THE JEWS, THE MINORITIES
AND THE MULTICULTURAL IMPERATIVE

INTRODUCTION

Today, in three of the earth's eight great civilizations[1] - civilizations which increasingly are finding themselves at one another's throat, specifically, (1) Western Christianity, (2) Orthodoxy, and (3) the Islamic World - anti-Semitism has re-awakened, like some hideous phoenix, and has become a major "player" among each civilization's radical right-wing champions. It seems that it has fallen to the Jews once again the bad luck of playing the villain in the "civilization drama" of all three cultures - and the incongruity of each feuding civilization choosing as its main villain the same "player" matters little to the right-wing partisans of each respective civilization. It is a unique situation where the old saying "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" does not apply. And the role assigned to the Jews in the mythology of these right-wingers? - they are the hated "globalists," the intellectual force behind multiculturalism, the bankers and financiers driving the economic integration of the world [Please see "The Elite, Money, and the End of Days"], the media moguls responsible for the destruction of "traditional values," the destroyers of the old Orthodox World through communism and socialism, and - finally - the Islamic World's "Zionist Specter" - a "nightmare" which has even "seized control of 'Holy Jerusalem'." [Please see our series of articles entitled "Pat Robertson and Illuminism"]

CIVILIZATION EMASCULATION

The Jews, according to these extremists, are the ubiquitous "destroyers of civilization," the ever present "civilization polluters" who emasculate all the civilizations with which they come in contact - and, the protestations of the Jewish community notwithstanding, there is a kernel of truth to these allegations - though not in the sense that these zealots mean.

The fact of the matter is, however, the Jews often do dilute the civilizations which they impact - especially the religious undergirdings of these civilizations. However, they do so not necessarily out of any sinister design bent on civilization destruction, but out of motives which aim at their (i.e., the Jews) own survival and inclusion - specifically, the effort by Jews to mitigate those aspects of the majority culture's religious undergirdings which exclude them, thereby creating what they see as a more "inclusive" and "non-threatening" society in which they too can participate as full members while not at the same time being forced to "convert." [Please see our article, "Political Christianity."] It is in this context that Jews have been at the forefront of removing those religious obstacles which they perceive have limited their full participation in society - and this is true not just with regard to Western Civilization, but also with regard to the Islamic and Orthodox worlds as well.

But it is in the West, and particularly in the United States, that Jewish efforts in this regard have proven extraordinarily successful, so much so that Benjamin Ginsberg, a Jewish political scientist, can write:

"... (Christian) religious symbols and (Christian) forms of expression that Jews find threatening have been almost completely eliminated from schools and other public institutions (in the United States). Suits brought by the ACLU, an organization whose leadership and membership are predominantly Jewish, secured federal court decisions banning officially sanctioned prayers in the public schools and creches and other (Christian) religious displays in parks and public buildings." [Please see Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)]

However, there has been a price for all this - a rage within the larger Christian majority which appears to be growing rather than subsiding. Jews may say that they are not "anti-Christian" and that their sole aim has been merely to provide an atmosphere in which they can also participate, but the clear result of all their activity over the last sixty years has been to diminish America's majority, Euro-centered, Christian civilization.

Jews, of course, would retort by saying that the civilization remains for all practical purposes a "Christian" civilization if only because the great majority of those living in the West (and in the United States) remain Christian; all that they have aimed at is the removal of the civilization's "rough edges." But to civilization purists, it is precisely these so-called "rough edges" - the ones which make minorities feel so uncomfortable - which must be guarded if the distinctive features of the majority civilization are to be maintained, such as prayer in the schools, the use of public Christian symbols during Christmas and Easter, etc.

THE ORIGINS OF TODAY'S
MULTICULTURAL ALLIANCE

If it had been simply a matter of "toleration" that the Jewish community had desired, rather than "full participation," there would never have been any trouble - Jews have been "tolerated" in the West, and especially the United States - for some time now. But what the Jewish community has been aiming at is "full participatory rights" - something which has persistently eluded them. What to do? Obviously, the Jews - acting alone - did not possess the numbers adequate to cause much of a ripple in the majority civilization. They needed allies - at least enough to cause waves. The opportunity to form an alliance large enough to cause such waves finally occurred in the 1950s with Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement.

