A Different Drummer [November 24, 2003]

On November 9, 1938, and on through the following day and night across Germany and Austria, Nazi storm troopers smashed Jewish shop windows, looted the stores, and beat Jews in their homes and on the streets, murdering at least 91 Jews, arresting 26,000 Jewish men and boys, all of whom were sent to concentration camps, destroying over 7000 Jewish businesses, and burning down 101 synagogues.

The storm troopers (Stuermer), also known as "brown shirts" for the uniforms they wore, hung posters in Jewish stores with the phrase, coined in 1880 by the famed German historian, Heinrich von Treitschke, "Die Juden sind unser Unglueck!" ("The Jews are our misfortune!"), and the warning to German Christians, "Deutsche, kauft nicht bei Juden!" ("Germans, don't buy from Jews!") The state-ordered "spontaneous" pogrom, which the Nazis mockingly called "Reichskristallnacht" (Imperial Night of Glass), and Jews have translated as the "night of broken glass" ("Kristallnacht"), was the beginning of the end, for Germany's 500,000 Jews. (With the "Anschluss" (annexation) of Austria on March 12 of that year, Austrians suddenly also became "Germans.")

On November 5, 2003, billionaire financier George Soros arose at a function to say, in so many words, "Die Juden sind unser Unglueck!" He blamed the Jews, Israel, and the policies of Pres. George W. Bush, for the rise in world anti-Semitism in recent years, most dramatically, since 911.

"There is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. The policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration contribute to that. It's not specifically anti-Semitism, but it does manifest itself in anti-Semitism as well. I'm critical of those policies.

"If we change that direction, then anti-Semitism also will diminish. I can't see how one could confront it directly."

Soros also responded to recent remarks by powerful anti-Semites, such as Mahathir Mohammad, who just stepped down as Malaysia's prime minister, that the Jews, particularly, Jewish financiers like Soros, rule the world.

Mohammad: "The Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them."

Soros: "I'm also very concerned about my own role because the new anti-Semitism holds that the Jews rule the world. As an unintended consequence of my actions, I also contribute to that image."

There are, of course, huge differences between Kristallnacht and Sorosnacht. First and foremost, Hungarian-born George Soros, whose family fled the Nazis, is a Jew! During the Nazi era of 1933-1945, it was unheard of for Jews to blame Jews for anti-Semitism. There were Jews who aided the Nazis in the killing of Jews, but that involved the extraordinary case of the "Kapos," Jews in the death camps who bought themselves a little time, by leading other Jews to the "showers," where they were gassed to death.

There is, however, precedent for Jews letting other Jews die, through deferring to murderous anti-Semitism. Once Hitler began carrying out his "Final Solution" in early 1943, Rabbi Stephen Wise and other American Jewish leaders found out about the genocide, but refused to publicize it, out of deference to Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR was in a position to bomb the death camps, or at the very least, the rail lines leading to them, but instead did nothing, costing millions of Jews their lives.

But this is a different time, a time of wealthy Jewish prostitutes, Jewish anti-Semites, and even Jewish Nazis.

And George Soros was not speaking before an audience of genocidal anti-Semites, a la Yassir Arafat, UN Human Rights Commissar Mary Robinson, or the al Qaeda leadership. Rather, he was speaking before the Jewish Funders Network, a group of multimillionaire Jewish philanthropists and their bureaucrats, in Manhattan's Harvard Club.

Rather than vilify Soros, the prostitutes, er, philanthropists, were polite to a fault. Event organizers Michael Steinhardt and Mark Charendoff, said nice things, and even saved Soros from further embarrassing himself. According to Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reporter Uriel Heilman, Steinhardt interrupted Soros' defense of anti-Semitism. "'George Soros does not think Jews should be hated any more than they deserve to be,' Steinhardt said by way of clarification, eliciting chuckles from the audience."

The interruption gave Soros a chance to catch his breath. He said he had more observations on the subject, but asked first if any journalists were in the room. When he found out journalists were present (surprise, surprise), he held his tongue.

(Note that after sitting on the Soros story for four days before running it, the JTA has since censored it, by killing the hyperlink to it. Fortunately, it is still posted on the web for now.

George Soros presents one of the greatest dangers to world Jewry. Unlike genocidal Jewish anti-Semites such as Israel's "post-Zionists" or Adam Shapiro, the co-founder of the PLO front, the International Solidarity Movement, Soros does not wake up in the morning thinking, "How may I help kill Jews?" For Soros, rather, the Jews are an inconvenience.

One of the ironies of George Soros, is that he is one Jew who really does seek to rule the world. Not the way anti-Semites from central casting like Mahathir Mohammad claim, through rigging currency markets, but rather through non-governmental organizations like his Soros Foundation and Open Society Institute, which are allied with anti-American organizations like the U.N., Red Cross/Red Crescent, and the New York Times, in trying to destroy America. Soros seeks to institute a humanitarian, socialist, world government.

