Putin and the Jews

The op-ed “Save the New Ukraine” in the New York Times by Bernard-Henri Levy and George Soros (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/opinion/bernard-henri-levi-george-soros-save-the-new-ukraine.html) makes me wonder what prominent Jews are up to regarding Ukraine and Russia.  Levy, who is supposed to be a French philosopher, was the man behind the ouster of Kaddafi in Libya, which has led to much chaos and bloodshed.  He no doubt relished the humiliating death of Kaddafi and the ensuing Arab on Arab bloodletting in Libya.  So, now what violence and chaos does he want to create in Ukraine and Russia?  Soros, an extremely wealthy and powerful Jew, lends his name to this enterprise, whatever it is.  To the extent that Ukraine separates from Russia and joins the West, it weakens Russia.  Putin realizes he is in trouble, but is being pressed on so many sides that he is having difficulty dealing with the situation. 

There is clearly a Jewish issue in Ukraine.  Ukraine has the third largest Jewish community in Europe and the fifth largest in the world, more than 250,000.  Before World War II there were over one million Jews in Ukraine.  (http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/communities/show/id/91)  So, it makes sense for Jews to concern themselves about Ukraine, not just from an international relations perspective, but from a Jewish racial perspective. 

Meanwhile, Jews played an outsized roll in the creation of the Communist state back in the early 1900s.  Then 75 years later, many (about half) of the billionaire oligarchs created by the destruction of the Communist state were Jews.  It’s these Jewish oligarchs who I think are a thorn in Putin’s side and likely to be shoved out in favor of KGB and old party types who are closer to him.  In 2007, the Guardian wrote (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jul/02/russia.lukeharding1)

…in a country where anti-Semitism is still rife and openly expressed, nationalist rabble-rousers have made much of the fact that of the seven oligarchs who controlled 50% of Russia's economy during the 1990s, six were Jewish: Berezovsky, Vladimir Guzinsky, Alexander Smolensky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Mikhail Friedman and Valery Malkin. 

The 2007 Guardian article goes on to say that some of the Jewish oligarchs were replaced by Slavs who were closer to Putin.  The 2007 oligarchs included Roman Abramovich, Oleg Deripaska, Mikhail Khodorkovsky (a Jew who ended up in jail), Boris Berezovsky (a Jew who lives in London as Putin’s enemy), Mikhail Prokhorov, Viktor Vekselberg, and Mikhail Friedman (a Ukrainian Jew then on decent terms with Putin). 

A 2012 Jerusalem Post (http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-Features/At-Putins-side-an-army-of-Jewish-billionaires) article, “At Putin’s Side, an Army of Jewish Billionaires” described the unveiling of the Red Army monument in Netanya, Israel.  With Putin were Mikhail Friedman, Moshe Kantor, as well as several other wealthy Russian Jews who now live in Israel. 

A January 2015 Bloomberg article (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-22/putin-said-to-shrink-inner-circle-as-ukraine-hawks-trump-tycoons)

 said: 

Businessmen who have long been close to Putin are “on the periphery now,” said Sergei Markov, a political consultant who helped monitor the referendum in Crimea that led to Russia’s annexation of the peninsula in March.

The core group around Putin is led by Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, Federal Security Service head Alexander Bortnikov, Foreign Intelligence Service chief Mikhail Fradkov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, according to Markov.

It will be interesting to see how Putin’s relationship develops with Russia’s Jewish oligarchs as he comes under increasing international pressure from the West.  Will he trust the Jews to continue to support him?  The Jews close to him will come under increasing financial pressure from Western sanctions, which may make them rethink their support for Putin. 

 Meanwhile, what to powerful, influential Jews like Levy and Soros have in mind.  Jews play an important roll in financial activities throughout the world.  They will be very involved in sanctions on Russia, and thus on at least some of their fellow Jews.  If Putin is making it more difficult for Jewish oligarchs in Russia, will the Jewish financial community act together to try to force him out.  If he perceives that they are trying to do that, how will he react?  If they were trying to do something sneaky to Putin, they would hardly call attention to it by writing an op-ed in the New York Times. .  But Putin must know that Levy succeeded having Kaddafi killed and throwing Libya into bloody chaos. 

