A Review of “Why the Germans? Why the Jews?” by Götz Aly

The culture of the Holocaust is destroying Germany. Endlessly reinforced over decades by the intellectual and media elite, the notion that Germans and their descendants are responsible for “the single most evil event in human history” has had such a demoralizing effect that millions fully support Angela Merkel’s current attempt to destroy the ethnic basis of their nation. The culture of the Holocaust has been used to devastating effect right throughout the West to stifle opposition to the Jewish diaspora strategies of mass non-White immigration and multiculturalism. “The Holocaust” is the absolute lynchpin of the White displacement agenda, with any hint of European racial or ethnic identification or solidarity being instantly linked with Auschwitz and its alleged horrors in the minds of millions (probably billions) of people.

The entire social and political order of the contemporary West — based as it is on spurious notions of racial equality and the alleged virtues of racial diversity and multiculturalism — has been erected on the moral foundations of the Holocaust. White people cannot be recognized as a group with interests because “never again.” Western nations have a moral obligation to accept unlimited non-White immigration from the Third World because “never again.” Europe must open its borders to hostile Islamic invaders because “never again.” Whites should meekly accept their deliberate displacement (and ultimate extinction) because “never again.”

Jewish historian Peter Novick has described how today’s culture of “the Holocaust” emerged as part of the collective Jewish response to the Eichmann trial in 1961–62, the Six-Day War in the Middle East in 1967, and, in particular, the Yom Kippur War in 1973. While the foundation was laid at Nuremberg in 1946, it was with these later events, and the anxieties they engendered among Jews throughout the world, that “there emerged in American culture a distinct thing called ‘the Holocaust’ — an event in its own right,” and with it a term that entered the English language as a description of all manner of horrors. From that time on, he notes, “the Holocaust” has become “ever more central in American public discourse — particularly, of course, among Jews, but also in the culture at large” and has since “attained transcendent status as the bearer of eternal truths or lessons that could be derived from contemplating it.”[i]

Novick acknowledges the primary reason for this state of affairs: that Jews, with their domination of academia and the media and entertainment industries, virtually dictate this “American” (and by extension “Western” culture) which has become so Holocaust-obsessed. He argues that the importance of the Holocaust is not a spontaneous phenomenon but stems from highly focused, well-funded efforts of Jewish organizations and individual Jews with access to the major media:

We are not just “the people of the book,” but the people of the Hollywood film and the television miniseries, of the magazine article and the newspaper column, of the comic book and the academic symposium. When a high level of concern with the Holocaust became widespread in American Jewry, it was, given the important role that Jews play in American media and opinion-making elites, not only natural, but virtually inevitable that it would spread throughout the culture at large. (Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Mariner Books, 1999), 12)

The Jewish director Jill Soloway observed that Jews in Hollywood are “recreating culture to defend ourselves post-Holocaust.” This ethnic “defense” has entailed the intensive promotion of racial diversity and mixing, the denigration of White people and their traditional culture, the hyper-sexualization of what now passes for Western culture, the glamorizing of sexual non-conformity and the breakdown of traditional gender roles — all alongside constant reminders of “the Holocaust” with its concomitant themes of noble Jewish victimhood and unsurpassed German (White, European) evil.

Since 1945, some 148 feature films have been made about “the Holocaust” — the majority after 1970. The Jewish intellectual Chaim Bermant observed that “the Jews that came to dominate Hollywood” between them “did more to determine American attitudes and tastes than the churches or even the schools.”[ii] The psychological effects of Hollywood’s Holocaust-obsession were clear by the 1990s when one survey found that 97 percent of Americans knew what “the Holocaust” was — substantially more than knew what “Pearl Harbor” related to, or that the United States has dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, and far more than the 49 percent that knew that the Soviet Union had fought on the American side in World War Two.[iii]

Throughout the West proliferating “Holocaust” memorials and museums are lavishly funded by taxpayers, and study of “the Holocaust” in schools is mandated by law in many jurisdictions. As well as serving to morally disarm Whites concerned about their own immigrant-led displacement, the culture of “the Holocaust” is a key part of Jewish efforts to prevent intermarriage in the diaspora. Eric Goldstein, for instance, notes how “Jews discuss, read about, and memorialize the Holocaust with zeal as a means of keeping their sense of difference from non-Jews alive.”[iv]

“The Holocaust” has become, in the words of Nicholas Kollerstrom, “an ersatz substitute for genuine metaphysical knowledge,” with Auschwitz now serving as the spiritual center of a new religion and a place of awed pilgrimage for millions of penitent Europeans. The narrative has also unleashed an endless flow of money from Germany to Israel and to compensate more “Holocaust” survivors than there were ever Jews in countries under German control.[v]

Without the “Holocaust” narrative, and the veneer of moral rectitude it confers upon Jewish activism, it is doubtful the 1965 immigration laws in the United States would have passed. Likewise, the toppling of the White Australia policy just eight years later — a direct result of Jewish ethno-politics — would probably not have occurred without the moral leverage “the Holocaust” afforded Jewish activists and their non-Jewish collaborators. The leftwing Australian historian Professor Henry Reynolds has acknowledged the Jewish ethno-political (and Holocaust-centered) origins of the regnant belief in biological racial equality when he noted that: “My students often ask me how it was that people in the past held such objectionable views [about race]. They have no understanding of just how pervasive racial thought was a generation or two ago, how the Second World War and the Holocaust marked an intellectual watershed after which nothing would be the same again.”[vi]

Boasian anthropology and the “the Holocaust”  

While the Jewish critique of racialist thought, spearheaded by Franz Boas, preceded World War II  by several decades, it gained urgency following Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933. In his book Racism, posthumously published in 1938, the Jewish “sexologist” Magnus Hirschfeld set out to provide a refutation of the racial doctrines of the National Socialists. “If it were practicable,” he wrote, “we should certainly do well to eradicate the term ‘race’ as far as subdivisions of the human species are concerned.”[vii] During the war the writings of Boas, his students Ruth Benedict, Melville Herskovits and others critical of the link between race, culture and ability began to reach a mass audience. Benedict’s Races and Racism, published in 1942, dismissed racial thought as “a travesty of scientific knowledge.”[viii] In the same year, the Jewish intellectual Ashley Montagu (born Israel Ehrenberg) published Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race which became a best seller.

These Jewish ethnic activists and their allies, with their pseudo-scientific theories, were only able to reach a mass audience through the eager assistance and promotion of Jewish influence in the press and publishing houses — not because of the intrinsic merits of their arguments. As a result of these efforts, the British historian David Cannadine has noted that: “By the end of the Second World War, the notion that race was the most significant form of collective human identity, consciousness, and ranking had been stripped of any serious claim to intellectual respectability.”[ix]

In 1949 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) convened a panel of “scientists,” chaired by Montagu, to “produce a definitive verdict on race.” One leftist historian has pointed out how the panel was comprised of “a team of ten scientists all of whom were recruited from the marginal group of anthropologists, sociologists and ethnographers who perceived the race concept primarily as a social construct.” He also notes that: “Most of these had at some point either been affiliated with the scientifically marginalized groups of cultural anthropologists that were mostly students of Franz Boas at Colombia University in New York.”[x]

After the panel’s first meeting at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, Montagu wrote a proposal for a final statement on race during one night at a nearby hotel, and over the following days the participants discussed “the race concept” in light of Montagu’s draft.[xi] Montagu claimed that “only if our deliberations had taken place at Auschwitz or Dachau could there have been a more fitting environment to impress upon the committee members the immense significance of their work.”[xii] At that time UNESCO House was the former headquarters of the German military during its occupation of France during World War II. Underpinning the words of the UNESCO declaration “was widespread revulsion at the Jewish Holocaust.”[xiii] Leftist academic Anthony Hazard notes that “a clear rejection of anti-Semitism seemed to underline the entire effort.”[xiv]

The Montagu-led UNESCO panel’s statement (replete with falsehoods and specious arguments) was issued in 1950. “Scientists,” it claimed, “have reached general agreement in recognizing that mankind is one: that all men belong to the same species, Homo sapiens.” Genes responsible for the “hereditary differences between men” were “always few when compared to the whole genetic constitution of man and the vast number of genes common to all human beings regardless of the populations to which they belong.” It therefore followed that “the likenesses among men are far greater than their differences.” The error here is assuming that small differences in the input to a system must yield small differences in the system’s output. On the contrary, it is often the case that small differences in the input result in large differences in the final outcome. For instance, it has often been pointed out that human beings and chimpanzees differ in less than two percent of their DNA; nevertheless, the difference in intelligence between the species is enormous. Many genetic diseases are caused by a single gene, and some of these are deadly.

The UNESCO panel’s statement proposed that it would be best “to drop the term ‘race’ altogether,” since “for all practical purposes, ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth.” Montagu and his colleagues ended their “definitive statement on race” with a ringing endorsement of the idea of a common humanity: “Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood; for man is born with drives towards co-operation. … In this sense, every man is his brother’s keeper.” Here we find the invariable Jewish tendency to couch the pursuit of specific Jewish interests in a pretended universal benevolence.

UNESCO’s Montagu-drafted “definitive verdict on race,” was published with a press release with the headline: “No biological justification for race discrimination, say world scientists: Most authoritative statement on the subject.”[xv] The New York Times reported on the statement with a story whose headline proclaimed: “No Scientific Basis for Race Bias Found by World Panel of Experts.”[xvi] The UNESCO Statement on Race amounted to the foisting of a Jewish ethno-political agenda onto the global polity — with devastating consequences for the interests of Europeans.

With this new agenda now in place at the highest level, and with the demonization and marginalization of dissenters, it was almost inevitable in the decades following the defeat of Germany that the remaining policies constructed on the basis of racialist thought and identity would be dismantled. The 1950 statement on race (which contributed to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education in Topeka) was described by one sympathetic commentator as “the triumph of Boasian anthropology on a world-historical scale.”[xvii]

Cannadine notes that, during the decades that followed, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand “abandoned their policies of racial discrimination, ended their restrictions on immigration … and embraced multiculturalism.” This misleadingly implies that these changes occurred as a result of a shift in popular sentiment, of people suddenly coming to their senses and “embracing” racial diversity. The reality in the U.S., and, as I explicated in my series of essays on Australia, was that the movement toward the liberalization of immigration policies in countries like Australia was a top-down, totally undemocratic movement pursued for specifically Jewish ends.

Götz Aly — Reinforcing the culture of “the Holocaust” in Germany

Roger Devlin has observed that “all of us in the West are supposed to be responsible for the ills of the rest of the world, but only Germans have had their identity entirely constructed on guilt for 70 years.” One of those who has worked hard to reinforce the culture of “the Holocaust” in Germany, and to entrench the climate of opinion that is leading the German people to destruction, is the University of Frankfurt historian Professor Götz Aly who has written a series of books on German “anti-Semitism,” the Third Reich and “the Holocaust.” Aly, who was involved with militant far left organizations in the sixties and seventies, is the descendent of a Turkish soldier who converted to Christianity in the seventeenth century. Despite his partial Turkish ancestry, Aly identifies as an ethnic German. He is, nevertheless, acutely critical of the German people and their history. Aly’s latest book (recently translated into English) is Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust, which is Aly’s attempt to explain “why German history culminated in genocide.”[xviii]

Unlike the bulk of establishment historians, such as the egregious Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Aly is at least willing to accept that the origins of post-Enlightenment German “anti-Semitism” can be traced to conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews — or rather, in his view, to the envy of average Germans at the rapid social and economic advancement of Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He regards attempts to account for the rise of National Socialism solely on the basis of political ideology as unsatisfactory, observing that “conservatives weren’t the only ones guided by hostility toward and even hatred of Jews. Reformers and pioneers of political liberty often were as well. We must look for explanations elsewhere.”[xix]

Despite these small concessions to reality, Aly remains firmly within the camp of intellectual apologists for Jews in proposing that “anti-Semitism” is a phenomenon that always has its wellspring in the psychopathology or delusions of non-Jews — in this case in the pathological jealousy of Germans. His exoneration of Jews from any role whatever in contributing to manifestations of “anti-Semitism” is hardly surprising given that Aly’s book has the imprimatur of the leading Jewish representatives of the Holocaust industry. The author, who is a past winner of a Jewish Book Award, notes, for example, how his research was “made a lot easier and a lot more pleasant by my helpful and welcoming colleagues at Yad Vashem” and that his work was underwritten by the Baron Friedrich Carl von Oppenheim Stipend for Research on Racism, Anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust.

