29 thoughts on “Fomenting Anti-Semitism”

  1. Practically all of it. In my experience, most Jews are urban liberals. Such people would vote for Heinrich Himmler for president before they’d support the arch-enemy, the “illiterate gun-toting redneck Christian”.

    NB: I have worked in the entertainment industry since 1992, so my sample of Jews may be biased.

  2. From what I’m seeing on the Daily Caller site, the OWS folks – undoubtedly with the help of Democrat advisers, have started to catch on to their “optics” issues and will be tailoring their message accordingly. Don’t expect to see any more “Blame the Joooos” signs or rape occurrences, although I’m sure the PC Palestinian support will continue.

  3. I think the claims about Democratic demagoguery are bonkers, but since they aren’t even falsifiable, I don’t know how to convince you they are bonkers.

    Regarding B. Lewis’ comment repeating a common stereotype, here is some data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews#Distribution_of_Jewish-Americans
    The majority of Jewish Americans live in the suburbs. If the above link doesn’t convince you, google “Most American jews live in the suburbs”.

    (By the way, a majority of African-Americans in the South also live in the suburbs, contrary to a similar stereotype — http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2011/03/17/census-more-blacks-in-south-moving-to-suburbs/)

    1. Bob, “urban liberal” would include the suburbs. The suburbs still have a mighty ‘city-oriented’ outlook. IOW: The opposite of “urban” is not “suburban” but “rural”.

      1. People move out of the city to the suburbs for various reasons. Do you want to discount all of those reasons?

      2. Another thought: Roughly 20% of all Americans live in rural areas. Does any rural voting bloc matter in Presidential politics? Are all presidential races decided in the cities and suburbs?

    2. I’m taking a few minutes off from the unpleasant but necessary task of cornholing your mom to ask: did you actually read what I wrote? I refer to the phrases “In my experience” and “my sample of Jews may be biased”. If not, I’ll explain: those phrases indicate that my opinion is based upon a) personal experiences, not statistical data, and b) observation of a limited sample range. In other words, I freely admitted from the very beginning the possibility that my opinion might be in error.

      Your attack therefore fails. Better luck next time, comrade.

      1. You repeated a stereotype. Not a bad stereotype, but it is one. I posted some data. You interpreted that as an attack, and then you made a joke about raping my mother. What is wrong with you?

        1. U MAD BRO?

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  4. “illiterate gun-toting redneck Christian”.

    Christian: Jewish Americans have always voted for Christian presidential candidates.

    Gun-toting: They have often voted for gun-toting candidates, starting with George Washington. Eisenhower, a decorated gun-toter, only received 40% of the Jewish American vote in 1956. Yes, they favored Stevenson, but Stevenson was involved in a fatal incident involving gun safety. They strongly favored Kennedy over Nixon, but Kennedy did considerably more gun toting than Nixon in WWII (not that this was Nixon’s fault, but nevertheless, that’s how it turned out.)

    Illiterate: Why anyone would want someone illiterate to be president is beyond me, but yes, Jews particularly value literacy.

    Redneck: Define Redneck. But yeah, you might have something there. For example, in 1980 although Carter won more of the Jewish vote than the other candidates, I suppose you could argue that more Jews voted for Reagan or Anderson over that redneck Jimmy Carter. (The numbers: Reagan 39% of the Jewish vote, Carter 45% of the Jewish vote, Anderson, 14% of the Jewish vote).

  5. In part I sometimes wonder if Jews vote Democratic as a mutual defense mechanism, because if they were Republicans the Democrats would demonize them 24/7 as ultra-capitalist elite international bankers who should all be hung, burned, or drowned. Karl Marx argued that mankind must emancipate itself from Judaism, and Bakunin was even more anti-Semitic than Marx. And of course the German Socialist Workers Party was adamantly opposed to capitalist Jews. If not for the Holocaust, much of the American left would still treat Jews as the ultimate evil.

