Archive for the 'Judaism' Category

Best wishes for a sweet and healthy year to my friends, colleagues and readers.
 

Things are spinning out of control

Robert Avrech has a story about blatant anti-Semitism in Holland, the land of Anne Frank:

Anti-Semitism has gotten so ugly in The Netherlands that Jews walking along Amsterdam’s street are being harassed by young Muslims who yell insults or give Nazi salutes…A TV programme broadcast on Sunday by the Jewish Broadcasting Organisation showed rabbi Lody van de Kamp confronted by Moroccan youths giving the Hitler salute.

and

“Jews are deserting Antwerp,” headlines De Standaard. The Belgian newspaper predicts that in fifty years there will be no more Jews living in the city. Due to an increase of Anti-Semitism, many young Jews are leaving the city to study in London, New York or Israel, where “working with a skullcap (kippah) isn’t a problem”, and they never return.

The sharp increase in anti-Semitism is only one among many indicators of social disintegration and dysfunction throughout the Western world. It is increasingly clear that (although there are individual honorable exceptions) our political elites lack the wisdom and courage to deal effectively with the problems confronting our societies. The ongoing appeasement of jihadism is one primary example; the orgy of financial irresponsibility is another.

Reading Robert’s post, I was reminded of a passage from Sebastian Haffner’s memoir. Haffner, as you may recall from my review here, grew up in Germany between the wars and wrote an indispensable book about his experiences and observations.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, Helen Thomas’s racist comments forced her retirement. This is not a victory. It is a harbinger.

Within five years at most, those very same comments will be accepted wisdom by the leftmost 1/3 of the American political spectrum and they will routinely voice such views in the public discourse without shame or remorse. No one will lose their job because they advocate the destruction of Israel.

The evolution has already begun. Scan the comments on the story at Huffington Post. Clearly many on the left already don’t find those sentiments shocking or beyond the pale.

Read the rest of this entry »

Does anyone else see the epically fearful irony of, a) Jews in German U-boats, b) Armed with nukes carrying American nuclear material, c) Whose bomb designs were tested in then-apartheid South Africa, stalking Iran’s jihadist Regime?

The Sunday Times of London reports just that in this crazier than Tom Clancy’s SUM OF ALL FEARS article titled:

Israel stations nuclear missile subs off Iran

Three German-built Israeli submarines equipped with nuclear cruise missiles are to be deployed in the Gulf near the Iranian coastline.
 
The first has been sent in response to Israeli fears that ballistic missiles developed by Iran, Syria and Hezbollah, a political and military organization in Lebanon, could hit sites in Israel, including air bases and missile launchers.
 
The submarines of Flotilla 7 — Dolphin, Tekuma and Leviathan — have visited the Gulf before. But the decision has now been taken to ensure a permanent presence of at least one of the vessels.
 
The flotilla’s commander, identified only as “Colonel O”, told an Israeli newspaper: “We are an underwater assault force. We’re operating deep and far, very far, from our borders.”

My irony meter has pegged out.

What’s next?

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard speed boats hunting those Israeli subs with Japanese commercial bass-finding sonar with made-in-China electronics?

Noah Pollak reviews a recent essay by Peter Beinart:

Beinart writes as if none of the tragedies of the past two decades happened, or if they did happen, that Israelis, unique among peoples, may not allow themselves to acquire any fears or resentments or lessons. Even Shimon Peres, one of Israel’s greatest doves, understands what has transpired, telling the Wall Street Journal a few days ago: “I am not surprised that so many Israelis lost their trust when they’re being attacked time after time, time after time.” Lost their trust indeed: the Meretz/Labor peace-process faction held 56 Knesset seats in 1992. Today they have 16. Normally in politics, such a massive shift in public opinion is accompanied by genuine inquiry about why it happened. Beinart is unreflective. It must be because of the settlers, or racism, or AIPAC.
 
