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How Anti-Whiteness is at the Heart of Jewish Identity

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The flip side of sweeping explanations that overlook the jews are the ones that are all about them. Where the jew-blind explanations are primarily for the non-jews, to keep us busy thinking about anything but jewish influence and power, the jew-centric explanations, which we’ll examine here, reflect how jews see the world and explain it to each other.

These jew-centric explanations of the world present a surreal, uncompromisingly one-sided view in favor of jews – how they’ve continually been wronged by others, most especially Europeans. This sick anti-White narrative is today the prevailing narrative in media, academia and politics. It comes from the jews.

New History: How Anti-Judaism Is at the Heart of Western Culture, by Adam Kirsh, Tablet Magazine, 13 Feb 2013:

The title of David Nirenberg’s new book, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, uses a term pointedly different from the one we are used to. The hatred and oppression of Jews has been known since the late 19th century as anti-Semitism—a label, it is worth remembering, originally worn with pride by German Jew-haters. What is the difference, then, between anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism? The answer, as it unfolds in Nirenberg’s scholarly tour de force, could be summarized this way: Anti-Semitism needs actual Jews to persecute; anti-Judaism can flourish perfectly well without them, since its target is not a group of people but an idea.

Nirenberg’s thesis is that this idea of Judaism, which bears only a passing resemblance to Judaism as practiced and lived by Jews, has been at the very center of Western civilization since the beginning. From Ptolemaic Egypt to early Christianity, from the Catholic Middle Ages to the Protestant Reformation, from the Enlightenment to fascism, whenever the West has wanted to define everything it is not—when it wants to put a name to its deepest fears and aversions—Judaism has been the name that came most easily to hand. “Anti-Judaism,” Nirenberg summarizes, “should not be understood as some archaic or irrational closet in the vast edifices of Western thought. It was rather one of the basic tools with which that edifice was constructed.”

This is a pretty depressing conclusion, especially for Jews destined to live inside that edifice; but the intellectual journey Nirenberg takes to get there is exhilarating. Each chapter of “Anti-Judaism” is devoted to an era in Western history and the particular kinds of anti-Judaism it fostered. Few if any of these moments are new discoveries; indeed, Nirenberg’s whole argument is that certain types of anti-Judaism are so central to Western culture that we take them for granted. What Nirenberg has done is to connect these varieties of anti-Judaism into a convincing narrative, working with original sources to draw out the full implications of seminal anti-Jewish writings.

The main reason why Judaism, and therefore anti-Judaism, have been so central to Western culture is, of course, Christianity. But Nirenberg’s first chapter shows that some persistent anti-Jewish tropes predate Jesus by hundreds of years. The Greek historian Hecataeus of Abdera, writing around 320 BCE, recorded an Egyptian tradition that inverts the familiar Exodus story. In this version, the Hebrews did not escape from Egypt but were expelled as an undesirable element, “strangers dwelling in their midst and practicing different rites.” These exiles settled in Judea under the leadership of Moses, who instituted for them “an unsocial and intolerant mode of life.” Already, Nirenberg observes, we can detect “what would become a fundamental concept of anti-Judaism—Jewish misanthropy.” This element was emphasized by a somewhat later writer, an Egyptian priest named Manetho, who described the Exodus as the revolt of an impious group of “lepers and other unclean people.”

As he will do throughout the book, Nirenberg describes these anti-Jewish texts not in a spirit of outrage or condemnation, but rather of inquiry. The question they raise is not whether the ancient Israelites were “really” lepers, but rather, why later Egyptian writers claimed they were. What sort of intellectual work did anti-Judaism perform in this particular culture? To answer the question, Nirenberg examines the deep history of Egypt, showing how ruptures caused by foreign invasion and religious innovation came to be associated with the Jews. Then he discusses the politics of Hellenistic Egypt, in which a large Jewish population was sandwiched uneasily between the Greek elite and the Egyptian masses. In a pattern that would be often repeated, this middle position left the Jews open to hostility from both sides, which would erupt into frequent riots and massacres. In the long term, Nirenberg writes, “the characteristics of misanthropy, impiety, lawlessness, and universal enmity that ancient Egypt assigned to Moses and his people would remain available to later millennia: a tradition made venerable by antiquity, to be forgotten, rediscovered, and put to new uses by later generations of apologists and historians.”

This “exhilirating intellectual journey”, presented as a “new history”, is really just the same old tired promotion of the same old jew-excusing apologia, replete with persistent jewish tropes:

  • That the defining feature of non-jews, and specifically “the West”, i.e. Whites, is “anti-jewism”.

  • That jews are powerless, innocent victims.

  • That non-jews try to invert and otherwise manipulate history.

These are actually just variations on the most common jewish trope of all: The problem is not the jews, it’s anyone and everyone else!

Jews are not unaware that there are other points of view. They simply do not compare to their own. Rather than denying the idea that, “the Hebrews did not escape from Egypt but were expelled as an undesirable element”, they invert and thereby co-opt it. Taken together with the hundreds of conflicts and expulsions since, the moral of the jewish narrative is that everyone else is the undesirable element, the “lepers”.

With the rise of Catholic polities in the Middle Ages, anti-Judaism took on a less theological, more material cast. In countries like England, France, and Germany, the Jews held a unique legal status as the king’s “servants” or “slaves,” which put them outside the usual chain of feudal relationships. This allowed Jews to play a much-needed but widely loathed role in finance and taxation, while also demonstrating the unique power of the monarch. The claim of the Capet dynasty to be kings of France, Nirenberg shows, rested in part on their claim to control the status of the Jews, a royal prerogative and a lucrative one: King after king plundered “his” Jews when in need of cash. At the same time, being the public face of royal power left the Jews exposed to the hatred of the people at large. Riots against Jews and ritual murder accusations became popular ways of demonstrating dissatisfaction with the government. When medieval subjects wanted to protest against their rulers, they would often accuse the king of being in league with the Jews, or even a Jew himself.

