T. Belman. Kirk and Carlson get a pass. Owens does not.
By Rabbi Dov Fischer, JP Dec 3/23
The Hamas-ISIS Gaza War has erupted not only in the Mideast but also on Twitter, TikTok, podcasts, and YouTube. Social media language tends to be edgy. In the politically conservative Jewish community where I reside, three conservative commentators have elicited concern: Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens.
First, Charlie Kirk. His work on colleges is amazing. Is he anti-Semitic? I don’t buy it. Is he “a little bit anti-Semitic”? First, I don’t buy it. He is a Christian Zionist. Second, there is no such thing as a “little bit anti-Semitic.” That’s like “a little bit pregnant.” Remember that as you read on.
The concern over Charlie Kirk is that he has endorsed Elon Musk’s observation that Jewish liberals have been major donors to certain horrible leftist causes. That’s not anti-Semitic. That’s true. For the past eight years in this column, I have written countless articles about the plague of Jewish apostate liberals, a problem to which my Catholic friends especially relate in a world of Catholic apostates like Joe Bidens, Nancy Pelosis, and Sotomayors who have done far more damage to America and have done more to promote abortion and homosexual marriage than even the Satanic George Soros has achieved.
Let us be clear. Judaism — real Judaism — is politically conservative. Open a Bible; it’s all there. Tough on crime. No abortions except to save a mother’s life. No homosexuality, and certainly no homosexual “marriages.” G-d created humans as male and female, binary. His pronoun is “He/Him/His.” Borders matter.
Everywhere in the world except in America, Jews are solidly conservative. They are the Conservative Party’s most reliable voting bloc in the United Kingdom. Jews from Russia and Ukraine despise communism more than anyone on earth. Israel — a place that reflects something about Jews — has been dominated mostly by conservative governments for the past 46 years. Even in America, Orthodox Jews — the fastest growing population of American Jews, and the ones who live by actual Judaim — vote 75 percent and more Republican.
So what’s wrong with the non-Orthodox Jews of America? Easy: they don’t know Judaism and are desperate to fit in with non-Jews. Therefore, many negate their Judaism. That’s how they think they make “friends” . . . until those “friends” turn on them or their college kids when war erupts in Israel or their daughter, Karen, applies to college. Alas, Jews who have stripped their Judaism of — Judaism — are left with nothing but “warped social justice.” Their refom rabbis cannot talk about kosher when they eat pork. They cannot talk about Shabbat when they have just driven 45 minutes to temple from the suburbs. They wouldn’t know the difference between a mikvah and the brine in a pickle jar. So they promote toxicity like DEI: “Look how progressive we are: we promote DEI even though that will keep our own grandchildren out of college.”
Idiots.
And, yet, do you know whom these Jewish idiots vote like? No, not Blacks. Not Puerto Ricans. Jewish liberals vote like White Protestant Dixie Southern Democrats. I explain:
For 125 years — a century and a quarter — White Protestant Southern Dixiecrats reliably voted exclusively for Democrats, despite their conservative values. They sent 12-14 Democrats to the U.S. Senate non-stop for 125 years. Deeply conservative White Protestant non-Jews in America’s Deep South were the same as mindless liberal Jews — and on the same 125-year time frame. Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana.