  

The Moneychangers

I just finished reading The Moneychangers by Upton Sinclair, and was surprised by how little the financial industry has changed in the 100 years since he wrote the book.  Sinclair is best known for The Jungle about tainted food and general poor living conditions of immigrants in America, which resulted in the creation of the Food and Drug Administration.  Since he wrote The Moneychangers, the US has created the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, but the main difference is that the unscrupulous bankers and traders are now billionaires instead of millionaires, and the old trusts are now called hedge funds.

The 2008 “Great Recession” was very similar to the Panic of 1907 that Sinclair wrote about.  Lehman Brothers went down in bankruptcy in 2008 as the Gotham Trust Company did in The Moneychangers.  One of Sinclair’s main points was that Wall Street tycoons made their money by using other people’s money, usually leaving the little guys exposed to the loss if anything went wrong.  In the housing meltdown, it was the homeowners and retiree pension funds that suffered most of the losses, while the fat cats got bailed out by the government.  The nation can endure thousands of small individual foreclosures and bankruptcies, but not one huge one.  Lehman was just small enough to let die.

Relating to my obsession with the involvement of Jews in the financial industry, The Moneychangers only mentions the word Jew once, when a cleaning woman tells the main character that a man who looked like a Jew had paid her to go through his trash.  Presumably all the stock market manipulators were Episcopalian Christians, who perhaps had not paid too much attention to the sermons.  They all loved the show of money in their elegant town houses, their massive Newport beach “cottages,” their yachts, etc.  It sounds like the titans of Wall Street today.  And the banking practices still sound almost the same.  They have made some changes to get around the regulations designed to protect the public, but the results are pretty much the same, and as 2008 showed, the public is still not protected.

The Charlie Hebdo Terrorists Won Something

The Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack aftermath showed serious problems with democratic institutions and  national security among western nations.  By publishing a cover that was a challenge to Muslim terrorists, Charlie Hebdo put the West on the spot after all its protestations that “We are Charlie.”  Clearly we were not Charlie.  Only CBS TV news initially began showing the new Charlie Hebdo cover, and after all other major news outlets turned out to be absolute cowards, CBS began showing only pieces of the cover, like everyone else.

Certainly there are restraints on free speech.  Just ask anyone remotely controversial who has tried to speak on a college campus recently.  Colleges are the leading centers of censorship.  Students abhor free thought and college administrators let them have their way.  Certainly there should be limits on free speech, but we find free speech much more restricted than it was fifty years ago.  Big brother is here and monitoring what you say.  Surprisingly, it is not so much NSA or the FBI, but your friends, neighbors and fellow students, who stand ready to attack you for anything you say that they think is “wrong.”  America is less free than it used to be.

In addition, there is the national security issue.  News organizations do not believe that the various levels of government (national, state, local) can protect them from terrorism.  They are afraid that if they show the Charlie Hebdo cover they will be killed on the way to work, or at work, like Charlie Hebdo.  They have some good arguments.  The best is probably that they have Middle Eastern correspondents in the region and that showing the cover would put those correspondents lives in danger.  But there is also the implication that the network anchors and newspaper editors are afraid for their own lives and refused to show the cover out of cowardice, which means that the terrorists won.

I think on balance you have to say that the Charlie Hebdo terrorists won something.  They did not significantly change the societies they attacked, but they did illustrate the moral and security weaknesses of those societies.  France claimed to be a home for unfettered free speech, but then restricted the free speech of those criticizing Jews and some others.  These restrictions may be reasonable but they do not correspond to the high ideals enunciated after the attacks.

Israeli Dishonor of the Holocaust

I am disappointed that there has not been more of an outcry from the Jewish community about the terrorist killings of thousands of civilians by Boko Haram in Nigeria.  This is exactly the kind of indifference that the Jews accuse America of during the World War II Holocaust.  Many Jews disparage Roosevelt (and Churchill) for not acting sooner to end the Holocaust by invading continental Europe sooner to reach the death camps.  The Jews believe that millions more Christians should have died in order to save millions more Jews in the camps.  Roosevelt and Churchill insisted on waiting until the invasion had a better chance of success.  Of course the reason it had a better chance of success was that something like 11 million Soviets died fighting Hitler in Russia along the Eastern Front softening up the Germans for the D-Day invasion.