The common thread in Anti-Judaism is that such accusations of Jewishness have little to do with actual Jews. They are a product of a Gentile discourse, in which Christians argue with other Christians by accusing them of Judaism. The same principle holds true in Nirenberg’s fascinating later chapters. When Martin Luther rebelled against Catholicism, he attacked the church’s “legalistic understanding of God’s justice” as Jewish: “In this sense the Roman church had become more ‘Jewish’ than the Jews.” When the Puritan revolutionaries in the English Civil War thought about the ideal constitution for the state, they looked to the ancient Israelite commonwealth as described in Judges and Kings.

Surprisingly, Nirenberg shows, the decline of religion in Europe and the rise of the Enlightenment did little to change the rhetoric of anti-Judaism. Voltaire, Kant, and Hegel all used Judaism as a figure for what they wanted to overcome—superstition, legalistic morality, the dead past. Finally, in a brief concluding chapter on the 19th century and after, Nirenberg shows how Marx recapitulated ancient anti-Jewish tropes when he conceived of communist revolution as “the emancipation of mankind from Judaism”—that is, from money and commerce and social alienation.

Religion, no religion, kings, no kings – the common thread is jews somehow managing to get special status and privileges. The jewish narrative explains this by imagining ubiquitous “anti-jews” who only imagine jews exist. Unsurprisingly, the “exhilirating intellectual journey” concludes by imagining Marx not as part and parcel of a quintessentially jewish revolutionary tradition but as an “anti-jew”.

Not until the very end of Anti-Judaism does he touch, obliquely, on the question of what this ancient intellectual tradition means for Jews today. But as he suggests, the genealogy that connects contemporary anti-Zionism with traditional anti-Judaism is clear: “We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of ‘Israel.’ ” For all the progress the world has made since the Holocaust in thinking rationally about Jews and Judaism, the story Nirenberg has to tell is not over. Anyone who wants to understand the challenges of thinking and living as a Jew in a non-Jewish culture should read Anti-Judaism.

More important, let’s touch on what this all means for Whites today. We live in an age in which millions of Whites are exposed to, and to a terrifying extent, have accepted the jewish narrative – a viewpoint utterly hostile to themselves.

Whoever did whatever to whom in the past, today it is jews who police the mainstream media and public political discourse and fill it with terms like “anti-semitism”, “Israel” and “Holocaust”. These terms reflect their obsession with themselves and their best interests, which includes imposing their way of seeing the world, their self-obsessions, onto everyone else.

Reinforcing this point, a “related content” link on the article above takes the reader to an older article from October 2011, Ron Rosenbaum Confronts ‘The End of the Holocaust’:

Alvin Rosenfeld is a brave man, and his new work is courageous. The book is called The End of the Holocaust, and it is not reluctant to take on the unexamined pieties that have grown up around the slaughter, and the sentimentalization that threatens to smother it in meretricious uplift.

The real “end of the Holocaust,” he argues, is the transformation of it into a lesson about the “triumph of the human spirit” or some such affirmation. Rosenfeld, the founder and former director of the Jewish studies program at Indiana University, which has made itself a major center of Jewish publishing and learning, is a mainstream scholar who has seen the flaw in mainstream Holocaust discourse. He has made it his mission to rescue the Holocaust from the Faustian bargain Jews have made with history and memory, the Faustian bargain that results when we trade the specifics of memory, the Jewishness of the Holocaust, and the Jew-hatred that gave it its rationale and identity, for the weepy universalism of such phrases as “the long record of man’s inhumanity to man.”

The impulse to find the silver lining is relentless, though. Suffering and grief must be transformed into affirmation, and the bleak irrecoverable fate of the victims must be given a redemptive aspect for those of us alive. In fact it’s an insult to the dead to rob their graves to make ourselves feel better. One recent manifestation Rosenfeld has shrewdly noticed is the way there has been a subtle shift in the popular representation of the Holocaust—a shift in the attention once given to the murdered victims to comparatively uplifting stories of survivors, of the “righteous gentiles,” of the scarce “rescuers,” and the even scarcer “avengers,” e.g., Quentin Tarantino’s fake-glorious fictional crew.

Rosenfeld is not afraid to contend with the fact that, as he writes, “with new atrocities filling the news each day and only so much sympathy to go around, there are people who simply do not want to hear any more about the Jews and their sorrows. There are other dead to be buried, they say.” The sad, deplorable, but, he says, “unavoidable” consequence of what may be the necessary limits of human sympathy is that “the more successfully [the Holocaust] enters the cultural mainstream, the more commonplace it becomes. A less taxing version of a tragic history begins to emerge, still full of suffering, to be sure, but a suffering relieved of many of its weightiest moral and intellectual demands and, consequently easier to be … normalized.”

Normalized? The Holocaust as one more instance in the long chronicle of “man’s inhumanity to man”? Rosenfeld’s book offers a welcome contrarian take on the trend. Yes, we’ve had enough, as Rosenfeld points out, of museums that cumulatively obscure memory in a fog of well-meaning but misleading inspirational brotherhood-of-man rhetoric.

