WAR OF PERCEPTION

America tolerates anti-Christian double standard

Recently in my ultra-liberal city of Portland, I found myself driving behind a car with just one bumper sticker. “So many Christians,” it read, “So few lions.” I wondered what could possess a person to adorn their car with this one homicidal sentiment—and then possess my community to let them drive around, unaccosted. A friend and I discussed later what other slogans might be put on a bumper sticker.

What if it said “So many Jews, so few gas chambers”? It could read, “So many blacks, so few nooses.” Or “So many Muslims, so few Abu Ghraibs.” How long would it take for a car with that sticker to be pulled over? Twenty minutes?  

The double standard is evident everywhere.

A superior court judge recently ruled that the National Education Association can discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation—if they’re discriminating against ex-gays. The NEA refused to let an ex-gay organization run an information booth at their conference, and the judge said this was fine. The DC Office of Human Rights said ex-gays aren’t protected from discrimination because their sexual orientation obviously isn’t “immutable;” (they abandoned practicing homosexuality). This kind of wordplay just shows the power of legal activists to manipulate discrimination laws to protect some citizens not others.

The Washington Times reports that a ten-year-old New Hampshire girl has been ordered to attend public school; the state disapproves of her mother’s firm Christianity and says she must be exposed to other religious faiths. Would they have done this to a Jewish or Muslim child? Unlikely.

By “exposure to other religious faiths,” the court really means “exposure to severe skepticism about Christianity.” In time for next Easter, children’s author Philip Pullman will treat us to his latest book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. The book claims the apostle Paul cooked up the “story” that Jesus was divine. Pullman told The Times that Paul’s “fervid imagination” is the only reason anyone thinks Jesus was the incarnated God. A rep from Canongate Books calls it a “book of genuine importance, a radical and ingenious retelling of the life of Jesus that demystifies and illuminates this most famous and influential of stories.” But you don’t have to wait until Easter for more pseudo-history claiming to uncloak the real facts about Jesus’ illegitimacy, bastard love child with Mary Magdalene, or other attacks on the faith. Christmas is right around the corner, and it brings scholarly attacks on Christianity as dependably as supermarket poinsettias.

The double standard also extends to those notorious cartoons. The Danes’ one-panel Mohammed cartoon created a ruckus around the world. Jews fight back too: the Arab European League is being prosecuted for a one-panel cartoon less than reverent about the Holocaust. But what about Christians? An entire comic book, Prince of Pieces, skewers a zombie Jesus—and no one fears hate crime charges. By Sam Miserendino, the comic book is about “a pissed off zombie Jesus returning to devour the flesh of sinners…As one character wryly observes, "For two thousand years you've been eating His flesh and drinking His blood... Now it's His turn."” The comic book isn’t even enough; a film is in the works, too.

This is not a time for Christians to go silent. Visit www.truthtellers.org for easy-to-follow steps to protest legislative threats to our freedom: threats going forward in Congress right now. This matters far more than protesting even the most grotesque media assault.

There is something each of us can do. My youngest sister reposted one of our stories on Facebook. Sheets of letters to the president, protesting his upcoming signing of the hate bill, sit near our fax machine. I’ve been considering how to carve out twenty minutes daily to call Congress, or commit to call just twenty names.

We need to make protest part of our daily lives, as the attack only thickens. There is reason for hope. Democrats dominate both houses of Congress, making them highly vulnerable at this time of intense voter dissatisfaction. God could still reverse the insidious tide sweeping us out to anti-Christian, anti-freedom seas—if we unite our faith with action.

What really empowers rampant anti-Christianity?

So few Christians who will put lions in their cages.

By Harmony Grant

Strangers On A Train

by E. Michael Jones

At 4:22 PM on September 12, 2008, a Metrolink passenger train ran a red light at the CP Topanga signal near the Chatsworth section of Los Angeles and plowed head on into a Union Pacific freight train, causing the deaths of the engineer and over 20 passengers. It was the nation’s deadliest train wreck in 15 years. The train wreck occurred on a curve just after the freight train had emerged from a tunnel, which meant that the engineers of the two respective trains had four seconds to react from the time the trains became visible to each other. During those four seconds the engineer of the freight train and his assistant applied the train’s emergency break and jumped from the train. Both men survived. During those four seconds, the engineer of the passenger train did nothing, allowing his train to plow into the freight train at over 40 miles per hour.

Within hours of the wreck, the spokesman for Metrolink blamed the crash on human error, and from that moment on the investigation focused on Robert Sanchez, the 46-year-old engineer of the Metrolink train, but the post-mortem following the crash soon became a hermeneutical battle, in which determinations about what could be said and what could not be said got made with little if anything to do with the canons of railroad safety.

Four days after the crash, California Senator Diane Feinstein delivered her verdict. The problem, according to Feinstein, was Sanchez’s work schedule, which made him work “an ‘untenable’ schedule of 11-hour days, five days a week in split shifts.” By the time hearings on the crash got held, people were lining up to make sure that this cloud had a silver lining for whichever group they represented. Speaking at a United States Senate hearing on the crash, Metrolink Chairman Ron Roberts began his testimony by extending “sincerest regret for this situation” but then got down to the business at hand. “This collision is not just what the NTSB determines to be the cause,” Roberts hinted darkly.

“It’s about our nation’s lack of investment in passenger rail as a whole.” Roberts, in other words, used the deaths of 25 people as an opportunity to ask for more money from the government. Labor wasn’t much better than management when it came to self-serving statements about the cause of the crash. Tim Smith, California Chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, saw the Senate hearing as a way of doubling the members of his union, claiming that “the deadly crash is a good reminder why railroad companies should always place two engineers aboard a train.” Those familiar with railroading have questioned Smith’s claim because experience has shown that when trains have two engineers they tend to distract each other with their talking.

