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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
On April 6, Ira Stoll published a silly and rather poorly worded op-ed entitled Anti-Semitism and the Economic Crisis in the Wall Street Journal. Even though Stoll was writing only a little more that a month after Israel ended its rampage in Gaza, he proposed that hatred of Jews might increase with the world financial crisis as the result either of irrational gentile prejudice or of rational gentile unscrupulousness.
Stoll refers to questionable but Jewishly self-serving historical analysis from Benzion Netanyahu, who is the father of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu:
As for the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the foremost historian of its causes, Benzion Netanyahu (the father of Israel's new prime minister), writes of the desire of the persecutors "to get rid of their debts by getting rid of their creditors." More generally, he writes, "it is an iron-clad rule in the history of group relations: the majority's toleration of every minority lessens with the worsening of the majority's condition."
In fact, a lot of Spanish debt -- possibly most -- was held by formerly Jewish New Christians, who were not subject to expulsion. Because the Spanish government expelled Muslims as well as Jews, a much more plausible explanation for the expulsion might lie in the desire of Spanish Christians to have a religiously homogeneous state after approximately 600 years of religious warfare.
Netanyahu's iron-clad rule does not even apply to his native Poland, where economic crisis rarely -- if ever -- created hostility toward Saxon, Armenian, Muslim Tatar, or Karaite Jewish Tatar populations, who were all generally perceived as honest in their dealings with people outside their groups.
Sometimes Jewish Tatars suffered secondary effects from hostility toward ethnic Ashkenazim, but more generally towards the end of the 19th century, Jewish Tatars were becoming just as annoyed with ethnic Ashkenazim as ethnic Russians or ethnic Poles were.
Stoll concluded his essay by turning from the historical to timeless religious concepts:
It may yet be that the Jews escape the current economic crisis having only lost fortunes. But if not, there will have been no lack of warning about the threat. When Jews gather Wednesday night for the Passover Seder, we will recite the words from the Hagadah, the book that relays the Israelite exodus from slavery in Egypt: "In every generation they rise up against us to destroy us." This year, they will resonate all the more ominously.
While Stoll could hardly have found a better means to absolve Jews of any legitimate grievances that non-Jews might have against Jews either for shameless financial aggression or for heinous slaughter of non-Jews, he probably was not incorrect in focusing on long standing financial issues instead of the latest Zionist atrocity against Palestinians, for Jews are disproportionately represented among America's hyper-wealthy plutocrats, business leaders, business reporters, academics in finance or economics, and policy makers in finance or economics.
As an increasing number of people have begun to understand the scale of the financial disaster and the role of leading Jews in creating the disaster, the organized Jewish community has shown increasing signs of panic
- that Jewish finance and economic leaders might actually be held accountable for their crimes or incompetence and
- that at the very least Jewish access to political and economic power might decrease in the USA.
The organized Jewish community and Israel advocates have developed two major strategies for dealing with this threat.
The primary effort focuses on blame-shifting or distraction via incitement against Arabs and Muslims. During the presidential campaign, the Clarion Fund acting as a front for Aish haTorah, Honest Reporting, the Republican Jewish Council (RJC) and probably several hyperwealthy Jewish plutocrats distributed the Islamophobic documentary Obsession, Radical Islam's War Against the West. Then the anti-Arab anti-Muslim campaign became personal with demonization of Rashid Khalidi, who is an Arab American professor at Columbia University. Since the Obama inauguration the RJC, various Israel advocacy organizations and various official Jewish groups have been treating various communities throughout the US with visits from notorious Dutch Islamophobic politician Geert Wilders, who does a dog and pony show to demonstrate that Western Muslims represent a barbarian threat comparable to Hitler and the German Nazis.