Here, stripped of the usual misleading brotherhood-of-man rhetoric, is an even more specific and virulent example of jewish self-obsession. Rosenbaum and Rosenfeld see sympathy, everyone’s sympathy, as something the jews alone deserve.

What we haven’t had enough of is a careful consideration of the implications of the Holocaust for the nature of human nature. As George Steiner told me (for my book, Explaining Hitler), “the Holocaust removed the re-insurance from human hope”—the psychic safety net we imagine marked the absolute depth of human nature. The Holocaust tore through that net heading for hell. Human nature could be—at the promptings of a charismatic and evil demagogue, religious hate, and so-called “scientific racism”—even worse than we imagined. No one wants to hear that. We want to hear uplifting stories about that nice Mr. Schindler. We want affirmations!

And the fact that it was not just one man but an entire continent that enthusiastically pitched in or stood by while 6 million were murdered: Doesn’t that call for us to spend a little time re-thinking what we still reverently speak of as “European civilization”? Or to investigate the roots of that European hatred? How much weight do the Holocaust museums give to the two millennia of Christian Jew-hatred, murderous pogroms, blood libels, and other degradations? Or do they prefer to focus on “righteous gentiles” in order to avoid offending their gentile hosts?

And for all their “reaching out” and “teachable moments,” how much do the Holocaust museums and Holocaust curricula connect the hatred of the recent past with contemporary exterminationist Jew-hatred, the vast numbers of people who deny the first, but hunger for a second, Holocaust? It’s a threat some fear even to contemplate—the potential destruction of the 5 million Jews of Israel with a single well-placed nuclear blast—a nightmarish but not unforseeable possibility to which Rosenfeld is unafraid to devote the final section of his book.

Rosenbaum, a perpetually offended professional jew, thinks the problem with jews is that they aren’t self-obsessed and offensive enough. The threat, as he sees it, is “human nature”, which is just another way of saying everyone and anyone else.

Rosenbaum goes on and on in this vein, expressing his contempt for “the non-jewish majority” because, in his opinion, they don’t care enough about the jews.

Consider the Faustian bargain that Holocaust museums in America have so often made with the non-Jewish majority: The survivors and eyewitnesses of the Holocaust are dying, and the only way to get Americans to care about the destruction of the Jews, the only way we will get a (nearly) front row seat on the National Mall in Washington for our Holocaust museum, is by convincing Americans that the Holocaust can be a “teachable moment” in America’s uplifting struggle against intolerance. Rosenfeld calls this bargain “the Americanization of the Holocaust,” and even though he’s on the executive committee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum he’s not happy about the tendency.

In discussing, for instance, the Los Angeles-based Museum of Tolerance (the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Holocaust museum), he says that “by situating the Holocaust within a historical framework that includes such quintessentially American experiences as the Los Angeles riots and the struggle for black civil rights, both of which are prominently illustrated, the Museum of Tolerance relativizes the catastrophe brought on by Naziism in a radical way. America’s social problems, for all their gravity, are not genocidal in character and simply do not resemble the persecution and systematic slaughter of European Jews during World War II.” It’s a critique I first saw articulated by Jonathan Rosen in a 1993 New York Times op-ed called “The Misguided Holocaust Museum” back when the museum on the Mall was first opening. At first I was surprised, but then I was persuaded, at least to a certain extent, by Rosen’s impassioned dissent from the conventional wisdom.

And of course there is the difficult question of how one compares such tragedies. Why not a Cambodian genocide museum? In what ways are the Cambodian, the Armenian, and the Rwandan genocides similar and different from the Nazi genocide? If the Rodney King riots do not deserve being placed on the same plane shouldn’t the casualties of slavery in America, an institution that killed the bodies and murdered the souls of those who survived, count just as much?

There’s an argument that it’s a politically savvy heuristic strategy to unite with other sufferers against the murderous haters rather than set our suffering apart. And Jews have a strong record of concern for the sufferings of others. Solidarity! But Rosenfeld is on a mission not to allow the differences of the identity of the Jewish victims to disappear, and he is both a moral thinker and an astute cultural critic.

Rosenbaum’s argument: Hey jews, you’re letting everyone forget that it’s all about the jews.

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Ian Jobling: Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish

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In November 2012, Ian Jobling was interviewed by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

When Jobling shuttered his website in May 2010, Hunter Wallace provided a synopsis of Jobling’s brief race-realist-ish career in White America, R.I.P.:

The saga began in 2006 when Ian Jobling and Mike Berman broke with Jared Taylor over his refusal to anathematize anti-Semites to their satisfaction. This can be traced back to the infamous David Duke/Michael Hart confrontation at the 2006 Amren conference. In the wake of that incident, Jobling and Berman circulated a letter which condemned Duke and anti-Semitism. If memory serves, they were displeased with Taylor’s response and launched “The Inverted World” in protest.

Mike Berman quit the project early on because (of all things) The Inverted World was not philo-Semitic enough for his tastes. Jobling spent the next few years supporting the Iraq War and attacking various prominent figures in the pro-White movement. His website targeted David Duke, Jared Taylor, Kevin MacDonald, and Frank Salter.

In 2009, The Inverted World evolved in White America, which was the same project under a new name.

I disagree with Wallace’s final analysis:

There was nothing wrong with White America. Jobling’s problem was that he didn’t have the temperament to build a successful website.

Jobling’s problem, from a pro-White point of view, was that he was a dissembler and dissimulator. He waved a pro-“white” banner and tried to tell Whites what to do, while his main priority, all along, was to fight “anti-semitism”. From his time at AmRen onward Jobling was pretending to be something he wasn’t. He could have called his own web site “Support Jews America” or “Jew-First America”. That’s what he was about. The mainstream is full of such organizations. Jobling deliberately went outside the mainstream, striking a pose in opposition to “liberalism” and “leukophobia“, only to spend a great deal of his effort attacking pro-Whites who most cogently distinguish and explain the role played by jews.

