April 27th 09, 12:20 PM
Jane Harman, Haim Saban, and AIPAC: The Disloyalty Issue in
Multicultural America
Kevin MacDonald
April 25, 2009
>> "Disloyalty is an age-old issue with Jews, and for a simple reason: Jews often have interests as Jews that stretch beyond national boundaries. Even before the existence of Israel, Diaspora Jews often could be said to have a "foreign policy" in the sense that there was a general consensus among Jews to favor some nations and disfavor others.
For example, the Spanish Inquisition targeted Jews who pretended to be
Christians, with the result that Jews in other countries sought
Spain's downfall. From 1881 until the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia was
seen as an enemy of Jews. As a result, the organized Jewish community
in other countries often opposed Russian interests. Jacob Schiff, the
preeminent Jewish activist of the period, financed the Japanese in the
Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, and he financed revolutionaries in
Russia.
At times, Jewish foreign policy interests were in conflict with those
of the wider society. In 1908 Schiff also led the successful effort to
abrogate the Russian Trade Agreement which was opposed by the Taft
Administration as not in the interests of the United States. Schiff's
motive for helping Jews in Russia conflicted with US national
interests as understood by the US government.
Questions of disloyalty are by no means unique to Jews. Loyalty issues
are common for minority groups living as a Diaspora, as with Overseas
Chinese and Indian groups living as minorities abroad. In the US,
issues of divided loyalties arose among pre-1965 immigrants who
retained attachments to their countries of origin. During World War I,
many German-Americans were reluctant to support the Allied cause
against Germany because of their ties with their homeland.
The German-Americans eventually assimilated completely, at least
partly because of their racial similarity to other White Americans.
However, assimilation is unlikely for post-1965 immigrant minorities
given their racial dissimilarities to the traditionally dominant
people and culture of America. This is even more so because of the
rise of multiculturalism as a paradigm for Western societies. As I
noted in my review of Mearsheimer and Walt's The Israel Lobby,
dual loyalty has become legitimate because of the rise of
multiculturalism in America — a phenomenon that is due in no small
part ... to Jewish activism. ... Beginning with Horace Kallen, Jewish
intellectuals have been at the forefront in developing models of the
United States as a culturally and ethnically pluralistic society. ...
Within the multicultural perspective, there is tolerance for different
groups but the result is a tendency to deprecate the importance or
even the existence of a common national identity. If there is no
national identity, it’s hard to see how there can be a concept of
national interest.
However, until the multicultural utopia legitimizes all loyalties in
the name of world citizenship, divided loyalties will likely be a
chronic issue. For example, ethnic Chinese who are American citizens
have been convicted of spying for China. An April, 2008 Washington
Post article listed 12 cases of ethnic Chinese spying on the United
States.
We should not, therefore, be surprised that at least some American
Jews may be more loyal to Israel than to the United States. Unlike
the German-Americans who assimilated to America, Israel remains a
powerful source of identity for the great majority of American Jews.
Chi Mak, the Chinese spy who was sentenced to 24 years in prison for
sending information on military technology to the Chinese, has as his
counterparts Jonathan Pollard and Ben-Ami Kadish, convicted of spying
on behalf of Israel.
Besides Pollard and Kadish, there is a bumper crop of neoconservatives
who have been credibly accused of spying for Israel: Richard Perle,
Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Bryen, Douglas Feith, and Michael Ledeen.
None of the neocons were convicted, and now we have the AIPAC
espionage trial in which former AIPAC employees Steven Rosen and Keith
Weissman have been accused of providing information to Israeli Embassy
employees. Jewish Congresswoman Jane Harman has allegedly been caught
agreeing to "waddle in" to help get the charges against Rosen and
Weissman reduced.
As part of her defense in the media, Harman pointedly noted that
"anyone I might have talked to was an American citizen, and these were
conversations that took place in the United States."
This is the multicultural defense par excellence. Harman was talking
to an American about the business of AIPAC, an American organization
that has not been required to register as an agent of a foreign
government. What could possibly be wrong with that?
One problem with that is that the American citizen that Harman may
well have been talking to was Haim Saban who is not only an American
citizen but also a citizen of Israel. Saban's commitment to Israel
seems almost a caricature of a nut case Zionist — someone who makes
Alan Dershowitz and Martin Peretz seem lukewarm by comparison.
Saban's commitment to Israel really knows no bounds. This is from an
interview with Haaretz in 2006; Saban's comments are in quotes.