During the Civil War, Lincoln and the Republicans ended slavery, while the Democrats and their Ku Klux Klan sought to preserve slavery. As a result, the cotton-plantation South became uniformly Democrat. However, a century later, Deep South White Protestant conservative loyalty to Democrats no longer made sense. The Deep South was socially, culturally, religiously, and politically still conservative — the Christian “Bible Belt.” Yet, incomprehensibly, Southern White Protestant conservatives kept electing only Democrats until the 1980s, even though the Democrats had turned left. Consider these unfathomable results listing all the key statewide winners in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana through 40 years from the 1940s and through the entire decade of the 1970s:
Alabama:
Gov. Frank DixonGov. Chauncey SparksGov. Jim FolsomGov. Gordon PersonsGov. Jim FolsomGov. John Malcolm PattersonGov. George WallaceGov. Lurleen WallaceGov. Albert BrewerGov. George WallaceGov. Fob JamesGov. George WallaceSen. John H. Bankhead IISen. George SwiftSen. John SparkmanSen. Howard HeflinSen. J. Lister HillSen. James AllenSen. Maryon Pittman AllenSen. Donald Stewart
Mississippi:
Gov. Paul B. Johnson, Sr.Gov. Dennis MurphreeGov. Thomas BaileyGov. Fielding WrightGov. Hugh WhiteGov. James ColemanGov. Ross BarnettGov. Paul B. Johnson, Jr.Gov. John Bell WilliamsGov. William WallerGov. Cliff FinchGov. William WinterGov. William AillainGov. Ray MabusSen. Theodore BilboSen. James EastlandSen. Wall DoxeySen. John StennisSen. James Eastland
Louisiana:
Gov. Sam JonesGov. Jimmie DavisGov. Earl LongGov. Robert KennonGov. Earl LongGov. Jimmie DavisGov. John McKeithenGov. Edwin EdwardsSen. William FeazellSen. Russell B. LongSen. Allen EllenderSen. Elaine EdwardsSen. J. Bennett Johnston
There were approximately 50 statewide winners for governor or United States senator in deeply red Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana during those 40 years. Of those 50 elected statewide in the Deep Red South, all but one were Democrats.
How explain that the most conservative electorate in America consistently assured Congressional Democrat majorities, thus also assuring decades’ endless domination of left-wing Supreme Court picks and federal judges? The historical record saw the White Protestant Deep South stick like barnacles to Democrats for approximately 125 years consecutively until they finally were compelled to choose between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
White Christian Dixiecrat voting patterns offer the “Rosetta Stone” insight into the Jewish historical tendency to vote Democrat. Once a voting demographic attaches to a party, it becomes very challenging to detach them even when continued affiliation becomes insane. Essentially, the group’s most politically ambitious individuals join the party of group choice and become invested in that party’s success.
Just as the individual aspiring politico invests himself or herself in a party, so does the larger group. They donate to “their” party. They meet personally with “their” party’s candidates, invite “their” party’s most prominent leaders to address their annual church or temple banquets, encourage their teens to apply for minimum-wage patronage summer jobs picking up trash in the neighborhood park by using connections with that local politician.
That’s how the Jewish pattern began. When they first arrived, Jewish immigrants were greeted at the boat and in Ellis Island by Democrat hacks while white-shoe Republicans barred Jews from their country clubs and hotels. Democrat hacks played and manipulated the immigrants — just as they do today — while Republicans mocked their accents and denied them jobs at their white-show law firms and medical practices. So Jews understandably cast their fates with the Democrats. That is how the mess began, just as White Protestant Dixiecrats began. And once it starts, White Protestant Bible Belt Dixiecrats show it takes 125 years to sever completely. Orthodox Jews already have done so, ahead of schedule. Others are following — slowly. Every time Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, or Ocasio opens her mouth, another ten Jews become Republican. Every time Biden sends money to Iran, ten more. Every time a Jewish kid gets ostracized at college because of Israel or DEI, ten more.
So Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk are 100 percent right. We all know it: Too many Jews give liberal and woke money and influence liberal and woke governmental policy. But don’t forget that the Adelsons were Trump’s biggest donors, and that a whole bunch of others like Norman Braman, Nicolas Muzin, Stephen Schwarzman, Jeffrey Yass, Bernie Marcus, and Paul Singer give multi-millions to Republicans. Don’t forget that American Jews include hard-right radio broadcasters Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro, Dennis Prager, Michael Savage, Andrew Klavan, and Alan Stock, the dean of Nevada talk radio. And the 2,500 Orthodox rabbis represented by Coalition for Jewish Values, where I am vice president. Jews include playwright David Mamet and the right-wing Zionist Organization of America. The late Milton Friedman inspired American conservative capitalism, and Ayn Rand was Alisa Rosenbaum.
Answer #1: Charlie Kirk is a Zionist.
