The number of anti-Semitic attacks around the world during Israel's three-week military operation against Hamas in Gaza was up more than 300 percent compared to the same period last year, reaching a two-decade high, according to figures released Sunday by the Global Forum Against Anti-Semitism.
The Israeli forum's annual report, released ahead of Tuesday's International Holocaust Remembrance Day, also cited the "conspicuous" comparisons being made between Israel's actions against Hamas in Gaza and those of Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.
More than 250 anti-Semitic incidents were reported around the world during the 22-day assault on the Islamic regime in Gaza, which began on December 27, compared to 80 during the same period last year, according to the report.
The bulk of the incidents were carried out in Western Europe and were led by local Muslims, including 100 each in France and Britain, the report found.
The violent assaults included attacks against both synagogues and Jewish communities, as well as vandalism of privately owned Jewish property, the report said.
The number and intensity of anti-Semitic incidents during the Gaza assault were "unprecedented" in the last two decades, said Jewish Agency official Amos Hermon at a press conference at Jerusalem's Jewish Agency headquarters, where the report was released.
Ironically, the dramatic spike in anti-Semitism followed a year in which anti-Semitic incidents dropped by 15%-20% from the previous year, according to the report.
At the event, Jewish Agency Treasurer Hagai Meirom predicted a fresh wave of global anti-Semitism in the wake of Operation Cast Lead - even though the report noted a drop in incidents since the end of the operation - and stressed that the government needed to provide additional resources to effectively respond to such attacks worldwide.
Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Sunday blasted the wave of anti-Semitic incidents, some of which, she said, were being expressed by government officials.
"During days of international challenges - such as Operation Cast Lead and the Second Lebanon War - we see that Israel's very existence as a Jewish state is exploited with anti-Semitic activity in the guise of criticism against Israel's military actions," Livni said.
She added that such incidents were rife in countries with a large radical Islamic presence.
"The battle against anti-Semitism is not detached from the battle over our existence, and in the global struggle between moderates and extremists," she said.
Over the last two weeks, a Vatican official, a Norwegian foreign ministry official and a British MP have all compared Israel's actions to those of the Nazis.
The upswing in virulently anti-Israel Holocaust parallels comes at a time of increasingly global Holocaust education and resources, Holocaust educators say.
"Paradoxically, as interest in the Holocaust continues to grow around the world, we are also witnessing a rise in the provocative and cynical use of the Holocaust in attacking Israel and Jews," Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev said.
"Our hope is that by making comprehensive, credible information about the Holocaust available in a number of languages, that we build a cadre of people who know what the Holocaust really was, who understand the realities and can serve as a buffer against those who would deny the Holocaust or make such manipulative comparisons that are so divorced from any semblance of reality," he added.
In a related development, Yad Vashem announced Sunday that it would launch its Web site, as well as a YouTube channel, in Spanish this week.
The new Web site will be launched officially in Spain on Tuesday, marking the fourth annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day, with the participation of Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos.
"The Holocaust has become the brand name of man's inhumanity against mankind," said Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi hunter of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center. "For some people it is the best way to get back at Israel and hit us where it hurts."
He added, "Our major challenge now and in the future is to protect and inoculate mainstream society from the fallacious distortions and inversions of the extremists who seek to manipulate the Holocaust for their own purposes."
Separately, the New York-based Anti-Defamation League urged the leaders of several European countries on Sunday to publicly condemn "the explosion of anti-Semitic rhetoric" and Holocaust comparisons at anti-Israel rallies against the Gaza operation.
"Blatantly anti-Semitic displays have contributed to an unacceptable wave of anti-Semitic threats of violence, intimidation and attacks against Jewish communal institutions and individuals in many countries," wrote ADL national chairman Glen S. Lewy and national director Abraham H. Foxman. "While it is important to take immediate steps to increase security measures for the Jewish community for the protection of property and the personal safety of individuals, there is also an urgent need for your government to publicly and forcefully speak out against such anti-Semitic attacks to make it clear that anti-Semitism, hatred and bigotry of any kind has no place in your country."
The ADL leaders wrote to the heads of eight countries - Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland - where "anti-Semitic displays have been present and condemnations from the highest level of government have been absent," the organization said in a press release.
The American Jewish group reminded the European leaders of the obligations their countries had undertaken to combat anti-Semitism in the 2004 Berlin Declaration of the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe.
The document declared unambiguously that international developments or political issues, including those in Israel or elsewhere in the Middle East, never justify anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile, a renewed blast of anti-Semitic vitriol is expected to be aired at the Durban II United Nations World Conference, to be held in Geneva in April.
The very date of the opening, April 20, demonstrates insensitivity to Jewish feelings, a Jewish Agency spokesman noted.
April 20, 2009 will mark the 120th anniversary of the birth of Adolf Hitler.
WASHINGTON – Suicides among U.S. soldiers rose last year to the highest level in decades, the Army announced Thursday. At least 128 soldiers killed themselves in 2008. But the final count is likely to be considerably higher because 15 more suspicious deaths are still being investigated and could also turn out to be self-inflicted, the Army said.
A new training and prevention effort will start next week. And Col. Elspeth Ritchie, a psychiatric consultant to the Army surgeon general, made a plea for more U.S. mental health professionals to sign on to work for the military.
"We are hiring and we need your help," she said.
