From Yahweh to Zion

by Laurent Guyénot

  As was pointed out earlier, Jews contributed massively to the success of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 march on Washington, DC, which led to his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The introductory remarks of Rabbi Joachim Prinz, then chairman of American Jewish Congress, before King’s famous “I have a dream” speech on August 28, 1963, offer a telling example of Jewish opportunism: “I speak to you as an American Jew,” Prinz begins. “As Jews, we bring to this great demonstration in which thousands of us proudly participate a twofold experience: one of the spirit, and one of our history. In the realm of the spirit, our fathers told us thousands of years ago that when God created man, he created him as everybody’s neighbour […]. From our Jewish experience of three and a half thousand years, we say: Our ancient history began with slavery and the yearning for freedom.” There followed a brief reminder of Jewish suffering from the ghettos of the Middle Ages to the recent Holocaust. Then, just when we would expect a word about the condition of black Americans, Prinz brushes away the issue: Americans “must speak up and act,” he says, “not for the sake of the negro, not for the sake of the black community, but for the sake of the image, the dream, the idea, and the aspiration of America itself.”700

  Some Black American leaders like Louis Farrakhan believe that the Jews championed their cause out of self-interest, essentially hijacking it.701 Charles Silberman seemingly agrees, while extending the analysis to other battles: “American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief—firmly rooted in history—that Jews are only safe in a society that welcomes a broad spectrum of attitudes and behaviors, as well as a diversity of religions and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example, and not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of American Jews to support the rights of homosexuals.”702 And so, thanks to the “Jewish identity merchants,” as Gilad Atzmon call them, “We are transformed into a matrix of a manifold of Jew-like tribal groupings defined largely by biology (color, gender, sexual preferences, race, etc.). However, it is hardly surprising that Jewish identity merchants are way better than anyone else in being Jews. Jews have been practicing Jewish tribal survival strategies (identity politics and ethnocentrism) for 3000 years.”703

  Throughout the twentieth century, cinema has been a powerful means of shaping American culture. Hollywood was founded by newly immigrated Jews from Eastern Europe in the 1920s: the Warner brothers, Carl Laemmle, William Fox, Harry Cohn, Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg, Adolph Zukor, and others. They built empires whose names became mythical: Twentieth-Century Fox, Columbia, MGM, Universal. These “giants […] dared invent their own vision of the American Dream. Even to this day, the American values defined largely by the movies of these émigrés endure in American cinema and culture.”704 Their dream factory gradually became a nightmare. In Hollywood vs. America, an angry Michael Medved asks: “Why does our popular culture seem so consistently hostile to the values that most Americans hold dear? Why does the entertainment industry attack religion, glorify brutality, undermine the family, and deride patriotism?” Medved asserts that “Hollywood ignores—and assaults—the values of ordinary American families, pursuing a self-destructive and alienated ideological agenda that is harmful to the nation at large.”705

  Never mentioned in Medved’s book is the Jewish influence on Hollywood. It is not surprising, if we know that Medved was born of German and Ukrainian Jewish parents, and presides over an Orthodox synagogue engaged in proselytism among liberal Jews in Southern California, not far from Hollywood. Like all neoconservatives of his kind, Medved plays the patriot by denouncing the “self-destruction” of the nation by liberal values. Hollywood is like bolshevism: if it is good, it is Jewish; but if it is bad, Jews have nothing to do with it.

  More candid is Joel Stein, who defines himself as a “proud Jew,” and replied in a 2008 Los Angeles Times article to Abe Foxman, who believes that talking about Jews’ power over Hollywood is “dangerous”: “I don’t care if Americans think we’re running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them.”706 Only a Jew can say such a thing without suffering the wrath of the ADL. In June 2014, the British actor Gary Oldman had to apologize to the Jewish community for having affirmed, in an interview with the magazine Playboy, that Hollywood is “run by the Jews.”

  Hollywood subversion exemplifies the thorn-in-the-side version of the “theory of mission,” according to which the attack on moral values is a service to society. It has largely been Jewish intellectuals who, possessed by this mission, have waged a war of attrition against Christian moral values, as Nathan Abrams noted in the article quoted above. It has also been Jews, beginning with the founder of Playboy Hugh Heffner, who, in pornography and erotica, have broken all the moral barriers one by one. “There’s no getting away from the fact that secular Jews have played (and still continue to play) a disproportionate role throughout the adult film industry in America. Jewish involvement in pornography has a long history in the United States, as Jews have helped to transform a fringe subculture into what has become a primary constituent of Americana.” The testimony of its producers, cited by Abrams, suggests that pornography for them is not only a lucrative business, but also “a way of defiling Christian culture”: “The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks,” explains Al Goldstein.707

  Changing the cultural environment of a nation requires the control of the screen and the press—the dream factory and the manufacture of opinion. The first is centered in Hollywood, on the West Coast, while the second is traditionally concentrated in the East, its two historic landmarks being The Washington Post and The New York Times. The news media act as a Darwinian mechanism of “cultural selection.” They do not really create new ideas, but instead decide whether an idea, a bit of news, an opinion, a book, or an artist is or is not admissible. In this way they indirectly determine our conceptions of truth, beauty, and goodness. In a society blessed with a truly free and independent press, a wide variety of opinion, values, and tastes will find expression. But since the end of the nineteenth century, the press has grown ever-more concentrated in the hands of Jewish owners and publishers. These media barons have a natural tendency to showcase the contributions of their own community. And they have grown more and more involved in the defense of the interests of their community and of Israel.

