Category: Islam

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The Sacred Chain, A History of the Jews, by Norman F. Cantor

 

Norman Cantor’s The Sacred Chain (1994) is a highly entertaining and informative book, of the kind I would like to bring to the attention of friends, Jewish and otherwise.

It covers Judaism from its mythological origins to the present day. Cantor dismisses the books of the Pantateuch as largely or entirely mythological: Adam and Eve, Abraham and Isaac, Moses, the flight from Egypt, the conquest of Canaan, and so forth.

“But until the glorious day dawns of archaeological verification of the line of Abraham, we have to stipulate that all of the Jewish history of the first millennium BCE and some of it for a century or two after that, as told in the Bible, is one of the great masterpieces of imaginative fiction or artfully contrived historical myths of all time. From empirical evidence, it did not happen.” – page 5

I may agree, but every religion needs its mythology, indeed, every religion is founded in mythology. Look at Christianity. Look at Islam, look at Judaism. They are all stories. The issue of myth is not whether it is factual, but whether it is true. Some people conflate factuality for truth, whereas truth is the yardstick by which the significance of facts is appraised and evaluated. Hence Lord of the Rings is true, as a story of right and wrong, good against evil,  but is not yet considered factual. At least not until the rise of a new civilization, when the King causes the Ring trilogy to be declared to be historical truth, and archaeologists engage in digs to find the lost continent of Numenor.

I digress.

In dealing with the 19th and 20th centuries, Cantor writes with disarming honesty of the divisions of the Jewish people into what he calls the black, the red and the white. [at page 275]  The blacks: followers of traditional Talmudic Judaism, the orthodox, the black-coated rabbinate and their congregations “who developed no evident policy of responding to modernity’s challenge”; the reds: Emma Goldman, Leon Trotsky, Bernie Sanders, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and all the communists and fellow travelers too numerous to mention. The whites: the capitalists, the followers of David Ricardo, the fully integrated dwellers of leafy suburbs from Berlin to San Francisco, the upper middle class professionals, the psychiatrists, the well-being gurus.

On the reds, Cantor observes:

“In retrospect, Jewish communism looks weird, and perhaps pointless, but at the time there was an unquestioning compulsion of many thousands of morally committed, energetic Jews to devote their lives to it and sacrifice their well-being and that of their families for it” – page 281

I find refreshing Cantor’s straightforward treatment of the massive involvement of Jews with Communism. What was this peculiar attraction for them? He essays two explanations:

  • a vestigial memory of biblical prophetic utterances on social justice,  coupled with Judaism’s intrinsic rationality, its elevation of the deity to such a transcendent position, putting the burden for society upon humanity itself that, when coupled with unresolved Oedipal conflicts with parents of the same sex, lead some to project outward from there to rebel and try to punish and overthrow patriarchal and matriarchal institutions of authority in society; – pp 276-277
  • “the inability of modernity and its institutional forms to absorb sufficiently brilliant and active younger Jews seeking a suitable role for themselves in secular society” – p 277

 

“Empirical data support the contention of French and German anti-Semites in the 1920s and 1930s that Jews were both capitalists and communists, and thus doubly anathema to the reactionary racist ands religious movements that funneled onto Judaeo-phobic fascism.

“The German cartoonists of the 1920s who depicted Jews as both bloated capitalists swallowing European civilization and nefarious red terrorists plotting to blow up Western civilization were not engaging in absolute fantasy, even though Jewish apologists then and historians now like to make that accusation and try to forget the whole thing.

But we cannot forget it”. – p 275

Nor can I. My first experience of being a racial minority was McGill University in the late 1960s. 80% of the arts faculty was Jewish, at least. The Marxist Leninists of the more orthodox Russian-oriented persuasion were entirely Jewish, while the Maoists were almost exclusively the children of priviligentsia of the Third World, such as Sikhs and Latin American millionaire’s kids. For a movement that based its entire analysis on the divisions of social class, it was startling – and wholly unremarked – how the divisions between the Marxists were entirely racial or ethnic, if you prefer.