Because eight years of Bush Administration and Jewish Zionist Neocon scare-mongering has worn out the shock value of the Islamic threat, the Jewish community and the Israel Lobby have pursued a secondary strategy to make Americans feel guilty for doubting Jewish competence in finance or for harboring negative thoughts about the role of Jews in the American political, social, academic or economic system. There has been an ongoing effort in the media to create a hagiography about Larry Summers, Ben Shalom Bernanke and other Jewish economists or finance experts. The campaign has the appearance of an attempt to create a form of Gramscian hegemonic blocking to prevent Americans from harboring doubts about the competence of Jewish policy makers like Summers, who has a record of almost unadulterated misunderstanding and failure.
With or without awareness President Obama has been recruited to quiet suspicions about the good will of Jewish bankers through an encomium of Leonard Abess, Jr. while Obama's recent speech at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum effectively put any qualms about excessive Jewish representation or influence in the US government or economy in the category of the most vile possible German Nazi anti-Semitism.
Yet the size of the current financial disaster, the role of leading economic or financial experts in causing the collapse, and the absence of warning with few exceptions from academic economists should put the "science" of economics in doubt. Economics is not math, and measuring tangible quantities is probably the least important aspect of the field. Over the last decade or so economists have attempted to introduce ideas of evolution or social psychology into the system, but these efforts are beside the point. Finance and hence economics is driven by corruption, manipulation, and conspiracy, which are intangibles hard to measure especially in combination with other intangibles like ethnicity or nationalism.
The major recent economic disasters like the Panic of 1873, which preceded the Long Depression, the Great Crash of 1929 that became the beginning of the Great Depression, and the current economic disaster all had Jewish aspects and seem to have originated with misbehavior within in Jewish networks of trust.
While the Long Depression itself is much disputed, the triggering event of the preceding panic was the collapse of the investments of the converted Jewish speculator Bethel Strousberg with concomitant ruination of many trusting Jews and non-Jews. If there was a Long Depression, which many modern experts doubt even if the losers did not, it lasted either 17 or 27 years according to different ways of looking at the data.
The Great Crash began in 1929 when the leverage of closed-end funds of the German Jewish American Goldman Sachs investment bank began to operate in reverse and wiped out a tremendous amount of stock value to create a panic among investors. Both Milton Friedman and Ben Shalom Bernanke analyzed the Great Depression, and neither Jewish economist could discern a Jewish ethnic contribution to the Great Depression even though the US investment banking industry had long be wracked by a sort of ethnic competition or warfare between the Jewish and non-Jewish firms. The conflict was particularly strong in the 1920s until Goldman Sachs began to operate its own leveraged closed end funds. At this point determining how decisions were made is difficult. Top management could have made the choices, but then as now Jewish financiers worked together through informal networks of trust to protect one another or to share information and sometimes strategies.
The preponderance of the evidence suggests that Jewish investment professionals sometimes operating against their own banks took derivative positions based on likely Federal Reserve behavior while many bankers short-sold and hedged against over-leveraging in the closed-end fund market. Overall the banking community advised the Federal Reserve Board of Governors to pursue of policy of contracting the money supply with the result of transforming the 1929 Crash into the Great Depression.
Little actual persuasion was necessary to convince the Federal Reserve to pursue exactly the same policies it had followed successfully in 1924 and 1927. The combination of Federal Reserve behavior and anti-Fed bets managed to exacerbate the Great Crash into the Great Depression while some mostly Jewish bankers became disproportionately cash rich.
The ultimate scope of the economic downturn was probably not anticipated. It lasted for the most part until the beginning of WWII in the USA (or 1946 by some analysts) even though Germany managed to achieve recovery by 1936. During the Great Depression the Jewish and non-Jewish investment banks acquired valuable equity and assets at fire sale prices, but Jewish institutions did distinctly better.
Even though anyone familiar with Yiddish literature or E. European ethnic Ashkenazi history must be aware that Yiddish Jews were heavily involved in all sorts of financial violence or manipulation during the second half of the 19th century, the Great Crash and Depression involved few Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim because Yiddish Jews on the whole did not yet have enough capital in the USA to take part in major financial skullduggery.