You said once that you are a one-note person, and that note is Israel.
Why?
"You can't explain love."
It's really love?
"More than love. Passion. A love that is passion."
Please explain.
"When we approach Israel I always ask the pilots of my plane to let me
sit in the chair between them. We don't play 'Heveinu Shalom
Aleichem,' but when I see the coast coming up my heart starts to go
boom, boom, boom."
Is Israel also part of your everyday life here, in Los Angeles?
"At 9 A.M. I start with London and Kirschenbaum [Channel 10's evening
current events program]. After that, throughout the day, if I see
something about Israel on one of the four channels that are always on
in my office, on mute, I immediately turn on the sound. And I have
Israeli music on my computer, classics and contemporary singers, too.
"Let me tell you a story. A few years ago I got some new albums and I
put them on the computer. Suddenly 'The Photos in the Album' [sung by
Haim Moshe] comes up. I'm standing there, shaving, listening to the
lyrics. And the tears stream over the soap, without my even being able
to explain why. Grandma, mom cooking, I promised you wouldn't fight
against anyone. A knife in the heart. That is the heart of the nation.
And I love this nation. I love the Jewish people, even more the
Israeli people. I feel a very deep bond which I can't explain."
Haim Saban is an American citizen, but can there really be any
question where his loyalty lies? I suspect it's the same with the
neocons accused of spying, and with AIPAC's Rosen and Weissman. A big
part of my article on neocons was simply to document their intense
commitment to Israel.
Nevertheless, I suppose that if we asked these people whether they are
more loyal to Israel than the US, they would deny it and they may be
utterly sincere in their denial.
But how could any reasonable person believe what they are saying?
Psychological research shows quite clearly that people with strong
ingroup loyalties are likely to suffer cognitive distortions that
would bias their attitudes and their policy recommendations. They may
well believe that their recommendations also benefit the United
States, but they might not even be aware of how their commitment to
Israel can bias their judgment.
The big picture here is that the Israel Lobby has managed to create a
climate in which issues of the loyalty of American Jews are off limits
at the highest reaches of government. However, this sensitivity to
Jewish concerns (and susceptibility to Jewish pressure) has not
filtered down into the intelligence and military establishment,
especially at the lower echelons.
Commenting on the Harman case, "an official with an American Jewish
organization," stated that suspicion of the loyalties of American Jews
is "rooted deep in the system and it comes from the bottom up.” An
Israeli official is paraphrased as claiming that "suspicion toward
Israel [is] prevalent in the military and intelligence establishments
but [is] not common at the political and diplomatic levels."
These lower-level people are less susceptible to public pressure
because they represent an institutional consensus that has not yet
embraced multiculturalism and the slavish American commitment to
Israel. Instead, they seem committed to the quaint view that America
is a nation state with interests that are different from other
nations, including Israel.
This in turn suggests that the powers that be may eventually get the
charges against Rosen and Weissman dropped. As a result of court
rulings in favor of the defense, this certainly looks to be the case.
Elite culture is far more influenced by Jewish sensibilities and far
more on board with the multicultural zeitgeist than those responsible
for initiating these investigations.
Rosen and Weissman may be exonerated, but the lower-level people still
have quite a bit of power. The American intelligence community is
doubtless the only reason Jonathan Pollard languishes in prison
despite huge public relations campaigns proclaiming the injustice of
his sentence. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were strongly
pressured to pardon him so that he can return to a hero's welcome in
Israel. However, as an Israeli commentator has noted, "Each time, over
the last 2 decades that there has been some sense that a commutation
or a pardon might be in the offing, there have been official leaks to
the media, creating such devastating press about Jonathan that it made
it difficult for the president to proceed with commutation."
The notorious Mark Rich received a pardon by throwing enough money at
Bill Clinton. But there was no powerful constituency opposing Rich.
It's different with Pollard. No president dare release Pollard, even
though Bill Clinton, at least, would have loved to do so. Clinton
agreed to release Pollard but changed his mind when CIA Director
George Tenet threatened to resign if Pollard was released.
It's noteworthy that the Israeli official quoted above exempts the
diplomatic service from the charge of being insufficiently sensitive
to Israel. This was not always the case. The State Department was
famously an anti-Israel bastion beginning with Secretary of State
George Marshall in the Truman Administration. Jewish foreign policy
activists — most notably the neocons — viewed the State Department,
and particularly the Near East Desk, as dominated by Protestant Ivy
Leaguers who were insensitive to Jewish concerns and particularly
Israel.