Next: Tucker. I repeatedly have defended Tucker. See here and here, for example. Tucker often has attacked the Anti-Defamation League, but so have I. The ADL is not Jewish and no longer speaks for Jews. Its chief professional officer, Jonathan Greenblatt, is a former Obama lackey, and he Obamized the ADL. When Tucker talks about Obama’s and Biden’s efforts to import millions of poor, needy immigrants reliant on government largesse who would vote Democrat and would replace the mainstream White voting class, Tucker is right. ADL attacked him as racist, so he hit back. He rightly noted that the same ADL that wants porous borders to bring in a replacement population in America hypocritically opposes efforts to import millions of Arabs into Israel to replace the Jewish majority. Tucker is right.
I do have one Tucker concern: whether his ongoing rightful battles against ADL may eventually give rise to a broader animus. That would be like blaming all White Protestant Dixiecrats for their 125 years of Democrat bullet-voting. I don’t blame Catholics for giving America Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Sotomayor, and scores of other toxicities. I hope Tucker gives more air time to like-minded Jews so we, too, can break through the iron wall of leftist media.
Answer #2: Tucker? Not yet.
Finally, Candace Owens. I have been a fan of hers from that early Congressional hearing where she nailed it to her debates on Laura with madman Cornell West. She led Blexit and did some great videos for “Prager U.”
Recently, something snapped. Ignorant of Mideast history, amplified by a personal tiff with Ben Shapiro — a wonderful Jew with a yarmulka who makes us all proud — she suddenly unhinged. She alleged apartheid in Israel because the Old City of Jerusalem has a “Muslim Quarter” and a “Jewish Quarter.” Her ignorance was palpable. The four “quarters” of the Old City (also a “Christian Quarter” and an “Armenian Quarter”) were not created by Israel but by a British cartographer mapping out the Old City in the 1840’s, two centuries ago. It was like mapping out 1960’s New York and calling Brooklyn’s Boro Park, Crown Heights, and Flatbush the “Jewish Quarter”; Bedford-Stuyvesant, Ocean Hill-Brownsville, and Harlem the “Black Quarter”; Bensonhurst, Bay Ridge, and “Little Italy” in Manhattan the “Italian Quarter”; and also Bay Ridge, Brooklyn and Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan the “Irish Quarter.”
She is simply ignorant. No one (except for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit) can know everything. But it is surprising that Ms. Owens so freely comments acerbically and assertively on things she manifestly does not know. Now in a tiff with Shapiro, she seems bent on smacking Israel, despite ignorance on that front. Thus, she sarcastically “endorsed” Nikki Haley for “president of Israel” because Haley agrees Hamas-ISIS must be crushed. Yet the same Ms. Owens supports Donald Trump, who is ten times the supporter of Israel. Owens does not know. Much worse: she does not know that she does not know. She does not even know that the head of government in Israel is the “prime minister,” not the “president.”
Ms. Owens amplified concerns when she recently provided a platform to despicable Israel hater, Norman Finkelstein, whom Israel once banned from entering for ten years. Finkelstein is another example of apostate Jews. The Soviet Union leveraged the likes of Karl Marx, Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, Karl Radek, Leon Trotsky, and their whole Yevesektzia. America has Bernie Sanders, Ben and Jerry, Noam Chomsky, and Norman Finkelstein. Our apostates and albatrosses.
Why did Ms. Owens suddenly give him a platform amid the Hamas-ISIS Gaza War and her tiff with Mr. Shapiro? Was she childishly showing: “Hey, Ben — and Dennis Prager — both of you Jews helped launch my career, but I now will demonstrate my independence by giving this horrid man my Daily Wire platform?”
There are three aspects to intelligence: Smarts (Chokhmah), Insight (Binah), and Knowledge (Da’at). Ms. Owens was blessed by G-d with the smarts. Alas, she does not have a great deal of knowledge. That is why G-d created books. She needs to grasp that she lacks critical knowledge, and Norman Finkelstein hardly is the beacon. Without adequate knowledge, Ms. Owens is not positioned to offer insight because, plainly put, she does not know what she is talking about on matters pertaining to Israel/Palestine.
Is she a Jew hater? Remember what I wrote above. After her Nikki Haley “endorsement,” her pegging the “Muslim Quarter” as reflecting Israeli apartheid, and her giving Finkelstein a platform, I now believe that Candace Owens is “little bit anti-Semitic.”
