The left now hates Israel far more than the Arabs do
MbS [Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman] versus Jeremy Corbyn symbolizes these two tectonic shifts, as does Israel now enjoying better relations with Egypt than with Sweden. The president of Chad turns up in Israel but a singer from New Zealand does not. Israel’s athletes compete in the United Arab Emirates but get banned in Spain. Muslims show increasing indifference to the breakdown in Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy, but Leftists express growing anger over it.
Pipes lists some reasons: “a mix of Palestinian public relations expertise and continued antisemitism” accounting for the increase in hatred for Israel on the left, and the Arab world’s growing dependence on Israel’s technology accounting for some of their increased tolerance for Israel. But I’ll add some more reasons.
Fueling some of the left’s hatred we have the fact that decades ago Israel was a very leftist country and it has been tacking to the right for a long time now. So Israel is a political changer of sorts, and political changers often raise special ire. What’s more, the left has become increasingly enamored of third-world victim groups such as the Palestinians and their propaganda, as well as their tendency towards violence and terrorism, which is seen as evidence of their terrible plight (“one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”).
Fueling some of the Arab world’s growing tolerance of Israel we have the fact that the Palestinians have long been unpopular among the leaders of their Arab brethren. They were used as pawns to justify aggression towards Israel, but never because the Arab world was inordinately fond of them (see, for example, Black September as well as the Palestinian history in Lebanon). Also, after several wars against Israel, the Arab world most likely realized that conventional warfare was not going to succeed. Maybe at this point they’re just tired of that particular fight, and have realized that there is something to be gained from a more peaceful relationship with the most successful nation in the region.
Arafat’s legacy, Fatah, and factions are still givers. Rational and practical change with reasoned motives. Emigration reform reduces collateral damage at both ends of the bridge and throughout. And, ironically, because Israelis are nationalists, tend their own garden, and share the fruits of their labor.
The more Muslims rape European women, the more their convoluted logic drives Europeans to hate Israel. Anti-Semitism never made any sense, because it never had to. Defective thinking and false history led Western Europe to voluntarily accept conquest by a vastly inferior culture – due in part to their envy and hatred of the Jews.
When the demographic conquest of Europe is complete, our former allies will potentially be an enemy orders of magnitude worse than the Soviets. Ironically, what could save us is the chronic animosity and blood lust of Muslims even toward fellow Muslims. So consumed are they by their Koran-inspired urge to demonization and genocide, scant provocation is required to trigger intramural mayhem.
Good analysis. The point about Israel’s political change is a very good insight. I follow this issue very closely, but had not given enough weight to that. Thanks!
Fueling some of the left’s hatred we have the fact that decades ago Israel was a very leftist country and it has been tacking to the right for a long time now.
That is key. Israel was supported early on by the Soviets and run by Socialists. Kibbutz were communist in practice. Then they elected Likud, a religious and conservative party; both anathema to the left.
Then they won the Six Day War, beating a Soviet client state. The Palestinians are a kleptocrat state relying on terrorism to simulate a foreign policy.
European anti-Semitism is reviving and the Jews are blamed for the Holocaust. They have always been too entrepreneurial and successful for the mediocrities that run Europe. America did not care and welcomed them but the political left is getting more and more European in outlook. I am old enough to remember anti-Semitism of the common variety. My father was very much like “Dirty Harry,” who hated Jews, Polacks, Guineas, Bohunks, and Ni**ers.
Other than my father, my first encounter (probably before I saw it in him) with anti-Semitism was with our black nursemaid. She resented shopping at all the Jewish owned shops in Chicago’s “Bronzeville.” I think this is an old story with blacks going back over 100 years. These days, the Jews have been replaced by Koreans who own the shops and liquor stores in black parts of Los Angeles. The blacks now hate Koreans.
And, of course, the left has relabelled Jews as white; therefore recipients of white privilege; therefore evil and racist. Double whammy; white and killed Jesus.
That is key. Israel was supported early on by the Soviets and run by Socialists. Kibbutz were communist in practice. Then they elected Likud, a religious and conservative party; both anathema to the left. Then they won the Six Day War, beating a Soviet client state. The Palestinians are a kleptocrat state relying on terrorism to simulate a foreign policy.
You’re out of sequence.
Israel won the Six-Day War in 1967. The Labor Party was the pre-eminent force in the politics of the Yishuv and then the State of Israel from 1930 until 1977, holding the prime minister’s chair and the lion’s share of executive portfolios. From 1977 to 2000, the Labor Party remained competitive, frequently able to assemble ministries after elections. The Labor Party as we speak has not formed a government in 19 years and has been displaced as the primary opposition party. Not merely the nationalist bloc, but the social-liberal bloc, and the religious bloc now have more public support than does the Labor Party. Israel’s political spectrum now looks like Poland’s.
The left’s antagonism to Israel I tend to doubt has much to do with the internal dynamics of Israeli politics and a great deal to do with the self-aggrandizing quality of the left. Fifty years ago, the left in the United States had a serious if debatable menu of policies it wished to pursue. The only hint of that nowadays is the work of someone like Harold Pollack. In our own time, it’s an upraised middle finger 24/7, and nothing more elevated than that.
Other than my father, my first encounter (probably before I saw it in him) with anti-Semitism was with our black nursemaid. She resented shopping at all the Jewish owned shops in Chicago’s “Bronzeville.” I think this is an old story with blacks going back over 100 years. These days, the Jews have been replaced by Koreans who own the shops and liquor stores in black parts of Los Angeles. The blacks now hate Koreans.
You had to go back 70 years to locate a black in your social circle who resented Jews. Have you ever met in meatspace a black who actually did hate Koreans? C’mon, the worst elements in the Los Angeles slums aren’t exemplars of the black population generally.
the Jews are blamed for the Holocaust. They have always been too entrepreneurial and successful
Jew privilege. Deja vu.
The left’s antagonism to Israel I tend to doubt has much to do with the internal dynamics of Israeli politics and a great deal to do with the self-aggrandizing quality of the left.
But Israel became winners and that does not appeal to the left. The political shift right, even if I got the order wrong, is the other part.
You had to go back 70 years to locate a black in your social circle who resented Jews.
No, I said it was my first experience. Now it is all around us.
As for Koreans, read the LA Times for heaven’s sake ! There was a Korean store owner who stopped a black kid from shoplifting and that set off riots. The Korean shop owners during the Rodney King riots were on top of their stores with rifles. Today, they would all be arrested.
The Korean shop owners during the Rodney King riots were on top of their stores with rifles. Today, they would all be arrested.
I don’t know if it still applies, but there was a time when the job with the lowest life expectancy was Korean grocers. I once had a classmate in med school whose father was murdered, and it wasn’t by Jews
There is a Korean grocer with a shop in San Pedro CA, across the street from section 8 housing and she has a one inch thick plexiglass window in front of the register. I used to buy beer from her when I had my sailboat there.
> You’re out of sequence.
I think so too. The Soviets stopped supporting Israel in the 1950’s. The reasons had more to do with the cold war and supporting the Arab states to counteract American influence in the region than antisemitism. There is also the suggestion that the Soviets were worried about the loyalties of the Jewish members of the Party. ISTR that in Bulgaria some party members were actually executed for Zionism.
More? Less? Equally? Perhaps? Exactly? Sometimes? Maybe yes, maybe no?
Hey, why split hairs? Let’s sit back and enjoy the gestalt!!
https://www.memri.org/tv/french-algerian-activist-houria-bouteldja-fight-philo-semitism-islamophobia-zionism
“The Soviets stopped supporting Israel in the 1950’s.”