But all of that is long gone — an early casualty of the demise of the
East Coast Yankee Protestant elite and Jewish ascendancy in those same
circles. But the intelligence and military establishments have still
not capitulated entirely. As a result, we see little flare-ups of
rebellion from time to time, like the current AIPAC case, the
investigations of so many neocons, and the continued incarceration of
Jonathan Pollard.
It is doubtless noteworthy that the Whites who remain influential in
the intelligence and military establishments are relatively unlikely
to be East Coast Ivy Leaguers. They are more likely to be Southerners
or have other White identities. As the co-author of a recent academic
report noted, “Politically and economically, the South remains the
heart of our country’s military.” The FBI remains a whipping boy of
liberals unhappy because it is insufficiently diverse.
The concern of the Israeli official that suspicions of Israel remain
prevalent in the US military and intelligence establishments is
particularly interesting. The attraction of White Southerners for the
military is on a par with the attraction of White descendants of
Puritans to moralistic aggression. The Southern military tradition is
a legacy of the Scots-Irish Celtic culture so well described in David
Hackett Fisher's classic Albion's Seed, Kevin Phillips' The Cousin's
Wars, and James Webb's Born Fighting.
As I have noted elsewhere, this is the only significant group of
American White people with any cultural confidence. For this group of
Whites — and only this group — there is "a racial pride that dares
not speak its name, and that defines itself through cultural cues
instead—a suspicion of intellectual elites and city dwellers, a
preference for folksiness and plainness of speech (whether real or
feigned), and the association of a working-class white minority with
'the real America.'”
This is implicit whiteness — implicit because explicit assertions of
white identity have been banned by the anti-white elites that dominate
our politics and culture.
The current angst about the obvious examples of Jewish disloyalty is
part of a larger cultural struggle. The old East Coast Protestant
elite and its bastions, such as the State Department and the Ivy
League universities, have fallen to the new multicultural zeitgeist in
which Jewish disloyalty is more or less inconceivable. But there are
still some holdouts. And therein lies the hope."<<
Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State
University–Long Beach.
Permanent URL: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-Harman.html
Multicultural America
Kevin MacDonald
April 25, 2009
>> "Disloyalty is an age-old issue with Jews, and for a simple reason: Jews often have interests as Jews that stretch beyond national boundaries. Even before the existence of Israel, Diaspora Jews often could be said to have a "foreign policy" in the sense that there was a general consensus among Jews to favor some nations and disfavor others.
For example, the Spanish Inquisition targeted Jews who pretended to be
Christians, with the result that Jews in other countries sought
Spain's downfall. From 1881 until the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia was
seen as an enemy of Jews. As a result, the organized Jewish community
in other countries often opposed Russian interests. Jacob Schiff, the
preeminent Jewish activist of the period, financed the Japanese in the
Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, and he financed revolutionaries in
Russia.
At times, Jewish foreign policy interests were in conflict with those
of the wider society. In 1908 Schiff also led the successful effort to
abrogate the Russian Trade Agreement which was opposed by the Taft
Administration as not in the interests of the United States. Schiff's
motive for helping Jews in Russia conflicted with US national
interests as understood by the US government.
Questions of disloyalty are by no means unique to Jews. Loyalty issues
are common for minority groups living as a Diaspora, as with Overseas
Chinese and Indian groups living as minorities abroad. In the US,
issues of divided loyalties arose among pre-1965 immigrants who
retained attachments to their countries of origin. During World War I,
many German-Americans were reluctant to support the Allied cause
against Germany because of their ties with their homeland.
The German-Americans eventually assimilated completely, at least
partly because of their racial similarity to other White Americans.
However, assimilation is unlikely for post-1965 immigrant minorities
given their racial dissimilarities to the traditionally dominant
people and culture of America. This is even more so because of the
rise of multiculturalism as a paradigm for Western societies. As I
noted in my review of Mearsheimer and Walt's The Israel Lobby,
dual loyalty has become legitimate because of the rise of
multiculturalism in America — a phenomenon that is due in no small
part ... to Jewish activism. ... Beginning with Horace Kallen, Jewish
intellectuals have been at the forefront in developing models of the
United States as a culturally and ethnically pluralistic society. ...