Beinart has thus joined a legion of others in the burgeoning profession of being an Israel Scold. Israel Scolds have adopted a set of condescending attitudes toward Israelis, their recent history, and their political choices, demanding that they never allow the cruelties of reality to undermine their faith in the promise of the progressive vision. The distilled pleading of Beinart is merely a series of demands that Israelis refuse to learn from experience: how dare they allow any hostility to Arabs creep into their politics; how dare they vote for Avigdor Lieberman, a populist who plays to the less-than-perfectly liberal Russian immigrants; how dare they lose faith in the peace process and the liberal hopefulness that animated it. Most important: how dare they upset the comfortable ideological existence of American Jews, whose acceptability to their liberal peers depends in no small degree on their willingness to join in pillorying Israel over the failure of the peace process — a failure, alas, that is not Israel’s but liberalism’s.

Read the whole thing. Pollak is highly effective in explaining the flaws in Beinart’s fashionable argument.

So this meetup between Obama and Netanyahu didn’t go…er…so well, from what I am reading. Some things I read tell me that this may alienate Jewish voters from Obama in the next election, or from the Democrats in the midterms.

I don’t have a lot of contact with many Jewish folks here in the wilds of Wisconsin, so I would like to ask those who may have more daily interaction with those of the Jewish faith a few questions.

If you are Jewish, does this latest episode make you not want to vote for Obama/Democrats if you voted for them before? If you have friends that are Jewish, is this what you are hearing from them?

I think that relations will keep souring with Israel as Obama’s term goes on – do you think that this will affect him in the 2012 presidential election?

Thanks!

Best wishes for a sweet and healthy year to all of my friends, colleagues and readers.

(Photo: Melissa Goodman)

Cochran G. and Harpending, H., The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, Perseus Books, NY, 2009.

In an earlier cb review of a book on the role of culture and education on American intelligence (Nisbett’s Intelligence and How to Get It:, I mentioned a hypothesis by physicist and iconoclast scholar Gregory Cochran suggesting a genetic basis for Ashkenazi intelligence scores (slightly less than one standard deviation above the American population’s average). Nisbett noted that this slight difference in average IQ translated into massive differences in the distribution of individuals at the very highest IQ levels (140+).

Cochran, and anthropologist Henry Harpending, have now written a fuller discussion of their Ashkenazi hypothesis within the context of a much wider contrarian, and occasionally irreverent, book on the new discoveries in human genetics affecting our understanding of the evolution of modern humans. The authors explicitly reject the convential wisdom that human evolution largely stalled with the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens as the sole hominid species on the planet.

With new techniques for examining the human genome, it’s possible to give approximate dates on the major recent changes to human physiology triggered by migrations into new environments or the adoption of new economic lifestyles (such as pastoralism or agriculture). Key physiological adaptations such as lactose tolerance, resistance to diabetes or obesity, Vitamin D absorption through skin, malarial protections (subject to recessive genetic disease such as sickle-cell anemia), high-altitude occupation, and the aforementioned Ashkenazis’ IQ, now have associated dates and timetables … and new research promises to nail down the timing and nature of similar genetic changes amongst the world’s populations. The impact of such genetic changes, and associated vulnerabilities, on the human occupation of Europe, North America, and Africa/Asia for the last 50,000 years are the focus of this book.

In contrast to most authors in the biological and social sciences, Cochran and Harpending believe that significant and influential human evolution has occurred in the recent past and that the pace of such evolution continues and even accelerates as selective pressures on modern populations intensify. The larger population pools in turn make it more likely that valuable mutations can spread widely and relatively quickly … often in ways that are completely independent of the X and Y sex chromosomes first used to map human genetic history. For example, Cochran and Harpending suggest that there may well have been an exchange of advantageous genetic mutations (through “introgression”) from Neanderthals to Cro-Magnon/H. sapiens sapiens without any associated impact on the paternal or maternal lines of genetic material associated with our species.

