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Understanding Jewish Influence. Part One.

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2003-09-30 07:23 | User Profile

[url]http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/vol3no2/km-understanding.html[/url]

[B]Understanding Jewish Influence I: Background Traits for Jewish Activism[/B]

Kevin MacDonald

[B]Abstract[/B]

Beginning in the ancient world, Jewish populations have repeatedly attained a position of power and influence within Western societies. I will discuss Jewish background traits conducive to influence: ethnocentrism, intelligence and wealth, psychological intensity, aggressiveness, with most of the focus on ethnocentrism. I discuss Jewish ethnocentrism in its historical, anthropological, and evolutionary context and in its relation to three critical psychological processes: moral particularism, self-deception, and the powerful Jewish tendency to coalesce into exclusionary, authoritarian groups under conditions of perceived threat.

Jewish populations have always had enormous effects on the societies in which they reside because of several qualities that are central to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy: First and foremost, Jews are ethnocentric and able to cooperate in highly organized, cohesive, and effective groups. Also important is high intelligence, including the usefulness of intelligence in attaining wealth, prominence in the media, and eminence in the academic world and the legal profession. I will also discuss two other qualities that have received less attention: psychological intensity and aggressiveness.

The four background traits of ethnocentrism, intelligence, psychological intensity, and aggressiveness result in Jews being able to produce formidable, effective groups—groups able to have powerful, transformative effects on the peoples they live among. In the modern world, these traits influence the academic world and the world of mainstream and elite media, thus amplifying Jewish effectiveness compared with traditional societies. However, Jews have repeatedly become an elite and powerful group in societies in which they reside in sufficient numbers. It is remarkable that Jews, usually as a tiny minority, have been central to a long list of historical events. Jews were much on the mind of the Church Fathers in the fourth century during the formative years of Christian dominance in the West. Indeed, I have proposed that the powerful anti-Jewish attitudes and legislation of the fourth-century Church must be understood as a defensive reaction against Jewish economic power and enslavement of non-Jews.1 Jews who had nominally converted to Christianity but maintained their ethnic ties in marriage and commerce were the focus of the 250-year Inquisition in Spain, Portugal, and the Spanish colonies in the New World. Fundamentally, the Inquisition should be seen as a defensive reaction to the economic and political domination of these “New Christians.”2

Jews have also been central to all the important events of the twentieth century. Jews were a necessary component of the Bolshevik revolution that created the Soviet Union, and they remained an elite group in the Soviet Union until at least the post-World War II era. They were an important focus of National Socialism in Germany, and they have been prime movers of the post-1965 cultural and ethnic revolution in the United States, including the encouragement of massive non-white immigration to countries of European origins.3 In the contemporary world, organized American Jewish lobbying groups and deeply committed Jews in the Bush administration and the media are behind the pro-Israel U.S. foreign policy that is leading to war against virtually the entire Arab world.

How can such a tiny minority have such huge effects on the history of the West? This article is the first of a three-part series on Jewish influence which seeks to answer that question. This first paper in the series provides an introduction to Jewish ethnocentrism and other background traits that influence Jewish success. The second article discusses Zionism as the quintessential example of twentieth-century Jewish ethnocentrism and as an example of a highly influential Jewish intellectual/political movement. A broader aim will be to discuss a generalization about Jewish history: that in the long run the more extreme elements of the Jewish community win out and determine the direction of the entire group. As Jonathan Sacks points out, it is the committed core—made up now especially of highly influential and vigorous Jewish activist organizations in the United States and hypernationalist elements in Israel—that determines the future direction of the community.4 The third and final article will discuss neoconservatism as a Jewish intellectual and political movement. Although I touched on neoconservatism in my trilogy on Jews,5 the present influence of this movement on U.S. foreign policy necessitates a much fuller treatment.

[B]Understanding Jewish Activism[/B] The sources of Jewish influence are ethnocentrism, intelligence, psychological intensity, and aggressiveness. These traits are seen as underlying Jewish success in producing focused, effective groups able to influence the political process and the wider culture. In the modern world, Jewish influence on politics and culture is channeled through the media and through elite academic institutions into an almost bewildering array of areas—far too many to consider here.

