Podcast No. 4 
Mark Weber on the Jewish Question Today

31 minutes/4,733 words

Audio Version: To listen in a player, click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as.”

Editor’s Note:

Mark Weber of the Institute for Historical Review and Professor Kevin MaDonald of California State University at Long Beach spoke on panel on the state of “The Jewish Question Today” at a Counter-Currents gathering in 2011. We will make Professor MacDonald’s comments available in a future podcast. Note: this is an unedited transcript of an extemporaneous talk.

Greg Johnson: The first person to speak today is Mark Weber, of the Institute for Historical Review. I’ve known Mark for some years now, and he is an eloquent man. I’m not going to give opportunities for you to draw any invidious comparisons between him and me, so I’m just going to give the microphone to him and let him talk.

Mark Weber: Thank you Gregory very much for inviting me here. It’s a tremendous pleasure to be here. I’m very encouraged, and I might say more about this later, but every time over the years that I’ve gone to events like this I’m more and more impressed with the quality, the intelligence, the awareness, the perceptiveness of the people in these meetings. And it’s a tremendous difference over the years. Fewer and fewer cranky people [audience laughs] and more and more intelligent people — it’s very, very encouraging to see this.

So many of the remarks that have been made this morning have been remarks that I thought, “that’s very good,” “that’s right,” and so forth. But one of them of course is how our worldview, our outlook, is vindicated by reality, by truth. And I don’t mean that just in the scientific sense. I think that’s an extremely important aspect of that as well, that not only scientific discoveries and so forth validate our worldview. But I’m struck enormously, that with each passing month, each passing week practically, each passing day, news events take place that vindicate and validate our essential worldview, and make it possible for us to speak more frankly and openly with other people who concede, at least dimly, some of this, and also has the effect of discrediting the lunatic view of our adversaries that prevails in our country.

In 1992 I had lunch with George Will. His secretary had arranged a luncheon. George Will’s sister lives in Newport Beach, and our offices are in Orange Country in Southern California, and she had arranged this thing. She later apologized because Will actually lied to her and to me about the nature of the meeting. Actually, as it happens he used the occasion to write a hit piece about me that was syndicated all over the United States, and even the world. My mother happened to be in Europe at the time, and she saw this horrible piece about me in the International Herald Tribune. And it’s amazing the extent to which deceit, lies, and so forth still have an impact, even if they’re baseless. And George Will, as anybody knows, is a master at deceit, misrepresentation, and so forth, but he does it in a very clever way, so he has an impact that way.

But during the course of the luncheon, he was taking notes and so forth and not getting quite as many good quotes, I think, as he wanted. So he cut to chase with a question that I find does cut to the chase very often in conversations with all sorts of people. The question was, “Why does anti-Semitism exist?” Well, that’s a very good question, and it deserves a good answer because it comes up constantly in our society. We have a branch now of the U.S. State Department set up to monitor anti-Semitism [http://state.gov/j/drl/seas/]. There’s no other anti-anything the U.S. State Department monitors, but they’re searching out for any examples of anti-Semitism. Indeed the name of the topic that in this section we’re supposed to be talking about, the Jewish Question, is already a very alarming thing: “The Jewish Question, oh my gosh, what does that mean?” I was in a courtroom once and they said “Mr. Weber, what do you mean by the Jewish Question?,” as if that’s a terrible thing.

Well, during the course of the luncheon with George Will when he asked this question, I gave an answer that I thought was sort of clever, but also accurate. I said, “I think anti-Semitism exists for the same reason that Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, says it exists, and he laid out in his book, The Jewish State. He said that anti-Semitism exists as a natural consequence of the fact that Jews live in non-Jewish societies, but that Jews think of themselves and act as a separate people and promote their own group interests, and that these group interests often conflict with those of the people they live among.” That’s pretty obvious, I think. And in fact, that’s historically accurate.

Theodor Herzl felt that this conflict is inevitable as long as Jews live as a separate group — as a nation, he called them: a “Volk” in German – as a nation among other people, and that the solution to this, he believed – in fact in his diary he called it “the final solution of the Jewish Question” – was for Jews to become a normal people by living in a country of their own.

