I.
The people shall hear, and be afraid: sorrow shall take hold
on the inhabitants of Palestina. [Exodus 15:14]
In October 2023, Israel invaded Gaza for the third time
since the turn of century - the previous two invasions having taken place in
2008 and 2014 - and a year later, we see that the invasion is dragging on, its
progress presenting a singular contrast to that of the invasions of 1956 and
1967. In the wars of 1956 and 1967, the Israeli army ejected the Egyptian from
Gaza in a matter of days, but in the war that started in 2023, it is unable to
eject Hamas, despite Israel's possessing one of the largest and most-well
equipped armies in the Middle East and one of the most technologically advanced
air forces in the world. I have heard rumours that most of the Israeli army
casualties are caused by friendly fire and that Israeli infantry tactics have
deteriorated to the level of the Russian. If the rumours are true, then the
present war marks a sad descent, for traditionally the Israeli army, unlike the
Russian, values the life of the individual soldier. But Israeli military
performance in the present Gaza war is in keeping with Israeli military
performance all throughout the 21st century, and in hindsight, Israel enjoyed
its last victory more than forty years ago, in the opening stages of the
Lebanon War of 1982. Granted, the 21st century Arab and Israeli wars caused the
deaths of a great many Arab civilians, which was perhaps the Israeli aim -
perhaps we should classify Gaza and Lebanon as punitive expeditions - but in
all these operations, Israel failed to secure its objectives; the south of
Lebanon remained in the hands of Hezbollah, Gaza in the hands of Hamas.
The Far Left has rejoiced because of this; Israeli setbacks
and defeats represent a blow to 'imperialism'. In keeping with this
'anti-imperialist' struggle, the Far Left makes its outrage over the Gaza
'genocide' known at all times and in all places and it continually expresses
its uncompromising solidarity with the Palestinian cause. This bond was on
display when I recently passed by a trade union building in one of Australia's
largest country towns and saw on the rooftop a Palestinian flag flying alongside
the Aboriginal and the Eureka. Palestinian nationalism and Palestinian Islamism
appeals 'intersectionally', that is, it appeals to all the disparate groupings,
tendencies, lifestyles, factions, associated with the Far Left; it appeals to
negroes, homosexuals, and environmentalists. This is illustrated by a recent
episode in which a prominent representative of the last group, Greta Thunberg,
the 'Swedish doom goblin', underwent travails because of her affiliation with
Palestinianism. That story began when Thunberg posted on social media a
photograph of herself holding up a 'Stand with Gaza' placard. Examining the
photo carefully, observers spotted a stuffed toy - a blue octopus - sitting
atop an armchair, and concluded, by a leap of logic that is unfathomable, that
Thunberg was using the octopus to send a coded anti-Semitic message.
We must view all this against the background of history.
Ever since the Far Left turned against Israel - which was probably sometime in
the early 1970s, when the Palestinian cause became Left-chic - Israel and
Jewish organisations have levelled a charge of anti-Semitism against the Far
Left. The Far Left is said to have taken up a new anti-Semitism; conservatives
in their polemics are making the anti-Israel Far Left equivalent to the
'Nazis'. If left-wingers study the history of the Arab and Israeli conflict,
they may be surprised to learn that the statement of equivalence that Far Left
anti-Zionists = Nazis is nothing new; in fact, it is at least fifty years old.
All the same, the virulence and vehemence of the Far Left in
2024 against Israel, Zionism, and the Israel lobby has given some on the
dissident Right pause, and some white nationalists have been forced by events
to give voice to opinions on the new anti-Semitism; Kevin Alfred Strom of has
written a good three-part analysis starting here. Those on the Far Right are
debating whether those on the Far Left have come over to their side on the
Jewish question. The matter is permeated by fog and confusion, because the idea
of anti-Semitism itself is vague and undefined, and this has been the case
since Moritz Steinschneider ('Maurice Stonecutter', 'Maurice Jeweller'), the
19th century Jewish political activist, invented the term, putting it forward
with a view to muddying the waters. And as we can see from the Thunberg
scandal, a great paranoia exists, and when we examine the dispute, we feel
uncertainty: does the pro-Israel activist really believe that Thunberg is an anti-Semite,
or does he not believe? Perhaps he is tricking us; perhaps he seeks to fool the
more gullible among us into thinking that Thunberg is an anti-Semite, that,
although it seems doubtful, Thunberg and her circle have been swotting up on
anti-Semitism, reading Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf and
Ford's commentary on the Protocols.
Naturally, those on the dissident Right contemplate the
possibility of a left-wing anti-Semitism with excitement and satisfaction:
their surrounded and encircled army has been waiting a long time for relief;
now their hope is that the Far Left has gotten wise to the Jewish question and
that it is assembling a rescue force that shall come to their aid. The
hypothesis is a most pleasing one; but all the same, those on the Right must
investigate the ideology of the anti-Israel Far Left dispassionately and rationally,
even if they run the risk of putting some illusions, some hopes and daydreams,
to rest. Articles such as Strom's attempt such an analysis. I here will be
doing something similar, and the conclusions I arrive at will not be all that
profound and original - the likes of Strom have said it all before - but what I
will be doing that is new is looking at the same material from a different
angle.
II.
The political circumstances of 2024 oblige us to formulate
clear, precise definitions; I will here attempt to define what anti-Semitism is
- that is, the real anti-Semitism and not the fake. Clear formulations matter;
their lack pollutes contemporary political discourse, as shown by the careless
bandying about of Steinschneider's conception.