[B]I. Jews are Hyperethnocentric[/B] Elsewhere I have argued that Jewish hyperethnocentrism can be traced back to their Middle Eastern origins.6 Traditional Jewish culture has a number of features identifying Jews with the ancestral cultures of the area. The most important of these is that Jews and other Middle Eastern cultures evolved under circumstances that favored large groups dominated by males.7 These groups were basically extended families with high levels of endogamy (i.e., marriage within the kinship group) and consanguineous marriage (i.e., marriage to blood relatives), including the uncle-niece marriage sanctioned in the Old Testament. These features are exactly the opposite of Western European tendencies

Whereas Western societies tend toward individualism, the basic Jewish cultural form is collectivism, in which there is a strong sense of group identity and group boundaries. Middle Eastern societies are characterized by anthropologists as “segmentary societies” organized into relatively impermeable, kinship-based groups.9 Group boundaries are often reinforced through external markers such as hair style or clothing, as Jews have often done throughout their history. Different groups settle in different areas where they retain their homogeneity alongside other homogeneous groups, as illustrated by the following account from Carleton Coon:

There the ideal was to emphasize not the uniformity of the citizens of a country as a whole but a uniformity within each special segment, and the greatest possible contrast between segments. The members of each ethnic unit feel the need to identify themselves by some configuration of symbols. If by virtue of their history they possess some racial peculiarity, this they will enhance by special haircuts and the like; in any case they will wear distinctive garments and behave in a distinctive fashion.10

These societies are by no means blissful paradises of multiculturalism. Between-group conflict often lurks just beneath the surface. For example, in nineteenth-century Turkey, Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived in a sort of superficial harmony, and even inhabited the same areas, “but the slightest spark sufficed to ignite the fuse.”11

Jews are at the extreme of this Middle Eastern tendency toward hypercollectivism and hyperethnocentrism. I give many examples of Jewish hyperethnocentrism in my trilogy on Judaism and have suggested in several places that Jewish hyperethnocentrism is biologically based.12 Middle Eastern ethnocentrism and fanaticism has struck a good many people as extreme, including William Hamilton, perhaps the most important evolutionary biologist of the twentieth century. Hamilton writes:

I am sure I am not the first to have wondered what it is about that part of the world that feeds such diverse and intense senses of rectitude as has created three of the worlds’ most persuasive and yet most divisive and mutually incompatible religions. It is hard to discern the root in the place where I usually look for roots of our strong emotions, the part deepest in us, our biology and evolution.13

Referring to my first two books on Judaism, Hamilton then notes that “even a recent treatise on this subject, much as I agree with its general theme, seems to me hardly to reach to this point of the discussion.” If I failed to go far enough in describing or analyzing Jewish ethnocentrism, it is perhaps because the subject seems almost mind-bogglingly deep, with psychological ramifications everywhere. As a pan-humanist, Hamilton was acutely aware of the ramifications of human ethnocentrism and especially of the Jewish variety. Likening Judaism to the creation of a new human species, Hamilton noted that

from a humanist point of view, were those "species" the Martian thought to see in the towns and villages a millennium or so ago a good thing? Should we have let their crystals grow; do we retrospectively approve them? As by growth in numbers by land annexation, by the heroizing of a recent mass murderer of Arabs [i.e., Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Arabs, including children, at the Patriarch’s Cave in Hebron in 1994], and by the honorific burial accorded to a publishing magnate [Robert Maxwell], who had enriched Israel partly by his swindling of his employees, most of them certainly not Jews, some Israelis seem to favour a "racewise" and unrestrained competition, just as did the ancient Israelites and Nazi Germans. In proportion to the size of the country and the degree to which the eyes of the world are watching, the acts themselves that betray this trend of reversion from panhumanism may seem small as yet, but the spirit behind them, to this observer, seems virtually identical to trends that have long predated them both in humans and animals.14

