Excessive Immigration
Page 3
But we face not only strong and angry positions on either side of this debate. Some, for example, claim to be colour-blind, or experience themselves as mixing freely with people of all skin types, languages and nationalities without significant differentiation. Indeed, some grow up in mixed race families, go to mixed schools and live in highly multicultural areas; and some are themselves ‘mixed race’, and hence, presumably, embody a solution to the problems of xenophobia. You can’t hate yourself, or your own skin colour. Except of course that you can — some people have ‘internalised racism’. Michael Jackson famously tried to whiten his skin. Rachel Dolezal, a white American woman, tried, still tries, to pass as black (Dolezal, 2017). These may not be exactly examples of racial identity dysphoria but it is documented that some blacks dislike their skin colour, some having been bullied at school or, apparently, internalising the messages of the advertising industry that white is more beautiful than black. But on the other hand, for many people, it is no big deal what colour anyone is. This step in our discussion raises the point, however, that xenophobia is not really or merely about skin colour. Difference, and emotional reactions to difference, are also about physical features, smells, cultural and lifestyle distinctions. A white person may admire the dark tan colour and ageless skin of a black person but dislike their frizzy, woolly hair or loudness. A traditional Englishman may physically resemble a Polish man but dislike his lifestyle. Conversely, the politeness of the English is often admired but its accompanying uptightness is not.
Another dimension of the problem of xenophobia is where it appears to rise above mere emotion to make claims to rational objections to mass immigration. What is often referred to as scientific racism is the argument based on selected information about genetics, IQ, population demographics, and so on, that people of African descent are genetically distinct and on average of lower intelligence, and that very large numbers of them coming to Europe or increasing in population in the USA are a threat to the civilisational integrity of those lands. In the minds of egalitarian xenophiles, there can be no real objection to the immigration of non-whites into white-majority countries that is not ultimately based on hateful unreason. Attempts at debates of this kind are frequently shut down by anti-racist students, for example, chanting, protesting, and sometimes being violent. In such scenarios the passionate conviction of those opposing what they regard as hateful xenophobia manages to override all possibility of dialogue in which viewpoint diversity could be honoured. It is often implied here that pseudo-rational objections to immigration or analysis of race is tantamount to physical violence, that not agreeing with a wholesale anti-racist argument is pretty much the same as being on the side of the Nazis. Many unfortunate whites who have tried to advance reservations about immigration have not only been silenced but vilified and forced from their careers. The head teacher Ray Honeyford is but one well-known example, forced from his career for publishing an article in the 1980s critical of multicultural educational policy in Bradford (Honeyford, 2006). The angry, militant anti-racist xenophile is usually completely unable to conceive of the possibility that some might have legitimately different views on these matters: to listen to opposing viewpoints presumably risks appearing to grant them some legitimacy. Growing evidence exists that people who pride themselves on their anti-racist credentials can be highly intolerant if not hateful towards those who hold political views that they dislike (Bizumik, et al., 2017).
We should not assume that white British people, or for that matter Americans, or Europeans, are uniquely xenophobic towards dark strangers. In 2015 a German man, Rolf Zilienski, shot and killed a man in Berlin. Zilienski was a neo-Nazi who was said to be a ‘White Knight’ who hated all foreigners. His victim was a white Englishman whom he had heard speaking English. Apparently that, and being drunk, was all it took for him to fire his sawn-off shotgun at Luke Holland. When Holland’s parents went to court in 2017, they were threatened by other German neo-Nazis. This — and not people who occasionally use politically incorrect phrases or civilly object to mass immigration — should be our benchmark for the meaning of far-right nationalist or racist haters. In September 2017 Emanuel Kidega Samson, a Sudanese immigrant to the USA, killed one man and shot several others in a white church in Tennessee. Fredrick Demond Scott, a black man from Kansas City, was charged in 2017 with two murders of white men and suspected of another three. He was reported to have said he wanted to ‘kill all white people’. These cases do not seem to receive the same outraged, anti-racist coverage as white-on-black murders. It is difficult to know what to make of the arguments put forward by Michael Graham in a series of provocative YouTube videos called Diversity Kills, where BAME British killers are listed who have murdered or maimed white people, in some cases escaping or getting light sentences often thought unjust, and not receiving anything like the same attention given to the Stephen Lawrence case.
Missing from discussions about immigration and multiculturalism are the nuances of disagreement and preference. I may prefer my own kind but display no outward prejudice towards others. I may wish that fewer immigrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa had come to my country and that large cities were not being slowly transformed into white minority areas but I accept that things change; there is nothing I can do about it; perhaps it’s even for the best to replace ‘pale, male and stale’ with ‘multicultural vibrancy’. I may hold a private view that some groups of people are better for certain jobs but if I am on an interview panel I suspend such private views and strive for objectivity and fairness, or I may even agree outwardly to an affirmative action policy that I privately think unwise. I may agree to attend anti-racist training and it may benefit me or I may for the sake of a quiet life pretend that it benefits me. In conversation with liberal peers, I may keep my mouth shut about mass immigration and Brexit or I may risk being alienated by being honest about my views. I may feel confused by competing knowledge claims and remain undecided. As has often been said, most groups prefer their own kind (Tajfel, 1982), or out of habit live among their own kind and know few if any ‘others’, but whites tend to be castigated for such behaviour, while it is much more accepted among non-whites.
