The Crimes of Jews
Pottling and Kettling
July 30, 2007
I get a steady rivulet of strange mail telling how horrible Jews are. Apparently there is no crime of which they are not guilty. I find myself wondering: How do they find the time to be so evil? Are they on amphetamines or something?
A curious odiousness runs through it. I don’t care whether you like Jews, but these birds need their heads examined. Anyway, here’s me on the horribleness of Jews.
They can’t compete with Christians.
The history of Christianity has been one of murder, torture, and Stalinism, of witless intolerance of things not intolerable and an utter refusal to mind its own business. Look at the record. Look at almost any part of the record. The question is how to choose.
During the witch hunts of 1450-1700, god knows how many tens of thousands of women were tortured savagely and then burned alive, for the sin of having a wart. This demonstration of God’s love and Christian charity was perpetrated not just by Christians, but by the church.
Jews can’t play in this league. They are outclassed.
Then there was the Inquisition, run by that infamous Jew Thomasberger Torquemadastein. (For recent graduates of American universities, there wasn’t really a Jew by that name.) For centuries countless people screamed for days as their shoulders were torn from their sockets, before they were burned alive, in Jesus’ name, amen. This too was a church operation, supported by such as their Most Christian Majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella.
I’m making a list of thousands of Christians tortured to death by Jews. Wait. I’m thinking….
Much of this churchly barbarism has had Jews as its target. Christians were always trying either to kill Jews or to convert them. Why they thought it was any of their business what Jews believed, or Cathars, or Moslems, I do not know. If you didn’t agree with them, they would burn you. Just like Jesus said to do.
If a king decided to go on a Crusade, which is to say an explicitly Christian war, he started by robbing the local Jews to pay for it. (Christians allowed Jews to work only as bankers and moneylenders, and then complained that they were bankers and moneylenders. The logic scintillates.) The army, typically a mob of illiterate louts, massacred Jews along the way and, if they took Jerusalem, they burned the synagogue with the Jews in it. Jesus loves me, this I know….
The sordid tale of Christian compassion continued through the Reformation and beyond. In 1692 the unpleasantly Christian people of Salem, Massachusetts killed 21 (if memory serves) people for being witches. The victims weren’t Jews, probably because the good people of Salem couldn’t find any. In the American South, the Christian churches of the time upheld slavery as God’s will, and these were preachers who saw what slavery really was. We have since romanticized it as happy nigras pluckin’ de banjo and grinning a lot. In fact it was godawful. Check the Spanish Christianization of South America.
Certainly as late as 1882 the Catholic Church was saying that the killing of Christian children by Jews at Easter was “a common practice” and that for the sacrifice to be effective the child had to die “under torment.” (Giuseppe Oreglia de San Stefano, SJ, quoted in Hitler’s Pope, by John Cornwall, page 42 in the Spanish edition. If Pius XII wasn’t an ally of Hitler, he sure simulated it well.) This is sick, evil stuff, and it runs through Christianity like marbling in steak.
By comparison, Jews are pikers. You might as well compare a shoplifter to the Boston Strangler.
Then there’s Israel. I don’t like what the Jews are doing in Israel, and neither do a lot of Israelis, but it is amusing to compare the crimes of Israel with those of, say, the US. America has caused the death of far more people in Iraq than Israel has killed Palestinians, and with far less excuse.
Note the double standard. When Israel kills kids in bombing attacks, it is a crime, but when the US regularly does the same thing in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia, it’s just collateral damage, necessary to bring democracy to people who didn’t ask for it, and anyway it didn’t happen, and besides it was an isolated incident, meaning one that was detected, and of course the dead were all terrorists, toddlers and all. Throw in the carnage in Vietnam, another American war started on lies, and the rise of Pol Pot, directly attributable to the war next door, and Israel looks like a pretty wet squib, crimewise.Judge both countries by the same measure, say I.
Few do. Countries are built on bullshit. Part of Israel’s bullshit is that the Palestinians left in 1948 because they wanted to, Jews being highly moral and incapable of atrocities or ethnic cleansing. Part of America’s bullshit is essentially identical: Americans are highly principled people and do not commit the atrocities that, for example, they documentably commit daily in Iraq. You might ask the Indians about ethnic cleansing. I note that Israel’s Arab citizens are better treated than American blacks were in 1950.