I have commented on Jobling a few times, mostly in association with others who behave similarly, like Lawrence Auster and Guy White. Unamused is another more recent but less zealous example.

I described my last and most direct exchange with Jobling in The Urge to Purge, in October 2008.

Jobling saw race through a polarized, black/white lens. This is common in the race-realist, human biodiversity (HBD), men’s rights and black run America (BRA) spheres. Even in such places, where racial traits and conflicts of interest are often otherwise relatively freely discussed, many people simply refuse to think or talk about jews. Others more or less actively defend jews, and do so even when their interests conflict with Whites. Jobling was this latter type.

Jobling’s view of the relationship between Whites and jews went beyond simple blindness. As I alluded above, he wrote volumes about “liberalism” and “leukophobia”. He stared directly at Marx and Freud and others who have done and continue to do similarly destructive work. He even read and wrote about Culture of Critique. Yet somehow his self-imagined analytical mind and interest in human behavior could never accept any significant difference between Whites and jews, biological or otherwise.

Actually, that’s not entirely correct. Jobling did see a significant difference between Whites and jews. On his now defunct Inverted World/White America website, Jobling blamed Whites while excusing jews. At least some of the content is preserved at archive.org.

Principles of the Pro-White Movement is typical of Jobling’s dismal brand of “white” advocacy:

Carrying on the dismal tradition of American white supremacism, most pro-whites today believe our current racial dispossession is due to Jewish influence on the West, if not actual Jewish conspiracies against whites. However, these tired lies conceal the real dynamics of white dispossession, which has been inflicted by white Gentiles on themselves. While it is true that Jews have been inclined towards highly liberal—that is, leukophobic—beliefs, nevertheless more than 90 percent of white racial liberals are Gentiles. Moreover, that Jewish leukophobia could thrive in America suggests that it was a mere extension of something in our national character. For these reasons, the pro-white movement repudiates anti-Semitism and will resolutely oppose the obsession with Jews that poisons and discredits our cause.

The portion of the text emphasized above is the only portion of the entire essay Jobling so elevated.

Drawing a clear distinction between Whites and jews, Jobling claims that jews aren’t to blame for “our current racial dispossession”, because it is “inflicted by white Gentiles on themselves”. This is the suicide meme. Note the subtle inconsistency in Jobling’s use of “our” and “themselves”, as if he doesn’t see himself as a “white Gentile”. For a self-described pro-“white” who can’t bring himself to capitalize White, it’s odd that he cares enough to capitalize gentile.

His two links showcase an uncanny ability to look directly at the hostility of jews against Whites before dismissing it.

The “Jewish influence on the West” link takes you to Jobling’s cockeyed review of Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique, Did the Jews Do It?:

Summarizing CoC is difficult, as it has two theses, one overt and one covert. The overt thesis is that a number of major 20th century intellectual and political movements—racial egalitarianism, Freudianism, Marxism, and advocacy of open borders—have been vehicles of Jewish ethnic interests. This thesis is supported by copious and convincing evidence. The covert thesis, which is never fully avowed or openly argued for, is much more ambitious. MacDonald would have us believe that Jewish activism is the major cause of the forces that he believes is bringing down the West: multiculturalism, mass non-white immigration, and the taboo against white racial identity. This thesis is manifestly implausible. MacDonald’s book is, in fact, an emotional, extravagant, and unsubstantiated indictment of Jews covered by a veneer of scholarship.

Jobling admits that MacDonald’s exposition of jewish hostility toward Whites is very convincing. He simply cannot accept it. At such a loss for an argument of his own he grabs the nearest one at hand. He takes the typical jewish intellectual behavior MacDonald so well documented and imputes it to MacDonald instead.

If MacDonald had confined himself to exploring the ethnic dimension of these movements, no reasonable person could object to his book. However, MacDonald’s real ambition is to convince us that the movements he discusses bear the majority of the blame for multiculturalism and all its attendant phenomena.

MacDonald introduces this agenda into the book through hints and implications, rather than overt argument. The sneaky, two-faced character of CoC is evident in his response to Paul Gottfried, who criticized MacDonald for laying excessive blame on Jews for the cultural changes in the West since 1950.

Here Jobling doesn’t act reasonable. The sneaky, two-faced character he sees is only a reflection of his own bias. MacDonald confines himself and Jobling still manages to get upset, even though he must claim to read MacDonald’s mind so he can do so.

Paul Gottfried is a jew who dissembles about jews, “whites” and “liberalism” in the same vein Jobling and Auster have.

There is a simple, but, I believe, devastating counter-argument to MacDonald’s theory. If the Jewish/Gentile dynamic that MacDonald outlines is rooted in these groups’ biological natures, and Jews have extensive powers to convert Gentiles to multiculturalism, why didn’t anything like multiculturalism emerge before the 20th century? Jews have been present in the West since Roman times, but Gentiles in medieval European societies did not believe in white guilt, nor did they think diversity was a strength, despite the presence of Jewish minorities—indeed, multiculturalism was not only non-existent in medieval Europe, it was unthinkable. That almost all Gentile societies containing Jewish minorities have remained strongly ethnocentric is evidence that Jews have little power to weaken Gentiles’ confidence in themselves.

Jobling never quotes MacDonald explaining MacDonald’s theory.