The result for me was to begin to insist that race and nation and biology – loose concepts, I admit – were far more important than they were held out to be. I think that the importance of the biological is obvious and would be readily or grudgingly agreed to by most people.  The second was my growing conviction that the great secret of modern life was that, while everyone talked social class, structures of oppression and sociological claptrap, most acted as if the biological domain was both real and consequential. Just look at assortative mating among the intelligent. The importance of the biological is exactly the heresy that Herrenstein and Murray, the writers of The Bell Curve,  espoused.

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Readers will observe that I have quoted from only a very few pages of The Sacred Chain. Cantor’s book covers vastly more than this review. It is as honest, fair-minded and well-written as one could hope for. Cantor praises and blames Christianity, Judaism and Islam equitably, as he does the secular humanists of more recent times.

My reflections are conditioned by one of the greatest traumas – if that is not too dramatic a word – of my clash with the Marxists and would-be Bolsheviks of university days. There is much, much more to this clever and engaging book than the 20th century Jewish attraction to communism. My reliance on the truth of the rest of the book is reinforced  by the truth of what he has to say about that strange attraction of so many Jews for Marxism. Like the influence of biology, it is one of those things which has been noticed but not often spoken of honestly.

Where everything is policed except the crime – 2

From the Telegraph – “An Asian grooming gang was free to roam the streets and abuse young girls because police officers were told to “find other ethnicities” to investigate, a detective has claimed. 

At least 57 young girls are thought to have been exploited by a paedophile network of around 100 suspected perpetrators based in south Manchester in the 2000s. The gang, mainly comprised of Asian men, hooked their victims on drugs, groomed, and sexually abused them. One girl, aged 15, died after being injected with heroin by a 50-year-old man. 

Following a two-year inquiry, commissioned by Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, into the historic failings of police and social workers, a report was published today which concluded that vulnerable girls in care were groomed and abused in “plain sight”. 

The report found multiple failings at the hands of GMP, including how fears over race relations appear to have played a part in senior police thinking when tackling grooming gangs comprised of predominantly Asian men.

It added that officers were aware of “many sensitive community issues” around policing in south Manchester in 2002 and 2003.” 

Summer daze/ Styles of Pessimism

Dalwhinnie is on vacation and Rebel Yell is cycling around Ottawa a lot. The world continues to go to hell at its accustomed pace and there is little we can do about it. For my part, I am trying to spend fewer hours at the computer. A vacation involves the lessening of worldly concerns, and the Internet is a relentless nag about being concerned. I do not really care about any Democratic candidate for the Presidency in 2020. Donald Trump will crush the one eventually chosen and only wilful blindness will prevent people from seeing it and the media from saying so.

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An interesting article appeared in Quillette regarding styles of pessimissm. “Four Flavours of Doom: A Taxonomy of Contemporary Pessimism” examines the issue well. The author, Maarten Boudry, identifies four kinds of doomism. I am guilty of at least one kind.

The Nostalgic Pessimist

In the good old days, everything was better. Where once the world was whole and beautiful, now everything has gone to ruin. Different nostalgic thinkers locate their favorite Golden Age in different historical periods. 

The “Just You Wait” Pessimist

Some are prepared to admit, unlike the nostalgists, that the world has improved considerably over the past two centuries. But, they maintain, this cannot possibly last. The hubris of modern man, with his naïve belief in progress, must be punished sooner or later. I call this the “Just You Wait” school of pessimism

The Cyclical Pessimist

This kind of pessimist will agree that things are going pretty well at the moment, but he doesn’t think our current run of luck is historically exceptional. Humankind has experienced periods of relative prosperity and peace before, but all have come to an end sooner or later. The course of history, for the cyclical pessimist, comes and goes like the tides or the seasons

The Treadmill Pessimist

The treadmill pessimist accepts the reality of some objective measures of progress (more wealth, less violence, longer and healthier lives), but maintains that—despite everything—we haven’t really made advances where it truly matters. Like Alice and the Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking-Glass, we have been running ourselves ragged only to find, when we take a breath and look around, that we are still in the same place where we started

Beaudry concludes:

Of course, we are not living in the “best of all possible worlds,” as Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss believed, but we may well be living in the best of all hitherto available worlds. If we want to create a better one, thus proving Dr. Pangloss wrong once again, the methods of science, free markets, and liberal democracy provide our best hope of succeeding. When will Westerners regain their belief in progress?

I am not an eco-doomist I am a cultural declinist and concerned about Islam’s invasion through adventitious exploitation of our lack of cultural antibodies.

Choose your doom. You can talk about one (ecological carbon fixation) but you cannot talk about the other (educational decline and islamic invasion). Why is this? Whose interest is served?

Further to my point on Islamic anti-Semitism

I wrote yesterday on Islamic anti-Semitism as a transcendent all-consuming passion. Lo! The next day a piece of conformation appeared.

German Intelligence Issues Taboo-Breaking Report on Muslim Antisemitism

By Dr. Manfred GerstenfeldApril 30, 2019FacebookTwitterPrintEmailMore1.7K

Antisemitic, pro-Palestinian demonstration in Berlin, July 17, 2014, photo by Boris Niehaus via Wikipedia

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,158, April 30, 2019

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The German Agency for Domestic Security recently published a report on Muslim antisemitism in the country – a development that is unprecedented not only for Germany but for all of Europe. The report makes clear that Muslim antisemitism is a major problem in Germany. At long last, Muslim antisemitism in Germany has been officially detailed for the public.

The German Agency for Domestic Security (Bundesamt fuer Verfassungsschutz) recently published a 40-page report entitled “Antisemitism in Islamism.” Never before has any European intelligence agency published a report on Muslim antisemitism. This report is a major break with the German past. It is the first official publication by a national body that exposes in reasonable detail the antisemitism originating in parts of the country’s Muslim community.

Anti-semitism?

I have no doubt that the New York Times is a cesspool of anti-Semitism, as the Israeli ambassador to the US maintains.

“In remarks posted to his official Facebook page and prepared for delivery at a Holocaust memorial event at the US Capitol, Dermer spoke of what he called “the Jew-hatred of growing parts of the intellectual class.”

“The same New York Times that a century ago mostly hid from their readers the Holocaust of the Jewish people has today made its pages a safe-space for those who hate the Jewish state,” Dermer said. “Through biased coverage, slanderous columns and antisemitic cartoons, its editors shamefully choose week after week to cast the Jewish state as a force for evil.”

“In describing the Times as a “cesspool,” Dermer said that the newspaper’s treatment of Israel “goes well beyond any legitimate criticism of a fellow, imperfect democracy.”

But this? This cartoon which was said to have crossed some sort of line?

Is this more offensive than Putin and Trump in homosexual embrace? Or any of the endless Internet memes of Trump as nazi, racist, dwarf, misogynist, lying scum, vainglorious nincompoop?

I happen to think Israel is a successful, modern, and relatively open democracy in the midst of the toughest, most intransigent Islamic fanatics. How it has restrained itself from massacring its Palestinian subject population, of carrying out General Dyer-like shootings of the nearest ten or ten thousand people, is a marvel of restraint, and something that bears contemplation. I congratulate them on having a long fuze and a carefully calibrated sense of vengeance. They have proven effective because they have shown restraint, when I might have lashed out in anger at my people being killed by fanatics.

Most? many? Muslims hate Jews with a passion that is quite beyond comprehension. I am not talking about disliking some Jews because they are assholes, or because some have offended you, or because they compete effectively. I am not talking about disliking even all Jews because they believe they are the Chosen Ones, in their estimation. Or because some Ashkenazis control this or that piece of the information/propaganda apparatus. I am talking about an all-consuming , all-comprehending hatred that is cosmic in its dimensions, and foundational to one’s world view. I have met people like that, and they were Muslim. It is like coming near the gravity well of a neutron star, where the gravity is hate. You do not want to approach it.

Compared to this kind of boundless hatred, Christian and secular-liberal-pagan anti-Semitism is frequently just snobbery and rudeness. It is exponentially smaller in its range and seriousness. I do not doubt it can be painful to be the target of it, but it does not intend radical extermination, as Islamic Jew-hatred does. Although a few more attacks by people on synagogues may force a rethinking of that position.

So pardon me if I find the Trump-Netanyahu cartoon to be only mildly offensive, and to be good political cartooning because it succeeds in being offensive in just the right way. If I thought Netanyahu was leading Trump around by the nose, that’s how I would caricature it.

I do not believe anyone is leading Trump around by the nose: not the Jews, the Masons, the Muslims, the evangelicals, the Illuminati, the Catholics, the Quakers, the liberals, the conservatives, or anyone. The very lack of control which anyone exercises over Trump is part of the reason the cartoon is effective.

But if the cartoon stimulates the New York Times to examine its habitual anti-Israeli stance, and question its wholly unmerited sense of moral superiority, that would be a great benefit. I suspect however that the armour of self-righteousness is too thick for them to abandon.

Netanyahu and Trump share important qualities: they are both rough and effective. For this they cannot be forgiven by the legions of self-defeatists.

Today’s dose of cultural doomism: Richard Fernandez on the fate of the Church and western society in general

I have a great deal of time and respect for the Roman Church, and vehement disagreements with it. However, on the fundamental questions of what Christianity is and means, it is sound. Here is the American Richard Fernandez writing on the fate of the Church, the universities and society. I could not have imagined the speed or thoroughness of the total moral collapse of the West that I grew up in. I would block and copy Fernandez’ article in its entirety, but shall content myself with this reference:

“[Pope]Benedict’s recollections [of the perversion of Roman Catholic seminaries into homosexual cliques] might be of little interest to non-Catholics did they not so closely mirror the recent experience of the secular West. As the devil was taking over the seminaries, something was also seizing the great universities of Europe and America, turning them into bastions of political correctness. Everything that happened inside the Church also happened outside with astounding swiftness. In less than 20 years, marriage was redefined from its centuries-old meaning as a union between a man and woman to include homosexuals. Abortion became a progressive sacrament. Concepts of gender and race, which some had thought to be immutable, were transformed in a few short years into a veritable smorgasbord of categories. Slate tells us Facebook offers users 56 genders to choose from.

“Although the fires that damaged the Notre Dame in Paris and almost started at St. Patrick’s in New York City during Holy Week seemed to underscore the disaster that had overtaken the Church, Rod Dreher points out that the flameless burning of the Western world’s secular cathedrals has been happening for some time. An ongoing and relentless purge of politically incorrect academic thought at institutions of higher learning has been proceeding apace. Librarians call it weeding and have already removed millions of books from campus collections. “At the University of California, Santa Cruz … the removal of 80,000 books from the Science and Engineering Library last summer sparked uproar among faculty … more than 60 science and math faculty members signed a letter to university librarian M. Elizabeth Cowell complaining they hadn’t been adequately consulted on which books could be discarded and which ones had to be saved.” It’s not fringe behavior, but a program abroad in the noonday sun. Dreher points out that a senior librarian at MIT openly regards “white” books as a waste of space and a legacy of oppression. Her article in the Association of Research Libraries argues the challenge now is to “build diverse and inclusive library environments that contribute to social justice.”

And so forth, endlessly. The hideous strength of white supremacy is observed even in dog walking.

I refrain from a daily re-iterations of alarm and despair at the decline of the moral backbone of the West, of what used to be Christian civilization, because I do not want this blog to become a Gates of Vienna, a Vlad Tepes or a Jihad Watch. But make no mistake: I agree with their analysis and perspectives. For me, Islam is not the enemy so much as it is the adventitious bacterium that invades the body politic when it has lost its antibodies. The anti-white-ism, anti-male-ism and anti-Christianity comes from this society, not from outside it. Trump is not remotely the answer to this dire situation of collapsing culture, but at least the rot has stopped, for the time being, in high places.

Now for the universities.

Please read the Richard Fernandez article.