Tag Archives: politics

Our Jewish Problem

Here’s a mainstream media article that makes no bones about the jewish hegemony over US politics. The central point of debate is whether jews think Obama is good or bad for the jews. That they have the power to decide his fortune, one way or the other, is taken for granted.

The tone for this exposition of particularist jewish concerns is set right in the title. Tsuris is yiddish slang meaning “trouble or woe; aggravation”. The masters of finance, politics and media are displeased, and they intend for us to know it.

The Tsuris – Why Barack Obama Is the Best Thing Israel Has Going for It Right Now, John Heilemann, New York Magazine, 18 Sept 2011:

Barack Obama is the best thing Israel has going for it right now. Why is that so difficult for Netanyahu and his American Jewish allies to understand?

How, exactly, did Obama come to be portrayed, and perceived by many American Jews, as the most ardently anti-Israel president since Jimmy Carter?

This meme, of course, has been gathering steam for some time, peddled mainly by right-wing Likudophiles here and in the Holy Land. But last week, it took center stage in the special election in New York’s Ninth Congressional District, maybe the most Jewish district in the nation and one held by Democrats since 1923. When the smoke cleared, the Republican had won—and Matt Drudge was up with a headline blaring REVENGE OF THE JEWS.

Obama’s people deny up and down that the loss of a seat last occupied by Anthony Weiner portends, well, pretty much anything for 2012. But the truth is that they are worried, and worried they should be, for the signs of Obama’s slippage among Jewish voters are unmistakable. Last week, a new Gallup poll found that his approval rating in that cohort had fallen to 55 percent—a whopping 28-point drop since his inauguration. And among the high-dollar Jewish donors who were essential to fueling the great Obama money machine last time around, stories of dismay and disaffection are legion. “There’s no question,” says one of the president’s most prolific fund-raisers. “We have a big-time Jewish problem.”

Obama’s team has made its share of errors in the conduct of its diplomacy and in allowing misperceptions to take hold: that its tough-love approach to Israel has been all the former and none of the latter; that its demands on the Palestinians have been either negligible or nonexistent. And many Jewish voters, like those Wall Street financiers (and, to be sure, the overlap between those groups isn’t trivial) who flocked to Obama and were then chagrined when he called them out as “fat cats,” have all too often focused more on the president’s words than his deeds—and come away with the impression that he doesn’t seem to “feel Israel” in his bones.

For Obama, such assessments would be funny if they weren’t so frustrating and absurd; and for the Jews who know him best, they are simply mystifying. In the last days of the 2008 campaign, the former federal judge, White House counsel, and Obama mentor Abner Mikva quipped, “When this all is over, people are going to say that Barack Obama is the first Jewish president.” And while that prediction has so far proved to be wildly over-optimistic, there is more truth in it than meets the eye.

The suspicions regarding the bone-deepness of Obama’s bond with Israel were present from the start, and always rooted in a reading of his background that was as superficial as it was misguided. Yes, he was black. Yes, his middle name was Hussein. And yes, in his time in Hyde Park, his friends included Palestinian scholars and activists, notably the historian Rashid Khalidi. But far more crucial to Obama’s makeup and rise to prominence were his ties to Chicago’s Jewish milieu, whose players, from real-estate powerhouse Penny Pritzker to billionaire investor Lester Crown, were among his chief supporters and financial patrons. In 2008—after herculean efforts by his campaign to reassure the Jewish Establishment that he was, er, kosher and stamp out the sub-rosa proliferation of the lie that he is a Muslim—he won 78 percent of the Jewish vote, four points higher than John Kerry’s total four years earlier.

This background meant that, although Obama was hardly an old hand on Israel when he became president, he was well attuned to the Jewish community and its views. “With the kind of exposure he had to Jewish backers, Jewish thinkers, in Illinois,” says deputy national-security adviser Ben Rhodes, “he came into office with a deeper understanding of Jewish culture and Jewish thought than, I would argue, any president in recent memory.”

The American push for a settlement freeze would be the first flash point in Obama’s relations with Israel and also a turning point in his standing with Jewish voters at home. With Netanyahu having just reassumed the prime-ministership in a coalition government that included several ultraconservative parties, he resisted Obama’s call for a freeze. American Jews, meanwhile, saw the administration as aggressively pressuring Israel but treading softly on the Palestinians. In combination with its policy of engagement with Iran, this fostered the impression that Obama’s stance amounted to punishing America’s truest friend in the region while rewarding its—and Israel’s—most lethal foe.

And then there was Netanyahu’s surpassingly volatile governing coalition, which was held together by far-right nationalist, fundamentalist, and even proto-fascistic elements (cf. Avigdor Lieberman).

Omitted: paragraphs detailing yet another Netanyahu snub.

But Netanyahu knew he could get away with it—so staunch and absolute is the bipartisan support he commands in the U.S. Garishly illuminating the point, on the night before his speech to Congress, the prime minister attended the annual AIPAC policy conference in Washington, where he was the headline speaker at the event’s gala banquet. Before he took the stage, three announcers, amid flashing spotlights and in the style of the introductions at an NBA All-Star game, read the names of every prominent person in the room, including 67 senators, 286 House members, and dozens of administration and Israeli officials, foreign dignitaries, and student leaders. (The roll call took half an hour.) When Harry Reid spoke, he obliquely but unambiguously chastised Obama for endorsing the use of the 1967 lines as the basis for a peace deal: “No one should set premature parameters about borders, about building, or about anything else.” The ensuing ovation was deafening—but a mere whisper compared with the thunderous waves of applause that poured over Netanyahu.