There was an article in one of the Jewish journals, either Tablet or Mosaic, that said the Soviets had been very cool towards Zionism but then gave Israel crucial support when it was really needed, right around the time of its founding in 1948. And then within a decade ditched Israel to cozy up to the Arabs.
I think the anti-Zionism is more fitting with Communist ideology plus the obvious reason that the Arabs had all the oil, so the question is why did the Soviets help Israel at all? My two cents (still overpriced) is that they wanted to stick it to Britain.
“…article…”
Probably this (by Martin Kramer):
https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/2017/11/who-saved-israel-in-1947/
No, I said it was my first experience. Now it is all around us.
Where? My encounters with black anti-semitism in meatspace sum to zero. I lived for more than four decades in New York State, which has ample populations of blacks and Jews. You have characters like Herbert Daughtry in extraparliamentary politics and Albert Vann in the state legislature. Few people are active in politics. That aside, you could fault Daughtry or Vann for anti-semitism, but that would be missing the larger point. They trade in bilious nonsense across the board.
As for Koreans, read the LA Times for heaven’s sake ! There was a Korean store owner who stopped a black kid from shoplifting and that set off riots. The Korean shop owners during the Rodney King riots were on top of their stores with rifles. Today, they would all be arrested.
There’s a disorderly criminal element in the black population and it has some signature features in Los Angeles. That’s completely alien to the world of the nurse’s aide in Omaha.
My encounters with black anti-semitism in meatspace sum to zero
Not even Jesse Jackson and “Hymietown ?
You have led a sheltered life. Ever heard of Louis Farrakhan ?
Not even Jesse Jackson and “Hymietown ?
I’m not one of JJ’s neighbors, so he’s not in my meatspace. Yes, I’ve heard of Louis Farrakhan. He grew up in Boston lives in Chicago. I haven’t set foot in Boston or Chicago since 1981.
There are some quite consequential cultural problems in the black population I wish would go away. Highly localized antagonisms (contra Koreans in South Central LA or contra Jews in Crown Heights) are unsightly, but they are not priorities. At the time of the LA riots, there must have been a dozen blacks working in my office in Rochester. At break time we talked about work or about family matters, not about Koreans or anything else abstract from our daily lives.
Art, you are sheltered.
The neighborhood where I grew up is now so crime ridden that blacks are leaving.
It was an idyllic place to grow up.
My point about Farrakhan was that I doubt there are that many Quran scholars among his followers. Lots of Jew haters though,.
Ah yes, Art, blacks in Rochester NY: There was a massive black riot in 1964; they burned down their own dwellings, block upon block.
Mind you, Rochester at that time was one of the weathiest cities per capita in the US due to Kodak and young Xerox stocks’ appreciation. The RINO city fathers hired Saul Alinsky (!) to counsel them on how to rectify the city’s woes. Nothing good came of that, of course, and Rochester has since slumped into the morass that afflicts all of upstate NY under the leadership of Democrats like the Cuomos.
Kindly cut out your use of “meatspace”. It is vulgar and reeks of personal cleverness.
As to Jews and blacks, consider the 9th Congressional district of Tennessee (Memphis). Its Congressman is Steve Cohen, Jewish, representing a population that is 66% black. He is as Leftist as they come, and his predecessor, the black Harold Ford, Jr, looks very virtuous in comparison.
Cohen seems to be the flip side of the coin that has Obama on the obverse. He is white, representing a large black majority; Obama is black, with a large white majority.
Just one man’s opinion: I think you have made an excellent point, Neo, about Israel’s initial embrace of socialism and its successful transformation into a sophisticated capitalist economy. The left has a long memory and is very good at holding grudges. Leftist mentors of old have embedded into their students their resentment toward Israel for betraying the left wing cause, causing this resentment to live on to this day and expressing itself in many forms. That the abandonment of socialism has been successful is the salt in the already existing wound. It is too bad this point is made so infrequently.
I spend some part of my internet time traveling in much worse neighborhoods than this and particularly in recent years, I am seeing a sharp uptick in blatant antisemitism. If a weed grows somewhere, if a window breaks somewhere, if a puppy dies somewhere, somehow a Jew is to blame. You can count on a certain crowd to show up, in predictable “3-2-1” fashion, landing on any given thread like a locust swarm and turning it into a creepy Jew hatefest. Normal people – such as they are on these sorts of sites – often scatter and the thread dies.
Is this because ever-present Jew-hate quietly hid in the shadows until WWII became a barely understood part of dusty history to the latest generation? Is this in large part due to internationalization of interactive media? I ask the latter because, having grown up in a region where I never heard of any living person with an issue about Jews, I soon began to encounter postings – often in European or culturally Europhilic forums – which featured what I came to realize was a deep-set hate of Jews for being Jews.
I can try to reason why this is occurring, but I simply don’t understand how some people can invest so much time, energy and emotion into bizarre and objectively irrational hatred.
Barry, thanks for the link. While I have only skimmed it for now I don’t think it is the same article but it seems to go into much more detail than the one I read. There were probably several such pieces this year on the occasion of Israel’s 70th anniversary.
One point to remember is that while the ascendancy of Likud and the decline of Labor have undoubtedly reinforced leftist hostility to Israel, that hostility began before Israel’s turn to the right.
My encounters with black anti-semitism in meatspace sum to zero
Definitely greater than zero for me. The first, in fact, was in the 1960’s when someone invited a Black Muslim to speak at my school. He was quite open about his hatred of Jews; it was an important part of his talk.
Fueling some of the left’s hatred we have the fact that decades ago Israel was a very leftist country and it has been tacking to the right for a long time now.
and
That is key. Israel was supported early on by the Soviets and run by Socialists. Kibbutz were communist in practice.
I have read that this infuriated American leftists, who felt betrayed (sic) by the widespread abandonment of the kibbutz life and other aspects of socialism. That they would indeed be furious that other people freely chose a different way of life is entirely in keeping with the leftist mindset–with which I have had entirely too much contact.
I think it is fruitless to try to understand bizarre or irrational thinking such as anti-Semitism, as fruitless as trying to rationally comprehend any kind of delusional thinking.
The odd thing is that while anti-Semitism has been a feature of Leftism in many places, many Jews (and most in the USA) incline in that same Leftward direction. Kind of like moths flirting with candle flames. See the song “Julius and Ethel” of the Rosenbergs’ innocence due in part to McCarthyism, by Bob Dylan, born Zimmerman: http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/dylan/julius_and_ethel.htm
Remember Joe Lieberman? He was effusive in giving verbal thanks to God for the opportunity to be a VP candidate, more than I can recall any (nominal) Christian candidate in either party doing. That may have offended the Godless Dems. After the election loss, the Party had zip to do with him despite his very liberal Senate domestic voting record. He ran successfully for re-election to his Senate seat, but as an independent, not as a Dem. Had to. Dems ran a Dem against him in the CT primary. Against a Dem VP candidate!
“…more than the Arabs do…” is of course a fairly serious generalization.
