The ADL: Managing White Rage

From The Occidental Observer, December 7, 2009

A recent Haaretz article on the state of the Jewish world contained the following:

In general today, one of the long-term challenges for the American Jewish community is evident in demographic forecasts that predict that in two or three decades, certain minority groups are expected to become a majority in the United States. A recent ADL poll showed that 12 percent of Americans hold anti-Semitic views — but among African-Americans, the figure is 28 percent, and among foreign-born Hispanics it is 35 percent.

“If 20 years from now the largest caucus in Congress is Hispanic, they will have a great deal to say about where foreign aid goes,” says [ADL head Abraham] Foxman. “On church-state issues and all kinds of social issues — some of which impact directly on the Jewish community and some indirectly — they will have a great influence. We are working on it now, so as they become the majority force, there is a sensitivity, a relationship. It’s a major challenge.”

Jews tend to have a very large blind spot when it comes to immigration. Norman Podhoretz recently published a book titled Why Are Jews Liberals? The basic pitch is that American Jews should support the Republican Party because it’s better for Israel. Podhoretz never proposes that Jews should actually become conservative — just support Republicans because they’re better for Israel. It never occurs to Podhoretz to oppose immigration for the same reasons alluded to by Foxman, his fellow Jewish activist and unregistered agent for a foreign government — to wit, that a future America with a non-White majority may well have much higher levels of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiment than an America with a White majority.

Podhoretz claims that American Jews have a religious devotion to liberalism — religious in the sense that it is wonderfully impervious to empirical reality or even a reasonable view of Jewish interests. But Podhoretz’s pro-immigration brand of “conservatism” is open to the same charge — that it’s not in the interests of Jews.

Is Jewish support for immigration really irrational? Stephen Steinlight certainly thinks it is, stating, for example,

Privately [American Jewish leaders] express grave concern that unregulated immigration will prove ruinous to American Jewry, as it has for French Jewry, and will for Jews throughout Western Europe. There’s particular fear about the impact on Jewish security, as well as American support for Israel, of the rapid growth of the Muslim population. At the conclusion of meetings with national leaders, several told me, “You’re 1000 percent right, but I can’t go out and say it yet.”

In fact, Steinlight even argues that massive immigration in general is bad for Jews: “Massive immigration will obliterate Jewish power by shrinking our percentage of the population — to a fraction of 1% in 20 years.” And he points out that there is also a problem with Latinos because they are

steeped in a culture of theological anti-Semitism that’s defied the post-Vatican II enlightenment of European and North American Catholicism. Nor have they a mitigating history of familiarity with Jews, little knowledge and no direct or familial experience of the Holocaust, and regard Jews simply as among the most privileged of white Americans. An ADL study found 47 percent of Latinos hold strongly anti-Semitic attitudes.

The idea that Jewish support for immigration is irrational fits well with the hostility that even Jews like Steinlight have toward the traditional people and culture of America. Steinlight’s hostility toward the restrictionism of 1924–1965 is palpable. This “pause” in immigration is perceived as a moral catastrophe. He describes it as “evil, xenophobic, anti-Semitic,” “vilely discriminatory,” a “vast moral failure,” a “monstrous policy.” Jewish interests are his only consideration, while the vast majority of pre-1965 Americans are described as a “thoughtless mob” because they advocate a complete moratorium on immigration. (See here.)

Such hostility is likely to be blind to rational calculations of self-interest — at least for most Jews.

Just as the vast majority of Jews can’t bring themselves to vote Republican because of fear and loathing of all those conservative Christians — a major theme of Podhoretz’s book, Jews can’t bring themselves to oppose immigration because of fear and loathing of Europeans and their culture.

Nevertheless, the fact that Jews are doomed to follow their gut hostility about Europeans and their culture doesn’t mean that they aren’t making rational calculations about the future. Foxman’s comments indicate what is doubtless the mainstream Jewish attitude about a non-White future: It presents problems, but the problems are manageable if the organized Jewish community makes alliances with the looming non-White majority. Read the Whole Article