Updated February 13, 2008:
Joachim Martillo has posted a lengthy and excellent opus, Judonia Rising: The Israeli Lobby and American Society, on one of his websites, an encyclopedic analysis of the US Israeli Lobby and its effects on US society. Noam Chomsky offered a critique (see the first comment at the end of the post for details), and afterwards, Joachim rewrote several pages. I have also been asked to offer a critique.
This is a very important work that ought to be read in full by anyone interested in the subject. It deserves to be widely disseminated and commented on, dissected and analyzed.
First of all, I agree with much of what he has written so there is no need to comment on what I agree on. If I don't mention it in what follows, that probably means I agree.
I do disagree with certain things.
Obviously, as a Commie, I have serious issues with the whole Bolshevik Jew killers thing. It's hard to argue that people who reduced the death rate by 70% in Russia were the worst killers to ever set foot in Russia. I'm so tired of debating the Bolshevik Jew killer thing that I don't even want to get into it anymore.
Now, for the rest.
It is incorrect to say that Jewish values include early age of sexual initiation and serial polygamy. Kevin MacDonald notes that US Jews have sex at the latest age of any ethnic group. They also have some of the most stable marriages last time I checked.
It's difficult to lump Abigail Thornton, a rightwing Jewish Republican opposed to civil rights, in with a US Jewish agenda that relentlessly promotes civil rights. Martillo fails to note that the Jewish neocons are actually opposed to civil rights law in the US, either by promoting Supreme Court justices sworn to dismantle it or by cheering on Republicans who have been refusing to enforce civil rights laws for almost 30 years now.
It's very hard to say that Friedmanite freemarketeer neoliberalism is part of the US Jewish agenda, as most US Jewish organizations are agnostic on economics and if anything, promote more state intervention, regulation of business, socialist redistribution programs, socialized medicine and education, etc.
Friedmanism is part of the agenda of the neocons, but the neocon agenda in whole is embraced by only at most 20% of US Jews who vote Republican. This is where the equation of Jewish neoconservatives with US Jews gets dangerous and wrong. US Jews vote up to 80% Dem in recent years.
Neocons are best seen as a rightwing split-off of Republican Jews whose views in whole are rejected by the overwhelming majority of US Jews. However, on Israel, many liberal US Jews are becoming neocons in whole or in part, but the average US Jew is still pretty diverse on Israel. It is better to say that the large US Jewish organizations have gone over to neoconservatism on Israel.
I am still not sure that the US media can be painted as 100% Jewish owned, as there are large media firms still run by old WASP money. Murdoch is apparently Jewish, but that goes way back. Here is a summary from the web on Murdoch's Jewish connection. It sounds reasonable:
Rupert (actually Keith Rupert) Murdoch's father was Keith Murdoch (died 1952), his mother Elisabeth Joy (nee Greene) and yes her mother, Marie Grace de Lancey Forth was born from a Jewish mother.It's downright bizarre the way so many ethnocentric voraciously attack the notion that Murdoch is Jewish. You would think they want to claim him.
Rupert's paternal grandfather, Patrick John, was a reverend, the maternal grandmother was Marie Grace de Lancey Forth, who was born in Warnambool, Victoria (Australia), HER mother Caroline Jemima (nee Sherson) was born to a Jewish family, hence by "Jewish law", making Rupert Jewish.
Also for the record, it was not unheard of "way back then" for Protestants or Catholics to marry Jews, and I know this as my grandparents are prime example. My grandfather, born in Ireland in 1895 to a prominent protestant family, married a Jewish woman, making my father and all his siblings Jews.
The Jewish ancestry comes purely from the MATERNAL line and has squat to do with the paternal.
It should also be noted that many Jewish families settled in Australia post 1788.
Martillo fails to discuss the theory of the Jewified US Gentile, as Albert Lindemann coined the term in his book Esau's Tears, Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews. This is also a theme of Yuri Slezkine's Jewish Century, the theme of which is best described as "we are all Jews now". Many US Gentiles are Jewified via marriage to or deep friendship with ethnocentric Jews.
This aspect of US politics is overlooked in folks trying to "blame it all on the Jew". Americans support Jews and support Israel. We are Jewified. I believe Karl Marx said that in 100 years the US would be a Jewish country. He was correct.
How those Gentiles got Jewified is open to debate.Perhaps they became Judeophiles and Zionists by brainwashing. Well, so what? Most of our political views are due to propaganda of some sort. Any analysis of US Jewry, the Lobby, etc, that does not take into account all of the Gentile support for Israel is bound to fail.