Of course in our society you’re supposed to think that Zionism is a wonderful thing, except if you’re very sincere about it and say, “Yes, all the Jews should live in another country.” But in our society this is a very big issue. Anyway, I said this to George Will, and I said that Theodor Herzl was accurate in explaining this, and it’s a phenomenon that has come up time and time again over the centuries in many different cultures, many different societies, and that was my answer. And then he was taking notes and so forth, and I said, “Mr. Will, why do YOU think anti-Semitism exists?”

Well, he was nonplussed. He didn’t know what to say, because George Will is smart enough to know what the politically correct answer is for all these kinds of questions. And his answer was, “Well, uh, I don’t really know, I think it has something to do with Christianity.” Well of course, that’s either a stupid answer or a deceitful answer. It’s either stupid, because he doesn’t know much about history, because this phenomenon, this tension between a very self-aware, powerful group — a focused group — and other cultures has existed in cultures that have nothing to do with Christianity. It existed in the ancient world. Of course, if you believe the Old Testament, it existed in Ancient Egypt. And it persisted in every country over the centuries where Jews have lived in significant numbers. Something called “the Jewish Question,” anti-Semitism (that’s a modern term), but the Jewish Question, this tension, has existed in the ancient world: in Alexandria it led to riots — there’s a very good book called The Jewish Strategy here by Revilo Oliver on that subject — the ancient Roman empire, among the Greeks, and of course now the Arab world is considered anti-Semitic.

But the big thing that’s changed over the years is this: whereas in the past, the Jewish Question was an issue or a tension or a problem that existed in a particular region, or a particular country, or a city, and was usually followed by expulsion from that place, and then later, I think in the 1930s and ’40s became a continental-wide Question; today it is a global Question. It’s a global issue. Because the power of the organized Jewish community: the Jewish Lobby, the Israel Lobby, whatever you call it, is one that has a particular grip here in the United States, the most powerful country in the world, certainly the one with the biggest military, and is fortified by having a base of support in a country of their own, Israel, that is supplemental in addition to the power that already exists here in the United States: the one feeds off the other.

But this Question exists now as a worldwide Question. Now going back to George Will, he gave an evasive answer. And I understand why he gave an evasive answer: because the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Elie Wiesel, when confronted with this question, “Why does anti-Semitism exist?” their answer is, “It’s inexplicable; it’s a disease; we don’t understand where it comes from.” And they insist that there is no relationship between what Jews do and what people think of Jews.

Now that defies common sense, so much so that some years ago George Soros, the very wealthy Jewish financier, gave a talk to a meeting of the Anti-Defamation League. Now he doesn’t usually do this, George Soros usually stays away from overtly Jewish organizations. But he did in this case. He gave a talk to the Anti-Defamation League, and in the course of this talk he made a remark, a rather mild remark, that he’s afraid that Israeli policy may have the effect of exacerbating anti-Jewish feeling in the world, and especially in Europe.

Well, immediately the next day the Anti-Defamation League denounced this statement by their own speaker, because they don’t want to admit there’s any relationship at all between what Jews do or what Israel does, and this terrible phenomenon of anti-Semitism. They don’t want to acknowledge that.

Well, in fact there is a relationship. And this is part and parcel of a society, the one we live in, that’s in denial about some of the most basic realities. Not merely about race, but certainly about power in our society. There is no group in America, no single ethnic/religious group that has more power than the organized Jewish community. There is no significant policy carried out by our government that’s contrary to the interests and the will of the organized Jewish community. That’s not true of any other group, whether it’s fundamentalist Christians or Catholics (who make up something like 40% of the population.) We live in a country where abortion is not only legal, it HAS to be legal, it can’t be made illegal, contrary to the religious views of Catholics. It used to be the religious views of most Christians, for example.

And on all sorts of issues, time and time again, Jewish sensibilities and Jewish interests are paramount, absolutely paramount, nowhere more so of course than in our foreign policy, where our political leaders whether Democratic or Republican insist and swear by their defense of Israel under any circumstance, they absolutely pledge to their security, guaranteeing their security, and also in addition emphatically guaranteeing their support for Israel not really as a state or a nation, but as a specifically Jewish state, something the United States doesn’t do for any other country.