The new suicide figure compares with 115 in 2007 and 102 in 2006 and is the highest since record keeping began in 1980. Officials calculate the deaths at a rate of roughly 20.2 per 100,000 soldiers — which is higher than the adjusted civilian rate for the first time since the Vietnam War, officials told a Pentagon news conference.
"We need to move quickly to do everything we can to reverse this disturbing ... number," Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli said.
Officials have said that troops are under tremendous and unprecedented stress because of repeated and long tours of duty due to the simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The stress has placed further burdens on an overwhelmed military health care system also trying to tend to huge numbers of troops suffering from post-traumatic stress, depression and other mental health problems as well as physical wounds and injuries of tens of thousands.
Yearly increases in suicides have been recorded since 2004, when there were 64 — only about half the number now. And they've occurred despite increased training, prevention programs and psychiatric staff.
When studying individual cases, officials said they found that the most common factors for suicides were soldiers suffering problems with their personal relationships, legal or financial issues and problems on the job.
The statistics released Thursday cover soldiers who killed themselves while they were on active duty — including National Guard and Reserve troops who had been activated.
The previous year's rate of suicides — 18.8 per 100,000 soldiers — had also been the highest on record. But the new pace of 20.2 per 100,000 was the first time the rate surpassed the civilian number, when adjusted to reflect the Army's younger and male-heavy demographics.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the suicide rate for U.S. society overall was about 11 per 100,000 in 2004, the latest year for which the agency has figures. But the Army says the civilian rate is more like 19.5 per 100,000 when adjusted.
The new estimated rate of 20.2 is more than double the 9.8 in 2002 — the first full year after the start of the war in Afghanistan
The new Army statistics follow a report earlier this month showing that the Marine Corps recorded more suicides last year than any year since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
That report said 41 Marines were possible or confirmed suicides in 2008, or 16.8 per 100,000 troops. The Marine rate remained unchanged from the previous year.
Marine and Army units have borne most of duty in the two wars, which have required more use of ground forces to fight the insurgencies.
The numbers kept by the service branches don't show the whole picture of war-related suicides because they don't include deaths after people have left the military. The Department of Veterans Affairs tracks those numbers and says there were 144 suicides among the nearly 500,000 service members who left the military from 2002-2005 after fighting in at least one of the two ongoing wars.
The true incidence of suicide among military veterans is not known, according to a report last year by the Congressional Research Service. Based on numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the VA estimates that 18 veterans a day — or 6,500 a year — take their lives, but that number includes vets from all previous wars.
"The suicide numbers released today come as no surprise to the veterans' community who has experienced the psychological toll of war," said Paul Rieckhoff, director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. "But we cannot let current trend lines continue. These are preventable deaths for which the Department of Defense and the VA can and must take bold action."
The Wall Street crowd that packed into the ballroom of the fancy Times Square hotel didn't know what was about to hit it.
As the bankers and analysts sliced into their grilled beef tenderloin and chicken, Sheila Bair stepped up to the microphone and told them off.
Too many people couldn't make their mortgage payments, she said. The mortgage industry was sitting on a ticking time bomb and just didn't get it. Pick up the phone, she said, and talk to borrowers.
"The sense of hostility from that audience was overwhelming," said Howard Glaser, a Washington-based mortgage industry consultant who sat at Bair's table that day in October 2007.
"I thought they were literally going to throw their desserts at her."
It would not be the last time the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. got under somebody's skin. Since the banking crisis erupted, Bair has led the call for more government action, creating a rift with former President George W. Bush's treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, and thrusting herself into the limelight.
Bair, who speaks in a soft but rapid-fire monotone, is a constant presence on financial news talk shows and on Capitol Hill. Forbes magazine last year ranked her the second-most powerful woman in the world, behind only German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Critics say she is on a liberal crusade, but the 54-year-old Republican has won a key ally: President Barack Obama. She's working closely with the new administration on a plan to reshape the financial world by creating a so-called "bad bank" that would mop up hundreds of billions in toxic assets from the balance sheets of U.S. banks.
The bad bank, if adopted, might be run by Bair's agency, the FDIC.
No firm decision has been made, though an announcement could come this week. Meanwhile, Bair is urging Americans to stay calm, even as some of the nation's largest banks teeter. The country is far better prepared for a financial crisis than it was during the Great Depression, she said in an interview last week.
"We all just need to get a hold of ourselves," she said. "It's going to be hard. It's going to take time. But we will work through it."
Roots in the Depression
Bair may be a Washington insider — she has lived in the area for most of the past 30 years — but her Kansas upbringing comes through in expressions like "oh golly." Hers is the world of Independence, Kan., where her late father Albert was the only surgeon in a town of 10,000. Her mother, Clara, was a nurse and a homemaker who grew up in a farming family that struggled to make ends meet during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
"We're direct — maybe sometimes too direct," Bair said. "The kinds of basic values I learned growing up in the Midwest are good things."
During the Depression, Americans learned tough lessons about the importance of thrift, but that sensibility has been lost in recent years, she said.
"We're getting back in touch with that," she said. "I think ultimately that will make us stronger as a society again."
Bair is quick with a laugh but is still a serious-minded policy wonk who tosses out terms like "regulatory arbitrage," "net present value" and "granularity" and keeps neat stacks of papers on her desk overlooking the Washington monument.
After graduating from law school in 1978, Bair took a job as a civil rights lawyer for Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Eventually, she landed on the staff of Sen. Bob Dole, a fellow Kansan. Being from "a good Kansas Republican family," didn't hurt, Bair said.