US Jews have plenty of money, but it is mostly in certain parts of economy. They were run out of the banks long ago and the Holocaust finished off the rest of Jewish banking power. Banks are now run by international corporations out of Japan, Hong Kong, Europe and the US. The ones in the US are not noticeably Jewish-owned.
It is true that Jews are important in investment banking. They made serious gains in this area in 1910-1920 but the effort to take over the regular banks was resisted by Gentile ethnic warfare. Jews also tried to take over the stock market at that time but were rebuffed similarly.
All of this is documented extensively in Henry Ford's The International Jew, an excellent book that is often not really anti-Semitic in any way, and at any rate is essential reading for documentation of US Jewish ethnic warfare in the US from 1900-1920. It was during this period that the Jewish Hollywood and media dominances were created.
I do not believe that the US financial or high tech industries are run by Jews at all. US Jews are huge in retail department stores, especially clothing, and also in jewelry, furs and a few other things. They don't really dominate real estate at all.
I also disagree that a US Jewish or Zionist elite is set to take over a rather democratically diminished US. There will be some Jews in such a setup, mostly neoconservatives, but most will be White Gentiles like Bush, Rumsfeld, Rove and Cheney, with some Blacks like Condoleeza Rice and the Powells and some Latinos like Alberto Gonzales.
Increasingly, the US is becoming a caste society based on income alone, and members of any race may join these hard rightwingers in their elitist project. It's all about money, not race, religion or ethnicity.
This undemocratic, quasi-fascist project will be resisted by many, and I assure you that liberal US Jews will be leading the charge to oppose this nightmare. People see Jews leading contrary movements going head to head with each other and think it's all part of an exceptionally devious and convoluted Jewish plot.
The truth is so much more mundane: Jews simply lead movements, and are also disproportionately attracted to fanaticism and extremism in general, in part due to the nature of Judaism itself, as Kevin MacDonald points out.
In related news, Tom Lantos, longtime Congressman from San Mateo, is dead. A Hungarian Jew and a Holocaust survivor, he has been a longtime, very strong supporter of the Israeli government. He led the charge to invade Iraq and promised an Israeli legislator that the US would take out Saddam for the benefit of both countries in 2002.
He helped rally Congressional Democrats to go along with Bush's mad war. Lantos is a good example of some of the very liberal California Jews who represent us Californians. They are superb on most liberal issues and get high marks from most liberal organizations on their voting records.
But on Israel, they are often surprisingly hawkish. Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein are good examples, as is Brad Sherman. As a progressive, I would probably vote for them, as the Republican running against them would be just as pro-Israel, if not more, along with being wrong about all the domestic stuff. Politics is so complicated.
As'ad AbuKhalil of the Angry Arab blog has a great article up about George Habash of the PFLP in the Electronic Intifada, who we wrote about previously. The lead photo is really nice too; I would run it here but I'm unsure about rights issues. EI, run by Ali Abunimah, is a great publication with superb views on the conflict.
It's run by reasonable Palestinians, exemplified by Abunimah, and their supporters, and it's as far from Hamas and Islamic Jihad as it is from Zionism. Zionists, mostly Jews, have been running a vicious campaign against Abunimah for years calling him an anti-Semite (What else?) but there's nothing to it.
To what extent the views of EI represent those of the average Palestinian on the street is not known. My worry is that as this conflict festers idiots like Hamas and IJ and bigger idiots like Al Qaeda will gain increasing power in Palestine. They won't achieve their goals, and I would not want them to anyway, but a lot more people, mostly Palestinians, are going to die.
AbuKhalil is wrong about one thing in his piece - that the PFLP hardly exists anymore.
While dwarfed by Hamas and Fatah, it's still a large and powerful organization with at least 80,000 active supporters, plenty of money, a fully armed guerrilla force that carries out regular attacks, a busy propaganda faction with websites, a newspaper and magazines, and up to a dozen above-ground organizations for everything from youth to women to workers.
Islamic Jihad gets way more press, but they are not much bigger than the PFLP. As an example, the PFLP fired 7 missiles on February 5th and 2 rockets on February 6th, all from Gaza and aimed at Sderot and Ashkelon. I think shooting these rockets is idiotic, but it's kind of hard to understand how a nonexistent army can fire 7 rockets in 2 days. They also fought a battle with Israeli forces in Gaza on February 5th.
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