By the time the Senate held its hearings, there was plenty of evidence about the crash concerning human error, the biography of the engineer, distraction, and a host of other details. The main issue was not gathering information. The main issue was determining which information could be deemed relevant according to the canons of acceptable discourse.

One of the first details to emerge in the aftermath of the crash was that Robert Sanchez was a homosexual, a detail which emerged from an AP story on his “troubled personal life” along with stories about traffic violations and larceny convictions. It seems that Sanchez’s “partner” had committed suicide in 2003 and Sanchez had received only three days off with pay to deal with the grieving process. Some observers wondered whether the wreck had been caused by aborted grieving resulting from too few paid grieving days. Some railroad workers complained that their employers allowed them three days off work but without pay.

Carolann Peschell, the sister of Sanchez’s deceased “partner,” felt that Sanchez had murdered him, but she could never get anyone to take her claims seriously. Peschell described Sanchez as “very odd, very strange,” but the rest of the press accounts seemed determined to explain how normal he was once it became clear that he was a homosexual. One report described “the easy smile and kind eyes in the burly engineer's driver's-license photo.”

Another report tried to generate sympathy for homosexuals by announcing that a lesbian officer on the Los Angeles Police Department had been among the victims of the crash which Sanchez had caused. Spree Desha, we read, “was a standout presence in the LAPD,” who “proudly wore her uniform on the train to reassure riders that they were under the watchful eye of the police.” Unfortunately, the train Ms. Desha had been riding on was under the watchful eye of a fellow homosexual, and it turns out that that eye had been blinded by passion. It was precisely that blindness which was the cause of her death. If Ms. Desha had been asked before she stepped onto the last train ride of her life if the engineer’s sexual orientation had anything to do with his job performance, one can imagine the answer.

The workplace ramifications of this moral fact quickly got medicalized and absorbed into discourse acceptable to the therapeutic state. As some indication that Metrolink’s criteria for employee evaluation were equally out of sync with reality Sanchez’s employer praised his job performance a little over a week before he caused the deaths of over 30 people by his negligence. In a letter they sent to him on September 3, Metrolink told Sanchez that he would be receiving an employee incentive award bonus check because they had ascertained that “The measurements to receive your award include safety and rules compliance, exemplary attendance and other performance factors that contribute to the success of your operation.”

Anyone who felt that Sanchez’s homosexuality had something to do with the crash got shouted down. It was clear that only a bigot would make statements like that. That became obvious when the fact was broached on an Internet forum for railroad workers. The person who raised the homosexual issue was subjected to long and labored explanations of the sort intended for idiot children from the folks who would be the first to die if the nation’s railroads continued blindly hiring homosexuals to drive their trains.

On September 30, 2008, RRTom entered the discussion at Trainorders.com by asking a question: “Are they saying Sanchez was a homosexual?” The immediate response seemed like relief that someone had finally stated the obvious.

The first response was: “Word’s been out on that for a while.” Then PumpkinHogger joined in by complaining that at work “we have to dance around all that and ignore it or be held to the fire by diversity policies.” The railroad version of political correctness in the workplace “fully muzzles and makes un-PC any spoken thought about anyone. … Sanchez’s co-workers may not have known his preferences were different from theirs. Nobody cares if someone is Catholic, that makes for a different lifestyle if a strict adherent, but gay just flips people out.”

But then political correctness kicked in and the focus of the discussion shifted from wondering whether the engineer’s homosexuality had anything to do with the wreck to wondering why someone would raise the issue in the first place. According to FJC, “People who work in the world of railroading are part of a big melting pot of differing ethnicities, religions, sexual preferences and personalities. I never try to judge a book by it’s [sic] cover.”

RRTom, however, remained unconvinced. His question: “Are they saying Sanchez was a homosexual?” prompted Pecosvalleychief to respond: “I was actually pleasantly surprised that no one directly reported this. Sure it was implied by the story of his ‘partner,’ but I never saw an actual statement that he was gay. I was kinda [sic] expecting the headline, ‘Metrolink Engineer a Sexual Deviant’ or some such crap. Maybe there is some hope.” Saying that the engineer’s homosexuality contributed to the the crash is something “You’d never see . . . in the ‘mainstream’ media. Maybe on the 700 Club or an anti-gay mouthpiece rag, but not in a metro newspaper.”

One railroader opined that he knew many homosexuals and that they were “like any other group,” which is to say “there are nice people and there are jerks.” Then, as if to sum everything up for the likes of RRTom, he added, “I don’t care if a guy at work is black white red or purple with green polka dots so long as he does his job in a professional and respectful manner.” To which RRTom replied: “It doesn’t sound like Sanchez was doing his job in a professional and respectful manner.” And that response in turn generated more vituperation and more lectures about the virtue of tolerance.

“I don’t know why his homosexuality was brought up,” Calhog opined. “He apparently was an excellent engineer, who for whatever reason, made the worst mistake an engineer can make. His sexuality had nothing to do with it.” To which Crosstie-Walker responded, “Well stated.” Crosstie-Walker’s opinion was seconded by Benthere, who claimed that “Being gay has nothing more to do with being an engineer and railfan as [sic] being Catholic or heterosexual.” And he, in turn was seconded by another railroad worker who felt that “How an adult American citizen lives his/her private life with another adult American citizen is of no concern. We don’t hear about straight employees of company XYZ who liked whatever.”

