Strange Bedfellows
E. Michael Jones and Israel Shamir: “A Report from Planet Mammon”
Edmund Connelly
December 6, 2008
http://www.theoccid entalobserver. net/authors/ Connelly- JonesShamir. html
Anyone who has followed the writing career of Catholic iconoclast E. Michael Jones will likely agree that his writings on Jews over the last half decade have been little short of incendiary. Thus the Internet site Fringe Watch claims that Jones “represents one of the foremost proponents of ‘religious’ anti-Semitism in Catholic circles.”
Jones’s major vehicle for airing his views on Jews is his magazine Culture Wars, which in recent years has run cover stories such as "Judaizing: Then and Now," "The Converso Problem: Then and Now," "Shylock Comes to Notre Dame," and “Too Many Yarmulkes: Abortion and the Ethnic Double Standard.” He then packaged these arguments in a monumental book called The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History, which I began to read last month.
Frank Gehry's Experience Music Project|Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, Seattle
(see discussion below)Viewed in isolation, some of Jones’s essays in his monthly magazine may appear as rambling, disjointed streams of thought, but once you have read enough of them, a central theme appears.
In essence, Jones’s view is that Jews, having rejected Logos (by rejecting Christ) were inevitably rendered revolutionaries. Jones’s treatment of various modern Jewish revolutionaries reads very much like Kevin MacDonald’s description of Jewish “movements” that undermined the West, movements such as Freudian psychology, Boasian anthropology, and so on. In effect, Jones is describing some of the subversive Jewish movements that MacDonald did not address in The Culture of Critique.
With respect to the Civil Rights movement, for instance, Jones notes that “virtually every black leader in the 20th century had a Jewish mentor, backer or controller who introduced him to revolutionary ideas or organizations.” Jones sees the process as Jews “luring Blacks away from Christianity into fantasies of heaven on earth, which could only be brought about by the violence which flowed from Messianic politics.”
Other fascinating approaches include film critiques such as Jones's review of Spielberg’s Munich. “We live,” Jones begins, “in a culture which erects monuments to Jewish culture. We also live in a culture which prohibits unauthorized interpretations of Jewish monuments.”
Here Jones introduces his claim of Jewish control of discourse, proffering such lines as “Munich is a movie about the rules of Jewish discourse. It is also a movie about how giving the wrong answer to a Jew will result in your death or the death of your career.”
In an analysis sadly lacking in most modern discussions of modern American culture, Jones illuminates the way in which “Jewish literary critics like Stanley Fish and Jacques Derrida were changing the rules of discourse.” “Discourse had become Jewish, which is to say, those who wanted to be heard and taken seriously had to follow the new rules.”
At every turn Jones violates those new rules. Consider, for example, his blunt assessment of abortion in America: “Support of abortion is a largely Jewish phenomenon. Indeed, although no one is allowed to say this, if there is a group responsible for the legalization of abortion in America, it is Jews.” Ouch!
Jones also examines popular music and architecture. Bob Dylan, Jones argues, was a leading revolutionary — “the bard who made Jewish revolution plausible in a peculiarly American way.” Frank Gehry, according to Jones, designs ugly buildings because as a Jew, he rejects Logos. Throw in other such Jewish architects as Daniel Libeskind or Peter Eisenman and you end up with “grotesque buildings” which they have built as “monuments to their hatred of Logos.” The photos accompanying the essay support such a claim.
Daniel Libeskind's Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto
Now comes his November issue of Culture Wars, with yet another provocative cover, this time showing the tall, sandy-haired Jones standing with his arm around the diminutive Israel Shamir. The Latin title “Ut Unum Sint” refers to the Catholic encyclical “That They May Be One,” but it is the subtitle that is so delicious: “A Report from Planet Mammon.”
Jones opens his essay by noting the power of the neocons to push America in a warlike direction that benefits Israel. Soon, however, he warms to his theme of the last half dozen years: Jews are a disruptive revolutionary force because of their rejection of Logos. In November’s essay he allows Shamir to carry the load in expounding upon this.
Peter Eisenman's City of Culture of Galicia in Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Shamir can do this because he is a Jewish convert to Christianity, a conversion both he and Jones see as a rebirth away from “the Judaic cult of Death.” Drawing from Shamir’s book Cabbala of Power, Jones employs quotes that reinforce St. Paul’s ideas on the Jews, namely that they are “the enemy of mankind.”
Earlier this year Shamir had written an article on Jimmy Carter and the Jewish “swarm attack” against him. In Cabbala, Shamir returns to this idea of a reflexive Jewish assault, arguing that Jews “have no king, but they attack in formation and devastate whole countries as if by plan.” The metaphor is apt.
Neither Jones nor Shamir buy the oft-heard Jewish explanation for anti-Semitism, that “it is because of what we are, not what we do.” Jones berates Jewish apologists who are “determined to ignore the toxic effect of Jewish behavior on native populations and the inevitable reaction which it brings forth from them,” a theme developed at length in Kevin MacDonald’s second book in his Jewish trilogy, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism.
One can understand Jones’s affection for Shamir by dint of the fact that both reject a physical, essentialist identity for Jews based on DNA. Instead, both men accept a theological basis for their definitions, with the Catholic Church as the true path.
Through this lens, the current neocon takeover of American Middle East policy becomes “The Jewish-American empire,” “the church of darkness” — literally a church in competition with the True Church.
As developed in Shamir’s latest book, Masters of Discourse, this idea of theological competition speaks directly to today’s world events. Jones credits Shamir as being a “man of his age precisely because . . . he can name the evil of this age without hesitation or circumlocution.” Shamir sums up this evil situation:
When the Church is subjugated, Jews triumph and when Jews triumph, mankind suffers. The Jewish universe is good for Jews. It is a curse for the others. . . . In Eastern Europe, times of Jewish dominance were the worst experienced by the ordinary people. . . . A good time for the Jews is not a good time for mankind. . . . The blessing of the Jews is a curse for others. . . . The regimes that are “good for Jews” are rarely good for anybody else.
Shamir also touches on a number of points I too have addressed. For instance, he claims that Jews, through the elevation of the Holocaust and other efforts, have attempted to replace Christianity in America and Europe with worship of Jews. In the American instance, belief in Jewish superiority has become the official faith of Pax Americana. I reached a similar conclusion by examining Jewish predominance in 20th-century American psychology.
Another theme Shamir and I share is that of “Judaic paranoia of hating and being hated.” I wrote about that in my review of books by James Petras (here) and in columns which can be found on this blog, particularly my column “A Hate with No Name.”
It is edifying to think that approached from two vastly different perspectives, Jones’s theological account can so well mirror and add to evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald’s scientific discussion of a Jewish “group evolutionary strategy.” Whichever version you accept as “getting to the root of the matter,” either will oblige you to take seriously the effect Jews and their movements have had on the modern world.
Edmund Connelly is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.
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