A good start for thinking about Jewish ethnocentrism is the work of Israel Shahak, most notably his co-authored Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel.15 Present-day fundamentalists attempt to re-create the life of Jewish communities before the Enlightenment (i.e., prior to about 1750). During this period the great majority of Jews believed in Cabbala—Jewish mysticism. Influential Jewish scholars like Gershom Scholem ignored the obvious racialist, exclusivist material in the Cabbala by using words like “men,” “human beings,” and “cosmic” to suggest the Cabbala has a universalist message. The actual text says salvation is only for Jews, while non-Jews have “Satanic souls.”16

The ethnocentrism apparent in such statements was not only the norm in traditional Jewish society, but remains a powerful current of contemporary Jewish fundamentalism, with important implications for Israeli politics. For example, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, describing the difference between Jews and non-Jews:

We do not have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior level. Rather we have a case of…a totally different species…. The body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world…. The difference of the inner quality [of the body]…is so great that the bodies would be considered as completely different species. This is the reason why the Talmud states that there is an halachic difference in attitude about the bodies of non-Jews [as opposed to the bodies of Jews]: “their bodies are in vain”…. An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness.17

This claim of Jewish uniqueness echoes Holocaust activist Elie Wiesel’s claim that “everything about us is different.” Jews are “ontologically” exceptional.18

The Gush Emunim and other Jewish fundamentalist sects described by Shahak and Mezvinsky are thus part of a long mainstream Jewish tradition which considers Jews and non-Jews completely different species, with Jews absolutely superior to non-Jews and subject to a radically different moral code. Moral universalism is thus antithetical to the Jewish tradition in which the survival and interests of the Jewish people are the most important ethical goal:

Many Jews, especially religious Jews today in Israel and their supporters abroad, continue to adhere to traditional Jewish ethics that other Jews would like to ignore or explain away. For example, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginzburg of Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus/Shechem, after several of his students were remanded on suspicion of murdering a teenage Arab girl: “Jewish blood is not the same as the blood of a goy.” Rabbi Ido Elba: “According to the Torah, we are in a situation of pikuah nefesh (saving a life) in time of war, and in such a situation one may kill any Gentile.” Rabbi Yisrael Ariel writes in 1982 that “Beirut is part of the Land of Israel. [This is a reference to the boundaries of Israel as stated in the Covenant between God and Abraham in Genesis 15: 18–20 and Joshua 1 3–4]…our leaders should have entered Lebanon and Beirut without hesitation, and killed every single one of them. Not a memory should have remained.” It is usually yeshiva students who chant “Death to the Arabs” on CNN. The stealing and corruption by religious leaders that has recently been documented in trials in Israel and abroad continues to raise the question of the relationship between Judaism and ethics.19

Moral particularism in its most aggressive form can be seen among the ultranationalists, such as the Gush Emunim, who hold that

Jews are not, and cannot be a normal people. The eternal uniqueness of the Jews is the result of the Covenant made between God and the Jewish people at Mount Sinai…. The implication is that the transcendent imperatives for Jews effectively nullify moral laws that bind the behavior of normal nations. Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, one of Gush Emunim’s most prolific ideologues, argues that the divine commandments to the Jewish people “transcend the human notions of national rights.” He explains that while God requires other nations to abide by abstract codes of justice and righteousness, such laws do not apply to Jews.20 As argued in the second paper in this series, it is the most extreme elements within the Jewish community that ultimately give direction to the community as a whole. These fundamentalist and ultranationalist groups are not tiny fringe groups, mere relics of traditional Jewish culture. They are widely respected by the Israeli public and by many Jews in the Diaspora. They have a great deal of influence on the Israeli government, especially the Likud governments and the recent government of national unity headed by Ariel Sharon. The members of Gush Emunim constitute a significant percentage of the elite units of the Israeli army, and, as expected on the hypothesis that they are extremely ethnocentric, they are much more willing to treat the Palestinians in a savage and brutal manner than are other Israeli soldiers. All together, the religious parties represent about 25% of the Israeli electorate21—a percentage that is sure to increase because of the high fertility of religious Jews and because intensified troubles with the Palestinians tend to make other Israelis more sympathetic to their cause. Given the fractionated state of Israeli politics and the increasing numbers of the religious groups, it is unlikely that future governments can be formed without their participation. Peace in the Middle East therefore appears unlikely absent the complete capitulation or expulsion of the Palestinians.