Then the fact that Sanchez was a compulsive text-messenger came out. On his next to last shift on September 12, a shift which lasted a little over two hours, Sanchez either sent or received a total of 45 text messages while driving a Metrolink passenger train. In his last shift, which began at 3:03 PM and ended with his death 79 minutes later, Sanchez had either sent or received 12 text messages. Sanchez sent his last message 20 seconds before he died. Sending a text message, we need to remember, involves looking at the cell phone’s small screen and keyboard and typing in a message. Unlike talking on a cell phone, which can be distracting while driving, texting must be distracting because it involves directing the driver’s eyes away from the road in front of him.

On October 1, 2008, the railroad workers began to discuss Sanchez’s penchant for “texting.” The bloggers at trainorders.com found this fact a little more difficult to dismiss, probably because compulsive texters don’t have a lobbying group which defends their compulsion. Smitty195 felt that Sanchez’s behavior “while operating a train with hundreds of passengers on-board” was “irresponsible and unsafe.” Texting while driving a train “is about as irresponsible as someone in that position can get.”

Checkmate concurred:

“Let’s do the math. 43 mph is 61.6 feet per second. Multiply that by 22 and you have him sending the text 1355 ft before impact. What was the official distance given from CP Topanga to the crash site? [I went] On Google Earth and came up with about 2100 ft. If all this is correct, he sent the message after blowing the signal.” Which is to say, the red signal ordering him to stop went by unnoticed because Robert Sanchez was deeply involved in texting.

Outrage against engineers who text while driving trains was more acceptable, but in expressing that outrage, the railroaders once again went out of their way to say that this compulsive texting had nothing to do with Sanchez’s “orientation,” or as TomPlatten put it:

If it, in fact, is true that he was “texting” 22 seconds before the crash—regardless of his “orientation,” he was clearly inattentive to his task, and was, therefore, responsible for the deaths of 24 people. Nothing can change that now! It is sad that he lost his own life, but if he had been doing his job properly, he would be alive today and so would the other folks who died! It is time to call a spade a spade.

Well, it depends on what you mean by spade here. Robert Sanchez, it turns out, wasn’t “’texting’ 22 seconds before the crash—regardless of his ‘orientation.’” He was texting 22 seconds before the crash because of his orientation. Sanchez, it turns out, “was something of a celebrity. . . among young train fans,” which was the main-stream media’s way of saying that he was in the habit of communicating with teen-age boys while he was running his train. It turns out that there was a link between Sanchez’s compulsive texting and his sexual compulsions after all, even if everyone from the main-stream media to the mainstream railroad establishment was determined to ignore it. Sanchez called these boys “his teenage train buffs,” according to his next-door neighbor Bud Amelsberg. “They would all yell at him as he rolled by.” And instead of ignoring them and keeping his eyes on the track in front of him, Sanchez would try to contact his fans and arrange to meet them.

The last message Sanchez ever texted, the one he sent 20 seconds before his death, “apparently told the teen and his friends where Sanchez would be meeting another passenger train,” according to KCAL 9 and CBS 2 reporter Kristine Lazar. Or is this just another way of saying that Sanchez last act before he died was arranging a meeting with a 14-year old boy, a meeting so important to him that he was willing to risk the lives of hundreds of people to arrange it.

Once again this fact took a back seat to other more important considerations, like discrimination against homosexuals. Cumbresfan, another railroading blogger, wrote: “I’m dealing with one [knee jerk nut] on another forum that believes that the engineer’s homosexuality was the direct cause of the wreck, that he was a pedophile and his texting was to young men for obvious reasons. He said if it was a priest it wouldn’t be covered up. I told him goodbye. I’m not going to argue with such a closed mind.”

In the American empire we can only offer technological solutions to moral problems, largely because we have acquired the unfortunate habit of redefining moral problems like homosexuality out of existence. The archetypal moment in this regard came in the early ‘70s when homosexuality was stricken from the DSM’s list of disorders. The only moral that the trainbloggers could draw from the Metrolink wreck was “respect the train” or as NJTMatt put it, “The solution is never to get comfortable and always respect the train. Texting while running is not having respect for the train. . . . based on what the NTSB has found this engineer seemed to have a habit of texting while on duty.”

As the details gradually emerged from the press accounts, the story of what actually happened began to take shape in spite of virtually everyone’s determination to force it onto the procrustian bed of allowable discourse. The engineer who was the cause of the fatal trainwreck was a homosexual who was in the habit of compulsively texting teenage boys while at the controls of passenger trains where the lives of hundreds of people were literally in his hands. Concern for those lives finished a distant second to Sanchez’s sexual compulsions.

Aquinas articulated the moral consensus among the ancients, both Christian and pagan, when he opined that lust makes you blind. Would Metrolink consider hiring an engineer who was blind? Probably not. Why then do they insist on hiring someone who, because of the fact that he is a homosexual, is blinded by lust? When we say blind we mean that in the most literal sense of the word, i.e., incapable of seeing a red light, in fact a large red light, prominently displayed as a warning not to proceed, as it was at the CP Topanga signal.

As a cultural mile marker which can indicate how far we have fallen over the course of my lifetime, I recommend Alfred Hitchcock’s Hollywood movie Strangers on a Train. The main character in the film is a tennis star who meets a homosexual deviant on a train by chance. The homosexual then proposes dual murders: he will kill the tennis star’s promiscuous wife if the tennis star agrees to kill his overbearing father. Hitchcock portrays the homosexual as a decadent member of the upper class because as of 1950, when the film was made, working men were family men. This is another way of saying that during the 1950s America came closer to implementing the family wage, i.e., a man earning enough to support a wife and children, than at any other time in its entire history.

Railroads didn’t (knowingly at least) hire homosexuals because for the most part union jobs went to the heads of families. The family wage had many benefits, but one was keeping homosexuals out of the engineer’s cab on trains and confined to places like Bohemia, where the damage they could inflict on decent people was negligible.