Now, for White Nationalists, or for this audience, one of the biggest things we face is this barrage of multicultural, “diversity is wonderful” propaganda that is pushed constantly in our media. Many people may not know this, but the slogan, “Diversity is Our Strength,” is a slogan that the Anti-Defamation League, perhaps the most powerful Jewish Zionist organization in America, claims credit for inventing. About a year after the Anti-Defamation League began a campaign promoting this slogan, President Clinton, at the time, used this slogan in a major address. And he modified it: he said not that “Diversity is Our Strength,” but that “Diversity is Our GREATEST Strength.” And the Anti-Defamation League in their bulletin took note of this with pride, that Clinton had not only used their slogan but he made it even stronger, even better.

This slogan, “Diversity is Our Strength,” is one that our political leaders, our educational leaders, our cultural system embraces as a dogma, and anybody who criticizes it is denounced as a hater, as a supremacist, all sorts of things. But it’s a slogan that is so obviously untrue to anybody who has had much experience in life, who knows much about history.

And the proof – and I’ve made this point over and over – that this is a lie is that the very people who promote this slogan show by their actions they don’t believe it themselves. The Anti-Defamation League insists that “Diversity is Our Strength,” but they lie when they say “Our Strength.” They mean it’s something for the gentiles, something for the goyim. For Jews, exactly the opposite principle is the one in place.

For Jews, and organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, insist that Israel must be a specifically Jewish ethnic religious state. And that underscores the essential double standard, the essential hypocrisy. Not only in this regard, which is dangerous for the white race and indeed for all races, but underscores the double standard that prevails in American society, in political life, our cultural life, our social life, across the board. Because an appearance or a support of the interests and the agenda of the Jewish Zionist group, of that Jewish Zionist power means a betrayal of the interests of every other group in every other way.

I put it this way: if you are a sincere liberal, or if you are a sincere conservative, you must reject this Jewish Zionist power. If you are a sincere liberal, and you are consistent about the importance of egalitarian societies or justice, then your support for a state which has institutionalized discrimination against its non-Jewish population, which has violated numerous security council resolutions, which is the only state in the Middle East that occupies territory of its neighbors, is one that every liberal should understand and reject for that reason. And anyone who is a sincere conservative should equally be appalled by an organization or an organized community that promotes slogans, that promotes an agenda, that promotes policies that mean the destruction of everything worth conserving, everything worth holding on to.

A very good point was made earlier in the morning by Kevin MacDonald, when he said a lot of what we’re doing is not new. We’re not having talks here this afternoon that are shedding new amazing light. It’s not so important to do that. It’s to talk about what this means for us in as much as possible a practical way. With regard to the Jewish Question and these kinds of points, it’s not necessary to make new discoveries about this, as one speaker pointed out. Much of this has been laid out very, very well over the years and over the decades by many others, much more articulate than anybody here this afternoon, but it’s necessary to make these points over and over again, highlighting this hypocrisy.

If there’s anything that needs to be stressed it’s this essential point that in our society no group has as much power – has the decisive power – as the organized Jewish community. We live in a society that is in the grip of this Jewish Zionist power. I know that a lot of Americans find that very disturbing. If you even talk about Jews as a separate group, that’s considered very, very dangerous. Because the ideology of America is that people come here and they all join in and we all become Americans. But the obvious untruth of that statement is that the Jewish community itself regards itself as a separate group with separate interests.

And the proof of that is that almost all Jews — in the United States or around the world, but almost all Jews in America – regard themselves as Zionists, as followers of Zionism. The essence of Zionism is Jewish Nationalism. It’s based on the premise that Jews are a separate and distinct nation, a distinct people, and therefore the Jews should and must have a primary loyalty to this nation-state, this group, this people. And to say then therefore that there’s no Jewish Question, is to ignore a reality that Jewish leaders themselves say.