As to why Soros should make nice with genocidal anti-Semites, I believe he is following the rule of "My enemy's enemy is my friend." Genocidal Muslims are America's greatest enemy. Strange bedfellows, and all that.

But you ask, Isn't Soros a Jew?! Tell him that.

The prostitutes who heard Soros speak, want his money. They refuse to understand that they would be making a deal with the Devil. Soros would only give money to Jewish philanthropies and organizations, in order to gain control over and subvert them. If there are any real Jewish leaders worthy of the name, they will vilify and marginalize Soros.

Most gentiles are unaware of how pervasive Jewish anti-Semitism is, particularly in America. Of course, Jews' internecine disagreements are so legendary, that there is a tradition of jokes on the subject: "Two Jews, three opinions." "If there were only two Jews in a town, they'd need three synagogues. One for each, and a third where they could worship together."

In America, conflicts that are simply the stuff of human nature and social interaction (conflicting interests, preferences, principles, etc.) are exacerbated by a reality in which Jews, unlike their European ancestors, may enter all professions and own land. The good news, is that American Jews are no longer desperately dependent on the Jewish community. The splintering of Jewish communities has meant that wealthy Jews no longer feel bound by any religious obligations to their brethren, and instead feel solidarity with other wealthy folks, Jewish and gentile alike. Meanwhile, wealthy Jews feel that irrational hatred for those less well off that is typical of so many wealthy people, but since it is socially unacceptable to show hatred for poor blacks and Hispanics, and wealthy Jews have business alliances with white gentiles, they focus their class hatred on Jews from the lower tax brackets. Poor, working-class, and lower-middle-class Jews often seem to be the only groups that well-to-do Jews are unafraid to "stand up to." And so, while during the immigrant generations, wealthy Jews gave overwhelmingly to Jewish philanthropies, and helped some gifted but poor Jews, today, in order to make friends, many wealthy Jews are more likely to help gentiles than Jews.

(An academic expression of the break up of Jewish community, was the alchemy whereby social scientists, many of them Jews, dishonestly redefined Judaism into an "ethnicity." Ethnicity refers to the nation of one's forebears, or in the case of an immigrant, one's nation of birth. Imagine categorizing Christians or members of any other religious group as an ethnic group. My ethnicity, for instance, is Hungarian-Russian-German-Canadian-Irish.)

Some will disagree with my calling such class hatred "anti-Semitism," but if it were merely class hatred, it would express itself equally towards Jews and gentiles alike. (I realize that some wealthy Jews are openly contemptuous towards poor white Christians, but this contempt is not as widespread as is commonly assumed.) When I told an Evangelical friend about class-based, Jewish anti-Semitism, he argued that perhaps the well-to-do Jews simply looked down on poor and working-class Jews whom they considered inferior types, independent of the latter's class origin. But since the well-to-do Jews ONLY feel that way about Jews whose parents made less money than their parents did, and are accepting of incredibly obnoxious but well-to-do Jews, there is no factor independent of being Jewish and poor that could explain their behavior. Indeed, while I have encountered well-to-do Jews (socialist and neo-conservative alike) who actively sought to derail me professionally, with rare exception, those who have supported me professionally have been Christians.

Discussions of class-based Jewish anti-Semitism are suppressed by the mainstream media. One exception I'm aware of, is David Mamet's 1991 movie, Homicide. In Homicide, working-class, Jewish Det. Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna) investigates the murder of the matriarch of a wealthy Jewish family. The victim's son, a doctor, pulls strings to get "the Jewish detective" assigned to the case. And yet, the doctor pulls social rank on Gold, as well, demanding of him, "Do you have the pride to do the job?" Gold responds in kind, "I'm not impressed by your money, or who you are."

And then there is the anti-Semitism of Jews who suffer from WASP-envy.

About 15 years ago, at a holiday dinner combining Jewish and gentile anti-Semites from my family, a Jewish relative remarked at how "civilized" things were. Translation: The dinner table conversation was dull as dishwater. That relative, who is unmistakably Jewish, wanted to pass for a WASP. The stereotypical Jewish family dinner is a series of quips and arguments; lacking the proverbial Jewish wit, and feeling hostility towards those Jews who have it, my relative opted instead to be "civilized." (Note that being "civilized" included trashing the First Amendment in favor of campus speech codes and workplace repression.)

Due to circumstances abroad, American Jewish anti-Semitism today has a significance that goes beyond social slights, ethnic envy, and comedies of social manners will not be produced on Broadway.

Sorosnacht came only days after it was revealed that 59% of those polled in European Union countries declared Israel (read: the Jews) to be the greatest threat to world peace, worse even than gulag-state and rogue nuclear power, North Korea. Die Juden sind unser Unglueck!

Some will no doubt be confused. Haven't millions of Europeans since World War II told of how sad they were about the poor Jews? Didn't postwar movie Germans from central casting all say, "Wir haben nichts gewusst!" "We didn't know!" (E.g., in the big-budget, 1964 Hollywood film, The Cardinal, by Otto Preminger, himself a Viennese Jew!)