Because of the nature of the hegemonic American discourse about Jews, any discussion Jewish economic or financial violence is subject to accusations of anti-Semitism, and the public is never even permitted to address the need for reform of Jewish economic behavior
- even though politicians routinely talk about African American male propensity to petty violent and criminal behavior and
- even though an African American politician like Barack Obama is counted as courageous for telling young black males to get their act together.
In reality African American culture suffers from various forms of structural inequalities that resulted from Civil War and US government behavior in the decades that followed and over which young African American males have no control whatsoever. In contrast, modern Jewish behavior has developed out of some very specific legacies inherited from ancient and medieval Judaism.
Seth Schwartz discusses the concept of virtualization of the community of Israel in Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E to 640 C.E. on pp 287-8:
The Local Community and the Community of Israel
We have already seen that the ideology of self-enclosure may often have been in tension with wider social and economic realities. That it was in tension even with religious realities is obvious enough. After all, by around 500 all Palestinian Jewish settlements shared the ideology and all that went with itthe synagogue, the symbolic centrality of the Torah, and so on. Some communities, furthermore, were aware of the tension between their self-conception as loci of religious obligation and meaning, and the biblical view of Israel, inherited by the rabbis, as a single people. On the mosaic pavement of the narthex of their sixth- or early seventh-century synagogue, the Jews of Jericho wrote the following.
May they be remembered for good, may their memory be for good, all the holy congregation (qahalah qadishah), great and small, whom the King of the Universe helped so that they pledged" and made [i.e., paid for] the mosaic. May He who knows their names, and those of their sons and the members of their household, inscribe them in the book of life with all the righteous. (They are) friends to all Israel. Peace [Amen].
The language of this inscription was derived from a communal prayer that until recently was known (in Aramaic) only from the prayer books of Kaffa-Feodosiya in the Crimea, and Cochin in India, both known only in copies printed in the eighteenth century Traces of the prayer have now been detected among the fragments of the medieval Palestinian liturgy discovered in the Cairo genizah, and the Jericho inscription seems to prove beyond a doubt that the prayer originated in late antique Palestine. How widespread it was there we cannot tell, though components of the Jericho inscription are paralleled at Hamat Cader, Alma, Dalton, Susiyah, and Chorazin." Of special interest is the conclusion of the inscription, haverim lekol Yisrael, a formula preserved in the traditional Ashkenazic prayer book, with a slight change, to haverim kol Yisrael (all Israel are friends), only in the inappropriate-seeming context of the conclusion of the blessing of the new moon [see note]. It seems obvious that this exclamation is intended to qualify or mitigate the powerful expression of the religious significance of the local community that it follows; contrary to what we may sometimes imagine, it seems to say, we are part of the larger community of Israel.
[Note: "May He who performed miracles for our fathers and redeemed them from slavery to freedom redeem us soon and gather our dispersed members from the four corners of the earth. All Israel are friends, and let us say, Amen." Here the local community is implicitly represented as a by-product of the exile, an imperfect condition from which we pray to be released, while we continue to affirm the unity of the people of Israel. The message is different from that of the Palestinian communal prayer.]
In late antiquity communities that practice a form of pre-Rabbinic Judaism developed a belief in their membership in the larger community of Israel. While such thinking differed little from comparable Christian conceptions, the pre-Rabbinic communities were not connected to a clerical hierarchy that provided governing authority and oversight.
The pre-Rabbinic virtualization of the pre-Rabbinic nation of Israel served as preparation for the great Medieval Rabbinic Jewish revolution which transformed pre-Rabbinic Judaism into a network of Medieval Rabbinic Jewish communities linked together by a trading network and by a sacred law, whose business and commercial rules and regulations were particularly well developed.
By the early medieval period Rabbinic Judaism is completely deterritorialized, and the Land of Israel is a spiritual concept that only plays an eschatological role. Maimonides' great law code and enumeration of the commandments contain neither obligation to settle the Land of Israel nor -- to the dismay of the anti-Zionist Satmarer Rebbe Teitelbum -- any law forbidding settlement. The physical Land of Israel simply was not important to Medieval Rabbinic Judaism.
