Jews

2013-10-08-NYT-Cohen-a-jew-not-quite-english-enough

A Jew Not Quite English Enough
By ROGER COHEN
New York Times, 2013-10-08

...

This is Ralph (born Adolphe) Miliband, the late father of David Miliband, Britain’s former foreign secretary, and of Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party. He is also, for that voice of the British conservative heartland, The Daily Mail, “The Man Who Hated Britain.”

The headline stood atop a recent piece that portrayed Ralph Miliband as a disloyal socialist. He is accused of “availing himself” of a good British education while criticizing the nationalism he encountered on arrival. He helped his father in “rescuing furniture from bombed houses in the Blitz.” He stood reverently at the grave of Karl Marx in north London. He denounced the Falklands War, even while — The Mail insinuates — scheming to avoid death duties on the family house in fashionable Primrose Hill, and suffered from a “giant-sized social chip on his shoulder” that explained his criticism of British institutions.

Sound familiar?
The rootless Jewish Bolshevik who profits from others’ losses,
shows no loyalty to the society in which he prospers,
and devises clever two-faced financial maneuvers
that demonstrate his essential hypocrisy:
All this could of course have been borrowed from
the Nazi propaganda Ralph Miliband fled as a young man.

...

The Labour leader steered clear of the evident Jewish stereotyping oozing from every insinuation in The Mail piece, which was written by a Jew, Geoffrey Levy, and defended most publicly by another Jew, The Mail’s deputy editor, Jon Steafel. For Levy and Steafel, in what the historian Lewis Namier characterized as the land of the “trembling Israelites,” Miliband was somehow not quite English enough. He was the Jewish communist outsider masquerading as an Englishman.

John Mann, a Labour member of Parliament and chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism, clarified the issue in a tweet. He called the attack on Ralph Miliband a “classical age-old anti-Semitic smear about disloyal Jews.”

...

David Miliband tweeted that his father loved Britain.
He now lives in New York, city of full-throated Jewishness.

[Cohen's column ends with that.

In my own personal experience, I never gave the issues of raised above any thought,
until I observed the post-9/11 push for war with Iraq,
observed (in my opinion) that such war would have little benefit for the United States while it would without a doubt, in my opinion, impose great costs on the United States,
observed that, on the other hand, it would without any reasonable doubt serve to remove a potential threat to Israel,
and observed, I believe correctly, that the people who were making the most passionate and vociferous arguments for such a war which would benefit Israel but not the United States
were, to an astonishingly large degree, American Jews.
Were they all just, despite their universally claimed "brilliance", just somehow mistaken?
Or were their judgments in fact based on the fact that improving the situation of Israel (in their view)
was more important than the health and well-being of the United States?

I can well understand that they do not believe that, that they just think they were mistaken.
But are they deluding themselves about their own motivations?

I can well understand that many Jews find such accusations distasteful,
if not worse, possibly even "evil".
But until the United States adopts
a more even-handed position on Israeli/Palestinian issues,
and thereby removes that obstacle to positive U.S./Muslim relations,
can we not question the motivations of Jews who favor pro-Israel policies?
And as to those gentiles who support Israel as much as the most ardent Jew,
certainly some are motivated by their own love for Zionism,
based on their reading of the Bible.
But also surely some gentile supporters of Israel do so
because it is politically and economically advantageous to them to do so.
As they know, and as Jews advertise, Jews support their friends.
They are, in effect, bought by Jewish political and economic power.
On the other hand, some are intimidated into at least not challenging Zionism.
It is not at all hard to find examples of prominent Americans
who have been punished for questioning either Zionism or Jewish power in America.

And on the financial issue, I have observed in the span of my public-issue-observing life,
since the late 1950s,
a pronounced move to policies in the business, governmental, and cultural realms
which reject the policies which led to the strong and productive America
which could play a major role in winning World War II,
while they so clearly favor the interests of Jews and women.
All those women in the work force (yet not enough for some at the New York Times),
what do they produce that would be useful in a war?
And on the issue of spreading prosperity around, see this column.
Such attitudes were not held in the Christian America in which I grew up in the 1950s.

Finally, on that charge of Jewish "pushiness",
just who is it that has been encouraging American women to "lean in"?
Just who is it that urged American women to "get to work"
rather than caring for their family?]