Whenever accusations of anti-Semitism are made, these should
be disarmed by the asking of a few questions that, although obvious, are rarely
asked. The first of these is: who are the Semites? We know that the Akkadians,
Phoenicians, and Arabs belong to the Semitic category as well as the Jews. And
that leads us to the next question: what, precisely, is 'Semitism'? We can
define Marxism, Freudianism, and Darwinism easily enough, but 'Semitism' is the
great indefinable, and that entails that one cannot be 'anti' it: we must know
what the 'ism' is before we can be 'anti' the 'ism'. We know what
anti-communism is because we know communism is. We know what a communist is,
but we do not know what a Semitist is. And so, we must ask: what is
anti-'Semitism'? Furthermore, we must ask why it is that anti-Semitism,
whatever it is, is the most wicked and obscene doctrine in the history of the
world. I am willing to accept the conclusion, but I must have arguments,
and so far, there seem to be none. Summing up, after a cursory examination,
Steinschneider's conception comes loose from its moorings; it is filled with
holes, as even Steinschneider's Wiki entry admits.
But a person who would make these sound objections would be
logical and rational, and at the same time naive; that is, he would be someone
who has had little to no experience of the Jewish people - at least none of the
experience that the Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, and Greeks of the Bible
had. The experience of these ancient peoples gave birth to a doctrine that I
call the real anti-Semitism, real because it is empirical.
The real anti-Semitism consists of a number of propositions
that are easy to understand, hard to accept - hard for most people, that is. In
the list, the first of the propositions is: Jews possess political power.
Second, they wield it over non-Jews; and third, they can use it for evil and
not good; and fourth, they use it as Jews and not as 'Illuminati', 'Masons',
'capitalists', 'corporations', 'globalists', 'the Far Left', 'the Davos elite',
not even as 'Zionists'.
To the American conservative, these are outrageous slanders,
but we can draw these anti-Semitic 'canards' from the one book that the
American conservative should regard as the most authoritative, and that is the
Bible. One only need start with the story of Joseph in Genesis, which if
you have read it - and chances are that you have not - tells of the
exploitation and starvation of millions of Egyptians by Joseph and the
enrichment of Joseph and his family. If anti-Semitism is whatever casts the
Jews in a bad light, then the Old Testament is the most anti-Semitic book ever
written. And for our purposes, it is important to recognise that the Bible
tells the story of all Jews and not some Jews: it does not distinguish between
'Zionist' and 'anti-Zionist' Jews, 'Marxist' and 'capitalist' Jews, 'good' Jews
and 'bad' Jews.
Joseph is a hero in the Bible, and the Bible allows us to
see how Jews see themselves. We would assume, then, that the Bible paints a
flattering portrait of the Jews. Or does it? The truth is that any reader would
be shocked and appalled by what Simeon, Levi, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Saul,
David, and other Old Testament heroes did to the non-Jews. And this brings us
to another proposition of anti-Semitism. The Jewish festival of Passover
celebrates evils wrought upon the Egyptians, Purim upon the Persians, and
Hannukah upon the Greeks. Any non-Jewish scholar contemplating these would find
them offensive, to put it mildly; but they rarely come up for criticism from
our Jewish intellectuals, and this is the case no matter how 'left-wing' the
Jewish intellectual may be. This is a central proposition of anti-Semitism. The
Jews of the Old Testament understood that a hostility existed but could not
explain that hostility. A blissful ignorance exists, and with it a presumption
of an irrationality dwelling in the minds of the non-Jews who take exception to
Jewish conduct. This carries over into the present, and we see a trace of it in
one article lauding the anti-Israel protests at American universities. The Jewish communist Daniel Lazare records with pride that at one American
encampment, the anti-Zionist Jewish activists 'On Monday evening, the first
night of Passover... even held a Seder complete with matzo and prayer books'.
Lazare had not read the Bible, otherwise he would have recognised that Passover
is not worthy of celebration, for it commemorates the mass slaughter of
thousands? tens of thousands? of the Egyptian 'firstborn'. Exodus 10:29:
'And there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was
not one dead'. Explaining Passover, Dan Barker writes:
Every year during Passover, the Jews hold a festive feast
where they celebrate the Tenth Plague. They eat unleavened bread, drink wine,
sing, and commemorate the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent children.
The word “Passover” is a translation of the Hebrew pesach, which most
likely means “he passed over.” During the final plague of Egypt, while children
were being murdered by the God of the Old Testament through no fault of their
own, the children of the Israelites who smeared lamb’s blood on their doors
were spared. They were passed over. Apparently, searching for that blood mark
was the only way God’s Angel of Death could tell the difference between the bad
innocent children and the good innocent children. Jews all over the world
annually rejoice over that non-difference, happy that they are the good chosen
people. [Dan Barker, God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction
(2016)]
All Jewish organisations, religious bodies, journals, agree
that the Jews of Exodus and subsequent books are typically Jewish. And they put
forward the notion that any criticism of this Jewishness is unfounded,
irrational, and moreover, dangerous and immoral. And this leads to another
important thesis, one that AIPAC, the Israel lobby, and American conservatives
extend to anyone who criticises Israel: any aspersions cast on the Jewish
people give evidence of a desire to hurt and even destroy the Jews wholesale.
If you deplore the conduct of the Jews of Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy,
Joshua, you are a Jew-hater who wants to exterminate all Jews; and the
same affect manifests itself when you deplore the conduct of the Jews of Israel
and the Israel lobby. Fancying themselves to be psychoanalysts, AIPAC, the ADL,
and other Jewish organisations claim to understand you better than you
understand yourself; they know the evil that lurks in your heart.