The medieval Jewish trade network facilitated by codification of Jewish Law extended throughout the Christian and Muslim world into SE Asia and over the Silk Road in China.
The medieval commercial system laid the foundation for the Jewish business social networking system
- that gave Jews so many advantages over gentile competitors,
- that created Central and Western European Jewish wealth,
- that survived into the modern period, and
- that faced disruption by secularization and modernization.
One other pre-modern or early modern innovation or set of innovations was critical to the development of such Jewish networks and necessary both to the creation of modern Jewish culture and also to the establishment of the modern Zionist political economic system.
The Polish government from the medieval to early modern period treated different ethnic groups functionally in a sort of caste system and gave them full autonomy as long as they fulfilled their designated role. Polish Armenians had a governing council called the Voit while in principle the Council of the Four Lands, to which the most important Jewish communities (kehillot) sent delegates, ruled Polish Jewry from the 16th until the 18th century when the Jewish Council failed to meet its tax obligations.
The Polish government effectively gave Polish Jews control of internal distribution of goods within Poland in addition to the role that they played in international trade from the beginning of the development of a distinct Polish Jewish community.
From the 16th century onward a segment of Polish Jews partnered with the magnate class of Polish Szlachta (Gentry) in the highly exploitive arenda (estate management) system, which squeezed the serfs and peasants for practically everything they had and which has tremendous similarity to Friedmanite Neoliberal economic doctrine.
Because increasing Jewish economic might was potentially threatening to the Polish ruling class, Polish Jews began to affect a sort of effeminate public style and culture in order to demonstrate that Jews were really harmless and that non-Jews should not be worried at the wealth and influence that Jews were gaining.
The new effectively hyperwealthy Polish Jewish estate manager class co-opted the Rabbinical intellectual leadership in a development that was eventually to split the Jewish community in several ways and to create a very early form of class-based factionalism among Polish Jews.
The arenda system probably set Polish economic development back centuries and eventually led to the collapse of Poland into the world’s first modern failed state when the Ukrainians rebelled in the 17th century.
Polish Jewish politics went transnational as the Prussians, Russians and Austrians divided historic Poland. Russian and internal Jewish attempts to reform the Jewish community shattered communal control of internal ideological deviance while increasing Jewish population with simultaneous shrinking of the traditional Jewish economic sectored created a Jewish working class and proletariat at the same time that the Czarist government was failing to modernize as fast or as well as its Austrian and German competitors.
Jews from Prussian and Austrian Poland began to emigrate into Austrian and German territories and to Yiddishize the local Jewish populations just as Austrian and German Jews began to emigrate to the United States. In addition as Polish nationalist feelings began to develop in occupied Poland, the magnate class began to feel closer to exploited and oppressed Polish peasants than to its erstwhile Jewish allies.
In effect, formerly Polish Jews became an extremely disaffected former elite, whose leading members felt they were deprived of the status, power, and wealth, which they considered their right at the same time
- that the Jewish working class was beginning to feel exploited by the Jewish proprietor class,
- that the newly developing Jewish intelligentsia was looking for a source of income and populations to mobilize, and
- that wealthy Western European Jews were looking for ways to invest in the Wild East of E. Europe and the Czarist Empire.
In addition, during the late 1840s and early 1850s part of the Russian Jewish community turned revolutionary and became involved in an increasing amount of sabotage, radical violence and targeted assassinations.
When the non-Zionist French Rothschild family sought to invest in Russian Caucasian oil in the 1870s, it took part in early Zionist schemes to send Russian Jews to Palestine as a way to alleviate revolutionary pressures in the Czarist Empire.
When Jewish led revolutionaries assassinated Czar Alexander II, the violent popular response led to large-scale Russian Jewish emigration to the USA at the same time that Jewish intellectuals began to dominate the non-Jewish revolutionary movement that included both a large number of disaffected Russians and also a larger number of even more disaffected members of Russianized populations.