Adapted by the writer for The Jewish Press from a version of this article that first appeared here in The American Spectator.
SEB_
It’s hard to imagine Owen of any one in fact bringing up that medieval accusation of the Jews sacrificing Christion children for their blood to mix with Matzo. I think it began in England many years before the Massacre at York and the Herem-never lifted- that the Rabbonim fixed on England.
*******However the Jews slowly filtered back into England from Flanders during the Cromwellian period, having been denied permission by the Directorate, of which the Head, Cromwell, who, willing, was overruled by the others. , to this day never officially granted*********.
However, it shows more than any other words how utterly ignorant and hateful those Goyim are towards Jews and most likely to themselves also.
i find it hard to imagine that anyone with suh a belief could like “himself”
SEB-
Reminds me of the old song that only I remember.
“A Little Bit Off The Top”…… and another………
“Hinky Dinky Parlez Vous” …..and another……… “Will The Angels Play Their Harps For Me” ….or ( “Do The Angels Play Their Harps All Day”)……. and another……………!!!
SEB-
Yes, like being a little bit pregnant, just a little…..
“But Owens’ rhetoric about Jewish people appeared to reach a new low this week when she liked a social-media post asking conservative rabbi Shmuley Boteach whether he is “drunk on Christian blood again”—an overt reference to the antisemitic “blood libel” canard that has regained popularity on the far-right via QAnon. (Days earlier, Owens dabbled in other antisemitic tropes by suggesting there’s a Jewish “gang” in Hollywood.)”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/ben-shapiros-daily-wire-cuts-ties-with-candace-owens-amid-israel-feud
From Daniel Greenfield:
It is noteworthy that Malik’s company 1789 is reported to be an anti-woke equity firm. Also, I find the obvious conflict between Malik being a Democrat and his company being an “anti-woke” equity firm to be a curious contradiction worth mentioning.
@Adam Dalgliesh
Thanks for the info.
I wish you a full and speedy recovery, your illness sounds kind of tough.
There are good points in Rabbi Dov Fischer’s opinion above.
And at the same time he pisses me off with HIS ignorance.
Many, perhaps most of modern Israel’s greatest patriots and heroes were entirely non-religious.
The Rabbi thinks that only religious believers can be patriotic.
Ted, my latest post, about the Russian Communist leader Lev Kamenev, just dropped into electronic oblivion, It was a reply to a question to me from REader about the sources of my information about Kamenev. Please rescue it from electronic oblivion and post it in this space, I had promised Reader a reply to my question, and if only out of courtesy to him. rpost it in this space.Thanks, Adam
@Reader. I got most of the information about Kamenev from a biography of Stalin. A quite long and detailed biography. The author’s name might by Simon Schama, although I am not sure about that .It is one of two biographies of Stalin by two Russian-speaking English-Jewish historians who have bothwritten extensively about Stalin. Right now I feel so weak that I cannot even reach to the lowest shelf of my bookcase, where the two very long biographies are. But when I feel a little stronger I will “recue” them and givve you the full bibliographic information.
I also found some useful information about Kamenev on websites, particularly one published by some sort of socialist organization that publishes short biographies about socialist and communist leaders over the past 200 years. Although brief, these articles are suprisingly fair and impartial.
Wiki[edia and some other web sites have some good articles about the Kara’ites and their history.
When I am feeling a little better I will send you more specific bibliographic information.
Thanks for asking.Itisnice to know that there are some other people who are interested in this kind of historical detail.
Most of the time Carlson didn’t mention Israel and I never heard him discuss Jews but.one way in which his broadcasts were valuable is his showing clips of reporters and dem politicians using the exact same words in responding to the events of the day exposing the dem party as a democratic centralist organization (leninist) and the legacy media as its propaganda arm.
They are all antisemites because their focus is on Jews as the troublemakers.
I already posted here, more than once, the statistics that most minorities vote for the Democrats, and many to a much greater extent than the Jews but no one ever pays any attention at how these minorities vote.
BTW, there are already 62 million Hispanics in the US, at least 12 times more than the Jews, why don’t these people (including the self-righteous R. Dov Fischer) bitch about them and how they vote?
