Diversity Macht Frei
February 8, 2017
Last Sunday, in the Observer, the Jew Nick Cohen published a hysterical denunciation of Trump and the Alt Right’s “postmodern fascistic style; a fascism with a wink in its eye and a bad-boy smirk on its face.”
Journalists need to learn, if they have not learned already, that no accommodation is possible with the alt-right because its ideology and tactics preclude it from wanting an accommodation. You cannot “balance” or appease such people – you can only expose them.
Interestingly, if you substitute the word “Jews” for “alt-right” in the preceding paragraph, the “alt-right” would probably agree, suggesting, as does so much of Jewish discourse, the psychological phenomenon known as “projection”. Cohen reserved a special venom for Steve Bannon, no doubt sensing, as I have previously observed, that Bannon Knows.
He has brought Steve Bannon, a true postmodern fascist, to the centre of power. Bannon exemplifies the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s sinister ideal of a political leader who unites his supporters by creating enemies for them to hate. Bannon and the alt-right have made Islam – not al-Qaeda, Islamic State, or the Shia theocrats in Tehran but all Muslims – their enemy of choice. They unite their supporters on racial lines against blacks, Jews and Latinos too. As a former journalist on his Breitbart site explained, Bannon believes “in a nutshell that western culture is inseparable from European ethnicity”.
The idea that Europeans have ethnic interests and might now seek to defend them appears to provoke the particular ire of the Jews. One cannot help but be struck by the contrast with Israel and the silence of diaspora Jews about it, as Jews there become ever more obsessive about their genetic lineage, in ways curiously reminiscent of Nazi racial purity laws.
Yael knew she would have to prove she was Jewish. But she never expected that trying to get married would turn into a nearly yearlong investigation of her family.
In the end Yael, who asked to go by a pseudonym to protect her privacy, was barred from marrying in Israel, along with her mother and older brother. Although they had long ago immigrated to this country as Jews, their lineage did not check out with the state religious authorities.
“Having an official Jewish wedding was always important to me,” she said. “Now I feel like a second-class citizen. It’s very upsetting to me. It’s very upsetting to my family.”
Over the years, the Orthodox rabbis who control marriage in Israel have become increasingly stringent about checking who is a Jew. More and more marriage applicants have been sent to rabbinical courts to be vetted. And just last month, those courts claimed the authority to put marriage applicants’ families on trial, too. Anyone found not to be Jewish is added to a marriage “blacklist,” as happened to Yael and her family.
…Because Jewishness is passed down from mother to child, the rabbinical courts bring in siblings or matrilineal relatives of marriage applicants and typically issue a ruling that applies to everyone. According to experts, this has been going on for least a decade and routinely for the past year and a half.
…Elad Caplan, a legal consultant for ITIM, said the rabbinical courts investigate about 5,000 people for their Jewishness each year and find fewer than 10 percent not Jewish. But he estimated that most of those people are Jews, too, and simply cannot prove it. It is “outrageous,” Caplan said, that Israel demands documents that in many cases were created by countries in the throes of violent anti-Semitism.
…Rabbi Shimon Yaakovi, an attorney who directs the Rabbinical Courts Administration, defended the Supreme Rabbinical Court’s ruling and said the rabbinical courts had to uphold Jewish law. “We can’t have someone walking around wrongly thinking he’s a Jew, and his family and friends believing it,” he said. “I understand people’s need to be part of the Jewish collective in Israel, but there are rules, and if we don’t obey the rules we undermine halacha. Judaism is not being measured by feelings.”
…Yael said she always felt like an Israeli Jew. Her family immigrated from Belarus when she was a baby, she explained in unaccented Hebrew, and she attended public schools, observed Jewish holidays and served in the army. She even grew up hearing her maternal grandmother’s story of Holocaust survival, she said. Then, she fell in love with a nice Israeli Jewish boy and last fall agreed to marry him.
…Over the decades, the experts said, the Chief Rabbinate’s worry about intermarriage has only grown. The checks became official policy in 2002.
…After the rabbinical court ruled against her, Yael went her own way. She had a private modern Orthodox conversion and married her fiance in a wedding ceremony that was not sanctioned by the Chief Rabbinate, and thus against Israeli law. Still, Yael said she held out hope that the state would recognize her, and her marriage, as Jewish before the weddings of any future children.
Notice that her feelings, her thoughts, her faith, her citizenship, even her military service, are considered irrelevant when deciding whether or not she is Jewish. Only the purity of her genetic lineage matters.
Yet these are the same people who rail against Europeans displaying any kind of ethnic consciousness whatsoever, describing them as “haters”.