And now we come to another proposition of anti-Semitism,
which is this: Jewish organisations and intellectuals can display an
extraordinary belligerence, aggression, and paranoia that non-Jews can,
whenever they deign to notice it, find obnoxious and offensive. Whatever did
Australians of all people do to merit this tweet:
Amusingly, the mentality behind it reminds of this tweet,
from the account of a renowned vatnik:
'You're locked in here with me', in the words of Rorschach,
one of the anti-heroes of The Watchmen (2009). A pop psychologist would
not characterise this as healthy.
Now it is a peculiarity of human nature that one group, if
it is decent and thinks of itself as being decent, dislike being accused of
wanting to oppress, enslave, murder another. Suppose a man is indifferent to
the fate of Israel or even mildly critical of the Zionist project: does that
make him bad? According to the Johnathan Greenblatts, it does; and furthermore,
it makes him hateful, evil, murderous. Any intellectual, journalist,
politician, entertainer, public figure who takes up a position even mildly
critical of Israel is shocked and overwhelmed by the ferocity of the attacks of
the Greenblatts. And his hackles rise; he takes umbrage at being called a
bigot, an anti-Semite, a Jew-hater, and inevitably, a Nazi. After the assault,
which 'discomfits' him - to use one of the favourite words of the Bible - he is
often reduced to spluttering that he likes the Jewish people, that he has many
Jewish friends, that he recognises the many accomplishments of the Jews in the
arts and humanities; and in a last desperate defence, he takes refuge in the
thesis (one that has by now become hackneyed) that not all Jews are Zionists.
Such is human nature, though, over time he becomes accustomed to the
unrelenting hostility and lack of fair play, and these exert influence upon his
character. Again and again, our liberal and moderate anti-Zionist is told that
he hates the Jews and everything Jewish and that he wants to murder Jews; and
the turning point comes when, exhausted, he asks himself whether there is
something to the accusations. This is human psychology. If I am indifferent to
x or mildly critical of x, and x, perceiving this, tells me that I hate him and
I secretly want to destroy him - the first time I may dismiss his accusations
as the ravings a madman, the hundredth time, I may think there is something to
them. Oddly, the Greenblatts and other witchfinders-general charged with
rooting out anti-Semitism make use of the indoctrination by repetition
technique of a cult. If you are told something over and over, you begin to
believe it, no matter how absurd it is.
In Greenblatt's conduct we perceive a self-destructiveness.
Representatives of the ADL and other organisations devoted to defending the
honour of the Jewish people often bring up without prompting anti-Semitic
'tropes' that are known only to the anti-Semitic cognoscenti, and they shout
these 'canards' and 'slanders' out loud and rub them in the faces of the public
- a public that is by and large ignorant of real anti-Semitism. The classic
example is the ADL's constant bringing up the 'blood libel', which is a Jewish
term for something that anti-Semites call Jewish ritual murder. Here, I will
not touch upon it, for it should be set aside for an advanced masterclass in
anti-Semitism; here, I am writing only a beginner's guide. The question is, why
are the Greenblatts, who are in the business of doing public relations for the
Jewish people, bringing up such an unsavoury subject; and why are they
presenting it to the 'normies', who know nothing of it and want to know nothing
of it? It is as though I feel a compulsion to blurt out to complete strangers
that I have been accused of terrible crimes and perversions; and at the same
time, I noisily insist that there is nothing to these slurs, that they exist
solely in the imaginations of accusers who are bad, wicked people who for no
reason want to slander my good name and destroy me. The irony is, if an irony
it be, that none of the strangers would never have heard the vile accusations
had I not importunately injected them into the general discourse. And my
repeating these slanders to an audience that is at first indifferent and after
a time resistant produces an effect. At the start, my audience concludes,
rightly enough, that I am somewhat unhinged; and by the end, it begins to ask
itself if there is anything founded in these 'unfounded' accusations after all.
III.
Because of his unusual appearance, Greenblatt is compared in
memes to Max Schreck in Nosferatu (1922).
Interestingly, modern commentators spy in Nosferatu
'anti-Semitic undertones'.
A Nosferatu, a Dracula, any variant thereof, is a Persona -
a word that the ancient Greeks used for a mask worn by an actor. In the Greek
theatre, the mask brings forth a character from out of the actor's unconscious;
and to use one of the terms of Jungian psychology, it presents us with an
archetype. Many Personae from the Old Testament are being called forth and
presented to this day, and as we shall see, that phenomenon constitutes one of
the premises in a chief argument for anti-Semitism.
One of the first Jewish Personae that appears in the Bible
is the Jewish pimp. Abraham pimps Sarah, Isaac pimps Rebekah, and Mordecai
pimps Esther. Significantly, the three Jewish men engage in pandering with a
view to political advantage: they wish to win the favour of non-Jewish rulers.
This feeds into the anti-Semitic 'trope' that the present-day Abrahams, Isaacs,
and Mordecais are encouraging venality and indulging our appetite for vice,
whether that vice be pornography, gambling, drugs, alcohol (in the Prohibition
days), the services of prostitutes... It is most important to note that they do
this in order to assert dominance: like the panderers of Biblical times, the
Jeffrey Epstein-style panderers of moden times exploit Gentile weakness so as to get
one over the Gentiles.
A second Jewish Persona, and one that is most pertinent in
2024, is the Jewish war criminal, who first appears in Genesis, in the
story of Shechem and Dinah. A two-man army, Simeon and Levi kill all the males
in the city of the Hivites, lay waste to that city, steal all the livestock,
and enslave all the women and children. Fearing the consequences, Jacob
reproves his two sons: 'And Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, Ye have troubled me
to make me to stink among the inhabitants of the land, among the Canaanites and
the Perizzites: and I being few in number, they shall gather themselves
together against me, and slay me; and I shall be destroyed, I and my house' [Genesis
34:30]. The racial massacres - for which the Jewish intellectual and anti-Nazi
activist Rafael Lemkin coined the term 'genocide' - commence in earnest in Numbers.
The Midianites are nearly all wiped out after Moses orders the death of all the
Midianite men and all the non-virgin women. Of the survivors, the Israelites
take captive 16,000 virgin females, and interestingly, 32 of these females are
set aside for a sacrifice to Yahweh - one of few instances of human sacrifice
that are approved of in the Bible.
The third significant Jewish Persona is the cruel overlord
and oppressor: see Joseph. The Joseph story leads us to what I call the Jewish
political model. The Jewish hero of the Old Testament seeks power not by
ascending to a throne - that would be too public - but by becoming a middleman.
He insinuates himself into a court and bit by bit makes himself indispensable
to a ruler who is usually vain, empty-headed, and easily swayed. Joseph and the
Pharoah, Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar, and Mordecai and Ahasuerus give examples.
The first two Jewish heroes, Joseph and Daniel, win the Gentile rulers over by
becoming interpreters of dreams and portents - that is, psychoanalysts - and
all three heroes use their influence to amass wealth and power for themselves
and for the Jewish people; and such are the persuasive powers of their Jewish
advisors, Ahasuerus and Darius the Median obligingly order the execution of the
enemies of Mordecai and Daniel.
Among the other archetypes we find the Jewish heroine who is
a Jewish patriot: we see the prostitutes Sarah, Rebekah, and Esther; two female
assassins, Jael and Judith, who murder men who are enemies of the Jews; and the
prophetess Deborah, a sort of Jewish queen, who being a 'stronk womyn' (strong
woman) doubtless wins the admiration of feminist scholars.
Quite a few archetypes can be found in the Bible that have
fallen into disuse, that is to say, we do not see Jews in the modern age taking
up these Personae. For examples of discarded Personae, see Elijah and his
disciple Elisha, who are evil wizards; these men are the Jedi of the Bible, but
unlike the Jedi, they owe allegiance to the dark side of the Force - perhaps
they are not Jedi, but Sith. And any discussion of magical powers in the Bible
brings us to the one archetype that appears more than any other, and that is
the religious maniac who makes a habit of animal and sometimes human sacrifice.
These are the men who give burnt offerings to Yahweh, that is, holocausts,
holocaust being a word that stems from the Greek word kauston, to burn.
'Burnt offering' appears nearly 250 times in the Old Testament and 'holocaust'
over a dozen times in the deuterocanonical texts. (When someone accuses you of
denying the Holocaust, the smart rejoinder is: 'Which one?'). Neither term
appears in the New Testament, suggesting that Christianity is a religion that
has parted ways from Judaism. The doctrine of the latter rests upon the ritual
slaughter, butchery, and sacrifice of animals; Yahweh takes pleasure in it; the
fiery sacrifice of these beasts is a 'sweet savor to the Lord'; Leviticus
is one long cookbook and butcher's manual. But after the destruction of the
Second Temple, Jews stopped their sacrificing; and sometime before then, the
Ark of the Covenant, a box that Yahweh lives in, was stolen by parties unknown.
After these two cataclysms, Jews enter the modern era, one that is devoid of
magic, Yahweh having left the Earth. Steve Wells observes that the destruction of
the Second Temple 'caused a complete change in Judaism: from a temple-based
religion, with lots of animal sacrifices, to a new form called Rabbinical
Judaism, with no sacrifices'.
The lower-case 'h' holocaust relates to the upper-case 'H'
Holocaust that we all we know; the two are connected. Those on the Left who are
opposed to Zionism, Israel, the 'genocide in Gaza', are unable to avoid this
relation, because any defender of Israel and Zionism will bring it up sooner or
later. And it is here that any rationality, logic, argument, comes to a halt.
We traverse from secularism to religiosity. And against faith, there is no
argument. Simply put, the Jewish religious tradition is filled with nonsense,
but such is the hold of that tradition on the contemporary Jewish mind, not
even the most avowedly secular Jewish intellectual is willing to challenge any
part, no matter how nonsensical.
Strom illustrates for us one instance of Jewish religious
absurdity:
According to the Talmud, in the year 132 AD the Romans
slaughtered the Jews in the town of Bethar. Bethar was a small town about ten
miles southwest of Jerusalem, and it had an area of approximately five city
blocks — one source gives its area as about 600 meters by 200 meters. Not only
did the Romans kill every Jew in Bethar, but according to the named and
“authoritative” rabbis writing in the Talmud, the number of Jews killed there
was 800,000,000. Just in case such a number might seem a tad exaggerated, the
Talmud makes it all clear by informing us that the blood of the holocausted
Jews ran to the sea in a huge tidal wave that swept boulders in its path and
was so deep that it reached the nostrils of the Romans’ horses. The crimson
tide of Jewish blood, we are told, roared over 35 miles to the sea, where it
stained the waters red four miles from the shore.
Not only did 800,000,000 Jews live in Bethar, but they lived
in luxurious ease, and within those 600 by 200 meters were 64,000,000 Jewish
schoolchildren who attended schools operated by the 400 synagogues. We are
additionally informed that the evil Romans wrapped each of the schoolchildren
in his scroll and burned all of them, and that the bodies of the Jews were then
used to build a wall enclosing Hadrian’s vineyard, which was 18 miles square,
and the Jewish blood that was salvaged from the tidal wave was used as
fertilizer for seven years.
And that brings us to the Talmudic tall tale that wields the
most power. This is the Holocaust, the 'h' being capitalised. According to the
Talmud, the Gentiles will throw the Jews into giant ovens; six million Jews
will be immolated; and Yahweh, recognising the sacrifice, will bring the
murdered Jews back to life. After this, the Jews will reclaim the lost State of
Israel.