The next day came his speech to Congress, in which he spelled out demands that were maximal by any measure: recognition by the Palestinians of Israel as a Jewish state as a precondition for negotiations, a refusal to talk if Hamas is part of the Palestinian side, an undivided Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and absolutely no right of return for Palestinian refugees.

Exactly one month after his Oval Office awkwardfest with Netanyahu, Obama made the mile-and-a-half trip from the White House to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel to have dinner with several dozen wealthy Jews. His appearance had twin objectives: to rake in more than $1 million and to calm their jangled nerves. Unlike many conservative Jews, the big-ticket Democrats in the room, who had paid $25,000 to $35,800 a head to be there, didn’t believe that Obama was hostile to Israel. Yet it’s fair to say they had their share of qualms and a ton of questions.

In addition to deploying Axelrod and DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, his campaign has hired an official outreach director to try to fix its Jewish problem: Ira Forman, the former head of the National Jewish Democratic Council. Forman is known for an encyclopedic knowledge of Jewish politics and a history in waging trench warfare against Republican Jewish groups. But none of that will prepare him for the job he is taking on. “A lot of what he’ll be doing is coaxing and persuading,” says a Jewish Obama megabundler. “A lot of people who raised a ton of money for the president last time are very short on enthusiasm for doing it again.”

The hiring of Forman is a tacit acknowledgment that the White House has badly handled the continual care and feeding required to keep major donors sweet—and all the more so in this case. The first White House liaison to the community was Susan Sher, who at the time was chief of staff to Michelle Obama. “Lovely woman, but she knew nothing about Israel,” says an Obama bundler, who some time ago attended a dinner with Sher and a clutch of A-list tribesmen: Mort Zuckerman, HBO co-chief Richard Plepler, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. “It was kind of insulting to have this woman talking to these people who know this issue backward and forwards. And then there was no follow-up. Nothing.”

Both the nature and scale of Obama’s Jewish problem—at least where donors are concerned—are tough to pin down. A recent poll by the Republican firm McLaughlin & Associates found that among Jewish donors who gave to Obama in 2008, just 64 percent have already donated or plan to donate to him this time. Complicating the picture is the fact that Jewish buckrakers cite a variety of complaints with Obama: Some object to his rhetoric on Wall Street, some to his economic policies, and some to his handling of Israel.

Omitted: paragraphs explaining why the jewish vote in NY-9 (Anthony Weiner’s vacacted seat) doesn’t matter.

On the other hand, thanks in large part to the indefatigable Ed Koch, who endorsed Obama in 2008 but has now become one of his loudest (and loopiest) critics on Israel, the NY-9 election was framed to an unusual extent as a referendum not just on Obama but on his supposed betrayal of the chosen people. All over TV and the web was Koch, doing a squawky imitation of Romney, saying that the “Obama administration is willing to throw Israel under the bus in order to please the Muslim nations.”

Even in the face of the most pessimistic (for Obama) reading of NY-9, Democrats will comfort themselves with two facts. The first is that, for all the outsize attention they command—and the earsplitting volume of the collective megaphone they wield—Jews make up about 2 percent of the national electorate. Too small a proportion, that is to say, to matter much to the overall popular vote.

The second ostensibly comforting fact for Democrats has to do with the trend lines of recent presidential-election history: Obama’s 78 percent of the Jewish vote, Kerry’s 74 percent, Al Gore’s 79 percent, Clinton’s 78 and 80 percent in 1996 and 1992, respectively. The implication here is that, in the end, the Jews will come home to Obama—mainly because they are overwhelmingly liberal and have nowhere else to go.

The trouble for Republicans is that, in the extant crop of candidates, there is no one who bears even a passing resemblance to Dutch. Though Rick Perry is as avidly pro-Israel as any politician alive—“If you’re our friend, we are with you,” he says. “I’m talking about Israel. Come hell or high water, we will be standing with you!”—his positions on almost every other issue are anathema to virtually every Jew to the left of Eric Cantor. And Perry’s theocratish tendencies have been criticized even by some who are pretty far right; the Christian rally he held in Houston not long before jumping into the race, “The Response,” was derided by Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League as a “conscious disregard of law and authority” because of the way it traversed the spheres of church and state.

Mitt Romney is an entirely different case. Within the Republican donor class, Romney is the strong favorite. He has actively courted the AIPAC crowd, staking out hawkish positions on Iran and pillorying Obama on Israel. The day before he opened his Florida headquarters earlier this month, Romney dropped in on a local AIPAC meeting in Tampa and was greeted with a standing O. But when it comes to winning over independent Jews or queasy Democratic ones, Romney may have done too effective a job in transforming himself from a pro-choice, pro-gay-rights moderate into a more conventionally conservative candidate. “He’s a phony,” a cheeky Democratic operative notes. “But for a lot of Jews, he may turn out to be just a little too convincing.”

The premise of Obama’s approach to Israel all along has been straightforward. Given the demographic realities it faces—the growth of the Palestinian population in the territories and also of the Arab population in Israel itself—our ally confronts a fundamental and fateful choice: It can remain democratic and lose its Jewish character; it can retain its Jewish character but become an apartheid state; or it can remain both Jewish and democratic, satisfy Palestinian national aspirations, facilitate efforts to contain Iran, alleviate the international opprobrium directed at it, and reap the enormous security and economic benefits of ending the conflict by taking up the task of the creation of a viable Palestinian state—one based, yes, on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed upon land swaps, with East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital.