Should probably be: “…more than the Arab governments do…”
which, actually should probably be fine tuned (aka corrected) to: “…more than SOME Arab governments do…”
Those countries such as Egypt and Jordan, which have de facto peace treaties with Israel are in fact replete with Jew hatred and hatred of the State of Israel. No, it’s not true of everybody in those countries—in fact, some Egyptians and Jordanians are quite friendly—but unfortunately, they are a rather small minority.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/jordan-insists-it-respects-peace-deal-after-minister-walks-on-israeli-flag/
But one is supposed to ignore all that and focus on the “peace”—i.e., the treaties, which have managed to stand up, though the one with Jordan is starting to unravel, officially. One might insist that this is all rather strange, since Israel is instrumental in helping defend the Kingdom of Jordan; but that fact does nothing to enhance King Abdullah’s popularity with his subjects.
al-Sisi, similarly has to walk a fine line; but he has more leeway to act in what he sees is Egypt’s interest; and if Israel is helping the Egyptian military clean up the Sinai peninsula, well so be it.
(The same disconnect, by the way, could be said to exist between King Mohammed VI of Morocco and his subjects, though there is no official treaty between Morocco and Israel. Nonetheless, Morocco, mostly due to Mohammed’s father, had decent relations with the Jewish State, and this has continued for the most part during the current king’s rule.)
No, things don’t always make sense in the way one might want them to.
Regarding Soviet support for the creation of the State of Israel in 1947-9, that astonishing aspect of Soviet diplomatic history took place, in fact during a very, very brief window, and it was intended, as mentioned above, to cause maximum discomfort to Britain and to the West in general. It was during this period that Greece was almost subverted, Yugoslavia was Communist (though ultimately Tito proved an anti-Stalin maverick), Masaryk was just defenestrated and the Iron Curtain was “descending”. Austria, too, was in danger (keep in mind that Vienna is more easterly than Prague (SE to be exact). China was communist; and Iran, too, was in the throes of Communist ferment during that time, as was SE Asia.
Whatever his reasoning, Stalin voted in favor of the partition of Palestine in November ’47, and gave the green light for Czechoslovakia to surreptitiously provide the Israeli army with desperately needed weapons for the war that soon followed.
Nonetheless, while there were pro-Stalin elements among the Israel kibbutzim, together with a small but active Israeli Communist Party (the leader of which was one of the signers of Israel’s Declaration of Independence), the government coalition of the nascent state, led by the socialist leader Ben-Gurion, quickly made it crystal clear, following Israel’s victory in the War of 1948-9 (War of Independence for Israel, “naqba” for the Palestinians), that Israel would orient itself not toward Moscow, thank you very much, but toward the West. Whereupon, the window shut tight and Stalin reverted to form, with Soviet media organs criticizing the new state relentlessly as part of the criminal West; and most infamously, with the “Doctor’s Plot” kangaroo trial held in Prague in the early 1950s, which resulted in the execution of Jewish doctors.
Soviet anti-Zionist agitation was vicious, vociferous and non-stop, and often blended seamlessly into Anti-Semitism. The Soviets, of course, were actively involved in arming Israel’s neighbors and goading them into war with Israel, going so far as to assist in the planning those wars as well as in some cases, sending Soviet personnel to fight (sub-rosa).
So what deus-ex-machina, if deus-ex-machina it is, can explain Soviet policy leading up to Israel’s creation?
Barry:
Thanks for that.
Dems ran a Dem against him in the CT primary. Against a Dem VP candidate!
Typically, the Democrat candidate was a trust fund baby whose father was a JP Morgan partner.
Traditional anti-Semitism was based on the Christian story of “Christ killers” but that morphed into hostility on two bases. One was that Jews did not intermarry and kept their dietary and other laws separate from the ruling majority. The second was that Jews, partly as a result of Christian laws forbidding property ownership, were too successful at the only trades left them, money lending and jewelry. Usury laws forbade Christians lending money.
In England, about the 14th century, Jews ended up in trouble because irresponsible nobles borrowed money they could not repay. Jews were not allowed to foreclose on property and ended up being expelled from England.
Greg Cochran, in his book, “The 10,000 year explosion.” postulates that Ashkenazi Jews evolved high IQs from the money lending tradition. He has a whole chapter on it.
More problems from being too smart.
Paul Johnson, in his “A History of the Jews” proposes that Jews invented Capitalism and the stock company as a way to transmit assets that mighty be necessary to quickly move if a pogrom threatened.
Ferdinand and Isabella financed their Armada and the exploration of the New World by borrowing from Jewish lenders. When the Spanish treasury was faced with default, they commanded all Jews to either convert to Christianity or leave the country. Jews could not easily (!) take land they owned along, so the wandering Jew in Europe, which Chaucer (predating F & I by a century) notes in one of his tales, long required highly portable assets easily hidden from authorities and thieves. Precious gems sewn into garment hems were key.
Source: Paul Johnson’s “A History of the Jews”, a fine work, as all of his are.
Growing Arab acceptance of Israel boils down to a four-letter word:
Iran
Growing leftist hatred is due to the left’s (mostly European left’s) desire to finish the work of Hitler, who was the ideal leftist – LGBT, vegetarian, Pro-Palestinian, self-proclaimed Socialist, persecutor of Christianity, and allied with Islam.
Mike K, it is more likely that non-Jewish Europeans, by channelling all those with a talent for abstract thought into nominally celibate professions during the middle ages, ended up selecting against genes that were not selected against in jewish populations (Rabbis were allowed — indeed encouraged — to have lots of children). Monks, nuns, and priests ran the European schools and universities during the middle ages, and you typically joined the church to make a living doing that sort of thing. It was actually quite a reasonable offer for the times — in return for being nominally celibate your superiors made all the big decisions and you never had to wonder where your next meal was coming from. So, quite possibly, jewish “intelligence” is the way all Europeans were before the catholic church got involved in the act.
This would, by the way, also explain the higher average IQ of east asians, who evolved at the same latitudes as Europeans, suggesting that, everything else being equal, native Europeans started out with the same average IQ levels. The catholic church was a mostly European institution during the middle ages…
My own sense is that the American and European left have become the most reactionary forces on Earth. They cling to anti-modern belief systems – Marxism, deep ecology, romanticism – with a religious tenacity. Reactionaries have always been willing to let anti-Semitism into their big tent. All the more so when they crave the acceptance of the Muslims they have invited to their countries.
it is more likely that non-Jewish Europeans, by channelling all those with a talent for abstract thought into nominally celibate professions during the middle ages, ended up selecting against genes that were not selected against in jewish populations
Interesting speculation. Have you read Cochran’s book ? He adds that the pressure of persecution that resulted in higher IQs may also have driven harmful mutations, like Tay Sachs. He has a whole chapter on that topic.
You might also read Joel Mokyr’s books on the actual flourishing of invention during the Middle Ages. They were not a period of intellectual stagnation as is often alleged. The absence of patent law meant that most inventions were anonymous.
A long-ago reading of a book on Israel’s kibbutzim generally concluded several things that are anathema to the Left (IIRC)
1. women who are given a choice between driving tractors and raising the kids overwhelmingly choose to stay in the nursery rather than the field.
2. “from each..to each” has the same free-loader effect and negative consequences that the Plymouth Colony famously discovered.
(we all know the story, so I link Slate’s “debunking” which, read closely, is nitpicking of the “literally but not seriously” fact-checking style the Left’s media is now known for)
https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/11/thanksgiving-socialism-the-strange-and-persistent-right-wing-myth-that-thanksgiving-celebrates-the-pilgrims-discovery-of-capitalism.html
3. completely joint ownership requires a hardheaded, authoritarian implementation of the rules, even if said rules are communally determined and the leadership democratically selected.