There are other lessons we can draw from the blogging railroaders’ inept attempts to understand the cause of the Metrolink train wreck, and most of them have to do with the state of contemporary discourse. If anything, their interest in this question is more immediate than that of the average American. If the nation’s railroads continue to hire lust-blinded engineers, they are much more likely to die as a result than the rest of us. And yet the blogging railroaders were so tyrannized by the conventional narrative, they seemed more likely to drive their trains over a cliff or head on into each other before they would give up their attitudes toward homosexuality.

In this they are remarkably similar to their traditional enemies, the nation’s automakers, who are fighting for their survival by aiming all of their weapons at their own heads. After arriving in Washington to ask for bail-out money, they seemed incapable of articulating the main reason they deserve to be bailed out, namely, because they are the last bastion of high wages in American industry. As a result their enemies, i.e. the Wall Street financiers, got to articulate the case against them with the help of other members of their ethnic group, i.e., the ones who control the media in this country. As Charles Krauthammer, one of their spokesmen put it, the real issue here is wages. The financiers and the media moguls want to force the auto industry into bankruptcy because, as Krauthammer wrote,

Saving Detroit means saving it from bankruptcy. As we have seen with the airlines, bankruptcy can allow operations to continue while helping shed fatally unsupportable obligations. For Detroit this means release from ruinous wage deals with their astronomical benefits (the hourly cost of a Big Three worker: $73; of an American worker for Toyota $48), massive pension obligations and unworkable work rules such as “job banks,” a euphemism for paying vast numbers of employees not to work.

What Charles Krauthammer forgot to tell us is that $350 billion dollars of the government’s bailout money had already been dispersed to the “massive pension obligations” of firms like AIG. The only difference is that the money at AIG’s pension fund gets divided up between hundreds and not hundreds of thousands of pensioners.

The Big Three should have no illusions about who calls the shots in this country. It’s no longer 1954 when what was good for General Motors is what was good for the country. It is now 2008 and under the new dispensation what is good for Wall Street is what is good for the country.

The big three automakers looked like deer caught in the headlights of one of their own cars when the mainstream media convicted them of flying to Washington in private jets. They were blinded in their way as well, if not by greed then by an inability to see that they were adopting the commands of their enemies and had been doing so for decades. Henry Ford, I suspect, would have been able to read the writing on the wall. When he was on his death bed, he was asked by a reporter what he thought of the Ford Motor Company going public, i.e, falling into the hands of Wall Street. His answer was clear enough. He raised himself up on one elbow and, wagging his finger at the reporter, said that he’d tear his company down brick by brick before he would let it fall into the hands of the Jews.

Charles Krauthammer and the people whose interests he represents have long memories. Now they are within striking distance of achieving two goals which have always been close to their hearts: punishing Henry Ford and destroying the last vestiges of union power in America. Another member of the same sect, Alan Greenspan, bragged about how during his tenure as head of the Federal Reserve System one of his main goals was keeping labor in line. His actual phrase was “off balance.” The goal of both men and the interests they serve is a world in which the goyim all work for firms like Wal-Mart and earn slave wages, which they can then be convinced to spend on flat-screen TVs, which enslave them still further.

Wall Street wants Detroit to die, so that they can pick up the pieces at fire sale prices and then reconstitute the auto industry along lines they find congenial, which is to say, with workers getting paid $5 per hour with no benefits.

As some premonition of his death, Robert Sanchez asked that his ashes be scattered on the railroad tracks. If Detroit doesn’t awake from its own dogmatic slumbers and discover what’s in store for them a few miles down the tracks, they should imitate Robert Sanchez and ask to have their ashes scattered over the Interstate Highway System.

E. Michael Jones is editor of Culture Wars

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Child Sex Industry Booms In South Africa

SOUTH AFRICA is well on its way to developing a child-sex tourism trade which could rival Thailand or the Philippines, child-care workers warn.

For as little as food for their family's pots, children as young as eight can be bought in the Cape -- and very little is being done to stop the burgeoning trade in children.

Research has shown that in Cape Town the industry is increasingly organised, with children either abducted and forced into prostitution, or exploited by their parents to earn income for their families.

In Durban and Johannesburg, reports are emerging of children being held as virtual prisoners in brothels and forced to service clients procured by their "pimps".

"South Africa has already created the fertile ground for the international body market and it is going to take an enormous effort to stop this from developing into a crisis as experienced in the Philippines, South America and the Far East," said Bernadette van Vuuren of the children's rights organisation Resources Aimed at the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (Rapcan).

Van Vuuren was speaking at a workshop last week organised by the children's magazine Molo Songololo to highlight the commercial sexual exploitation of children. It was attended by 18 organisations which for the first time began sharing the information they have on child prostitution in South Africa.

Their initiative was sparked by an invitation to the South African government and non-governmental organisations to attend a world congress on commercial sexual exploitation of children in Sweden next month.

"Our research into the trade in children indicates that our country is a sitting duck for the infiltration of organisations which prey on vulnerable children in countries affected by poverty and low levels of protection for their most vulnerable," said Van Vuuren.

In Cape Town, criminals have already begun exploiting the lucrative child-prostitute market. Van Vuuren said it was common knowledge on the Cape Flats that gangs controlled prostitution rings which abducted girls from their homes and sold them in Sea Point and the city centre.

"These gangs are no longer the street-roaming gangsters of the past but have become organised and sophisticated in line with international standards. The harsh reality is that communities are powerless to intervene in any way to stop this exploitation of their children," she said.

Children are often introduced to hard drugs like cocaine to ensure their co-operation with their gangster pimps who also supply them with drugs, or are beaten into submission.

