Monday, November 14, 2022



Old Europe

This must be the ultimate in political incorrectness: Radiocarbon dating shows that civilization first evolved in Europe, not Mesopotamia

There are lost civilisations, and then there are forgotten civilisations. From the 6th to the 3rd millennium BC, the so-called “Vinca culture” stretched for hundreds of miles along the river Danube, in what is now Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and the Republic of Macedonia, with traces all around the Balkans, parts of Central Europe and Asia Minor, and even Western Europe.

Few, if any, have heard of this culture, though they have seen some of their artefacts. They are the infamous statues found in Sumer, where authors such as Zecharia Sitchin have labelled them as “extra-terrestrial”, seeing that the shapes of these beings can hardly be classified as typically human. So why was it that few have seen (or were aware of) their true origin? The person largely responsible for the isolation of the Vinca culture was the great authority on late prehistoric Europe, Vere Gordon Childe (1892-1957). He was a synthesiser of various archaeological discoveries and tried to create an all-encompassing framework, creating such terms as “Neolithic Revolution” and “Urban Revolution”. In his synthesis, he perceived the Vinca culture as an outlying cultural entity influenced by more “civilised” forces. His dogmatic stance and clout meant that the Vinca culture received only scant attention. Originally, interest in the signs found on pottery had created interest in some academic circles, but that now faded following Childe’s “papal bull”.

Interest was rekindled in the 1960s (following the death of Childe), largely due to a new discovery made in 1961 by Dr. N. Vlassa, while excavating the Transylvanian site of Tartaria, part of Vinca culture. Amongst various artefacts recovered were three clay tablets, which he had analysed with the then newly introduced radiocarbon dating methodology. The artefacts came back as ca. 4000 BC and were used by the new methodology’s detractors to argue that radio carbon-dating was obviously erroneous. How could it be “that” old? Traditionally, the Sumerian site of Uruk had been dated to 3500-3200 BC. Vlassa’s discovery was initially (before the carbon dating results) further confirmation that the “Vinca Culture” had strong parallels with Sumer. Everyone agreed that the Sumerians had influenced Vinca Culture (and the site of Tartaria), which had therefore been assigned a date of 2900-2600 BC (by the traditional, comparative methodology, which relied on archaeologists’ logic, rather than hard scientific evidence). Sinclair Hood suggested that Sumerian prospectors had been drawn by the gold-bearing deposits in the Transylvanian region, resulting in these off-shoot cultures.


Some of the Tartaria tablets above. Carbon 14 dating has revealed that they were created at least 6,500 years ago, so their symbols predate Sumerian cuniform, which was previously the oldest writing known. Such symbols have been found on pottery, figurines, spindles and other clay artifacts.

But if the carbon dating results were correct, then Tartaria was 4000 BC, which meant that the Vinca Culture was older than Sumer, or Sumer was at least a millennium older than what archaeologists had so far assumed. Either way, archaeology would be in a complete state of disarray and either some or all archaeologists would be wrong. Voila, the reason as to why radio carbon dating was attacked, rather than merely revising erroneous timelines and opinions. There is no debate about it: the artefacts from the Vinca culture and Sumer are very much alike. And it is just not some pottery and artefacts: they share a script that seems highly identical too. In fact, the little interest that had been shown in the Vinca culture before the 1960s all revolved around their script. Vlassa’s discovery only seemed to confirm this conclusion, as he too immediately stated that the writing had to be influenced by the Near East. Everyone, including Sinclair Hood and Adam Falkenstein, agreed that the two scripts were related and Hood also saw a link with Crete. Finally, the Hungarian scholar Janos Makkay stated that the “Mesopotamian origin [of the Tartaria pictographs] is beyond doubt.” It seemed done and dusted.