The irony is that Obama—along with countless Israelis, members of the Jewish diaspora, and friends of Israel around the world—seems to grasp these realities and this choice more readily than Netanyahu does. “The first Jewish president?” Maybe not. But certainly a president every bit as pro-Israel as the country’s own prime minister—and, if you look from the proper angle, maybe even more so.

Heilemann proceeds from an explicit recognition that jewish financial power (“the non-trivial overlap between jewish voters and Wall Street financiers”) and jewish political contributions (“the high-dollar Jewish donors who were essential to fueling the great Obama money machine”) drive US politics. Clearly this drive extends beyond their current focus on Obama and Israel.

Heilemann idolizes jews and their ethnocentrism. Whether as “the Jewish vote”, “the Jewish Establishment”, “the Jewish community”, “the Jewish diaspora” or just plain old “the Jews”, jews and jewish interests are presented in a purely positive light. This is in stark contrast to the cynical, sinister regard for Whites and White political interests found in most of the mainstream media. Jews are not pathologized for having a group identity, nor are they portrayed negatively for openly arguing about and pursuing their own group interests, independent of the rest of us.

Heilemann and US media pundits and politicians in general treat jewish nationalism with the utmost deference and respect. Though Israel is a jewish ethnostate, ruled by a coalition “held together by far-right nationalist, fundamentalist, and even proto-fascistic elements”, it enjoys the obsequious fealty of Obama and other top US politicians. This may cause consternation for some jews who don’t think it is good for the jews, but their grumbling pales in comparison to the pitiless condemnation and vilification routinely aimed at any form of White nationalism.

Heilemann confides that even the most powerful non-jewish politicians in the US are expected to “feel Israel in their bones”. This is really just one facet of the more general requirement to placate jews, doing whatever they deem best for themselves. But the jews often can’t agree on what they think is best, and so what results is a humiliating, circus-like environment in which US presidents and their challengers regularly profess their love for the jews, only to get kicked in the teeth by one subset of jews or another who don’t find the performance pleasing enough.

Here Heilemann describes Rick Perry as “avidly pro-Israel as any politician alive” and yet “anathema to virtually every Jew to the left of Eric Cantor”. In other words, anathema to virtually every jew. Heilemann’s point is that Obama and every contender for his job each have their own jewish problems, though different in degree. As Heilemann relates the dances these clowns perform to please the jews, what comes through loud and clear is the presumption that the rest of us are immaterial. How this impacts our lives if of no concern. In this way Heilemann indirectly informs us that we all have a jewish problem.

Tea Party Upgraded

At first they ignored the Tea Party. Then they mocked it. Now they characterize it as an existential threat.

Democrats seek to pin credit downgrade on tea party, Washington Times, 7 August 2011.

It is a measure of the arrogance and desperation of this bankrupt system’s defenders that they think they can pin the blame for unsustainable debt on the one political group that’s actually opposed to it.

(Cartoon via US News and World Report.)

Michele Bachmann Serves the Interests of Everybody Except Whites

Bachmann: America ‘cursed’ by God ‘if we reject Israel’ | Minnesota Independent: News. Politics. Media., 8 February 2010:

I am convinced in my heart and in my mind that if the United States fails to stand with Israel, that is the end of the United States . . . [W]e have to show that we are inextricably entwined, that as a nation we have been blessed because of our relationship with Israel, and if we reject Israel, then there is a curse that comes into play. And my husband and I are both Christians, and we believe very strongly the verse from Genesis [Genesis 12:3], we believe very strongly that nations also receive blessings as they bless Israel. It is a strong and beautiful principle.

Bachmann: Obama ‘Has Failed the African American Community’ and Hispanic Community | CNSnews.com, 20 June 2011:

“Mr. President, the status quo is not working for Americans,” said Bachmann. “The status quo certainly isn’t working for the African-American community, with 16 percent unemployment, or the Hispanic community, with nearly 12 percent unemployment. It’s even worse for the youth: For Hispanic youth right now, 26 percent unemployment; for African-American youth, 40 percent unemployment.

“This president has failed the Hispanic community,” said Bachmann. “He has failed the African-American community. He has failed us all when it comes to jobs.

“As president of the United States, my goal will be job creation in the Hispanic community, job creation in the African-American community, job creation for all Americans, and turning this economy around,” said Bachmann. “And we will.”

Nothing to see here says our special jewish fifth columnist “friend” Lawrence Auster, Is Bachmann making a special appeal to minorities?:

As can be seen from the full context of the statement, Bachmann was not making any particular appeal to blacks and Hispanics.

Says the guy who lives on planet Israel. Here’s pro-Israel, pro-non-White Bachmann, in full context, in her own words: Michele Bachmann Explains President Obama’s Jobless Report Quote.

Bachmann supports everybody except the people who actually make up the Tea Party.

Image care of Russian jews who hate Bachmann more than Whites ever could.

Weinergate: Jewish Values on Display

It began with the usual judeo-liberal media attempts to ignore or at least downplay the scandal as it was first starting to swirl around one of their rising stars. When it was clear the controversy could not be snuffed out with silence Weiner himself went on the attack, calling an interviewer’s implication that he had done anything inappropriate outrageous. As we know now Weiner was bluffing, but at the time he seemed to think customary jewish tactics of argument – playing the victim with bombastic bluster while he berates his interlocutor – could serve more broadly as a long-term strategy.