  The Washington Post was purchased in 1933 by Eugene Meyer, who was both close to Harry Truman (who appointed him the first president of the World Bank in 1947) and the very Zionist American Jewish Committee. In 1952, the committee stated as its mission to “continue to stimulate pro-Israel sentiments among the American people, particularly on radio and television.” The other leading American newspaper, The New York Times, was bought in 1896 by Adolph Simon Ochs, whose son-in-law Arthur Hays Sulzberger became director of publication in 1938, and was succeeded by his son and then his grandson. Sulzberger denounced in 1946 the “coercive methods of the Zionists” influencing his editorial line. But from the creation of Israel to the present day, the newspaper he founded has produced singularly unbalanced coverage of Palestine.708 The two other top-selling daily newspapers, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, are also owned by Jews, as are the three main weekly magazines (Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report) as well as most political reviews (National Review, New Republic, Weekly Standard). Alongside the defense of Israel, they all promote the religion of the Holocaust.

  The television industry has followed a similar path, and the concentration of Jewish power there is even more extreme. “Today, seven Jewish Americans run the vast majority of US television networks, the printed press, the Hollywood movie industry, the book publishing industry, and the recording industry,” writes John Whitley.709 The major news channels—ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN—are naturally included in this category, as well as Rupert Murdoch’s FOX empire, a mainstay of neoconservative propaganda. Murdoch, while
not Jewish, is close to Ariel Sharon and Likud. In 2004 he directly or indirectly owned more than 175 print titles (40 million newspapers sold weekly) and 35 television channels, reaching 110 million spectators on four continents.

  Given the pro-Israel bias of these media moguls, when the US Department of Justice investigates foreign groups that brought $36 million into the US to plant stories in the US media promoting Israeli foreign policy objectives, it is only pointing at the tree concealing the forest.710

  In such a situation, everything Middle East-related is very carefully filtered and spun. But what is perhaps even more important is that the media has become the most important power, after money, in American democracy. The press makes and unmakes reputations, and thus elections, while maintaining the illusion of popular choice. In a conference in Israel, Haim Saban, a media magnate and multimillionaire, gave his recipe for influencing US politics: “Donations to political parties, think-tanks and media control.” Gilad Atzmon suggests this is why “democracy today, especially in the English speaking world, is a political system that specialises in positioning inadequate, unqualified and dubious types in leadership positions.”711

  But what makes the power of the Jewish elite unique is the taboo that surrounds it. As the editorial writer Joseph Sobran wrote: “Survival in public life requires that you know all about it, but never refer to it. A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims; and if you don’t respect their victimhood, they’ll destroy you.”712 Actually, you may refer to Jewish power if you are Jewish, like Joel Stein as quoted above, but not if you are a Gentile: star presenter Rick Sanchez was dismissed in 2010 for having said that CNN and the other media networks were all run by Jews.713 Gilad Atzmon therefore correctly characterizes Jewish Power as “the capacity to silence criticism of Jewish Power.”714

  Chapter 11

  CHILDREN OF THE MAD GOD

  “By my own self I swear it; what comes from my mouth is saving justice, it is an irrevocable word: All shall bend the knee to me, by me every tongue shall swear.”

  Isaiah 45:23

  Yahweh, the Levites, and the People

  In chapter 2, I drew the portrait of Yahweh as a “sociopath among the gods,” based on his raging extermination of his peers. I also hypothesized that this little tribal god’s self-styled status as the only true God and sole creator of the universe exemplifies sociopathic narcissism. In this chapter I will discuss Yahweh not in his relationship to other gods, but to his chosen people.

  From a Feuerbachian point of view (see chapter 3), Yahweh could be regarded as a personification of Jewishness, “the objectified Jewish essence,” just as the universal God of Christianity is, for Feuerbach, “the objectified human essence.” From this point of view, the “character” and “mentality” of Yahweh would be the projection of those of the Jewish people. But that is not accurate. For in the Bible, it is not the Jewish people but its religious elites who incarnate Yahweh and who speak, legislate, and rage in his name. “Yahweh” is nothing more than the voice of the priests. The prophets themselves, who speak in God’s name, are really the spokesmen of the priests, or of some priestly clan or another.

  The people, on the other hand, are almost always rebels against Yahweh’s authority. The main theme of biblical history is the “alliance” between Yahweh and his people, and its leitmotiv is the alternance of submission, insubordination, and punishment.