A much smaller group within the Russian Jewish intelligentsia began to dream of creating its own empire by mobilizing Western European Jewish wealth for a colonial enterprise that would send lower class Russian Jews to Palestine and that Jewish intellectuals would direct from European capitals.
Even though practically no Western Jews had any interest in immigrating to Palestine and even though working class Russian Jews were much more interested in revolution than in colonialism, Zionist colonialist ideas were far from ridiculous. There were more Yiddish Jews than there were Danes or Croats, and Western European Jewish wealth and effective GDP was far larger than those of Denmark, which was running a fairly respectable colonial empire at the time. With or without awareness the Zionist movement was proposing a low budget colonial empire that would be run from a virtual colonial motherland among the Jews of Central and Western Europe.
The Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl and his fellow Congress or Political Zionists found an effective marketing strategy in using the Dreyfus Affair to scaremonger wealthy Western Jews with fears of imminent pogroms at the same time Congress Zionism created a sort of liberal enlightened national Jewish identity that could substitute for the traditional religious faith and sacred law on which the Jewish networks of trust so strongly depended. Such networks of trust gave Jews immense competitive advantage in both business and finance as well as more recently in both the arts and academia.
Because all major European states encompassed multiple ethnic or national groups at the time of Herzl, the Congress Zionist concept of liberal Jewish national identity made sense in the Old World context.
Because citizenship and nationality are congruent in the USA, the famous German American Jewish lawyer Louis Brandeis developed and proselytized a form of Congress Zionism stripped of the idea of a separate Jewish national identity as a way of bringing liberal Enlightenment values to immigrant Yiddish Jews in order to Americanize the newest segment of the US Jewish population.
Thus, Brandeis originated the form of Zionist ideology that is called Refugeeism and that was compatible with the philanthropic politics that German American Jews practiced, that still characterizes the American Jewish community, and that expresses itself at its most hypocritical in the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Save Darfur movement.
More or less simultaneously with Brandeis’ conversion, the Zionist movement brought wealthy members of the British Rothschild family into the fold. There was a strong element of economic self-interest in the Rothschild Zionization because the British Rothschilds desperately wanted to invest in Mesopotamian oil. Members of the family could easily discern a value both to dismembering the Ottoman Empire and also to creating a Jewish colony in Palestine to which a pipeline from Mesopotamia could be directed.
The Zionist members of Rothschild family influenced some of the chief families of the Cousinhood of the wealthiest British Jewish to become Zionists. The combined Jewish wealth fairly quickly brought forth the Balfour Declaration possibly in part as an exchange for information about the Zimmerman Note that so enraged the US Congress and that brought the USA into WW1 on the side of France and Britain against Germany.
The section Judonia, Balfour Declaration and Afterward of Judonia Rising: The Israel Lobby and American Society documents the subsequent history of the Zionist movement in the UK and the USA from the issuance of the Balfour Declaration until the present day.
Nowadays, the State of Israel is the keystone in the Zionist imperial system, but commitment to Zionist ideology and beliefs fuels the corrupt Jewish social networking that has given Zionists such spectacular domination over the minds of Western leaders that European and European settler states walked out of Durban II when Iranian President Ahmedinejad stated the obvious about the nature of Zionism and the State of Israel.
Throughout the American media, Jewish Zionist networks of trust police Zionistically unacceptable opinions. Zionist networks of trust within US movie industry have long boycotted Vanessa Redgrave and other pro-Palestinian activists within the film industry.
Academic Jewish Zionist networks of trust have favored Zionist and Zionist-influenced academics willing to produce a ridiculous and nonsensical history of Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Russian Empire since 1850. American schools and universities dutifully indoctrinate Americans with such historical nonsense to guarantee reflexive support for the State of Israel even though Zionist ideology contradicts basic American principles.
Jewish Zionist networks of trust have so thoroughly penetrated the US government regulatory, the US criminal legal system, and the international legal system that Zionist organizations operate with impunity and without scrutiny throughout the USA and the world.
Jewish Zionist networks of trust made it possible for Jewish Zionists to manipulate Jewish officials and academics in the USA, the UK and France for the purpose of creating the Israeli atomic arsenal.