It has been said that Italians are racist and also that they have a ‘passion for all things foreign’ (esterofilia). This probably captures some of the reality of ambivalence. We prefer our own kind but we like a degree of exoticism. We like to holiday abroad and ‘see the world’ and most are curious about and friendly towards small numbers of refugees. We welcome tourists to and investors in Britain but we do not want millions of foreigners, refugees or otherwise, coming to live here and significantly changing the culture for the worse. The ‘we’ here, of course, excludes passionately xenophilic, anti-borders pro-immigrationists. Some academics, particularly in the German theological world, now write about xenosophia, or an attitude of interfaith openness, welcoming and embracing otherness (Streib & Klein, 2018). But to most people, these are simply word games. The fantasy of intercultural and religious harmony is just that — fantasy. You can pretend all you like that there must be some nice middle ground between Muslims and Christians, or between atheists and believers, but it is just that — pretence.
Missing too is an acknowledgement that most of us simply struggle through life, we cannot understand the complexities of society, we do not know why we feel as we do, we change our minds, do not have much influence over events or social trends, and while relatively tolerant do not want to have to bow to the vociferous political feelings of those motivated by either Cultural Marxism or far-right extremism. The naïve language of empowerment and hope, as in ‘be the change’ and ‘love not hate’, feels good but is self-deceptive. We are filled with good intentions but also weighed down by personal and human history and information overload. Many of us get irrationally irritated (but often silently) by others’ harmless idiosyncrasies — accents, voices, mannerisms, facial features, minor eccentric behaviours — but these are not necessarily
commented upon or regarded as important: they are simply human, and probably none of us is or can be expected to be free of them. Jokes about people with ginger hair, for example, are understood in this way. Most of us need time to adjust to changed conditions; it’s well known that villagers can take years to accept newcomers, and even many established immigrants resent newer immigrants. Disliking rap music is something we have a right to, without being accused of racism. Most of us are not political activists or academics with a strong stake in arguments about xenophobia or racism. But equally, most, probably all of us sometimes experience painful misunderstandings and conflicts with partners and family members, as well as estrangements and hatreds, and the overwhelming majority of us are subject to powerful forces of human nature, however much this concept is belittled by some academics.
But just as few people are wholly xenophobic, we can question the identity of xenophiles. I suggest that they are often less xenophilic than ‘xenophobophobic’. In other words, they hate those who are not, like them, gung-ho supporters of foreigners. Their activism on behalf of ‘the Other’ is less about empathy for them and more about having an anti-authoritarian personality that reflexively lines up and shoots down the typical array of enemies. The fight against perceived authoritarianism — against powerful factions that are not left-wing — probably has both cultural and personal roots, for example in the work of Adorno et al. (1951/1980), whose work is a classic of anti-Semitism masquerading as objective academic analysis. Hatred of everything not leftist and not egalitarian is also seen vividly among anti-Fascists, or antifa, whose street and online activism strives to shut down and harass all perceived as white supremacists. Indeed, in Bray’s (2017) terms, ‘whiteness is indefensible’ and the ‘never again’ meme drives relentless activism against the white and right-wing enemy — ‘the transhistorical terror of fascism’.
3
Anti-Semitism
Judaism stems from around 3,500 years ago, in the eastern Mediterranean lands, and ethnicity and monotheism were combined from its inception. It seems the Jewish people have always been characterised by nomadism, persecution, and persistence in their self-belief and group identity. If you believe your ethnic group and/or culture to constitute ‘the chosen people’, you have to accept that others (by definition not chosen) will have some feelings about this. Jewish exceptionalism is problematic, yet saying anything about Jews is extremely sensitive, whether your statement is negative or positive. For Westerners, the Holocaust defines the special suffering of the Jews and marks them out as beyond any criticism which smacks of ant-Semitism. Anti-Semitism (also less well-known as Judeophobia) is an irrational hatred and persecution of Jews, and is always associated with Nazi genocide. Today, the world population of Jews is calculated to be an astonishingly small 14.5 million, a little less than half of whom live in the USA and another significant proportion in Israel, with much smaller populations spread across the world (Dashefsky et al., 2016). Up to six million Jews — almost a third the worldwide total — were killed by the Nazis during the 1930s and 1940s, many in purpose-designed gas chambers. Hitler had developed a personal and political hatred of Jews from his early years. Nobody but the most stubborn of Holocaust deniers has serious doubt about this. Yet even before Nazi persecution, the peak population of Jews was probably only around 17 million — a highly prominent minority group.
