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Can you believe the approach on the left failed to win out over the one on the right?
Robert MacIver, Scottish-born sociologist from Columbia university, who worked alongside members of the Frankfurt school when they were associated with that institution, was commissioned to conduct a study of the work of “Jewish defense” organizations, on behalf of the National Community Relations Advisory Council, between 1950 and ’51 (Jewish defense = “growing anti-Semitism”, in order to “strengthen the centripetal forces”).
If the actual study is available online, it’s behind an academic paywall, but from the articles that discuss it, his recommendations were that American Jews should “seek effective participation in the common life of the American community”, that Jewish organizations should eliminate duplication of efforts in the community relations field, and that a single system of fact-finding on anti-Semitism be established (rather than the ADL make their stuff up, and the AJC make their stuff up). For this, amongst other things, he was called ‘unobjective’ and accused of being anti-Semitic.
This is an episode that has largely been lost down the memory hole, but all the Jewish publications were talking about it at the time.
Apparently, the Gentile professor took issue with the AJC’s contention that “the American Jew can lead a full Jewish life as an integrated American”. Why can’t one be Jewish and an integrated American at the same time? Because if you go by what the Jewish publications were writing about in the early 50s, being Jewish meant raising funds for Israel, decrying the poor treatment Israel was receiving on the international stage and from its blood-thirsty neighbors, raising funds for Israel, creating youth movements centered around the centrality of Israel in the life of American Jews, fund raising, complaining about antisemitism and celebrating the enormous power of the Jewish community to sideline those who were critical of them or of Israel or of their relationship to Israel (aka anti-Semites). Hard to imagine it today, but that’s how things were like, back in the 1950s.
Needless to say, the report was taken very seriously, and its recommendations were implemented in full.
Click either picture for the full text of articles dealing with the MacIver report, that were too long to include in image form.
On the right, an article from NYT from 1952 about the responses by the ADL and AJC to the recommendations (the picture is from an earlier article from a different paper).
On the left, a slightly more interesting article by someone named Jacob Landau, who was the founder of the JTA. He is writing supposedly in response to the report, and in opposition to its recommendations. At first glance, he doesn’t seem to be making any actual arguments, just recounting various anecdotes whose contents don’t seem to be helping his case, insofar as he’s trying to make one. Why would Churchill, in 1936, be meeting with the founder and with the president of the JTA, a wire-service devoted exclusively to the Zionist project in Palestine, which at the time was still far from being an accomplished fact, and why would the president, George Backer describe himself as a non-Zionist when he was working for one of the central Zionist organs of his day? (Even if he believed that about himself, how does it help disprove the notion that Jewish solidarity transcends ideological lines?) All the anecdotes have the same sort of quality to them, as though they are designed to convey the exact opposite message of what the piece is supposedly about.
What the article seems to be, is a bit of elaborate trolling.
It is as though he is saying is, I’ve spent my entire professional life letting my mouth write cheques that all your asses are going to have to cash – meeting with various big-wigs from whom I had no reason to expect an audience, making requests I had no reason to think would be granted, smoothing ruffled feathers in ways that could only be expected to give more offense – and whenever I left such a meeting, when not only was I not thrown out on my backside but having actually received a positive response to whatever message I was delivering, I would say to myself, ‘wow, these goyim are dumb!’.
And now I see this whole kerfuffle about a report with a set of recommendations that should be so blindingly obvious that the scandal should have been why weren’t these our own guidelines from the beginning, and I see these pro-and-con debates as though there is anything here that even bears discussion, and I’m starting to ask myself, is it really the goys who are the dumb ones?
Running in neutral
The Egregiousness of it All
You know that feeling, when you get a glimpse of the dark underbelly of reality, and realize that however bad you imagined it to be, it’s actually somehow worse? There was a good example of this, from not too far back, when the Nobel Prize committee awarded the peace prize to the Venezuelan opposition candidate. The people who sit on such committees, whatever else one might think of them, at least have the benefit of an education and so should be able to form a world view based on practical realities. In this particular case, they are instead trapped in a bubble of their own creation. Unable to adjust to their new position on the global totem pole – no more relevant on the international stage than Argentina, or Tajikistan for that matter – they’ve regressed into inhabiting a parallel reality. It had a distinct and unsettling cargo cult vibe to it, as though they honestly believed that by conducting some farcical awards ceremony they could influence reality in their favor.