Of course the fact that Anthony Weiner is a jew, or as Debbie Wasserman Schultz might put it, a proud pro-Israel jewish member of Congress, has gone mostly unremarked upon in mainstream coverage. As with the DSK affair, a powerful political figure can be a proud jew, a representative of their very distinct community, right up until they do something embarassing or criminal, at which point, oh yeah, they just happen to be jewish, no different than anybody else, and anyway, so what?

A fleeting glimpse of the significance of Weiner’s jewishness came to light in a Radar Online article titled Weiner Used Jewish Sexual Stereotype To Facebook Sexting Partner, by Dylan Howard, 6 June 2011. Oh my. Howard says Weiner’s “reference to a stereotype of Jewish women’s aversion to the sex act is sure to create more heat under a scandal that is already red hot.” Actually, it was the opposite of aversion:

“You give good head?” the embattled and married New York congressman asked the woman on March 16, this year.

She responded: “I’ve been told really good…and i love doing it.”

At that point, 46-year-old Weiner declared: “wow a jewish girl who sucks (bleep)! this thing is ready to do damage.”

So the problem, according to Howard, isn’t Weiner’s lying, or infidelity, or obsession with sex. The problem is that Weiner thinks negative thoughts about jewish women. In private.

This is an absurd excuse for a more direct and plausible understanding of the exchange, which is that Weiner is not only happy to have found an eager virtual sex partner, but that he is delighted that she is jewish – that he finds her jewishness especially exciting. Such an understanding is bound to create cognitive dissonance in the minds of deracinated Whites, lectured relentlessly for decades now, most especially by jews, that any preference for our own kind is peculiar and wrong. So better to invert reality and pretend that Weiner holds a dim view of jewish women.

There’s more on this stereotyping excuse below, but first let’s take a brief detour. The Radar Online article contained a link to a May/June 2011 Moment Magazine article which provides some background on Weiner and specifically his jewish bona fides. Live from New York, It’s Anthony Weiner, by Daphna Berman:

A Master Of Political Theater, Congressman Anthony Weiner Has Leveraged His Strong Liberal Opinions, New York Attitude And Willingness To Go Head-To-Head With Republicans On Cable TV To Fill A Void In The Democratic Party.

Weiner, whose ninth district includes parts of Queens and Brooklyn, represents what is arguably the most Jewish congressional district in the U.S. Raised in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in a middle-class Jewish family, he now lives in Forest Hills, Queens, and is—as he likes to remind people—a true New Yorker. His parents are divorced: His father, Morton, is a lawyer, and his mother, Frances, a retired public school teacher. He had two brothers, Jason and Seth (who was killed in a 2000 hit-and-run accident). Weiner and his mother are close, and she has accompanied him on campaigns—though he refused to have his mother answer questions directly. “She’s completely out of control,” he tells me. “You have no idea what she’s going to say.”

Weiner attended New York public schools, from Brooklyn Technical High School to SUNY Plattsburgh, where he graduated in 1985 with a degree in political science. He went to work for then-Congressman Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and became something of a protégé; he reportedly said to his boss, “I’m going to take your job some day.” He learned quite a bit from his mentor—also Jewish, and now the senior senator from New York—and, most notably, has absorbed much of the media acumen for which Schumer is known. “As a staff member to Schumer, he learned how to take advantage of the electronic media and how to get on television,” says Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. Former Republican Senator Bob Dole once said the most dangerous place in Washington was the space between Schumer and a camera, and critics could say the same of Weiner.

[Congressman Jason] Chaffetz [(R-Utah)], who has worked with Weiner on other bipartisan issues, concedes that Weiner can be “over-the-top,” adding that “his style offends a lot of people and he sometimes makes issues a little too personal. He’s aggressive, which works for some people. When we’re on the same side, it can be helpful.”

Jousting with conservatives can sometimes come across as a sport for Weiner, although he insists otherwise. “It’s a necessary thing to do,” he says. “I have a choice: I can shout at my television or shout at the host directly. I’m not afraid of having a debate about these issues. And some of these programs are so deep in lies and demagoguery that someone needs to be there to correct the record.” Then, with a smile, he adds: “It allows me to burn off bile.”

One of his colleagues is Florida Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, who serves with him on the Judiciary Committee and is a personal friend. “Anthony is one of the most quick-witted legislators there is, and once he gets hold of an issue, there’s no letting go,” she says. “He’s very well-spoken and knows how to get a point across succinctly and effectively. He’s an excellent debater, and when a back and forth is necessary, he’s someone you can call on to be the standard-bearer.”

Weiner has always been assertive about his Jewishness. In his own words, he’s spent “more time at melaveh malkahs [post-Shabbat gatherings], a lot more time at shul, at sisterhood breakfasts, and at bond breakfasts than probably just about anybody else.” He doesn’t belong to a synagogue or consider himself close to a single rabbi—except to say, consummate politician that he is, “all the shuls in my district are my home shuls.” Says Warren Hecht, president of the Queens Jewish Community Council: “He’s a Jewish official who hasn’t forgotten” his roots or his district.

Weiner, whose middle name is David, had his bar mitzvah at Union Temple in Park Slope, Brooklyn. As part of a promise to his Twitter followers, he recently released a photo of himself on his big day as an awkward-looking 13-year-old boy, complete with a self-described 1970s Jewfro. “We weren’t a very religious household, but we had a very strong sense of our Judaism,” Weiner says of his upbringing.

