Monday, March 16, 2015

How will American Jews deal with white privilege?

American Jews will have to deal with the fact that to the vast herds of vibrants they are the wealthiest & most privileged whites of all. It changes nothing that they see themselves as non-white or even that most white nationalists & ethno-nationalists see them as non-white too. It does not change the essential paleness of their skin & their incredible wealth & privilege.

American Jews will have to adjust to this & they will have three possible reactions.

First they may double down on their identity as victims. stressing their history as an oppressed people and using the Holocaust narrative as a shield & as a bludgeon against the various ethnicities. This tactic works so well against whites and especially against the fly-over country evangelicals that they are tempted to see it as a perfect defense against all accusations of privilege. However the Asians, Blacks, and mestizos do not see themselves as guilty of anything and can rightly point out that they had no part of any American bigotry against the Jews. The fact that the American south was wholly accepting of jews never acted as a defense in the eyes of left wing Jews. So I think they are going to be in the same boat as the Irish who use mythical tales of discrimination as an attempt to deflect criticism for their openly chauvinistic racial attitudes. To the current anti-racist whether one is Catholic Irish or Jewish American doesn't matter what matters is their privilege.

Second American Jews may try to minimize their demonization through contempt & deflection the whole while holding on to victim status. The use of laughter as a weapon against their detractors is a useful & powerful weapon. The American comedy scene is as dominated by Jews as any other part of the entertainment industry. Through dominance of the information industries they will be able to hold the line against the racial animus caused by multiculturalism. Jewish domination on American Universities is beginning to slip & if the Gramascians & Cultural Marxists are right this will topple Jewish cultural dominance.

Third the American Jews might surrender their place in the atrocity Olympics and embrace their place as the gatekeepers of American culture & begin to defend American culture against postmodernity and come to see American whites as their natural allies just as many Zionists have.

What are Jewish institutions doing now? Well they seem to be trying to simultaneously follow the first & second strategies.

Here is a sample of a general attack on Multiculturalism by an avowedly Jewish publication

One might well add, Why stop with Ovid? Has anyone taken a look at the Old Testament recently? Lot’s two daughters slept with him in order to continue his line (Genesis 19). Joshua slaughtered 12,000 Canaanites in one day (Joshua 8) and soon thereafter “smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings: He left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded” (Joshua 10:40). In the Holy Book, no one is judged harshly for war crimes. Is the Bible a manual for righteous massacres? Should trigger warnings be mandated? Should the Columbia Core print up a new edition of the Bible with a frontispiece warning the tender reader against the gruesome stories to be found therein?

 This is exactly the sort of defense against Political Correctness put up by authors decades ago at the National Review & American Spectator.But this is not a Neocon, but a man of the left.

Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph.D. program in Communications at Columbia University, is the author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage; Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street; and, with Liel Leibovitz, The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election.

This is not the oeuvre of a committed rightist, but a mainstream leftist. Yet something has changed for him the radicals in academia are a threat if not yet an outright foe. Perhaps there is a reason for this.

At the end of last year, the American Studies Association earned more press attention than it has in its entire history by voting to boycott Israeli academic institutions. The effect of the boycott has been devastating—not to Israel, where apparently its sole effect has been to interfere with the dissertation work of one Arab graduate student, but to the ASA itself. Immediately after the vote, hundreds of college presidents and faculty leaders blasted the organization, with several schools withdrawing their membership. This fall, the ASA embarrassed itself by threatening to bar representatives of Israeli universities from its annual convention, only to reverse the decision under the threat of discrimination lawsuits. Its leadership managed to make things even worse by banning Jewish media organizations from the conference, under a press policy one commentator derided as being “as complicated, arbitrary and daunting as getting a press pass for the North Korean Politburo meeting, except that the ASA professes to be a progressive organization devoted to the exchange and dissemination of ideas.”