From the standpoint of an unquestioning acceptance of the dogmatic Hollywood version of “the Holocaust,” Götz Aly asserts that: “What remains contentious are questions of its ultimate meaning and deeper causes,” and argues that “the answers will, no doubt, continue to be fragmentary. Nonetheless, historians have a duty to seek them.” So, according to the author, historians have a moral and intellectual duty to search for the ultimate meaning of “the Holocaust” (provided of course this fully exonerates Jews) but not a duty to determine the actual facts regarding the alleged event itself. So much for the once revered academic tradition of fearlessly seeking out the truth wherever it leads. In the subsequent parts of this review I critically analyze Aly’s “envy” theory of the German “anti-Semitism” which forms the basis of his much praised book.

Notes

[i] Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 144.

[ii] Chaim Bermant, Jews (London; Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1977), 91.

[iii] Novick, Holocaust, 232.

[iv] Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2008), 211.

[v] Nicholas Kollerstrom, Breaking the Spell: The Holocaust, Myth & Reality (Uckfield: Castle Hill, 2014), 133.

[vi] Henry Reynolds, Why Weren’t We Told? — A personal search for the truth about our history (Melbourne: Penguin, 2000), 248-249.

[vii] David Cannadine, The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 205.

[viii] Ibid., 210.

[ix] Ibid., 211.

[x] Poul Duedahl, “From racial strangers to ethnic minorities, On the socio-political impact of UNESCO, 1945-60.” Paper presented at 7th Annual International Conference on Politics and International Affairs in Athens, Greece, in 2009.

[xi] Ibid.

[xii] Anthony Q. Hazard, Postwar Anti-Racism: The United States, UNESCO, and “Race,”1945-1968 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 38.

[xiii] Cannadine, The Undivided Past, 212.

[xiv] Hazard, Postwar Anti-Racism, 39.

[xv] Duedahl, “From racial strangers.”

[xvi] Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 341.

[xvii] Robert Wald Sussman, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 207.

[xviii] Götz Aly, Why the Germans? Why the Jews?: Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 2.

[xix] Ibid., 3.

[xx] Ibid., 1.

[xxi] Ibid., 9.

[xxii] Ibid.

[xxiii] Ibid., 110.

This article is about three things: Jewish attitudes on free speech, a book about the so-called “blood libels”, and how these ritual murders of which Jewish groups have been accused are linked to aversion for Jesus and Christians in Judaism.

The threads are all related. I’ll start from the third.

The above video, which I posted on my blog, among others attracted comments to the effect that it is not representative, publishing it is a biased choice, and the people in it are just a band of idiotic alcoholics. (In addition, Christians in Israel are treated wonderfully, have the same rights as Jews, and they all lived happily ever after.)

Those who make these claims have (or pretend to have) little knowledge of Jewish religion and Jewish history.

Because the people in the clip may as well have been drunk (or not), but what they say is due to much more than just alcohol. After all, as they say, in vino veritas, “in wine there is truth.”

The video shows images of 2012 Jewish attacks on a church and a monastery in Israel, with the background of a song from a group of Jews who gathered on Christmas Eve 2007, “to ‘celebrate’, in the Jewish way, the birth of Jesus.”

The signs defacing the church’s walls read “We will crucify you”, “Death to the Christians”, “Jesus is dead”, “Jesus son of Mary, the prostitute”, “Jesus the son of a whore”, “death to Christianity!” And on a car: “Jesus is now a corpse.”

The lyrics of the song repeatedly convey one of the messages written on the church’s walls: “Jesus is a bastard.”

In the same way as Islamic apologists attempt to portray Muslim terrorists, murderers and jihadists as betraying the true meaning of Islam, so Judaism apologists try to describe Jews who have attacked Christian buildings or gratuitously insulted Christian beliefs as having nothing to do with Judaic religion.

Both are wrong.

Today, March 24th, is the Feast of the Holy Infant Martyr St. Simon, patron saint of Trent.

He is the subject of a book published in early February 2007, Pasque di sangue. Ebrei d’Europa e omicidi rituali (Blood Passover. The Jews of Europe and Ritual Murder), which shows that there may well have been some truth to several “blood libels,” including the case in which Ashkenazi Jews of German descent living in the northern Italian city of Trent, near the Austrian border, were found guilty of murdering a Christian 2-year-old boy named Simone, crucifying him head down, mutilating his body and using his blood to bake matzot for Passover in 1475.

The child was canonised by the Church and became San Simonino di Trento. His entry in the Roman Martyrology was removed in 1965, after the Jewish-friendly, please-forgive-us Vatican II which gave us Nostra aetate re-examined the case and changed the verdict.

What makes this book extraordinary is that it wasn’t written by a nasty “anti-Semite,” but by Professor Ariel Toaff, who is descended from a line of rabbis, is the son of Elio Toaff, former chief rabbi of Rome and considered Italy’s highest Jewish spiritual and moral authority from the end of World War II to the early 2000s, and is a rabbi himself.

He also teaches at Tel Aviv University and at the time of the book’s publication was professor of Medieval and Renaissance History at Bar Ilan University in Israel. His work has focused on Jews and their history in Italy and is regarded as a world authority on Italian Jewry.

Ariel Toaff, who holds dual Italian and Israeli citizenship, was 64 when Blood Passover was published by the academic publishing house Il Mulino based in Bologna, a highly reputable company that prints books used in university courses, especially in humanities like philosophy and history. If you, like me, had studied philosophy at an Italian university, many — if not most — of your books would have been published by Il Mulino. This is important, as it shows that the scholarship of this volume must have been of a respectably high level, or this publishing house wouldn’t have risked its reputation by printing it.

As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz commented at the time of its publication in the aptly-titled article “And if it’s not good for the Jews?”:

It would have been far easier to dismiss the book if the author had been Christian. Then the dilemma could have quickly been solved by branding the scholar an anti-Semite. [Where have we seen that before?] It’s also easy to dispense with radical Diaspora Jews who not only attack Israel’s policies but also sometimes challenge its very right to exist. They can simply be dubbed self-hating Jews. The matter becomes much more complicated when a Jewish scholar from a religious Jewish university touches on an issue that arouses primordial Jewish fears.

The book’s blurb tells the reader that “this book takes on, courageously, one of the most controversial themes of the history of European Jews … rereading the vast documentation of this trial [the Trent Trial] and of many others without prejudice … the author explains the ritual and therapeutic meaning of blood in Jewish culture and reaches the conclusion that as far as Ashkenazi Judaism is concerned, the ritual murder accusation was not always an invention.”

Blood Passover was viciously attacked even before it was published by people, to use the author’s words, who didn’t even know what colour its cover would have:

The book sparked intense controversy including calls for him to resign from or be fired from his professorship, the questioning of his research, historical method(s), and motives as they relate to his writing of the book, threats to his life, and demands that he be prosecuted. [Emphasis added]

Really? And here I was, thinking, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, “Je Suis Charlie” and free speech marches, that Jewish communities everywhere were totally in support of freedom of speech. Shocking!

Some sordid, mindless cartoons must obviously be on a much higher level, far more worthy of being defended than decades-long scholarly historical research.

Censorship in this case is a mild word. Violent polemics erupted in the Italian media, and within the Jewish community even before the book was out. Blood Passover was withdrawn from bookshops very few days after its release, deliveries were blocked and the merchandise recalled.

Such a rapid action of withdrawal from the market can be comparable only to that of products which are physically harmful.

EBay quotations of such a rare work fetched at the time 100-400 euros.

The actions against Blood Passover were compared by historian Franco Cardini to Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, in which books were considered damaging for people’s minds and burnt. A book withdrawn from circulation after few days is tantamount to a book burnt or destroyed in other ways.

Two days before the volume’s publication, an advance review by another Italian Jewish historian, Sergio Luzzatto, appeared in Italy’s main daily Il Corriere della Sera, entitled “Those Passovers of Blood. The staggering revelation of Ariel Toaff: the myth of human sacrifice is not just an anti-Semitic lie”. It’s worth quoting a long excerpt from it:

Trent, March 23 1475. Eve of Pesach, or Passover. In the home-synagogue of a Jew of German origin, the usurer Samuel from Nuremberg, the battered body of a Christian 2-year-old baby, Simonino, the son of a humble tanner, is found. The city is in shock. As the only consolation, the investigation is moving forward. According to the investigators, the most notable men of the local Jewish community participated in the kidnapping and killing of the “cherub”, also involving women in a macabre ritual of crucifixion and outrage of the corpse. Even Moses “the Elder”, the most respected Jew of Trent, made a mockery of the hanging body of Simonino, as if to mock a renewed passion of Christ. … Only torture — it was thought — could push peaceful Jewish householders to confess to have killed children of the Gentiles: murder followed not only by the crucifixion of the victims, but also by practices of ritual cannibalism, i.e., the consumption of young Christian blood for magical or therapeutic purposes. …

So, in today’s world, only an unheard-of gesture of intellectual courage could allow to reopen the whole dossier, on the basis of a question as precise as it is delicate: when we discuss all this — the crucifixions of infants on the eve of Passover, the use of Christian blood as an ingredient in the unleavened bread eaten during the feast — are we talking about myths, namely ancient beliefs and ideologies, or rites, namely real events and even prescribed by the rabbis? The act of bravery has been accomplished now. The disturbing question has been posed to the sources of that age, by a historian perfectly equipped to do so: an expert in the food culture of the Jews, including religious precepts and eating habits, as well as the story of the intertwined Jewish and anti-Semitic ideas. …

Toaff maintains that approximately from 1100 to 1500, in the period between the First Crusade and the autumn of the Middle Ages, some crucifixions of Christian “cherubs” — or perhaps many — really happened, leading to reprisals against entire Jewish communities, punitive massacre of men, women, children. Neither in Trent in 1475, nor elsewhere in late medieval Europe, Jews were always innocent victims. In a large geographic area of ​​the German-speaking area between the Rhine, the Danube and the Adige, a minority of Ashkenazi fundamentalists really performed, and many times, human sacrifices.

Moving with extraordinary skill on the land of history, theology, anthropology, Toaff illustrates the centrality of blood in the celebration of Passover: the blood of the lamb, celebrating the liberation from slavery in Egypt, but also the blood of the prepuce, from the circumcision of Israel’s male infants. It was blood that a biblical passage in Exodus says was spilled for the first time by the son of Moses, and that some Orthodox tradition regarded as one with the blood of Isaac that Abraham was ready to sacrifice.