If they are not racists, Jews in general and Israelis in particular need to speak out about the atrocities in Nigeria,  Ideally, Israelis should come to the aid of the Nigerians, if not, at least they should lead a worldwide campaign to protect the Nigerians from Boko Haram.  It’s a Holocaust issue.

While it did not point out the Jewish hypocrisy on the matter, a recent op-ed in the Denver Post pointed out the worldwide hypocrisy in reacting so strongly to the Charlie Hebdo killings in France and so weakly to the killings in Nigeria.

Hoothis Take Over Yemen

The situation in Yemen appears to be a mess.  We don’t really know who is in control of the country.  That’s not unusual.  For a long time, Yemen was more or less divided into two countries, North and South Yemen, with Sanaa and Aden as its respective capitals.  The Hoothis who are taking over the country in Sanaa, are a relatively unknown group, described to some extent by the NYT  

They are Shiites getting help from Iran, but apparently not your ordinary Shiites. And they are fighting al Qaida in Yemen (which sponsored the French terrorist attacks), as is the government that they are overthrowing.  Again we find the US allied with Iran against al Qaida, while Israel is killing Iranian generals in Syria.  

Strange world! 

Yemen would have been a mess in any case, but did we make it worse by intervening in the Middle East in Iraq and Afghanistan, and encouraging government overthrows in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and other countries?  We certainly did not have a beneficial effect. 

Yemen borders on Saudi Arabia.  Does the instability in Yemen bode ill for Saudi Arabia, especially if the Shiite Hoothis take over?  Although their border is mostly desert, it can’t be a good thing.  

Who Should I Worry About?

The attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris presents the question of whether I should be worried about Jews taking over America and transferring its wealth and power to Israel, or whether I should be worried about Muslim terrorists attacking Western institutions, or whether I should be worried about the increasing Hispanic nature of America due to the Hispanic influx.  Or maybe something else, like the decline of religion in America.  Things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes not.  People fight, sometimes because they have to in order to survive, sometimes because the choose to overthrow the status quo.

The fact is that I agree with the Democratic side of the Jewish establishment on most issues.  I just worry that they love Israel more than America.  Jews tend to consider Israel as a 51st state, and people in the Middle East perceive it the same way.  They see Israel with its occupation of Palestinian land as an extension of America.  They tend to see Israeli hatred of Arabs as an extension of American hatred of Arabs.  Israeli and American Jews bear a significant responsibility for Muslim hatred of the West.  It's hard to say which came first Arab hatred of Jews before Israel, or Arab hatred of Jews (and the West) due to the creation of Israel and resulting displacement of millions of Arabs.  Israel was created first, then the Arabs stated the first war.  

The Israelis have faced Arab and/or Muslim terrorism ever since the creation of Israel.  Of course the Israelis also stooped to terrorism in order to create Israel.  Now terrorism has spread to the whole world, in part thanks to cheaper, easier transportation.  The first step was high jacking airliners.  The world responded pretty well to these hijackings and now we have moved to a new tactic.  It is pretty cheap and easy to get from Yemen to Paris, much easier and cheaper than it would have been 50 years ago.  Or over the Internet you can recruit someone in Paris to do your dirty work without having to travel.  The increasing homogenization of populations another factor favoring terrorists.  A couple of generations ago, a Muslim in Western Europe would have stood out and been easy to track, but not so today.  Muslims make up a significant percentage of the French population, partly a result of a long war in Algeria, which brought many Algerians to France under unpleasant circumstances.

All of that is no excuse for the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians.  If Muslims want to prevent unpleasant depictions of the prophet Mohamed, they should go about it like everybody else in democratic countries.  They could try to get a law passed outlawing such depictions.  Hopefully they would not get such a law, but that is the way you go about it in democratic societies.  We have laws against certain types of pornography and other things that offend most of the population.  If many people are offended by certain characterizations of Mohamed, then they could be outlawed or restricted.  But violence is not the way to do it.  If some Muslims are not going to act in a civilized manner, then Western society must take steps to protect itself from them.  The problem, of course, is to take steps that do not destroy the very civilization that we are trying to preserve.