"She's aggressive in the right sense," said Dole, who still speaks with her monthly. "If she has an idea, you're going to hear about it."
Bair moved home to run for the House of Representatives in 1990, losing in the Republican primary by fewer than 800 votes. She has fond memories of riding a bicycle through the district with a little yellow flag attached, handing out yellow and blue brochures and following up with personal notes.
"You're out there riding your bicycle running for Congress, you're the talk of the town for weeks," she recalled. At the time, Bair was single, and that may have contributed to her defeat, at least in Dole's opinion.
"Out in parts of Kansas, we like to elect married people," Dole said. "I always used to tell Sheila, 'if you had been married, you would have been a shoo-in.'"
'Rock and Brock'
After leaving Dole's staff, Bair served on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for four years until 1995. She was a top lobbyist for the New York Stock Exchange until 2000, a taxing job that required constant travel. It also meant less time with her two children, Preston and Colleen, who are now 15 and 9.
She met her husband, Scott Cooper, in the late 1980s at a party on Capitol Hill. Cooper, who works at a Washington trade group, said his wife has an uncanny ability to stay calm and put work behind her when she's not at the office.
"When she comes home, she's home, and she's part of the family." Cooper said. "Not that she doesn't use her BlackBerry a lot."
Bair returned to government after Bush took office in 2001, receiving assurances that her job as an assistant treasury secretary overseeing banking policy wouldn't be a 24-7 affair. But then came the 9-11 attacks and the collapse of Enron. Protecting banks from terrorist attacks and reforming the pension system became part of her mandate.
At Treasury, she worked with the late Federal Reserve Governor Edward Gramlich on an early effort to combat predatory lending. Gramlich was one of the first regulators in Washington to warn about dangerous lending practices.
Seeking again to spend more time with her kids, Bair left government in summer 2002 for the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. There, she taught financial regulatory policy for four years and wrote two children's books.
One of them, "Rock, Brock and the Savings Shock," tells the rhyming story of two young boys. Rock burns through his allowance on trinkets like green hair goo and peppermint-flavored wax fangs. His thrifty brother Brock saves to buy a telescope and presents for his parents.
"Brock's cash," Bair writes, "grew and grew and grew — eight, then sixteen, then thirty-two. His pile of bucks became so great, he had to store them in a crate! Ten weeks went by. Poor Rock was doomed. He had no cash; Brock's had ballooned!"
Making enemies
When the Bush administration went looking for a chairman of the FDIC in 2006, Bair was a known quantity with a long background in banking issues. Plus, nobody expected the job to be all that exciting.
The FDIC, which celebrated its 75th anniversary last year, insures deposits up to $250,000 per account, an amount lawmakers raised from $100,000 last fall. The agency employs about 5,000 and its $2.2 billion budget comes from more than 8,300 FDIC-insured banks.
Bair didn't have much of a honeymoon. Months after she was confirmed, the agency's top economist warned trouble was brewing with mortgages made to borrowers with poor credit.
As the subprime crisis exploded, she became an outspoken voice for government intervention, though her ideas never caught on with the Bush administration. Democrats in Congress, though, embraced them with fervor. Last November she broke with Paulson and proposed using some of the $700 billion in financial bailout money to prevent foreclosures.
"She made bitter enemies out of the (Bush) administration," said William Seidman, who led the FDIC from 1985 to 1991. "If they had their choice of one official that they could personally throttle, she would lead the list."
Earlier this winter, Washington was awash with suggestions Bair had also clashed with then New York Federal Reserve Bank President Timothy Geithner, who is now Obama's treasury secretary.
Bair insists there won't be a problem with Geithner.
"We have different perspectives frequently, and I think that's a healthy thing," she said. "You don't want to get everybody in the room nodding."
Critics say her record of helping consumers stave off foreclosures is mixed and that she has steered the FDIC into an activist role to the detriment of the agency's traditional purpose of limiting the damage from failed banks.
"She's off on a lot of social missions," said Bert Ely, a banking industry consultant in Alexandria, Va.
Bair, though, said she remains "very much a capitalist."
"Sometimes people misinterpret that as somehow I'm not a real Republican or something. I very much am. I guess I'm more of a Teddy Roosevelt kind of a Republican ... It's been said that Franklin would be proud of me, but I think Teddy would be proud of me too."
I first met Sam Francis at a meeting of the John Randolph club in Chicago. He was sitting at a table with Tom Fleming. Both men are two years older than me. Both gave me the impression that I was a freshman trying to sit at the Junior Lunch Table in the School Cafeteria.
The last time I saw Sam Francis, it was at a meeting in Washington. Sam was the moderator at a talk given by John Tyndall, a leader of the National Front in England. Mr. Tyndall was trying to get us enthused about being white guys, and so he launched into a peroration about the glories of Elizabethan England. Since Elizabethan England was the place where Catholic priests, like Edmund Campion, SJ, could be hanged until not quite dead, drawn and quartered and have their entrails thrown into boiling oil for the crime of saying the Mass, I was less than enthralled by the picture Mr. Tyndall had painted for us. In fact, if his intention was to bring us all together, his talk had the exact opposite effect. Since both Father Campion and Lord Burghley and his henchman Walsingham were all white, just what meaning did this fact possess?
My friend Gerry Bruen must have been entertaining the same thoughts because after Mr. Tyndall finished his speech, Gerry asked him whether “the Irish are white.” The question annoyed Mr. Tyndall, who got a disgusted look on his face and said, “Of course, the Irish are white. My mother is Irish.”