The main value in MacDonald’s work is in the facts he gathers and lays out – the names, dates and quotes – exposing historic hostility and aggression of jews against Whites. Those, like Jobling, who make a big stink about MacDonald’s motives or theories seem most intent on distracting attention away from what he documents.

Jobling’s implication that jews haven’t lobbied for special rights, or in favor of more general principles like pluralism, tolerance, equality, diversity (the hallmarks of modern multiculturalism), or that this never contributed to the collapse of the societies hosting them before the 20th century, is absurd. If he had looked a bit harder he could have found evidence for it in Rome (see particularly the bits about “jewish rights” and what Tacitus had to say). There have been copious examples in Europe since.

Before Rome and beyond Europe there were Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, Macedonia and more. A study of the history of people tolerating jews living amongst them teaches two lessons: 1) The jews can be counted on to do a good job looking after themselves, and 2) everyone else could do a better job.

The contemporary guilt-tripping of Whites is a case in point. It traces directly back to the emancipation of jews in Europe. The undoing of European rule over European societies proceeded apace once jews were granted equal access to citizenship and the ruling class. The cries of jews against “discrimination” and “hate”, openly aimed at Europeans as early as the late 1700s, are echoed today in the service of every other imaginable “oppressed” “minority”.

The tendency to blame Whites, which Jobling noted in his SPLC interview, began in earnest only after the jews were emancipated. Jews have consistently blamed Whites for every problem created by their integration, and before. The basic mechanism is still the same today. The use of “racism” as shorthand for “Whites are to blame” is simply a generalization of how jews, and Jobling, use the term “anti-semitism”.

Jobling’s second link, “Jewish conspiracies against whites”, takes you to his article, The Insanity of David Duke.

What Jobling actually tries to explain is why he thinks “the racial right in America is fundamentally insane” using “the worldview of David Duke”. The most important part of that worldview, from Jobling’s point of view, is what he describes as Duke’s “theory that Israel was complicit in the 9/11 attacks”. (The only surviving link to Duke is How Israeli terrorism and American treason caused the September 11 Attacks.)

It would be easy to prove that this theory is merely wrong, but I am making a much stronger claim: that this theory is the product of a mind that has lost touch with the principles of reason, a mind that is so maddened by hatred of Jews that it obsessively and irrationally twists everything that it dislikes about the present and the past into evidence of Jewish evil. Because Duke is so popular with the racial right, his views are a good indication of those of the broader community.

Once again Jobling goes on the warpath, not against the facts or Duke’s arguments, but against his own theories, projecting his own maddened hatred onto Duke. He is so disturbed by Duke that he does not try to address what he says directly. He just wants to blot him out. Losing touch with the principles of reason he irrationally twists what Duke argues into evidence that the entire “racial right in America” is fundamentally insane.

Here and elsewhere Jobling regularly “proved” things that were clearly a matter of opinion – usually what he proved was that his opinion about someone else’s opinion was worthless.

Turning now to what Jobling had to say in his SPLC interview, we find that one reason he finally gave up his pro-“white” schtick is that he just couldn’t abide Whites having the kind of nationalism jews have:

In the wake of 9/11, there were a lot of people saying the U. S. was at fault for the attacks, that they were somehow justified by U.S. policies toward Israel. I didn’t buy that argument. And that’s why I got the idea that everyone blamed whites first — that there was an inclination to blame white people even though a non-white was to blame.

A part of white nationalism that I really never bought into but I just sort of agreed with because of the people around me is the idea of ethnonationalism — that it’s natural for people to align with their own race and to work in their own race’s interests. And if you don’t do that, there’s something wrong with you and if you don’t defend your own race’s interests, you’re just going to be victimized by other races because those other races have it together, right? The idea is we are organized by race and we all are meant to work in our race’s interest.

So this is really the heart of white nationalism and the major scholarly exponent of this idea today is Kevin MacDonald. And also J. P. Rushton. And Taylor was popularizing these wrongheaded ideas.

A major source of contention between us [Jared Taylor and Jobling] was the Iraq War. I was a supporter, which may well have been the wrong position. I basically bought into the Bush administration’s line. I believed in the idea of trying to establish a liberal democratic nation in Iraq.

Taylor doesn’t believe in those ideals, not at all. He took this very simple-minded nationalist viewpoint, that we should allow other nations their sovereignty. I always basically agreed with liberal democratic ideals. My concerns about non-white immigration were that immigrants did not believe in those ideals, so we needed to retain a white nation so we can go on being a liberal democracy. That was very, very different from what Taylor believed.

To my knowledge Jobling has never criticized jewish nationalism, and here we see his test drive with “white” nationalism was based on support for Israel and his view of jews as “white”. Ultimately however, he just “never bought into” nationalism for anyone but jews.

Jobling tried to argue that jews were really just like any other White ethnicity. As time went by it must have become as clear to him as it already was to many of the people arguing with him that the truth is the opposite. The modern “liberal” “leukophobic” democracy Jobling says he likes so much treats jews and Whites to different standards. In particular, nationalism for jews is treated completely differently from the nationalism of any European ethnicity.

France for the French is a perfectly reasonable statement most Whites would agree to without a second thought. But as Ian Jobling, the SPLC, and most jews will tell you, France for the French is nothing but a “far-right”, “racist”, “xenophobic”, “nazi” concept. If it means jews can’t hold any office and come or go as they please then it’s also unthinkably “anti-semitic”. At the same time, if you want to be US Secretary of Defense you must say you support Israel as a jewish state.

This undeniable reality completely undercuts Jobling’s core claim that jews are “white”, no different from the rest of us Whites. When push came to shove, Jobling gave up on both nationalism and “whites”. He goes on supporting Israel and jews.

What might motivate a man to argue and behave as Jobling does? There are some hints in his SPLC interview:

I grew up in Louisville, Ky. My mother teaches history and women’s studies at the University of Louisville. My parents divorced in 1974 and my father moved up to Canada, where he taught at a seminary. I went to the best private school in Louisville. Then I went to Amherst College.

My involvement with American Renaissance was incredibly hard on my family relationships. I still see my mother and father, but with my mother’s family, there was so much conflict there that I just stopped seeing them.

Both my parents, I think, did rather well about this. And chose to ignore it. The problem is hard — seriously disagreeing with a family member. Can they put that disagreement aside, to save the rest of the relationship? And both my mother and father managed to do that, [to] compartmentalize and segregate this whole problem. And they did manage to treat me as a son.

My mother’s family was obsessed with sorting out my life, however. They couldn’t get over it. It made for some very rough times and very snarky, hostile Thanksgivings.

Jobling never exhibited any religious basis (e.g. a Christian or Christian Zionist ideology) for his behavior. The impetus appears, by his own account, to come from within his family. Jobling’s description of his extended family, especially on his mother’s side, includes some characteristically jewish traits: academic, snarky, obsessed with sorting out his life, ultimately unable to get over his “white” activism.

It’s likely Jobling is at least partly jewish. Whether he is nor not, Whites probably haven’t seen the last of him, or for that matter, more like him. If Jobling does once again sally forth, nobody should be surprised if it’s to carry on the one consistent ambition he has always had – to fight for the jews.

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Ian Jobling’s Homecoming

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In November 2012, Jobling was interviewed by the Southern Poverty Law Center. One-Time American Renaissance Writer Ian Jobling Repudiates Racist Editor Jared Taylor. Jobling-related web documents have a tendency to go away, so I’m archiving the exchange here, no blockquote.

Can you tell us a little about your childhood?

I grew up in Louisville, Ky. My mother teaches history and women’s studies at the University of Louisville. My parents divorced in 1974 and my father moved up to Canada, where he taught at a seminary. I went to the best private school in Louisville. Then I went to Amherst College.

I’ve read the Southern Poverty Law Center’s stories about neo-Nazis and other really extreme racists, and my background is really quite different from theirs. I didn’t publish songs about killing Jews. I didn’t beat up any black people. I basically did research on crime and education as they relate to race.

How did you end up going from a Ph.D. program to white nationalism?

Starting around 2002, I was still in grad school. I was really very unhappy there. It was plain that I wasn’t going to get a job in the academy. White nationalism was a position totally opposite to everything that I had known up to that point. The ideas coincided with my inclination and interests in a number of ways.

One thing that I was very angry about was what I called cultural egalitarianism, the idea that there is no superior or inferior culture. Everyone is sort of just different and we should be nonjudgmental and tolerant of everything. That I didn’t agree with, and I still don’t. I thought Western culture to be superior in certain ways and that an argument could be made for that. And I was very interested in evolutionary psychology, which studies the relationship between genetics and behavior. It was through that work that I came into contact with racial difference research by [race scientists] Jean-Philippe Rushton and [the late] Glayde Whitney.

Did you get to know them?

Yes, I reached out to them, met them and participated on listservs with them. And I was really quite impressed by them. For someone angry at the liberal culture of the academy, as I was, they had what I thought was a really good critique of what was going on there. So I became very attracted to these ideas, partly because of my frustration with academia.

The 9/11 attacks had something to do with it, too. In the wake of 9/11, there were a lot of people saying the U. S. was at fault for the attacks, that they were somehow justified by U.S. policies toward Israel. I didn’t buy that argument. And that’s why I got the idea that everyone blamed whites first — that there was an inclination to blame white people even though a non-white was to blame. I felt like non-whites were getting all sorts of special apologies and so, if that makes any sense, that was one of the things that really angered me and attracted me to white nationalism.

And it was personal, too. I lived in some pretty bad neighborhoods in Buffalo and was a victim of one robbery by a couple of black youths and another attempted robbery.

Had you run into racist ideas before graduate school?

I never encountered anything like that in my childhood. I don’t think I have ever met a skinhead in my whole entire life. I was part of an academic community that was transnational.

When was it that you started getting frustrated with the academy?

I’m someone who has an analytical mind. And it seemed that were no rules to literary criticism and a lot of advancement in that field had to do with sucking up and just not rocking the boat. For example, my interest in evolutionary psychology and in biological theories of human behavior was off the map in terms of ideas that people were using at that time. They were talking about Marx and Freud and such things.

I don’t think I should ever have gone to the academy really and some of my frustration was always sort of present.

How did you come to know Jared Taylor?

Glayde Whitney [who once wrote a fawning introduction to former Klan leader David Duke’s autobiography] was an especially big fan of American Renaissance. It wasn’t long after I came to know him that I published my first essay. There’s actually an article in American Renaissance about my conversion. I was interested in evolutionary psychology, I guess, starting from 1997, and I came to think these are very bright people and not everything they tell you is false. And so I eventually became interested and persuaded by them about racial differences in intelligence, criminality, and so forth. I didn’t know Whitney was linked to Duke and I had no interest in anti-Semitism.

Tell us about your time at American Renaissance.

I joined in November of 2003 and learned Web design basically on the job. I put up the new amren.com website, which ran news stories. People would comment on them. I also would moderate comments. It was a very popular site. The comments had to be moderated to keep the anti-Semites out. And then I wrote articles, stuff Taylor wanted written about. I didn’t have a lot of discretion at any point in my career there.

The major project that I undertook was the revision of The Color of Crime [a booklet about racial differences in crime rates], which came out in 2005. I did all the research for that.

When did you start to question your commitment to white nationalism?

One thing you must understand is there are two basic strands to white nationalism. This is not generally understood. One strand relates to racial differences in intelligence and behavior. And especially research on black and white intelligence differences. There is some real substance in that research, though I’m no longer as convinced by all that stuff as I used to be. I took a body of research on black/white differences in intelligence and extrapolated from it wildly and irresponsibly into a general theory of white superiority over all other races.

What’s the other strand?

A part of white nationalism that I really never bought into but I just sort of agreed with because of the people around me is the idea of ethnonationalism — that it’s natural for people to align with their own race and to work in their own race’s interests. And if you don’t do that, there’s something wrong with you and if you don’t defend your own race’s interests, you’re just going to be victimized by other races because those other races have it together, right? The idea is we are organized by race and we all are meant to work in our race’s interest.

So this is really the heart of white nationalism and the major scholarly exponent of this idea today is [anti-Semitic theorist] Kevin MacDonald [who argues that Jews are genetically driven to undermine majority white societies by favoring such things as multiculturalism and non-white immigration]. And also J. P. Rushton. And Taylor was popularizing these wrongheaded ideas.

Did Taylor have any trepidation about associating with such a prominent anti-Semite as MacDonald?

Of course. He never alluded to Kevin MacDonald. He wanted to keep himself clear of that crowd. I came to see ethnonationalism as dumb and really dangerous. It’s basically the same mindset as Nazism, right? Hitler believed that different races had different interests and they were like organisms that were designed to work together. And they had to compete against each for world dominance. Hitler thought the Jews were getting the upper hand in the struggle, so something had to be done about that.

Taylor doesn’t believe in genocide. But the basic idea here is the same—there is a natural and a moral obligation to side with your own race and compete with other races. This is how he sees the world.

My other problem was that I came to see that most American Renaissance subscribers are Holocaust deniers. Some of them aren’t, but most of them are. It infuriated me because I think Holocaust denial is an evil conspiracy theory. I was always indignant about that and I never got any sympathy from Taylor. I always wanted American Renaissance to take a position against Holocaust denial as extreme anti-Semitism. But he always dismissed that concern in a rather smug and condescending manner.

What else did you find problematic?

One of the main arguments in The Color of Crime was that Latinos have these high crime rates. That means as Latin American immigration increases, America should grow more crime-ridden. But that isn’t happening. From 1990 to now, there’s been a reduction in crime, simultaneous with substantial [Latino] immigration. And so that link isn’t there. Taylor tended to downplay arguments like these that were inconsistent with his white nationalism.

There were other problems with The Color of Crime. If you look at crime statistics, they’ll show that blacks are 100 or 150 times more likely to commit assault against a white person than a white person is against a black person. And this is entirely true. This is what the statistics do say. And Taylor used this to try to make the argument that there’s a great hostility against whites amongst blacks.

But the argument is silly. If you’ve got a population which is 90% white and 10% black, whites are much more likely to encounter whites than blacks. And that means that any kind of crime, interracial crime, is going to be skewed by that likelihood of encounter. So what Taylor “discovered” — that blacks are supposedly more criminal than whites — didn’t have the ugly meaning that he attributed to it. Once you started adjusting for blacks as a minority, you found blacks were as likely to commit crimes against whites as they were against other blacks. No white nationalist story there. The second edition of Color of Crime, which I reworked, fixed some of these problems.

Why do you think Taylor plays ball with anti-Semites?

Taylor’s position always was we should just remain silent about Jewish issues. In an organization so rife with anti-Semites, that kind of silence is the same as complicity.

Taylor invites people who are associates of David Duke, like [Holocaust denier] Sam Dixon, to the conference. His personal associations are a problem to. He is close to Holocaust denier Mark Weber, who regularly stayed over at his house. There’s a kind of complicity there that maybe made him not see how anti-Semitism discredited us. Given Taylor’s ethnonationalist views, that people are naturally loyal to their race and naturally struggle against each other, well anti-Semitism naturally follows from that, right? But Taylor avoids the whole issue. I think Kevin MacDonald is just more intellectually honest than Taylor is.

How did your parents deal with your white nationalism?

My involvement with American Renaissance was incredibly hard on my family relationships. I still see my mother and father, but with my mother’s family, there was so much conflict there that I just stopped seeing them.

Both my parents, I think, did rather well about this. And chose to ignore it. The problem is hard — seriously disagreeing with a family member. Can they put that disagreement aside, to save the rest of the relationship? And both my mother and father managed to do that, [to] compartmentalize and segregate this whole problem. And they did manage to treat me as a son.

My mother’s family was obsessed with sorting out my life, however. They couldn’t get over it. It made for some very rough times and very snarky, hostile Thanksgivings.

What finally made you decide to move on?

After the 2006 conference, a bunch of us got together and wrote a letter to Taylor about anti-Semitism. I didn’t put my name on it. He was very upset by it and he published a snotty reaction, that he wasn’t going to be pushed around. It was over—I left.

We had other differences, too. A major source of contention between us was the Iraq War. I was a supporter, which may well have been the wrong position. I basically bought into the Bush administration’s line. I believed in the idea of trying to establish a liberal democratic nation in Iraq.