I know, I know, they can’t do that because it would be racist!
Email received from “Dr. Jane Statlander, PsyD”;
Joel B. Pollak 11 Dec 2023
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/12/11/biden-im-a-zionist-but-the-south-didnt-like-that/
The President said it. It must be true!
All THREE of them suck.
@Adam Dalgliesh
Where did you get your stuff about Kamenev, that he was a Karaite, etc.?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Kamenev
The point of my somewhat overlong post about Kamenev is that nearly all histories of the Revolution describe him as Jewish when he was actually a Gentile. Many early Boshevik leaders have been inaccurately described as Jews by historians, journalists Youtube raconteurs and others who were not Jews. This includes Lenin, who was only one-eigth part Jewish by descent, and Felix Zzerzhinsky, the first head of the Bosshevik secret police, the Cheka, who was of entirely of ethnic Polish descent on both sides of his ancestry. The exagerated desciptions of the predominence of Jews among the early Jewish leaders has been exploited by antisemites,
Ted, my comment on Lev Kamenev has just deopped into electronic oblivion. Could you please retrieve it and post in this comments section? I just wrote it, so it must have just fallen into anelectronic waste basket. Thanks.
Just a persnickeny correction of a detail: Lev Kamenev was not Jewish. His mother was an Georgian, like Stalin Since he had no Jewish ancestors on his mother’s side, he cannot be considered Jewish. His father was also not Jewish. He was a member of an “ex-Jewish” heretical Jewish sect, the Karaites, that the leading rabbinic “deciders” (poskim)had ruled in the sixteenth century were apostates, and hence not “real” Jews. They therefore pronounced a herem, or ban on them. They were not allowed to attend “orthodox: synogues. :Orthodox: Jews were not allowed to marry them , Orthodox Jews were forbidden to attend their synogues or prayer meetings, All of these bans were still enforced by Russian rabbis at the time of Kamenev’s birth in tsarist Russia, and throughout his life in pre-revolulionary Russia. Around the time of Kamenev’s birth, the Karaite community contested their earlier classification as “Jews” by the tsar’s government, and requested that they be classified as a separate religion from Judaism, That request was granted, Throughiut Kamenev;s life, any official pers he had to carry or any forms he had to fill out identified him as a Karaite, not as a Jew. He and other Kara’ites were not subject to the residence restrictions and other discriminatory laws that were imposed on Jews. This allowed Kamenev to live in Moscow or St. Peterburg without being hassled by the tsar’s police. My guess , and it is onlyis that facilitated his revolutionary pre-1917 activities.
One reason that Kamenev has always regarded as a Jew by anti- Boshevik Russians, and by non-Bolshevik western historians and journalists, is because of his Jewish-sounding birth name, Rosenblum.However, this is by no means proof that he was a Jew, He might have been descended, for example, from an ancestor who was a Jew before the Karaites were excommunicated. Or a Jew who married a Karaite andjoined the Karraite community at some point. In addition, many non-Jews in Russia in Kamenev’s lifetime had German names that could be Jewish, but were often possessed by non-Jews as well. So Kamenev’s German birth name might mean only that he had a German, not necessarily Jewish ancestor somewhere inhis paternal line.
When I began this comment I had no idea it would go on so long.!
I agree, as I usually do with Rav Fischer, however Ben Shapiro made a huge mistake about the vaccines. He had the chutzpah to deride anyone who didn’t get it and encouraged his supporters to get it. I don’t give a damn about his kippa.
Whatever happened that caused Candace Owen to snap, (“Recently, something snapped,”) it is unfortunate because she has chosen for her life’s work, to be in the public limelight.
If you or I made mistakes in our younger days because we had not read enough history, we may feel chagrin in recalling those errors, but the mistakes made were likely only in the presence of a few people, not the world at large.
It must be much more difficult to err on such a public scale. Each time I have erred, or each time someone asked me a question that despite a superficial answer I realized that I didn’t know the answer, it motivated me to find out why I really didn’t know the answer to that question. It motivated me to read and learn. But each of those moments of vulnerability were mostly private experiences.