"Rent Boys" have been operating for years in downtown Cape Town and street children -- boys and girls -- have often turned to prostitution as a way of earning money.

Escort agencies, massage parlours and night clubs close to Cape Town's Waterfront and harbour area have also allegedly been hiring young girls to "entertain" foreign seamen. Some set girls up in flats and pay them an allowance so they can be available exclusively when the seamen dock in South African ports.

"Taxi Queens" is the term used in Mitchell's Plain to describe the sexual exploitation of young schoolgirls by taxi owners. The children are allegedly paid to sit up front and entertain drivers while they work and are then sexually exploited at the end of the day.

In recent research into child prostitution conducted at schools in the Western Cape, the issue of what is commonly referred to as "survival sex" was highlighted. Children from those schools studied were being prostituted by either their families or as a result of being abandoned with no source of income.

In rural areas children are sent to shebeens, migrant-labour hostels and to farm workers who pay either in cash or with food. "Research indicates that this is a common reality in poverty-stricken communities in this country. A case was reported to us of an eight-year-old boy prostituted by his family as their only source of income," said Van Vuuren.

A social worker in the rural town of Napier recently conducted an awareness programme on sexual abuse at a school. By the end of the day 16 children had reported to her that they had been abused and by the end of the week she had 66 names.

David Fortune, project manager of Streets, an organisation working with street children, agreed that many girls living on the streets turn to prostitution as a way of making money quickly.

The organisation runs a drop-in centre where street children are offered services including counselling and it is in these sessions where Streets measures the scale of child prostitution.

"Typically, these girls have been abused at home and tend to have less self-worth because of their experiences. They believe they're enjoying some form of elusive freedom, that they are in control of their own lives without parental authority. But when they fall pregnant on the streets that myth is shattered," said Fortune.

He said most street children lived in groups and often the girls were sexually abused within the group and forced into prostitution as a way of earning money for their cohorts.

His information was underscored by Renee Rossouw of Ons Plek, a shelter for street girls. But she said a survey conducted by the project had indicated that the percentage of street boys and girls involved in "survival sex" was equal.

Another Cape organisation which has been forced to confront the ugly reality of child prostitution is the Sex Workers' Education and Advocacy Taskforce (Sweat). Although the organisation was established to promote the health and safety of adult sex workers, they discovered children involved in the industry as well.

"We have found that prostitutes are vehemently opposed to forced sex work and child prostitution. They have told us that they are very worried about the increasing numbers of children involved in the industry and that some of their clients are requesting young children," said Sweat's psychologist and researcher, Ilse Pauw.

"In the sex industry there are strong moral codes about what is right and wrong. The sex workers we deal with are outraged when they see under-aged children on the streets."

Inspector Ernie Riedeman of the Child Protection Unit said the unit did not have the capacity to do the kind of observation on the streets required to break child prostitute rackets.

"At present we have 900 cases with only 18 detectives in our unit. We have had some breakthroughs, like exposing the Internet site which advertised child prostitutes to tourists in Germany," Riedeman said.

The organisations agreed to continue sharing information, to lobby the government to take strong measures against child prostitution and to launch a campaign to highlight the problem publicly.

The South African government will attend next month's international conference and has already submitted its amendments to a draft declaration and agenda for action.

Labor news

The Sandra Bernhard Monstrosity

I suppose we could all just write off Sandra Bernhard as a nut case and leave it at that. But the thing is that her rant against Christianity and her threatened gang-rape of Sarah Palin occurred at Theater J—J as in Jewish.

Theater J is a project of the Jewish Community Center of Washington. At the bottom of the homepage there is the stamp of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington DC. You can click on tabs for Jewish Living which direct you to material on classes and retreats. Another tab brings you to information on programs for infants, toddlers and school-age children. About what you would expect at a Jewish community center.

But then there’s the video (posted at the Jewish Community Center website) of Bernhard saying about Sarah Palin, “Don’t you fucking reference the Old Testament, bitch. You stay with your goyish, crappy, shiksa-funky [or is it "shiksa-fucking"?] bullshit. Don’t you touch my Old Testament, you bitch. Because we have left it open to interpretation. It is no longer taken literally. You whore …”

So the moral high ground comes from having the correct interpretation of the Bible? I thought that was the sort of thing that people like Palin are accused of. How very quaint coming from this super edgy and ultra-chic Jewish-lesbian radical. 

This sort of invective ruins careers if one substitutes, say, anti-black invective for Bernhard's anti-goy rant. Heard from  Michael Richards lately? Bernhard can refer to the New Testament as “goyish, crappy, shiksa-funky bullshit” and it’s a great career move. She gets rave reviews in the mainstream media, including the Washington Post. The audience can be heard laughing and clapping appreciatively in the background while she says it, and Ari Roth, the artistic director, informs us that there are standing ovations after every performance.

Roth’s defense of the indefensible is a masterpiece of double-think: “There is a message of hope and ecumenical tolerance at the heart of what we’re trying to achieve here. Even in Sandra’s show. It’s complicated. It isn’t hate ful [sic]. There’s hope for all of us.”

Yeah, it’s complicated. Love is hate. Up is down. Black is white. Orwell would love it. You can just see the ecumenical tolerance and love in her face in this photo taken during her performance. Feel the love.

 

The first take-home message, then, is that Jews don't have to play by the same rules as the rest of us. In an era when talking disparagingly about other groups is a sure way to career oblivion, it’s still possible for a Jewish performer to denigrate  the goyim and the Christian religion and to advocate physical violence and sexual degradation against someone merely because they believe what most white people believe. And she can do it at a Jewish community center.

