Who Is Anti-Semitic?

It's an easy question to answer, but first you need to figure out who is "Semitic". It's likely not what you thought. Because of the Holocaust, most people think that Jews are the only Semites. They are not.

The word Semitic actually describes a bunch of different kinds of people, all based on their language. If your culture speaks a Semitic language, i.e., one that comes from something called the Proto-Semitic language, then you are a Semite. I hate to break the news to all of the dickwads on the right wing, but the speakers of those Semitic languages are: Akkadians (Assyrians and Babylonians), Ammonites, Amorites, Arameans, Chaldeans, Canaanites (including Hebrews/Israelites/Jews/Samaritans and Phoenicians/Carthaginians), Eblaites, Dilmunites, Edomites, Amalekites, Turukku, Ethiopian Semites, Hyksos, Nabateans, Maltese, Mandaeans, Mhallami, Moabites, Shebans, Meluhhans, Maganites, Ubarites, Sabians and Ugarites. And, most importantly, that list also includes ... dare I say it ... Arabs!

Which is why it is almost laughable to hear the wingnuttery describe Arabs who hate Israel as Anti-Semitic. These people think the 50 senators and the president who "boycotted" Babbly Nuttinyahoo's speech are anti-Semites.

Can you imagine that, our own pro-Arab crypto-Islamist openly-secretive -- did I mention pro-Arab? -- jihadi-in-chief, Barack Hussein Obama, an anti-Semite? A contradiction in terms if I've ever seen one.

My Review of The Turner Diaries

I finally took my own advice (I'm good at dishing it out, not so good at taking it myself) and read The Turner Diaries. I was fully prepared to hate it -- I was looking forward to talking about a constipated writing style, cardboard cutout characters, a stumbling plot and wooden prose descriptions. I was actually more than a little disappointed when I got none of that stuff. It is, very surprisingly and for the most part, well-written.

The very first chapter, in which the narrator describes four "Negroes" from the "political police" kicking down his door to search for guns (which are of course outlawed), is a Wayne LaPierre wet dream. Soon our "hero" and the members of his group, The Organization (as "the resistance" is called), organized like a series of communist-like "cells", blows up the FBI building with a truck bomb containing ... ammonium nitrate. It's not a coincidence that Timothy McVeigh had two pages from this book in his getaway car after the Oklahoma City bombing. They were the very two pages that describe the preparations for blowing up the FBI; I won't provide it here --it's a workable blueprint for bomb making.

Ultimately, I think that it's really an inversion of, and a through-the-looking-glass take, on the Weather Underground's journey in the early 70s. Take away all the White Supremacy stuff and you have a ripping good tale, a dystopian alternate history/sci-fi take on the future as imagined in 1978. All of the wackjob stuff you would expect is in here: Confiscation of guns, requirement to have an electronic ID to buy stuff, the need to go "underground" and fight against The System, the stockpiling of weapons and bomb-making materials.

I'm generally a big fan of the dystopian fiction genre (e.g. The Iron Heel by Jack London, 1984 by George Orwell, It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis). But this is really beyond the pale -- I've never read anything that is so matter-of-fact about the necessity to elevate the White Race by killing off all "subhuman mongrels", e.g. the blacks, the Jews, the Chicanos/Hispanics, the Asians, the mixed-race whites, etc. The list of intended victims runs into the billions.

While in the main the book is a gripping narrative of the actions of one Earl Turner, in the last quarter of the book or so it veers off into racist and anti-Semitic polemic that is hard to take. Besides (spoiler alert), all non-whites die in the end. And I do mean all. It's not a pretty prediction, but it's one that the Neo-Nazis and others of their ilk salivate over. This book really does enact the "Final Solution", on everyone that isn't white. Not surprising, since William Pierce, the author, was a Big Shot in the Neo-Nazi movement in this country and founded the National Alliance white-separatist, white nationalist, anti-Semitic organization. That fact was the only thing that kept me from believing that it was intended as a overblown, over-the-top satire on Nazis. You remember Poe's Law. The notorious fascist group, The Order, took its name and behavior directly from the book, which had an organization with the same name and the same designs.

This book is definitely worth reading. if only to get a chilling insight into the thinking of these people.

NOTE: As a sidebar, while I was reading it, I could not help but notice some eerie parallels between this book (1978) and The Talking Heads' song,  "Life During Wartime" (1979) -- was the song inspired by this book and not, despite what David Byrne claimed, the Weather Underground? I can see why he'd try to keep that part to himself.

It's an interesting question. The descriptions of life on the run in the song can be equally -- and is some cases, better --  applied to the events in this book.

Check out the lyrics, especially this line: "Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit? Heard about Pittsburgh, PA?" That line has always been somewhat of a mystery to me. Until I read this book. The first bomb set off by The Organization (as "the resistance" is called) was set off in Houston. (On September 11, wrong year. Make of that what you will...) Later on, a bomb takes out Detroit, and there is also a surprise and deadly race riot in Pittsburgh by the non-whites who are not willing to kowtow to their new overlords.

It's in the book. I tried to find anything on the Internet that makes this correlation, and I couldn't find it. Maybe I am one of a very few people who have both heard the song enough to remember the lyrics and read this book. It doesn't seem to me that there would be a lot of crossover audience...

You can download The Turner Diaries free in a variety of formats, if you want to read it for yourself. I'm not recommending it as proper reading, but we must know our enemy!

Glenn Beck and Anti-Semitism

Glenn Beck might be easily dismissed as just the latest in a line of self-created Anti-Semitic media demagogues (Father Charles Coughlan, anyone?), but for the fact that he is drawing a very large audience of low-information low-education viewers who hang on his every word.

And increasingly that word is "Jew". It's the Jews, physically embodied in Beck's favorite whipping boy, George Soros, who are tearing this country apart, whose "Jewish" banking has caused the current economic troubles, whose lavish "Jewish" monetary support of "socialist" and "communist" organizations, such as MoveOn.org and Media Matters is resulting in the "takover" of this country by those fascist-communist-socialist-atheists...

Beck recently ran a three-day attack on George Soros, which began on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Coincidence? Maybe, but for someone who pretends to be such a fucking know-it-all expert on the whole Nazi thing, it's hard to swallow that it was just coincidence.

It's also especially hard for the Holocaust Survivor community, which had this to say:

Fox news commentator Glenn Beck may have thought he had an easy target in the controversial financier George Soros – but he didn't reckon with Jews who care about Holocaust remembrance and don't take kindly to reckless charges being thrown into the political maelstrom.
“It's totally over the top,” said Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman about Beck's latest outburst.
What Beck said: Soros, a child in Hungary who survived by living with a non-Jewish family, “used to go around with this anti-Semite and deliver papers to the Jews and confiscate their property and then ship them off. And George Soros was part of it. He would help confiscate the stuff. It was frightening. Here's a Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the death camps. And I am certainly not saying that George Soros enjoyed that, even had a choice. I mean, he's 14 years old. He was surviving. So I'm not making a judgment. That's between him and God. As a 14-year-old boy, I don't know what you would do. I don't know what you would do. But you would think that there would be some remorse as an 80-year-old man or a 40-year-old man or a 20-year-old man, when it was all over, you would do some soul searching and say, 'What did I do? What did I do?'”
Soros, Beck went on, “is not a fan of the state of Israel. George Soros is -- many people would call him an anti-Semite. I will not. I don't know enough about all of his positions on Jews. I know his mother, in George Soros's own words, his mother was an anti-Semite. And so he just has this weird, weird world view. He's also an atheist.”
Beck said he wasn't judging Soros – but that's sure what it sounded like to a lot of listeners.
The ADL's Abe Foxman is also a child survivor who lived only because his parents turned him over to his Catholic nanny.
. . .
The issue of the Shoah “is so sensitive that I'm not even sure Holocaust survivors themselves are willing to make such judgments,” Foxman went on “For a political commentator or entertainer to have the audacity to say, there's a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, that's horrific. It's totally off limits and over the top.”
Beck's comments “were either out of total ignorance or total insensitivity,” he said.

Glenn Beck is not a total moron. He knows what he is doing, and what he is doing is riding the crest of a wave that is old in history, even in American history. It's sometimes forgotten that the Ku Klux Klan had other targets besides black people: Catholics and Jews were also on the Hate List.

Henry Ford (yes, that Henry Ford) was a notorious anti-Semite in the 1920s, publishing an extremist rag called The Dearborn Independent, which was responsible for the first US publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Father Coughlan with his increasingly strident radio broadcasts was the wave rider in the 1930s, but after WWII and the liberation of the death camps, when the horrors of the Holocaust were finally known and almost undeniable, the American strain of Anti-Semitism had to go underground, as it were.

But it's still there, and all it's waiting for is the proper fertilizer and watering for it to spring into full bloom. And Glenn Beck is fertilizing it like crazy with all the shit that keeps spewing out of his mouth.

And don't forget that Glenn Beck is a Mormon, and if you scratch a Mormon deep enough, you'll likely come up with someone that doesn't like Jews: First of all, they've got a lot of nerve passing themselves off as "The Chosen People" when it is obvious from the Book of Mormon that they may have once had that designation but subsequently lost it. It's pretty obvious who has that mantle now if you just look at what the Mormons call Utah: Zion. Hence Zion National Park. Secondly, they for the most part remained in Europe during the great migration to the New World, which God had created and then let wither except for the early Jewish migrations thousands of years before Columbus. And as soon as they got here they started fighting each other with horses and chariots and whatnot, none of which have ever shown up in the archeological diggings, and then Jesus comes to visit and everything is fine for a while and then they start fighting again and pretty soon they are all dead except for the Indians who got to stick around but had their skin turned dark as a punishment. But it'll all be okay in the end since those who convert to Mormonism will become a "white and delightsome people".

I am not making this up.

So the Jews who remained in Europe somehow lost their "Jewness" and never got it back, which was okay since the Jews who first settled the Western Hemisphere couldn't keep theirs either, and now it's the Mormons who are God's Elect.

Anyway long story short, I suspect that Beck's Mormonism has more than a little to do with his Anti-Semitism, especially illustrated in his idolatrous worship of fellow Mormon (and pro-Nazi Anti-Semite) W. Cleon Skousen and his blueprint for Christian theocracy, The Five Thousand Year Leap.

I half expect to see The Protocols of the Elders of Zion on the required reading at Beck's so-called "university".