At this point, Sam Francis broke into the discussion, and turning to Mr. Tyndall, he asked, “Are Jews white?” Mr. Tyndall was taken aback by the question. After a long pause, he turned to Sam and said, “I’ll have to get back to you on that one.” So today I’d like to honor the memory of Sam Francis by trying to answer his unanswered question: “Are Jews White?”
But before I get to that answer, I need to talk about the Culture Wars.
Sam and I were both casualities of the culture wars of the ‘60s. Both of us started out in professional life as academics, both of us got fired for transgressing the canons of political correctness. In this I claim seniority over Sam. I was fired from a position as assistant professor at a Catholic college in 1980 for being against abortion. Sam was fired from the Washington Times many years later. What we had in common was not some racial identity—our persecutors were as white as we were—but rather the fact that both of our ethnic groups had been declared wicked during the opening battle of the culture wars of our generation, namely, the cultural and sexual revolutions of the ‘60s. Sam was a white southerner, a group which had been under attack since the beginning of the civil rights movement, if not the Civil War. And I was a Catholic ethnic from one of the big cities of the North. Although the war against Catholic ethnics in the North was a post-World War II campaign (that was waged under a number of names ranging from urban renewal in the ‘50s to busing in the ‘70s), it actually antedated the civil rights movement’s assault on the South by a number of years.
As proof that the two campaigns were linked by something more than my mind, I point to Martin Luther King’s arrival in Chicago a little over 40 years ago in the summer of 1966. It would be tempting to portray what happened in Chicago during the summer and early fall of 1966 as a racial struggle, but that’s not really what this battle in the culture wars was really about. Martin Luther King’s people noticed that the minute they set foot in Chicago.
“Down South,” Southern Christian Leadership Conference Worker Dorothy Tillman said, “you were black or white. You wasn't Irish or Polish or all of this.”
What the SCLC attempted to do was transpose the moral mandate they felt they had to end integration in the south, to the cities of the north where segregation existed only by tenuous analogy. Ethnicity, not skin color, determined residence in cities like Chicago. Up North, White was a completely negative designation, deriving from black, which referred to the skin color of the newly arrived migrants from the south.
I know of no northern city which had a neighborhood called “White Town,” but Chicago did have a Jew Town, a Greek Town, and a China Town. Detroit had its own Greek Town as well as a Pole Town. Cincinnati had its “Over the Rhein” and Philadelphia had a Germantown and its own China town as well as neighborhoods which everyone knew were ethnic even if the name of the ethnic group wasn’t included in the name. So, everyone who lived in Philadelphia knew that Bridesburg was Polish, South Philly was Italian, and that Northeast Philadelphia, when I grew up there, was Jewish. If Chicago’s ethnics became “white” during the struggles over the social engineering of housing in the ‘40s and ‘50s, it was only because they defined themselves as the negative of the threat, which they perceived as black hordes streaming into and then taking over their neighborhoods, not because of any racial identity of their own.
The only thing that linked people like me with people like Sam Francis in the culture wars was the psychic space we occupied in the mind of the enemy. One of the most formidable culture warriors of the 1960s was a Jew by the name of Leo Pfeffer. In his book The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy, Murray Friedman refers to Pfeffer as the lawyer who “advised, planned and argued more church-state cases before the U.S. Supreme Court than anyone else in American history.”
In 1947 Pfeffer filed briefs in two historic cases before the US Supreme Court: Everson v. Board of Education, challenging a New Jersey law that allowed state funds to be used for busing school children to religious schools; and McCollum v. Board of Education, which concerned an Illinois released-time program permitting school facilities to be utilized for religion instruction during regular school time.
This is what Pfeffer had to say about his opponents in the Culture Wars. In a memoir which appeared in 1975 in the liberal Catholic journal Commonweal entitled “The ‘Catholic’ Catholic Problem,” Pfeffer wrote that “whenever I felt that my daughter should not have something she wanted, she threatened to marry a Catholic army officer from Alabama.” “The truth of the matter,” Pfeffer continued, “was that I did not like the Catholic Church as I did not like the military and the South and for pretty much the same reasons. In the first place, it stood for what I opposed, and opposed . . .what I stood for.”
Sam and I came under attack during the Culture Wars not because we were “white,” not because we belonged to the same racial group, but because our enemies viewed us as belonging to two different groups, both of which they found repugnant.
This leads me to my first conclusion about the Culture Wars. The culture wars weren’t racial; they were ethnic. Sam and I were both white, but we belonged to two different ethnic groups because ethnicity in America is based on religion. According to the sociological theory known as the triple melting pot, country of origin ceases to be an indication of ethnic identity after three generations in America. At that point, it is replaced by religion, which becomes the source of ethnic identity in America. So the triple melting pot, as of the 1950s when Will Herberg wrote his book Protestant, Catholic, Jew, refers to Protestants, Catholics and Jews. America far from being some unified nation inhabited by generic Americans turns out to be a lot like the former Yugoslavia, a country made up of three ethnic groups based on three religions each engaged in a form of long-standing covert warfare against each other, one which often, as
My second conclusion flows from the first. The culture wars are simply not understandable in racial terms. The different sides in the culture wars may have used race as a pretext, but the identity of the antagonists was ethnic not racial in the sense commonly portrayed in the media. In applying the ethnic calculus to this period of history, we discover that the blacks, even if they were the most visible player in the civil rights phase of the culture wars of the ‘60s, were ultimately the pawn of other groups, which were just as white as the groups they attacked.