Yet no Zionist success has been greater than the manipulation and the looting of the US and world economy since the 1980s with concomitant creation of a Jewish Zionist plutocratic elite.
Revisionist (Jabotinskian) economic thought worked out the program in the 1920s and 1930s. Eran Kaplan writes on pp. 59-60 in The Jewish Radical Right, Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy:
For the Revisionists the nation was the only social factor that could provide a complete economic framework that would benefit all its members. As Abba Achimeir put it, only the nation and its different organs were responsible for the economic well-being of its members. And, according to Achimeir, the most efficient way to run a national economy was to use protective tariffs to encourage local production while refraining from any intervention in internal economic and social relations.
Achimeir thus invoked the familiar dichotomy between the socioeconomic infrastructure, which should be free from intervention from above, and the political and legal superstructures, which the state should control because it is responsible for setting the goals and guidelines of the national economy.
In a 1933 article Abba Achimeir analyzed the causes of the international financial crisis that followed the 1929 stock market crash. He argued that neither the Great War nor any other international conflict had caused the crisis, as most economists had claimed. The crisis was the logical outcome of the demise of liberal and free-market economics. It marked the collapse of the international system, which suppressed the needs of nations in favor of abstract concepts that people could not relate to.
People, Achimeir claimed, were national, not economic, beings. Human society therefore should not be analyzed and constructed according to some abstract economic rationale. An economic model that was developed according to purely economic considerations led inevitably to an international system, whereas a nationalist approach, Achimeir maintained, always led to an active economic reality, where the nation found itself in a constant state of war (to protect its own market and overtake other markets).
In describing the organizational principles of the Revisionist youth movement Beitar, Ze'ev Jabotinsky stated, "The structure of Beitar and its sense of discipline are a successful and healthy combination between freedom on the one hand and a monistic harmony on the other." The Revisionist economic model similarly combined the freedom of capitalist private ownership with the discipline of active state involvement in the operation of the national market.
The Jabotinskian approach to economics was compatible with traditional Jewish economic behavior. Even though Labor Zionists had rejected such economic practices as a result of E. European class conflict, such behavior quickly reestablished itself among Yiddish Jews as their children moved from the working to professional class.
When Begin took office in Israel, the Jabotinskians finally obtained state-power in Israel at approximately the same moment that American ethnic Ashkenazim, who were generally Jabotinskians, were taking over from the German American Jewish elite within the organized Jewish community, within Israel Lobby organizations, and throughout American business, society, and politics.
By 1980 the State of Israel was receiving at least $2 billion of unaccounted US foreign aid per year and could experiment with the type of ethnonational financial warfare of which Jabotinsky and his followers dreamed in the pre-State period.
The activities of new but traditional American Jewish networks of trust in combination with modern corrupt social networking dovetailed precisely with the implementation of the Jabotinskian program because the presence of Jewish Zionists in the US financial and media industries in combination with Israeli government support of strategic industries made it possible for Zionists to control all sides in a major financial transactions including the press coverage.
In effect the active state mentioned in the last sentence of last paragraph of the quote is not Israel or the United States but has become the Zionist virtual colonial motherland, which is squeezing the economic systems of subordinate states just as Polish magnates and Jewish estate managers squeezed the peasants and serfs of the Polish arenda system of the 17th century.
Suddenly in the 1990s, IPOs were taking place without the traditional four quarters of profitability, the process of seeking venture capital funding included vetting with regard to attitudes toward Zionism or the State of Israel, and an immensely powerful class of politically mobilized Zionist billionaires was created while the US economy was bled through a series of booms and busts from which Zionist oligarchs and their intelligentsia profited.
Because President Obama has put some of main members of the corrupt Jewish social networks in charge of undoing the disaster that corrupt Jewish social networking has created, there really is no discernible end to the perpetual world-wide financial nakba that is now tracking the perpetual Palestinian nakba that the Zionist state continues to exacerbate right before our eyes.