Like the Jews, blacks too had felt excluded from full participation in the majority civilization - and, like the Jews, blacks too had felt oppressed by the symbols of that civilization: all-white country clubs, the use of degrading racial imagery, etc. It was on this common ground of exclusion that Jewish and black leaders began to forge their alliance - an alliance which could command numbers sufficient enough to cause waves. Jews contributed much of the early intellectual and legal expertise as well as a great deal of the Movement's financial backing, while blacks contributed the people and much of the grass roots organizational wizardry. Just how important this alliance was to black and Jewish progress toward "full participation" is testified to by Jesse Jackson. He writes,

"The benefits of the coalition have been clear ... blacks and Jews worked together to pass ... (most of the civil rights laws) ... Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley ... (worked hand-in-glove with) Jack Greenberg and Joe Rauh ... Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Cheney - two Jews and a black - found a common grave in Mississippi ... "[2 ]

And it wasn't just some haphazard process that Jews and blacks used to achieve their goal of "full participatory rights" in the majority white civilization - it was one which was carefully crafted and which contained its own inner dynamic and rationale. It's been described in detail by liberal guru Joseph Raz. Raz describes it as a three-staged process. Raz calls the first stage "Toleration." He writes,

"It consists in letting minorities conduct themselves as they wish without being criminalized, so long as they do not interfere with the culture of the majority. To a considerable degree this meant restriction of the use of public spaces and public media by the minority. It also usually meant that all its activities were to be financed out of the resources of the minority community - in addition to its contribution through taxation to the maintenance of the general culture."[3]

The Jewish community had already advanced to this stage of the process by the end of the Second World War - and during the late 1940s and early '50s they undertook the arduous task of helping blacks up the ladder to this level as well. But neither community had any intention of stopping there.

Raz continues,

"Toleration was eventually supplemented ... by a second liberal policy toward minorities - one based on the assertion of an individual right against discrimination on national, racial, ethnic, or religious grounds, or on grounds of gender or sexual orientation ... Nondiscrimination rights go well beyond toleration. They have far-reaching consequences that affect the way the majority community leads its own life. Most obviously, it is no longer free to exclude members of the minority from its schools, places of employment, residential neighborhoods, and so on ... Under a regime of scrupulous nondiscrimination a country's public services, its educational system, and its economic and political arenas are no longer the preserve of the majority, but common to all its members as individuals."[4]

This second plateau (the assertion of individual rights against discrimination on national, racial, ethnic, or religious grounds) was essentially reached in the mid-1950s and codified by the Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. Board of Education (which ended racial segregation in the South and in the nation's public institutions) and the 1964 Civil Rights legislation of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society." At this point other minorities [e.g., Latinos, American Indians (i.e., "Native Americans"), gays and lesbians, militant feminists, etc.] began joining up - expanding the minority coalition and strengthening the assault against "Traditional America."

Finally, the third step is reached: the affirmation of "multiculturalism" and "diversity." Raz writes,

"Multiculturalism emphasizes the importance to political action of two evaluative judgments. First, the belief that individual freedom and prosperity depends on full and unimpeded membership in a respected and flourishing cultural group. Second, a belief in value pluralism, and in particular in the validity of the diverse values embodied in the practices of different societies. Given those beliefs, multiculturalism requires a political society to recognize the equal standing of all the stable and viable cultural communities existing in that society. This implies the need for multicultural political societies to reconceive themselves. There is no room for talk of a minority problem or of a majority tolerating the minorities. A political society, a state, consists - if it is multicultural - of diverse communities and belongs to none of them."[5 ]

"Value pluralism" - i.e., the concept of politically recognizing differing "systems of evaluative judgments" in the nation's institutions - then, is the end of the process towards which the minority community is pushing. In this system of thinking, all systems of "evaluative judgments" must be accorded equal weight in the nation's public institutions - including its system of public education. Thus, when liberals undertook to inject textbooks which taught homosexual life-styles into the New York public school system several years ago, it occurred not as a happenstance incident - as some liberal apologists would have people believe - but as part of a "natural process" which liberals were pushing - a process which they feel is not only logical, but irresistible.

DISPLACEMENT OF MAJORITY WHITES

The process of cultural and social "diversification" - which has essentially meant the dispossession and displacement of the majority white civilization" - has been greatly aided by two separate phenomena which manifested themselves propitiously (at least insofar as the minority coalition was concerned) in the early 1950s, just as the process which Raz describes was beginning to "take off:" the first was the stunned silence the white community was forced into as the full extent of what the Nazis had wrought in the name of "white superiority" during World War II became clear - after all, how could anyone push "white pride" in the face of what the Nazis had done? The second phenomenon was the unprecedented expansion of the federal bureaucracy beginning first with Roosevelt's New Deal and which continued to explode in size during and after the Second World War - a bureaucracy which, as Professor Daniel Bell of Columbia has suggested, emanated principally from America's more liberally oriented college and university system and which was made up of "free thinkers," Jewish intellectuals and secularists to a much larger extent than was true for the general population. For the most part, these were people who not only did not conceive of themselves as having much of a stake in the older Euro-based, Christian culture, but for one reason or another actually felt threatened by it.

