick on that one particular error?
Chapter 24 begins with a discussion of the far right’s response to the first U.S. attack on Iraq in 1990. Some of it opposed the war. In West Palm Beach, Florida, anti-war protestors wore “David Duke for Governor” buttons. Zeskind honestly reports politician Pat Buchanan’s claim that the only people who would benefit from the war in the Middle East would be the Israeli government and its “amen corner” in the USA, but this makes Zeskind, and the rest of his Lobby, determined to undermine him.
So he denounces Buchanan as “an unabashed bigot”, condemning his anti-war stance as fervently as he denounces “racism”. On page 430, he criticizes Buchanan for attacking “brown-skinned” immigrants, but it just happens that the most significant source of illegal immigrants undermining the income of poor Americans happens to be Mexico. This is not, even slightly, evidence of racial prejudice. Zeskind sneakily implies that it is, but his reason for opposing Buchanan is not sympathy for poor immigrants.
An egregious example of the amalgam technique is when Zeskind compares William Carto to violent supremacist Louis Bean; “Carto would never openly advocate the bloodbath Beam was seeking to encourage, but both obviously went to the same reservoir for ideas”. The implication is, Carto would secretly advocate a bloodbath. And that you can’t fish in that ‘reservoir’ selectively – he wants us to believe, if you blame the Jewish neo-con cult for the bloodbath in Iraq, you’ll inevitably end up supporting a bloodbath in America.
Another example:
“Whether or not militiamen and common court activists believed the Holocaust happened, whether or not they used slur words to describe black people, whether or not they wanted to send nonwhite people and race traitors into the proverbial desert, the militia in the 1990s marched to the same drumbeat that other bands of white paramilitarists had heard before them”.
This amalgamates unorthodox interpreters of the U.S. constitution, those who disbelieve the details of a particular historical event, people who use unpleasant words, and those who conspire to commit murder. As well as fishing in the same reservoir, they march to the same drumbeat. You could just as well say Leonard Zeskind marches to the same beat as the Israeli government.
He explicitly argues, taking his cue from a court decision against a white power outfit called “The Order”, that there is no distinction between white supremacy and white separatism. Any other ethnic group which wishes to be separate, can do so, without being supremacist, but white gentile European separatism he regards as inevitably supremacist, and uniquely dangerous.
Like most American anti-fascists, Zeskind fails to understand the “skinhead” phenomenon, which began in Britain in the sixties. He believes “the skinhead uniform represented an idealized industrial worker”. In fact, it parodied it. Like most American anti-fascists, Zeskind doesn’t understand irony.
Zeskind uses various underhand devices to amalgamate the Reagan presidency (1981-89) with white supremacy, and, conceding that president Reagan made Martin Luther King day a national holiday, he says it was under “great pressure”. He does, however, point out that Reagan spoke out against David Duke’s 1989 candidacy as a Republican for the Louisiana house of representatives. But Pat Buchanan, who is no racialist, but is a critic of Israel, is amalgamated with swastika-tatooed skinheads (page 416).
He complains that opposition to U.S. intervention is considered de rigeur among supporters of Pat Buchanan and David Duke alike – ‘white nationalism’ had ‘morphed’ into ‘isolationism’ – the idea that the USA has no business invading other countries. Again, a careless reader could derive from this a positive view of white nationalism. Zeskind frequently reveals his anti-fascism is covert support for American aggression, as opposed to ‘isolationism’.
Zeskind claims that, among the irrational prejudices which motivate white supremacists, are the idea that black men are more likely to be criminals than white men, and, in particular, they are far more likely to commit interracial rape. He produces no statistics to disprove these prejudices.
I don’t know the truth about the above hot-button issue, but I do know that Zeskind gets the lynching of Leo Frank by a Georgia mob in 1915 wrong. Frank wasn’t killed because he was Jewish, and it was not because he had been convicted of “the rape and murder of a white woman” as Zeskind claims. It was because he had been convicted of the murder of a 13-year-old girl, and had had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment.
Another incident Zeskind hypes up is the “murder” of five communists in North Carolina in 1979: what actually happened was some anti-fascists physically attacked a convoy of cars which they thought contained Ku Klux Klan members, shouting “death to the Klan!”. The men fought back, and five of the anti-fascists died. The local authorities, following the constitution, determined that the men were acting in self-defense. This conclusion is correct, whatever one thinks of the victims’, or of the assailants’, politics. A video of this event can be found on Youtube (3).
“Busing” was a policy put into place by well-meaning federal do-gooders during the seventies and eighties – children were taken by bus from predominantly white schools to black ones to break down “de facto segregation”. Its only effect was to encourage interracial violence, and it was abandoned, but Zeskind tries to paint reasonable opposition to this policy as racist.
In section IV of my article (2), I show
There is also over-reporting of hate crimes, which, if uncritically accepted, exaggerates the amount of hate in our society.
Even some of the most notorious “hate crimes” turn out to be something else. “Hate incidents”, which include protected speech, are amalgamated with actual crimes. Ordinary crimes, like random arson of churches by bored youth, are made into “hate crimes” by falsely claiming the churches are disproportionately African-American. Fake hate incidents, such as minority students writing hateful graffiti, are added to the mix, even after the hoax is admitted. “Perceived expression of insensitivity”, etc., are included as “hate”. Finally, crime statistics, compiled by genuine academics like Steven Pinker, which show a century-long trend of decline in hate crimes, are ignored (4).
Like all anti-fascist writers, Zeskind amalgamates support for less immigration with “hate”. But, given the existence of nation states, and the status of citizens of those nation states, it is rational for some of those citizens to campaign for restrictions on immigration, since immigrants compete with them for housing and jobs, particularly the latter, by asking for lower wages. Anti-immigration isn’t hate.
So what’s behind the exaggeration of white supremacy? Cui bono? Minority rabble-rousers like Al Sharpton benefit, and their supporters benefit temporarily until hoaxers like Azalea Cooley, Crystal Magnum, Tawana Brawley, etc., etc. are found out (5).
Another beneficiary of the hype is Jewish power, an important aspect of which is the taboo against discussing it. Zeskind follows this taboo, for example, the idea that the media is in Jewish hands is dismissed without considering the evidence.
On pp 492-3, Zeskind states that white identity is inherently oppressive. But isn’t it possible that it is simply an expression of genetic interests (Salter, 6)? And that the attempt to make it sound uniquely pathological is an expression of different genetic interests (MacDonald, 7)? In the section entitled “Are Jews Whites?”, Zeskind defends the boilerplate leftist definition of race: it’s “socially constructed”. He says “whiteness” is more akin to the divine right of kings than it is to the difference between blue jays and cardinals.
In fact, as Salter (6) explains, racial consciousness is an expression of genetic interests. Being altruistic to people in whom your genes detect copies of themselves, and perhaps hostile to those who have less copies of themselves, helps those genes reproduce. Under some circumstances, its in the genetic interests of, say, Swedish people, to distinguish themselves from Norwegians. Under other circumstances, such as the invasion of Europe by Genghiz Khan, its in Swedes’ genetic interests to consider themselves in the same race as Norwegians. That’s what “whiteness” is. It’s not a mental illness. It’s not socially constructed. It’s a simple expression of plain old genetic interests.
There’s much in Zeskind’s book about how people like the Christian Identity movement drew “anti-Semitic sap from the Christian tree”, but nothing about Jewish attitudes to Christians and others.
At one point, Zeskind describes an economic crisis in farming in the nineteen-eighties which drove many famers into the “newly resurgent” far right. Apparently, many of these farmers could recite the names of Jewish bankers – the Rothschilds, Goldman, Sachs, etc. – before they could tell you who their congressman was. I have the same problem. Couldn’t it be that those bankers are more important than whomever the Lobby has appointed to claim to represent us?
The concept “Zionist Occupied Government and its lackies” is frequently mentioned in a dismissive tone, without debate, and on page 484, he sneers at talk of “those conspiratorial string pullers” at the Anti-Defamation League, as if these ideas are ridiculous. Without missing a beat, and without evidence, Zeskind refers to the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 as “mistaken”. This is a major clue as to Zeskind’s real politics. His opposition to white nationalism is an expression of his Jewish identity.
Anti-fascism is the hyping up of white extremism, the lie that this, perhaps the least racially-oriented society in history, is in constant danger of reverting to the bad old days of lynching and segregation. The main effect of this effort is to hide the elephant in the room.
Zeskind, L. (2009). Blood and Politics. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
This is another contribution to my argument (1) that, if one rejects the attempts of Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League to close down debate on the Israel/Palestine question by shouting “anti-semitism”, one cannot simultaneously try to help resolve issues by throwing the phrase “ Islamophobia ” around. You’re either politically correct, or you’re not.
A New York synagogue invited a notorious anti-Muslim campaigner, Pam Geller. Jews Against Islamophobia (2) told the synagogue it should disinvite her, because “hate” is not really free speech.
Actually, it is. You invite someone to defend what you call “hate”, then you explain why you disagree with it. This is freedom of speech, a sub-category of freedom of expression, an important achievement of Western societies, enshrined in the first amendment to the U.S. constitution.
Jews Against Islamophobia accepts that “the respected Southern Poverty Law Center” can “list” organizations such as “Stop Islamization of America”, as “hate groups”. This gives the SPLC the right to tell us what we can listen to.
“Objecting to the invitation to Geller is not a First Amendment or censorship issue. Only the government can violate someone’s free speech rights.”
According to this, if any body other than a government one bars someone from speaking, it’s not a violation of their rights. This would mean that if Brooklyn College had barred speakers from the Boycott Israel campaign, it would not be censorship.
Jews Against Islamophobia’s constituent organizations are among the ones who try to stop Gilad Atzmon from speaking – for example, some of them recently told a Portland venue that Atzmon is a “holocaust denier”, and it decided not to host him. The weasel words of the SPLC – “hate group”, “bigotry”, “racism” – are as easily used against Israel’s critics as against its fanatics.
Why shouldn’t a synagogue invite Pam Geller to speak? It agrees with her view that the USA and Israel have a common cause against Islam. What’s the problem? It makes Jewish supremacists look bad?
I commented on Mondoweiss criticizing Jews Against Islamophobia. To my amazement, my comment was not approved.
[Correction – January 25, 2014 – my comment was approved]
1.https://masspsychology.wordpress.com/2013/01/03/what-is-islamophobia
2.http://mondoweiss.net/2013/04/inviting-islamophobia-coalition.html
Jay Knott, April 7, 2013
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”:
The Jewish media persuaded the courts to convict Ahmed of texting while driving
Jews are over-represented in the global banking system
Jews were responsible for trying to bring Russia into line with the other European countries
Jews sacrifice children
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”.
“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
to
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
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.
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 11th, 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.
Jay Knott, December 31 2012
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
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
the jay report 