But when the Vinca Culture suddenly predated Sumer, this thesis could no longer be maintained (as it would break the archaeological framework, largely put in place by Childe and his peers), and thus, today, the status is that both scripts developed independently. Of course, we should wonder whether this is just another attempt to save reputations and whether in the following decades, the stance will finally be reversed, which would mean that the Vinca Culture is actually at the origin of the Sumerian civilisation… a suggestion we will return to shortly. But what is the Vinca Culture? In 1908, the largest prehistoric and most comprehensively excavated Neolithic settlement in Europe was discovered in the village of Vinca, just 14 km downstream from the Serbian capital Belgrade, on the shores of the Danube. The discovery was made by a team led by Miloje M. Vasic, the first schooled archaeologist in Serbia.

Vinca was excavated between 1918 and 1934 and was revealed as a civilisation in its own right: a forgotten civilisation, which Marija Gimbutas would later call “Old Europe”. Indeed, as early as the 6th millennium BC, three millennia before Dynastic Egypt, the Vinca culture was already a genuine civilisation. Yes, it was a civilisation: a typical town consisted of houses with complex architectural layouts and several rooms, built of wood that was covered in mud. The houses sat along streets, thus making Vinca the first urban settlement in Europe, but equally being older than the cities of Mesopotamia and Egypt. And the town of Vinca itself was just one of several metropolises, with others at Divostin, Potporanj, Selevac, Plocnik and Predionica. Maria Gimbutas concluded that “in the 5th and early 4th millennia BC, just before its demise in east-central Europe, Old Europeans had towns with a considerable concentration of population, temples several stories high, a sacred script, spacious houses of four or five rooms, professional ceramicists, weavers, copper and gold metallurgists, and other artisans producing a range of sophisticated goods. A flourishing network of trade routes existed that circulated items such as obsidian, shells, marble, copper, and salt over hundreds of kilometres.”


A Vinca jug, showing a clear mastery of ceramics

Everything about “Old Europe” is indeed older than anything else in Europe or the Near East.

In Sumer, the development of writing has been pinned down as a result from economical factors that required “record keeping”. For the Vinca Culture, the origin of the signs is accepted as having been derived from religious rather than material concerns. In short, the longest groups of signs are thus considered to be a kind of magical formulae. The Vinca Culture was also millennia ahead of the status quo on mining. At the time, mining was thought not to predate 4000 BC, though in recent years, examples of as far back as 70,000 years ago have been discovered. The copper mine at Rudna Glava, 140 km east of Belgrade, is at least 7000 years old and had vertical shafts going as deep as twenty metres and at the time of its discovery was again extremely controversial.

Further insights into “Old Europe” came about in November 2007, when it was announced that excavations at an ancient settlement in southern Serbia had revealed the presence of a furnace, used for melting metal. The furnace had tools in it: a copper chisel and a two-headed hammer and axe. Most importantly, several of the metal objects that were made here, were recovered from the site.

The excavation also uncovered a series of statues. Archaeologist Julka Kuzmanovic-Cvetkovic observed that “according to the figurines we found, young women were beautifully dressed, like today’s girls in short tops and mini skirts, and wore bracelets around their arms.”


Female goddess with a short skirt and a v-neck top. False eyelashes too?


A man in military uniform?

The unnamed tribe who lived between 5400 and 4700 BC in the 120-hectare site at what is now Plocnik knew about trade, handcrafts, art and metallurgy. The excavation also provided further insights into Old Europe: for example, near the settlement, a thermal well might be evidence of Europe’s oldest spa. Houses had stoves and there were special holes for trash, while the dead were buried in a tidy necropolis. People slept on woollen mats and fur, made clothes of wool, flax and leather, and kept animals. The community was also especially fond of children: artefacts that were recovered included toys such as animals and rattles of clay, and small, clumsily crafted pots apparently made by children at playtime.

It is but two examples that underline that Old Europe was a civilisation millennia ahead of its neighbours. And Old Europe is a forgotten culture, as Richard Rudgeley has argued: “Old Europe was the precursor of many later cultural developments and […] the ancestral civilisation, rather than being lost beneath the waves through some cataclysmic geological event, was lost beneath the waves of invading tribes from the east.” Indeed, Rudgeley argued that when confronted with the “sudden arrival” of civilisation in Sumer or elsewhere, we should not look towards extra-terrestrial civilisation, nor Atlantis, but instead to “Old Europe”, a civilisation which the world seems intent on disregarding… and we can only wonder why.