A good discussion of Jewish moral particularism can be found in a recent article in Tikkun—probably the only remaining liberal Jewish publication. Kim Chernin wonders why so many Jews “have trouble being critical of Israel.”22 She finds several obstacles to criticism of Israel:

1. A conviction that Jews are always in danger, always have been, and therefore are in danger now. Which leads to: 2. The insistence that a criticism is an attack and will lead to our destruction. Which is rooted in: 3. The supposition that any negativity towards Jews (or Israel) is a sign of anti-Semitism and will (again, inevitably) lead to our destruction…. 6. An even more hidden belief that a sufficient amount of suffering confers the right to violence…. 7. The conviction that our beliefs, our ideology (or theology), matter more than the lives of other human beings.

Chernin presents the Jewish psychology of moral particularism:

We keep a watchful eye out, we read the signs, we detect innuendo, we summon evidence, we become, as we imagine it, the ever-vigilant guardians of our people’s survival. Endangered as we imagine ourselves to be; endangered as we insist we are, any negativity, criticism, or reproach, even from one of our own, takes on exaggerated dimensions; we come to perceive such criticism as a life-threatening attack. The path to fear is clear. But our proclivity for this perception is itself one of our unrecognized dangers. Bit by bit, as we gather evidence to establish our perilous position in the world, we are brought to a selective perception of that world. With our attention focused on ourselves as the endangered species, it seems to follow that we ourselves can do no harm…. When I lived in Israel I practiced selective perception. I was elated by our little kibbutz on the Lebanese border until I recognized that we were living on land that had belonged to our Arab neighbors. When I didn’t ask how we had come to acquire that land, I practiced blindness…

The profound depths of Jewish ethnocentrism are intimately tied up with a sense of historical persecution. Jewish memory is a memory of persecution and impending doom, a memory that justifies any response because ultimately it is Jewish survival that is at stake:

Wherever we look, we see nothing but impending Jewish destruction…. I was walking across the beautiful square in Nuremberg a couple of years ago and stopped to read a public sign. It told this story: During the Middle Ages, the town governing body, wishing to clear space for a square, burned out, burned down, and burned up the Jews who had formerly filled up the space. End of story. After that, I felt very uneasy walking through the square and I eventually stopped doing it. I felt endangered, of course, a woman going about through Germany wearing a star of David. But more than that, I experienced a conspicuous and dreadful self-reproach at being so alive, so happily on vacation, now that I had come to think about the murder of my people hundreds of years before. After reading that plaque I stopped enjoying myself and began to look for other signs and traces of the mistreatment of the former Jewish community. If I had stayed longer in Nuremberg, if I had gone further in this direction, I might soon have come to believe that I, personally, and my people, currently, were threatened by the contemporary Germans eating ice cream in an outdoor cafe in the square. How much more potent this tendency for alarm must be in the Middle East, in the middle of a war zone!…

Notice the powerful sense of history here. Jews have a very long historical memory. Events that happened centuries ago color their current perceptions.

