http://www.counterpunch.com/neumann01072003.html

Response to Michael Neumann's "Blame Yourself: American Power and Jewish Power"
(An examination of Neumann's thesis which should be more correctly entitled "In Defense of the Jews")

by Chad Powers
January 2003


In modern times, the essence of pan-Jewish identity isn't religion, race, or ethnicity. It is communal self-defense, collective dissimulation, and apologetics. For many Jews there remains the traditional hostility to the non-Jew (sometimes personified as "Christians," "WASPs," etc., but increasingly turning into "Muslims" and "Arabs.") Look at Israel. The self-described "Jewish state" -- international emblem of Jewish legend -- embodies, and exemplifies, these characteristics. It really doesn't matter if one is an Orthodox Jew or a dedicated Marxist. Fear, shame, rage, and other psychic wounds emanating from the "Holocaust" are the base of modern Jewish identity, the ultimate chain that binds. Those of Jewish descent who don't subscribe to this fundamental tenet tend to leave the ethnocentric fold (these people are defined in Jewish terms as "self-haters," socialized by non-Jewish culture to loathe their roots.) Such self-critics make fast tracks away from the Jewish clan which, by traditional Orthodox law (and even secular dictate), literally refuses to let go of them.

Review modern self-appraisal in Jewish literature these days and you'll find that Jews don't really know what they are today as a community. All they can agree upon is the "anti-Semitic" threat (and, hence, an almost hysterical allegiance to Israel, its nuclear bombs, and institutional apartheid). Hitler, after all, followed Jewish racist form in checking genealogical pedigrees in rounding up -- to his criteria -- anyone "Jewish." This net of course caught Jews across the entire political spectrum. No Jew (at least those who define themselves as "Jewish") today has forgotten that. Because this is what a Jew means in modern Jewish consciousness. Victim. The Persecuted. (Of course, this conviction has always been pretty much so in Jewish history, but that's a religious story for another time).

Given that Jews only know themselves as victims, have successfully erased the more unpleasant parts of their collective history from public view, and have socialized everyone else to believe their convictions of chronic disadvantage even as they dominate vast portions of American culture, it follows that defense of the Jewish collective (however one defines it) is paramount in the Jewish psyche and that ANY seed of anti-Jewish hostility must be forbidden from ever taking root again. Who knows where it could lead to, this conviction holds, once let out of the box? That's why Jews are so vehement in resisting even the slightest criticism of their community, whether one focuses on Israel, the tenets of the Old Testament, the self-defined Jewish personality trait of aggressive "chutzpah," Jewish power and influence, or anything else. Criticize Jews in general? That's a stereotype. Criticize Christians in general. That's history.

And that's why the vast Thought Police web about all this has so deeply taken hold upon us all in America. Despite the fact that the Jewish community assails with regularity every group from WASPs to African-Americans (deemed to be the most "anti-Semitic" ethnic group in America by Jewish survey after survey), Jews institutionally refuse anyone the right to speak about them from the same critical perspective. And "Jews the Victims" have the enormous, unchallenged power -- as anyone can easily witness its censorial blanket around us -- to enforce this dual standard.

Michael Neumann, who is Jewish, has written some fine articles in recent months condemning the racist state of Israel. They are courageous. For this, going against the Zionist grain, all righteous people should thank him. But his firm reluctance to face the reasons for the state of Israel (i.e., Jews and massive Jewish influence throughout American culture in the formation of public opinion) is quite strange. But not really surprising. Because it is quite the norm among those who -- for whatever reason -- hold some sort of allegiance to what is known and understood as "Jewish."

The problem is that ethnocentric, dissimulating, apologetic Jews are everywhere -- in the right-wing movement, in the left-wing movement, neo-cons, Libertarians, Scientologists ... You name it. And what is the common denominator of a Zionist, a Jewish "neo-conservative," and the likes of a Jewish atheist? It is the defense of "being Jewish" (and there is no clear consensus about what exactly this means -- except mutual Jewish allegiance against what's called "anti-Semitism") and an activist deflection of collective responsibility for a history of Jewish chauvinism, exploitation, and ethnocentrism.