Therefore, in the ritual meal of Passover, the solemn unleavened bread was mixed with powdered blood, while other dried blood was dissolved in wine before reciting the ten curses of Egypt. Which blood could be more fit for purpose than that of a Christian child killed for the occasion, asked the most fanatical among the Jews studied by Toaff? This is the blood of a new Agnus Dei [lamb of God] to be consumed for the purpose of good wishes, so as to precipitate the downfall of the persecutors, cursed followers of a false, lying faith. [Emphases added]

This astonishing declaration confirms what Professor MacDonald and The Occidental Observer have always said: in their interactions with European Gentiles, Jews may have been victims at times, but they were not passive victims, and quite often they were not innocent victims. Something, other than mere “racism” (of which anti-Semitism is considered a form), incited the often despised and hated goyim to attack the “Chosen People.”

Before his outright persecution — there’s no other word for it — Ariel Toaff was so sure of his assertions, the result of decades of studies and research, continually taught in his university courses, that he gave an interview to Trent’s regional newspaper L’Adige on 8 February 2007 titled “The truth about San Simonino and the Convictions for the Simonino Rituals, the Case Must Be Reopened” and subtitled “Professor Ariel Toaff has no hesitation:  “The case of Simonino must be reopened, because there is reason to believe his ritual infanticide probable.” In it he said (the original article has been removed from the paper’s site, but I’ve found the following reproduction):

In short, the analysis of these acts and other documents prompts me to consider unlikely that the judges had been able to put in the mouth of the accused, who spoke a sort of German Hebrew, tales so full of precise references to the tradition, the rites, the memory of these communities of the Germanic area. It’s not possible that public officials knew all that; therefore those testimonies could not be the result of extortion or a projection of the thought of the judges.

About his method, he says:

I started by ignoring the most problematic aspects of the matter: the Passover, the blood for the Passover, unleavened bread, etcetera. So I checked that for everything else there is a hundred percent historical evidence. For example, a witness mentions an acquaintance, one Asher, a Jew convicted of usury in Venice: I checked and it was all true. At this point, I focused on Passover celebrations and compared the Trent depositions with the texts of the Jewish communities in Germany at the time: here too the correspondence is perfect.

This is crucial, because the convictions were based on the confessions of the accused, and the 1965 review of the trial exonerated the Jews on the grounds that the confessions must be false because extracted under torture. Forced confession is by no means a foregone conclusion.

Yes, the final obstacle was exactly the testimonies which made ​​reference to the sacrifice of Simonino. And it’s here that the linguistic aspect is fundamental. It was a bad Hebrew which was said to add an exotic and Satanic aura to these communities. I used not the Italian but German pronunciation, looked for the possible semantic variants and found the references to a certain environment of Nürnberg Judaism. In this way it became clear that the speech in Ashkenazi Hebrew of Trent Jews could not have been induced by non-members of the community. Therefore the confessions can be considered credible. Let’s not forget that we are talking about a minority of fundamentalists who were not representative of the entire religious galaxy: the Jewish world of the time was as varied as the Islamic one, which harbours even small fringes of terrorists, is today.

Ariel Toaff explains that he covers the story of Trent in eight chapters of his book, adding that he studied trials of Jews in various parts of Europe. A series of elements, the professor maintains, clearly confirms the thesis that infanticide has actually happened. He concludes:

I’m ready for discussion, but first I wish my interlocutor be informed on my research. Those who answer by reminding me that the Jewish tradition forbade the use of human blood in rituals adds nothing serious to scientific analysis: we’re talking about fanatics who violated the prohibition. On the other hand, several colleagues who have approached my work agree with my reconstruction of the presence of those violently anti-Christian Jewish communities which included very virulent and aggressive members. There may be someone who still has doubts on the last link of my reconstruction, ritual murder. For my part, however, I believe there is no room for doubt in terms of historiography. Therefore I think it would be right for Trent to reopen that chapter on the basis of the new elements in my book. [Emphases added]

When Taoff examined the trial records of the murderers of St. Simon of Trent he was staggered. The confessions of the murderers contained details of the crime that only the killers could know, and material that could not have been known to the Italian clergy or public officials. The secret rites practiced by the Ashkenazi community, which could not have been known by the judges, were faithfully reproduced in the confessions.

Even historian and member of the Venice Jewish community Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, who is clearly a Jewish apologist, admitted that there was no real argument among the Italian Jewry to answer Toaf’s accusation:

In Italy (but the reaction would have been the same in France or Britain) even the Jewish intellectual elite is clearly without arguments when faced by Toaff’s arguments. They lack the basics, to use soccer jargon, namely they completely lack the knowledge of Hebrew (which would allow one to read and learn about the rich bibliography produced in thousands of years of history by the Italian Jewish communities), they are not up to date with the real and not rhetorical situation of historical studies and research on even fundamental issues like the Trent Trial in 1475. They are desperately looking for ‘expertise’ that cannot be improvised.

In other words: Italian Jewry knew that the atrocities described in the book never happened even without knowing — or maybe because they didn’t know — any of the relevant facts.

Dr. Amos Luzzatto, former president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, said:

Even if the author should manage to prove that a deviant sect existed for centuries … clearly it could never be identified as a Jewish group, or as part of a Jewish community. This would be comparable to saying that the rabbis who were present at [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust Denial Conference in Teheran represent mainstream Judaism.

On the contrary, it would be comparable to saying that terrorists shouting “Allahu Akbar” and proclaiming to vindicate the prophet Muhammad while killing Jews are not a Muslim group, which is the opposite of what most Jewish people say. Fanaticism among Jews is notorious, impressing commenters from the ancient world to the present and now driving the ethnonationalist right in Israel and its legion of supporters in the Diaspora.

Just after the book’s release in Italy, in the article “Bar-Ilan to order professor to explain research behind blood libel book” Haaretz showed that initially, despite the pressure he was under, Toaff was still defending his position, albeit with some incipient signs of vacillation:

University historian Toaff has raised a storm by alleging in his book that some blood libels — accusations that Jews killed Christians in ritual murders to add their blood to matza and wine on Passover — may be based on real ceremonies in which the blood of Christians was actually used. …

In an interview with the Italian newspaper La Stampa, Toaff responded angrily to his critics, saying, “My research shows that in the Middle Ages, a group of fundamentalist Jews did not respect the biblical prohibition and used blood for healing. It is just one group of Jews, who belonged to the communities that suffered the severest persecution during the Crusades. From this trauma came a passion for revenge that in some cases led to responses, among them ritual murder of Christian children.”…

In an interview Friday with The Associated Press, Toaff said, “There is no proof that Jews committed such an act.” But he added that the confessions do hold some truth — as when the accused recount anti-Christian liturgies that were mainly used on Passover, when the Israelites’ liberation from ancient Egypt became a metaphor for Judaism’s hope for redemption from its suffering at the hands of Christians.

“These liturgical formulas in Hebrew cannot be projections of the judges who could not know these prayers, which didn’t belong to Italian rites but to the Ashkenazi tradition,” he said. …

Bar-Ilan University spokesman, Shmulik Algrabli, said, “Professor Toaff is one of the greatest scholars in his field, and we have confidence in his scientific method. The contentions of the study will be clarified when the author returns to Israel.” [All emphases added]

After his post-publication statements in Italy that he would let himself be crucified in order to stand by his book’s conclusions, when he returned to Israel Toaff surrendered, withdrew the book from the market and said he would give the proceeds from the past sales to the (then) Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. A new, revised edition of the work was published in 2008, which however didn’t substantially change the thesis of the first edition.

For a murder to be ritual an essential component is religious hatred. And this has been very widespread, deep-rooted, taught from an early age, practised for generation after generation.

For Jews, says Toaff, in rabbinic texts Abraham did kill Isaac, was not stopped by God as in the Bible. Isaac was then resurrected by God.

This shows that the two prohibitions adduced by the rabbis as obstacles to the ritual murders examined in Blood Passover — prohibition on the consumption of blood and prohibition to kill — become absolutely null and void if even the patriarch Abraham was considered pious for ritually sacrificing his son.

Toaff’s book incontestably shows that there has been a profound, sometimes violent and even murderous, anti-Christian streak in European Jewish communities.

It’s not an accident. It derives from Jewish sacred texts, filled with hatred for Jesus and Christianity, which say very much the same as the song and the graffiti in the video above this article.

There are numerous texts, besides Blood Passover, illustrating Jewish hate for Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Christians, who have been the symbols behind various Jewish sacrifices, rituals and obscene mockeries over the ages. What Toaff says in Chapter 12, that Jesus was called “bastard, son of whore”, was already well known.

In the Jewish book Toledot Yeshu (Generations of Jesus, or Life of Jesus), Jesus is described as an illegitimate child, “the bastard son of a menstruate woman.” Jewish tradition considered as the worst thing for a woman to conceive during menstruation, a period of ritual impurity during which relations are forbidden according to Jewish Law. In the case of Mary, this was made even worse by the accusation that the child’s father was a pagan, and she had committed adultery. The same book says that Jesus was a sorcerer, and is now in Hell immersed in boiling excrement.

Toledot Yeshu only reproduces descriptions of Jesus contained from the Talmud.

Rev. I.B. Pranaitis writes in The Talmud Unmasked. The Secret Rabbinical Teachings Concerning Christians:

The Talmud teaches that Jesus Christ was illegitimate and was conceived during menstruation; that he had the soul of Esau; that he was a fool, a conjurer, a seducer; that he was crucified, buried in hell and set up as an idol ever since by his followers.

Author Mirza Tahir Ahmad says:

[A]uthentic Jewish religious literature is full of their gloatings about Jesus’ death upon the cross…

The Talmud, the doctrinal book which fully expounds all the knowledge and beliefs of the Jewish people, taught that Jesus had not only an illegitimate birth, but was doubly uncouth in view of his having been born out of a devilish wedlock of Mary during the period of her menstruation…

All that is decent in man revolts against the stinking filth which was heaped upon the holy name and image of Jesus in the literature of his hostile antagonists.

Peter Shäfer, in his Jesus in the Talmud, comes to similar conclusions:

Rabbinic texts present Jesus as the illegitimate child of an adulteress who leads a licentious life and seduces other Jews to idolatry through the practice of magic and blasphemy. He does not find his place in heaven but in hell, where he is condemned to sit eternally in boiling excrement in punishment for his sins. (see here)

I conclude with Ariel Toaff’s entry in Discover the Networks. I find it odd that it considers the fact that the Jewish people who confessed to the sacrifice of the little boy San Simonino did so under torture as a sign that their confession is false, but they don’t consider the fact that Toaff has recanted the accusations contained in his book under various threats, including death threats, as a sign that his recanting is also false.

His overall behaviour has in fact seemed very different from that of a man who has altered his views.

But then, freedom of speech is only invoked when the targets of free expression are Muslims — or even better Christians. When it comes to Jews, the rules of the game immediately change.

Hatred and [the] spirit of sacrifice . . . are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren. (Illuminations, Walter Benjamin 1968, 262)

I recently came across a very well-done video featuring Edmund Connelly’s TOO article “Reel Bad WASPs,” part of his excellent 8-part “Eye on Hollywood” series. I don’t know who produced the video, but it’s a great example of the effectiveness of this medium for getting out our ideas, with spot-on clips from the movies, and a calm, “just the facts” voice over.

It completely belies the constant refrain of the ADL that the Jews who dominate Hollywood just happen to be Jews — that their Jewish identity is completely irrelevant to American movies.