In his book Fatal Embrace, Benjamin Ginsburg confirms our suspicion that the racial conflicts of the ‘60s weren’t really racial at all by showing that virtually every major civil rights organization, including or one might say especially, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was in some sense of the word controlled by Jews:
Jews served as major financiers and strategists for the civil rights movement. Jews served as well as the key liaisons between the civil rights movement and the government during both the Kennedy and Johnson eras. Jewish groups, organized through the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, had long worked closely with blacks in efforts to eliminate housing and employment discrimination from the 1950s and after.
Jewish contributions provided a substantial share of the funding for such civil rights groups as the NAACP and CORE. Jewish attorneys were at the forefront of the legal offensive against the American apartheid system. Stanley Levinson, a longtime official and fund-raiser for the American Jewish Congress, became Martin Luther King’s chief aid and advisor, having previously served as a major fund-raiser for Bayard Rustin. Harry Wachtel was a major legal advisor and fundriaser for the SCLC. Levinson and Wachtel were often called King’s twin Jewish lawyers. Jack Greenberg, head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund was the most important single civil rights lawyer in the United States. Jews comprised a large segment - perhaps one-third of the whites who participated in civil rights marches and protests in the South during the 1960s.
Kevin MacDonald, America’s premier racial theorist, says pretty much the same thing as Ginsberg in the article on the Jewish-Black alliance which appeared in Race and the American Prospect, the book Sam was editing before he died:
“The record,” MacDonald writes, “shows quite clearly that Jewish organizations as well as a great number of individual Jews contributed enormously to the success of the movement to increase the power of blacks and alter the racial hierarchy of the United States. (p. 221).
“Jews,” he continues, “have played a prominent role in organizing blacks beginning with the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. The NAACP was founded by wealthy German Jews, non-Jewish whites and blacks led by W.E. B. Dubois. The Jewish role was predominant:
“By mid-decade, the NAACP had something of the aspect of an adjunct of B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee, with the brothers Joel and Arthur Spingarn serving as board chairman and chief legal counsel, respectively; Herbert Lehman on the exectuive commitee; Lillian Wald and Walter Sachs on the board (althought not simultaneously); and Jacob Schiff and Paul Warburg as financial angels. By 1920, Herbert Seligman was director of public relations and Martha Greuning served as his assistant. . . . Small wonder that a bewildered Marcus Garvey stormed out of NAACP headquarters in 1917 muttering that it was a white organization.
The NAACP, in other words, was a Jewish organization that mobilized America’s blacks to fight racial discrimination insofar as this was congruent with Jewish goals. Benjamin Ginsberg is remarkably frank in discussing the terms of the Jewish-Black alliance:
By speaking on behalf of blacks as well as Jews . . . Jewish groups were able to present themselves as fighting for the abstract and quintessential American principles of fair play and equal justice rather than the selfish interests of Jews alone. This would not be the last time that Jewish organizations found that helping blacks could serve their own interests as well. . . . Gains achieved on behalf of one, Jewish organizations reasoned, would serve the interests of both, while allowing Jews to project an image of unselfish pursuit of the public good. . . . For Jews . . . gains achieved on behalf of blacks in terms of equality of opportunity also promised to serve their own interest in eliminating discrimination.
It turns out that there was more to this alliance than simply fighting discrimination, by allying themselves with the blacks, the Jews found that they could covertly attack the people they perceived as their main political enemies and weaken if not destroy their political influence.
I’m talking again about the ethnic groups to which Sam and I belonged. Ginsberg goes on to say that “Jews . . . had been suspicious of conservative Southerners at least since the 1920 Leo Frank case and were only too happy to help reduce their influence in American politics.” Having succeeded in the South, the WASP-Jewish coalition behind the civil rights movement decided to deal with its enemies in the North, namely the Catholic ethnics. “Liberals,” Ginsberg continues, “seized the opportunity to attack and weaken their political rivals in the North as well. Liberals charged the Northern Democratic party’s coalition of machine politicians and labor leaders [i.e., the Catholics] with racism, worked to deny them representation at Democratic national conventions and sought to cut off their access to federal patronage.”
Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago, was the quintessential Catholic machine politician, and as such he became the target of the Jewish-WASP alliance when Martin Luther King arrived in Chicago a little over 40 years ago in the summer of 1966. Why did Martin Luther King go to Chicago, the site of the worst debacle of his public career? He went to Chicago because 1) the Quakers invited him 2) because Nelson Rockefeller gave him $25,000 if he would take his campaign to the North and 3) because, as Ginsberg puts it, “Stanley Levinson, a longtime official and fund-raiser for the American Jewish Congress, became Martin Luther King’s chief aid and advisor.”
The Jews, as the ethnic constellation around Martin Luther King shows, could not have done this damage alone. They were part of an alliance that included the Northeastern WASP establishment and the main-line Protestant denominations, which saw the civil rights movement as their great crusade. That alliance, according to Ginsberg, began in the years before World War II, when the Jews and the Anglophile WASP establishment united against America First and got America into the war on the side of England. It went into a brief period of remission after the War, but Senator Joe McCarthy’s attacks on the WASP establishment got it going again just in time for the civil rights movement and the sexual revolution, when Jews and WASPs united to get the government into the birth control business as a way of controlling the fertility of their unsuspecting Negro allies.