It was precisely this class of people who - with the advent of Roosevelt - began moving into the new bureaucracy created by "big government," bringing with them their new "antireligious" attitudes and their desire for a more multicultural society. It wasn't so much that their numbers were actually growing as it was that their role and influence in government was expanding.[6] In this regard, Bell says, there has been plenty of reason for majority whites to feel threatened - they should feel threatened, because they are threatened.[7 ]

Why? - because, as Raz explains, what multiculturalism is ultimately aiming at is their displacement - the reduction of their majority white, Euro-centric, Christian-based culture to mere "equal status" with all the other cultural communities in the country, including the gay and radical feminist communities. It's for this precise reason that the budget battle between Clinton and the House Republicans has been so hotly contested: what House Republicans are aiming at isn't so much a balanced budget as it is the emasculation of the Federal bureaucracy - and liberal Democrats know this. Should House Republicans succeed, liberalism in this country will be permanently crippled.

SHOCK OF MULTI-CULTURALISM

The shock of multiculturalism - especially the kind of multiculturalism which elevates the gay and lesbian communities to equal status with the older Christian culture - has been mind-numbing to most whites. William Raspberry, a well known black journalist, has come closest to understanding the nature of this shock; in commenting on the drive by gay rights advocates to gain "employment access" to the U.S. military, he writes,

"Why does the military establishment feel threatened by President Clinton's promise to lift the ban against gays? What is it that so many rank-and-file Americans - including most of the ex-servicemen I've talked to - fear will happen to military discipline and morale if the ban is lifted? ...

"I'm guessing that if the lifting of the ban meant only that homosexual service personnel would no longer have to lie, no one would care very much. But the fear is that something else would change, in unhealthy directions ...

"Lifting the ban might be easy and relatively non controversial if it were just a matter of fairness ... But when the goal moves beyond popularly perceived fairness and comes to condoning sexual behavior, a lot of people - not all of them bigots - start bailing out. There's a difference between a homosexual saying, on the one hand, 'My sexual orientation and behavior are none of your business', and, on the other hand, 'I demand that you acknowledge my sexual choices as the exact equivalent of yours'."

The rage that all this is leading to is manifesting itself in white churches throughout the country, and is made all the more dangerous when one begins to assess the real, relative strengths of the majority and minority communities in the country. For example, if one were to add up all the minorities together, throw in the white feminists and the gay and lesbian communities, it is doubtful that the minority community could account for even 25 percent of the electorate.[8 ]

LITTLE CHANCE FOR COMPROMISE

The problem is made all the more difficult and explosive when one begins to realize that in the end there is probably little chance for compromise between the minority cultures which have arisen in recent years and the older, white culture. Indeed, even a liberal like Ronald D'Workin believes that - with regard to issues like abortion and homosexuality, issues which are extremely consequential to important components of the minority (multicultural) alliance - there may be no middle ground, and Americans are only kidding themselves in thinking that there is one.[9] This portends very grave and ominous consequences for the future. Alan Wolfe, professor of sociology and political science at Boston University explains; using the issues of abortion and homosexuality as examples, the same ones which D'Workin used, he writes,

"... abortion (and homosexuality) are matters of 'high' politics (for the feminist and gay and lesbian communities), involving fundamental questions about the definition of public and private, liberty and authority, and the meaning and purpose of life ... At this principled elevation, abortion (and homosexuality) present a tragic conflict, like the Civil War (and the question of slavery). Each side in the debate understands itself, and is understood by its antagonists, as standing for a world-view that cannot be compromised."[10] Under these circumstances, our national discussions on questions of morality, religion and culture have become "a language game that has the form of meaningful communication, but is in fact merely another form of aggression against those with whom we disagree."[11 ]

Wolfe explains:

"The problem begins with intellectuals, who routinely violate fundamental democratic principles in the way they balance the competing interests at stake. Both a liberal such as Laurence Tribe of the Harvard Law School and a conservative such as R.C. Sproul, an evangelical theologian, are incapable of recognizing the legitimacy of their opponent's position ... Tribe is explicitly antidemocratic. To him, the whole purpose of a constitution and a supreme court is to act as a check on popular positions. Sproul, by contrast, sees government as having no other purpose than to embody God's will - not exactly a formula for pluralism or religious liberty."[12]

James Davison Hunter, one of the few American writers who is trying to understand the culture wars rather than fight them, agrees with both Dworkin and Wolfe; he believes that new fault lines are emerging in U.S. society which inevitably will set citizen against citizen over questions of identity, sexuality, and private behavior - questions which do not lend themselves easily to discussion and compromise.