A few years ago I was interviewed by a Jewish writer who did another big hit piece on me. It’s very unfortunate that it goes with the territory: you do interviews and sometimes they’re good, other times they’re hit pieces. But anyways, this Jewish writer did this long story with me. I made a lot of these points with him, the same points. I said the same thing to him that I say to everybody else. And I ask him, I said several times during the course of this lengthy interview that went over several days, I said “have I said anything in the course of this conversation that you think is factually wrong, or hateful, or bad?” And he thought about it, and he said, “what disturbs me, is that the remarks you make, if made by a Jew, made in a synagogue or in a conversation, nobody would find exceptional or unusual. But it’s very unusual and unsettling (or disturbing, I forget what word he used) when a gentile says it.”

Now that’s the whole point. We have a tremendous opportunity to make tremendous impact by merely stating the truth, merely stating the reality. And these points that we’re making in this conference here this weekend, and the points that we try to make over and over again, are truthful, they’re real, they’re based on reality. And they need to be said over and over again. I’m going to again reaffirm this basic point that Kevin MacDonald made: we need to repeat this, and bring it out as it applies to new things happening all the time.

The other day there was a little news item that we put on our website – I urge everybody if they don’t know about it to check out our website, http://www.ihr.org/, Institute for Historical Review, and look at all these things. I put an item there about the fact that a Jewish art dealer in California is going to be putting up for auction some portraits of Hitler. He thinks he’ll sell them for some tremendous amount of money. But as far as I know no one in the United States has made the point that I made about this in a broadcast I did. And that is, that these are stolen paintings. It’s unclear who stole them, but they were probably stolen at the end of the war by a French or American soldier who just took them. Now, any artwork that had belonged to a Jew in Europe in the 1930s and 40s, there’s a huge hue and cry to make sure it’s returned to its rightful owner. But objects that belonged to Hitler or the Germans or “the Nazis,” that’s free game. And nobody even brings it up.

Now that’s an example of just one of so many of the double standards that exists in our society. And it’s repeated over and over and over again. Anyone who cares about intellectual consistency, if not justice, should be concerned about a government – our government – that repeatedly, continually carries out policies that represent one standard basically for Israel and Jews, and another standard for everyone else. So much so, that we have political leaders now who are more supportive of Israel than they are of the United States.

Just a few weeks ago, in May, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to the U.S. Congress. He was interrupted, depending on your count, by 30 standing ovations, repeatedly. He got more standing ovations, more applause, than he gets from his own Israeli parliament, and more than any American president gets from the U.S. Congress.

Now why is that?

Is it because American politicians are so insightful, are so more aware than people in other countries — or even Israelis – that they do this? No. They want to get elected. They want to get re-elected. They want power. And they know that giving homage to Benjamin Netanyahu is securing their interests with the group that has real power in America, the organized Jewish community, this Jewish Zionist power. And that is a sign of a country that in a very fundamental way has become very corrupt. Because they’re putting their own individual career interests ahead of the interests of the country, and ahead of the interests of humanity.

You’ll find very much that I try to put very much these issues in universal terms. And that’s why the IHR website is first and foremost interested in this in a global and an historical sense. Because I believe very strongly that we must reach out to people no matter what their background is, to support the breaking of this power which is destructive to ALL of us, to all nations, to all cultures. In fact if we have a world that the Anti-Defamation League is in favor of, a world in which “Diversity is Our Strength,” means ultimately an end of higher art, of technological achievement; it means the destruction of everything that’s worthwhile in a society.

Question: Has there ever been a problem with Jews in Eastern Asia? And has there ever been any outspoken Eastern Asian government officials speaking out against Jews?

Mark Weber: About the first question, the reason that there was a, you might say, a handling of the Jewish Question in Muslim countries, and in Europe for much of history, is because the dominant factor in society was religion. Jews were oppressed in Europe, or kept in a separate position, because they were a separate religion. And religious sensibilities were absolutely paramount; they pervaded everything.

Earlier we were talking about the tendency of White people to do things that are self-destructive. The best example that I can think of in history, is the madness of the Children’s Crusade. It had White people in Italy, Germany, and France turn over their children in a spectacular show of moral righteousness, to march to the Holy Land, and so impress the Muslims there that the Christians would take over the Holy Land. Well, this is a tragic thing and I think there must be hundreds, thousands of little tragedies as a mother was saying “my little Pierre,” or “my little Hans, I don’t want him going off on this thing.” And the parish priest saying, “No, no, you have to do this for God. This is the right thing, he’ll go to heaven.” And these children, eventually they were all sold into slavery and died. It’s a very tragic thing, but people are willing to sacrifice even their children for an idea this strong.