One of the minor themes that runs through this set of illustrative examples, which can be found in the above link, is ‘going above and beyond’ – taking an already bad situation, and making it worse by the fickle behavior of feckless people. Take one such instance:
Against the backdrop of growing anger against Zionist control of every aspect of American political life, a group of “Zionists” gets the idea that by buying a bunch of media assets and installing “their people”, and dictating what is permissible to be said on them, they can somehow keep a lid on the simmering discontent. Moreover, an additional wrinkle was that once again, this goon-like behavior passed without any concerted pushback from American Jews, who despite having been given every opportunity to show that there is a difference between themselves and the “Zionists”, are still incapable of doing anything more than offer their feeble protests as individuals. Keeping these two things in mind, you would expect there to be a low murmur of disapproval, at minimum, if someone like David Sirota were to try to pass off this act of banditry as just a typical day for corporate America, giving as his example a corporate exec from the 1970s talking about trying to propagandize his organization in favor of “the free enterprise system”, the system he was raised to believe in and which is arguably the one upon which his country was actually founded. To claim that this has any similarity to a tiny sectarian minority engineering a government-mandated hostile takeover of the most popular communication channel of their day, because they didn’t like what was being said about them on it, is just profoundly buffoonish.
Apart from anything else, for most people, the forced sale of TikTok and the further consolidation of media companies under Zionist ownership was just odd to witness – producing a sense of alienation, as though you are dealing with people who have a fundamentally different psychological makeup from everyone else around them. It’s likely that the reason Sirota doesn’t share a sense of perplexity at such behavior, is because it doesn’t strike him as out of the ordinary. In his own life, admittedly on a smaller scale, but in a qualitatively similar manner, he acts in much the same way.
About a week following the Oct 7 attacks, the ‘Jacobin’ website published a conversation between him and two other people, with Sirota serving as moderator. Both of the other participants, Matt Duss and Daniel Bessner, have been colleagues of his, and Bessner is Jewish. Clearly, Sirota thought nothing of using these events to platform and promote people within his ethnic and professional network – because, isn’t that what anyone would do?
Unsurprisingly, that conversation between people who already knew and agreed with each other went nowhere and was wholly uninformative. A representative statement from each of the participants:
Duss:
‘Regarding the US response and the allied response, Joe Biden’s view of the US relationship to Israel is characterized as “no daylight.” My own view is that that approach is part of what got us here.’
Bessner:
‘I think this has been a tragedy decades in the making on all sides.’
And the moderator, asking the really important questions:
‘Let’s talk about Hamas’s connections to Iran. Is Hamas a proxy for the Iranian regime? If they are, should the actions of Hamas be seen as an act of war against Israel by Iran?’
If David Sirota doesn’t see a problem with using his moderator role to inject AIPAC talking points into a conversation, then it’s not at all surprising that he fails to see the problem with the Zionist tactics of Larry Ellison &Co. What is surprising is him being confirmed in his delusional thinking by people who ought to know better.
I would imagine Ryan Grim doesn’t actually agree with Sirota’s Ellison-buying-CBS take. When presented with such an opinion, however, he was moved to show his approval of it. I believe that the reason for this is that he is displaying something along the lines of ‘normalcy bias’. He is one of shrinking pool of Americans who is being well-served by the status quo, and so he wants to believe that if he just keeps doing what he is doing for a while longer, things will eventually work themselves out, and reach a satisfactory conclusion. In the meantime, he makes his living by “breaking stories” about events in Gaza, and by scavenging off the leaked emails of a dead sex-trafficker to give the public a clearer picture of something they were already sufficiently well-informed about. In both cases, he is telling people who already know, what they already knew, and pretending this is the same thing as “doing something”.
A retaining wall can only hold back so much weight accumulated behind it, before it crumbles; and when it does, where do most of the dirt and debris come to rest? Similarly, when in the presence of someone trying with all their might to keep a roiling fluid trapped in a container that will not bear the mishandling, the smart thing to do is to stand well back, as far as possible. The grim reality is that there are people placing themselves squarely between the immovable object that is Jewish lack of self-awareness, and the unstoppable force known as reality.