FWIW, the LDS Church’s early foray into communitarianism, called the United Order, also ran into the same problems, which are caused by human frailty and economic reality. It is notable that three groups with high religious / ideological motivations to make the system work still could not do so, which is why Lenin went straight to the Authoritarian part without going through the Communitarian Democracy stage at all (he just talked, in public, as if they had).
4) a non-economic and unexpected consequence of kibbutz family life and raising all the kids together is that, viewing each other as brothers and sisters, the kids wouldn’t marry within the kibbutz; this same effect may be behind the common tribal systems of Native Americans and others that clans had to marry outside, and often the linked clans were specified, to maximize genetic diversity (although they didn’t call it that).
“…pressure of persecution…”
Seems a bit fanciful.
More likely, such diseases were the result of generations of in-breeding (and we’re talking of very long periods).
Before the negative genetic ramifications of intra-family marriages became more widely understood, first-cousin marriages in Judaism were permitted (even encouraged) and were not uncommon.
Moreover, in small villages (“shtetls” in Yiddish), and even within a larger, if circumscribed, region there was often a relatively limited gene pool.
Occam’s razor would seem to point in this direction (though I’m no expert in this particular field).
Hating Israel was a nice litmus test when it was all about Arab Nationalism, the money and power of OPEC, and Arab leaders understood that keeping the worst tendencies of Islam at bay was the only way to keep their power/position. It wasn’t really about hating Israel per se, and more about having something to create solidarity among nations that in many ways, had little in common in terms of goals or the routes to hold on to power. And then getting to be the Arab World’s leader by being the one who was funding Hamas et al. and demonstrating that they were the one’s proving their loyalty to the idea of Arab Nationalism (think shades of wanting to be a modern day Nasser who could show up the West).
The way the Brits divided up the Arab World into different nations may have been ignorant/brutal/imperialist, but it worked in terms of ending the constant fisticuffs. Then Iran demonstrated what would happen if you let the religious element take control, and Arab nations doubled-down on squashing their own religious elements, why else would Sadat take the money?
Iraq, for all that you may hate Saddam Hussein, kept Iran at bay for a decade with the Iran-Iraq War. But when the US went in with its shock and awe hubris and decided to stick around (that Bush I at least knew better than to do), we managed only to upset the secular-ish apple cart in the name of spreading democracy and opened a Pandora’s Box of Islam’s worst tendencies. (Never mind that thinking people not blinded by getting their article as the cover story on the Weekly Standard or National Review understood that path dependency meant that was a pipe dream, you cannot just plop down institutions into a place that local cultural habits do not support; you can only get there through development over time, if even). Thus now there is no Arab Nationalism, instead, there is whatever the current hardline religious group that has the most British pudding fed martyrs to act like the worthless hooligans that they are.
With no Arab Nationalism, with each secular-ish Arab leaders dead or hanging on via palace intrigue and murder, who has time to hate on Israel? The Sultan of Oman recently said that Israel has the right to exist and … NOTHING. Not a peep from anyone. Even the US media ignored it. And everyone ignored it because everyone knows Israel exists and isn’t going anywhere and that Arab nations will never ever be able to overcome the coordination problem of their now regional and cultural differences to do anything about Israel even if they wanted to.
And besides, why would they want to? Israel is their best defense against Iran. Israel is the one that will keep Iran nuke free. Israel is the one who will get fed up and do something covertly shock and awe that will be good for everyone (except of course Iran).
That kaffiyeh wearing lefties in America trade in anti-semitic rhetoric today is simply that they’ve made their world view about venerating the noble oppressed and poor (with government being the best tool to allow the oppressed and poor to gain top dog status, and we would all laugh as those lefties get their comeuppance if it didn’t mean it would s*ck for us, too). They screech Max Boot-like about orange man undoing the so-called stable world order that arose out of WWII, while simultaneously they are doing the same d*mn thing, except that instead they are justifying permanent majority tyranny (or minority tyranny it’s hard to know sometimes) and merrily destroying the democratic experiment.
D Cohen offers a most peculiar thesis for the origin of relatively higher “Jewish intelligence”, that European Jews were more than serfs in the Middle Ages, based on his apparent anti-Catholic and geographic notions, for which there are no factual bases, to my knowledge.
Cohen seems to be echoing Arnold Toynbee’s thesis that great civilizations arise from great challenges (among them, geographic, i.e. harsh winters).
The Encyclopedia Britannica says Toynbee “examined the rise and fall of 26 civilizations in the course of human history, and he concluded that they rose by responding successfully to challenges under the leadership of creative minorities composed of elite leaders.”
Which is of course absurd on its face. Especially, “creative minorities”.
Humanity has always been hierarchical; that comes from us being social critters. The pack has its leader. Pure democracy does not work, but becomes rule by mobs. See the French Revolution, which ended with an Emperor atop.
And where are the American Jews, a tiny minority to be sure, today? On the Left. But as leaders? Perhaps Cohen will respond, yes, as (occult) thought leaders.
More likely, such diseases were the result of generations of in-breeding (and we’re talking of very long periods).
Cochran’s thesis is that evolution happened rapidly and the period of Jewish persecution was more recent than most assumptions about evolution. In-breeding was part of the thesis but the mutations were both positive and negative.
As to Asian IQ, I have no theory but the mandarin class was meritocratic when European nobility was based on brawn, not brains.
Iraq, for all that you may hate Saddam Hussein, kept Iran at bay for a decade with the Iran-Iraq War.
I agree that overthrowing Saddam was a mistake in retrospect. Some of this used to be called “The CNN Effect” when policy was driven by TV and do-gooders. The Somali mission creep was such an example.
At the time, I thought it was worth a try to see if Arabs could rule themselves without tyrants. The nation building was botched, largely by Bremer. Nation building in Afghanistan, of course, is insanity. I had thought there was an Iraqi middle class but they refused to go back. A friend of mine was an Iraqi doctor.
The way the Brits divided up the Arab World into different nations may have been ignorant/brutal/imperialist, but it worked in terms of ending the constant fisticuffs.
WTF are you talking about?
1. Saudi Arabia (formed of the Hijaz, Nejd, and a section of the Gulf coast), the larger part of Yemen, and Oman have never been dependencies of any European power. Other portions of the Arabian peninsula were placed under British protection between 1839 and 1899. Pretty much all the ruling families in these areas held their positions antecedent to the advent of British protection and some of these dynasties are almost as venerable as the Hanoverians who hold the British throne).
2. No part of the Maghreb was ever held by Britain leaving aside a brief run of years around the 2d World War. (These were French and Italian dependencies). Each Maghreb country has a signature Arabic vernacular and (bar Libya) each is descended from what were ca. 1800 functionally sovereign states. Libya’s the exception; two antique satrapies were lashed together to form Libya, i.e. the post-war allies reduced the number of Arab states in said act.
3. Egypt’s distinctive qualities are obvious. George Antonius in his pan-Arab polemic eschewed any idea of conjoining Egypt with Arab territories to its east, maintaining that the history of the region demonstrated that such a coupling was inherently unstable. That aside, Ottoman authority in Egypt was notional after 1805; the British arrangement with Egypt maintained between 1881 and 1922 was one established with an extant political entity, not an artifact of British policy.
4. The Sudan counts as an Arab state due to a process of acculturation of an extant negroid Nilotic population. That acculturation was anything but thorough and there are still large tracts of the country occupied by people who do not consider themselves Arabs.