Muslims take their religion as seriously, or many of them do, as Christians used to take Christianity. Christians used to take their religion so seriously that Jews who are a different religion were segregated and kept in a separate status. But they got all the privileges as soon as they converted to Christianity. The same thing is true in the Muslim world. If a Jew becomes a Muslim, then he’s instantly accepted as equal.

Now, in the modern world, since the Enlightenment, religion doesn’t have that place, and Jews have taken tremendous advantage of the fact that we regard people as individuals. And so on that basis, Jews have this tremendous power. So that’s the answer to that.

With regard to East Asia, there’s been a small Jewish community at one time in China; there’s been no real significant Jewish community in Japan although there are some American Jews as soldiers. So it’s never been a real issue. In China though, the Chinese traditionally had such a very strong sense of their own ethnic identity, such a strong sense of who they are, that the idea of foreigners or outsiders of any kind having large influence was almost unthinkable.

In fact the very word “China” means “the Middle Kingdom,” “the Central Kingdom,” the center of the universe essentially. And for centuries the Chinese took the view that all other people are or should be subordinate to the Emperor of China. But anyway, it hasn’t been an issue in Asia because there have been very, very few Jews.

But it is an international issue, it is now a global issue. And all over the world, there is a consensus that what Israel is doing and what the United States is doing in support of Israel is wrong. This is reflected over and over again in the United Nations, in which there are lopsided votes in which Israel and the United States and maybe the Marshall Islands are on one side, and the whole rest of the world is on the other.

One of the biggest setbacks or defeats with organized Jewish power in the world has been the abandonment of Zionism and of Israel by the European Left over the last 20 years. In Norway we saw an example of that: the leading Leftist party in Norway is supportive of the efforts to boycott Israel, divest, and so forth. And this is across the board now, in almost all of the world.

The last great bastion of Jewish power politically, culturally, and so forth is here in the United States. And Jews know this; they’re very, very aware of this. I snuck in, as it were, to the huge AIPAC rally in Southern California, and this was a point they made: Congress is our linchpin; if we loose that, we’re screwed. Because they know that around the world there’s very little sympathy left for Israel and what Jews are doing around the world. And there’s an awareness of this, basically around the world.

It’s only in America where people can be as deluded as Michelle Bachmann and proclaim how much they love Israel, a love they don’t proclaim for any other country except maybe the United States. But anyway, the state of the world Jewish Question is it is a world question. And this is the center of that power, right here. I think it’s really crucial that we highlight and emphasize that here, in the bastion of that power. Because the most deluded, the most misguided, the most misled people in the world are the American people.

Question: On the question of the Jews in China, how did communism get to China, and what about the Opium Wars, and the manufacturing being moved out of the United States to China? Don’t the Jews have something to do with American manufacturing, so they must be there now?

Mark: Well, there are Jews in China. I was in China two years ago. The Chinese are not going to be fooled by anybody. They don’t buy for a moment this egalitarian nonsense of the United States. They’ve seen what egalitarianism in a real form can mean during the Great Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward, which was madness and destructive.

But having said that, with regard to how did Communism come, it’s interesting that the only countries in the world where the Communist Party is still in power: Vietnam, China, North Korea, and Cuba, the only countries it is still in power is where the communists came to power not as communists but as nationalists. Nationalism is a far, far more powerful force than communism or any other these kinds of ideologies.

And communism is still in power in China; the Communist Party is still in power, even though it has entirely abandoned Marxism in any serious sense of the word. It prides itself in being the party that made China independent and strong and prosperous. And the same thing is true of the Communist Party in Vietnam, where it came to power as a nationalist movement. In every other country, communism is gone because it was imposed in Eastern Europe by the Red Army, and in the Soviet Union basically by a coup, organized by Jews.

But now around the world the Jewish Question is a very important one. Now most people don’t put it that way. They talk about the power of Zionism, or the Israel Lobby. But nonetheless that’s what it amounts to, that’s what it is, and it’s very important above all that the fight be carried out against this power here in the center of that power, the United States.