“Civilisation” in Sumer was defined as the cultivation of crops and domestication of animals, with humans living a largely sedentary life, mostly in village or towns, with a type of central authority. With that definition of civilisation, it is clear that it did not begin in Sumer, but in Old Europe. Old Europe was a Neolithic civilisation, living of agriculture and the breeding of domestic animals. The most frequent domestic animals were cattle, although smaller goats, sheep and pigs were also bred. They also cultivated the most fertile prehistoric grain species. There was even a merchant economy: a surplus of products led to the development of trade with neighbouring regions, which supplied salt, obsidian or ornamental shells.

In fact, they were not actually a “Neolithic civilisation” – they were even further ahead of the times: in the region of Eastern Serbia, at Bele Vode and (the already discussed) Rudna Glava, in crevices and natural caves, the settlers of Vinca came in contact with copper ore which they began fashioning with fire, initially only for ornamental objects (beads and bracelets). They were more “Bronze Age” than “Stone Age”… this at a time when the rest of Europe and the Near East was not even a “Stone Age civilisation”. One scholar, the already cited Marija Gimbutas, has highlighted the importance of Old Europe. So much so, that many consider her to have gone too far. She interpreted Old Europe as a civilisation of the Goddess, a concept which has taken on a life of its own in the modern New Age industry, extending far beyond anything Gimbutas herself could ever have imagined. Bernard Wailes stated how Gimbutas was “immensely knowledgeable but not very good in critical analysis… She amasses all the data and then leaps to conclusions without any intervening argument… Most of us tend to say, oh my God, here goes Marija again”. But everyone agrees that her groundwork is solid, and it is from that which we build.

Gimbutas dated the civilisation of Old Europe from 6500 to 3500-3200 BC. It was at that time that the area was overrun by invading Indo-Europeans. The local population could do two things: remain and be ruled by new masters, or migrate, in search of new lands. It appears that the people of Old Europe did both: some went in search of a haven to the south, on the shores of the Aegean Sea, and beyond. Harald Haarmann has identified them as being responsible for the rise of the so-called Cycladic culture, as well as Crete, where the new settlers arrived around 3200 BC.

For Gimbutas, the difference between Old Europe and Indo-Europe was more than just one people invading another. It was the difference between a goddess-centred and matriarchal and the Bronze Age Indo-European patriarchal cultural elements. According to her interpretations, Old Europe was peaceful, they honoured homosexuals and they espoused economic equality. The Indo-Europeans were warmongering males. And it’s that conclusion with which many have great difficulty, for nothing is ever as distinct as that. Today, artefacts of the Vinca culture grace the display cabinets of several museums, for they are magnificent ceramics – of an artistic and technological level which would not be equalled by other cultures for several millennia. It is believed that their writing originated out of sacred writing. Like Crete, they were a peaceful nation; Crete’s palaces had no defensive qualities.

The recovered artefacts of the Vinca culture equally show they had a profound spiritual life. The cult objects include figurines, sacrificial dishes, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic dishes. When we note that their number (over 1000 examples at Vinca alone) exceeds the total number of figurines discovered in the region of the Greek Aegean, we can only wonder why Old Europe is not better known today.

Life was represented on these objects as embodying the cycle of birth and death of Nature, along with the desire of man to get Nature’s sympathy or to mollify it in the interest of survival. Shrines were discovered in Transylvania with complex architectural designs, indicating the involvedness of the rituals which were conducted in them. It may not have been a matriarchal, Goddess worshipping civilisation, but it was definitely a complex and established religious framework. Though nothing suggests it was a Goddess cult.