      1. Yes, and I’m also familiar with his work “On the Jewish Question.” Where do you think Hitler, who said you have to understand Marxism to understand National Socialism, picked up some of his worst ideas, such as the need to purge the world of Jews and Slavs (also written off by Marx)?

        Marx considered the Jewish fondness for money and capital to be one of mankind’s worst traits, and one that would have to be eliminated.

        Right now, Democrats are stoking the fires and getting the peasants outraged about evil, greedy, blood-sucking capitalist bankers. How could the DNC not know that the peasants would assume the bankers were Jewish when they’ve had cries of “evil capitalist Jewish bankers” ringing in their ears for over a century? It’s a standard part of their class-warfare playbook.

          1. Wow. Only an hard-core socialist intellectual could accomplish the mental gymnastics necessary to dismiss Marx’s writings on the Jews. Yes, Marx was wildly anti-semitic and laid the logical foundation for the policies of the Nazis and Stalinists by clearly linking “Jewishness” to capitalism, greed, and evil. He’s often held up as the stereotype of a “self-loathing Jew.” But at least he didn’t hate Jews as much as Bakunin.

            As for the Democrats, let’s see.

            Democrats lynched Leo Frank in Atlanta in 1915 (Perhaps he was the only Republican in the city?)

            FDR’s blatant disregard for the Jews is well known, having been personally warned since 1933 about Germany’s treatment of the Jews and refusing to even make a statement criticizing Hitler’s Jewish policies.

            Joe Kennedy Sr. of course favored German brutality against the Jews, as did Joe Kennedy Jr.

            There are all the rants from Father Coughlin, a friend of Joe Kennedy and a huge FDR supporter early on (He came up with “Roosevelt or Ruin!”), who broke with Roosevelt because he thought FDR was too capitalist and in bed with Jewish bankers. Coughlin’s paper was “Social Justice” and he wanted the nationalization of industry, a minimum wage, taking money from the wealthy for redistribution, crushing property rights, strict limits on profit, and pretty much every other idea from the progressive movement. He had millions and millions of listeners, and I don’t think Republicans tune in to hear policies to the left of Dennis Kucinich but slightly to the right of Fidel Castro.

            I shouldn’t leave out Henry Ford, who ran for the Senate as a Democrat in 1918, and who later created “the Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and whose full size portrait sat on Hitler’s desk.

            Moving on, Truman wrote “”The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as Displaced Persons as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog.”

            More recently, Rep Henry Waxman (D-CA) said that some Jews are voting Republican because “they want to protect their wealth.” Dang those greedy Jews!

            And as the Boston Review conducted a survey of who was to blame for the financial crisis, and 32% of Democrats said “the Jews.” link

            Given all that, it’s really irresponsible for the Democrats to be whipping up an outcry against evil, greedy, international capitalists of unknown (but suspected!) ethnic identity.

          2. George Turner: “Henry Ford, who ran for the Senate as a Democrat in 1918, and who later created ‘the Protocols of the Elders of Zion’…”

            Actually, the origins of Protocols has never been confirmed, but they were decidedly European. Wikipedia states that Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, head of the Paris office of the Russian Secret Police, is suspected of being one of the authors.

            What Ford did was to fund the publication of 500,000 copies between 1920 and 1922. That’s a lot of books. Can’t find an apples-to-apples comparison on short notice, but consider that Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street (1920) sold 180,000 copies in its first eight months – that was the mark of a widely popular novel back then. Ford printed almost 3 times as many copies of Protocols over 2 years. Henry Ford was one incredibly motivated fellow.

            Interestingly, in 1921 Little Green Footballs New York Times journalist Philip Graves exposed plagiarism in Protocols, after British-Jewish writer Lucien Wolf traced its philosophical origins. That didn’t cool off Ford’s printing presses. (Did Ford ever own a sled named Rosebud?)

            If there’s such things as ghosts, I’ll be getting a nasty email from William Randolph Hearst.

  6. “If not for the Holocaust, much of the American left would still treat Jews as the ultimate evil.”