That is the attack from the top, by rich Jews and militant Muslims.  What about the attack from the bottom, the increasing influence of Hispanics, who have recently arrived, and blacks, who have recently begun to acquire political and economic power.  As a while Anglo, I am sorry to see our traditional power eroded.  Rich Anglos may have been as bad as rich Jews, but I always had hope that culture and religion would be some restraint on them, which has been lost in recent years.  Rich, white bankers may have been a inwardly greedy as Jews or others, but they had to sit through Sunday services in main line Protestant churches which held them to Jewish and Christian standards set out in the Bible in the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and many other places.  They at least had to publicly subscribe to these teachings in order to do business and maintain their place in the community.  That no longer seems to be true.  Thus there are fewer restraints of the worst impulses of human nature.  I often thought that blacks, especially black women, had a sincere religious faith and decency that surpassed most everyone else in society.  Much of that seems to be lost, as so many black women today end up as struggling, single mothers.

The Hispanic influx is probably much like the earlier influx of Poles, Germans, Irish, Italians, and so on.  One difference is that the influx has been so large, at least until recently, that there are not the same pressures to assimilate as there was on the previous immigrants.  They could always live in small communities where they could speak their native language, but with Spanish, they are not restricted to small communities.  You can pretty easily live a normal, active life in America speaking only Spanish.  You are hardly restricted at all.  There might be some grocery or department stores that are not Spanish friendly, but there are many that are.  If you compare Spanish immigrants to Asian immigrants, there appears to be a big difference.  Asians don't bend the community to their ways, but Hispanics do.

I guess I have to accept change, but I'm still resisting.

Don't Blindly Trust Southern Poverty Law Center

I question the Washington Post article, The current state of white supremacist groups in the U.S.,” using the Southern Poverty Law Center as an authority on who self-respecting people should hate or not hate.

I don’t think people should blindly accept the pronouncements of he Southern Poverty Law Center about who is a hate group and who is not.  Although the SPLC’s main goal is defending the rights African Americans, an unstated but important goal is protecting Jews. Jews in general believe that they are superior to blacks, so that if they can protect the inferior race of blacks from discrimination, they can certainly protect superior Jews from it.  (There are of course Jews who depend black on principle, not just self-interest.)  Morris Dees. the primary founder of SPLC is not Jewish and was probably motivated by his genuine concern about protecting the rights of blacks.  His cofounder and law partner, Joe Levin, was Jewish, and was motivated by an experience he had at the University of Alabama in which a fellow member of his Jewish fraternity was mistreated and discriminated against because he had argued in favor of integration in the school newspaper.  Thus, he appears at least superficially to be motivated by Jewish self-interest rather than altruism.

My concern about Jewish attitudes toward race are due in large part to what is going on in Israel.  Israel seems increasingly to be turning into an apartheid state espousing race hatred, perhaps not surprising since it was founded by Irgun terrorists like Menachem Begin, who killed almost 100 foreign officials when they bombed the King David Hotel.  There are almost no blacks in Israel.  Israelis would say that’s because there are no black Jews, I think it’s because Jews don’t want blacks to become Jews.  In any case, Israel is lily white.  And of course Jews hate Palestinians, although race is only one factor underlying that hatred.  Now Israel is in the throes of deciding whether it should be a Jewish state or a democratic state.  It can’t be both because Arabs outnumber, or will outnumber, Jews in Israel.  Netanyahu wants to define Israel as a racist, Jewish state.

An op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, “How to Fight the Campus Speech Police: Get a Good Lawyer,” about a dispute between Jewish students at Brandeis University points up the growing strength of the conservative, racist Jews in Israel.

So, the Washington Post tells us that Jews hate David Dukes.  Big deal, they hate Palestinians, Arabs in general, and lots of other people.  David Dukes has company, maybe undesirable company, but company nevertheless. The Washington Post picks sides and sides with the Jewish bigots rather than the Christian bigots.