The same mistake has been made in Malta, where for generations certain statues were interpreted as “Mother Goddess” statues, whereas alternative thinkers as Joseph Ellul pointed out that there was nothing specifically feminine about these statues; that they showed a deity, but that it could equally be male or female. Recently, Ellul’s point of view has become shared by other experts on Malta, such as Dr. Caroline Malone, who argued that the theory that the Maltese temples were erected as part of a goddess-worshipping culture is no longer valid. In her opinion, Maltese prehistoric society was a relatively stable, agricultural community, living on an intense and densely populated island, which celebrated cyclical cycles of life, rites of passage, transitions between different stages of life, from separation to reintegration, fertility, ancestors, all of this within a cosmological context… and very much like Old Europe. Around 3200 BC, the culture of Old Europe migrated, to the Aegean Sea and to Crete. Today, they are considered to be the origin of the Minoan civilisation, though it is a dimension that few Minoan scholars have included in their writing, instead largely opting to see Crete as yet another “stand alone” civilisation. Gimbutas stated that: “the civilisation that flourished in Old Europe between 6500 and 3500 BC and in Crete until 1450 BC enjoyed a long period of uninterrupted peaceful living.” Motifs such as the snake, intertwined with the bird goddess motif, the bee and the butterfly, with the distinctive motif of the double axe, are found both in Old Europe and Crete. But the best evidence is in the writing of Old Europe and the Linear A script of Crete, which are to all intents and purposes identical.

But it is equally clear that contacts between Sumer and Old Europe existed at the time of the Ubaid culture, in Eridu – the site which inspired Sitchin so greatly in his formulation of the Annunaki theory and his identification of these statues as “Nephilim”. The Ubaid culture is ca. 4500 BC and though we should perhaps not go as far as concluding that Sumer was a child of Old Europe, the two cultures obviously knew each other. Indeed, in recent years, Old European artefacts were even discovered in Southeastern France, suggesting that the civilisation of Old Europe travelled not merely to the East, but also to the West. Perhaps we should even consider them to be at the origin of the megalithic civilisation? But no-one, it seems, has dared to topple that stone yet.

***************************************************

Yes, sometimes women are sexist too

One thing has bothered me of late. As part of my role with Future Women, I work with employers to support women’s leadership and men’s active role in gender equality. Too often, I have heard the same refrain repeated: “Our problem is not with sexism. The issue is not how men in our team treat women; the issue is how women in our team treat one another.”

The feminist in me finds this challenging. I want to explain that this is a tired old stereotype, an outdated trope of catfights, mean girls and queen bees. It’s an invention of male leaders who benefit from portraying women as conniving, selfish individualists who only feel secure when the spotlight is on them, and them alone.

The problem is that I actually know many women who’ve felt cut down by colleagues who are supposedly members of the sisterhood. Academic studies and surveys back up the negative experience many women claim to have had working for a woman boss. One, in the journal Gender in Management in 2009, found that while women didn’t believe gender to be a predictor of good management, they still preferred not to work for another woman.

If you believe, as I do, that women are no more or less inherently cruel to women than people of other genders, what is going on? Research suggests there are five intersecting factors at play. First, women tend to have higher social expectations about how women managers or colleagues will behave. Poor treatment by your boss feels all the more undermining when it comes from someone who you presumed was an ally. The hurt is more keenly felt. Women expect women to behave better, so feel more disappointed if they don’t.

Second, principles of scarcity are at play. While great progress has been made, women remain few and far between in rooms where decisions are made and culture is shaped. A young, ambitious woman entering a graduate role might look upwards to the C-suite of her employer and see a room of nine decision makers. Only two are women. She says to herself, unconsciously: “I’m getting one of those women spots,” not, “I’d like a seat at that table, and each seat should be equally available to me.” The shortage of women in senior positions renders other young, ambitious women as competitors.

The shortage of women in senior positions renders other young, ambitious women as competitors.

Third, research shows that when women realise their gender is an impediment to career progression, they may try to differentiate themselves from others of the same gender. That is, if being a woman holds you back at work, then you’ll try to prove you’re not “like the rest of them” but that you’re different and worthy of different treatment. The same research suggests that other disadvantaged groups in workplaces experience the same challenge. This makes it all the more difficult for women of colour, or women with disabilities, to succeed.