Taylor doesn’t believe in those ideals, not at all. He took this very simple-minded nationalist viewpoint, that we should allow other nations their sovereignty. I always basically agreed with liberal democratic ideals. My concerns about non-white immigration were that immigrants did not believe in those ideals, so we needed to retain a white nation so we can go on being a liberal democracy. That was very, very different from what Taylor believed.

What happened after you left American Renaissance?

I ran a website called “The Inverted World” for a while [that was against anti-Semitism but white nationalist]. I was still dedicated to the white nationalist cause. Some people accused me of being in the pay of Israel, called me a Jew-lover. It was sort of a mire and I got sick of it.

I now realize that it was really misguided. I had erected this whole theory of white superiority based on very limited evidence and believed that non-white immigration was going to cause the United States to become a Third World country. That wasn’t happening and I eventually recognized that.

I feel so much distance between me and that former self that I just wanted to put that behind me.

And what do you think about your years as a white nationalist now that you’ve left?

It may be that there are innate, biological differences among the races. There is a large body of academic research on these differences, and this research is credible, which doesn’t mean that it won’t be overturned in the future. Scholars should not be persecuted for publishing research on these matters. But this subject is so explosive that, in our daily lives, we should ignore it to the extent that this is possible. We should make an effort to treat people equally and not impose our stereotypes on them. That’s where most Americans are today, and I’ve come to accept the common wisdom.

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Decoding the Racial Political Discourse

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During a discussion on MSNBC’s The Cycle concerning Mitt Romney‘s assertion that President Obama should “take [his] campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago”, Touré, the program’s co-host and designated angry black man, got angry:

“That really bothered me,” he said. “You notice [Romney] said anger twice. He’s really trying to use racial coding and access some really deep stereotypes about the angry black man. This is part of the playbook against Obama, the ‘otherization,’ he’s not like us.”

“I know it’s a heavy thing, I don’t say it lightly, but this is ‘niggerization,’” Touré said to the apparent shock of his co-panelists. “You are not one of us, you are like the scary black man who we’ve been trained to fear.”

Naturally this led to a battle between Touré and conservative co-host S.E. Cupp. She took particular issue with the fact that Touré admitted that VP Joe Biden‘s “chains” comments were divisive, but is now calling Romney a “racist” for saying the Obama campaign is “angry.”

“Do you see how dishonest that is?” she asked.

Touré denied calling anyone a racist, which prompted Cupp to say, “Certainly you were implying that Mitt Romney and the base will respond to this dog-whistle, racially-charged coding, and hate Obama, the angry black man?”

“Absolutely,” he replied.

“That’s so irresponsible,” Cupp answered back.

“This is not a revolutionary comment,” Touré later said. “This is a constituency all-white party that rejects the black vote.”

Indeed, anti-White rhetoric in media and politics is a long-term trend. Touré’s comments call to mind Cassandra Jackson’s Huffington post article from June, Why the War on Affordable Health Care is a War on Blacks and Latinos, which I discussed in a podcast titled Guilt-Tripping.

Niggerization, if the term has any meaningful sense, describes a political environment such as we have today, whereby race-conscious blacks like Touré freely project their own racial fears and animosities onto hopelessly deracinated Whites like Romney. This niggerization was preceeded and is enabled by judaization, whereby race-conscious jews lecture and lord over deracinated Whites. For example, in faulting the Republican party for being too White, Touré is simply aping the attitudes and tactics of race-conscious jews. As Harold Meyerson wrote in 2008:

Republican conventions have long been bastions of de facto Caucasian exclusivity, but coming right after the diversity of Denver, this year’s GOP convention is almost shockingly — un-Americanly — white. Long term, this whiteness is a huge problem.

DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz reiterated the point in January:

There is a reason that the Democratic Party is far more diverse than the Republican Party, because the natural home, politically on major issues to Hispanics, to women, to Jews, to Asian-Americans, the diverse spectrum — to African Americans.

The entire spectrum of diversity is comfortable in the Democratic Party because we stand up for the issues that matter to those communities and Republicans shun them.

Non-Whites who participate in the discourse hosted by the thoroughly judaized corporate media are expected to wear their racial identity on their sleeve and regularly present their race-based grievances against Whites. Any White who might respond from a perspective explicitly favorable to Whites has already been excluded or removed. The deracinated Whites who remain can only sputter helplessly about how “divisive” and “irresponsible” their unrestrained racial antagonists are, the pretense being, despite constant reminders otherwise, that the only responsible divide is ideological.

The most notorious icons of Whiteness – Romney, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity – are strictly judeo-conservative, afforded their limelight only so long as they profess love and respect for jews and Israel. Tellingly, it is these deracinated, pro-jew Whites who are most often identified as “nazis”, accused of using dog-whistles to appeal to Whites, while secretly hating jews.

What we see here are the reality-inverting, guilt-tripping tactics I referred to in my discussion of Jackson. Non-Whites are using the jewish playbook, passively-aggressively accusing Whites of sneakily conspiring to stereotype, scapegoat, and even war on them. One clear marker is how they unapologetically assert their Otherness even as they pathologize and demonize Whites for noticing. It taps into decades of cultural marxism and anti-White propaganda, and is ultimately based on a centuries-old jewish blame-shifting narrative that put Whites on the defensive back when blacks were still in chains.

The simple fact is that non-Whites are waging and currently winning a war against Whites. It is a war the vast majority of Whites will not think or speak of, much less fight. The more Whites concede, the more non-Whites demand. Their chauvinists fight more or less openly for the interests of their people, allying with each other against Whites. All Whites get in the judaized, niggerized mainstream is indirect, ineffective code-speak.