So what is the common denominator of pan-Jewish unity? The details of the ideology of Zionism? No. Most Jews are not "card-carrying" Zionists. Is it religion? No. Modern Jewry is diverse in their religious beliefs, or lack of them. Rather, Jewish allegiance to each other today is founded upon the conviction that Jews in their Diaspora are always at risk to the periodic surfacing of Gentile "anti-Semitism." While this is certainly part of Zionist ideology, and Judaism too, a Jew does not have to buy all the rest of the Zionist package to believe in the state of Israel as a last defensive/offensive resort for world Jewry, a crucial buttress against hostility towards Jewish power and chauvinism.

Do Jews gather en masse in secret backrooms to decide the fate of the world? No. Of course not. But common Jewish conviction and communal political and social activism -- per intra-Jewish loyalty and collective designs for protection and prosperity -- is both real and measurable. Jewish organizations conduct surveys about Jewish allegiance and mutual support (financial and otherwise) for Israel and international Jewry all the time. And the endless Jewish declaration that Jewish ethnocentrism is as benign as any other ethnic American group's self-interest melts away at close inspection. It is not Armenian-Americans, nor French-Americans, nor Native Americans, nor African-Americans who dominate so much of popular American culture, nor is it these who are empowered with an intrinsic fear of the Ethnic Other (who might rise up against the dominant ethnic power) as its foundation of identity.

But, of course, there are exceptions to every rule, of course. Like Mr. Neumann, a few Jews here and there are active in the anti-Israel movement, but as measure of the strength of pan-Jewish ethnocentric power in American culture, and its omnipresence, it is CRUCIAL not to offend those going against the mainstream Jewish grain, lest they abandon the anti-Israel cause. To do so would bankrupt the pro-Palestinian movement, because credibility rests with Jews in Western culture, not with Arabs. Certainly per the Middle East. Hmmm. And why would that be? Jewish dominance of coal mines?

Mr. Neumann postulates that enormous Jewish power in American government is illusory because "A Zionist US government would have suppressed all anti-Israel material as 'hate literature' or terrorist propaganda." He concludes, then, that such powerful Zio-centrism is a fallacy. What he discretely neglects to mention, of course, is that the Jewish Lobby that's as weak as he'd like you to think is actually powerful enough to have evoked its defensive ethnocentrism one better. It has successfully suppressed not anti-Zionist material as "hate literature," but, rather, that which encompasses it: i.e., ALL and ANY "anti-Jewish" critical material is popularly held to be, categorically, the epitome of "hate." The Anti-Defamation League and Simon Wiesenthal Center are the best known agencies that have institutionalized this scenario. This is, in fact, amazing power: the Jewish community has the ability to stigmatize -- and thereby completely diffuse -- ANY criticism coming its way, without public forum whatsoever.

Look. You know and I know that there's a scam here. If you need to counter one of the many pro-Zionist Jews who own a newspaper, facts themselves about the Middle East won't really help you. Short of owning your own newspaper (or a subversive friend who'd risk his job in the editorial office), your only hope for even the smallest gain in this ideological war is to hold up your own Jew, even if you've only got a handful against the Other Side which lines the Star of David from horizon to horizon. As few Jews as you might have, at least this has the wonderful effect of countering -- at least in symbolic degree -- the inevitable charge of "anti-Semitism" which has for a long time now been used as a tool throughout modern society to silence dissent about anything Jewish and anything Israeli. Such is the dimension of Jewish power and influence. It is immense. It is so immense that a Jew is even necessary to afford the credibility to legitimately challenge Jewish hegemony. It's quite like the field of law (where Jews also, of course, have enormous influence): you get your psychiatrist to testify for the defense, and I'll get my psychiatrist to testify for the prosecution. In the debate before the judge and jury, lain before the altar of the socialized platitudes of Jewish victimology culture, ideological combatants must each have their own Jew to -- if not seize the higher moral ground -- at least make sure they don't lose it. The term for this, sometimes bantered about in Jewish circles, is Jewry's "moral capital." The gold mine for this, of course, is what's known by any socialized grade school kid in America as the "Holocaust," wherein Jewish victimization is supra-heroized as the embodiment of innocence and righteousness, a moral contagion that is publicly held to permeate all spheres of Jewish endeavor. And that has traditionally been held, however bizarrely, to be included in the justification for the racist state of Israel.

So it's kosher -- if barely, and precariously -- for a Jew to go against the Jewish grain and criticize Israel. Of course, on the other hand, if in defense of the Palestinian people a non-Jew decided to criticize the heart of the Palestinian problem -- Jewish identity, Jewish history, and enormous Jewish power which created, informs, and defines the existence of Zionism -- all is lost. Because then your few "good" Jews would feel alienated, offended even. Is it not unjust to include them within the category of "Jew" in the otherwise massive Jewish chain of allegiance to Israel? Must we not delineate, like seeds from the fruit, the "Jew" from the "Zionist?" And, hence, it will be inevitably declared, in the usual Catch-22 Doublethink, that criticizing the self-declared Jewish Chosen People notion -- the origin of Jewish identity, and the recurrent theme of Jewish justification for ideological existence, in one form or another -- is itself "racist." Without a Jew or two, then, the Palestinians would be left to their struggle on their own, Jewish-less, which -- against the massive Jewish/Zionist propaganda wall against them everywhere in America, and non-Jewish indifference -- means that, as little as their side of the story is ever heard with the few "good Jews," it would be heard EVEN LESS without them. Probably a public forum of about zero.

And, of course, the Palestinian war for human dignity and justice cannot be won by throwing stones at tanks in and around Israel. The war is here, in America. It is a grotesquely one-sided propaganda war, and those Jews who cluster throughout the institutions of public opinion-making have free reign to define the world for all, to their liking. Even a few token Jews once and a while on the Palestinian side, and their attendant "moral capital," is needed in maintaining any sort of ideological battle against what can be fairly described as chronic Jewish injustice.

This all informs Mr. Neumann's recent work about Jewish power throughout America, this power's centrality in the anti-Palestinian propaganda war, and his refusal to take (Jewish) responsibility for it. Jews are victims always, after all. Even the fact that they dominate so much of American society is -- to Mr. Neumann's taste -- not their fault. "Blame yourself" non-Jewish America. Indeed. And while you're at it, make sure you take responsibility for the entirety of the worst of Jewish history and identity too. Nazis killed Jews (and so did Christians, and Poles, and Russians, and on and on, and now Muslims) and Jews have always been innocent of everything. Nothing else matters in history but this innocence. Is that not so?

Neumann's own Jewish victimhood motif even goes so far to claim that Jews are not responsible for the creation of immoral Israel. No, no. Not the Jewish/Zionist lobbying group that had been incessantly lobbying American presidents for decades, buying off the Democratic Party (and now the Republicans), exploding today with pro-Israel fanatics bursting out from the Jewish crowd from the very White House windows.

Neumann's displacement goes this far: What is the reason for Israel? GENTILES are to blame, of course. American fears of communism built Israel. Egypt's Nasser built Israel. "The real culprits in the story of Jewish influence in America," says Neumann, "are the people who let it all happen. These are the non-Jewish Americans who, in their opposition to Israel, are so timid that a couple of words from Alan Dershowitz would send them all scuttling like cockroaches back to their dark corners."

Not only are Gentiles to blame for the quintessential expression of Jewish identity (Israel) in modern times, but Neumann offers up the usual Jewish dual moral standard in defense of his position. Non-Jews, he says, in a flare of poetic license, are like cockroaches. Oh, really? Can anyone imagine a Gentile author publicly calling generic Jews, whatever the context, whatever the rhapsodic flare, "scuttling cockroaches" hurrying "back to their dark corners," and have his career survive after it? Think about this. Again, it is an expression of power. Jewish power. Mr. Neumann, as a Jew, can say just about anything he'd like. Trent Lott says something nice about Strom Thurmond and gets crucified for it. Louis Farrakhan calls Judaism a "gutter religion" in some never-discussed context and gets tarred and feathered by the Jewish Lobby. Mr. Neumann can allude to non-Jews, categorically, as "scuttling cockroaches" (and a similar referral to "cockroaches in a bottle" about Palestinians was made by an Israeli general, Raphael Eitan, a few years ago and is now part of the pro-Palestinian folklore of articulated Israeli racism) and, despite the multicultural minefields where the slightest offense to Ethnic Others can ruin careers, Neumann hasn't a worry in the world. That, my friends, in our multicultural world, is power.

Mr. Neumann also states that Jewish activism to create the Jewish state was not "decisive." American antagonism to Soviet communism was "decisive" in the creation of the Jewish state. By this kind of argument we can also "decisively" blame Hitler for Israel, as well as Goyim "anti-Semitism," the nice beach at Eilat, and the Good Tooth Fairy. Neumann's form of argument is standard in Jewish circles. Another version of it goes like this: Is the Jewish community in any way responsible for Jewish "self-hatred" (Jewish anti-Semitism), which has had so many adherents that it is a tradition in the Jewish community? No. Of course not. Jews who are disgusted with Jewish chauvinism and ethnocentrism have merely -- in their attempts to assimilate with non-Jewish society -- internalized irrational Gentile prejudices and bigotry. It is an echo of Gentile anti-Semitism, and Jewish self-hatred actually has nothing whatsoever to do with Jews. Hence, on all counts -- from the recognition among some self-critical Jews that their community is morally troubled to the very formation of the "Jewish state for Jews," Jews, like Mr. Neumann, hold their community to be immune from criticism.

In Neumann's topsy-turvy world, we must even drag in the inevitable Judeo-centric Freudian psychobabble. Of course. Neumann's Jewish power-mongers are -- after all -- declared by him to be "eunuchs." Is that also somehow a central motif to, say, Viacom's Sumner Redstone? Or warlord Ariel Sharon? (By the way, there's an entirely bizarre self-reflective Jewish Freudian literature about an alleged feminization of Jewish men in history.)

Neumann also implores the reader to believe that the LACK of Jewish power may be evidenced in "why you don't see Arnold Schwarzenegger playing the widowed, retired Israeli paratrooper" running around killing Palestinians onscreen in Jewish/Israeli service. Of course, in the REAL world, Schwarzenegger attends Simon Wisenthal Center banquets (a prerequisite these days to prosper in Hollywood) and he has donated millions of dollars to the SWC's Judeo-centric causes. Schwarzenegger faces ugly rumors in Jewish Hollywood, of course, about his (Nazi?) Austrian father and the burden on the actor to prove his philo-Semitic credentials to the Jews who oversee his Hollywood career is enormous.

Mr. Neumann's strange, schizophrenic article seems to attempt to convey two very incongruous things. On one hand, he very guardedly admits a kind of -- to his eyes -- speculatively inconclusive evidence of a Jewish takeover of parts of American culture, but then he argues that, gosh, dominating Hollywood and the mass media isn't really that big a deal and the locus of power in culture is really located elsewhere, and anyway, guilt for this power must be dumped on Gentiles who allowed this all to happen.

Gentiles are not slaves to the mass media, he argues, and are free to accept or deny the Judeo-centric slants on the world that permeate modern society, whether it's the continuing revolt against the remains of the former WASP power structure; the conscious destruction of ANY religious faith (but particularly the Jewish historical nemesis: Christianity) as something to be marginalized in daily society, and replaced by what increasingly appears as a nihilistic liberalism; sexual hedonism (Judaism celebrates sex, as so many Jewish authors decree) in rebellion against Christian prudery; the pseudo-religious celebration of America's omnipresent Freudianism; pervasive cultural obsessions with secularized Talmudic injunctions to a "this life" materialism; the Holocaust secularly embodied as Western society's defining moral sacrament; America itself as an appendage to expanding Israeli brutality; or merely accepting Jesus as a Jewish savior. Neumann's is the typical reactionary argument in denying the persuasive powers of mass media: if presented with Coke, coke, coke, coke, coke, or its echo Pepsi, the choice is truly yours.

But ultimately, he seems to argue, forget the mass media. Whoever owns coal mines and asbestos dumps really controls society, right? Watch out for the logging industry. And those who run roads. Would that be those people in uniforms who take your fifty cents at kiosks on toll thoroughfares? It seems like a clumsy attempt by Mr. Neumann to point the finger away from Jews at the heart of the American brain and nerve center as the lifeblood of social and political decison-making (mass media, government, the arts, publishing, the intelligentsia) to society's dumb trunk. In Mr. Neumann's odd view, the essence of social power is not in its interlinked ideological network sources, but in America's industrial infrastructure.

Although his argument about the location of real cultural and political influence is absurd, let's look at Jews and the realms he chooses as the locus of true American power (the areas he calls "reality.") Even here, Neumann implicitly portrays Jews as victims, inferring that they are not adequately represented in these fields. He names the following as the sources of "reality": "armies," "oil," "auto plants," "farms," "mines," "forests," "oceans," "roads," "airports," and lastly -- very cautiously, with apologetic qualification-- the "media."

Is he serious? Save for the mass media, is this list a joke?

Although it should be clear to any social thinker that the heart of power in any culture is in the realm of the apparatus that invents "public opinion," and, indeed -- as religious values corrode -- defines reality itself, let's briefly examine the realms that Mr. Neumann implies to be devoid of Jewish influence. Subtly, this is an assertion of Jewish victimhood in these fields.

The core of Neumann's analysis is here: "The notion that Jews control America stems from a couch-potato school of political analysis. If your world is the TV screen, the Jewish-control theory makes some sense, because Jews really do pervade the entire range of your remote. And if you should look at the newspaper during commercials, you may find something similar. But contrary to popular belief, the sinews of reality are not found in the media. They reside in armies, oil fields, auto plants, factories, farms, mines, forests, oceans, roads and airports. Here the Jews do not prevail, nor do they prevail even in the financial world. Even in the media, their power is exaggerated."

OK. Let's see. Let's go down the list of Neumann's area list of a lack of Jewish power. Again, Jews represent 2.5% of the American population:

1) "ARMIES." Is the locus of power in armies, or is it located with those who tell armies what to do? Is the foundation of power to be found among the likes of African-American and Latino soldiers crawling under barbed wire, or the Jewish coterie of warmongering White House/Pentagon individuals who NEVER SERVED IN THE MILITARY, like Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, and other obsessive Israelists throughout the White House, Pentagon, and State Department? By 1996, 4 of 7 CIA directorates were also Jewish, as well as the head of the CIA, John Deutch who was pardoned by Bill Clinton before an investigation into Deutch's classified CIA documents at home could be finished.
[See extensive examination of Jewish power in government here].

2) "OIL." No Jews in "oil fields?" If Mr. Neumann means actually dropping sweat at oil rigs, he's probably right. If he means CONTROLLING and DIRECTING oil rigs, it's another story. Shell Oil isn't "oil" enough for Mr. Neumann? Marcus Bearsted, who was Jewish, founded the firm that became Shell Oil and his son "became chairman of the Shell Oil Company after his father." [GREENBERG, M. p. 68]