Fourth, when women advocate for other women, it is taken less seriously than when men advocate for other men. Nobody assumes a male manager who hires another bloke to work on his team is motivated by achieving gender balance. Whereas women who hire other women may be perceived as showing favouritism or trying to push a diversity agenda. (Aside: there is nothing wrong with pushing a diversity agenda. More of us should be.)

Finally, women are not saints. Awful human beings of all genders exist in this world. That women sometimes have to work with other women they dislike is par for the course.

**********************************************

Disrespecting Scottish history

It’s not just America that is in the process of rewriting its history and casting itself as patriarchal and oppressive – a similar process is taking place in Scotland. Giants of the Enlightenment such as David Hume are being reimagined as the architects of slavery and the fathers of modern racism.

Scotland’s first black professor, Sir Geoff Palmer, exemplified the new way of thinking in an astonishing talk I heard him give recently at Dundee University. He spoke about the horror of George Floyd’s murder and told the audience that when he watches the footage of the strangulation: ‘All I can see is David Hume.’

The attempt to topple the Scottish Enlightenment began in September 2020 when a group of students demanded that Edinburgh University’s David Hume Tower be renamed. Hume’s crime was to have described black Africans as inferior to white people in a footnote in his 1748 essay Of National Characters. He wrote: ‘I am apt to suspect the Negroes [sic] to be naturally inferior to the whites.’ Despite arguments that this was a misunderstanding or at least a misrepresentation of Hume’s work, the university sided with the student activists and Hume Tower is now 40 George Square.

Two months later, Sir Geoff was appointed as Edinburgh Council’s chair of the Edinburgh Slavery and Colonialism Legacy Review Group and following the findings of this group, a national Museum for Slavery is being considered. Changes to the school curriculum are also being proposed to help focus on slavery, and a plaque has been mounted on the statue of Henry Dundas in Edinburgh claiming that he was responsible for holding back the abolition of slavery.

Several historians have questioned the legitimacy of the claims about Dundas, noting that the history of the late 18th century was far more complex than is being suggested and that holding him responsible for the continued slave trade goes against current academic understanding. However, rather than engaging with these historians and exploring the facts, as an academic should, Sir Geoff Palmer has taken the easier option of labelling them ‘an academic racist gang’.

This isn’t the only bit of suspect thinking from Sir Geoff. In the course of that speech in Dundee University he claimed that there is still an assumption that black people are inferior to whites and that this is a direct consequence of the works of Hume and Immanuel Kant. Unless we teach about slavery properly, Sir Geoff claimed: ‘We are never ever going to get rid of racism because racism is derived from slavery, so people have to know the reason they have these feelings.’

Do the people of Scotland really have ‘these feelings’? Are there many Scots who believe that black people are inferior to whites? If so, I’ve never met them.

Sir Geoff has some peculiar ideas. One of his stated reasons for imagining Scotland to be racist is the ratio of black to white people living there. ‘People have put forward the perception that Scotland is less racist than England or elsewhere,’ he said in an interview with the Herald. ‘I say to them: “Look around. Look at where you work. Do you have a fair representation of the diversity of society? Look where you live.” Because if you don’t have a fair representation, then you better think again.’ It’s hard to make sense of this thought, but Sir Geoff appears to think that unless a vast number of black men and women suddenly choose to relocate to Scotland, it will remain racist.

But then, Sir Geoff is not always consistent. He has said ‘I don’t believe in taking down statues’, and that he simply wants streets, statues and buildings linked to slavery to be marked with signs explaining the past. Yet the renaming of the David Hume Tower was essential, he says, because ‘as long as they say nothing, people are going to continue to believe that negroes are inferior’.

Sir Tom Devine, Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, pulls no punches when it comes to Sir Geoff’s claims. Sir Geoff has ‘zero scholarly credibility’ to speak about Hume, he tells me. ‘The ridiculous and absurd suggestion that a single footnote from the huge published output of Hume, the world’s preeminent philosopher of the time, encouraged slavery is patent nonsense.’ Sir Geoff himself, it should be noted, is not an academic historian, nor a historian, nor a philosopher. His expertise is in cereal science. Sir Tom, on the other hand, has edited a collection of essays about Scotland’s historic involvement in the slave plantations: Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past.

