By Ian Jobling • 7/11/08
Kevin MacDonald’s theories about the causes and consequences of Jewish intellectual movements are one of the dogmas of racial right and paleoconservative intellectuals. As I explain in my article about his Culture of Critique, MacDonald thinks that Jews promote multiculturalist, anti-Western—in short, leukophobic—doctrines that undermine white Gentile racial pride and identity in order to weaken Gentile resistance to the Jewish pursuit of power. Jews are hypocrites in MacDonald’s view because they support Jewish nationalism while undermining Gentile nationalism. As he says, Jews “[oppose] the idea that the United States ought to be a European nation,” but “have been strong supporters of Israel as a nation of Jewish people” (Culture of Critique, p. xxxiv). While MacDonald and his followers have a strong case that Jews promote leukophobia, their accusations of hypocrisy are on shaky ground. Rather, today’s Jewish liberals are consistently hostile to both Jewish and Gentile nationalism. Jewish hostility to Gentile nationalism would thus seem to be motivated by disinterested intellectual principle than by a lust for ethnic power.
Consider Steve Sailer’s recent remarks on the VDARE blog about a nasty attack on Italian ethnic identity published by a certain Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times. Kimmelman sneered at how drearily Italian Italy remained with its “all-white, all-native, monoethnic” TV programs and bigoted preference for spaghetti over falafel and curry. Sailer casually commented, “Do you ever get the impression that Kevin MacDonald has secretly bought a controlling interest in the New York Times and is rewriting its articles to make them prove his theories correct?”
That Sailer felt no need to justify his dig at American Jews demonstrates the dogmatic acceptance of MacDonald’s theories among the paleoconservative, racial right community that VDARE caters to.
It’s lucky for Sailer that he didn’t have to substantiate his accusation, as I don’t think he would have been able to. I don’t dispute that the Times is dominated by Jewish liberals, and I myself have taken Jewish Times columnists like Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, and Roger Cohen to task for their leukophobia. However, when Sailer asserts that the Times proves MacDonald correct, he is also accusing Jewish liberals of hypocritically promoting Jewish nationalism while undermining that of Gentiles. That claim falls flat, however.
If Sailer were right, you would expect pro-Israeli groups like CAMERA and Honest Reporting to love the Times. However, that is far from the case. Both groups are indignant over the paper’s anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian bias, and they marshal more than enough evidence to convince reasonable people of their case. It would seem, then, that the Jewish liberals who dominate the Times are just as reflexively critical of Jewish as of Gentile nationalism.
The Times publishes discredited Palestinian propaganda that weakens Israel and demonizes it for defending itself against aggression. For example, a recent editorial by the Lebanese writer and former PLO member Elias Khoury falsely implies Israel was the aggressor in its 1948 War of Independence when, in fact, the Israelis were defending themselves against Arab attack.
Khoury also asserts, as though it were an established truth, the discredited lie that Jews conducted a premeditated campaign of “comprehensive ethnic cleansing” against Palestinians during that war. As CAMERA says in its reply to Khoury, historical research has demonstrated that the Israeli government never had any plan to expel Palestinians and made no efforts to do so during the 1948 war.
Had the Arabs not chosen to launch a war of aggression against the nascent State of Israel, had they not attempted to erase the Jewish presence through violence, had they accepted the UN Partition Resolution calling for two states existing side-by-side, and had Arab leaders not urged their constituents to leave their homes until such time as they succeeded in obliterating the Jewish state, there would have been no Palestinian displacement and no Palestinian refugees.
Khoury goes on to blame the Israeli wall of separation and checkpoints for making Palestinians’ lives a “hell on earth.” Khoury makes no mention of the history of Palestinian terrorism that made such security measures necessary, nor does he give the Israelis credit for having tried to come to a reasonable compromise with the Palestinians.
The Times has also given credence to the bogus claim that Palestinian refugees and their descendants have a legally sanctioned “right of return” to Israel. If granted, this return would swamp Israel with millions of hostile refugees and threaten the state’s Jewish character. The Times, then, condones demographic suicide for Israelis as well as white Americans.
Jewish journalists at the Times show the same anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian bias. Take Steven Erlanger, until recently the Jerusalem bureau chief for the Times. The conservative blog TimesWatch takes Erlanger to task for casting Islamic terrorist organizations in a sympathetic light. The journalist has:
talked of PLO terrorist leader Yasir Arafat’s “heroic history” in January 2005 and has issued sympathetic profiles of Palestinian terror bombers. Erlanger once opened a story by referring to Hamas as “the Islamic group that combines philanthropy and militancy.”
CAMERA has collected its many complaints about Erlanger here.
In sum, far from proving MacDonald correct, Times articles undermine his theory of Jewish hypocrisy. The paleoconservative cliche that Jewish liberals are guilty of a double standard in their views of Gentile and Jewish nationalism seems to be without foundation. A much better explanation of Jewish leukophobia is diversity snobbery, which afflicts both Jews and Gentiles alike.
It’s likely that many of the other claims made by MacDonald and his followers would prove just as threadbare if submitted to careful scrutiny. The more I think about MacDonald’s ideas, the more I suspect that they are paranoid fantasy rather than useful social science.