I’m always willing to believe the worst of people, and it’s certainly the way to bet, but Jews do not have the solid credentials of savagery that Christianity does. I guess they just lack spirit.
Yet still I get the strange mail. I have wondered why the weird hostility to Jews. It is weird. I loathe a lot of people, and constantly try to add to the list, but I’m not obsessive about it. People who worry about Jews are obsessive. It eats them up. They see Jews peeking from everywhere. When the New York Times, a Jewish paper, supported Bush’s war on Iraq, as did almost the whole country, it was on orders from Jerusalem. When the Times turned editorially against the war, as had almost the whole country, it was to Stab Our Boys in the Back. You know, the leftwing anti-American Jew media. Everything whatever is controlled by Jews, with malign purpose. Why?
Charles Murray, who isn’t, is the coauthor of The Bell Curve. Writing in Commentary, a Jewish magazine, he notes the following:
In IQ the average American Jew is at the 75th percentile. Six times as many Jews as others have an IQ of better than 140. The imbalance increases for still higher IQ’s. In 1954, on an IQ test given to all kids in the public schools of New York, of those scoring above 170, 24 of 28 were Jews. This is neither new nor debatable. Those who study such things, most of whom are not Jewish, have known it for decades.
Writes Murray, “In the first half of the 20th century, despite pervasive and continuing social discrimination against Jews throughout the Western world, despite the retraction of legal rights, and despite the Holocaust, Jews won 14 percent of Nobel Prizes in literature, chemistry, physics, and medicine/physiology. In the second half of the 20th century, when Nobel Prizes began to be awarded to people from all over the world, that figure rose to 29 percent. So far, in the 21st century, it has been 32 percent. Jews constitute about two-tenths of one percent of the world’s population. You do the math.” Uh…yeah.
If you say on the web that Jews are smart, you get furious mail saying no they aren’t, no they aren’t, no...they...are NOT, in a rising scream. This leaves the writers in the interesting position of saying that Jews control publishing, television, the press, retail, wholesale, Hollywood, Wall Street, international banking, the research institutions, the schools, and the universities. But they aren’t very smart. (I forgot planetary motion. They control planetary motion.) (And watermelon futures. Never forget watermelon futures.)
In my experience of Jews, which is considerable, they aren’t just bright but, worse, they respect intelligence and scholarship, in anybody. If you speak three languages or play a good game of chess or made high scores on your GREs, they are likely to say, “Geez, that’s really good.” With Jews, being a nerd doesn’t carry the opprobrium it does elsewhere. Maybe nerds dress funny, but they’re smart. Jewish women are unmistakably attracted to smart men. (They seem to prefer smart Gentiles to smart Jewish men, but that’s another matter.)
This sets the stage for trouble. The United States is a profoundly anti-intellectual country, and Jews are a profoundly intellectual people. They tend to look like space aliens to much of the country. In America, (or Mexico, for that matter) smart is tolerated, barely. If a Gentile kid pops high on his SATs or grabs a Merit scholarship, he can still be socially accepted as long as he shows that he didn’t really mean it. Any bright kid runs into this. Jews don’t see things this way.
And of course Jews are usually urban. Take people who are bright, culturally inclined towards things intellectual, who live in cities and have a cosmopolitan outlook, and you get people who are fluently conversant with books, the arts, politics, other countries, and such like. They regard this fluency as very much a good thing. So do I. What exactly is the problem?
Being smart, they rise, especially in a brain-intensive civilization, and then seem to control things, and to an extent do, and the rest resent them. (Hitler detested Jews as a genetically inferior people who dominated German intellectual life.) It is easy to hate what you feel inferior to. This is why people who disliked the Russians hated the French, why people who merely dislike blacks hate Jews. It was impossible to feel inferior to Russians, who wore bad suits. Just as in the band-saw shriek of feminists, “We are too equal,” there is audible a fear that maybe they aren’t, in the anti-Semites insistence, “They did it by conspiring,” there is a worry that maybe they didn’t.