Whites should think about what this really implies about America of the future when whites are a minority and Jews remain as a hostile elite. Kevin MacDonald reminds us what happens when a hostile Jewish elite rules over a society that they loathe, in this case the Jewish Communists who acted as mass murderers of Christians during a period when Jews were a hostile elite in the Soviet Union.

The situation prompts reflection on what might have happened in the United States had American Communists and their sympathizers assumed power. The “red diaper babies” came from Jewish families which “around the breakfast table, day after day, in Scarsdale, Newton, Great Neck, and Beverly Hills have discussed what an awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist society the United States is.” Indeed, hatred toward the peoples and cultures of non-Jews ... has been the Jewish norm throughout history—much commented on, from Tacitus to the present.

It is easy to imagine which sectors of American society would have been deemed overly backward and religious and therefore worthy of mass murder by the American counterparts of the Jewish elite in the Soviet Union.... These [white Christians]  now loom large among the “red state” voters who have been so important in recent national elections.

Jewish animosity toward the Christian culture that is so deeply ingrained in much of America is legendary. As Joel Kotkin points out, “for generations, [American] Jews have viewed religious conservatives with a combination of fear and disdain.” ... In the end, the dark view of traditional Slavs and their culture [held by the Jewish elite in the USSR] is not very different from the views of contemporary American Jews about a majority of their fellow countrymen.

Sandra Bernhard is Exhibit A for this type of contemporary American Jew. And the target of her wrath is Sarah Palin, the personification of red-state America.

One can  imagine the horror that would greet someone who made analogous comments about Judaism or the Holocaust. We doubt that people like Ari Roth would attempt to find nuances and subtleties in such art. There would be no talk of artistic license.  No attempts to find deep meanings of tolerance and hope despite the surface message of hatred and the facial expressions of seething rage and sneering contempt.

The second take-home message is that this sort of hostility to whites and to Christianity is a mainstream Jewish phenomenon. Whatever else one might say about Bernhard, she is part of a very large and vibrant Jewish subculture in America and throughout the West. In this case, it is performed by a Jewish comedienne at a Jewish community center, with an appreciative audience, many of whom are doubtless Jewish. And this is no insular culture far removed from the American mainstream. Rather, her work is reviewed respectfully and even enthusiastically in the prestigious media.

The hostility of the mainstream Jewish community, and especially the organized Jewish community, to white Europeans and the culture of the West can be seen across the entire Jewish political spectrum, from leftists like Sandra Bernhard to the neoconservative right.

The neocons do not express their contempt with the apoplectic rage of Sandra Bernhard — at least in public. But it's there nonetheless. As Jacob Heilbrunn notes, the neocons had "a lifelong antipathy toward the patrician class." The result, as Norman Podhoretz phrased it, was to proclaim a war against the “WASP patriciate.”

And, like Sandra Bernhard, the neocons aren't very fond of Middle America either. But of course, they aren't in competition with Middle America in their crusade to dominate American foreign policy for the benefit of Israel.

This anti-white hostility

affects a wide range of phenomena, from Jewish involvement in the media—as exemplified by Bernhard, to Jewish involvement in immigration policy.

 

But it goes even beyond that. Bernhard is quite frank about being a lesbian and typically draws a large number of the Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual-Transgender crowd to her performances. The audience laughing about “big black brothers” gang-raping a female Republican vice-presidential candidate and trashing the New Testament is part and parcel of the culture of the left. It is the sort of humor that would work well among professors at elite universities or op-ed writers at the New York Times.

This culture of the left therefore includes a lot of non-Jews. Destroying this culture is an enormously uphill battle. It is a culture that is now decades old and entrenched in all the  elite power centers of society. The task will not be easy. But, considering what happened in the Soviet Union when a hostile Jewish elite obtained political power and was unleashed on the people and culture they  hated, there is an obvious moral imperative in doing so.

By The Occidental Observer

Nathan Abrams On Jews In The American Porn Industry

A story little told is that of Jews in Hollywood’s seedier cousin, the adult film industry. Perhaps we’d prefer to pretend that the ‘triple-exthnics’ didn’t exist, but there’s no getting away from the fact that secular Jews have played (and still continue to play) a disproportionate role throughout the adult film industry in America. Jewish involvement in pornography has a long history in the United States, as Jews have helped to transform a fringe subculture into what has become a primary constituent of Americana. These are the ‘true blue Jews’.

Smut peddlers

Jewish activity in the porn industry divides into two (sometimes overlapping) groups: pornographers and performers. Though Jews make up only two per cent of the American population, they have been prominent in pornography. Many erotica dealers in the book trade between 1890 and 1940 were immigrant Jews of German origin. According to Jay A. Gertzman, author of Bookleggers and Smuthounds:The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), ‘Jews were prominent in the distribution of gallantiana [fiction on erotic themes and books of dirty jokes and ballads], avant-garde sexually explicit novels, sex pulps, sexology, and flagitious materials’.

In the postwar era, America’s most notorious pornographer was Reuben Sturman, the ‘Walt Disney of Porn’. According to the US Department of Justice, throughout the 1970s Sturman controlled most of the pornography circulating in the country. Born in 1924, Sturman grew up in Cleveland’s East Side. Initially, he sold comics and magazines, but when he realized sex magazines produced twenty times the revenue of comic books, he moved exclusively into porn, eventually producing his own titles and setting up retail stores. By the end of the 1960s, Sturman ranked at the top of adult magazine distributors and by the mid-70s he owned over 200 adult bookstores. Sturman also introduced updated versions of the traditional peepshow booth (typically a dark room with a small colour TV on which the viewer can view X-rated videos). It was said that Sturman did not simply control the adult-entertainment industry; he was the industry. Eventually he was convicted of tax evasion and other crimes and died, disgraced, in prison in 1997. His son, David, continued running the family business.