The video also discusses a footnote in Chapter 1 of The Culture of Critique where I called attention to the movie Addams Family Values in a footnote that was quoted also in Connelly’s article and appears in the video. I thought I would contextualize this footnote a bit. This is the original passage and the accompanying footnote:

Jews have also been at the forefront of the adversarial culture in the United States, England, and France since the mid-1960s, especially as defenders of the adversary culture in the media and the academic world world (Ginsberg 1993, 125ff; Rothman & Isenberg 1974a, 66–67).[4]
[4]. A recent, perhaps trivial, example of this type of intellectual ethnic warfare is the popular movie Addams Family Values (released in November 1993), produced by Scott Rudin, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, and written by Paul Rudnick. The bad guys in the movie are virtually anyone with blond hair (the exception being an overweight child), and the good guys include two Jewish children wearing yarmulkes. (Indeed, having blond hair is viewed as a pathology, so that when the dark-haired Addams baby temporarily becomes blond, there is a family crisis.) The featured Jewish child has dark hair, wears glasses, and is physically frail and nonathletic. He often makes precociously intelligent comments, and he is severely punished by the blond-haired counselors for reading a highly intellectual book. The evil gentile children are the opposite: blond, athletic, and unintellectual. Together with other assorted dark-haired children from a variety of ethnic backgrounds and white gentile children rejected by their peers (for being overweight, etc.), the Jewish boy and the Addams family children lead a very violent movement that succeeds in destroying the blond enemy. The movie is a parable illustrating the general thrust of Jewish intellectual and political activity relating to immigration and multi-culturalism in Western societies (see Ch. 7). It is also consistent with the general thrust of Hollywood movies. Separation and Its Discontents (Ch. 2) reviews data indicating Jewish domination of the entertainment industry in the United States. Powers, Rothman and Rothman (1996, 207) characterize television as promoting liberal, cosmopolitan values, and Lichter, Lichter and Rothman  (1994, 251) find that television portrays cultural pluralism in positive terms and as easily achieved apart from the activities of a few ignorant or bigoted miscreants.

As Edmund Connelly notes, despite what I wrote, movies like this are not trivial at all. But the book was about ethnic warfare in academia, not popular culture, and even though I knew it was an important part of the overall picture, I consciously de-emphasized it. After all, it was just one movie, not a general analysis, and my mindset at the time was that an example from popular culture would reflect negatively on a project that was mainly intended to describe the ethnic warfare that had taken place in the hallowed halls of ivy (since rectified by Edmund Connelly’s work and by a section of the Preface to the First Paperback edition of Culture of Critique, p. xlvi ff. [2002]).

But I must admit that the movie really angered me. At the time (1993), I was just beginning to be aware of the issues that eventually resulted in The Culture of Critique. What was so amazing was how explicit it was, not only in its depiction of bubbly, good-looking, happy, athletic, blond, intolerant WASPs, but in its stereotypical depiction of the Jewish child with a yarmulke as a leader of a coalition of non-Whites and Whites who were portrayed as rejected by the mainstream culture and therefore morally entitled to inflict extreme violence on the blond people. (The same contrasts are apparent in the “Nordics versus implicit Jews” theme of The Switch.”)

Twenty plus years later, it still rankles. The video does a great job of showing the torture and mayhem inflicted by the coalition of the disgruntled. The evil Whites are burned at a stake and roasted on a spit. Violence against Whites is perfectly legitimate. Hilarious!

But the amazing thing is that I saw the movie in the first weekend it was out in Orange County (CA), at that time almost all White. I can still recall looking down my row during the most violent scenes and seeing all those White faces roaring in laughter. They loved seeing White people being roasted on a spit by assorted non-Whites led by a Jewish child. But of course, they weren’t processing it that way. The message so obviously in the minds of those who made the movie was completely lost on them.

Nevertheless, Addams Family Values grossed considerably less than half the amount raked in by its predecessor, The Addams Family, despite much better reviews (!).

Typical is the review in the New York Times by Janet Maslin. She hinted at some of the torture and mayhem by calling its humor “delightfully arch and subversive” — the subversive message was just fine with her, hilarious even.

Now it could be that the making of this sequel was sheer drudgery for all concerned. But it doesn’t seem likely. There’s simply too much glee on the screen, thanks to a cast and visual conception that were perfect in the first place, and a screenplay by Paul Rudnick that specializes in delightfully arch, subversive humor. That the ghoulish Addamses somehow remain much sweeter than the rest of us is no small part of the joke.

So the Addams family is much sweeter than the rest of us despite the leading role of daughter Wednesday in carrying out the violence against the blond people — as “hell-bent on revenge.” With the hearty approval of her family.

Naturally Maslin’s description of the Thanksgiving pageant scene leaves out a description of the ethnic dimension of the conflict, apart from an invidious description of WASP culture as all about cardigans, pastel-colored clothes, and drinking highballs.

It also gives the Addamses a chance to sabotage the camp’s Thanksgiving pageant in memorably creative [i.e., gruesomely painful] ways. “Your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs!” Wednesday warns the Pilgrims, as she horrifies their pastel-clad parents while playing a Pocahontas hell-bent on revenge.

Revenge indeed. This is a Jewish revenge fantasy — a paradigm of the theme of Jews as a hostile elite. Connelly quotes David Gelernter’s essay on the hatred of the new elite for the people they rule. (Connelly, unlike Gelernter who was writing in Commentary, does mention the Jewish dimension of the new elite.)

“The old elite used to get on fairly well with the country it was set over. Members of the old social upper-crust elite were richer and better educated than the public at large, but approached life on basically the same terms.” The new, heavily Jewish elite is not only different from the non-Jewish masses, in Gelernter words, “it loathes the nation it rules.”

So here we have a group of Jews with access to the elite media and an audience of millions who nevertheless see themselves as outsiders and victims. A hostile elite that loathes the people they rule over. A very bad recipe for the future of White America.

Indeed, it is remarkable that the disgruntled group in Addams Family Values is pretty much the same as the non-White coalition centered in the Democratic Party  (on average, around 80% of Jews and other non-Whites vote Democrat in recent presidential elections). The exceptions are that feminism is not emphasized (White women are burned at the stake and roasted over a spit along with White men), and there is no mention of homosexuals as a minority with a grudge. Nevertheless, it’s a coalition of the aggrieved — of non-Whites or children who feel rejected because they don’t fit into WASP culture (and despite the fact that similar biases are apparent in all cultures, and egregiously so in Israel and traditional Jewish culture).

The theme of revenge as motivating Jewish leftists appears in the chapter  in Culture of Critique on Jewish leftists (and Sonnenfeld, Rudin, and Rudnick  are certainly leftists with their intellectual roots in the Jewish left that came to dominance with the 1960s countercultural revolution):

This antipathy toward gentile-dominated society was often accompanied by a powerful desire to avenge the evils of the old social order. For many Jewish New Leftists “the revolution promises to avenge the sufferings and to right the wrongs which have, for so long, been inflicted on Jews with the permission or encouragement, or even at the command of, the authorities in prerevolutionary societies” (Cohen 1980, 208). Interviews with New Left Jewish radicals revealed that many had destructive fantasies in which the revolution would result in “humiliation, dispossession, imprisonment or execution of the oppressors” (Cohen 1980, 208) combined with the belief in their own omnipotence and their ability to create a nonoppressive social order—findings that are reminiscent of the motivating role of revenge for anti-Semitism among the Jewish-dominated security forces in communist Poland discussed above. These findings are also entirely consistent with my experience among Jewish New Left activists at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s (see note 13). (here, p. 85 and p. 103)

“Humiliation, dispossession, imprisonment or execution of the oppressors.” Such as burning blond people at the stake and roasting them on a spit.

Revenge is also a theme of Jewish hostility that culminated in the torture and mass murder of the early Soviet era, as recounted in Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century.

Indeed, one wonders what would motivate the Jewish commissars to revenge apart from motives related to their Jewish identity. Traditional hostility toward non-Jews and their culture forms a central theme in the writings of
Israel Shahak and many mainstream Jewish historians, including Slezkine … .[64] An important aspect of Slezkine’s general theoretical approach is that relationships between Mercurians and Apollonians involve mutual hostility, suspicion and contempt, and a sense of superiority (p. 20). These traditional attitudes were exacerbated by the increase in tensions between Jews and non-Jews beginning with the pogroms of 1881 and extending, with fits and starts, into the period of the Bolshevik Revolution. Slezkine’s argument that Jews were critically involved in destroying traditional Russian institutions, liquidating Russian nationalists, murdering the tsar and his family, dispossessing and murdering the kulaks, and destroying the Orthodox Church has been made by many other writers over the years, including Igor Shafarevich, a mathematician and member of the prestigious U. S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Shafarevich’s review of Jewish literary works during the Soviet and post-Soviet period agrees with Slezkine in showing Jewish hatred mixed with a powerful desire for revenge toward pre-revolutionary Russia and its culture.[65] But Shafarevich also suggests that the Jewish “Russophobia” that prompted the mass murder is not a unique phenomenon, but results from traditional Jewish hostility toward the non-Jewish
world, considered tref (unclean), and toward non-Jews themselves, considered sub-human and as worthy of destruction. (“Stalin’s Willing Executioners: Jews as a Hostile Elite in the USSR,” p. 93-94)

Revenge is indeed a Jewish value, but only, as in Addams Family Values, when directed against non-Jews (see Shlomo Brody, “Aski the Rabbi: Is Revenge a Jewish Value?,” Jerusalem Post, Oct. 23, 2014) — yet another example of Judaism moral particularistism. So we may be assured that Rudnick et al. remain in the good graces of the Jewish community.

This is a horrifying vision of a future that could well come true when Whites lose political power along with their demographic eclipse as a result of the immigration onslaught — just as torture and mass murder occurred in the USSR with the cooperation of the Jewish elite. It’s a revolution not based on love of universal humanity, but of hatred for the traditional people and culture of the West.

Introduction

I was flattered when asked to review Thomas Goodrich’s book Hellstorm. Though first published in 2010 it has recently come out in paperback and Kindle editions and deserves wider notice. That said, I knew this would not be an easy book to read and review.

Hellstorm chronicles the atrocities and deprivations visited upon Germany from 1944 to 1947. Though much of the story will be familiar to serious students of World War II, the author appears to have also included some new primary-source material. The bibliography shows that Goodrich has accessed most of the older major works in this field, making Hellstorm a well-researched compendium. So, if you have not read Bacque, Sajar, Keeling, et al. you will find them quoted and footnoted here.[1]

In addition to hundreds of footnotes the book contains two maps, always a plus, sixteen pages of photographs, and a useful bibliography and index. If fault can be found, it would be that Goodrich seems to have completed his research by 2000 so none of the more recent historiography has been included. Also, there are places in the narrative where the events described are not assigned a date and location making the chronology a bit unclear.

These are minor criticisms, however, because it is not simply as a piece of historiography that Hellstorm finds its power, but as a gut wrenching, heart rending story of human suffering and the malice that produced that misery.

Synopsis

Prologue: Right from the start Goodrich grabs the reader by the lapels and shakes him. He starts by describing the fate of the East Prussian village of Nemmerdorf. In October 1944 it became the first town in Germany proper to be overrun by the Red Army. Soviet troops went into a blood frenzy of rape, torture, and murder.

The author makes it clear that by 1944 the war aims of the Allies was not just the defeat of the German armed forces, nor even the destruction of the National Socialist regime, but rather, “nothing less than the utter extinction of the German nation” (6). Why the genocidal intent?

Goodrich suggests that, in large part, this genocide was the culmination of an eleven-year propaganda campaign against Germany lead mainly by American Jews.  International Jewry had declared war on Germany in 1933 by instituting economic sanctions as well as the above-mentioned propaganda offensive. The author quotes from Theodore N. Kaufman’s book Germany Must Perish! “Germany must perish forever! In fact — not in fancy . . .  by preventing the people of Germany from ever reproducing their kind” (7). He also cites Ben Hecht’s A Guide for the Bedeviled in which Germany and Germans are compared to a cancer which must be destroyed.

