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How did the mass immigration of Muslims into Western Europe (or indeed Mexicans into the United States) benefit Jews? It is not enough to respond by citing Barbara Spectre or some other Jew saying that diversity keeps Jews safe or Tikkun Olam or something, I mean seriously, if you think it benefits me (a rich Jewish New York banker, the kind of person who matters in this thought experiment) then tell me how.
It seems rather more likely that Jews bought into the progressive, enlightenment, democratic narrative of universal progress upon which the United States was founded by gentile men. This is why there are also gentile whites of the kind who celebrate their own incoming minority status, for example, and indeed many of them.
Why do most white conservatives oppose mass immigration in practice? It’s not out of an esoteric quasi-spiritual reverence for Yamnaya ancestry or the legacy of Greece and Rome, or ethnic purity (and it mostly never was). It’s about the fact that they don’t want to live in a dirtier, poorer, more violent, culturally foreign society peopled largely by people who don’t like them (I don’t, for what it’s worth, think any large percentage American Jews ‘dislike’ whites).
That is the realization most anti-immigrant whites have had; that is what Saad seems to have had. His interests may or may not align with yours, certainly it’s unlikely they do on every issue. But if the issue is mass immigration from the Islamic world (which is by orders of magnitude the number one issue for the European right and Europe in general), then he and them would appear, on this issue, to want it to stop.
Well, as ever, the tragedy of Jewish assimilation is that we tried too hard and were too good at it. Too good at capitalism, too good at liberalism, too good at socialism. Jews took liberalism, fundamentally a gentile invention, too literally, bought into it too wholly, took its premises to their logical conclusions too honestly and too directly. I think of this often. Peter Singer, for better or worse, could only be Jewish; like Marx with Hegel, he is guilty only of extending a gentile ideology - that of Bentham and Mill - to its logical conclusions. It is no surprise that many of the ‘Jewish’ elites far rightists decry (along with many far right Jews like BAP and Moldbug) are only ‘half-Jewish’, because assimilation rates for secular Jews are at 70%+ and have been since at least the 1980s in the US, again in part it’s the extreme rate of Jewish assimilation that leads to such overrepresentation, because Jews had and have the temerity to get rich and then marry the existing elite rather than their own.
This is the grand irony of rightist antisemitism. The greatest charge is hypocrisy, that Jews do unto others (diversity, moral degeneracy etc) what they do not do unto themselves. In reality, precisely the opposite is true, far from cynically exploiting Western enlightenment ideas, (Ashkenazi) Jews tried too hard to implement them. They gleefully expropriated Jewish capitalists in Russia, gleefully embraced the sexual revolution of Hugh Hefner et al (for all the kvetching about Jewish pornographers preying on innocent blonde girls, Jewish women are actually extremely overrepresented among female porn actresses (Casey Calvert, Abella Danger, Nina Hartley), it’s not as if they spared themselves sexual modernity), and gleefully promoted refugee rights, socialism and a generous peace with the Palestinians in Israel even after multiple humiliations (and were only, ultimately, rebuffed because they were demographically swamped by Sephardim, Mizrachim and 1/8 Jewish Soviet immigrants.
The problem, which I think we have always failed to understand, is that the gentile writers of the enlightenment were less revolutionary than they appear from their writings. They were thinking in the context of an established civilizational structure whose boundaries they wanted to test, but which they did not wholesale wish to upend - even if they wrote as such. Freed from the metaphorical and sometimes literal ghetto by this ideology, the mistake we made was thinking it was SO great that we should take these ideas of universalism, of rights, of equality, of peace, of personal and communal liberation to their logical conclusions. We didn’t understand that the gentiles, writing in the context of their own worldview, their own educations and faith and so on, did not mean that themselves.
I really think this is the tragedy of the Haskalah.
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