Strange to criticize a  left wing group for "being 'as complicated, arbitrary and daunting as getting a press pass for the North Korean Politburo meeting'". This is how all leftist organizations always act those of us who have been watching them metastasize into the malignancy that now dominates campus life can't help, but wonder where this concern has been for the last 50 years. a movement led, guided, and fed by Jews for decades is now turning on them as the demographics of both the US & the American Campus have altered. This alteration has been championed by the Jewish academics, bankers, & journalists from the beginning. It seems a little late for buyers remorse.

Here's Professor Gitlin on boycotts:

Boycotts and divestments appeal to ideals of citizenship. Vote with your money. Make perpetrators of injustice pay a price. Raise the stakes so that, when they get their calculating minds around a cost-benefit analysis, they decide the cost is too steep. Often such campaigns are constructive.

They can be constructive, but not always. I wonder why? 

Presently, I’m involved in the alumni wing of Divest Harvard, a student-run campaign to press the university to sell holdings in fossil fuel corporations whose business model is to make civilization untenable by burning carbon and dumping the by-products into the atmosphere. (So, I want to add, is Robert K. Massie.) There are several hundred other university campaigns of this sort, with some colleges, churches, cities, and foundations following suit. The objective is to stigmatize those corporations and to further the development of energy sources that the earth can sustain.

All these movements have been tied to practical objectives, some more radical than others. Their justifications lay in a sheer disproportion of rights. The rights of the Negro passengers and the grape pickers and the Stevens workers and the South African majority were not comparable to the rights of the segregationists or the growers or the South African white minority. In a sense, the fossil fuel movement has more radical ends, since the present movement, if it had divine powers, would put fossil fuel companies out of business altogether. But in none of these cases was or is there a clash of right against right.

So attacking American Companies there is no clash of "right against right." That is no one was being unduly harmed, except greedy white oil drillers (and the families they keep in a middle class lifestyle)  & their corporate masters. However if there are innocent Jews being harmed by the boycott it's time for some analysis of the motives.

Still and all, many supporters of BDS do not understand, or have not thought through, just what they are subscribing to. Consider the 2005 BDS call by Palestinian organizations, which can be read on the official BDS website. It favors “broad boycotts” and “divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.” These measures, the call goes on, “should be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by (with my italics):
1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in U.N. resolution 194.”
Leave aside, for now, that the BDS organizers are highly selective about the international obligations they wish to enforce at the cost of academic freedom. (They have a point when they say that all campaigns are partial and selective, though one might well marvel at their insouciance when it comes to slaughter perpetrated next door by Bashar al-Assad.) Leave aside the sleight of hand with which they claim that their boycott (actually blacklist) targets only Israeli institutions, not individuals.
But consider the slipperiness of the BDS goals. The first statement I have italicized is deliberately vague. Which “Arab lands”? According to Hamas, they include the entirety of Israel. Moreover, the phrase is coded to imply that the very existence of the state of Israel, as recognized in 1948, is what constitutes “colonization.” (If that were not so, it would suffice to say “end the occupation”—meaning the occupation that took place, and continues to take place, as a result of the 1967 war and the Jewish-Israeli settlements that continue, illegally, to expand on the West Bank.) To BDS, the original sin would seem to be the founding of the Israeli state. The language masks (however thinly) the desire of one of the parties to the horrendous Israel-Palestinian conflict that the other one disappear.

Seems that maybe divesting & boycotting has a whole constellation of details that perhaps should be carefully examined before jumping in with both feet. Perhaps BDS is not always the unalloyed good that Professor Gitlin's other examples were. After weighing the good & the bad what is the professor's conclusion.

 But history is always surprising and sometimes pleasantly so. So let me close with some more bad news and then a touch of good news. The bad news is that, in a time of severe fiscal pressures on higher education, of plutocratically enforced inequality, and of relentless, potentially catastrophic climate change, the Doctoral Student Council of the City University of New York took time to consider not a proposal to divest from fossil fuel corporations or a campaign to boost funding but a BDS resolution against… Israel. The good news is that, this past Friday, Oct. 24, the BDS resolution failed.

Well that certainly is good news. It seems that American Jews are going for option four keeping their privilege & their place at the head of the anti-white grievance committee. The only word for that is chutzpah.

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