Category Archives: Judaism & Jews

UPDATED (12/9): Rabbi Ben Isaacson: Rest in Peace, Daddy.

Family, Ilana Mercer, Judaism & Jews, South-Africa

My father, Rabbi Ben Isaacson, died today, December 7, 2020, of heart failure. He died in Johannesburg, South Africa, the home he loved, fought for and would never have abandoned. Dad was a true son of South Africa.

My father had a brilliant and original mind. Before his death, he was working on books about the greatest Hebrew prophets who were his muse.

This column of mine, “Job: Jewish Individualist, instantiates and is greatly influenced by dad’s thinking. I wager no rabbi would look at Job as a scrappy dissident who quarreled with G-d and won on the merits of his argument.  The book is a radical philosophical masterpiece, to which dad’s thinking, at once scholarly yet original, was well suited

From him, I got a fierce sense of immutable justice, a deep love of the best in literature and music (J.S. Bach was as close to G-d as it gets, he once muttered in secret), and an analytical habit of mind.

His medical team in South Africa were healers with a heart. I am proud of and grateful to South Africa’s finest—and to my family, all.

I love you daddy. xx

NEW COLUMN: An Anti-Semite Asks & Is Answered: Is Israel Racist? (Part 1)

Anti-Semitism, Argument, Critique, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Racism

THE NEW COLUMN, in which I recount a recent interview I gave, is “An Anti-Semite Asks & Is Answered: Is Israel Racist? (Part 1).” It is on Townhall.com, WND.COM, The Unz Review
and American Greatness.

An excerpt:

…  Prejudice—here used as the right to pre-judge—is a concept more fittingly attached to the Jewish ethno-state, not racism. The idea of rejecting some and welcoming others into the fold, as Israel most certainly does, is an extension of an individual’s right as a sovereign, discerning human being.

So long as no real violence and aggression are involved, the right to pre-judge and, consequently, to associate or dissociate in accordance with one’s prejudgments—this is the prerogative of a free person, and, by extension, of a free group of people, living in voluntary association.

Is freedom of association racist? Is exclusion racist? Only if you are of the progressive left. Both vicious and violent, the progressive left believes that one is compelled by egalitarian, humanistic dogma to accept everyone into your midst on pain of punishment.

Again, the freedom to exclude is not racist. Rather, it is the inherent right of free individuals, living severally or collectively.

The freedom to exclude is a libertarian tenet of liberty. This, not racism, is the reason many libertarian-minded conservatives were with Barry Goldwater in opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as it dictated with whom people may associate or dissociate from—who they employ, serve, sell to, or rent to.

Free people associate and dissociate at will.

To wit, say a retail store selling Nazi insignia and memorabilia opens its doors in my neighborhood. I enter in search of the yellow Star of David Jews were forced to wear during the Third Reich. The proprietor, decked out in Nazi regalia, says, “I’m sorry, we don’t serve Jews.” …

… READ ON

… THE NEW COLUMN, in which I recount a recent interview I gave, is “An Anti-Semite Asks & Is Answered: Is Israel Racist? (Part 1).” It is on Townhall.com, WND.COM, the Unz Review and American Greatness.

 

UPDATED IV (11/10/020): NEW COLUMN: Multiculturalism Elbows Anglo-Americans Out

Conservatism, Culture, Founding Fathers, History, IMMIGRATION, Islam, Judaism & Jews, Multiculturalism

NEW COLUMN is “Multiculturalism Elbows Anglo-Americans Out.” It’s on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

An excerpt:

America is “a society that is and always has been multiethnic and polyglot,” burbled David Frum, in a 2016 exposition. It’s a refrain repeated by centrists like Frum and French (also David), by all lefties and by well-trained faux rightists.

Such dissembling about America having always been multicultural are no more than post hoc justifications for turning the country into a veritable Tower of Babel.

Early America’s colonies were founded by Englishmen in periwigs, speaking different English dialects. They were joined by Irish, Scottish, French, Dutch, German and Swedish Christians, who quickly adopted English as lingua franca.

Not even the woke Wikipedia denies that, “Nearly all colonies and, later, states in the United States, were settled by migration from” one colony to another, with “foreign immigration” generally playing “a minor role after the first initial settlements.”

In other words, population growth was organic, a result of the settlers themselves multiplying and being fruitful, not of a flood of immigrants.

This so-called “multiethnic” dispensation saw early Americans publicly debate and come to a broad agreement on some highly complex, abstract matters of political philosophy, an impossibility today. The colonial community had to be pretty tight to arrive at the Articles of Confederation, followed by the Constitution.

Try as he might, not even the sainted Barack Obama got away with claiming, as he did, that, “Islam had been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding.”

Beyond their heavy involvement in the slave trade and in the Barbary wars—and contrary to Obama’s modern myth-making—Muslims were most certainly not enmeshed in America from its inception.

Moreover, and almost to a man, the learned Founding Father, as chronicled by Laura Rubenfeld of PJ Media, held a dismal view of Islam and its vampiric prophet. 

It gives me great pleasure to break it to my anti-Semitic readers and to Ilhan Omar, the representative from Mogadishu in Minnesota: Jews were around. Early American Jews were of, mostly, Sephardic origins, having hailed from Spain and Portugal. That Jewry has always been more refined and reactionary than their radical, East-European brethren, who arrived much later.