On September 15, 1944 President Franklin Roosevelt converted such hate-filled rants into official policy by endorsing the Morgenthau Plan. Named for Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and developed by his chief lieutenant Harry Dexter White (both Jews), this plan envisioned reducing the postwar population of Germany by two-thirds mainly through the starvation of 50 million men, women, and children. Winston Churchill also signed on to the Morgenthau Plan.

To the east, Ilya Ehrenburg, “perhaps the most influential Jewish writer anywhere in the world,” was advocating German genocide via articles in Pravda, Isvestja, and Red Star as well as in millions of leaflets distributed at the front. “The Germans are not human beings. . . . Kill, Red Army men, kill! No fascist is innocent, be he alive, be he as yet unborn” (10).

Chapter 1 covers the terror bombings conducted by American and especially British air forces. This campaign begun in July 1943 with attacks on the port city of Hamburg that left, “750,000 homeless [and] an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 dead, mostly women and children” (14). Called by various names — area bombing, carpet bombing, saturation bombing, and unrestricted bombing — the indiscriminate destruction of urban areas could more accurately be described as terror bombing.

The leading architect of terror bombing was Chief of British Bomber Command Arthur “Bomber” Harris. Postwar assessments by military and political leaders as well as historians have led most to agree that, in contrast to strategic bombing of military targets and production and transportation facilities, bombing of residential areas and cultural monuments was ineffective. While causing massive devastation, it failed to break civilian morale.

Chapter 2 deals with the issue of POWs on the Eastern Front. Much has been written about the poor treatment received by captured Soviet (but not Western) soldiers. But Goodrich makes the point that Stalin, “refused to sign the Geneva Convention on prisons of war or the Hague Treaty on land warfare” (49).  With no assurance of humane treatment for their own troops Germans gave little quarter. Unfortunately, massacres of prisoners on both sides began early. For instance, on July 1, 1941 160 captured Germans were shot or bayonetted in Broniki, Ukraine.

Chapter 3 continues to chronicle events on the Eastern Front as the Soviets advance into Germany. Rape, murder, looting, and destruction accompany the Red Army. “Kill them all, men, old men, children, and the women, after you have amused yourself with them!” urged Ilya Ehrenberg (81).  One German boy recalled that in his town, “everyone wearing anything military — a military coat, for example … [was] shoved against a wall and shot” (86). Also in this chapter Goodrich recounts the disaster that befell the refugees trying to flee west by sea. On the night of January 30, 1945 the Wilhelm Gustloff was steaming west on the Baltic Sea, grossly overloaded with 8,000 women, children, and wound soldiers. Goodrich skillful describes the scene.

That black stormy night, as she struggled through high winds and heavy, ice-filled waves, the Gustloff’s ventilation and plumbing systems failed utterly. Strained beyond its limits, the tightly-sealed ship filled with a hot, nauseating stench of urine, excrement, and vomit. The groans and screams of severely wounded soldiers and the wails of separated families added to the ghastly horror. But the worst was yet to come. At approximately 9 P.M., three heavy jolts rocked the passengers on the Gustloff. (89)

The ship had been torpedoed by a Soviet sub. Goodrich gives a figure of roughly 7,000 men women and children lost.[2]

Chapter 4 gives an account of the Yalta Conference of February 1945. For seven days the leaders of the Big Three — Britain, the US, and the USSR — met in Crimean Black Sea resort. This conference confirmed the decision made by Roosevelt and Churchill at Casablanca in 1943 to accept nothing less than unconditional surrender from Germany thus insuring that the Germans would fight to the bitter end. Goodrich notes that the US President “was a staunch supporter and admirer of [Stalin] and defended him at every turn” (98). It was FDR who gave the Soviet dictator the moniker “Uncle Joe.”

Most of this chapter is devoted to describing the holocaust of Dresden. The city, which had been spared up to this time, was obliterated in mid February 1945 by Allied air attacks. The author gives six compelling reasons why Dresden should have been spared the destruction visited upon Hamburg and other German cities. But spared it was not.

On February 13 and 14 the magnificent Baroque city was bombed to rubble. Then thousands of incendiary bombs were dropped igniting the debris to create huge fire storms. “[T]he International Red Cross estimated that 275,000 had died … other estimates that place the death toll at 300,000 to 400,000 may well be closer to the mark” (123).  After the horror of Dresden a few Allied political and military leaders raised protests, but “the air terror continued unabated” (125).

Chapter 5 returns to the plight of those fleeing the Soviet advance. After 150 pages of death and destruction the reader may think he has become inured to descriptions of violence. Then Goodrich recounts the shocking story of Neustettin. After the Red Army overran the city in February 1945 2,500 girls of the Reich Labor Service were killed, many after the most gruesome torture imaginable.

Chapter 6 deals with the conduct of Allied soldiers in the West. Their behavior was not nearly as bad as the Soviets, but the GIs did “’their share of looting and raping’ a US sergeant admitted” (169). Even more serious than looting and rape were the “large number of captured or surrendered Germans [who] were simply slaughtered on the spot” (170). Fortunately, these were the exceptions rather than the rule and Goodrich concedes that “the average GI and Tommy comported himself amazingly well” (170).

Chapter 7 describes the Battle of Berlin, the desperate, heroic, ugly, and hopeless defense of the German capital.

Chapter 8 covers a number of topics: the concentrations camps in the West, the fate of German POWs and civilians in the East, and the treatment of foreigners who supported or collaborated with the Germans.

When the concentration camps in western Germany were captured Allied soldiers were greeted by the sight of thousands of emaciated bodies, living and dead. With the breakdown in production and distribution of food, fuel, clothing, and medicine, “thousands of camp inmates swiftly succumbed in the final weeks of the war to typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis, starvation, and neglect” (230). The Allied forces blamed the camp guards for these conditions and shot most of them on the spot. At this point of the war, however, many of the guards were ordinary German soldiers assigned to the camps to keep some semblance of order until Allied troops arrived.

The surrender of German forces in the spring of 1945 did not bring peace nor stop the killing. In Czechoslovakia German civilians and POWs were subjected to savage reprisals. Almost all Germans, many from families who had been there for centuries, were expelled from their homes. Over 200,000 were killed, many tortured to death. Similar scenes, on a lesser scale, were played out in Rumania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. In France, 100,000 French citizens who had collaborated with the Germans were murdered.

At the end of the war over five million Soviet citizens — POWs, Cossacks, foreign workers, veterans of Vlasov’s German/Russian army — fell into the hands of the western Allies. To appease Stalin, Operation Keelhaul was implemented to forcibly return these millions to the USSR to face execution or years of slave labor. Operation Keelhaul became Operation Prevarication as the War Department solemnly proclaimed, “The United States Government has taken a firm stand against any forced repatriation and will continue to maintain this position. . . . There is no intention that any refugee be returned home against his will” (251).

Meanwhile General Eisenhower was circumventing the Geneva Convention by designating captured German soldiers as DEFs, Disarmed Enemy Forces rather than POWs who would be accorded certain protections under international law. As a result, the surrendering Germans were imprisoned in huge open-air enclosures without shelter, and with little food, water, or medical care. Hundreds of thousands died of exposure, starvation, dehydration, and disease. Probably close to one million German prisoners died in American and French camps.  “And thus, in ‘peace,’ did ten times the number Landsers die than were killed on the whole Western Front during the whole of the war” (260).

”’These Nazis are getting a dose of their own medicine’ a prison commandant reported proudly” (255). At the same time the International Red Cross reported that ninety-nine percent of American POWs held by Germany survived the war and returned home safely.

Chapter 9 begins with the German unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945. One phase of the war was over. Incredibly, “the worst yet lay ahead. . . .  The war against Germany continued unabated” (279). Goodrich points out that the Morgenthau Plan was never officially repudiated and what might be called the Modified Morgenthau was implemented. “’Most children under ten and people over sixty cannot survive the coming winter,’ one American admitted in October 1945” (289). A few US elected officials protested the treatment of Germans, but the great humanitarian Eleanor Roosevelt declared after a fact-finding tour that conditions in Germany were “tolerable” (292).

Chapter 10 surveys the de-Nazification process instituted after the war. This process involved imprisonment, interrogation, and punishment. Interrogation was often accompanied by beatings, rapes, and even more extreme torture. Few failed to confess to whatever they had been accused of while often implicating others as well. “One man opposed to the vengeance-minded program was George Patton. ‘Evidently the virus started by Morgenthau and [Bernard] Baruch of Semitic revenge against all Germans is still working,’ wrote the general in private” (299).

Twice in the book Goodrich mentions that in immediate postwar Germany the Salvation Army was, “one of the few relief organizations that dared face and fight the incredible suffering, regardless of the Allied political pressure.” (318). Although the Salvation Army was hardy able to “make a dent” in the desperate conditions these efforts might be something to keep in mind when you hear the bell ringers around Christmas time.

Chapter 11 covers the expulsions of over twelve million Germans from Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia. After the war the USSR would claim a bit of East Prussia, the rest of the territory was awarded to Poland. The Germans, whose ancestors had lived in these lands for many centuries, were forced to flee west. Without adequate food, clothing, or shelter, exhausted and hungry, these hapless refugees were robbed, beaten, raped, and murdered by Russian soldiers, Polish militia men, and gangs of Gypsies and Jews. It was, “the greatest death march in history, [and] it was preordained that millions would never survive the trek” (334).

About two million eastern German expellees, mostly women and children, died.  Another one million ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia also died. Four million more Germans were sent east and disappeared into the gulags. Unbelievably, it appears that, “far more Germans died during the first two years of ‘peace’ than died during the previous six years of war” (344).

Epilogue: The author suggests that the one thing that saved Germany from total postwar destruction was the beginning of the Cold War. By the late 1940s “Great Britain and the United States were more intent on erecting a bulwark against Soviet expansion than in flailing a fallen enemy even further” (354).

Goodrich ends the book by saluting the German people’s will to live manifest in their postwar economic miracle. Yet he also notes that the propaganda campaign against Germany has continued — a psychological and political necessity for the victors to justify their wartime and postwar policies.

Conclusions

Hellstorm is revisionist history in the most basic definition of the term “revision” — to look at again.  Seven decades after the end of World War II the standard narrative still reads like a morality play — the forces of good fought and triumphed over the forces of evil. Whenever history is written in such simplistic terms the reader should know that much of the story is missing. Building on earlier efforts, Hellstorm provides some of the missing pieces of the story.

This reviewer can remember when James Bacque’s Other Losses came out in 1989. It caused a minor stir. It contained evidence that perhaps one million Germans died in captivity in the West. It was released by a major Canadian publisher. It was reviewed by several mainstream publications. And, in that pre-internet age, it was available on the shelves of chain bookstores.

Yet Other Losses shows how difficult it is for any single book, no matter how significant, to change public perceptions of World War II formed by decades of incessant propaganda.  Jews were the real victims of the war, and whatever losses the Germans may have suffered were their own fault.

The need for a more balanced view of the war and the need to interpret National Socialist Germany within a historical perspective is why Hellstorm is an important book. More such books need to be written. The suffering of the German people needs to be acknowledged. People of European extraction everywhere should see that the children burned alive or crushed under rubble were our children. The women beaten and raped were our women. The young soldiers summarily executed were our boys.

After seventy years, the denials and hypocrisy of the war and postwar years need to be recognized. For example, today America is fighting a War on Terror, yet terror — the killing of the innocent for military and political ends — was a major tactic of the Allies during World War II.

In 1984 Jewish author and media personality Studs Terkel published a best-selling oral history entitled The Good War. There was absolutely nothing good about World War II. It was a tragedy for our peoples and civilization.

William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Thus it is with World War II. The war is still being fought. It is a psychological war that heaps shame and guilt on Germany, and ironically, on her opponents as well to the extent they shared Germany’s race and culture. The war ought to be seen as an internecine conflict, the result of a failure of statesmanship by both Anglo-American and German leaders. As Patrick Buchanan wrote, it was The Unnecessary War.[3]

An optimist might see the tide beginning to turn. In the past several years a number of mainstream books have been published seeking to present a more impartial view of the wartime and postwar suffering.[4]

This is much more than just an issue of nuanced historiography. The narrative of World War II continues to be used as a propaganda weapon to demoralize the West. The effort to historicize World War II should continue. Hellstorm is part of that effort.

[2] The loss of life was probably even greater than the author states. More recent research reveals that the Gustloff may have had over 10,000 abroad and approximately 9,400 were lost including 5,000 children. That would be six times the loss of life from the sinking of the Titanic making it the greatest maritime disaster in history. See Cathryn J. Prince, Death in the Baltic: The Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff (NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013).

[4] In addition to the Prince book cited above see: Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2012).

You know all those ads where Blacks (usually cool and competent) and  Whites (often dorky and behaving weirdly) are hanging out together, often drinking beer while watching football. Best friends forever. The Hollywood/Madison Ave. image of America’s harmonious multicultural future.

Now we all know that this is a fantasy of the people who run the media. But its implausibility derives from not only because White people prefer being with other Whites—the phenomenon of implicit Whiteness. The  same goes for Blacks, and a recent academic paper goes further, showing that Blacks disapprove of Blacks who socialize with Whites (which makes me think that  such commercials are not going to be effective with either race) (“Testing the ”Black Code”: Does Having White Close Friends Elicit Identity Denial and Decreased Empathy from Black In-Group Members?“).

The “Black Code” referred to in the title refers to the attitude among Blacks that ‘‘relationships with whites must be kept at arm’s length maintaining a silent us against them mindset. Blacks who appear too friendly and comfortable around whites are viewed with suspicion; their blackness in question.”

Prior to presenting their own data, the authors review findings that “Blacks, more than any other racial group, show empathy toward members of their in-group.” In the  experiment Black college students (mostly female from an all-Black college) observed a  Facebook page of a White person alone, a Black person alone, and a Black person and a White person, either with same-race friends or opposite-race friends.

Results showed that Blacks saw Blacks with White friends as less Black — perhaps not too surprising. More interesting were the results for empathy which was measured by telling the subject that the person in the photo had lost his parents in a car accident so he had to raise his two younger siblings. Subjects showed significantly more empathy for Blacks pictured either alone or with Black friends than when they were pictured with White friends. But Whites pictured with Black friends did not get any more empathy than Whites pictured alone or with White friends. The authors conclude:

Having cross-race friends made Black targets seem ‘‘less Black’’ and thus less like the self for our Black participants, thereby decreasing empathy …. However, having cross-race friends did not necessarily make White targets seem ‘‘more Black’’ or more like the self; thus, there were no implications for empathy.

The paper shows that the racial chasm continues in “post-racial” America, despite the fact that our elites have decided that race doesn’t even exist except as a way for Whites to obtain unearned privilege. And Blacks are far from passive bystanders in this process, behaving far more aggressively than Whites in actively maintaining racial boundaries and stigmatizing other Blacks who socialize with Whites.

The authors note that such discriminatory behavior can work against Blacks in the workplace because Blacks must typically work with Whites. And it also plays out in academic situations where Blacks who take school seriously are ostracized for “acting White.”

A theme at TOO is the racialization of American politics, as Whites coalesce in the Republican Party and everyone else votes Democrat. So it’s not surprising that everything else becomes racialized too. Heather MacDonald has a great article on the total corruption of humanities departments at American universities, where, e.g., English majors at UCLA need not take any courses in Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer, but must take three courses from the areas like “Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies” and “Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies.” So it’s not surprising that the campus environment encourages Blacks to completely avoid anything having to do with traditional Western culture.

Compare the humanists’ hunger for learning with the resentment of a Columbia University undergraduate who had been required by the school’s freshman core curriculum to study Mozart. She happens to be black, but her views are widely shared, to borrow a phrase, “across gender, sexuality, race, and class.”

“Why did I have to listen in music humanities to this Mozart?” she groused in a discussion of the curriculum reported by David Denby in his book on Columbia’s core. “My problem with the core is that it upholds the premises of white supremacy and racism. It’s a racist core. Who is this Mozart, this Haydn, these superior white men? There are no women, no people of color.” These are not the idiosyncratic thoughts of one disgruntled student; they represent the dominant ideology in the humanities today. Columbia not only failed to disabuse the student of such parochialism; it is also all but certain that some of its faculty strengthened her in her close-mindedness, despite the school’s admirable commitment to its beleaguered core.

There’s not much doubt how this student would have scored in the study on empathy for Blacks with White friends.

Make no mistake about it, multiculturalism is the death of the West as a culture. Imagine a world without Shakespeare or Mozart, because that’s what it’s going to be as Whites are increasingly displaced, first from elite universities like UCLA and Columbia, then everywhere else.

As part of our Christmas program here at TOO we highlighted Bad Santa, a film by the Weinstein brothers. The Catholic League has a number of posts on another Weinstein film, Philomena, which is currently in release. This brief comment notes several other anti-Christian movies by the Weinsteins:

[An ad for Philomena in the New York Times] gives high profile to a review by the Times’ Stephen Holden, which says, in part, that the film’s “political subtext” is its “comparison of the church’s oppression and punishment of unmarried sex…with homophobia and the United States government’s reluctance to deal with the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.”

This is a straightforward pitch to anti-Catholic bigots. The Weinsteins are no strangers to Catholic bashing, having made a good living off of it. In 1995, they offered “Priest,” a film featuring nothing but miscreant priests; I succeeded in getting the movie’s opening date moved from Good Friday. In 1998, they gave us “The Butcher Boy,” which starred Sinead O’Connor as a foul-mouthed Virgin Mary. In 1999, we were treated to “Dogma,” where the audience learned of a descendant of Mary and Joseph who works in an abortion clinic. In 2002, they released “40 Days and 40 Nights,” a film that ridiculed a Catholic for giving up sex for Lent. Also opening in 2002 was “The Magdalene Sisters,” a movie that smeared nuns. In 2003, “Bad Santa” opened for the holidays; Santa was cast as a chain-smoking, drunken, foul-mouthed, suicidal, sexual predator. In 2006, “Black Christmas” made a predictably dark statement about the holiday.

In 2013, the Weinsteins released “Philomena,” a tale about an Irish teenager who abandoned her out-of-wedlock son, and who, because of the good efforts of nuns, was adopted by an American couple. Of course, the movie maligns the nuns, as well as Catholic teachings.

It is the sexual maniacs in Hollywood who nurture a debased culture, one that breeds illegitimacy and AIDS. Yet the Weinsteins, and the Times, never stop blaming the Catholic Church, which counsels restraint. Thus have they inverted the victim and the victimizer.

That’s quite a list of movies, and I agree that the ascendant and now regnant culture of Hollywood and the left since the 1960s has generally championed a sexual dystopia, particularly noticeable in rates of illegitimacy which have skyrocketed over the last 50 years. Predictably, the destruction of cultural supports for high-investment parenting is poison for working class Whites and for Blacks and Latinos, with illegitimate birth being linked to every measure of pathology, from poor school performance to drug use, criminality, etc. But it is a culture where high-IQ types do just fine.

As in all other areas of U.S. society, such as the financial system, the culture is geared for the new elite. No one should be surprised at this. New elite. New culture that’s geared for them — a culture, that as Pat Buchanan notes

Grant Smith, writing at Antiwar.com provides an enlightening account of the nomination of Stanley Fischer as Vice-Chair of the Federal Reserve (“AIPAC’s Fed Candidate Stanley Fischer on a Warpath against Iran: Dual-citizen nominee’s lifetime benefit to Israel comes at a heavy cost to America“). When I first read that Fischer was a possibility, my only thought was something like “Can’t we find anyone who’s not Jewish to fill a post like that?” After all, the Chair of Federal Reserve has been Jewish since 1987, Janet Yellen, the present vice-chair, will likely be the next chair, and Yellen’s predecessor was Donald L. Kohn.

And one would think that appointing an Israeli citizen —and a high-level one at that (former head of the Israeli Central Bank and likely on a first-name basis with everyone who matters in Israel) — would raise all kinds of red flags about old-fashioned issues like dual loyalty.

But there is much more to the story. Fischer, it turns out, will be AIPAC”s man at the Fed.  Smith notes that

As Bank of Israel governor, Stanley Fischer played a central role in coordinating the implementation of AIPAC-generated sanctions against Iran—ostensibly over its nuclear program.  Stuart Levey, the head of the U.S. Treasury Department’s division for “Terrorism and Financial Intelligence,” an office created after heavy AIPAC lobbying, met often with Fischer in Israel alongside the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and chiefs of both the Mossad and Shin Bet to explore how to “supplement” UN sanctions and end-run Russian and Chinese opposition.[v]  The Levey-Fischer strategy was “to work outside the context of the Security Council to engage the private sector and let it know about the risks of doing business with Tehran” particularly against European banks that had only partially drawn back their business dealings with Iran.  In 2010, Israel dispatched Fischer to meet with Chinese and Russian “counterparts” in order to financially isolate Iran.[vi]

Smith’s phrase “ostensibly over its nuclear program” is beautifully suggestive. The fact is that Israel has many reasons to want a destructive war with Iran besides the putative nuclear weapons program—its support of Hezbollah, its alliance with Syria, its hostility toward Israel, and simply the fact that it is an energy-rich, technologically sophisticated neighbor with a population of around 75 million and regional ambitions. Israel would love to crush a rising rival power in the region before it becomes too difficult.

There is a strong presumption that Fischer would continue his pro-sanctions work as Vice-Chair of the Fed. Indeed, the Fed is already deeply involved.

That the Fed is a key player in Iran sanctions implementation is certainly no secret.  The Fed has been an equal partner in levying hundreds of millions in fines against foreign banks such as R.B.S, Barclays, Standard and Chartered and H.S.B.C. which were charged with violating the Iran sanctions regime.

Smith also notes the cost to America for implementing the AIPAC-inspired sanctions on Iran — something that is completely missing in U.S. media coverage, despite the obvious implications for the American economy:

Although AIPAC never mentions it, American exporters have been seriously hurt by sanctions on Iran and the punitive secondary boycott.  A coalition representing the US Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, Coalition for American Trade, the National Foreign Trade Council and others urged Congress not to enact sanctions provisions they estimated would cost $25 billion and 210,000 American jobs.  (PDF)  Keeping such a costly regime in place despite thawing relations and any hard evidence of an Iranian nuclear weaponization program has therefore required immense ongoing efforts by Israel lobbying groups.

Smith suggests other reasons why AIPAC would want Fischer at a top post in the Fed: To head off the burgeoning BDS movement by targeting U.S. bank accounts and freezing their financial flows, protecting the flow of U.S. aid to Israel, easing rules so that Israeli banks can acquire U.S. banks which would further entwine the economies of the two countries, and having top U.S. officials openly possess dual citizenship in the U.S. and Israel.

This last point bears elaboration. It is well-known that AIPAC vets government employees. Charles Freeman, prospective head of the National Intelligence Council until torpedoed by AIPAC, comes to mind.  True, there is no shortage of American Jews who can be trusted to follow the AIPAC line, including a long list of neoconservatives (e.g., Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, Schulsky, etc. in the run up to the Iraq war) who have shuttled between various government positions and the AIPAC infrastructure. Stuart Levey and David Cohen, who have headed the Terrorism and Financial Intelligence arm of the Treasury Department that enforces sanctions on Iran, are excellent examples.

As is Martin Indyk who is mentioned in the article. Indyk’s story is a good sign that concerns about dual loyalty have been absent for a very long time. Indyk was born in England in 1951, grew up in Australia and received his Ph.D. there , then lived in Israel where “he is said to have worked for right-wing Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir,” He then emigrated to the U.S. where, by 1982 he was working for AIPAC and from 1985–1993 was the president of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

This record of pro-Israel activism made him, despite his brief sojourn in the U.S., qualified him for high positions in the U.S. government — U.S. ambassador to Israel and Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs during the Clinton Administration. He became a U.S. citizen just 10 days before assuming these positions. As Ambassador to Israel he was investigated for security breaches (like other Jewish-American government officials (e.g., Kenneth Pollack and David Satterfield) and many neocons [Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Bryen, Douglas Feith, and Michael Ledeen; see here, p. 23ff]).

Is anyone so naive as to think that Indyk is a patriotic American with nothing but America’s best interests at heart?

Inkyk’s most recent appointment is as U.S. special envoy to the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations. As the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs notes, “Is this the equivalent of asking the wolf—and one with a long record of failure at that—to tend to the Middle East chicken coop?”

Given how easy it was for someone like Indyk to become a U.S. citizen and immediately rise to the top level of U.S. government posts dealing with Israel, the Lobby doesn’t have much to worry about. But how much more convenient it would be to have dual citizens in top positions in the U.S. and Israel. Smith suggests that AIPAC likely  “sees the Fischer appointment as an important test case to assess American tolerance for openly dual Israeli-American citizens running key U.S. federal agencies. “

This shows how far Zionism has come. In the early decades of the 20th century, most American Jews did not support Zionism because they feared it would lead to charges of dual loyalty. Now we have the prospect of U.S./Israeli dual citizens who have held very prominent positions in the Israeli government serve as high officials in the U.S. government that deal with issues deemed vital by Israel.  Smith suggests that former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. and historian Michael Oren might “someday lead the Near East division of the State Department,” or Israeli generals could be part of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Indeed, why not? There is not likely to be much of a problem in Congress, or any blowback on such appointments in the mainstream media—yet another example of how Jewish media influence

is a critical pillar of Jewish power. Of course, Fischer was careful to distance himself from current Israeli government policy in an effort to smooth over his long history of rabid Zionism beginning as a child in a Zionist youth organization in his native Africa. A statement by Fischer critical of the Netanyahu government was leaked by a former AIPAC lobbyist. But, as as Smith notes, Fischer “had every chance to pull U.S. and Israeli financial levers that could have forced Israel out of occupied territories or forced compliance with International law” but did nothing.”

The obvious conclusion is that Fischer would be a willing accomplice of AIPAC and the ethnonationalist right in Israel. And create a precedent for more such dual citizens in high places in the U.S. government.

The Israel Lobby, temporarily set back with the success of the Iran negotiations, has wasted no time in paving a new path to war via the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013. This bill is now being considered by the Senate, led by Bob Menendez, Chuck Schumer, and Mark Kirk, all staunch supporters of the Israel Lobby.

The bill has two noteworthy aspects. First, it would bar Iran from enriching any new uranium whatsoever. As everyone knows, this is a non-starter with Iran, so adopting the bill would guarantee that even tougher sanctions provided by the bill would kick in, putting Iran in an impossible situation, thus virtually ensuring the much desired war.

Secondly it puts huge pressure on the U.S. to go to war if Israel sees fit to attack Iran. The bill

 includes a non-binding provision that states that if Israel takes “military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran’s nuclear weapons program,”  the U.S. “should stand with Israel and provide, in accordance with the law of the United States and the constitutional responsibility of Congress to authorize the use of military force, diplomatic, military, and economic support to the Government of Israel in its defense of its territory, people, and existence.”

While legitimate arguments can be made in support of and against the legislation, your headline impugned Senator Menendez’s loyalty, insinuating that he is not acting in the best interest of the United States as he sees it. Running a photo of Sen. Robert Menendez speaking at the podium of an AIPAC event further implies that he was trying to “sabotage” the administration’s efforts on Iran for reasons related to Israel under pressure from American Jews. We are shocked that a version of the anti-Semitic theme that “Jews manipulate the U.S. Government” was boldly featured on your site.

Whether done intentionally or not, it is deeply troubling to see how easily even a well-respected mainstream media outlet like the Huffington Post can fail to see the ugly stereotype projected when the language of “sabotage” is combined with the image of an identifiably American Jewish organization known for its effectiveness in promoting U.S. political support for Israel. The charge of dual loyalty leveled against Jews has, for centuries, been a catalyst for scapegoating and vilifying Jews. It has no legitimate place in our society.

The charge of “age-old anti-Semitic canards” cuts off any rational, empirically based debate before it can start, which is exactly what the ADL wants. The charges themselves are portrayed as nothing but irrational anti-Semitism reflecting a medieval mindset. No need to discuss the evidence.

But the tactic works. At least partly because of the ADL’s activism, there were virtually no articles on the Jewish role in promoting the Iraq War in any of the major U.S. national newspapers or television media. The same can be said re Jewish influence on the media,  immigration policy, elite academic institutions: The topic of Jewish influence is simply off limits for rational discussion.

All of which reminds me of Andrew Joyce’s send-up of the canard strategy in the Marc Rich pardon case (“Justice Denied: Thoughts on Truth, ‘Canards’ and the Marc Rich Case, Parts One and Two“). As in the case of the Nuclear Free Iran Act of 2013, the defenders of Rich were quite liberal in their use of the canard strategy and its implications that Rich’s enemies were motivated by “anti-Semitism.” Rich’s defenders also pointed to a confluence of interests between the U.S. and Mr. Rich, based on Rich’s prodigious philanthropy, pretty much all of which was donated to Jewish causes. Foxman’s letter supporting Rich’s pardon pointed to Rich’s charity but didn’t explain how contributions to Jewish charities benefit U.S. taxpayers defrauded by Rich to the tune of $100 million; nor did he mention the $250,000 Rich contributed to the ADL—now that’s a real confluence of interests.

There is another parallel between the successful Marc Rich pardon campaign and the pressure for war with Iran. Elie Wiesel, the unlikely exemplar of Jewish moral authority, used his influence to lobby Bill Clinton on behalf of Rich (see Joyce’s article). In the present campaign, Wiesel was featured in full-page ads in the New York Times and the Washington Post paid for by Birthright Israel co-founder Michael Steinhardt and produced by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s  This World: The Values Network. (Andrew Joyce notes that Rich contributed $5 million to Birthright Israel.) Wiesel  uses his moral authority to encourage stronger sanctions on Iran and “the total dismantling of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure,” both of which, if pursued, would certainly leave Iran in a politically untenable position that would leave war the only option.

Jewish moral capital is at the root of both these strategies. This is obvious in trotting out Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel as a war advocate, but the effectiveness of the canard strategy depends ultimately on the fact that being charged with anti-Semitism still carries powerful moral clout (such that there is little public sympathy for those who lose their jobs for simply speaking the truth).

One wonders how long the power of Jewish moral capital can continue given that Israel’s behavior vis-à-vis the Palestinians is finally getting some meaningful international sanction. But one can be sure that the strategy will continue to be used exactly as long as it remains a useful strategy. Intellectual integrity has nothing to do with it.

It’s that time of year again. Time for Jewish angst about Christmas. The Tablet has a revealing article by Adam Chandler that gets at the Jewish view of the season (“All-Star Team of Jews Defiles Christmas in Billy Bob Thornton’s ‘Bad Santa’: How the Coen brothers and Terry Zwigoff helped create a holiday classic that angers gentiles“). Described as “the greatest Christmas movie of all time,”

ten years after its release, Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa, a rail whiskey blend of Brecht and Bukowski, has become a holiday standard. Brought to life by a Jew from Wisconsin (Zwigoff) and four Jewish brothers (two Coens and two Weinsteins), it is regarded as a classic send-up of Christmas culture gone awry. The crude, brilliant movie is a staple of Comedy Central’s December line-up.  …

With an assault of impiety, the film makes Christmastime in America seem an impossible place to be if you live at the margins. The way that message is conveyed throughout the movie, however, is more fluid than solid. After his introductory monologue, Willie stumbles into the alley behind the bar where, with the Chopin nocturne still lilting, he upchucks loudly into the snow. It’s a beautiful shot, retching Santa and all, that ends with the postcard appearance of the movie title in red lettering.

Uplifting stuff for the holidays. The artistic contribution of the Coen brothers is critical:

In an interview last year, director Terry Zwigoff explained how the Coen Brothers turned Bad Santa from holiday pastiche into scorched earth. “Like the kid would ask Santa, ‘Do you and Mrs. Santa ever think of having kids?’ And in the original script it was just, ‘No, thank God.’ And the Coens made that into, ‘No, thank the fuck Christ.’ That’s their gift. They have a gift for dialogue.”

Such an improvement! The gleeful desecration of all that is held dear by the hated and resented outgroup.

Catholic League President William Donahue expressed the attitude of the rest of America, noting

In a word association game, the mere mention of Santa to kids begets comments like ‘kind,’ ‘cheerful,’ and ‘loving.’ But the Santa in ‘Bad Santa’ is anything but: he is a chain-smoking, drunken, foul-mouthed, suicidal, sexual predator. He is shown soiling himself in Santa’s chair, vomiting in alleys, having sex with a woman bartender in a car, and performing anal sex on a huge woman in a dressing room. And his commentary in front of kids is replete with the ‘F-word.’

Indeed, IMBD reports that “The unrated version of the film furthers the record for the most profanities in a Christmas film, including 170 uses of “fuck”, 74 uses of “shit”, 31 uses of “ass”, 10 uses of “bitch”, and 1 use of “bastard”, in variable forms.”

Now that’s comedy!

And the best part for the Adam Chandlers of the world is that it doesn’t really have a Christmasy ending: “While Bad Santa jerks in the direction of a happy ending, there is little redemption to be had. After all, no one is asking that we get into the spirit of Christmas or channel its goodwill. For a Jew at Christmastime, it’s all we could ever want in a holiday movie.”

The following column on a scholarly book on the Jewish role in subverting Christmas ran last year around this time:

A new book, Joshua Eli Plaut’s A Kosher Christmas: ’Tis the Season to Be Jewish, documents what we have known all along: The Jews did indeed subvert Christmas.  This book deserves a full review, but Ethan Schwartz’s summary and comment (“Twas the night after Christmas“) deserve scrutiny. First the summary:

Jews have been the vanguard of an effort to “transform Christmastime into a holiday season belonging to all Americans,” without religious exclusivity.  The most important Jewish mechanisms of secularization are comedy and parody, for laughter undermines religious awe.  Take, for example, Hanukkah Harry from “Saturday Night Live”, who heroically steps in for a bedridden Santa by delivering presents from a cart pulled by donkeys named Moishe, Hershel, and Shlomo.  Remarkably, Hanukkah Harry has emerged as a real Santa-alternative for many American Jews.  Plaut sees such things not as attempts at assimilation but as an intentional subversion of Christmas traditions.  “Through these parodies,” he writes, “Jews could envision not having to be captivated by the allure of ubiquitous Christmas symbols.”  And it isn’t just Jews: for Americans in general, Jewish parody helps ensure that Christmas “not be taken too seriously” and that the celebrations of other traditions “be accorded equal respect and opportunity.”