Within the multicultural perspective, there is tolerance for different
groups but the result is a tendency to deprecate the importance or
even the existence of a common national identity. If there is no
national identity, it’s hard to see how there can be a concept of
national interest.
However, until the multicultural utopia legitimizes all loyalties in
the name of world citizenship, divided loyalties will likely be a
chronic issue. For example, ethnic Chinese who are American citizens
have been convicted of spying for China. An April, 2008 Washington
Post article listed 12 cases of ethnic Chinese spying on the United
States.
We should not, therefore, be surprised that at least some American
Jews may be more loyal to Israel than to the United States. Unlike
the German-Americans who assimilated to America, Israel remains a
powerful source of identity for the great majority of American Jews.
Chi Mak, the Chinese spy who was sentenced to 24 years in prison for
sending information on military technology to the Chinese, has as his
counterparts Jonathan Pollard and Ben-Ami Kadish, convicted of spying
on behalf of Israel.
Besides Pollard and Kadish, there is a bumper crop of neoconservatives
who have been credibly accused of spying for Israel: Richard Perle,
Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Bryen, Douglas Feith, and Michael Ledeen.
None of the neocons were convicted, and now we have the AIPAC
espionage trial in which former AIPAC employees Steven Rosen and Keith
Weissman have been accused of providing information to Israeli Embassy
employees. Jewish Congresswoman Jane Harman has allegedly been caught
agreeing to "waddle in" to help get the charges against Rosen and
Weissman reduced.
As part of her defense in the media, Harman pointedly noted that
"anyone I might have talked to was an American citizen, and these were
conversations that took place in the United States."
This is the multicultural defense par excellence. Harman was talking
to an American about the business of AIPAC, an American organization
that has not been required to register as an agent of a foreign
government. What could possibly be wrong with that?
One problem with that is that the American citizen that Harman may
well have been talking to was Haim Saban who is not only an American
citizen but also a citizen of Israel. Saban's commitment to Israel
seems almost a caricature of a nut case Zionist — someone who makes
Alan Dershowitz and Martin Peretz seem lukewarm by comparison.
Saban's commitment to Israel really knows no bounds. This is from an
interview with Haaretz in 2006; Saban's comments are in quotes.
You said once that you are a one-note person, and that note is Israel.
Why?
"You can't explain love."
It's really love?
"More than love. Passion. A love that is passion."
Please explain.
"When we approach Israel I always ask the pilots of my plane to let me
sit in the chair between them. We don't play 'Heveinu Shalom
Aleichem,' but when I see the coast coming up my heart starts to go
boom, boom, boom."
Is Israel also part of your everyday life here, in Los Angeles?
"At 9 A.M. I start with London and Kirschenbaum [Channel 10's evening
current events program]. After that, throughout the day, if I see
something about Israel on one of the four channels that are always on
in my office, on mute, I immediately turn on the sound. And I have
Israeli music on my computer, classics and contemporary singers, too.
"Let me tell you a story. A few years ago I got some new albums and I
put them on the computer. Suddenly 'The Photos in the Album' [sung by
Haim Moshe] comes up. I'm standing there, shaving, listening to the
lyrics. And the tears stream over the soap, without my even being able
to explain why. Grandma, mom cooking, I promised you wouldn't fight
against anyone. A knife in the heart. That is the heart of the nation.
And I love this nation. I love the Jewish people, even more the
Israeli people. I feel a very deep bond which I can't explain."
Haim Saban is an American citizen, but can there really be any
question where his loyalty lies? I suspect it's the same with the
neocons accused of spying, and with AIPAC's Rosen and Weissman. A big
part of my article on neocons was simply to document their intense
commitment to Israel.
Nevertheless, I suppose that if we asked these people whether they are
more loyal to Israel than the US, they would deny it and they may be
utterly sincere in their denial.
But how could any reasonable person believe what they are saying?
Psychological research shows quite clearly that people with strong
ingroup loyalties are likely to suffer cognitive distortions that
would bias their attitudes and their policy recommendations. They may
well believe that their recommendations also benefit the United
States, but they might not even be aware of how their commitment to
Israel can bias their judgment.
The big picture here is that the Israel Lobby has managed to create a
climate in which issues of the loyalty of American Jews are off limits
at the highest reaches of government. However, this sensitivity to
Jewish concerns (and susceptibility to Jewish pressure) has not
filtered down into the intelligence and military establishment,
especially at the lower echelons.
Commenting on the Harman case, "an official with an American Jewish
organization," stated that suspicion of the loyalties of American Jews
is "rooted deep in the system and it comes from the bottom up.” An
Israeli official is paraphrased as claiming that "suspicion toward
Israel [is] prevalent in the military and intelligence establishments
but [is] not common at the political and diplomatic levels."
These lower-level people are less susceptible to public pressure
because they represent an institutional consensus that has not yet
embraced multiculturalism and the slavish American commitment to
Israel. Instead, they seem committed to the quaint view that America
is a nation state with interests that are different from other
nations, including Israel.
This in turn suggests that the powers that be may eventually get the
charges against Rosen and Weissman dropped. As a result of court
rulings in favor of the defense, this certainly looks to be the case.
Elite culture is far more influenced by Jewish sensibilities and far
more on board with the multicultural zeitgeist than those responsible
for initiating these investigations.
Rosen and Weissman may be exonerated, but the lower-level people still
have quite a bit of power. The American intelligence community is
doubtless the only reason Jonathan Pollard languishes in prison
despite huge public relations campaigns proclaiming the injustice of
his sentence. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were strongly
pressured to pardon him so that he can return to a hero's welcome in
Israel. However, as an Israeli commentator has noted, "Each time, over
the last 2 decades that there has been some sense that a commutation
or a pardon might be in the offing, there have been official leaks to
the media, creating such devastating press about Jonathan that it made
it difficult for the president to proceed with commutation."
The notorious Mark Rich received a pardon by throwing enough money at
Bill Clinton. But there was no powerful constituency opposing Rich.
It's different with Pollard. No president dare release Pollard, even
though Bill Clinton, at least, would have loved to do so. Clinton
agreed to release Pollard but changed his mind when CIA Director
George Tenet threatened to resign if Pollard was released.
It's noteworthy that the Israeli official quoted above exempts the
diplomatic service from the charge of being insufficiently sensitive
to Israel. This was not always the case. The State Department was
famously an anti-Israel bastion beginning with Secretary of State
George Marshall in the Truman Administration. Jewish foreign policy
activists — most notably the neocons — viewed the State Department,
and particularly the Near East Desk, as dominated by Protestant Ivy
Leaguers who were insensitive to Jewish concerns and particularly
Israel.
But all of that is long gone — an early casualty of the demise of the
East Coast Yankee Protestant elite and Jewish ascendancy in those same
circles. But the intelligence and military establishments have still
not capitulated entirely. As a result, we see little flare-ups of
rebellion from time to time, like the current AIPAC case, the
investigations of so many neocons, and the continued incarceration of
Jonathan Pollard.
It is doubtless noteworthy that the Whites who remain influential in
the intelligence and military establishments are relatively unlikely
to be East Coast Ivy Leaguers. They are more likely to be Southerners
or have other White identities. As the co-author of a recent academic
report noted, “Politically and economically, the South remains the
heart of our country’s military.” The FBI remains a whipping boy of
liberals unhappy because it is insufficiently diverse.
The concern of the Israeli official that suspicions of Israel remain
prevalent in the US military and intelligence establishments is
particularly interesting. The attraction of White Southerners for the
military is on a par with the attraction of White descendants of
Puritans to moralistic aggression. The Southern military tradition is
a legacy of the Scots-Irish Celtic culture so well described in David
Hackett Fisher's classic Albion's Seed, Kevin Phillips' The Cousin's
Wars, and James Webb's Born Fighting.
As I have noted elsewhere, this is the only significant group of
American White people with any cultural confidence. For this group of
Whites — and only this group — there is "a racial pride that dares
not speak its name, and that defines itself through cultural cues
instead—a suspicion of intellectual elites and city dwellers, a
preference for folksiness and plainness of speech (whether real or
feigned), and the association of a working-class white minority with
'the real America.'”
This is implicit whiteness — implicit because explicit assertions of
white identity have been banned by the anti-white elites that dominate
our politics and culture.
The current angst about the obvious examples of Jewish disloyalty is
part of a larger cultural struggle. The old East Coast Protestant
elite and its bastions, such as the State Department and the Ivy
League universities, have fallen to the new multicultural zeitgeist in
which Jewish disloyalty is more or less inconceivable. But there are
still some holdouts. And therein lies the hope."<<
Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State
University–Long Beach.
Permanent URL: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-Harman.html