The Negro-Jewish alliance fell apart years ago. The definitive moment was the Ocean Hill-Brownsville School Board battle of 1967 when Negro activists aided by the Ford Foundation took over that school board and promptly fired all of its Jewish teachers and principals.
The Jewish-WASP alliance lasted longer, but it too is now showing signs that it is breaking up in a messy and acrimonious divorce. As evidence for the break-up I would cite the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, the Walt-Mearsheimer report on the Israeli Lobby, and Jimmy Carter’s book calling Israel an Apartheid state. As evidence of the acrimony, I would cite David Horowitz’s critique of Carter’s book which begins with the headline “Jimmy Carter: Jew hater . . .” and then goes on to get really intemperate. The tattered remnant of the WASP ruling class now clearly views Israel and their neoconservative supporters in America as a Frankenstein of their own making. Neoconservatism, like the civil rights movement, was a black operation which got out of control, because as Liddell-Hart points out in his book Strategy, all black operations ultimately get out of control. The WASP ruling class now looks upon the neocons as the latter day version of Osama bin Laden, except that the Israelis have a lot more at their disposal than stinger missiles.
The same thing is true of Sam Francis’s career as a writer. It wasn’t the Negro that destroyed Sam Francis. In fact, if you look at the end of his career from a racial perspective, it becomes completely incomprehensible. The next to last time I saw Sam Francis, he told me the story of how he got fired at the Washington Times. Sam didn’t look good. He was obviously suffering from the heart disease that would kill him. Gone was the swagger, but gone with it was, at least in my mind, the suspicion of me as the Yankee upstart freshman at the junior lunch table. Sam was a man of principle who showed courage in his writings and suffered at the hands of those who hated both his ethnicity and his integrity. When I spoke with him this time, he had been fired from his job as a columnist at the Washington Times. In fact, that was the topic of our conversation.
Sam mentioned a memo he had seen, actually a fatwa, issued by the Anti-Defamation League demanding that someone do something to stop his writing. The man who stepped forward to pull the trigger in that act of targeted character assassination was William F. Buckley, the godfather of modern conservatism, and a Catholic.
Once again the dynamic of this sortie in the culture wars was ethnic/religious. Buckley volunteered to go on a mission of the sort which had characterized his entire tenure as the editor of National Review. He was going to be the goyische front man (or trigger man) for the Jewish interests that had supported him since the inception of that magazine in 1955. In case you’re interested in the details, I recommend again Murray Friedman’s book The Neoconservative Revolution, especially the section on the role people like Martin Liebman, and Frank Meyer and William (Willi) S. Schlamm, and other “forgotten Jewish godfathers” played in the creation of National Review. In return for the favor, Buckley acted as their goyische hit man, rubbing out whomever they found convenient. Buckley, it should be noted, didn’t just treat Southern Protestants this way. By the time he got around to rubbing out Sam Francis, he had already knifed fellow Catholics like Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran in the back.
Sam was well aware of what Bill Buckley and National Review had done to the conservative movement. In Shots Fired, he argued that the serious right would have to go back beyond Burke and the 18th Century to understand what had happened. Only then could conservatism “work toward its own liberation . . . from the ideological paradigms that have dominated the conservative mind since the 1950s and to formulate a new paradigm that can more correctly identify who is a real enemy and who is a real friend of the core of the American nation and the Civilization of European man that our nation represents” (p. 276).
Sam is right. If what’s left of the WASP establishment or the paleoconservatives or other men of good will want to do something effective in the culture wars, they will have to understand just who the enemy is in this battle. But in order to understand that, they will have to go back well beyond the ‘60s to understand what is going on. In order to answer that question we have to go back well beyond the 18th century, in fact 1800 years beyond it, back to the opening shot in the culture wars. This battle began 2000 years ago, at the foot of the cross, when Annas and Caiphas, the Jewish high priests said to Jesus Christ, “If you come down from the cross, we will accept you as our Messiah.” Needless to say, Jesus did not come down from the cross, and because he didn’t the Jews rejected Him, chose Barabbas, and became revolutionaries, condemned to seek heaven on earth by following one false Messiah after another from Simon bar Kokhbar, to Shabbetai Zevi, to Alex Portnoy, to Paul Wolfowitz.
Sam has also written that “The distinguishing feature of 20th century revolutionary behavior and thought has proved to be . . . precisely its racial character.” But his own demise in the culture wars belies that statement.
So, as Sam would say, who is the real enemy? To answer that question, let’s return again to Professor MacDonald’s analysis of the NAACP, the premier organization in both chronology and size of “the Jewish-black alliance.” That alliance “essentially involved wealthy German Jews aiding black organizations financially and though their organizations abilities.” That meant Jewish organizers like Joel Spingarn, who “was chairman of the NAACP from 1914 to 1934,” but the NAACP could not have survived without the support of wealthy Jews like Jacob Schiff, the man who bankrolled the Bolsheviks.
The real enemy, it turns out, both here and in Russia, was the revolutionary Jew.
He is not our enemy because of some occult racial inheritance. The revolutionary Jew is our enemy because he has rejected Logos. This means that Jews to the extent that they accept, honor and revere Logos, are not our enemies. There are Jews who accept Logos fully by sincerely accepting baptism, and there are Jews who accept it in some lesser capacity by their docility to the truth. We all know Jews like this, and they should not be excluded from our fellowship, especially since many of them have suffered at the hands of “the Jews” themselves.