As with similar projects in America, there is an attempt in Scotland to discredit even those Scottish Enlightenment figures who opposed slavery. No white man can be given credit. But in the process of amplifying white guilt, many of the vital gains of the Enlightenment – gains that Hume embodied – are actually in danger of being lost. The Enlightenment, despite its contradictions and limitations, helped to transform and modernise the world and gave us the tools with which to celebrate and fight for human equality. It developed an academic and intellectual legacy that helped to challenge narrow, parochial and moralistic outlooks in society. Debate, scepticism, an examination of the facts and a questioning attitude to life were encouraged. In today’s arguments about Scottish colonialism and slavery, these enlightened attributes are being lost, which in the end will do the most harm to the very people that Sir Geoff claims to champion.

Discussing the renaming of the Hume Tower, Edinburgh’s Professor Jonathan Hearn says: ‘I was left with the overwhelming feeling that the question of the building’s name has nothing to do with Hume, and that Hume was only standing in as a symbol of something else – a rather vague conceivable notion of the oppressiveness of western Enlightenment thought.’ Perhaps due to the backlash, the university’s principal, Professor Peter Mathieson, has now apologised for the confusion, and suggested the Tower’s name could be changed back. This, at least, would be one small victory.

***************************************************

No More ADL: When it comes to Jews, the organization now does more harm than good

I have often deplored the anti-Christian orientation of the ADL under foxy Foxman and it seems that it is just as hateful under its present management

Which of these two individuals do you find more problematic?

Kyrie Irving, a kooky basketball player who believes that the Earth is flat, that JFK was shot by bankers, that the COVID vaccines were secretly a plot to connect all Black people to a supercomputer, and that Jews worship Satan and launched the slave trade?

Or Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, who accepted $500,000 from Irving last week without even meeting or even talking to the all-star—and who was then forced to give back the donation when Irving blatantly refused to apologize?

Let’s think about it for a minute. One of these guys is a weirdo with dumb opinions he may or may not actually believe. The other is running a soulless racket which just made it clear that you can say whatever you want about the Jews and buy your indulgences at a discount price.

Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely believe that Irving’s endorsement of a Black nationalist documentary based on an obscure Jew-hating book, to say nothing of Kanye West’s meltdown, will most likely contribute to a surge in antisemitism in America, particularly in the Black community. But we Jews don’t control Kyrie Irving; in theory, we do control the ADL, and we shouldn’t want our chief defense group to behave in a way that advances antisemitic conspiracy theories about shadowy Jews trafficking in money and influence for fun and profit.

All of this leads to one sorry conclusion: It’s time to say goodbye to the ADL. It can’t be killed, so we need to just walk away from this formerly venerable organization, and weaken it before it swerves so far off the road that it takes us with it.

If you think the above is hyperbole, or if you haven’t been paying much attention to the ADL lately and still imagine it as a paragon of the good fight against antisemitism, here’s a sizzle reel of Greenblatt’s years in office. Since leaving the Obama White House and taking over the organization in 2015, Greenblatt has turned the ADL into a partisan attack machine, fueled by corporate cash and increasingly oblivious to any real suffering of any real Jews.

Need some proof? Here we go.

In 2017, the ADL issued a guide to America’s worst antisemites, a 36 (double Chai!) person rogues’ gallery. Louis Farrakhan, the Black supremacist beloved by celebrities, wasn’t on it. Nor was the Oberlin professor who argued that 9/11 was a Jewish conspiracy. Nor Linda Sarsour of the Women’s March, who argued you can’t be both a Zionist and a feminist, because the former makes you somehow less than human, and who equated Zionism with neo-Nazism. Instead, the ADL picked a posse of minor right-wing nutjobs and no one else. Unironically, it called its guide “Naming the Hate.”