5. The Fertile Crescent actually was carved up by Britain and France in 1918. The thing is, the territory in question incorporates four separate spectra of vernacular Arabic, contained territory occupied not by Arabs but by Kurds, and contained two blocs of territory (one large, one small) where religious dissenters were congregated (and a majority). Quite apart from considerations of reasons of state, it was perfectly sensible to organize it into a multiplicity of states. They just chose bad boundaries.
Definitely greater than zero for me. The first, in fact, was in the 1960’s when someone invited a Black Muslim to speak at my school. He was quite open about his hatred of Jews; it was an important part of his talk.
When Elijah Muhammed died, the Nation of Islam had about 20,000 members in a black population approaching 30 million. The main body of the Nation of Islam followed W. Deen Muhammed and repudiated every signature feature of Elijah Muhammed’s creed. The minority followed Louis Farrakhan and retained Elijah Muhammed’s weirder teachings. Not sure what the numbers are now, but when his association with Jesse Jackson brought Louis Farrakhan to prominence, the papers reported his organization had 1/10th the membership of W.D. Muhammed’s.
Art, you are sheltered. The neighborhood where I grew up is now so crime ridden that blacks are leaving.
Sheltered from what? From your confusion of what you read in the papers with the palpable reality of daily life? Blacks looked at collectively have a half-a-dozen consequential problems to work on. Anti-semitism and hatred of Koreans are ancillary and localized problems.
As for the neighborhood you grew up in, it’s crime-ridden because of weak law enforcement, not because the people living there despise Jews or Koreans. Deal with the real problem. Heather MacDonald has spilled a great deal of ink about how Wm. Bratton and Rudolph Giuliani accomplished what they did in New York.
I agree that overthrowing Saddam was a mistake in retrospect. Some of this used to be called “The CNN Effect” when policy was driven by TV and do-gooders. The Somali mission creep was such an example.
You’d have preferred Uday or Qusay?
Paul Johnson, in his “A History of the Jews” proposes that Jews invented Capitalism and the stock company as a way to transmit assets that mighty be necessary to quickly move if a pogrom threatened.
Capitalism is the disaggregation of functions within productive enterprise, with proprietorship, management, artisanship, finance, and distribution and sales partially or fully parceled out among different actors. It also incorporates the replacement of master-journeyman-apprentice relations with more contingent employer / wage-earner relations. None of these are discrete ‘inventions’ and they emerged in places with very few Jews.
The Fertile Crescent actually was carved up by Britain and France in 1918. The thing is, the territory in question incorporates four separate spectra of vernacular Arabic,
I think that is what he was talking about.
Your other comments seem a bit illhumored
Art Deco:
See this.
Excerpt:
I think that is what he was talking about.
Why? He said ‘the Arab World’, not ‘the Fertile Crescent’.
Attitudinal surveys conducted by the ADL consistently show that African Americans harbor “anti-Semitic proclivities” at a rate significantly higher than the general population (23 percent and 14 percent respectively in 2016).
1. Blacks are more likely to be rude about Jews than non-blacks. No surprise there; Charles Silberman wrote about this a generation ago and delineated some of the disconcerting features of it. I think it was Martin Peretz who said at the time that black anti-semitism was an offense, not a peril, and that the rabbis-on-the-reporter’s-Rolodexes needed to move on to another subject. An unsightly phenomenon, but not one likely to do Jews much injury. As for Farrakhan, see Leon Wieseltier’s assessment: we know who he is because the media like writing about freaks, not because of any organizational accomplishments he has. See also Mark Steyn’s comparison of the British media’s treatment of Farrakhan with the American media’s: the British media who’ve covered him will reprint his bizarre and readily parodied numerological discourse, stuff the American media suppress.
2. Partisan Democrats make talking points out of the share of self-identified Republicans who thought BO a Muslim or thought BO was born abroad. People sometimes say strange things when you ask them idle questions about matters they hardly give any thought to.
3. BTW, social survey research also reveals that Jews are quite antagonistic to evangelicals, something that is most certainly not a reactive phenomenon.
This is more anxiety provoking than anti-semitism among blacks, because that attitude is going to be an important ingredient in defining the culture of the legal profession and the culture of the studios which produce content for the media. (Curiously, when motion picture production was largely in the hands of Jewish companies (ca. 1940), the content was much more in tune with the American vernacular than it is today). Now, I’ve never encountered this up-close-and-personal, and I have encountered up-close-and-personal antagonism to evangelicals among bluebloods. Then again, I didn’t grow up in New York or Miami. I grew up Upstate, where Jews are reconciled to living in circumstances where most of their friends are gentiles and don’t make themselves disagreeable in that way.
4. Sorry to be a bore about this, but if I’m losing sleep over black culture, it’s not anti-semitism among blacks that keeps me awake. What keeps me awake would be a political culture manifest in identity-driven voting and voting driven by a hankering after emotional validation, an odd sort of narcissism which sees it as illegitimate for peasants in authority to enforce standards on blacks, psychological present-mindedness (which leads to bad management of personal finance), an exaggerated taste for display goods, a haphazard approach to sex and family life, and a decay in intellectual life wherein it fixates on race or fixates on utter humbug, &c. By and large, these are problems which have appeared in the last 60 years.
Art Deco:
You can try to explain it away, but I think there’s plenty of evidence that black people have higher rates of anti-Semitism than the rest of the population does. Or perhaps you’re saying that black people don’t really have higher rates of anti-Semitism, because white people are just more shy about expressing such feelings to pollsters? That’s certainly not an argument that many black people aren’t anti-Semitic; it’s an argument that many people in America of all races are anti-Semitic.
I don’t think anyone here thinks that the black rate of anti-Semitism is the most worrisome thing going on with black culture in the US, which has other very grave social problems.
By the way, about Jews and evangelicals, the polls on that are pretty iffy. I wrote an entire post on the subject. Please read it if you haven’t already. And for those Jews who don’t quite trust evangelicals, there is plenty of reason to call it a “reactive” phenomenon, in historic terms. There is a very lengthy Christian anti-Semitic history, and I would wager that most Jews who are somewhat distrustful of evangelicals (and as I said, read my post for some discussion of how the figures were arrived at and what they mean) do not keep up on the difference between evangelicals and other Christians, or the exact up-to-date viewpoint of various Protestant Christian denominations today.
Hmmm. A comment disappeared.
You can try to explain it away, but I think there’s plenty of evidence that black people have higher rates of anti-Semitism than the rest of the population does.
I’m not explaining it away. I’m saying it’s not that important.
there is plenty of reason to call it a “reactive” phenomenon, in historic terms. There is a very lengthy Christian anti-Semitic history,
Which has little to do with contemporary American evangelicalism. It has a great deal to do with Catholicism in Austria and Poland 90 years ago. ‘Reacting’ to Karl Lueger by baying at Jerry Falwell is perverse. It doesn’t require one be well-schooled in variation among sects in time and place. It requires you look at what’s actually in front of you.
Art Deco;
You seemed to start out in this thread (here, for example, as well as here) by indicating that black anti-Semitism is practically non-existent. No one here ever said it was an especially big problem for the black community, and I think everyone would agree that the black community has much bigger problems than that.
But that’s not what this thread is about. You were responding to a commenter who had written that many blacks are anti-Semitic and also anti-Korean. You were arguing that your personal experience with this was zero.
Art Deco:
If you read my linked post on Jews and evangelicals, you would see that the data is very suspect to begin with. In addition, there’s no reason Jews should be up-to-date on every Protestant sect. Most Christians are not up-to-date on Jewish sects, nor would I expect them to be. Also, read what I wrote there about conversion and the name “evangelicals.”