I even heard that exact line from real Germans, such as an attractive business lady of a certain age, whose shop I was visiting in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps, in 1984. (I didn't have to tell her I was a Jew; she just knew.)

Most people under a certain age are unaware of the de-Nazification re-education programs our army of occupation imposed on the West German populace after World War II, or that for at least 25 years after the occupation officially ended in 1950, West German school children were forced to endure films shot by the American servicemen who liberated the Nazi death camps in 1945. The films showed the starving, surviving Jews (some of whom died in the days to come) and mountains of skeletons of murdered Jews.

The films caused sensitive souls to vomit. I was repelled by them, seeing them as a bullying way of torturing the children for the sins of the fathers and grandfathers. That was before I encountered Holocaust-deniers.

I believe that the occupation authorities anticipated that a day would come, when German parents would tell their children, that the Holocaust was just another lie manufactured by those wily Jews who run the world. It was imperative that young West Germans know, "that it did happen here."

Likewise, across Europe, in the face of American power, and a tacit understanding that the Europeans could blame everything on the Nazis, Europeans paid lip-service to "the horror." I grew up on the myth, for example, of the French resistance. A fraud named Jean-Paul Sartre, who had all the physical courage of a church mouse, made a career out of claiming to have been a resistance fighter. Had half as many Frenchmen fought in the resistance as claimed to, the Germans would have endured a worse slaughter in France than they did in Russia.

The French killed the Nazis with kindness. Anyone who doubts me, need only visit Paris. Rotterdam resisted the German Wehrmacht; it was leveled. Paris surrendered without a peep; after the war, it looked as beautiful as it had in the 1920s.

The hatred that Europeans now routinely express towards Jews, the tacit support they give to the murderous Muslims in their midst, could be expressed in the form of a t-shirt: My Grandfather Got to Kill Jews, but All I Got was This Lousy T-Shirt.

Hundreds of millions of Europeans have a sentimental attachment to the notion that they may determine whether the Jews live or die.

In "The European Solution," Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick argues that Europeans seek the destruction of Israel as part of a package deal, which includes the subordination of the U.S. to Europe. The Europeans, so Glick, see this as a golden opportunity to recapture their lost glory. The Americans would have to sacrifice the Jews, as a gesture of good faith, on the way to instituting a humanitarian, world government. (Sound familiar?) So, we'll kill the Jews, as part of a filthy, lousy operation to help Europe.

Is the idea delusional? Sure, but it's the Europeans' (and Soros') delusion, not Glick's. She cites French "policy wonk" Dominique Moissy as having explicitly articulated the delusion, in terms of Israel relinquishing her sovereignty, which is a lace curtain way of saying, "We'll kill the Jews."

It doesn't occur to the power-crazed Europeans, as Steve Sailer recently noted, that Europe's fall from greatness owes much to the slaughter of its most creative group, the Jews. But then, the Europeans have given up on greatness in the arts and sciences, and care only about naked political power, albeit power derived through bureaucratic jockeying, and sucking up to terrorists.

In the classic, 1964 John LeCarre (aka David John Moore Cornwell) novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, British counterintelligence spy Alec Leamas must "defect" to communist East Germany, where he accuses a Nazi butcher, Mundt, now atop the East German spy service, who is already under suspicion of being a traitor, of being a double agent.

And in fact he is. But the ruse involves a double switch. Leamas' charges against Mundt are designed to fall apart at trial, exonerating and thus saving the truly guilty man, and pointing instead to Fiedler, an innocent colleague and rival of Mundt's, a humane, worldly, charming, bon vivant of a man who actually believes in communism, but lacks the system's brutality (I know, he's too good to be true)- and who is a Jew.

(LeCarre notes repeatedly, by the way, how well Nazis did in postwar East Germany, as many others have noted how well they did in postwar West Germany. That was before LeCarre "evolved," regarding the Jews.)

With the deed done, Leamas confesses to his civilian lover, "We are witnessing the lousy end to a filthy, lousy operation to save Mundt's skin. To save him from a clever little Jew in his own Department who had begun to suspect the truth. They made us kill him, do you see, kill the Jew. Now you know, and God help us both."

Leamas' speech was LeCarre's metaphor for the Jews always being sacrificed for the sake of some grubby, political expediency.

I say, not this time.

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A Different Drummer is the New York-based web-samizdat of Nicholas Stix. An award-winning journalist, Stix provides news and commentary on the realities of race, education, and urban life that are censored by the mainstream media and education elites. His work has appeared in the (New York) Daily News, New York Post, Washington Times, Newsday, the American Enterprise, Weekly Standard, Insight, Chronicles, Ideas on Liberty, Middle American News, Academic Questions, CampusReports, and countless other publications. Read Stix' weekly column in Men's News Daily. E-Mail him your comments and feedback at Nicholas Stix