    I think this is utterly untrue, but again, I have no idea how to argue with you. What could possibly convince you that you are wrong?

    1. Who was predominantly responsible for anti-semitism in America prior to WWII? You really think it was the Left?

      1. Uh, that would be yes. After all, the left prior to WW-II, and after, was devoted to keeping blacks down, having been forced to give up their policy of perpetual race-based human slavery.

        FDR’s State Department was devoted to keeping Jews out of the country, even turning back a shipload of them, and for a long time counted on the ardent support of Father Coughlin, who eventually renounced FDR for being too friendly to bankers (Coughlin was way to the left of FDR).

      2. Who was predominantly responsible for anti-semitism in America prior to WWII?

        Joe Kennedy is unavailable for comment.

      3. Having grown up in Texas since 7th grade, the only reason anti-Semitism wasn’t a completely alien concept was All in the Family. But Archie Bunker’s prejudice was a drop in the bucket compared to the fear and loathing out there. (And it didn’t prevent him from getting along with Jews. Norman Lear understood the difference between prejudice and hate.)

        I learned about anti-Semitism by following politics, and about some of its more modern Western origins from Thomas Sowell’s Cultures trilogy. It’s a story common to many immigrant groups, not just Jews: immigrant population moves into a neighborhood, is disproportionately adept at some form of trade, the locals interpret the statistical anomaly as evidence of some sort of dishonesty. Crown Heights is a monument to this sort of bigotry – it should get a historical marker.

        (I think the obvious explanation for immigrant success stories is that entrepreneurism and immigration are both activities for the risk-non-averse. Especially when immigration places one in a country where a different language is spoken.)

        Leftist politics is similarly suspicious of disproportionate shares of success, so I can understand why the Left is more likely than the Right to embrace anti-Semitism.

  7. I’ve read this blog for a long time, so I know the arguments for why Hitler was a leftist, rather than the right-winger the rest of the world believes him to be.

    But above, we see arguments that slave-owning plantation owners were left-wingers and that Henry Ford was a left-winger. Why? Because they were Democrats. I’m flabbergasted. What was left-wing about Henry Ford?

    How about the Klan? Want to explain why they were leftists too?

    As for Father Coughlin, I find his overall ideology, and his views on ecomomics in particular, to be almost completely incoherent, although the anti-semitism was coherent enough…

    There is no doubt that there was plenty of anti-semitism to be found on all parts of the political spectrum, but I think it is a far reach to claim that the ideology plantation owners and Henry Ford is shared by Barack Obama and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. Not because the latter two are an African-American and a Jewish-American but because of what they believe in.

    But more to the point: what did the DNC say that was code for anti-semitism? Any actual quotes?

    1. Answering your question ,must begin with definitions for “left” and “right.” In the realm of economics, it’s a slam-dunk – all leftist economic doctrines involve some form of economic intervention for purposes other than addressing fraud and safety concerns. Through “redistribution” in all its forms (including welfare and non-welfare subsidies, among other schemes), the State arbitrarily decides economic winners and losers. Nationalized businesses – Hitler’s railroads, many nations’ education systems, PEMEX – either disadvantage or abolish altogether private-sector competition.

      Regarding texts (not just the Constitution), the right seeks to interpret through genuine linguistic study, while the left inserts Derrida-esque hallucinations into the text, and omits the latter half of the Second Amendment entirely.

      Regarding foreign policy, the left tends to be swayed by class warfare stereotypes. It tends to blame US international disputes on American aggression. They tend to favor Communist states, Muslim-majority states, and the Third World over the West – so many of them opposed intervention in Nicaragua and Grenada, and supported intervention in Serbia.

      On education, the right believes parents should hold absolute educational authority, while the left believes schools serve in part to liberate children from their parents’ bourgeois attitudes.

      On matters of race, that’s really neither left nor right. The Klan, MEChA, and the Black Panthers (original and New) are all racist organizations, but not even a Kos diarist woudl accuse the aforementioned nonwhite organizations of being right-wing.