He came by his solid Zionist inclinations early on. “Support for Israel was always a very big focus in my household growing up,” says Weiner, who has been to the Jewish state more than a half-dozen times. He remembers wearing a homemade pin to Sunday school that read, “I am a Zionist.”

As a congressman, he has consistently pushed pro-Israel legislation, and Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), counts him among the “top 10 congressmen” in terms of Israel issues.

From the outside, Weiner’s hawkish Israel views appear to have collided with his personal life. His wife, Huma Abedin, was born in Michigan to a Pakistani mother and an Indian father, and raised in Saudi Arabia. Her late father, an Islamic scholar, established an institute there that aimed to deepen religious tolerance, while her mother, who is a sociology professor in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, helped create one of the first women’s colleges in the country.

The pair dated for two years before announcing their engagement, and Weiner was uncharacteristically tight-lipped about their courtship. In a meeting with the New York Daily News editorial board in 2008, Weiner dodged a number of personal questions but was adamant when asked if his relationship posed a potential risk to his political ambitions. “I’m certain that the relationship was not the product of a political calculation,” he said. Later, he also refused to answer what his Jewish mom thought of his girlfriend. “It’s not something I want to talk about.”

The July 2010 wedding was covered widely. The reports were gushing, accompanied by photos of the couple with the beautiful bride in a white Oscar de la Renta gown. Response in the Jewish community was tepid: “Christian President Marries Jewish Congressman to Moslem Political Aide on Shabbos,” read the headline on The Yeshiva World News after the Saturday nuptials.

The ZOA’s Klein is more direct: “People I’ve spoken to in his district said they wouldn’t support him because he intermarried.” In fact, before Weiner came to the ZOA dinner in December, Klein warned him that his marriage to a Muslim might elicit jeers from the crowd.

Whoops. More cognitive dissonance, this time for jews. How to reconcile Weiner’s assertive jewish identity with his choice of a non-jewish spouse? Hmmm. As Moment is written by jews, for jews, at least the readers who are unhappy about “intermarriage” (wink, wink, it’s about “religion”) aren’t subjected to any insinuations that they’re ignorant xenophobic bigots.

The article also discusses Weiner’s aspirations to become mayor of New York City:

It’s unclear what Weiner’s chances may be. At the 2011 Congressional Correspondents’ Dinner, noting the absence of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Weiner, one of the event’s headliners, said: “Who knew that what it takes to be mayor of a big city is to be a hot-tempered, arrogant, loud Jew with nine and a half fingers. Who knew? And in other news, I’ve taken a job as a meat cutter at Arby’s.”

But changing demographics, as well as a shifting political reality, may present something of a challenge to what until now has been a meteoric rise. Political strategist Hank Sheinkopf says, “New York is less white than ever and less Jewish than ever, and traditional social class lines don’t hold.” Weiner’s only chance, he says, “is to position himself as a non-billionaire from the outer boroughs. He can do it, but it will be difficult.”

The article’s conclusion contains a bit of unintended prophesy:

“He’s passionate—people respect that and respond to that,” says Queens Jewish Community Council President Hecht. “If he was a phony, people would see right through him.

Tablet Magazine (by jews, for jews) expanded on Radar Online’s quick bit of damage control. Understanding Weinergate, by Marc Tracy, 7 June 2011:

How social media felled a rising star, and how his Jewishness was involved

That about sums it up. Half of Tracy’s article is spent floating the implausible notion that Weiner doesn’t understand the internet. He’s an idiot savant. No mention of the more plausible notion that Weiner’s incredible arrogance and lust had something to do with his assertive self-image as a “rising star”, an unassailable zionist soldier for judeo-liberal interests.

Expanding on the Radar Online article quoted above, the second half of Tracy’s excuse-making consists of a deeper examination of jewish identity, group-pity, and navel-gazing about stereotypes:

There is one more thing to discuss, though if my mom wanted to stop reading this post now, I wouldn’t mind. A Nevada woman Weiner flirted with on Facebook told him that she understood herself to be good at giving oral sex and added, “i love doing it.” To which the congressman from Queens responded: “Wow a jewish girl who sucks []! this thing is ready to do damage.”

I’ll pause for your laughter. But this is also, believe it or not, yet another manifestation of a generation gap! Weiner is old enough to be of the generation that, brought up on Portnoy’s Complaint and its spawn, generalizes Jewish women as sexually cold, and specifically unwilling to perform blow jobs and inept at them when they can be reluctantly coaxed. But a younger generation has almost the exact opposite conception of Jewish women: They (again generalizing) see Jewish women as more willing than the average woman to give blow jobs and as especially skilled at the task. Contributing editor Rachel Shukert has written the definitive article about this (she discusses it here); the new stereotype became especially pronounced in the public consciousness, she argues, thanks to Monica Lewinsky. When that scandal broke, Weiner was almost 30.

Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that the single journalist most responsible for forcing this scandal into the open—who briefly hijacked Weiner’s press conference yesterday demanding an apology—is the conservative impresario Andrew Breitbart, who, yeah. Can you imagine if they had had Twitter in the shtetls?

When jewish stereotypes are discussed in scandal rags like Radar Online, intended for consumption by the hoi polloi, there is a pretense that jews are scandalized by such things. Amongst jews themselves such things inspire laughter. Listening in on their conversation what one actually finds is a seemingly inexhaustible capacity to argue about how they perceive themselves and how they are perceived by others, coupled with strong desires and active efforts to shape those perceptions.