The contemporary incarnation of Sturman is 43-year-old Jewish Clevelander Steven Hirsch, who has been described as ‘the Donald Trump of porno’. The link between the two is Steve’s father, Fred, who was a stockbroker-cum-lieutenant to Sturman. Today Hirsch runs the Vivid Entertainment Group, which has been called the Microsoft of the porn world, the top producer of ‘adult’ films in the US. His specialty was to import mainstream marketing techniques into the porn business. Indeed, Vivid parallels the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly in its exclusive contracts to porn stars who are hired and moulded by Hirsch. Vivid was the subject of a behind-the-scenes reality TV show recently broadcast on Channel 4.

Nice Jewish girls and boys

Jews accounted for most of the leading male performers as well as a sizeable number of female stars in porn movies of the 1970s and ‘80s. The doyen of the Hebrew studs is Ron Jeremy. Known in the trade as ‘the Hedgehog’, Jeremy is one of America’s biggest porn stars. The 51-year-old Jeremy was raised in an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Flushing, Queens, and has since appeared in more than 1,600 adult movies, as well as directing over 100. Jeremy has achieved iconic status in America, a hero to males of all ages, Jewish and gentile alike - he’s the nebbischy, fat, hairy, ugly guy who gets to bed dozens of beautiful women. He presents an image of a modern-day King David, a Jewish superstud who supersedes the traditional heroes of Jewish lore. No sallow Talmud scholar he. His stature was recently cemented with the release of a pornomentary about his life, Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy. As probably the most famous Jewish male porn star, Jeremy has done wonders for the psyche of Jewish men in America. Jeremy has also just released a compilation CD, Bang-A-Long-With Ron Jeremy. For £7.99 (including delivery), the lucky listener gets to enjoy Jeremy’s hand-picked favourite porno grooves along with narration by ‘the legend’ himself. As the publicity blurb gushes, ‘Out of the brown paper wrappings and into the mainstream’.

Seymore Butts, aka Adam Glasser, is everything that Jeremy is not: young, handsome and toned. Glasser, a 39-year-old New York Jew, opened a gym in 1991 in Los Angeles. When no one joined, he borrowed a video camera for 24 hours, went to a nearby strip club, recruited a woman, then headed back to his gym and started shooting. Although the movie stank, with a bit of chutzpah and a few business cards he wangled a deal with a manufacturer and started cranking out films. Within a few years, ‘Seymore Butts’ – his nom de porn which is simultaneously his sales pitch – became one of the largest franchises in the adult-film business. As the king of the gonzo genre (marked by handheld cameras, the illusion of spontaneity and a low-tech aesthetic meant to suggest reality), he is today probably the most famous Jewish porn mogul. Seymore Inc., his production company, releases about 36 films annually, most of them shot for less than $15,000, each of them grossing more than 10 times that sum. Glasser employs 12 people, including his mother and cousin Stevie as respectively genial company accountant (and matchmaker for her single son) and lovable but roguish general gopher. Glasser currently even has his own reality TV show (also broadcast on Channel 4), a ten-episode docu-soap called Family Business, whose opening credits show Glasser’s barmitzvah photo.

In search of a buck

Jews became involved in the porn industry for much the same reasons that their co-religionists became involved in Hollywood. They were attracted to an industry primarily because it admitted them. Its newness meant that restrictive barriers had not yet been erected, as they had in so many other areas of American life. In porn, there was no discrimination against Jews. During the early part of the twentieth century, an entrepreneur did not require large sums of money to make a start in the film business; cinema was considered a passing fad. In the porn business, it was similarly straightforward to get going. To show ‘stag’ movies or loops, as they were known, all one needed was a projector, screen and a few chairs. Not tied up with the status quo and with nothing to lose by innovation, Jews were open to new ways of doing business. Gertzman explains that

"Jews, when they found themselves excluded from a field of endeavour, turned to a profession in which they sensed they could eventually thrive by cooperating with colleagues in a community of effort . . . Jews have for a very long time cultivated the temperament and talents of middlemen, and they are proud of these abilities".

The adult entertainment business required something that Jews possessed in abundance: chutzpah. Early Jewish pornographers were marketing geniuses and ambitious entrepreneurs whose toughness, intelligence and boundless self-confidence were responsible for their successes.

Of course, the large number of Jews in porn were mainly motivated by the desire to make profits. Just as their counterparts in Hollywood provided a dream factory for Americans, a blank screen upon which the Jewish moguls’ visions of America could be created and projected, so the porn-moguls displayed a talent for understanding public tastes. What better way to provide the stuff of dreams and fantasies than through the adult-entertainment industry? Performers did porn for the money. As ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman commented, ‘Those Jews who enter the pornography industry have done so as individuals pursuing the American dream.’

Secular sex

Like their mainstream counterparts, Jews who enter porn do not usually do so as representatives of their religious group. Most of the performers and pornographers are Jewish culturally but not religiously. Many are entirely secular, Jews in name only. Sturman, however, identified as a Jew - he was a generous donator to Jewish charities - and performer Richard Pacheco once interviewed to be a rabbinical student.

Very few, if any, porn films have overtly Jewish themes, although Jeremy once tried to get several Jewish porn stars together to make a kosher porn film. The exception is Debbie Duz Dishes, in which Nina Hartley plays a sexually insatiable Jewish housewife who enjoys sex with anyone who rings the doorbell. It has sold very well, spawned a couple of sequels and is currently very hard to buy - perhaps indicating a new niche to exploit. Indeed, according to an editorial on the World Union of Jewish Students website,

"there are thousands of people searching for Jewish porn. After things like Jewish calendar, Jewish singles, Jewish dating, and Jewish festivals comes ‘Jewish porn’ in the list of top search keywords that GoTo.com provide".