This powerful sense of group endangerment and historical grievance is associated with a hyperbolic style of Jewish thought that runs repeatedly through Jewish rhetoric. Chernin’s comment that “any negativity, criticism, or reproach, even from one of our own, takes on exaggerated dimensions” is particularly important. In the Jewish mind, all criticism must be suppressed because not to do so would be to risk another Holocaust: “There is no such thing as overreaction to an anti-Semitic incident, no such thing as exaggerating the omnipresent danger. Anyone who scoffed at the idea that there were dangerous portents in American society hadn’t learned ‘the lesson of the Holocaust.’ ”23 Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, a premier neoconservative journal published by the American Jewish Committee, provides an example:

My own view is that what had befallen the Jews of Europe inculcated a subliminal lesson…. The lesson was that anti-Semitism, even the relatively harmless genteel variety that enforced quotas against Jewish students or kept their parents from joining fashionable clubs or getting jobs in prestigious Wall Street law firms, could end in mass murder.24

This is a “slippery slope” argument with a vengeance. The schema is as follows: Criticism of Jews indicates dislike of Jews; this leads to hostility toward Jews, which leads to Hitler and eventually to mass murder. Therefore all criticism of Jews must be suppressed. With this sort of logic, it is easy to dismiss arguments about Palestinian rights on the West Bank and Gaza because “the survival of Israel” is at stake. Consider, for example, the following advertisement distributed by neoconservative publicist David Horowitz:

The Middle East struggle is not about right versus right. It is about a fifty-year effort by the Arabs to destroy the Jewish state, and the refusal of the Arab states in general and the Palestinian Arabs in particular to accept Israel’s existence…. The Middle East conflict is not about Israel’s occupation of the territories; it is about the refusal of the Arabs to make peace with Israel, which is an expression of their desire to destroy the Jewish state.25

“Survival of Israel” arguments thus trump concerns about allocation of scarce resources like water, the seizure of Palestinian land, collective punishment, torture, and the complete degradation of Palestinian communities into isolated, military-occupied, Bantustan-type enclaves. The logic implies that critics of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza also favor the destruction of Israel and hence the mass murder of millions of Jews.

Similarly, during the debate over selling military hardware to Saudi Arabia in the Carter administration, “the Israeli lobby pulled out all the stops,” including circulating books to Congress based on the TV series The Holocaust. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the main Jewish lobbying group in Congress, included a note stating, “This chilling account of the extermination of six million Jews underscores Israel’s concerns during the current negotiations for security without reliance on outside guarantees.”26 In other words, selling AWACS reconnaissance planes to Saudi Arabia, a backward kingdom with little military capability, is tantamount to collusion in the extermination of millions of Jews.

Jewish thinking about immigration into the U.S. shows the same logic. Lawrence Auster, a Jewish conservative, describes the logic as follows:

The liberal notion that “all bigotry is indivisible” [advocated by Norman Podhoretz] implies that all manifestations of ingroup/outgroup feeling are essentially the same—and equally wrong. It denies the obvious fact that some outgroups are more different from the ingroup, and hence less assimilable, and hence more legitimately excluded, than other outgroups. It means, for example, that wanting to exclude Muslim immigrants from America is as blameworthy as wanting to exclude Catholics or Jews.

Now when Jews put together the idea that “all social prejudice and exclusion leads potentially to Auschwitz” with the idea that “all bigotry is indivisible,” they must reach the conclusion that any exclusion of any group, no matter how alien it may be to the host society, is a potential Auschwitz.

So there it is. We have identified the core Jewish conviction that makes Jews keep pushing relentlessly for mass immigration, even the mass immigration of their deadliest enemies. In the thought-process of Jews, to keep Jew-hating Muslims out of America would be tantamount to preparing the way to another Jewish Holocaust.27

The idea that any sort of exclusionary thinking on the part of Americans—and especially European Americans as a majority group—leads inexorably to a Holocaust for Jews is not the only reason why Jewish organizations still favor mass immigration. I have identified two others as well: the belief that greater diversity makes Jews safer and an intense sense of historical grievance against the traditional peoples and culture of the United States and Europe.28 These two sentiments also illustrate Jewish moral particularism because they fail to consider the ethnic interests of other peoples in thinking about immigration policy. Recently the “diversity-as-safety” argument was made by Leonard S. Glickman, president and CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a Jewish group that has advocated open immigration to the United States for over a century. Glickman stated, “The more diverse American society is the safer [Jews] are.”29 At the present time, the HIAS is deeply involved in recruiting refugees from Africa to emigrate to the U.S.