If Weiner’s private lewd flirtations make you queasy, you don’t want to click the “here” link in the text above. It takes you to Interview with Rachel Shukert on Jewish girls and blowjobs at Best Sex Writing 2008. Here’s the most relevant portion of this irrelevant sideshow:

Why do you think the stereotypes about Jewish women and sex are so pervasive? What do you make of the contrast between the older stereotype of the frigid Jewish woman vs. the newer one of the oversexed one?

Well, I think it’s important to stress that most of the factors in the culture that have made Jewish women seem unattractive–whether it’s being frigid, or physically unappealing, demanding, spoiled, etc.–have been created by Jewish men. Now, I love Jewish men. The men I love most in the world–my husband, my father, my grandfather–are Jewish men. But it’s not Gentiles who invented the “shikse goddess” or wrote all the JAP jokes. Who knows why? Frustration, mostly, I think. All that self-loathing and insecurity.

I’m going to speak in incredible generalizations here for a minute, so just bear with me. I think that Jewish men in the past 30 or 40 years have been extremely invested in making themselves sexy and attractive to the culture-at-large–and they are, they seem smart, sensitive, generous, etc. But with it comes this sense of fear, this kind of atavistic fear, I think, that at any moment they’ll be found out. And if anyone can call a Jewish man on his bullshit, it’s a Jewish woman. So they rationalize why they shouldn’t be involved with Jewish girls–all of these reasons. Jewish women are left open to constant criticism. And since Jews have been such an intrinsic part of popular culture, all this stuff disseminates and becomes conventional wisdom.

Now, I think this is changing, hugely. I think Jews have become more and more of an accepted part of mainstream culture, and this generation of Jewish men are more comfortable with themselves than ever before, and no longer feel like they’re straddling two worlds and trying to leave one of them behind. They can look on their Jewishness as something comforting instead of something constricting. But in the meantime, I think Jewish women have been like, “You know what? We’re sick of waiting for you,” and started on their own project of who they are, which is extremely interesting. And that’s what’s ascendant right now, I believe, which is very exciting for me. So that’s the split, I think, that the old Jewish stereotypes were disseminated by men, and the new ones by women. And the mainstream picking up on it.

Judeo-centric views like this were discussed in Jews Run Hollywood, Whites Get the Blame. I find it refreshing to read such criticisms of jewish media influence, cited approvingly by jews without the usual denials and personal attacks in response. It’s refreshing because critiques from any point of view sympathetic to “shiksas” or their men is painted as “hate” and greeted with howls of real hate from jews.

The nonchalant “yeah” link in the Tablet article above tugs on another interesting jewish thread. You may have noticed how the judeo-liberal media makes judeo-conservative media mogul Andrew Breitbart out to be the devil incarnate. Breitbart broke the Weiner story and wouldn’t let it die. Maybe you wonder why. Tablet relates the jewish view in Being Andrew Breitbart, by Allison Hoffman, 21 May 2010:

But who is Breitbart? The New Yorker sent Rebecca Mead to find out, and it turns out that Breitbart, who was adopted, is a Jewish boy from L.A.’s Westside, specifically in Brentwood. There he attended the exclusive Brentwood School, which is the kind of place that turns out the people who run Hollywood’s machinery—the Ari Golds and the producers and the lawyers and the managers. But Breitbart tells Mead he was, even as a high-schooler, turned off by “the industry” and instead fascinated by the theatrics of Washington, D.C. His politics, he reports, emerged from his exasperation with the “deconstructive semiotic bullshit” first introduced to the American cultural scene by emigré members of the Frankfurt School—radicals, almost all of them Jews, exiled by the Nazis in the 1930s.

The article Hoffman links provides more insight into Breitbart’s background and motives. Rage Machine – Andrew Breitbart’s empire of bluster, by Rebecca Mead, 24 May 2010:

Breitbart is the founder of Breitbart.com, which, since 2005, has aggregated news from the Associated Press, Reuters, and other wire services. He is also the proprietor of several newer Web sites—Big Hollywood, Big Government, and Big Journalism—that provide right-leaning commentary and original reporting. Their content is largely supplied by unpaid bloggers, who are given a more prominent platform than they might otherwise attain. The Big sites are dedicated to countering what Breitbart believes is the leftist bias of American cultural and media institutions.

Breitbart, who is Jewish, grew up in Brentwood, an affluent part of Los Angeles. He seems a familiar bicoastal type until he starts explaining his conviction that President Barack Obama’s election was the culmination of a plot, set in place in the nineteen-thirties by émigré members of the Frankfurt School, to take over Hollywood, the media, the academy, and the government, with the aim of imposing socialism.

Breitbart is tall and burly, with eyes the color of Windex, silver hair that he sometimes forgets is no longer blond, and jowls that he wobbles for emphasis when he wishes to express outrage. He is fond of saying that he has two modes of discourse: righteous indignation and puerile jocularity. “I like to call someone a raving cunt every now and then, when it’s appropriate, for effect,” he informed me. “ ‘You cocksucker.’ I love that kind of language.”

Breitbart considers himself an accidental cultural warrior. “I am not as partisan as people think I am,” he told me, calling himself eighty-five per cent conservative and fifteen per cent libertarian. His conservatism fails him on issues such as the legalization of prostitution, and he sometimes tilts toward favoring gay marriage. “But, when the entire media is structured to attack conservatives and Republicans, there is a huge business model to come in and counterbalance that,” he said.

