Category Archives: Judaism & Jews

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.

 

 

Ashkenazi Jews’ IQ: Judaism Itself, The Study Of Talmud, In Particular, Is a High-IQ Activity

History, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Judaism & Jews, Logic, Reason

This article reduces the reason for Ashkenazi Jews’ aggregate, genetically based, high IQ to Jewish exclusion and suffering: “selection events”:

… the frequent pogroms to which Jews were subject in Eastern Europe would have been “selection events” which would have selected for correlates of IQ such as future-orientation, social skill, planning and simply the wealth needed to escape. Thus, Lynn argued that, even though Jewish IQ was high before the Holocaust, it was probably even higher afterwards.

There are other reasons for the high IQ in Ashkenazi Jews predating the pogroms and the Holocaust. These have to do with the substantive nature of Judaism itself, not least the premium put on the study and analysis of scripture and certainly the study of Talmud. (I would argue that even the study of our Tanach, which Rabbi Ben Shapiro has mistakenly called Torah, does the brain good.)

At the secular, Israeli secondary school I attended, not enough Talmud was taught, unfortunately. Still, the process of reasoning, called pilpul, captivated me; it’s marvelous—magic, really.

There is the Socratic Method and there is pilpul—“a dialectical method of Talmudic study, consisting of examining all the arguments pro and con in order to find a logical argument for the application of the Law and at the same time to sharpen the wits of the student.”

The Talmud is calisthenics for the mind, for sure, but also sagacious.

Whittling down Jewish thinking and achievement over thousands of years to oppression-generated genetic mutations during the Middle Ages has its flaws. The article, “Are Jews Smarter?”, in the New York Magazine, puts paid to such reductionism:

“To say that the Jews have a history of emphasizing scholarship is not just the fantasy of ethnic chauvinists and Woody Allen fans. To look at a single page of the Talmud is to understand this, with its main text at the center, its generations of rabbis arguing around the rim. The dialectic and critical reasoning are at its core.”

Remember, too, that the young scholar who did mental gymnastics the best got the prettiest girl …

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UPDATED (1/9/019): Muslim Power In US

Barack Obama, IMMIGRATION, Islam, Judaism & Jews, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Multiculturalism, Religion

If you can believe it, “the Census Bureau has not asked questions about religion since the 1950s, so it is hard to know for sure” how many Muslims have made the US their home.

“America has 3.5m Muslims, around 1% of the population. Some say the number is closer to 5m and rising,” surmises The Economist.

Only about 100 Muslims filed papers this year to run for office. These few attract a disproportionate amount of attention, largely because of America’s views of their faith. Polling by the Pew Research Centre in April 2017 found that 44% of eligible voters think there is a “natural conflict” between Islam and democracy. …

… Muslim-Americans overwhelmingly backed Barack Obama. This was a big change for a religious minority that tended to have conservative views: traditionalist Muslims and LBGT advocates are strange bedfellows. Donald Trump’s election, though, has brought a clutch of progressive Muslims into politics. Some are now heading to Congress.

Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian-American lawyer, narrowly emerged from a crowded field in the Democratic primary in Michigan’s 13th congressional district, which covers Detroit

She ran unopposed “in the mid-term elections for the seat John Conyers occupied for more than half a century (until he resigned, following allegations of sexual harassment), … to become the first Muslim woman to sit in Congress.”

She was “joined there by Ilhan Omar, a Somali immigrant who won a primary in Minnesota to fill the congressional seat of Keith Ellison, one of two Muslim men in Congress (the other is Indiana’s André Carson).”

Predictably, the women are progressive.

MORE: “Muslim Politicians”.

UPDATE (1/9/019):

NEW COLUMN: Slate’s Resident Idiot Slanders Jewish Woman — Me

Argument, Judaism & Jews, Justice, Propaganda, Race, Racism, South-Africa

NEW COLUMN IS “Slate’s Resident Idiot Slanders Jewish Woman — Me.” It’s currently on WND.com and the Unz Review.

An excerpt:

When Slate magazine went after President Trump’s former speech writer, Darren Beattie, it chose to libel this writer, as well.

That’s a bully’s calculus: If you can, why not ruin the reputation of another individual, just for good measure?

Ruining reputations by labeling and libeling unpopular others is all in a day’s work for the bully, who has nothing in his authorial quiver but ad hominem attack.

The individual who penned an unsourced hit piece on me is Slate magazine’s designated “chief news blogger.”

A hit piece is “a published article or post aiming to sway public opinion by presenting false or biased information in a way that appears objective and truthful.”

Our intrepid journalist does not even feign objectivity.

Indeed, nothing screams Fake News like a “newsman” engaging in sloppy slander.

Incidentally, double-barreled surnames are largely a feminist affection. “Mathis-Lilley” happens to be male. Or, rather, an excuse for a man. Real men don’t bully, berate and bitch baselessly.

That’s what my many dogged, anti-Semitic, unmanly readers do. (Yes, I’m a Jewish, independent writer, the daughter of a scholarly, penniless rabbi. Bullies invariably target the weakest.)

The Mathis-Lilley article was published on August 20, this year, in the section called “The Slatest.” (Slate does cutesy and corny quite well.)

Mathis-Lilley lies throughout the piece, starting with the title:

“White House Speechwriter Appeared on Panel With Author Who Compared Black South Africans to Cannibals.”

It didn’t happen. No such comparisons were made. Cannibalism serves merely as metaphor in my book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.”

The origin of the title is expressly and unambiguously explained in the Introduction. “It is inspired by Ayn Rand’s wise counsel against prostrating civilization to savagery.” (p. 8)

The exact Rand quote is citation No. 15 in “Into the cannibal’s Pot.” It comes courtesy of “Robert Mayhew (ed.), Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q&A (New York, 2005).”

Unlike Mathis-Lilley’s unsourced material in Slate, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” is topped and tailed with hard evidence, and sports over 800 endnotes.

Based on the evidence presented, readers come to see “that South Africans had been tossed into the metaphorical cannibal’s pot.” (p. 9)

These are facts, not slander. Slander is Slate’s purview. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “Slate’s Resident Idiot Slanders Jewish Woman — Me,” is currently on WND.com and the Unz Review.