      The left tends toward a schizophrenic attitude toward s3xuality – s3xual freedom is lionized, but s3xuality itself is treated frivolously. The right has the higher opinion of s3x, and recognizes the sociological consequences of s3xual license. Left and right often overestimates the role the State should play in promoting or protecting s3xual license and s3xuality, respectively.

      What issues of left-right divide did I miss?

  8. There was an interesting former Communist-turned-conservative writer named Nathaniel Weyl who wrote a series of books for Arlington House and their Conservative Book Club in the Sixties. I had been indoctrinated by the Hive and its academic branch that anti-Semitism was the monopoly of the so-called “Right” (which, in the Hive’s view, included everyone from Hitler and Mussolini to anarcho-libertarian pacifist Robert LeFevre); but Weyl really opened my eyes to the long history of collectivist Jew-hating–going back at least as far as a self-hating Jew named Karl Marx. You might have trouble finding Weyl’s books these days, but they’d be worth looking up. (Not you, Bob-1. You’re too dense. But you might want to look up George Fitzhugh on Wikipedia, probably your favorite source of information in lieu of actyual books. Fitzhugh was the premier apologist of 19th Century Southern chattel slavery, and his arguments are in many ways echoes of Karl Marx.)

    1. Except that Marx’s “On The Jewish Question” was predominently argument for Jewish emancipation, albeit it was, naturally, a rather Marxist argument.

  9. Starting with the first question, about Henry Ford, you have to go back to the foundations of socialism and the British industrialist Robert Owen, which definitely answers the question “Can a rich, successful industrial magnate be a hard-core socialist revolutionary?” You should at least read his wiki. Marx and Engels based much of their work on Owen’s experiments in his factories and in socialist communities he set up in the US. The US experiments were an abject failure (on American diarist and true believer wrote “All the men do is stand around and accuse each other of not working”, but Owen refused to report that to his socialist peers, including Engels, so he lied and told them of great success. Engles had been a little skeptical of Marx’s new theories, but Owen’s likes convinced him that the ideas were working in practice, and to forge ahead.

    Through the early years, Henry Ford was much in the model of Robert Owen, believing that he could improve production by bettering the lives of his workers, and could better the lives of his workers not only through higher pay, but by controlling their personal lives as well, including personal interventions, interviews, a vast squad of company social workers to evaluate their character, habits, and beliefs, and to make corrections when necessary.

    Like Owen, he thought of his workers like a farmer thinks about a herd, trying to make happy cows that would yield more milk. Like Owen, he thought his system would spread and transform all of society, making it peaceful, just, prosperous, and utopian through the application of social science and scientific production methods. It’s not so much his anti-Jewish work that made him a hero to the Nazis. It was his writings on his system of production, uniting socialist ideals with real-world output. As an aside, he sold his Ford tractors at a loss to transform the lives of small farmers, which echoes the agrarian promises of the Nazis, the fascists, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and pretty much every other communist dictator in history,.

    From one perspective Ford looks like the paragon of American capitalism, yet from the other his factories were an experiment in Stalinist industrialization and government, with an all-wise despot bringing prosperity to his workers and transforming a nation into an economic powerhouse. And like the Nazi or Stalinist systems, if a worker failed to produce or rocked the boat, they had their attitude adjusted by repeated application of a billy club.

    There’s a fundamentally important Supreme Court ruling from where the Dodge Brothers, heavy investors in Ford, sued him for paying the workers too much. The Court ruled in favor of the Dodge Brothers, saying that a corporation has a fiduciary responsibility to its investors and that it can’t blow the money trying to create a social utopia. So Ford was forced to pay them millions so they could recover their investment, and they founded Dodge Motors. That ruling stopped other corporations from going down the path of Robert Owen and Henry Ford.

    He stands in stark contrast to the heads of other US automotive companies, who were interested in making a profit building cars, not creating a social revolution.

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