In this regard, Hunter believes that a fundamental change has occurred within the larger conservative religious community in America; they are no longer the fractured community they once were - a fact which had enabled liberals to run roughshod over them for so many years; they have united. Protestants have joined forces with other Protestants, and Protestants with Catholics in an effort to confront the forces of "secularism," "globalism," and "modernism" which they believe threaten to inundate and render irrelevant their larger Christian community. Under such circumstances, their own "interfamily differences" have been set aside in order to confront what is perceived to be a larger threat: the destruction of their community by forces which they see as inimical to their continued existence as a meaningful and viable community.

Hunter apparently agrees with Dr. Samuel P. Huntington, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. Huntington says that -

"... world politics are entering a new phase ... (in which) the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural ... The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics ..." [13 ]

Increasing numbers of scholars are beginning to see the development of a new phenomenon in all of the world's great civilizations - a movement away from the globalism and secularism of the last forty years; they believe that this is what the new "fundamentalism" is all about. It is in this ominous context that these scholars believe the questions of abortion, homosexuality, family, single motherhood, feminism, etc. must be viewed. Seen from this perspective, there can be no middle ground. Each side (i.e., the forces of globalism on the one side, and religious or "civilization" fundamentalism on the other) is pushing for total victory.

THE THREAT TO THE JEWISH COMMUNITY

And where do the Jews fit in all this? - although most whites would not say so, there is a great deal of anti-Jewish hostility in their anger; and this hostility is clearly reflected in their hate-filled rhetoric against the A.C.L.U. Why? - because in the artful phraseology which has over the years come to surround anti-Semitism in the United States, the A.C.L.U. has become nothing more than a code word for the Jews. White males perceive the A.C.L.U. to be nothing more than the tool of the Jewish community - a Jewish community that is out to "get them" by emasculating their Euro-centered, Christian-based civilization. Moreover, the rhetoric directed against the A.C.L.U. is not confined merely to the crazed fringes of the Religious and Secular Right. Well-known and well-thought-of members of the conservative movement habitually use this rhetoric - people like William Bennett, Jack Kemp, Bob Dole, George Bush, etc. - and it's pretty much of a stretch to believe that in using this rhetoric they are not well aware of its anti-Jewish overtones - its use as a code word by the radical right against the Jews - and that in doing so some of them - not necessarily those listed above - are purposefully sending signals to those elements.

In the perception of many majority whites, the heart and soul - and the financial power and brains - of their minority combatants are the Jews [by which they mean LIBERAL Jews (most white Christians - at least those who live outside New York - don't even realize that there is such a thing as a "conservative Jewish community")].

Of course, what mainstream whites say in the privacy of their homes, far-right politicos say openly and in public. Take one example, Vanguard Magazine, of Hillsboro, West Virginia:

"Jews ... have taken the lead in persuading a whole generation that homosexuality is a normal and acceptable way of life; that there is nothing at all wrong with White women dating or marrying Black men, or with White men marrying Asiatic women; that all races are inherently equal in ability and character - except that the character of the White race is suspect because of a history of oppressing other races; and that any effort by Whites at racial self-preservation is reprehensible.[14 ]

While such rhetoric used to be confined to small, radical-right fringe groups, it can now be found in many "respectable" quarters throughout the right-wing matrix (thanks largely to the increasing links between "moderate" groups and far-right groups which have been nourished as a result of the Culture Wars of the last few years) - and liberals are making a big mistake in believing otherwise.

MINORITY ALLIANCE
BEGINNING TO FRACTURE

To make matters worse for the minorities, their alliance is becoming too unwieldy and is showing evidence of internal disintegration. To a large extent this is the result of liberal overreach - women in combat, gays in the military, homosexual marriage, etc. [Indeed, it's no accident that today the largest women's organization in the country is no longer the National Organization of Women (NOW), but Concerned Women of America (CWA), a Christian-based organization which virulently opposes the feminist agenda of NOW.] The fact of the matter is, the Jewish / black alliance is all but dead - thanks largely to Louis Farakhan and the Nation of Islam; moreover, the feminist / black alliance has splintered, a fracturing which became especially evident during the O.J. Simpson trial. And it's not just in the United States. Take Europe, for example: in Vienna, Austria, newly arrived Muslim immigrants want to ban the wearing of crucifixes by Catholic children in the public schools; the same demands are being made by North African immigrants in France.