Nor is Christian anti-Semitism only something connected to 90 years ago and not just in the Old World. I certainly have encountered it in my lifetime, and I’m hardly 90 years old.
there’s no reason Jews should be up-to-date on every Protestant sect. Most Christians are not up-to-date on Jewish sects,
Why would anyone expect anyone to know much about Lubavitcher Hasidim v. Satmar Hasidim? Both are tiny localized communities. And I’m not suggesting American Jews know anything about evangelical sects; I’m suggesting American Jews not impute something that isn’t there to a broad array of evangelical types (who aren’t localized and are enumerated in eight digits).
Nor is Christian anti-Semitism only something connected to 90 years ago and not just in the Old World. I certainly have encountered it in my lifetime, and I’m hardly 90 years old
Where? I’ve encountered five types of anti-semitism.
1. One is strictly in online fora and concerns people of the palaeo / alt-right dispensation and their intellectual godfather is Kevin McDonald. My wager about most of those guys is that they’re technical personnel who missed out on promotions they thought they were due and have recriminated by manufacturing a social worldview which incorporates snarling at various enemies, Jews among them. A great many of them are quite susceptible to conspiracy theories and their worldview has some axis of Likud – AIPAC – PNAC – CBS – Sulzberger – Goldman, Sachs axis controlling American public life. Steve Sailer and Ron Unz [!] are always trolling these people and subscribe to most of the BS themselves. Incorporated within this is the notion that Jews dominate institutions through successful social networking and shutting out others. You’ll note about these chaps is that they commonly loathe George W. Bush, a man they fancy advanced through social skills and connections.
2. Another is through publications like Catholic Family News and The Remnant. This actually is theologically-driven. The thing is, it’s an odd side-current in the content of these publications and the publications themselves are an eccentric subset of Catholic discourse and observance in this country.
3. I’ve heard complaint (again, online) from people occupying the nexus of Catholic traditionalism and Catholic worker sentiment that walks right up to the line of anti-semitic sentiment. The thing is, the content of their remarks isn’t any different than you might see in some tiresome British leftoid publication. The same imbalance of attention, the same refusal to acknowledge the Mack-truck sized holes in their arguments, the same assumption that Jews are honor-bound to be as indifferent to their own welfare as people who have it in for them. I don’t think this is a species of Christian discourse. It’s a species of the adversary culture traded in by people who also trade in Christian discourse.
4. The sidelong remarks you’d occasionally hear from people born prior to the 1st World War. They tended to be light-hearted, but did carry the assumption that Jews were a them and not an us. The worst offender I remember had a Jewish family living next door to her; they were quite good friends. People are funny.
5. The Five O’Clock shadow, which my mother grew up with but had no time for herself, in junior high school or later (“But Doris is my friend, mother”). I suppose you could attribute that to my grandparents’ Appalachian presbyterian upbringing. I think you’d be on firmer ground making note that my grandfather was a member of the bar and had practiced law in Manhattan for 11 years, which he found a somewhat jarring experience.
You were arguing that your personal experience with this was zero.
That’s true, it is zero. And I was using that as an indicator of the significance of the phenomenon, not the presence of the phenomenon.
Idea:
To supplant anti-Semitism, how about a discussion of pro-Semitism?
Neo
First Happy New Year to all of you here.
When you put the heading”The left now hates Israel far more than the Arabs do
You meant by stating Israel is “Jews” rather than the State of Israel however its not officially “Jewish State”, so this comparison irrelevant between left (I believe in the western world and another part of the world) and Arab for many points and causes as you well knew well Jews suffered hugely and contentiously in the western world more comparing Islamic empires, history there without denial as you trying to put.
Arab /Israeli conflict/hatred which same in on both sides who are both responsible for this never ending disputes due to the invasion and occupying land rather sharing it with those inhabitant for centuries despite number or time frame and other facts.
however just to make the point looks to me there is a seamier sense of hatred when you write about Arab, this not strange from the Jews who cam of originated in Eastern Europe I believe the historical bad memories and historical bad treatment still resonate in their mind’s of their generations, which causing most dangerous and most smears hatred and campaign towered Arabs were those who born or from heritage families from Eastern Europe and examples of those many in US and Israel.
I must add that you forgot one nation here, Iran Mullah for the last 40 years the chanting still as strong as before
http://olstreaming.s3.amazonaws.com/MAG/WebHigh/5/1/1/f/NN11456458.mp4
Another reason for high Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence distribution is that the custom in the shtetl was that the brightest boy in the yeshiva would be married to the richest merchant’s daughter. If the town was large enough, and the yeshiva outstanding enough, there would be a competition among the merchants for the brightest boys for their daughters, which was generally settled by the amount of endowment the merchant was willing to place on his prospective son-in-law and the yeshiva. Since success in business is at least somewhat correlated with brains, the daughter was no slouch, either. Hence, smart children.
Jews probably did not invent capitalism, although they were involved with its development early on. What they did invent was banking, which is a necessary condition for capitalism. Early church law forbade the assignment of debts, and interest as well. Jewish law did not, with respect to commercial transactions. A Jewish trader would go to a “pre-banker,” generally a gold- or silversmith, and say, “Moshe, I’m going to Moscow to buy furs, and carrying all this gold would be dangerous. Here’s 400 ducats. Please write to your cousin Yankel in Moscow that I have 400 ducats on deposit with you.” And Moshe would write, “Blessed be the Name. Dear Yankel, the bearer of this letter is my trusted friend Avraham, who has 400 ducats on deposit with me. Please allow him to draw from you a like amount. We will settle up when we meet at Pesach, the Holy One, Blessed be He, willing. Good fortune and blessings, Moshe.” Avraham would present the letter to Yankel and draw on it. Very quickly, those letters came to be endorsed and exchanged themselves — voila, banknotes!
I’m not exactly sure what DF is saying, but if I understand him, in response: 1) Israel is the Jewish state and everybody in the world knows it. If you say, “I hate Italy,” that means you hate Italians, and if you say, “I hate Israel,” that means you hate Jews; 2) since there’s not a square foot of habitable land on this planet that hasn’t been conquered by the present owners from somebody else, (and by them from the previous owners, and so on, ad infinitum), I don’t know where it is, which means that, by your logic, the Normans should still hate the French, the Sámi people should still hate the Scandanavians, the Britons should still hate the Saxons, and so on, which is not the case; and 3) European-origin Israelis do not nearly hate the Arabs as much as do Sephardic and Eastern Jews, who lived among the Arabs for centuries before being expelled from their countries in 1948. Please try to get your facts right.
What they did invent was banking, which is a necessary condition for capitalism.
Institutions of finance are an aspect of capitalism, not a condition of it. You can certainly have production financed through re-invested earnings, financed through equity capital, or financed through bonds. Sharia-compliant financial practice in the Muslim world antedated late Medieval banking in Europe.
DF, you’re not making sense.
Ah yes, Art, blacks in Rochester NY: There was a massive black riot in 1964;
There was a riot of significance. It wasn’t on the scale of Detroit (1967), Miami (1980), or Los Angeles (1992).
they burned down their own dwellings, block upon block.
The area continued to be populated after 1964, and, no, people weren’t living in wigwams.
Mind you, Rochester at that time was one of the weathiest cities per capita in the US due to Kodak and young Xerox stocks’ appreciation.