Sexual rebels

Is there a deeper reason, beyond the mere financial, as to why Jews in particular have become involved in porn? There is surely an element of rebellion in Jewish X-rated involvement. Its very taboo and forbidden nature serves to make it attractive. As I written in these pages before, treyf signifies ‘the whole world of forbidden sexuality, the sexuality of the goyim, and there all the delights are imagined to lie . . .’ (‘Reel Kashrut: Jewish food in film’, JQ 189 [Spring 2003]).

According to one anonymous industry insider quoted by E. Michael Jones in the magazine Culture Wars (May 2003), ‘the leading male performers through the 1980s came from secular Jewish upbringings and the females from Roman Catholic day schools’. The standard porn scenario became as a result a Jewish fantasy of schtupping the Catholic shiksa.

Furthermore, as Orthodox Jew and porn gossipmonger Luke Ford explains on his website (lukeford.net): ‘Porn is just one expression of [the] rebellion against standards, against the disciplined life of obedience to Torah that marks a Jew living Judaism.’ It is also a revolt against (often middle-class) parents who wish their children to be lawyers, doctors and accountants. As performer Bobby Astyr put it on the same website, ‘It’s an “up yours” to the uncles with the pinky rings who got down on me as a kid for wanting to be musician.’

As religious influences waned and were replaced by secular ones, free-thinking Jews, especially those from California’s Bay Area, viewed sex as a means of personal and political liberation. America provided the freest society Jews have ever known, as manifested by the growth of the adult industry. Those Jewish women who have sex onscreen certainly stand in sharp contradiction to the stereotype of the ‘Jewish American Princess’. They (and I’m speculating here) may have seen themselves as fulfilling the promise of liberation, emancipating themselves from what feminist Betty Friedan in 1963 called the ‘comfortable concentration camp’ of the household as they set out into the Promised Land of the porno sets of Southern California. It signified their economic and social freedom: they were free to choose to enter, rather than coerced into it by economic and other circumstances. Once they had lain down, they could stand on their own two feet, particularly as female performers typically earn twice as much as their male counterparts.

Sexual revolutionaries

Extending the subversive thesis, Jewish involvement in the X-rated industry can be seen as a proverbial two fingers to the entire WASP establishment in America. Some porn stars viewed themselves as frontline fighters in the spiritual battle between Christian America and secular humanism. According to Ford, Jewish X-rated actors often brag about their ‘joy in being anarchic, sexual gadflies to the puritanical beast’. Jewish involvement in porn, by this argument, is the result of an atavistic hatred of Christian authority: they are trying to weaken the dominant culture in America by moral subversion. Astyr remembers having ‘to run or fight for it in grammar school because I was a Jew. It could very well be that part of my porn career is an “up yours” to these people’. Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw, said (on lukeford.net), ‘The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We don’t believe in authoritarianism.’ Pornography thus becomes a way of defiling Christian culture and, as it penetrates to the very heart of the American mainstream (and is no doubt consumed by those very same WASPs), its subversive character becomes more charged. Porn is no longer of the ‘what the Butler saw’ voyeuristic type; instead, it is driven to new extremes of portrayal that stretch the boundaries of the porn aesthetic. As new sexual positions are portrayed, the desire to shock (as well as entertain) seems clear.

It is a case of the traditional revolutionary/radical drive of immigrant Jews in America being channelled into sexual rather than leftist politics. Just as Jews have been disproportionately represented in radical movements over the years, so they are also disproportionately represented in the porn industry. Jews in America have been sexual revolutionaries. A large amount of the material on sexual liberation was written by Jews. Those at the forefront of the movement which forced America to adopt a more liberal view of sex were Jewish. Jews were also at the vanguard of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman replaced Marx, Trotsky and Lenin as required revolutionary reading. Reich’s central preoccupations were work, love and sex, while Marcuse prophesied that a socialist utopia would free individuals to achieve sexual satisfaction. Goodman wrote of the ‘beautiful cultural consequences’ that would follow from legalizing pornography: it would ‘ennoble all our art’ and ‘humanize sexuality’. Pacheco was one Jewish porn star who read Reich’s intellectual marriage of Freud and Marx (lukeford.net):

"Before I got my first part in an adult film, I went down to an audition for an X-rated film with my hair down to my ass, a copy of Wilhelm Reich’s Sexual Revolution under my arm and yelling about work, 'love and sex'."

As Rabbi Samuel H. Dresner put it (E. Michael Jones, ‘Rabbi Dresner’s Dilemma: Torah v. Ethnos’ Culture Wars, May 2003), ‘Jewish rebellion has broken out on several levels’, one being ‘the prominent role of Jews as advocates to sexual experimentation’. Overall, then, porn performers are a group of people who praise rebellion, self-fulfilment and promiscuity.

What are we ashamed of?

This brief overview and analysis of the role and motivations behind pornographers and performers is intended to shed light on a neglected topic in American Jewish popular culture. Little has been written about it. Books such as Howard M. Sachar’s A History of the Jews in America (New York: Knopf, 1992) simply ignore the topic. And you can bet that the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Jews in the United States did not include any celebrations of Jewish innovation in this field. Even the usually tolerant Time Out New York has been too prim to deal with it, although the more iconoclastic Heeb plans an issue on it. In light of the relatively tolerant Jewish view of sex, why are we ashamed of the Jewish role in the porn industry? We might not like it, but the Jewish role in this field has been significant and it is about time it was written about seriously.

Nathan Abrams is a Lecturer in Modern American History at the University of Aberdeen. He has just completed a book on neo-conservatism in the United States.