To Muslims, the crucifix is a symbol of grief and oppression; but to Catholics, the crucifix is a symbol of their faith. Catholics, who have worn their crucifixes to school for centuries in nations which for more than a millennium have prided themselves on their Catholicism, see Muslim demands to ban their crucifixes as an abatement of their civilization; they are frightened by what they see as a process which is diluting their historic culture. Multiply these problems many times over throughout Europe as Muslim immigrants stream into Europe from North Africa and Turkey as a result of economic dislocation, and one can begin to appreciate the depth to which the civilization identity of Europe is being tested - and its growing! The anxiety Europeans feel is somewhat similar to the apprehension many white Americans are experiencing as a result of Mexican and Latin American immigration, but insofar as the immigration Europeans are experiencing is a non-Christian immigration, their civilization problems are that much more severe.

White Europeans see themselves besieged by a militant Muslim fundamentalism on the outside and a growing Islamic Fifth Column on the inside. And they perceive themselves paralyzed from taking effective action against this threat by multicultural elites which have captured the governing institutions of their civilization. And again, the comparison between what's happening in Europe with regard to Islamic fundamentalism is mirrored in the United States by what a growing number of whites see as a Hispanic invasion of their civilization; American whites also see themselves as impotent to take action to protect their civilization by a multicultural elite which - like the elites in Europe - have seized the instruments of government.

JEWS AS THE VILLAINS -
GOD HELP US ALL

In all of this, whites are increasingly fixating on the Jews as the "masterminds" behind their miseries and perceived "displacement." As we said at the beginning, it seems that it has fallen to the Jews once again the bad luck of playing the villain in the "civilization drama" that is currently raging in Europe and the United States as "white Christians" increasingly bestir themselves to take back their culture "for Christ and the church." And the role assigned to the Jews in the mythology of these "Civilization purists?" - it's the same one which Hitler assigned them sixty years ago. To be sure, the rhetoric has been toned down, and the use of code words tends to mask what is being said and who the main targets are - but to those who really stir themselves to look into these matters, there can be little doubt as to what is occurring.

Evangelicals, if they are honest, know full well what we are talking about here. Most have heard it by now in their churches; it does little good for them to pretend otherwise. Evangelicals need to begin to stand against the pull of this mythology - and they need to do it now before it really begins to take hold. The magnetism of this kind of thinking - once it gets started - is too much to be successfully resisted once it gets a full head of steam behind it.

God bless all of you,

S.R. Shearer
Antipas Ministries

1. Professor Samuel P. Huntington of Yale defines eight major civilizations: (1) Western - which includes Western Europe and North America; (2) Slavic-Orthodox; (3) Islamic - which includes three subdivisions: Arab, Turkic and Malay; (4) Latin American; (5) Hindu; (6) Confucian; (7) Japanese; and (8) African. [Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations," Foreign Affairs, Summer, 1993, pg. 22-25.]
2. Jesse Jackson, "No Group Has Won Its Rights Without Help," in the Los Angeles Times, March 6, 1994, pg. M-5.
3. Joseph Raz, "Multiculturalism: A Liberal Perspective in Dissent, Winter, 1994, pg. 67.
4. Ibid, pg. 67.
5. Ibid, pg. 67.
6. Daniel Bell, "The Dispossessed - 1962," Columbia University Forum (Fall, 1962), pp. 4-12.
7. Daniel Bell, "The Dispossessed - 1962," Columbia University Forum (Fall, 1962), pp. 4-12.
8. From "Being an American," an essay by Louis Menand, in the October 30, 1992, issue of the Times Literary Supplement. Menand is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine. This particular piece was taken from Harper's Magazine, March, 1993, pg. 26.
9. Please see "The Coming Face of the Culture War" in The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1994, pg. 74.
10. Ibid., pg. 74; also see Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America's Culture War by James Davison Hunter, Free Press, 320 pgs.
11. Wolfe on Hunter in "The Coming Face of the Culture War," The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1994, pg. 74.
12. Wolfe on Hunter in "The Coming Face of the Culture War," The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1994, pg. 74.
13. Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations," Foreign Affairs, Summer, 1993, pg. 22-25.
14. By the Research Staff of National Vanguard Magazine, Hillsboro, West Virginia.