Personal income per capita was roughly 12% above national means. Had little to do with stock market dynamics and a great deal to do with goods and services produced therein, at Kodak, Xerox, Bausch & Lomb, the University, and all other employers in town.
The RINO city fathers hired Saul Alinsky (!) to counsel them on how to rectify the city’s woes. Nothing good came of that, of course, and Rochester has since slumped into the morass that afflicts all of upstate NY under the leadership of Democrats like the Cuomos.
RINO is a nonsense term, as much then as now. Rochester’s problems have little or nothing to do with the clownish invitation to Alinsky (which, IIRC, was the brainchild of certain business executives, not Mayor Lamb or whoever was the city manager at the time).
Kindly cut out your use of “meatspace”.
No.
It is vulgar and reeks of personal cleverness.
It isn’t, it doesn’t, and you’re a pest.
“Kindly cut out your use of “meatspace”.
No.”
What the hell does “meatspace” mean? Never heard this made-up word before this thread.
“both sides who are both responsible for this never ending disputes due to the invasion and occupying land rather sharing it with those inhabitant for centuries”
Wrong. The fault for the perpetuation of this conflict lies almost entirely with the Arabs. Israel repeatedly tried to settle but was faced with Arab annihilationism and rejectionism in 1948, 1967 and 2000. Israel agreed to share the land in 1948 but Arabs invaded Israel vowing to “drive the Jews into the sea”. After the war the West Bank and Gaza were in Arab hands but they did not lift a finger to set up a Palestinian state. So the fault for there not being a Palestinian state is 100% Arabs’, 0% Israel’s. Rinse and repeat for 70 years.
“the Jews who cam of originated in Eastern Europe” The majority of Jews in Israel now and for a long time have been descended not from Eastern European Jews but from Middle Eastern Jews who were persecuted and ethnically cleansed from countries where they had lived for thousands of years since long before the establishment of Islam. Your comment consists almost entirely of lies.
“What the hell does “meatspace” mean?” The real world, where the physical flesh is, vs. the electronic world. I see this fairly frequently in my travels through the nether regions of the Internet but hardly ever on mainstream forums populated by normies.
“Partisan Democrats make talking points out of the share of self-identified Republicans who thought BO a Muslim or thought BO was born abroad.” Yeah, they do, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not a relevant question. I’m not a Christian or a believer in any Abrahamic faith, and it’s my natural tendency to not give a rat’s a$$ what someone else believes in, but the inherent nature of Islam makes the wise person take note of whether someone is Muslim. Only Obama knows what, if any, religious faith lives in his heart. The question was worth considering with Obama in particular because of his childhood, in which he was exposed in intimate ways atypical of future American leaders to a virulent and violent stone age faith, and because of a string of actions and statements that would make a reasonable person wonder. You could largely predict his policy by asking yourself, “What would the Muslim Brotherhood do?”
ArtDeco is trying to be clever with “meatspace” a term appropriated(?) from Scot Adams (Dilbert) and his “meatpuppets.” And it seems that ArtDeco takes offense from time to time with those who disagree with his “wisdom,” which is just his point of view. Unfortunate behavior when displayed.
Captain Obvious signing out.
Only Obama knows what, if any, religious faith lives in his heart.
It’s a reasonable inference nothing serious. You generally get your religion from your father. His was absent and in his place was Stanley Armour Dunham, who fancied Unitarianism (“You get five religions for the price of one”). Steven Sailer pointed out that of all the black congregations there be in Chicago, he and Mooch land at Jeremiah Wright’s, which was short on religion and long on Africanisant political posturing. Oprah Winfrey looked into that congregation, then abandoned it in short order, maybe because she’s something of a conventional protestant and wasn’t in the mood to listen to a political blowhard on Sunday morning.
The question was worth considering with Obama in particular because of his childhood, in which he was exposed in intimate ways atypical of future American leaders to a virulent and violent stone age faith,
Islam isn’t a Stone Age faith and its violence is seen only in discrete contexts. While we’re at it, Obama lived in Java from 1967 to 1971. Islam as practiced in Java is lax and syncretistic. His stepfather, Lolo Soetero, supposedly died of cirrhosis of the liver; the smart money says his observance wasn’t all that strict.
and because of a string of actions and statements that would make a reasonable person wonder. You could largely predict his policy by asking yourself, “What would the Muslim Brotherhood do?”
No, you could have predicted the Iran deal by reading antique articles in Foreign Affairs by creatures like Robert Pastor. See Thomas Sowell’s column on “one-uppers”, read Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed, read Paul Hollandar’s Political Pilgrims, read back issues of The Nation (or, for a subtler and more sophisticated treatment, back issues of The New York Review of Books). Obama sucked up to the Castro brothers too. That’s just what you’d expect from a bourgeois who had lived where he lived, worked where he worked, and hobnobbed with creatures like Wm. Ayers.
ArtDeco is trying to be clever with “meatspace”
Actually, it was a piece of short-hand I hardly gave any thought to in typing it.
And it seems that ArtDeco takes offense from time to time with those who disagree with his “wisdom,”
Whether I do or not, ‘cicero’ wasn’t complaining about my viewpoint.
“Actually,” then for clarity say what you mean. Just a request from one of the many “meat puppets.”
Art Deco:
I was a personal witness to all that I posted re Rochester in the 1960s. As a matter of fact, I was playing in a tennis tournament in Rochester (Rochester Tennis Club? I forget) while buildings were on fire in the black ‘hood not very far away in a totally residential area aka ghetto. I stand by my remarks. Doesn’t matter who first had the Alinsky idea; it was the city that hired him. Says a lot about their collective wisdom or lack thereof, which is a RINO trademark: Bleeding hearts in suits.
ArtDeco. No one has asked you to “go away,” you’re a pest. Enough.
Mike,
So you grew up in South Shore when it was still South Shore! It must indeed have been wonderful. I was fascinated by your posting at Chicago Boyz. Thanks so much for that.
(And from there, I read the posting just before it, about Rockford, which when I was a child we visited every once in awhile as a family outing. Bishop’s Cafeteria was a big hit; and later on, the Anchor Inn, if you remember that chain. And I didn’t know that Rockford had fallen on such evil times as the posting said, as far back as it said — the open-air drug markets and so on. And now I live here, and drugs and crime are still a feature in Rockford.)
More lost South Side glory: Drexel Boulevard, which by the time I entered UC had gotten pretty bad. My husband’s aunt’s family had by then decamped from their original home on Drexel and — 48th St. ?? I think. — to Beverly Shores, Ind.
And now the execrable Obama’s library is to despoil the east end of Jackson Park and the Midway. Over the objections of 200 UC faculty, who’ve written letters and complained loudly to the Chicago PTB about it. Why, asks Richard Epstein — who was tenured prof. in the UC Law School for 30 years, is now Visiting Lecturer and Prof. Emeritus there and Prof of Law at NYU, and Fellow of the Hoover Institution (and a whole 6 weeks my senior! *g*) — Why not build the abomination in Washington Park, at the west end of the Midway?
I will not visit Hyde Park nor the UC campus again. I prefer to remember them as they were.
By the way, your map shows Cornell Ave. south of 61st St. In the early ’70s, my Honey and I spent three years in a back apartment in a converted 6-flat brownstone on the east side of Cornell, in Hyde Park. We had a great view of the alley behind the building, if you went out on the fire escape. *g* And we could walk to Powell’s Used Books on 57th St.
Thanks for the history, and the memories.
And happy New Year!