By looking back into post-Neanderthal human prehistory with new genetic data, scholars can track the movement of humans out of Africa and into Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Americas. They can also begin to hypothesize about the role that genetic change played in the relative reproductive success of Upper Paleolithic hunters, the first agricultural communities in Eurasia, and the Indo-Europeans who left their cultural and linguistic imprint on roughly 3 billion of the people in the world today.

Read the rest of this entry »

Daniel Henninger:

In New York this week, I asked a former Eastern European dissident who spent time in prison under the Communists: “If you were sitting in a cell in Cuba, Iran or Syria and saw this photo of a smiling American president shaking hands with a smiling Hugo Chávez, what would you think?”

He said: “I would think that I was losing ground.”
Read the rest of this entry »

This link is not about a zoological species, but rather about Israel-bashing, anti-Semitism, and political intimidation on an American college campus. It deserves careful reading.

The “rhinoceros” reference is, of course, to Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 play, which is summarized at the link. (The play has also been made into an excellent film, featuring Zero Mostel–this would be a very good time to order it from Netflix or pick it up at a local video store.)

See also my 2002 post on the rise of political violence and intimidation in America.

link via Meryl Yourish

Went to see Defiance a couple of days ago. This is the story (based on real events) of a group of Jews in Nazi-occupied Byelorussia who obtained weapons, moved deep into the forest, and established a community there, sometimes joining with Russian partisans for raids on German troops and on local collaborators.

This post (via a comment by Eric at Bookworm) indicates that many “official” reviewers did not like this movie very much, and cites an absolutely bizarre passage in a review published by CNN:

It’s a remarkable story, one that should have inspired a more exciting and original movie than this sluggish compendium of earnest debates and hackneyed battle scenes.

Zwick’s Hollywood liberal credentials are not in doubt, but his films have a surprisingly gung-ho undercurrent (they include such martial adventures as “The Last Samurai,” “Glory,” “The Siege,” “Legends of the Fall” and “Courage Under Fire”).

So, films are now supposed to be assessed based on the “Hollywood liberal credentials” of their directors? And the past heroism of Jews fighting their would-be murderers must only be portrayed and celebrated when Jews are not currently fighting other would be murderers?

Americans must no longer allow their opinions on movies, or on anything else, to be mediated by the court scribes of the old media. For movies as for books, reviews by “nonprofessionals” posted on blogs and on sites like Amazon are generally much more enlightening than those by the “professionals.”

Defiance will not go down as one of the great movies of all time, but it holds your interest and it tells a story that ought to be better known. Go and see it if you have a chance.

…could someone please remind me?

Because based on the images and stories below, it seems like it might be 1932 in Germany, as Nazi street thugs work to complete the destruction of the Weimar Republic.

Or it might be 1928 in one of those American cities where the Ku Klux Klan is running rampant.

Here are reports and videos from some of the anti-Israel (and often openly anti-Semitic) demonstrations that have been held around the world since Israel launched its Gaza incursion:

San Francisco…also this

Melbourne, Australia

Anaheim

Fort Lauderdale

Chicago

Dublin, Ireland

Holland

Paris

New York City

UPDATE: Read hating Israel in Trafalgar square

Here is the speech that Governor Sarah Palin was going to give at the anti-Ahmadinejad rally in NYC. It’s a good speech, and deserves your attention. Excerpt:

Ahmadinejad may choose his words carefully, but underneath all of the rhetoric is an agenda that threatens all who seek a safer and freer world. We gather here today to highlight the Iranian dictator’s intentions and to call for action to thwart him.

The world must awake to the threat this man poses to all of us. Ahmadinejad denies that the Holocaust ever took place. He dreams of being an agent in a “Final Solution” — the elimination of the Jewish people.

Note that I referred to a speech that Sarah Palin was going to give. She was not allowed to give it, because she was disinvited from the rally.
Read the rest of this entry »

As an exhibition in Berlin earlier this year demonstrated, Jewish Communists returning from exile to the Soviet occupied part of Germany were confronted with prejudice and suspicion and sometimes even had to fear for their lives. The exhibition was located in the rebuilt Neue Synagogue (New Synagogue) and curated by the Centrum Judaicum Foundation, in cooperation with the historian Andreas Weigelt, who is attending to the documentation center for the former concentration camp Lieberose.