And so we find Jews fighting or financing the War of Independence. Francis Salvador and Haym Solomon come to mind. “The highest ranking Jewish officer of the Colonial forces was Colonel Mordecai Sheftall.” Why, Jews even produced proud Confederate soldiers, the likes of Col. Abraham Charles Myers.

It was to the peaceful Jews of America that George Washington saw fit to promise peace and goodwill in a 1790 address to a synagogue congregation in Newport, Rhode Island.

Descendants of the original inhabitants of the United States of America are certainly not up to dealing with the political aggression brought to the country’s politics by recent immigrants. Come to speak of it, neither are the First Nations, the American Indians, who’re also politically more passive, when compared to the barbarians who’ve joined the Empire, since 1965.

To tether the character of Rep. Ilhan Omar to America’s immigration preferences is perfectly proper. Likewise Rashida Tlaib. The representative from Michigan is a second-generation Palestinian-American, and is every bit as tribal, politically aggressive and reliably leftist as Omar.

By virtue of its main source countries, America’s mass immigration policy privileges individuals like Omar: angry, anti-white, and highly receptive to theories that blacken the West and porcelainize the undeveloped world (a pedagogic poison that is, by the way, hothoused in the U.S.—K to 12 and beyond). …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN is “Multiculturalism Elbows Anglo-Americans Out.” It’s on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

UPDATE I (11/8/019):

Joe writes: “Don’t forget Judah P. Benjamin [featured above], Secretary of State for the Confederacy. Southern Jews fought with great valor against Lincoln’s einsatzgruppen.”

Others would have preferred that Benjamin be more of a loser.

UPDATE II:  The Economist, a left-liberal publication, comments on, “The rising clout of Indian-Americans,” and alludes to the passivity of the Ameri-Indians, by comparison, as I did in the column. “There may well be an Indian-American president before there is an American Indian one,” they write.

UPDATED III (12/10/019):

Important column by @michellemalkin emphasizing the attempt to regain states’ rights lost. Did you know that “communities” lacked “… explicit…rights to stem the lucrative tide of #refugees coming largely from Third World countries”?

UPDATE IV (11/10/020): Judah Benjamin.

NEW COLUMN: White Guilt: Where Does It Originate And How To Fight It

Christianity, Hebrew Testament, IMMIGRATION, Judaism & Jews, Nationalism, Race, The State, The West

NEW COLUMN IS “White Guilt: Where Does It Originate And How To Fight It.” It’s on The Unz Review and on WND.COM.

An excerpt:

Is white guilt a Christian affliction? Edward Gibbon would probably say so.

Gibbon was the genius who wrote, in 1776, the 12 volumes that comprise “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” wherein he saddled nascent Christianity with the downfall of the Roman Empire, no less. (I read the 1943 version, which was “condensed for modern reading.”)

By so surmising, Gibbon brought upon himself the wrath of “bishops, deans and dons”—not to mention that of the great Dr. Samuel Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell. Boswell called Gibbon an “infidel wasp” for “the chapter in which he showed that the fall of Rome was hastened by the rise of Christianity.”

And indeed, Gibbon seems to point toward Christianity’s self-immolating, progressive, pathologically inclusive nature, remarking on the courting by early Christians of “criminals and women.” [Not my words.]

Even more infuriating to his detractors was Gibbon’s prodigious scholarship. “No one could disprove Gibbon’s basic facts,” notes American author Willson Whitman.

Whitman, who wrote the 1943 Foreword to the abridged version, remarks on how “Gibbon outraged the Christians of his era by suggesting the ‘human’ reasons for the success of Christianity.”

“Among these reasons [Gibbon] noted that Christianity … attracted to its ‘common tables’ slaves, women, reformed criminals, and other persons of small importance [Whitman’s words, not mine]—in short that Christianity was a ‘people’s movement of low social origin, rising as the people rose.” [His words, not mine.]

To go by Gibbon, Christianity might be called the Social Justice movement of its day. Gibbon certainly seemed to suggest so.

In no way was Gibbon, who “professed Church of England orthodoxy,” diminishing Christianity’s centrality to Western civilization, or its essential goodness and glory. He was just following the evidence.

With Gibbon’s historical analysis in mind, it’s difficult to dispute that America, once identified as a staunch Christian country, seldom stands up for and safeguards Christian interests.

Trust Tucker Carlson to take note. On April 22, 2019, less than two minutes into this broadcast, the TV anchor observed that American foreign policy imperils the already imperiled Christian communities across the Muslim world. For one, the ancient Iraqi Christian community is a shadow of what it was under Saddam Hussein.

To their own dwindling, Western flock, American and European Christian leaders seldom offer succor and support. More often than not, church leaders are inclined to scold Westerners and berate them for insufficient procreation.

Take Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput. For outbreeding Christianity, Chaput offered praise for Islam as a civilization—as if civilizations are great because of huge numbers, rather than human capital—namely, people of superior ideas, abilities and sensibilities; people capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy, to say nothing of mercy and charity.

Has not Christianity’s great heart been instrumental in ameliorating famine, and thus enabling Muslim Africa’s population explosion? …

…  READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “White Guilt: Where Does It Originate And How To Fight It,” is on The Unz Review and WND.COM.