I was a personal witness to all that I posted re Rochester in the 1960s. As a matter of fact, I was playing in a tennis tournament in Rochester (Rochester Tennis Club? I forget) while buildings were on fire in the black ‘hood not very far away in a totally residential area aka ghetto.
The Tennis Club of Rochester is now located in a suburban township on the southeast side, and has been there for about 50 years. Prior to that, it was in an unremarkable east side neighborhood near the city line, about a 20 minute walk from the home my parents lived in just a few years earlier. There were two epicenters to the 1964 riots, both 3x as distant from the Tennis Club as was their old house. If you were playing at the Genesee Valley Club, that would have been about a 1/2 hour walk to the mayhem on the northeast side and on the southeast side (and a world away psychologically).
Again, the Mayor of Rochester in 1964 was a Democrat, Frank Lamb. The city administration was in the hands of a professional manager, and that job changed hands again and again between 1961 and 1967. Mayor Lamb presided over city council meetings and had no executive function. Only one Republican has served as Mayor of Rochester since 1961. He was Stephen May, who took office in 1970. He had some acidulous critics. Calling him a ‘RINO’ is bizarre. He was a standard-issue Republican pol in that time and place.
Rochester’s problem has never been bleeding hearts. It’s problem has been that it’s run by mediocre standpatters and the public is content with that. The political class couldn’t go to school on New York City’s success with crime control and the suburban voters have no interest in innovation if it means they’d have to pay 10c extra in property taxes. So, the place suffers relative decline socially if not economically. Kodak’s failures in innovation were a blow economically, but the company imploded incrementally and the area was able to adjust as it was happening.
AesopFan,
Thanks for your comment on December 31, 2018 at 10:20 am, in all of its several parts. All news to me, and all quite interesting. Your observation that “hard-headed authoritarianism” is necessary to keeping people to the Rules about completely jointly-owned property is particularly well-put.
Also, your Point 4 about the kibbutzim’s rule that children from a given kibbutz must marry outside of it, and your notice that this has also been the rule in other tribal clans, is interesting.
If I have it straight, the general Jewish tradition has been to frown on intermarriage with gentiles. Certainly my mother-in-law came in for megatons of criticism and was all but disowned (for a time, anyway) by her Orthodox Jewish parents, immigrants from Hungary, for marrying my father-in-law, a nice atheistic formerly-Lutheran boy from Germany. And she disapproved of her little boy’s marrying me, a shiksa. (All of his aunt’s children ended up marrying Gentiles. *g* What you can expect in this lax modern age….)
And of course the Royal Families of Germany-Britain-Russia involved a lot of intermarriage within their particular clan. But this was presumably largely for the purpose of keeping their political power all in the family.
So it would seem there have been two, opposite, clan-based approaches to the intermarriage issue.
Of course, in the case of (say) the American Indians, I don’t see (at the moment) why marrying outside the clan would not be a different approach to consolidating and expanding political power, or at least to making a given tribe less likely to be attacked by another, by extending the tribal families to include each other in kinship-by-marriage?
Much food for thought!
I’m not explaining it away. I’m saying it’s not that important.
. . .
Blacks looked at collectively have a half-a-dozen consequential problems to work on. Anti-semitism and hatred of Koreans are ancillary and localized problems.
They are important problems for Jews and Asians (and whites) especially when they are harassed, assaulted, robbed or murdered.
They are important problems for Jews and Asians (and whites) especially when they are harassed, assaulted, robbed or murdered.
I’m not aware of any data that says that Jews qua Jews or Koreans qua Koreans are more likely (than any other non-black population segment) to be beat up by black hoodlums.
“I’m not aware of any data…”
This is getting tiresome.
Apropos of this unfortunate topic, cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal is back in the news with another possible appeal. The question of why liberals persist in idolizing this racist murderer is an interesting one.
This is getting tiresome.
What’s tiresome? Do blacks beat up Jews or Koreans more frequently than they beat up anyone else (controlling for residence patterns) or don’t they? If they don’t, why are instances of blacks beating up Jews or beating up Koreans of exceptional interest?
The question of why liberals persist in idolizing this racist murderer is an interesting one.
He’s admired by the usual red haze types and a smattering of black nationalists. The more salient question is why liberals never show the red haze types the door.
ArtDeco:
Here is a clue: it is the concept that Blacks or other oppressed classes cannot be racist. Tiresome indeed.
Here is a clue: it is the concept that Blacks or other oppressed classes cannot be racist. Tiresome indeed.
Spike Lee trades in that rubbish. I haven’t heard it asserted in this thread.
Art Deco:
1964 was more than 50 years ago. I simply remember what I saw while playing in that tournament, and the smoke was close. Very close. I felt as if I were playing tennis (dressed all in white of course) in the future South Africa, which I had visited for duty at hospitals, including a missionary one, 2 years before.
The U of R docs that taught me, from GPs on up, had all bought Haloid for pennies a share, for reasons of supporting a local, I suppose, and the stock value exploded when it became Xerox. So I was taught by a bunch of millionaires who had never gone into medicine for profit on that scale. They were all opposed to Medicare.
They were all Republican. Meek ones, even then.
Perhaps I faultily recall a RINO city gov’t in Rochester, but no Repub I can recall stood up against them and the selection of Saul Alinsky, which is truly the critical part of my recollection.
I got the H out of Rochester as quickly as I could, went South, stayed there! Not sorry!
“Your comment consists almost entirely of lies.”
As expected its typical reptative reply from those who live with thier lies.
Did I meantion “Majority Jews” from Estern Eurep?
No read my comment and again.
Art Deco: “What’s tiresome?”
Your persistent attempts in this thread to deny or minimize black racism.
“Do blacks beat up Jews or Koreans more frequently than they beat up anyone else (controlling for residence patterns) or don’t they?”
Remember I also mentioned whites, and I could have mentioned Hispanics. Are you really denying that racism is a factor in who blacks choose to assault? Of course it’s a factor. Any racial or ethnic group which becomes a target of black racism will then be a target for violence.
Arab /Israeli conflict/hatred which same in on both sides who are both responsible for this never ending disputes due to the invasion and occupying land rather sharing it with those inhabitant for centuries despite number or time frame and other facts.
Ah, the “both sides” canard, favored by those who don’t know the history and by those who seek to conceal the history.
But if by “invasion and occupying land” you meant the Muslim invasion and occupation of the Middle East and North Africa, you would be correct. Islam has been oppressing Christians and Jews ever since, with oppressive taxes, discriminatory laws, legally sanctioned daily harassment and violence–and the occasional pogrom. A key fact is that too many Muslims cannot stand the sight of Jews (and Christians) who are not subservient and–horrors–more economically successful.
The U of R docs that taught me, from GPs on up, had all bought Haloid for pennies a share, for reasons of supporting a local, I suppose, and the stock value exploded when it became Xerox.
Haloid was one of the Wilson family businesses (the other was a holding company of Howard Johnson’s franchises). Haloid made photographic paper, and functioned as a supplier for Kodak. This discusses their IPO in 1936. I doubt it was ever a penny stock.
http://finance.answers.com/Q/What_was_the_original_Xerox_stock_price_in_1936
Your persistent attempts in this thread to deny or minimize black racism.
That wasn’t the subject under discussion. The subject under discussion was antagonism on the part of blacks for Jews and Koreans, the dimensions of that phenomenon, and the significance of that phenomenon. This isn’t that difficult.
Now you’re getting pedantically evasive.
And don’t forget the recreational racist violence, known as the knockout game or polar bear hunting or various other expressions.