He does not pretend to be an expert in policy, or to be particularly interested in it. “Just because I am paying attention to politics and culture doesn’t mean that I should be talking about the health-care bill, talking about the minutiae,” he told me. Instead, Breitbart is obsessed with wresting control of the political narrative from the established media organizations. If the wire services that Breitbart aggregates, and the bloggers he recruits, serve as his content providers, then Breitbart might be called a malcontent provider—giving seething, sneering voice to what he characterizes as a silenced majority.

Breitbart frequently decries racism, and likes to point out that he was adopted, as was his younger sister, who is of Mexican descent. “I hold in great disregard the idea that somehow her blood and my blood separate us,” he told me. “I grew up resenting people who would look at us at the table and would go, ‘Why are those people together?’ ” He likes to say that he is “pro-miscegenation.” As a result, Breitbart says, he is outraged when charges of racism are cynically made. Last year, he appeared on “Real Time with Bill Maher” and sounded this theme: “There’s nothing in this country that is a worse accusation—in America, if you accuse somebody of racism, that person has to disprove that.”

“I just feel like I am one of these Idaho guys saying, ‘You’re not taking my land’—with a gun, on my porch,” Breitbart told me one evening. He was sitting in the bar of the Bowery Hotel, in Manhattan, drinking white wine from a glass that was being refilled by a slim waitress in a black wrap dress. His companions were similarly urbane.

Breitbart’s image of himself as a Western survivalist, he was explaining, referred to the sense of siege he felt in Los Angeles, which, he contends, has become egregiously radical since September 11, 2001. “There are people there that are aggressors,” he said. As the evening progressed, it emerged that the closest Breitbart had ever come to the real Idaho was on the Internet. He’d been looking online at properties in Coeur d’Alene, a resort town, while fantasizing about life elsewhere. “I saw the golf course there, and it had a really cool island,” Breitbart said.

Breitbart’s parents were quietly conservative. His father was a restaurateur and, later, a lobbyist for the food-service industry; his mother was a bank executive. But their son, who attended the prestigious Brentwood School, was reflexively liberal. “It was like the water I was in,” he told me. Gary Hewson, a classmate, who is now a real-estate developer, recalls Breitbart as “a bit of a class clown, a rabble-rouser.” Breitbart says, “That was my only discernible skill.”

For college, Breitbart went to Tulane University, in New Orleans, a period that he now regards with a mixture of shame and nostalgia. “It was four hideous years of debauchery of a level that was incomprehensible to me,” he told me. “I remember rationalizing my misbehavior. I remember giving my dad a book on the chemical structure of MDMA”—Ecstasy—“and I was, like, ‘Dad, what do you think of this?’ ”

“I was so excruciatingly bored after college—it was like going home to Pittsburgh to get into the steel industry, then realizing that you hate steel,” he says. “I hated Hollywood. I hated being at parties and hearing people say, ‘I work at “Mad About You,” I work in the clothing room.’ ”

Breitbart also began to reconsider the education that he had received in Tulane’s American Studies department, where, in his off-hours from partying, he had been exposed to critical theory. “I wanted to read Mark Twain and Emerson and Thoreau,” he says. “And I remember moments in class where I thought my head was going to explode, going, What the fuck are these people talking about? I don’t understand what this deconstructive semiotic bullshit is. Who the fuck is Michel Foucault?” He came across the work of Camille Paglia, and was captivated by her analysis of the takeover of academia by the left.

“A lot of these guys I was reading about in my American Studies class were German and Italian social scientists from the University of Frankfurt,” he says. “Once you see what their plan was, you realize that it was implemented. It was taking over the cultural institutions. The left is smart enough to understand that the way to change a political system is through its cultural systems. So you look at the conservative movement—working the levers of power, creating think tanks, and trying to get people elected in different places—while the left is taking over Hollywood, the music industry, the churches. They did it through academia; they did it with K-12. You look back at the last forty years, and people didn’t put up a fight.”

But of course many people put up a fight, and still do. The inconvient truth for judeo-conservatives like Breitbart is that most of those people are demonized as “racists” and “anti-semites” – shoved down the memory hole as if they never existed, never resisted. Judeo-conservatives join judeo-liberals in doing this. They are two faces of a jewish hegemony over politics, media and culture. Breitbart may feel some small measure of compassion for the Whites who never resisted, especially because he knows just how much judeo-liberals detest us anyway, but it’s only relative. Judeo-conservatives find White conservatives (which is to say most Whites) useful, for the moment at least. For them the judeo-liberal takeover doesn’t represent a tragedy, much less a crime. But it does present a “huge business model” selling a white-washed view of the ongoing jewish aggression and hegemony. Judeo-conservatives are just as fond of vulgarity and deviance as their judeo-liberal comrades. Sure, they disagree about some things, vehemently some times. What they agree on is that Whites must defend or at least defer to jewish interests, while the idea of Whites defending White interests fills them all – from Weiner to Breitbart – with fear and loathing.

A Disagreement About Who is Firstest

The video above is part of a CNSNews article, DNC Chair: Republicans Believe Illegal Immigration ‘Should be a Crime’, 31 May 2011. It quotes Wasserman Schultz spouting the usual apologia in favor of genocidal levels of immigration into the US:

“We have 12 million undocumented immigrants in this country that are part of the backbone of our economy and this is not only a reality but a necessity,” she said. “And that it would be harmful–the Republican solution that I’ve seen in the last three years is that we should just pack them all up and ship them back to their own countries and that in fact it should be a crime and we should arrested them all.”