There seem to be two messages here. One is the message of subversion utilizing ridicule among other methods. The other is that Jews are seen as high-mindedly making Christmas  ”into a holiday season belonging to all Americans.” The end result is that Christmas is not “taken too seriously” and the Christian religious aspect central to the traditional holiday is de-emphasized.

People who take their religion seriously do not allow their religion to be ridiculed. One need only think of the Muslim reactions to cartoons ridiculing Mohammed. The fact that Jews have been able to ridicule Christianity without any serious negative consequences is an important marker of Jewish power and an equally strong indication of the decline of Christian religious belief. I suspect that the organized Jewish community would react in outrage if non-Jews ridiculed religious Judaism. Indeed, any criticism of Jews as Jews is off limits in the mainstream media. (A topical short list of verboten topics: the loyalties of neocon Jews and their role in promoting the war in Iraq, the Jewish aspect of the Ivy League admissions scandal, how Jewish control of Hollywood influences media content.)

Schwartz doesn’t quarrel with Plaut’s evidence, but wonders if it’s good for the Jews that such a book be written:

There is something disconcerting about this thesis, summoning up classic anti-Semitic images of conspiracy and sabotage.  Without a trace of irony, Plaut recounts incidents in which fundamentalist Christian groups complained that “certain Americans, particularly Jews, were trying to take the ‘Christ’ out of Christmas.”  He adds that “anti-Semitic comments often ensued.”  Those Christian fundamentalists might well feel vindicated by Plaut’s argument; yet Plaut is unfazed by this connection, and rightly so.  It is not inherently anti-Christian, he recognizes, to oppose Christianity’s domination of a secular democracy.  If Jews have helped to make American society more open, they should be proud of it.

So Jews subverted Christmas but their motives were pure and idealistic. [Somehow Adam Chandler’s pure idealism fails to come through in his comments on Bad Santa.] But such an account ignores the Jewish role in conceptualizing America as a proposition nation—a major topic of The Culture of Critique. The Jewish stress on cultural pluralism (which has now morphed into multiculturalism) was an explicit rejection of the ethnocultural strand of American identity, an important part of which was Christianity. (Indeed, until the recent wave of immigration resulting from the 1965 law, Jews constituting 2–3 percent of the population, were the only identifiable American group that was not Christian.) Jews were central to building a wall between religion and the public square which has resulted in the “war on Christmas” that we still see raging. Jews were also central to changing U.S. immigration policy to be open to all the peoples of the world, again with an ideology that America is merely a set of abstract principles and has no ethnic or cultural core; therefore it should be open to all peoples and these peoples should be able to retain their own culture as part of the American mosaic.

I realize that many good people shy away from saying it, but the reality is that Jews have very aggressively pursued policies that benefit them and are opposed to the interests of the traditional people of America and the West. And because Jews attained status as an intellectual and media elite, they have been able to have a very large effect on public policy and even on the attitudes of non-Jews.

Plaut emphasizes the difference between the very aggressive behavior of Eastern European immigrants with their hatred of Christianity contrasted with the German Jews who arrived in the mid-19th century and “embraced the holiday.” It’s an important distinction, at least in the American context. But in any case, Plaut’s description of the motives of the Eastern European as stemming from their hatred of Christianity hardly paints them as idealistic crusaders on behalf of an open society.  It bears repeating once again that Jews react with hostility to the idea that Israel should not have a Jewish ethnocultural core while they have led the campaign against the idea that America and the West have any ethnocultural core. As with their promoting non-White, non-Christian immigration, their advocacy has nothing to do with ideals of moral universalism but everything to do with pursuing what’s good for the Jews, motivated by Jewish hatreds toward the traditional people and cultures of the West. The war on Christmas is thus a central example of the theme of Jews as a hostile elite.

Mondoweiss excerpted a review of Max Blumenthal’s Goliath by Jerome Slater, including:

[Max] Blumenthal quotes Akiva Eldar, one of Israel’s greatest journalists, who sums up the findings of Israeli public opinion surveys: “Israeli Jews’ consciousness is characterized by a sense of victimization, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanization of the Palestinians, and insensitivity to their suffering.”

Well, we’ve known that for quite some time, but Slater’s point is that nothing will happen until American Jews pressure their government. Unfortunately, this will not happen “primarily because so many Jewish and other American ‘pro-Israelis’ … are impervious to the facts.” In Slater’s view, then, Blumenthal ends up preaching to the choir because his book is more. or less excluded from discussion in the mainstream media (apart from a hostile review by Eric Alterman in The Nation which, sadly, is part of the MSM).

This highlights once again the power of Zionism in the mainstream media (and why aren’t we hearing outrage in the MSM about the ethnic cleansing of the  Bedouins to make room for housing for Jews?). Even if Slater is right that the book was excluded for its strident tone, one has the feeling that the main problem is simply the facts that it presents. (Even Eric Alterman agrees that the book is “mostly technically accurate.”)

The reality is that a “siege mentality” goes a long way to explain Jewish political behavior in the U.S. as well as Israel — their fear of and loathing toward an America dominated by White Christians. As Elliott Abrams has stated, the American Jewish community “clings to what is at bottom a dark vision of America, as a land permeated with anti-Semitism and always on the verge of anti-Semitic outbursts” (p. 86).

When you feel you are under siege, anything is justified, and it is impossible to think critically about your behavior.  The blinders are on and there’s no way to remove them. The Simon Wiesenthal Center sends out emails reassuring its Jewish customers with the phrase, “The light of hope, the light of freedom, the light of Jewish values and solidarity.” In their own impregnable self-image, Jews have higher ethical standards than anyone else—a light unto the nations. Israel is a paragon of moral behavior, no matter what the rest of the world thinks.

This reminded me of an article by Kim Chernin, writing in Tikkun in 2002 (discussed here, p. 11). She wonders why so many Jews “have trouble being critical of Israel.” She finds several obstacles to criticism of Israel:

• A conviction that Jews are always in danger, always have been, and therefore are in danger now. Which leads to:

• 2. The insistence that a criticism is an attack and will lead to our destruction. Which is rooted in:

• 3. The supposition that any negativity towards Jews (or Israel) is a sign of anti-Semitism and will (again, inevitably) lead to our destruction. . . .

• 6. An even more hidden belief that a sufficient amount of suffering confers the right to violence. . . .

• 7. The conviction that our beliefs, our ideology (or theology), matter more than the lives of other human beings.

Chernin describes how this plays out:

We keep a watchful eye out, we read the signs, we detect innuendo, we summon evidence, we become, as we imagine it, the ever-vigilant guardians of our people’s survival. Endangered as we imagine ourselves to be; endangered as we insist we are, any negativity, criticism, or reproach, even from one of our own [like Blumenthal], takes on exaggerated dimensions; we come to perceive such criticism as a life-threatening attack. The path to fear is clear. But our proclivity for this perception is itself one of our unrecognized dangers. Bit by bit, as we gather evidence to establish our perilous position in the world, we are brought to a selective perception of that world. With our attention focused on ourselves as the endangered species, it seems to follow that we ourselves can do no harm. . . . When I lived in Israel I practiced selective perception. I was elated by our little kibbutz on the Lebanese border until I recognized that we were living on land that had belonged to our Arab neighbors. When I didn’t ask how we had come to acquire that land, I practiced blindness. . . .

Wherever we look, we see nothing but impending Jewish destruction. . . . I was walking across the beautiful square in Nuremberg a couple of years ago and stopped to read a public sign. It told this story: During the Middle Ages, the town governing body, wishing to clear space for a square, burned out, burned down, and burned up the Jews who had formerly filled up the space. End of story. After that, I felt very uneasy walking through the square and I eventually stopped doing it. I felt endangered, of course, a woman going about through Germany wearing a star of David. But more than that, I experienced a conspicuous and dreadful self-reproach at being so alive, so happily on vacation, now that I had come to think about the murder of my people hundreds of years before. After reading that plaque I stopped enjoying myself and began to look for other signs and traces of the mistreatment of the former Jewish community. If I had stayed longer in Nuremberg, if I had gone further in this direction, I might soon have come to believe that I, personally, and my people, currently, were threatened by the contemporary Germans eating ice cream in an outdoor cafe in the square. How much more potent this tendency for alarm must be in the Middle East, in the middle of a war zone! . . .

This is intense ethnocentrism with a peculiarly Jewish twist—ethnic paranoia might be a better term. Even when things seem really good, death and destruction are only moments away, and that justifies taking any and all measures to ensure the safety of the group. Every event is seen through the eyes of the group—an extreme form of collectivism foreign to the Western tradition of individualism.

Another aspect that fuels Jewish ethnic paranoia on display here is a very long historical memory that colors everything. Events that happened centuries ago color their current perceptions. This powerful sense of group endangerment and historical grievance is associated with a hyperbolic style of Jewish thought that runs repeatedly through Jewish rhetoric. Chernin’s comment that “any negativity, criticism, or reproach, even from one of our own [like Bluenthal’s Goliath], takes on exaggerated dimensions” is particularly interesting. In the Jewish mind, all criticism must be suppressed because not to do so would be to risk another Holocaust. As Peter Novick noted in his The Holocaust in American Life (p. 178), the general attitude among Jews is that “There is no such thing as overreaction to an anti-Semitic incident, no such thing as exaggerating the omnipresent danger. Anyone who scoffed at the idea that there were dangerous portents in American society hadn’t learned ‘the lesson of the Holocaust.’”

So when John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt publish The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy, a scholarly effort explicitly directed at securing Israel’s long-term interests, it is greeted with charges that it is a reincarnation of the Protocols by the Zionist Organization of America and even by J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami.

This is the same mentality behind the push by Jewish organizations for laws against “hate crimes” construed as anything that makes a group feel uncomfortable. No criticism is allowable, no matter how well-founded or well-intentioned. In Australia, the new attorney general wants to rescind hate crime legislation, “especially … provisions that make it unlawful to offend or insult people on the basis of their race.” Jewish organizations, as usual, are leading the opposition (“Racism is not free speech“). For Jewish groups, there is no real difference between well-reasoned honest criticism and irrational ravings. All criticism must be suppressed as vilification and “racism.”

Of course, this is really just yet another facet of Jewish ethnocentrism, with a strong dose of aggressiveness. That is, Jewish groups are very aggressively pursuing their interests, in this case removing a powerful weapon from those who would defend the traditional peoples and cultures of Australia and other Western societies—the weapon of being able to criticize the many peoples who are invading their lands (e.g., talk about IQ and immigration) and to openly discuss conflicts of interest between Jews and the traditional people and culture of the West which obviously have a bearing on the long term  White survival and well-being.

In other words, Jewish ethnic paranoia is quite adaptive because it results in vigorous attempts to remove the weapon of simply being able to have open and honest discussions, even in a society that prides itself in the  right of free speech. Preventing such discussions completely (as in the case of Australia) or pushing them underground (as in the case of the U.S. with its teetering First Amendment), means that reasonable discussions of issues like dual loyalty (possible in Israel but not the  U.S.) or the Jewish ethnic interest in promoting multiculturalism are suppressed. As Wilmot Robertson and Joe Sobran noted long ago, the greatest power that  Jews have is to prevent discussions of Jewish power, to the point that even positive assessments of Jewish contributions, such as Joe Biden’s recent faux pas, do not have much media penetration.

Definitely a tough nut to crack. And it reminds us once again that a little bit of a similar psychological profile would result in a dramatic turnaround in the fortunes of Whites.