I think Candace Owens is bright enough to register when she lacks knowledge, but she has not yet had the time to do the reading and research, and at a moment of vulnerability she has tried to cover her public vulnerability at the expense of others.
It is possible that when one’s personal vulnerability is laid bare in a public way, it might act as a deterrent to feeling motivated to learn. A person in that position might want to first convince themselves or others that they do know what they are talking about. For someone as bright as Owens, public shame over not knowing what she is saying is like a dagger to the heart, because that has been her very identity: her intelligence, her mastery of public political discourse. It seems understandable that she would double down on her mistakes as an attempt to cover the defect which has revealed her ignorance.
I can only hope in time that she can heal from these experiences enough to want to learn, to be eager to learn from her mistakes, and to eventually even welcome criticism as a chance to learn something she did not know that she did not know.
I think Owens does not want to be an antisemite, but most of all she does not want to be or be seen as ignorant. For her, “ignorant,” probably means “ignorant black woman” a degraded image of herself that she has probably worked all her life to overcome. And if Jews are the ones laying her ignorance bare for all to see by calling her an antisemite, I think this would be very difficult for her, because Jews had been so prominent in their support for and interest in her points of view.
All of this can be remedied over time: all of us who visit this website have learned from many mistaken ideas from our youth, and we continue to learn every day. She can continue to learn too, but it might be a little more difficult to do so being such a public figure and being judged all the time, on every statement.
I cannot imagine she became as inspiring a figure as she was, prior to all of this controversy, by being uninterested in learning. Perhaps she is someone who will be more motivated to learn because she is in the public eye.
I think she always understood that Jews and Blacks shared experiences of discrimination, and shared being slaves in their historical past. She also was likely inspired by Jews who overcame the Holocaust to found their homeland on their ancient birthplace, just as she overcame the discrimination against Blacks to become an inspiring political conservative voice. Somehow I hope she finds her way back to her connection with Jews because it was good for her, for Jews, for conservatives, and for the US as a whole. But to do that she will have to understand the pain many Jews have felt by some of her actions and statements. And it is an open question as to whether she will be able to do that.
@Peloni Carlson also excised the antisemitic rants of Ye whom Owens defended. And even though he rarely mentioned Israel, when he did, it was usually some crackpot rant about the nefarious doings of the Mossad or insinuation that Israel is entangling America in her wars and doesn’t deserve the aid.
Hello?
@Pelonhi
Thanks for your comment. I wasn’t up to date on that stuff.
The greatest reproach which might be made against either Carlson or Kirk on the issue of antisemitism, ironically enough, would be the role which each of them played in promoting Owens’ debate over antisemitism with Ami Kozac, in which Owens repeatedly made her antisemitic positions clear. Shortly after Owens aired the recording of the her conversation with Kozac, Kirk posted it on his Twitter account without any comment or critique at all. A few days after this, Owens was interviewed in regards to her outrageous statements, which she only partially addressed, in which she repeated her pronounced support for the moral equivalence between the Simchat Torah slaughter and the Pals dying as human shields, as well as suggesting that the ‘Israeli Lobby’ was responsible for funding the CRT teachings in the US, the latter of which Carlson clearly agreed. Personally, I found these actions by both Kirk and Carlson, both, to be irresponsible at best if not outrageously disturbing. The lack of editorial rebuke by either Carlson or Kirk in promoting Owens’ antisemitic rant to their millions of subscribers, to which Carlson partially agreed, seemed to miss Rabbi Fisher’s notice, but I believe it is noteworthy to consider.
Additionally, Owens’ antisemitic tendencies long precede her most recent rant, covering interactions with Kyrie Irving, Ye and Andrew Tate. I can’t say that this is true with either Carlson or Kirk, but I was greatly disappointed by both of them supporting Owens antisemitic vitriol to the degree and manner in which they did.
One more point to share, Owens’ support for Trump is lukewarm at best due to her ego being bruised by Trump during an exchange at a party, from which she comically concluded that Trump would only hurt the Reps in 2024. Her preferred choice at the time appeared to actually be Desantis, but she ultimately concluded that due to candidate misstatements, administrative mistakes, and unimpressive polling numbers, Desantis had no chance of winning.