12 million? The backbone of our economy? The Republican solution is arresting them all? Political views don’t get much more detached from reality than this. And this is not some random US congresswoman. Wasserman Schultz leads one of the two major political parties.

The second half of the video starts with a question about a disagreement at a meeting which took place a few days earlier. Note that this question triggers a far more impassioned response:

Question: The Republican Jewish Coalition head was reported in the New York Times – Matt Brooks is saying that you were proposing a gag order on this subject.

Wasserman Schultz: Ha ha, yeah, well, uh, you know I take… one of the most tremendous sources of pride for me is that I am the first jewish woman to represent the state of Florida in Congress. And, ah, another tremendous source of pride for me is that I am a pro-Israel jewish member of Congress and I proudly support a president that is pro-Israel. Um. What I think is unfortunate and what I suggested, along with others, including members of the Republican Jewish Coalition that are not the executive director of that organization, um, is that we need to make sure, like AIPAC pushes for, like Jewish Federation pushes for, like ADL and every major jewish organization pushes for in this country, we need to make sure that Israel never becomes a partisan issue. And that’s what we talked about in that meeting.

The meeting was a bipartisan jewish affair regarding jewish interests. Jewish GOP official blasts DWS, Politico, 24 May 2011:

The top official at a Republican Jewish group blasted Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz for an “unprecedented and inappropriate” effort to quell partisan debate over Israel in a private meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday at which both were present.

Republican Jewish Coalition Executive Director Matt Brooks clashed with Wasserman Schultz, as I reported yesterday, after Wasserman Schultz called for partisan unity on matters of Israel policy and Brooks – whose group had criticized her for speaking before the liberal group J Street – responded that he reserved the right to attack Democrats who stray from a hawkish pro-Israel line.

Another take on the interview and the disagreement – DNC chair argues Obama isn’t losing support of Jewish voters, Los Angeles Times, 26 May 2011:

The South Florida Democrat laughed at charges leveled by the head of a Republican Jewish group that she wanted to squelch partisan criticism over Israel. Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, accused Wasserman Schultz of proposing a “gag order” on criticism about Israeli policy when they and others met privately with Netanyahu this week.

“We need to make sure that Israel never becomes a partisan issue, and that’s what we talked about in that meeting,” Wasserman Schultz said. She quoted Netanyahu as saying, at the end of the meeting, that when it comes to Israel, “we need to erase the aisle” between Democrats and Republicans.

“Everyone that calls themselves legitimately pro-Israel believes that we should not make Israel a partisan issue. Unfortunately, I think there are organizations that claim to be pro-Israel that are partisan first and pro-Israel second. And I think unfortunately the way the Republican Jewish Coalition has conducted itself is they put their Republicanism in front of their pro-Israel stance. And I think that’s unfortunate. And I think it’s why the Israeli Embassy said that Israel should not be a partisan issue.”

Here are a couple of previous media reports concerning Wasserman Schultz’s background.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz picked as Democratic National Committee chair, POLITICO, 5 Apr 2011:

The congresswoman is beloved by the Democratic rank and file for her aggressive, outspoken advocacy for liberal points of view. She’s frequently deployed as a surrogate, particularly to groups of women and Jewish voters.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz Picked to Chair D.N.C., NYTimes, 5 Apr 2011:

Ms. Wasserman Schultz is known inside the party for her strong fund-raising abilities, and she represents South Florida, which will be a critical battleground in the 2012 presidential race.

Some background on Matthew Brooks:

Matthew Brooks serves as Executive Director of both the Republican Jewish Coalition, an organization dedicated to enhancing ties between the Jewish community and the Republican Party, and the Jewish Policy Center, a think-tank that examines public policy from a Jewish perspective.

Matt began his political career as State Chairman of the Massachusetts College Republicans while still an undergraduate at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA. Matt managed the Jack Kemp for President campaign in Massachusetts, as well as directed projects in New Hampshire and New England. Matt became the Political Director of the Republican Jewish Coalition in 1988. Taking a leave of absence from the RJC, Matt served as the National Field Director for Victory ‘88 Jewish Campaign Committee, designing and implementing campaign strategy on behalf of the Bush-Quayle ‘88 campaign. Matt was appointed Executive Director of the RJC in 1990.

Matt was twice selected (in 2006 and 2008) by the Jewish Forward as one of the 50 most influential Jews in America.

In addition to his duties leading the RJC, Matt also serves as the organization’s principal spokesman. In this role Matt has been a frequent guest on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and has been quoted extensively in publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and other major newspapers.

One of the many consequences of jewish influence in media and academia is that the perfectly descriptive term Zionist Occupation Government is painted as “an antisemitic conspiracy theory”. Yet, the jewish conspiracy is right out in the open. Erase the aisle. Israel first, party second. This is the state of US politics today.

What we see here is a disagreement between hyper-ethnocentric jews who hold positions of great power and have strong influence over the US government. What they care about most is what’s best for the jewish ethnostate of Israel. They all agree that in US politics the interests of Israel should always come first, across the board, for everyone, not just jews. The big question for them is whether to continue imposing this the usual stealthy judeo-liberal way, or the usual in-your-face judeo-conservative way.