As we know, this reclamation is what happened in 1948, when
the prophecy was fulfilled. Or perhaps it was not; perhaps the prophecy was
nonsense, religious nonsense, all along.
IV.
When considering all this, the theme that emerges is
continuity. A bridge across time joins the Jews of Biblical times to the Jews
of today, and it is faith and blood that links the two generations. Unusually
for a religion, Judaism takes race and faith to be commensurate; the men of the
Jewish faith who choose to marry women who are of a non-Jewish faith are
betraying the Jewish race. In Numbers, the Fourth Book of Moses, Jewish
men 'commit whoredom with the daughters of Moab' [Numbers 25:1].
Outraged by this, Yahweh sends a plague that kills tens of thousands of Jews.
Fortunately, the plague comes to an end after a Bible hero, Phinehas, spies a
Jewish man, Zimri, copulating with a 'Midianitish' woman, Cozbi, in a tent; he
steals into the tent and with a spear skewers the pair; he 'thrust both of them
through, the man of Israel, and the woman through her belly' [Numbers
25:8]. Greatly pleased by the double murder, Yahweh puts an end to the plague -
but not before it has killed 24,000 Jews.
Racial purity matters to the Jews of the Bible because of
continuity. In one form or another, the doctrines of afterlife and the
immortality of the soul turn up in the teachings of all the world's religions,
but Judaism is unique insofar as the only immortality and afterlife that it
acknowledges lie in the continuance of the Jewish racial line. This is why,
after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the daughters of Lot ply him with
alcohol and rape him - 'that we may preserve seed of our father' [Genesis
19:32]. As Guyenot writes in From Yahweh to Zion: Three Thousand Years of
Exile (2018):
This fundamentally materialistic nature of ancient Hebraism
has often been pointed out by historians of religion: the rewards promised by
Yahweh to those who “fear” him are entirely material—to be “full of days,” to
have numerous offspring and a great fortune. Man’s only survival is through
generation, or blood descent, according to the Torah... In the story of Cain
and Abel... It is not Abel’s soul that suffers, but rather his blood “crying
out to God from the ground” (Genesis 4:10).
We must pause here. In the event that readers feel some
revulsion to the above, I must warn them: they are feeling the onset of
anti-Semitism. Does the atmosphere of the tawdry saga that is the Old Testament
seem cloying, closed-off, stuffy, suffocating, incestuous? Does the morality of
the Bible seem debased? Yes, and such a reaction is healthy and normal; but it
is anti-Semitic.
V.
Guyent's ruminations on blood, progeny, lineage, and
continuity prompt us to delve into the topic of the Jewish philosophy of life.
Because the events of the Old Testament are often sordid and the actions of
Yahweh are often merciless, cruel, and murderous, one would assume that Jews
have a fierce mien and a grim view of life, but that assumption does not square
with our knowledge of the Jews that we are acquainted with in everyday life and
the world of popular culture.
Between ourselves, this is where many anti-Semitic polemics
fall down. A recent article by Douglas Mercer posted at the National Alliance
site, an article that primarily concerns the Jewish comedian Jerry Seinfeld,
goes too far; it lacks nuance; simply put, it is so badly written and badly
thought out, so much so that I will not be linking it here, for it gives
anti-Semites a bad name. If you spoke like Mercer does to anyone old enough to
remember Seinfeld, they would regard you as a freak - and rightfully so.
A comic masterpiece, Seinfeld features good actors who possess superb
comedic timing, and it made viewers laugh. To those of us who experienced it,
it gave fleeting moments of pleasure; we have fond memories of it; and perhaps
the more nostalgic of us revisit it; but Mercer, a puritan, tells us: stop
enjoying it! But even the founder of the National Alliance, William Pierce,
concedes that some Jewish TV and movie productions amuse him. In a 2001
broadcast, Countering the Poison, Pierce says:
All in the Family’s Archie Bunker was used to make
White Americans with traditional ideas about race and sexuality seem
ridiculous, to seem ignorant and small-minded. M*A*S*H, starring the
leftist actor Alan Alda, was used to make Whites with traditional attitudes
seem like vicious bigots, despised by all decent people. Tens of millions of
White Americans watched these programs on black-and-white television screens
week after week. I was one of those White Americans. The programs were
genuinely funny, genuinely entertaining.
But alas, he sighs: 'And they were genuinely poisonous to
the easily manipulated lemmings who made up the vast majority of the viewers'.
He goes on to say that the creator of All in the Family, Norman Lear,
was Jewish; as was the producer of the M*A*S*H TV show, Larry Gelbart;
as was the director of the M*A*S*H movie, Robert Altman.
In all due deference to Pierce, when I first heard him in
that broadcast - nearly a quarter of a century ago - identify Altman, one of
the great New Hollywood directors, as a Jew, I experienced doubt: after all,
Altman was known to be a Catholic director. And indeed, the Wiki entry (which
is by no means authoritative) says that Altman was not Jewish. If Wiki is right
and Pierce is wrong, it is of no great consequence, but I think that it is a
symptom. Simply put, white nationalists always want to offload anything bad
about white culture, the white Western world, what Spengler called the Faustian
or Occidental Culture, onto the Jews; furthermore, they are unwilling to admit
that many of the Jews working in the fields of popular culture and
entertainment have given us works that are diverting and amusing. To the white
nationalist, such a concession represents a betrayal of the worst kind. For he
believes that one cannot relax - not even for a second. The ethic of the white
nationalist is: take everything, even an old and trivial piece of entertainment
such as Seinfeld, seriously - extremely seriously. The American white
nationalist is as dour as a member of the Plymouth Brethren, and one can spy
the spirit of Protestantism lurking behind him; for all his professed
anti-Christianity, he is at bottom an Evangelical.