As the Gospel of St. John makes clear, the Jews became “the Jews” the minute they rejected Christ. As such, their only identity is negative. The minute they rejected Logos, which means reason, order, speech, and word, they became revolutionaries, determined enemies not only of Christ and the Christian social order, but any order in any society not of their own revolutionary making. Thirty years after rejecting Christ, the revolutionary Jew rose in rebellion against Rome. Seventy years later they united under Simon bar Kokhbar, one of their many messiahs, and tried the same thing again. Having failed to destroy Rome they attemtped to destroy the Europe which St. Benedict created out of the ruins of the Roman Empire and to replace it with one of their many deadly Utopias. What do Jerusalem under Simon bar Kokhbar, the Soviet Union under Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamanev, and Radek, the short lived Soviet Republics of Bavaria under Kurt Eisner and Eugene Levine and Hungary under Bela Kun, the racial Apartheid state known as Israel under terrorists like Menachem Begin or Itzhak Shamir, or the neocon never-never land known as a free and democratic Iraq have in common? Death is what they have in common. Lots of people have to die to bring about the revolutionary Jew’s version of heaven on earth.
The West which we seek to preserve is based on docility to Logos, the order of the universe which makes discourse possible. The essence of the Jewish Messianic politics which seeks to create heaven on earth is rejection of Logos, not sacred (or wicked) DNA. The essence of the Jewish rejection of Logos is known as the Talmud, which is anti-Logos in every sense of the word, from hatred of Christ all the way down to rejection of the practical logos that is known as morality. We saw a recent example of Talmudic thought this summer during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon when Charles Krauthammer and the Jewish rabbinic council attacked the Just War theory--in particular its ban on killing noncombatants and the principle of proportionality--as a “Christian” idea and, therefore, one which Jews did not have to follow. The principles of the Just War Theory are another word for civilized behavior. Those who refuse to be bound by them are barbarians and deserved to be treated as such. No country can implement Talmudic thought--as our country has—and not suffer the consequences that rejection of Logos necessarily brings with it.
In France in 1890, in wake of the one hundredth anniversary celebration of the French Revolution, the Jesuits who wrote for Civilta Cattolica explained how widespread rejection of Logos, in the form of the French Revolution, led to bondage, in particular bondage to Jews. The same thing is true of our country in the wake of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. We swallowed the bait of sexual liberation and ended up enslaved by our enemies. Lest anyone misunderstand me, I am saying that the Jews are our enemy insofar as we are partisans of Logos. They are the enemy of Logos, because their religion is based on hatred of Logos.
Lytton Strachey and his friends once referred to the subversive movement we call Bloomsbury as the “higher sodomy.” Taking a page from his book, I will refer to Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular as the “higher Logos.” Those of us who follow the higher Logos know, however, that the only proper response we can make to our enemies is to love them, and the clearest manifestation of that love is our desire to bring them to the Truth, otherwise known as the Logos. We should work for their conversion to the Higher Logos.
At this point, it should be obvious that I am not just talking about Jews as the enemies of Logos. I am also talking about Christians who want to live and act like Jews. The Puritans spring immediately to mind along with the poisonous Judaizing influence they have had on America from the moment of its birth. But I am also thinking of the character assassins and apologists for usury, pornography and other Jewish forms of social control, those who feed at the trough of institutions like the Bradley Foundation - their name is Legion - and earn their money by poisoning the public mind.
The same forces which used the NAACP to turn the Negro into the revolutionary vanguard in the United States, the same forces which subverted the idea of conservatism, are still at work today. As Nelson Algren once said, every movement begins as a cause, becomes a business, and ends up being a racket. This is nowhere more true than in the civil rights movement, where the NAACP made the transition from cause to business, and the name of the racket is the Southern Poverty Law Center. In case you haven’t noticed, the SPLC has declared war on Catholics. Traditional Catholicism is now featured as harboring 100,000 anti-Semites. I have been listed as one of the most prominent of those 100,000, even though I am not now nor have I ever been a traditionalist. Another man on the list is Lt. Commander John Sharpe, who has just been suspended from his job as public relations officer on the USS Carl Vinson pending an investigation into his involvement in “supremacist” organizations.
Why has John Sharpe, an Annapolis graduate and career officer in the Navy, incurred the wrath of the SPLC? Was it because he plotted to blow up a Church in the South? Was it because he was lowering in the bushes in Mississippi with a rifle waiting to shoot civil rights marchers? Was it because he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan? Was it because he believes in racial supremacy? Was it because he urged people to harm Jews? No, John Sharpe was singled out for persecution because he was a Catholic and because he decided that he didn’t want to go along with all of the Catholic prostitutes—Father Sirico of the Acton Institute springs immediately to mind-- who were claiming that free market laissez faire capitalism was completely compatible with what the popes had to say in encyclicals like Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno. John Sharpe made the mistake of re-publishing distributist classics by writers like G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, and for that his patriotism has been called into question by the United States Navy, which has accepted as worthy of something other than contempt the smears and slanders of the SPLC.