Can we discuss ‘the Jewish question’ without real or apparent racism? Even to raise a question like ‘Why did/do some people dislike or persecute Jews?’ sometimes triggers accusations of anti-Semitism. Yet it is clear what some of the negative perceptions of Jews are. Some white working-class Britons felt wary of the presence of ‘Yids’ in London’s East End from the 1930s. In the fundamentalist religious sphere, orthodox Judaism is seen as highly superstitious with behaviours of an obsessive-compulsive nature. Ritual circumcision performed at eight months (or at all) is unnecessary, painful and traumatic. Culturally, Jewish identity may be seen as patriarchal. Politically, Zionism attracts much criticism and condemnation, and much is written about the ‘new anti-Semitism’ centring on criticism of Israel. More commonly, Jews are often considered greedy, wily and mean in relation to money. Notably, Jews are over-represented among financiers, jewellers, in the entertainment, media and arts world, and in academia. The stereotype of the hook-nosed, money-lending Shylock Jew persists.
Most curiously, however, Ashkenazi Jews (mainly European) are believed to have the highest average IQs (up to around 115) of all ethnic groups (Lynn, 2011a). This is clearly reflected in Jewish achievements rewarded by the Nobel Prize and other distinctions. Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein are just three of the vast list of prominent Jewish intellectuals. Yet even this highly positive aspect of Jewish identity is often played down or denied, as if an acknowledgement might excite envy and anger, or reinforce what social justice advocates wish to deny entirely — that IQ and race have any reality. A parallel conundrum is found in the experience of Asian Americans (mostly Japanese) who, although an ethnic minority, do not conform with the sociological paradigm of poorer performance, income and disadvantage. Rather, on average they do better educationally, and earn as much as if not more than whites (Sakamoto et al. 2009). It appears that sociologists do not welcome such non-confirmatory evidence of ethnic disadvantage (Martin, 2017).
I look briefly at Jewish influences on academia later on, but it is worth pointing out here MacDonald’s (2002) suggestions. Jews, he says, as a non-assimilating group have always retained an outsider and iconoclast identity and a form of ‘ethnic warfare’ underpins Jewish intellectual movements. They have dominated many social science departments in universities. They have often opposed Darwinism, and have been ‘a critical factor (necessary condition) for the triumph of the intellectual left in late twentieth century societies’. They have been highly alert to non-Jews and their influence, in this view, much as infidel-awareness is present in Islam. The anthropologist Ashley Montagu said, ‘If you are brought up as a Jew, you know that all non-Jews are anti-Semitic’. Many Jews have also shown intolerance of other Jews’ criticisms, for example of the novelist Philip Roth’s often unflattering portrayals of ‘self-hating Jews’. Alongside Jewish notions of purity, separateness and superiority, in MacDonald’s view, is a mission to change the social world, as in Marxism and psychoanalysis. Jewish psychotherapists like Wilhelm Reich, Fritz Perls and Arthur Janov have promoted the values of a ‘direct relation to nature’ that elevates physicality and emotion above intellect, in some ways anticipating or chiming with the claims of Afrocentric writers.
We run into problems when we try to distinguish between religious, cultural and genetic Judaism. The tradition of Jews marrying other Jews underlines their genetic identity, as does the disproportionate tendency to develop certain diseases like Canavan Disease, Tay Sachs Disease, and Bloom Syndrome (see Atzmon et al., 2010). But Judaism is also a religion into which anyone can be converted. Besides this, many who identify as Jewish are atheists, which suggests that Jewishness is not necessarily a religious identity (Gutierrez, 2016). Some are ‘crypto-Jews’, some ‘half-Jews’, some are prepared to identify as ex-Jews (Dvorkin, 2015) and some are discussing a post-ethnic American Jewish identity (Kirsch, 2013). The Jewish community is, however, recognisable as a people determined to defend itself. The Anti-Defamation League pre-dates Nazi persecution, originating in 1913 and with roots in B’nai B’rith which began in 1843. The ADL is a largely American organisation that monitors extremists who are anti-Semitic or racist against any other group, backing organisations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People since 1909, and funding many educational initiatives in the domain of anti-racism. It claims to defend freedom of speech but like similar organisations is highly sensitive with regard to perceived slights against its own members and adherents of other religions. But it has at times courted trouble, for example for being reluctant to call the Armenian genocide of 1914–23 a genocide (in wh
ich up to an estimated 1.5 million died), preferring designations like ‘atrocity’.
Stamford Hill is an area in north London that is home to about 30,000 Hasidic Jews, or Haredi. There are about 50 synagogues in this vicinity, many gender-separate schools, considerable inter-marriage, the birth rate is almost six per family, and hence the Jewish population is increasing quickly. The Jewish residents observe strict rituals and dress in conspicuous orthodox garments that cannot be ignored in 21st century Britain. Orthodox Jewish behaviour is inevitably regarded by many with great curiosity or as frankly neurotic. Ritual rocking motions or pre-tearing sheets of toilet paper before the sabbath are some examples. Rationales can obviously be provided but these rest in ancient scriptures and in attachment to tradition. Tensions arise in Stamford Hill due to rapidly rising population, overcrowding, and problems with planning permissions.