If you want the opposite of seriousness, look to the Jewish
philosophy of life as expounded in Ecclesiastes. There we find plenty of
the materialism that Guyenot speaks of, and a pronounced opposition to the
heroic spirit that we see in the myths of the Greeks and the Babylonians.
To understand the anti-heroism of Ecclesiastes, take
note of how the Old Testament parodies certain of the Greek and Roman heroic
myths. The story of Samson parodies the story of Hercules, and it does this
because it is intending to degrade; it wants to make fun of the demigod myths
and drag them into the mud.
At the same time, the Jewish tradition wants to recast these Classical myths; it wants
to build a Jewish version. The result is that in the person of Samson, the Bible
creates a Jewish Hercules. Samson is the son of a mortal woman and an angel (or
perhaps Yahweh himself) in the same way that Hercules is the son of Alcmena,
who is a mortal woman, and Zeus. From the telling of the Samson story, we can deduce
that the Jewish tradition despised the Classical but at the same time
acknowledged its power.
When examining Ecclesiastes, let us look first to the
hedonistic and happy-go-lucky philosophy. This book of the Bible delivers welcome relief from all the gloom, violence, and seriousness, that goes before:
"There is nothing better for a man, than that he should
eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour."
2:24
"There is no good ... but for a man to rejoice, and to
do good in his life." 3:12
"Every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of
all his labour." 3:13
"There is nothing better, than that a man should
rejoice in his own works." 3:22
"A man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat,
and to drink, and to be merry." 8:15
"Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine
with a merry heart." 9:7
"Walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of
thine eyes." 11:9
"Of making many books there is no end; and much study
is a weariness of the flesh." 12:12
Then there is the anti-heroism:
"For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth
beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other;
yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a
beast." 3:19
"For to him that is joined to all the living there is
hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion." 9:4
"For the living know that they shall die: but the dead
know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them
is forgotten." 9:5
Finally, there is the nihilism and pessimism:
"All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all
turn to dust again." 3:20
"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy
might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the
grave, whither thou goest." 9:10
"The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the
strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding,
nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them
all." 9:11
Seinfeld won for itself the reputation as being the
'show about nothing'. A good many critics attributed Seinfeld's
nihilism, hedonism, and anti-heroism to the influence of the spirit of the
nineties, a decade which was, according to these critics, postmodern. And
indeed, Jerry Seinfeld's world view slots into the postmodernist's quite
nicely. But we can see how it is that the philosophy of Seinfeld and Ecclesiastes
converge.
V.
I think I have presented a fairly comprehensive summing up
of the principles of anti-Semitism, and over other accounts it possesses the
advantage of being rooted in the Jewish past; it does not waste time on recent
Jewish history - the history of the Rothschilds, the Balfour Declaration,
Theodor Herzl, Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank, Bibi Netanyahu, and the rest. In order
to understand the principles of real anti-Semitism, one needs to forgo the
contemporary and stick to tradition.
Something that struck me when exploring that tradition is
the importance of the insight that there are three characters on the stage: the
Jews, the non-Jews, and Yahweh. The last of these is the worst killer and
oppressor of the Jews, and throughout the books of the major and minor
prophets, Yahweh does nothing but threaten to rape, starve, enslave, and kill
the Jewish people. Now and then he throws the Jews a bone and promises them
dominion over the non-Jews; but most of his utterances, including the very last
words of the Old Testament, consist of threats towards the Jews. And if we are
to believe the tales of the earlier books, the body count of Jews killed by
Yahweh - and often for small infractions - reaches into the hundreds of
thousands. Ridiculously, the Catholic Church regards the books of the minor
prophets as holy, and it devotes sacred days to their study. That being by the
by, the important question is: why is it that Jews worship a god that is so
destructive and abusive? What do they get out of it?
An economist would say that the Jews of the ancient world
performed a cost-benefit analysis when throwing their lot in with Yahweh, which
is true enough, and we know that to these Jews, the benefits of a fealty to a
murderous, capricious, and grim god outweighed the costs. But to repeat, such a
statement is anti-Semitic.
And so now that we have some understanding of what I call
the real anti-Semitism is, we must ask the question, does the ideology of the
radical, pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel Left betray its impress? Has the radical
Left become anti-Semitic? Has it become - to use a word that is now over-used,
worn-out, and nearly devoid of meaning - 'Nazi'?
VI.
In order to answer that, we must scrutinise contemporary
leftist discourse and keep a look-out for the special words and phrases that
may indicate anti-Semitism. Such is the task of the Greenblatts, who perform it
every day: it is their purpose in life.
Certain words were acceptable yesterday and unacceptable
today. Some sixty to seventy years ago, Blacks in America were called
'coloreds', 'negroes', and 'blacks'; over time, those terms became verboten
and were replaced by 'Black' (with a capital b) and 'African American', the
last being a misnomer because most American negroes have never set foot in
Africa.
Some words become reserved for use by one group and not
another, and the word 'Black' may wind up in that category. When Trump referred
to 'Black jobs' in the 2024 debate with Biden, sectors of the Left professed
outrage: because Trump is a white man, it was implied, he had no right to use
the word. But African Americans can use it all they want. The same holds true
for the ultimate reserved word, which is of course the 'n' word. Negro musical
performers, especially rap artists, can use it all they want, but if a
non-negro uses it, well, he condemns himself to cancellation.
We see the same twisting and turning when it comes to the
words 'Jew' and 'Jews'. If you are not Jewish and you refer to Jews with the
definite article - 'The Jews' - you run the risk of sounding anti-Semitic. Likewise,
the indefinite article arouses suspicion and hostility from the Greenblatts,
especially when you apply it to an individual: 'The economist Milton Friedman
is a Jew'. The verb 'jew' betokens anti-Semitism as well: see its use in the
1995 Michael Jackson single They Don't Care About Us: it means to
deceive, exploit, swindle, rob.
But in the main, Jews themselves are allowed to freely use
words that are forbidden to non-Jews. A Jewish writer may exclaim, 'I am a
proud Jew'; he may declare that 'rising anti-Semitism on American college
campuses is making the Jews nervous'; he is permitted to throw 'Jew' and 'Jews'
about liberally. But you are not allowed, and you shall treat 'Jew' and 'Jews'
in the same manner that you would treat words that refer to African Americans:
these are the words that are to be handled most carefully, and better yet, not
at all. It is far safer to use the adjective 'Jewish' ('These are the Jewish
people', 'This is the Jewish-American community') instead of the nouns 'Jew'
and 'Jews'. But you must take care to deploy 'Jewish' positively, never
negatively; otherwise, you will stray into anti-Semitic territory. Years ago,
when discussing the world of contemporary finance with a friend of mine - who
was a prominent leader on the Far Right - I explained to him the practice of
short-selling, and he shook his head disapprovingly and opined that
short-selling sounded 'very Jewish'.
I predict that the words 'Zionism' and 'Zionist' will go the
way of 'colored' and 'negro'. In the Bible, Zion denotes three things: a hill
near Jerusalem, Jerusalem itself, and a mystical land. Zionism, the political
and national movement that we all know, draws upon these Biblical connotations.
A hundred years ago, the word attracted little in the way of controversy and
comment, but in recent years, it has become a curse-word, especially to those
on the Far Left, so much so that the ears of the Greenblatts prick up when they
hear it; to the Greenblatts, the man who uses the word 'Zionist' as a pejorative
term - and perhaps he contracts it sneeringly to 'Zio' - is announcing to the
world that he is an anti-Semite.
We know that in 2024, the Far Left likes using the words
'Zionist' and 'Zio', which to the Greenblatts implies that the Far Left is on
the way to real anti-Semitism. How, then, does Greenblatt fight it? The only
means of refuting anti-Semitism is denial. You deny the proposition that Jews
possess great wealth and power, that they can use their resources to bring
about evil and not good, that they can be - as we see in the example of
Greenblatt - paranoid, belligerent, aggressive, and a little unhinged. Denying
is what American conservatives and Jewish organisations do around the clock.
But a limit is reached, and after a point even the Far Left, which
traditionally pays scant attention to Jewish matters, starts to show signs of
scepticism; it cannot buy into the notion that the Jews are a poor, victimised,
oppressed people who are bullied at every turn by the Gentiles in a most savage
and cruel manner. They cannot accept Greenblatt's contention that the Jews
possess no political power. And so, cracks begin to appear.
It is true that the Far Left fails to perceive the link
between the Jews of yesterday and the Jews of today: if prominent thinkers of a
left-wing persuasion deigned to read the Bible, they would see that Netanyahu's
starvation of the Gazans mirrors Joseph's starvation of the Egyptians. But
then, few on the Left or the Right bother to read the Bible and study Jewish
history; and even the most devout Christians are unaware of what dwells in the
Bible's pages.
VII.
Leftism consists of a number of beliefs, propositions. We
can conceive of these as being part of a solar system, the center of which is
socialism, Marxism, communism, Bolshevism. The typical leftist mind is filled
to the brim with Marxism; it is crammed, and it has no room for any of the
'isms' - and that includes anti-Semitism - that compete with Marxism. All the
same, the left-winger must deal with allies who subscribe to non-Marxist
beliefs. Among the non-Marxists are those who dedicate their energies to the
advancement of Islam and their race. And that brings us to Ilhan Omar, an East
African immigrant and a Muslim who was elected to the US House of
Representatives in 2019. In that same year, Omar caused a controversy with this
tweet, which was deemed anti-Semitic:
Oddly, Omar is considered to be left-wing, that is, someone
to be grouped in the same category as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, both of whom are self-professed socialists. And it is here that
the notorious phenomenon of left-wing anti-Semitism comes into play. In
contemporary America, a sort of no-man's land exists between the sphere of the
classical socialist, the Marxist, the Bolshevik, and the sphere of the Muslim,
the African American, the immigrant; and in that fertile soil the real anti-Semitism,
an anti-Semitism of the sort that can be detected in Omar's tweet, sprouts.
Omar showed signs of becoming aware of the propositions that are easy to
understand, difficult to accept: that Jews possess power, that Jews possess
money, that Jews use both to get their own way, that they do this as Jews and
not as members of the 'Davos elite' and 'the capitalist class' and 'the fascist
Left' - these are the propositions that the anti-Semite finds unremarkable and
the American conservative abominable.
The political implications are profound, and we need to
digest them; one could write a lengthy analysis of what they entail for the
Right, the Center, and the Left. But a meditation on the spiritual aspects as
opposed to the political would profit us more.
In the section on Ecclesiastes, I touched upon the
Jewish attitude towards the Roman and Hellenic heroes, and how Judaism sought
to appropriate Classical myth and turn it into something Jewish. Judaism wanted
a Hercules or Gilgamesh, and it gave us Samson. But how was the Classical and
Babylonian hero to be converted into a Jewish? The answer is: by means of a
holocaust.
After the mysterious angel reveals that he has impregnated
the previously barren wife of Manoah, Manoah begs him to stay for dinner, for
he has killed a goat for the occasion. The angel agrees, but demands that
Manoah sacrifice the goat to Yahweh so as to mark the unborn Samson and
consecrate his person to Yahweh. Manoah complies: 'So Manoah took a kid with a
meat offering, and offered it upon a rock unto the LORD' [Judges 13:19].
Now, think of that image - the sacrifice of a goat on an altar - and what it
reminds you of; does it not evoke a Satanic horror movie? After this quasi-Satanic
sacrifice, the Bible continues with infernal imagery. The angel departs,
shooting off to the skies, leaving an exhaust column of flame in his wake; he
is like a rocket ship - or a cartoon devil. 'For it came to pass, when the
flame went up toward heaven from off the altar, that the angel of the LORD
ascended in the flame of the altar' [Judges 13:20]. The symbol of the
flame, fire, heat, is to Judaism what the symbol of the moon is to Islam.
Because of centuries of Christian indoctrination, we in the West associate the
Old Testament fire imagery with hell, devils, Satan; but we must keep in mind
that the Old Testament differs from the New in its conception of Satan, hell,
devils, demons. Old Testament stories such as the story of Samson challenge our
Christian assumptions. For centuries, we in the West have believed that hell is
'down there', under the earth, under our feet; but the fiery angel - who
refuses to divulge his name - after taking his leave flies off up there and not
down there. Perhaps Hell or what the ancient Norse called Muspelheim is up
there, in 'heaven', and not down there, deep in the bowels of the earth.
In the B-grade British horror movie Long Time Dead
(2002), a marauding Arabic fire demon (a 'djinn') kills a series of British
students and nightclubbers, setting them alight with his touch; Yahweh murders
Uzzah and then Moses' nephews Nadab and Abihu using the same method. The last
two men died because they performed a holocaust ritual in the incorrect way,
much like a neophyte practitioner of black magic who, when attempting to summon
demons, commits the mistake of stepping outside the pentagram. After the deaths
of Nadab and Abihu, Yahweh warns their father Aaron that Jews should take extra
care when entering Yahweh's tent. Curiously enough, apologists for Judaism will
tell us that the deaths by immolation of Uzzah, Nadab, and Abihu were good. If
we are to make sense of this notion of ‘the good’, we must perform what
Nietzsche calls a transvaluation of values and understand that the Jewish
tradition sees such spectral fire-beings as not evil and demonic but splendid
and divine.
But those of us who stand outside the Jewish tradition take
a different view, and we want to keep Yahweh as far away from us as possible,
for he belongs in a horror movie of the seventies Satanic genre - movies such
as The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976).
Both movies are Christian, and perhaps the makers of them
were looking at their subject the wrong way. Our perspective is limited by
centuries of Christian indoctrination and training; like us, the ancient
Egyptians found themselves constrained by their own religious presuppositions
when it came to the Jewish question. For the life of them, they could not
understand the Jewish religion, and they sought to comprehend Jewish religious
doctrine by seeing in it parallels with their own - they believed that Yahweh
was Set, the Egyptian god of darkness and evil, in disguise. And Set in
Egyptian theology is the closest deity to the devil in Christian theology.
Mulling over cross-religious comparisons, I see parallels between Yahweh and
the fire-giant Surtr of Norse myth; Surtr is a blacksmith, and a recent
academic treatise argues convincingly that Yahweh is the Canaanite god of
smelting.
Were the Egyptians right about Judaism? Certainly, we can
see that today's Christians have gotten Judaism wrong, and it is the opposing
elements, the contradictions, within it that make Christian Zionism a jumble.
The authors of the Talmud loathed Christianity, and that should make Christians
treat Israel and Zionism with caution; but Christian Zionists treat the State
of Israel as a means to an end. Steve Wells speaks of the American Evangelist
attempts at building the Third Temple:
The Jews returned to Israel in 1948 and took control of the
territory that contains the site of the temple in 1967. So a third temple could
be rebuilt and animal sacrifices could resume. What's the hold up?
The hold up is the red cow.[2] A red cow that meets the
requirements of Numbers 19 must be found and sacrificed to make the holy water
that can purify priests from all the dead bodies that they have come into
contact with during their lives.
Once a red cow is found, killed, and burned, its ashes can
be used to purify priests, the temple can be rebuilt, and God will smell the
sweet savor of burning animal flesh once again.
And according to Maimonides, when the third temple is
rebuilt the Messiah will come.
Of course, Christians believe the Messiah came and went a
long time ago. But many also believe that when a red heifer is found and the
temple is rebuilt, he'll come again. And then all hell will break loose and the
end of the world will come.
Recently five red heifers have been sent from Texas to
Jerusalem, hoping that one of them will meet the rabbi's standards.
To the person who has seen one too many seventies horror
movies, these Evangelicals are playing with fire. What would happen if the Dome
of the Rock was levelled and the Third Temple was built in its place?
Conceivably, Yahweh could come back; although perhaps we need to recover
Yahweh's box, the Ark of the Covenant, for that to happen, the mere suggestion alone
should frighten. The rebuilding of the Temple could make up the premise of a
seventies-style horror movie: by their actions, Orthodox Jewish zealots and
foolish Evangelicals unleash Yahweh once again upon the world; in the movie’s
trailer, a voiceover announces in a sepulchral tone: 'An ancient evil returns'.
But in order to bring back Yahweh, perhaps we do not need to
restore the Temple, or find the Ark of Covenant, or build a portal that will
allow him into cross from his dimension into ours, because to judge by the
chaos, misery, and death in Gaza and Lebanon, Yahweh is already here.
