THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

I was watching a report on the Council of Conservative Citizens on CNN. The representative of the Anti-Defamation League said that the group was "racist and anti-Semitic." I have not heard anyone even imply that they have said anything anti-Semitic.

What the ADL was calling "anti-Semitic" was the fact that the CCC was worried about the disappearance of the white race.

So what the ADL is saying is that anyone who is concerned about the disappearance of the white race is THEREFORE anti-Semitic.

This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you use your Jewish identity to fight for the destruction of another group, that group is going to hate you.

Some years back, New York rabbis put a full-page ad in the New York Times which read, "Jews, Be Jewish!" They were worried about the disappearance of Jews.

According to the ADL, Jews have a right to an identity, but whites don't. And they are willing to crush all opposition to that position.

And, as always, respectable conservatives are the very first to want to join the lynch mob.

The day after Don Kennedy appeared on "Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher" for the League of the South, Maher made an interesting comment. That show the next night was about Jews and Jewish identity. Maher began by saying that the discussion about Jews was the continuation of a theme: he was dealing with important identity groups. He said he had had Southerners on the night before, and this one was about Jews. This was a very, very strong boost to Southern identity, since Jewish identity is absolutely holy to liberals and therefore to respectable conservatives. Maher said that Southerners have an identity as important as that of Jews!

You know this is true. I know this is true. But what liberal or respectable conservative would DARE say that? That was a brave thing for Maher to say, because it is a statement liberal Jewish groups would declare to be Evil. After all, it is still traditional for a real Southerner to be proud of it if he is white. Turncoat Southerners deny this, but everybody knows it is true. To the ADL, if you are proud to be white, you are anti-Semitic. The New York-based ADL promotes the idea that Jewish identity is at war with Southern identity, just as it is with white identity.

In the history of the South, exactly the opposite was the case. Bernard Baruch was born and raised in Camden, South Carolina. His father was Deputy Surgeon General of the Confederate States of America. After the War, his father was a member in good standing of the Kershaw County Ku Klux Klan in the 1870s. When they lived in New York as wealthy, highly respectable people, Bernard could never keep his father from jumping up and shrieking the Rebel Yell whenever "Dixie" was played.

Bernard Baruch said the first time he ever even heard of anti-Semitism was his first day in New York City, when someone called him a "dirty Jew." The story of loyal Southern Jews goes on and on. Both of the first Jewish senators in the United States were from the South, and the first Jewish cabinet member in America was Confederate Treasury Secretary Judah P. Benjamin. When I was coming up in the 1950s in South Carolina, the Speaker of the State House of Representatives was Solomon K. Blatt, of Barnwell County.

Down through the years, dealing with hundreds of Northern Jews, I have thought of all this as their militant hatred of the South and white people in general boiled out. The most recent example of this was a comment by feminist leader Betty Friedan, blaming the impeachment of Clinton on "dirty old white men." The hatred of white people, the hatred of the South, all this is routine and accepted rhetoric among leftist Jews. Nobody, but NOBODY objects to it, least of all respectable conservatives. As I say, their only comment is to demand a lead place in the lynch mob when a white gentile gets out of line.

One Jewish man years ago said to me, "Other Jews can't believe it, but I actually LIKE the South." It never occurred to him that this might just lower my opinion of his Jewish friends. I wonder what he would have thought of the South if I had said, "Other Southerners can't believe it, but I actually LIKE Jews!" But then again, white gentiles don't have feelings, do they? So when Maher compared Southern and Jewish identities, he was saying something very important. Historically, Southern Jews have been proud to be white and proud to be Southern.

But for a New York Jewess, it is routine to blame "dirty old white men." I wonder how liberals -- and therefore respectable conservatives -- would have reacted if someone had blamed ANYTHING on "dirty old Jews"? This statement is typical of Friedan, and Friedan is typical of the ADL mentality. Friedan is a member of a group which is referred to by pretty well everybody else -- privately -- as "New York Jews." By this is not meant people like Bernard Baruch and his father who tried to bring civilization to that city from the South. It refers to a group of people which, using its Jewishness as an excuse, are rude and nasty and openly hate and insult other groups. The group that brought over this ugly "New York"-type Jewishness was the millions of Eastern European Jews who came over in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They brought with them every grudge they ever got in Europe. They brought over their far leftism. They made it fashionable for New Yorkers to glory in their rudeness. Not all of them, of course, but the ones who didn't have that attitude were obviously overwhelmed by those who did.

Today, a major heritage of this wave of immigrants is an attitude of pure hatred for those around them, the hatred demonstrated by the Friedans and the Dershowitzes and a legion of others. They keep alive the spirit of the pogroms their ancestors suffered, and they are determined to make Americans suffer for nineteenth-century Russian anti-Semitism. Not surprisingly, their gentile neighbors soon got to really hate Jews. Then Hitler came along and gave them a fresh justification for their nastiness and hatred. Anybody who talks back to them now is anaziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews.

Friedan continues this horrible tradition of "New York City Jews." Today, due to the New York Jewish tradition -- with a little help from their liberal friends in the North -- the old Czarist idea that Jews don't have feelings still rules. It just rules IN REVERSE: Modern America insists that it is white gentiles who are without feelings. Jews who worry about the survival of Israel are just being patriotic. Whites who worry about the survival of their race are being naziswhowanttokillsixmillionjews. I cannot imagine a policy better guaranteed to promote anti-Semitism. This is why I appreciated Maher's offhand -- and unintended -- comment on Southern identity being comparable to Jewish identity. Maher says we Southerners not only have feelings, we even have a right to an identity. Just like humans do.