via Roger L. Simon
Michael Ledeen eviscerates the idiots at Harvard's Kennedy School and the University of Chicago who wrote what Roger referred to as The Protocols of the Elders of Harvard.
As an unashamed evangelical Protestant I must applaud these two nice Jewish fellows for standing up, not for their religion, but for the idea that religion is not a criteria suitable for inclusion as a central focus when disagreeing about policy matters. The profs at Harvard and the University of Chicago who wrote this garbage are antisemites of a type that Goebbels would admire. Their disgusting tripe is publicized due to the tenured positions that they hold, certainly not to any originality of thought. This unctuous crap could have been published in Der Sturmer sixty years ago.
The Illiberal Arts departments of our "finest" universities deserve to be held up to ridicule until they rid themselves of these parasitical anti-religion troglodytes. Until then alumni should sit firmly upon their wallets and Americans in general should take up Mommas, Don't Let Your Sons Grow Up to Be Ivies as a national refrain.
8 comments:
I came across the same phenomenon just the other day at work. Two ostensibly pro-American pro-military co-workers were vehemently denouncing our alliance with Israel on the grounds that that's what's causing all our problems with the Muslims. When I asked what Israel had to do with Buddhist monks being killed in Thailand by Muslim fanatics they changed the subject.This whole thing gives me the willies.
This is what I was referring to the other day when I said there are a lot of subterranean flows here. To me, this new anti-semitism is part and parcel of the get-rid-of-the-Mexican movement currently afoot. Everybody's upset, scared, and unable to act so they're lashing out at whatever seems convenient and convincing themselves that that's the real problem. It isn't.
MHA,
I considered linking the phenomena but I don't really understand the hook.
Is it just 'those damned furriners' or something else? Nativism isn't unkown here but there seems to be something deeper going on and I don't quite get it.
Rick,
I don't quite get it either. That's why it really gives me the willies.
If you look at our history lashing out is not new. In the south after the Civil War it was the blacks that were the cause of all the trouble.
During WW2 we locked up all the Japanese in camps. Imagine that. Until this recent hissy fit over immigration I thought the days of us targetting a class or race of people and rounding them up was over.
Of course the folks in the south were protecting southern womanhood. In WW2 it was the nation they were protecting, now it is both. And yes it is creepy.
It is interesting to read about Truman's dilemna concerning Palestine and the Jewish state during the years following WW2. In those days Israel had not yet been named and Palestine was exactly how everyone referred to the region. The pressure from the Zionists on one side was extreme and on the other side were the same arguments we hear today...Arabs and oil.
The British just handed it over to the UN and wanted some kind of trusteeship. And of course there was the violence, Jews blew up a hotel in Jerusalem and Arabs killed Jews and vowed to drive them into the sea. 60 years later and the fight goes on. People are tired of the whole damn thing.
As for the Ivies, I think they have too much influence. I remember during the Harriet Miers fiasco reading some idiot oped by Ann Coulter, in defence of Ivies. Yes, they are better than the rest of us says Ann. That gave me the willies too. It was the last time I read anything she wrote.
People just want this stuff to stop. They feel they are being stalked.
To me, this new anti-semitism is part and parcel of the get-rid-of-the-Mexican movement currently afoot.
-MHA, be careful about lumping such things together. That's the trick of the left: differences of wealth or power among nations and peoples? well, ultimately they all come down to the same old racism; or it all comes down to victimization by the patriarchy; Islamophobia is the same thing as Judeophobia, etc. etc. We, the left, believe in diversity and difference but we all talk about our various forms of oppression in exactly the same way. Because the bottom line in the international game we are playing is that all participants in the anti-American, anti-Israel left alliance recognize and share in the same kind of victim status.
I would say a certain amount of honest "othering" is to be expected as part of the human condition. It is true that every people must define itself in relation to other peoples. (Even the left that is supposedly against othering relies on the greatest form of of all: all of us "others" are being oppressed by the western colonialist patriarchs.) It can be no other way if a people are to engage in political self-rule, if we are to admit that a world of self-ruling nations is superior to some all-inclusive global empire ruled by victim-baiting elites; because of this imperative, please don't confuse the ethics of politics and nationhood with the ethics appropriate to participating in the global marketplace.
It is fine if you want to define America as a nation of immigrants, but you still must debate openly with those who doubt you can integrate all kinds or all numbers of immigrants. In any case, just because all nations must define themselves against their others, this does not make all forms of othering the same phenomenon, or morally comparable. For example, I don't consider those Americans who wail against France the moral equivalent of today's anti-Zionists. The difference lies in historical realities, not in some abstract conceptual space where one variable is as good as another in some equation of difference.
Antisemitism is a different phenomenon than, say, anti-black racism. Typically, the antisemite hates the Jew for appearing to be somehow superior and the white supremacist hates the black for the opposite reason. And this difference is, again, not simply a metaphysical abstraction, where random prejudice fills in blanks, it is rooted in history and the actual evolution of human culture. The Jewish nation is the first nation, the people with the gall to first define monotheism, and declare themselves in covenant with the one god; this has proved an unusually successful survival strategy and Israel receives antagonism to this day for just this reason, from people who hate a world in which some nations impose themselves on those around them - the successful Jews in the otherwise failed Middle East, the Amerians shaping and leading the global marketplace, the Japanese taking the lead in robotics - and thus implicitly denying that all tribes can or should live in some symmetrical containment of their differences.
Whatever the morality and national ethics you would like America to live up to vis a vis Mexicans, I don't imagine you would consider it Israel's ethical obligation to integrate millions of illegal Arab immigrants. You would not consider that possible or ideal for Israel, given the widespread antisemitism in the Arab world and the Islamic imperative to destroy Israel, but also given the Israeli imperative to define itself as a nation of Jews. Now if some American claims that the current immigration means, say, America essentially losing Southern California to Mexico over the long run, you should debate the claim honestly and openly without lumping him in the same boat as these two academic idiots who can't get over their prejudice of Jews for being too smart and crafty. The claim may be equally crazy, i'm not so sure, but it is not the same kind of claim or the same kind of craziness.
Truepeers,
I agree with most of what you say, but I'm saying something entirely different.
Maybe I'm completely out to lunch on this, but I'm getting a really eery feeling here suddenly. I don't know what's behind it exactly, but I sense that the same thing is behind both the new anti-Semitism on the Left and the new anti-Mexicanism on the right.
This is--I sense--a new phenomenon, at least in my lifetime, different from the same-old hatred and envy of success which lies behind the Leftism and anti-Americanism I've known my whole life.
Truepeers,
What I'm trying to say is that a completely new tone seems to have entered the arguments just within the last week. A completely new tone which doesn't sound familiar in the least. Something new is here; what it is ain't exactly clear.
MHA, sorry for steaming off. I look forward to hearing you identify the moment when time reveals it better. Here's a theory: the anti-Mexicanism is of course a question of fear, but perhaps most specifically a fear that this crisis is a sign that the old white working class is somehow disappearing. It is one thing to be ruled by foreigners, but when the plebeians are no longer of your kind, it's a sure sign your people are on the road to decadence and oblivion: the future always comes from the margins, from the weighty masses that have yet to speak.
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