In 2018, the organization came under scrutiny for flubbing its reporting on antisemitic attacks—the group’s bread-and-butter and a major source of its centurylong trust and prestige—perhaps to further the false impression that Jews were under attack by hordes of white supremacists heartened by the rise and rhetoric of Donald Trump.

In 2020, Greenblatt signed on to a campaign calling on Facebook to censor pro-Trump ads. His partner in this assault on free and political speech? Incredibly, it was Al Sharpton—who has still not publicly apologized for his role in inciting the Crown Heights pogroms in 1991. This politically motivated commitment to curbing free speech continues: Last week, shortly after Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk (the left’s favorite bogeyman du jour), Greenblatt issued a call to companies to suspend all advertising on the social network. The list goes on.

This rank partisanship is understandable: Impactful leaders make political calculations, and even if they err too enthusiastically on one side or another they may be forgiven for playing hardball to promote their organization’s end. But the organization’s end itself has changed under Greenblatt in ways that make the old ADL unrecognizable. Before Greenblatt’s arrival, for example, the ADL defined racism as “the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another, [and] that a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics.”

That perfectly sound definition was too much for Greenblatt’s ADL, and so, in 2020, the organization changed its tune to define racism as “the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people”—a definition they needed to change yet again in the wake of Whoopi Goldberg’s 2022 comment that the Holocaust wasn’t “about race.”

Scroll on to the ADL’s homepage these days and you’ll be treated to a love letter to critical race theory, defined merely as a noble tool that “helps us understand how and why racial injustice continues to persist in the U.S.” Parents who object to CRT being taught in their children’s schools, another page cannily suggests, are borderline domestic terrorists or, at the very least, in the sway of white extremist groups.

Besides, sayeth the ADL, have no fear: “there is no evidence that critical race theory is being taught in K-12 schools.” You know, besides the Critical Race Theory Coalition Summit hosted by the Portland Public School District. Or the Loudon County Public School District’s partnership with a group called The Equity Collaborative to train teachers in CRT. Or the California Department of Education endorsing a CRT-based ethnic studies curriculum despite more than 100,000 objections.

And what of the Jews? In the wake of some complaining that the group founded in 1913 to protect one of America’s most threatened minorities from prejudice and violence seems much less focused on Jews these days, a senior ADL staffer in charge of Jewish outreach tweeted: “One of these days we need to talk about how the Jewish community’s reactions to antisemitism coming from Black people is inherently tied to (implicitly racist) fears of Black violence.”

The possibility that “the Jewish community’s reactions to antisemitism coming from Black people” might be tied to attacks like this one, or this one, or this one, or this one, or this one, or this one, or many more like them, was obviously out of bounds. Which was actually of a piece with the ADL’s new recommendation for how Jews globally should react when violence is done to us: “Jews,” tweeted the same senior staffer, “*have* to be ok with Palestinians *explaining* why some turn to terrorism.” In case you’re scratching your head here, let me simplify: The ADL believes that whenever Jews get violently stabbed, shot, blown up, or beaten, our first reaction must be to search our souls for what we must’ve done to deserve it.

Sure, Greenblatt and the gang occasionally murmur some correct condemnation of some real hater, but no one in their right mind can inspect his tenure and deny that he has hollowed out the ADL of any and all connection to its original mandate, instead using its clout to turn it into an effective and stealthy progressive, partisan operation. And this actually puts real Jews in danger, because anyone can now claim that talk of antisemitism on the rise is merely political propaganda. Bad vibes, as the kids say........

Here, then, is my solution to the problem that is Jonathan Greenblatt’s ADL: Let’s accept that the ADL is no longer a Jewish organization and ask for a divorce. Greenblatt can keep everything: His anti-racism, AstroTurf organization and all the corporate money trees he shakes on its behalf. We amcha Jews walk away with nothing—nothing, that is, but our dignity and our safety, both improved by no longer being pawns in a profit game that is endangering us more by the day.

****************************************

My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

*****************************************

No comments: