The UK government is considering making certain criticisms of Israel illegal [1] (PDF).
The “Home Affairs Committee” recommends making illegal, among other things,
—Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust).
—Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
—Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.
—Applying double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
—Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
A similar law, but applying only to colleges and universities, the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act”, is being considered in the USA, but is widely regarded as unconstitutional, thus unenforceable [2].
The UK report refers to the Macpherson report on the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993:
The Macpherson report, published in 1999 as a result of the inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, recommended that the definition of a racist incident should be “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”…
This entirely subjective definition was enshrined into law [3]. In tune with the Macpherson report, the Home Affairs Committee report considers denial of the problem of antisemitism to be evidence of it. As this 2000 report by “Civitas” explains [4], the Macpherson report considered that a police officer denying he is racist is evidence that he is.
Clearly, many people “perceive” various criticisms of Israel as a form of racism called “antisemitism”. However, the Committee generously accepts that “for a perpetrator to be prosecuted for a criminal offence that was motivated or aggravated by antisemitism”, requires evidence, and someone other than the victim to make an “objective interpretation of that evidence”. The broad definitions of “antisemitism” in this report give an idea of what the Committee considers to be “objective”. For example, it argues that “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour” is objectively antisemitic. In other words, opposing racism is objectively racist.
The Committee also wants to prosecute criticism of Zionism within Britain:
Referring to Birmingham University as a “Zionist outpost” (and similar comments) smacks of outright racism…
it claims, on page 35, discussing the views of the president of the National Union of Students [1].
This assault on freedom cannot be reduced to Jewish power in British society, because it has so much in common with anti-racism in general. It’s the irrational moral panic about “racism” that enables these reports, together with a lack of understanding of the value of freedom of expression. This weakness, and this misunderstanding, need to be highlighted and challenged.
Gilad Atzmon and Alison Weir are major critics of the elephant in the room – the Jewish Lobby. Both have helped us break from the approach, led by left-wing gatekeepers such as Noam Chomsky, which assumes that unconditional support for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is in the interests of Western capitalists. In fact, as I showed in my article “Faithful Circle”, support for Israel is against the interests of the vast majority of the West’s inhabitants, rich and poor i.
Atzmon and Weir have both been subject to attempted censorship by groups within the Palestine solidarity movement on both sides of the Atlantic (but not in the Gaza Strip nor the West Bank). These groups try to persuade people not to book Atzmon and Weir to speak on the Palestine question. Atzmon is deliberately provocative, and the humorless left takes everything he says literally. Weir is more careful. Everything she says and writes is well-researched and referenced. It was more difficult to invent a case against her, but eventually Jewish Voice for Peace discovered that she once gave an interview to an obscure radio show run by a guy called Clayton Douglas, whom they claim is a “white supremacist” ii, and started trying to persuade peace groups and Palestine solidarity organizations not to work with her.
That’s not the real reason they don’t want you to listen to Weir. No-one would have heard of Douglas unless JVP had publicized him. A more plausible reason is the success of Weir’s recent “Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the United States Was Used to Create Israel”, iii whose title speaks for itself. Weir’s opponents don’t want us to find out that the main reason for American support for Israel is the Lobby, because this realization might lead to weakening that support. It would also make Jews in the USA feel less comfortable, and Jewish Voice for Peace is more concerned about that than it is about dead Palestinian children.
Despite my respect for Atzmon and Weir, I think it’s illogical when they help spread the latest left-wing debate-stifling accusation – “Islamophobia”. Atzmon thinks Jewish organizations are responsible for stirring up “Islamophobia” iv, whereas I find that these groups often use the word to try to manipulate white guilt to undermine discussion of the negative aspects of Islam. For examples, go to the Anti-Defamation League’s website and search for the word “Islamophobia”. I regard this as homologous with the effort to suppress Weir’s and Atzmon’s arguments on the grounds that they are “anti-semitic”. These allegations are part of the assault on our freedom known as “political correctness”.
Max Blumenthal is an influential gatekeeper, working tirelessly to maintain Jewish control of the Palestine solidarity movement. Despite his vitriolic attacks on herv, Weir generously says his “Great Islamophobic Crusade” vi which claims “Nine years after 9/11, hysteria about Muslims in American life has gripped the country” is “an excellent article” vii. In effect, Weir says to Blumenthal “I support your use of hyperbole to exaggerate anti-Muslim sentiment, but I object when you use the same p.c. leftist techniques to smear me as anti-semitic”.
I don’t deny there is some irrational prejudice against Muslims in the West. A 14-year-old Sudanese American boy was arrested in Texas in September 2015 because his teachers thought the clock he brought to school might be a bomb. But look at the reaction. The story rapidly spread on Facebook and Twitter, became front-page news around the world, professional victims were able to make plenty of political capital out of itviii, and the boy was invited to the White Houseix. The country is not “saturated with anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamophobia”, as Linda Sarsour claims.
Consider that president George W Bush said, shortly after September 11th 2001, that “Islam is peace” x.
Consider how often the media and politicians condemn “Islamophobia” as if it is a thing, but call ISIS the “so-called” Islamic state, as if they want to protect the religion from association with its unpalatable expressions.
Finally, consider that the fear of being accused of “Islamophobia” was one of the reasons the authorities in Britain ignored Muslim gangs raping and trafficking hundreds of under-age girls for decades xii.
We should be free to think critically about Islam and its consequences, without worrying if we are being “Islamophobic”. I am not convinced, as Atzmon is, that Muslim atrocities are likely to be “false flag operations” xiii, nor that Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League stir up irrational dislike of Muslims, as Weir believes.
In conclusion, if we want to appeal to the mass of people, most of whom have every interest in ending Western support for the Jewish state, we need to abandon the accusatory, debate-stifling language of the leftist thought police.
This is a response to Spencer Sunshine’s article for Political Research Associates, Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism, 1. I argue that it doesn’t oppose racial discrimination, rather, it defends one form of it by greatly exaggerating another.
There are a few factual errors in the article. As an example of a passage which I could pick apart, because I directly experienced the events in question, but don’t think it’s worth the effort, here’s Sunshine’s account of the reasoning behind the successful efforts of Jewish leftists to oust a Palestine activist from the co-operative movement:
Pacifica Forum members attended Occupy events in Eugene and Portland, Oregon, attempted to use a left-wing bookstore in Portland to host an antisemitic speaker, and one was a board member at an annual co-operative conference.
But that’s not the main problem. More important is to explain the hidden cause of Mr Sunshine’s logical errors.
The above sentence follows from a passage in which Sunshine asserts, without explanation, that anyone who tolerates the airing of what he labels “far right” ideas, should be treated the same as someone who actually believes these ideas. This is subject to a logical contradiction. Suppose you adopt Sunshine’s prescription, and treat anyone who tolerates any “far right” ideas in the same way as people who actually hold those ideas. What about someone who tolerates people who tolerate “far right” ideas, but doesn’t herself tolerate those ideas? Do you treat her in the same way as those whom she tolerates, who tolerate “far right” ideas? Where do you draw the line?
Whereas most of us might be concerned about how how true or false a given proposition about the world is, Sunshine’s position involves adopting a complex classification system, in which some ideas are classified as “far right”, and some as “progressive”. His elaboration of this classification makes it clear he cares primarily about “anti-semitism”. He uses this term very broadly, to include anyone who challenges Jewish interests.
Apart from the logical absurdity of Sunshine’s position, it could lead to violence.
I’ve written some articles which, while generally what Sunshine would call “progressive”, utilize some “far right” ideas. This is one of them: Invention, Imagination, Race and Nation2.
Part of Spencer’s anti-fascist front uses violence against peaceful “far right” meetings (see my 2012 article on the incident at Tinley Park3). So, if generally “progressive” people who make use of some “far right” ideas are regarded as being as bad as these “far right” activists, some of Sunshine’s friends might try to disrupt our meetings. This could lead to a tragedy.
So far, in my experience, anti-fascist harassment has only led to one Palestine solidarity activist getting fired, because he worked at a co-op which was easily persuaded by Jewish activists that he believes “far right” ideas. The real reason was that he was trying to persuade the co-op movement to boycott Israeli goods.
Why take anti-fascism seriously? Sunshine’s article includes warning of “a revival of fascist influence within countercultural music scenes”, and the influence of the “far right” among environmental activists.
The article becomes more serious when Sunshine says the president of the Palestinian rights advocacy group, If Americans Knew, Alison Weir, is “crypto-antisemitic”, because she talks and writes about the power of the Israel Lobby. Since it can be shown that the Lobby is the main reason for American support for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, suppressing discussion of this issue helps it continue (see my article, Faithful Circle4).
His attempt to discredit Weir is the most obvious giveaway of Sunshine’s real aim – thought-policing the left in the interests of Jewish privilege. Alison Weir is liberal to a fault. Her message of support for the victims of Jewish supremacy is becoming increasingly heard. That’s why Jewish racialists within and without the left are slandering her more than ever.
Another clue as to Sunshine’s covert racialist aims is his attempt to amalgamate any critique of any aspect of Jewish over-representation, in positions of power and influence, with Nazism:
The same goes for those who repeat traditional Nazi-era antisemitic conspiracies, such as that Jews control the government, banking system, or the mass media… while repeating classical antisemitic narratives, deploy code words such as “Zionists,” “Jewish neocons,” or the “Frankfurt School” — instead of “the Jews.”
He wants us to believe that if you attribute the notorious pro-Israel bias in the US media to Jewish over-representation in its ownership, or criticize a large section of the Jewish community for its support for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, or mention the role of the neo-conservatives in persuading the US government to massacre the inhabitants of Arab and Muslim countries in various wars since September 11th 2001, while noting that the majority of the neo-cons are self-identified Jews, you are in the same league as the murderers of Anne Frank.
The degree of Jewish control of the media, and whether or not it matters, are empirical questions. We shouldn’t care at all whether or not a theory conforms to a “classical antisemitic narrative”. Objecting to a position because it sounds like Nazi propaganda is illogical; just because the Nazis claimed the Soviet government murdered the Polish officer corps5, doesn’t mean it’s not true.
Chutzpah is a Yiddish word meaning “breathtaking hypocrisy”. Sunshine alleges
Allowing Far Right participation can also pose a security risk. Far Right actors may use such opportunities to collect personal information on progressive activists and information about their organizations. This has been an ongoing problem, in particular for antifascist and other groups that monitor the Far Right.
But this is at least as true of allowing anti-fascist participation in progressive movements. The Portland 9/11 Truth Alliance has had its members’ details publicized, because, of the wide range of conspiracy nuts hosted by the group, one or two of them mentioned the idea of Israeli involvement in September 11th. Overt Zionists are copying what anti-fascists do – “doxxing” (publishing the names etc.) of Palestine activists, hoping employers will take notice, while remaining anonymous themselves.
For example, The Canary Mission “is publicizing the identities of pro-Palestinian student activists to prevent them from getting jobs after they graduate from college. But the website is keeping its own backers’ identity a secret” 6.
As a result of its chutzpah, the anti-fascist left is immune to irony. Sunshine’s piece treats the Southern Poverty Law Center as if it is an authority. The SPLC describes a group as a hate group if it spreads ideas about some other group of people which inspire a person, or persons, to commit violence against that second group. But the SPLC’s labeling of the Family Research Council as a hate group led a man to shoot a security guard at the group’s headquarters with a 9mm Sig Sauer semi-automatic pistol – which means, using its own criteria, the SPLC is a hate group. The attacker can be heard on this Youtube video admitting to the police that he found the FRC via the SPLC 7.
“Anti-semitism” is one form of racial discrimination which has never been very important in the US. You can tell this by looking at statistics for lynchings – if a particular minority has been seriously discriminated against in US history, you can be sure some of its members will have been murdered by mobs. What the SPLC and its allies mean by “anti-semitism” is opposition to a minority using its privileged position to oppress others. Logically, genuine opponents of racial privilege would surely prioritize undermining Jewish supremacy, rather than exaggerating the danger of white nationalism. The role of anti-fascists like Spencer Sunshine is to try to prevent us from drawing that logical conclusion.
Jessica Valenti’s column in the Guardian is usually about the oppression of women. Sometimes, she tries to comment on other left-wing issues, such as “racism”:
Adults should be allowed to have whatever opinions they want, but children do need to be protected against certain views. For example, it’s right to stop them being able to view websites which advocate violence against minorities.
Equally, it is right to shield children against dangerous left-wing ideas. One of the weapons of the Muslim child-rape gangs, whose decades of abuse is currently being uncovered in the UK, was American-style anti-racism.
The pimps are adept at trading on teenage rebellion and use similar methods, according to Crop, of convincing the girls all white people are racist. This is part of the controlling process, to instil guilt in the girls. “Like most teenagers, I was going through a phase of arguing with my mum,” says Gemma. “Amir told me they didn’t understand me and were racist and ignorant. I believed him.” Gemma was given an Asian name by Amir, and told she had to read the Koran, a story support workers tell me is not uncommon. “They erode the girls’ identities,” says Kosaraju, “to make them more compliant and needy.”
I pointed this out in a comment on Valenti’s article. It was deleted.
Julie Bindel is one of the few feminists who stood up to the left and put the interests of girls before those of Pakistani men. Guardian hackette Jessica Valenti is, unfortunately, more typical.
More:
Show Racism the Red Card is more than just a bunch of social justice warriors trying to police offensive humour at football matches. It is trying to extend its influence into schools – according to Ged Grebby in the Guardian, “England’s young people aren’t racist – but they need better education“.
A specific example of what Grebby calls “racism” is
Through Show Racism the Red Card’s work in schools, we have found that there is a large amount of negativity when young people are asked questions about “immigration” or “Muslims”
Show Racism the Red Card aims to weaken children’s fear of Muslims. Unfortunately, this fear is justified. It’s true that the majority of Muslim men in the UK are not child-traffickers, but it’s also true that Muslim men are over-represented by a factor of over 150 among child-traffickers. Being wary of Muslims is just like being wary of strange men – most strange men aren’t child-molestors, but we teach children to use statistics to err on the side of caution. It should be exactly the same with Muslims, but political correctness undermines our ability to teach children to defend themselves.
Footnote 1, June 27, 2015 – According to a report in the Daily Telegraph, the police suppressed a report into Muslim grooming gangs just before the 2010 election “to avoid inflaming racial tensions”.
Footnote 2, June 28, 2015 – This interview with Lauren Southern describes feminists inventing “rape culture” in European societies, while ignoring real rape culture in backward countries, and outposts of backward countries, in places like Rotherham, UK.
Footnote 3, November 1, 2015 – I received an email about an paper on “racism” in children’s books entitled “The elephant in the room: picturebooks, philosophy for children and racism“, by Darren Chetty. It argues that children should be taught anti-racist ideas to counter these negative influences.
The paper is ridiculous, but given what we know about the susceptibility of people like social workers and schoolteachers to ridiculous p.c. ideas, it’s not completely harmless.
The author of “The Elephant in the Room” explicitly denies he’s in favour of “white guilt”:
“Lest I be accused of such a thing, I am not suggesting that White children be made to feel guilty.”
Because he’s so up-front about it, I think we can assume he is being sincere. But, regardless of his intentions, it’s easy for less scrupulous people to use some of the ideas of Critical Race Theory to manipulate the weakness known as “white guilt” in credulous children. For example, Pakistanis in Rotherham used white guilt to blackmail underage girls into having sex with them.
“The pimps routinely tell their victims that their parents are racist towards Asian people and that they disapprove of the relationships because the men are of Pakistani Muslim heritage.”
However, she also made the mistake of giving some credit to the “anti-racist” viewpoint:
“Some of the parents I met were racist, and some had developed almost a phobia against Asian men, fuelled by the misinformation and bigotry trotted out by racist groups in response to the pimping gangs.”
Despite this attempt to appease Muslims and their allies, Bindel was listed as “Islamophobic” on the website “Islamophobia Watch”.
After all, if it’s Islamophobic for “racist groups” to complain about Muslim rape gangs, isn’t it Islamophobic when a progressive such as Bindel does the same?
Concepts like “racism” and “Islamophobia” are worse than useless.
Footnote 4, January 16, 2016 – I just came across the most comprehensive examination of the effect of anti-racist legislation on the ability of the UK police to stop Muslim grooming gangs I’ve seen yet – “Rotherham: the Perfect Storm“, by Anne Marie Waters.
The anti-fascists and Zionists of AFA and Hope not Hate have made a big mistake in attacking the United Kingdom Independence Party. So long as they harassed obnoxious outfits like the British National Party, they were on safe ground. But UKIP has the support of millions.
The self-styled progressive sections of the politically switched-on classes, whose visceral contempt for the white working class makes every other prejudice in 21st century Britain pale into insignificance in comparison.
If the Duke University false-allegation-of-rape case of 2006 were nothing more than the persecution of three students by a university, solely because they are white, male, and allegedly wealthy, and that their accuser is black and female, it would show nothing more than the corruption of one university by political correctness – the reverse of discrimination against minorities, women, etc..
But the fact that the district attorney, the local police department, and most of the media, joined eighty-eight academics at the university, in stating or implying their guilt, long after it was clear that no crime had taken place, shows that it’s not just academia. Political correctness is more deeprooted and widespread.
Though they were proven innocent – rather than merely “not guilty”, the DA who prosecuted them was imprisoned for misconduct in the case, and their accuser convicted of murder, much of the mainstream media, for example, the New York Times, Salon, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the Daily News, Newsday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, FT Magazine, and the Daily Beast, continues to try to convince the public that they were in fact guilty of something: How the Media Again Failed on the Duke Lacrosse Story.
The continuing saga of the Duke lacrosse three contradicts the hypothesis of professional anti-racists that the USA’s dominant culture is white supremacist, etc..
The Southern Poverty Law Center, known to its admirers by the initials $PLC, has exceeded its normal bounds of logic and reason. Reacting to the murder of three attendees at a Jewish Center in Kansas City on April 13th, the $PLC argues
The fact of the matter is that more people have been killed domestically by radical right extremists than Islamic extremists since 9/11
Since September 11th, 2001, more people have been murdered in the USA by white extremists than by Muslims. But if you choose September 10, 2001, as your starting date, the opposite is true.
Notice also that the $PLC distinguishes between ‘radical right extremists’ and ‘Islamic extremists’. Despite their medieval views, the latter can’t be classified as ‘radical right extremists’, because most of them aren’t white!
P.S. Good news – the $PLC and the “Anti” Defamation League have been dropped by the FBI.
Taking advantage of the fact that, in anti-racism legislation, the burden of proof has shifted toward the defendant, a gang of gypsies falsely accused a British schoolteacher of racial harassment.
Mrs Hampson found herself involved in a clash with a family of travellers who had illegally established themselves on green-belt land and had blocked her way home one day, you might have expected the grandmother to receive a decent hearing from the authorities.
France’s most popular comedian is a black guy called Dieudonné M’Bala. One of his supporters is a footballer named Nicholas Anelka. Dieudonné has been prosecuted under France’s “anti-racist” (anti-freedom) laws, fined and had shows canceled for making a gesture called the quenelle (see picture). Roughly translated, this gesture means “up yours to the establishment”.
Anelka made the gesture, in support of Dieudonné, during a game for his (ex) club in the English Premier League, West Bromwich Albion, in December last year.
Part of the “anti-racist” left, and some of its Zionist allies, claimed that the gesture is “abusive and/or indecent and/or insulting and/or improper,” and “included a reference to ethnic origin and/or race and/or religion or belief“, and an “independent” commission agreed. Among the allegations is that the “quenelle” gesture is an “inverted Nazi salute”. The idea that black Frenchmen would give Nazi salutes is too ridiculous to waste time with.
But the cowards of the Football Association, Anelka’s club, and its sponsor, fell over each other to grovel to the “anti-racists”. Anelka was suspended for five games, and fined. He was also ordered to undergo “education” – reminiscent of Stalinist “re-education camps”. The final straw was when he was told to apologize.
Anelka delivered an inspiring “up yours” to his employers, and to the p.c. establishment in general, by tearing up his contract. He tweeted:
Following talks between the club and me, propositions were made to me in order to reintegrate me into the squad under certain conditions that I cannot accept. Wishing to retain my integrity, I have therefore taken the decision to free myself and put an end to the contract linking me with West Bromwich Albion to 2014, with immediate effect. i
West Brom are right to say that this is an “unprofessional” way to resign. By resigning on Twitter, rather than through the official channels, Anelka showed his contempt for them.
The “anti-racist” establishment isn’t really about fighting “racism”. Persecuting a footballer for an obscure gesture in support of a French comedian is not going to have much effect on attitudes in England. It’s about power – trying to make people accept being told what to think, taking advantage of our eagerness to please, our fear of being accused of wicked thoughts.
Normally, this guilt is turned against white people, in the guise of defending black people. But the attacks on Anelka and Dieudonné indicate that it’s more about Jewish power than black advancement.
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.
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 Martinvi.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Portland Jewish Federation
Oregonians for Immigration Reform
explicit defense of racial supremacy
yes
no
support for bombing civilians
yes
no
support from Oregon politicians
100.00%
0 %
hypocritical whining
yes
no
moral/Jewish values
yes
no
subject to attempts to prevent meetings
no
yes
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:
During the recent attack on Gaza, which killed over 160 people, including 37 children (
the jay report 