  Consider chapter 42 of the book of Jeremiah, whose ideology is so typically Deuteronomic that some biblical historians speculate that Jeremiah and his scribe Baruch were the main authors of Deuteronomy and the six following books.715 After the fall of Jerusalem, the people of Judah come to Jeremiah asking him to intercede before God, “so that Yahweh your God may show us the way we are to go and what we must do.” The prophet Jeremiah answers them: “I hear you; I will indeed pray to Yahweh your God as you ask; and whatever answer Yahweh your God gives you, I will tell you, keeping nothing back from you.” The Judeans promise to “obey the voice of Yahweh our God to whom we are sending you.” “Ten days later the word of Yahweh came to Jeremiah,” who then summons “all the people from least to greatest” and reports that Yahweh has told him to tell them not to take refuge in Egypt, lest they “will die by sword, famine and plague: not a single one of them will survive or escape the disaster I [Yahweh] shall inflict on them.” But a few clever ones challenge Jeremiah and doubt whether he has really consulted with Yahweh. “When Jeremiah had finished telling all the people all the words of Yahweh their God, which Yahweh their God had sent him to tell them—all the words quoted above—Azariah son of Hoshaiah, and Johanan son of Kareah, and all those arrogant men, said to Jeremiah, ‘You are lying. Yahweh our God did not send you to say, ‘Do not go to Egypt and settle there.’ It was Baruch son of Neriah, who keeps inciting you against us, to hand us over to the Chaldaeans so that they can put us to death or deport us to Babylon’” (43:1–3). Finally, none of the leaders followed Yahweh/Jeremiah’s order. They took refuge in Egypt, and Jeremiah actually went with them. Every reader may ponder in his heart if, in the same situation, he would have been among the “arrogant” or the gullible, and thus clarify his relationship to prophetic authority and the Bible in general.

  Here, as throughout biblical history, the people are presented as rebelling against the authority of Yahweh, whether it is incarnated by Moses, the priests, or the prophets. Consequently, the Jewish national character or mentality cannot be deduced directly from the character or mentality of Yahweh. What interests us is the cognitive mechanisms that Yahweh induces in his people. To study Jewish collective psychology, we must consider how the believer or ethnic Jew cognitively internalizes the foundations of his religion and identity inscribed in the Bible. This is difficult for Christians, who are not used to reading the Bible as Jews do: Christians do not identify with the Jewish people, nor do they feel directly concerned with the relationship between Yahweh and Israel. They tend to rationalize Yahweh’s behavior in the Old Testament by the notion that he was dealing with a hardened people.

  In this chapter, I will suggest that Yahweh, as the sociopathic or psychopathic god, has inculcated in the Jewish people the syndrome of the “psychopath’s son.” Philip Roth has formulated this very idea through the character of Smilesburger in Operation Shylock: “A Jew knows God and how, from the very first day He created man, He has been irritated with him from morning till night. […] To appeal to a crazy, irritated father, that is what it is to be a Jew. To appeal to a crazy, violent father, and for three thousand years, that is what it is to be a crazy Jew!”716

  This approach makes it possible to give a dialectical account of sociopsychological tensions in the Jewish community as a whole, and in each Jew individually insofar as he identifies with that community. The son of a psychopath, unless he escapes early on from his father, has no choice but to structure his personality by mimicking the paternal psychopathy. But his psychic autonomy also drives him to free himself from this father who lives in him, at the cost of terrible suffering.

  What Is a Psychopath?

  Psychopathy is a syndrome of traits classified among the personality disorders. Some behaviorally oriented psychiatrists prefer the term sociopathy. In an effort to get everyone to agree, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American psychiatric bible, has decided on “antisocial personality disorder.” I prefer the term psychopathy, which is still more commonly used, but we need to keep in mind that we are talking fundamentally of a disorder of sociability. Since our personality is what connects us to society, psychopathy is the archetypal personality disorder, of which all others can be considered partial manifestations or variations.

  Canadian psychologist Robert Hare, in the wake of Hervey Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity (1941), has defined the diagnostic criteria of psychopathy on the basis of a cognitive checklist that is now widely adopted.717 The most striking traits of the psychopath are lack of e
mpathy and conscience. Other traits are common to narcissism: Psychopaths have a grand vision of their own importance. In their minds, everything is owed to them because they are exceptional. They are never wrong, and failures are always the fault of others. They often show megalomania, but some learn to hide their arrogance under false modesty. If the psychopath pretends to rise to the universal level, it is because he confuses it with his personal interests, and the truth with his own opinions. However, the psychopath is distinguished from the simple narcissist by his appetite for power, which makes him much more destructive. Moreover, his capacity for harm is not inhibited by any scruples or remorse: he is incapable of feeling guilt. Although he imagines himself a hero, and in some cases looks like a hero, the psychopath is, on the human spectrum, the polar opposite of the hero who sacrifices himself for his community. He has no qualms about sacrificing the people around him, and, when he knows he is lost, he consoles himself by causing as many people as possible to fall.

  Basically, the psychopath perceives others as objects. He has a mechanical view of people and human relationships (and, in some way, of himself as well). Although devoid of conscience, he often has a keen perception of the law, which he, as a mechanic of the social engine, overestimates. He has not internalized moral law and in this sense is not socialized, but he has mastered the rules of the game and cheats without qualms if he can. For the same reason, the psychopath almost always develops an immoderate taste for money. He idealizes it as the epitome of power, the very essence of the social; he thinks that people can be bought and sold like things, and life often proves him right.