But it wasn’t just distributism that got John in trouble with the SPLC. It was also his two-volume attack on the war in Iraq, Neoconned and Neoconned Again, to which I contributed. The slanderers at the SPLC referred to the Neoconned volumes as containing “several articles by racists and anti-Semites.” If the idiots at the Navy who collaborated in the SPLC smear of John Sharpe’s name had taken the time to look at the book the SPLC cited they might have found notorious anti-Semites like Noam Chomsky, Paul Gottfried, and Jeff Steinberg among its contributors. Why would a Jew hater include Jews among the contributors to his book? Probably because he is not what the SPLC says he is. The article in the Navy Times attacking John Sharpe was based on the legwork of the SPLC’s paid troupe of character assassins, and it gives new credence to the old oxymoron joke about military intelligence.
In the end, when Father Scalia entered his hospital room and asked him if he wanted the sacraments of the Church, Sam Francis chose the Higher Logos, and we can honor him by choosing the cause of Logos as we enter the next phase of the culture wars. Both Sam Francis’s deathbed conversion to Catholicism and the persecution of John Sharpe are symbolic of a shift in the culture wars. The offensive launched by the Southern Poverty Law Center is the best indication I can offer that the main front in the culture wars is now the confrontation between Jews and Catholics. The Enlightenment is finally dead.
There are no more quasi-Masonic movements, where each of us can rise above whatever sect he belongs to and join the Lodge known as “conservatism” or liberalism, or whatever. I think we, no matter what our religious or ethnic background, should rejoice at this development because in this confrontation 1) the Church has both a history and a set of beliefs that will lay to rest forever the charge of anti-Semitism and destroy it as a tool of political oppression and 2) because no matter how much they want to finesse the attack by focusing on what they consider fringe groups, the Jews have taken on a considerable group of people, who will react eventually to the attack. The situation in Hungary now is a case in point.
And finally, we should be happy because the attack clearly defines the terms of engagement, all of which are all spiritual. The revolutionary Jew is our enemy because he is a rejecter of Logos, not because of his DNA. We are not anti-Semites because we oppose the machinations of the revolutionary Jew. No, we are true Christians because of that, as the Church from the time of St. Peter onward has proclaimed. Like St. Peter and St. Paul, we are suffering at the hands of the Jews, “the people who put the Lord Jesus to death, and the prophets too. And now they have been persecuting us, and acting in a way that cannot please God and makes them the enemies of the whole human race” (I Thess 1:15).
We are now engaged in a battle which has ebbed and flowed over the centuries, but the sides in this battle have not changed. What has changed are the odds. The Jews have never been stronger; the Catholics have never been weaker, but the outcome of spiritual battles--and the battle for the soul of the West, as Tolkien knew, is a spiritual battle--no matter what the odds, is rarely predictable. If St. Paul, representing the Christian position, has to say, “When I am weak, I am strong.” Then the revolutionary Jew, representing the opposite position has to say, “When I am strong, I am weak.” We are outgunned on every front in the culture wars, but that is no reason for despair, if we follow the Logos that St. Paul followed, because he was outgunned by the Jews too, outgunned but not undone, saying, “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down but not destroyed."
And so, as Theoden said, “we come to it in the end, the great battle of our time, in which many things will pass away. But at least there is no longer need for hiding.” Nor, might we add, any place to hide. Many if not most of us are here today because our careers have already been destroyed by the revolutionary Jew and his goyische front men. The Jews spy on us through our computers. They suborn fellow Catholics to betray us, get us fired, prevent us from speaking. Our backs are to the wall. But in attacking John Sharpe, the SPLC has created the American Catholic version of the Dreyfus affair.
They have clarified the issue. By going along with their slanders, the Navy has put itself on trial. It is our duty to play the cards which providence has dealt us. We have never been weaker, and our enemies have never been stronger, but that is no reason for despair, because as Elrond says, “this quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong.” And why is that? Because “such is the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them as because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.” (I, p. 283).
At this point, if we were all French or Austrian or English or Russian, I would utter a stirring call for the return of the Bourbons or the Habsburgs or the Stuarts or the Romanovs to the throne. But since we’re all Americans, I can’t do that. We have no common past. We have no royal family waiting in the wings. We have no established religion which can act as a source of order and identity. We have no racial identity. We have no common DNA. I am almost tempted to say that we have no we. We are a nation of nations, and that is all we have ever been.
All we have is various ethnic traditions and communities—Sam Francis’s South, my ethnic neighborhoods—united by the frail bonds of Logos as perceived by a human soul so beset by human passion. Even if our souls are weak, however, Logos is not. Logos is the glue that holds the universe together, and so it is strong enough to unite us as Americans whether it be the higher Logos which acknowledges Christ as Lord of the universe or the lower Logos which honors him by seeing this order in the works creation or in the moral law. We are the party of Logos, and it is only as such that we can think of surviving much less prevailing over our enemies.
WASHINGTON – Michael Steele was elected Republican National Committee chairman on Friday, defeating the incumbent party chief and three other challengers over six rounds of voting to become the first black to lead the GOP. The former Maryland lieutenant governor takes over a beleaguered GOP as Republicans seek to rebound from back-to-back defeats in national elections that gave Democrats control of Congress and the White House.
"As a little boy growing up in this town, this is awesome," said Steele, the most moderate candidate in the field and considered an outsider because he's not a committee member.
In a brief acceptance speech, the new GOP chairman struck a tone of inclusiveness.
"We're going to say to friend and foe alike: We want you to be a part of us, we want you to with be with us, and for those who wish to obstruct, get ready to get knocked over," Steele said.
He won 91 votes out of a possible 168 in the sixth round. A simple majority of 85 was needed, but it took six rounds for Steele to win.
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