Called “Zwischen Bleiben und Gehen” (“Between Staying and Going”), the exhibition documented the lives of 10 Jewish men and women in the post-war Soviet occupied zone, later East Germany:

Nelhans’ fate was especially tragic. Having survived the war underground in Berlin, he helped found a Jewish community in East Berlin in late 1945, only to be arrested in 1948 by the NKVD, the Soviet secret service – allegedly for helping Jewish Red Army soldiers escape to Palestine.

Jailed for 25 years by a military court, he died in a Soviet labor camp in 1950, aged 51. Some 47 years later the Russian military authorities conceded Nelhans had been falsely convicted and ordered his posthumous rehabilitation.

…

The East-West propaganda battle began immediately after the war. The Communist Party loudly trumpeted its view that East Germany was innocent of the evil Nazi past.

…

Stalinist party purges in Eastern Europe, accompanied by anti-Semitic show trials in Prague and Budapest sparked fear among Jews in East Berlin.

…

Jews who were communist party members often found themselves accused of being “Zionist agents” or “Jewish nationalists” at a time when the communist Eastern bloc was supporting Arab states in their conflict with Israel.

The website of the Centrum Judaicum itself currently has no information on this exhibition, but here is some English language information on two other past exhibitions: Pioneers in Celluloid: Jews in Early Cinema and Relatively Jewish. Albert Einstein – Jew, Zionist, Nonconformist.

Some more pictures of the Neue Synagoge can be found here.

The modern anti-Semite looks entirely different. He does not have a shaved head. He has good manners and often an academic title as well…The modern anti-Semite does not believe in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But instead he fantasizes about an “Israel lobby” that is supposed to control American foreign policy like a tail that wags the dog. For the modern anti-Semite, it goes without saying that every year on January 27 he will commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz. But at the same time he militates for the right of Iran to have atomic weapons.

–Henryk Broder, in a speech to the German Bundestag.

Read the rest of this entry »

…because it increasingly seems that the first 3 digits must be one, nine, and three.

Denis MacShane, a British member of Parliament, writes:

Hatred of Jews has reached new heights in Europe and many points south and east of the old continent. Last year I chaired a blue-ribbon committee of British parliamentarians, including former ministers and a party leader, that examined the problem of anti-Semitism in Britain…Our report showed a pattern of fear among a small number of British citizens — there are around 300,000 Jews in Britain, of whom about a third are observant — that is not acceptable in a modern democracy. Synagogues attacked. Jewish schoolboys jostled on public transportation. Rabbis punched and knifed. British Jews feeling compelled to raise millions to provide private security for their weddings and community events. On campuses, militant anti-Jewish students fueled by Islamist or far-left hate seeking to prevent Jewish students from expressing their opinions.

Read the rest of this entry »

…because it increasingly seems that the first 3 digits must be one, nine, and three.

British film-maker Richard Littlejohn has released a documentary titled The War Against Britain’s Jews. Read this article, in which he talks about some of the things he has learned in his research.

I believe this program ran on Britain’s Channel 4 on Monday—don’t know if any reruns are planned.

Via Judith at History News Network.

Via Rand Simberg comes this essay by Michael Hodges.

I can’t tell if the Hodges piece is parody. If not, he reminds me of a leftist anti-Semitic high-school history teacher I had. He too used that “people of the book” line, to knock Christendom for being more hostile to Jews than Islam is and to explain away Muslim mistreatment of Jews.

In fact the Muslim record, particularly the recent Arab-Muslim record, only looks good in isolated cases or by comparison with the worst abuses of old Christendom. The modern Christian world is astonishingly tolerant by historical standards. Christian institutions have shrunk away from national government while radical Islam seeks to perpetuate Islam’s historical political totalism.

Read the rest of this entry »