The problem of anti-semitism cannot be solved by a clever publicist, several panelists at the Facing Tomorrow conference said Thursday in Jerusalem.

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, through which he has been battling anti-Semitism for the past 43 years, said it matters little what and how Jews do - the truth has little impact on how Jews or Israel are perceived.

The paradox, he said, is that despite all evidence to the contrary, Jews believe that "it will matter what we do, what we say and how we act."

Foxman attributed anti-Semitism to jealousy that so many Jews excel at what they do. 

Distress due to anti-Semitism was the main reason his family left Russia, Google co-founder Sergey Brin told TheMarker in an interview over the weekend.

Brin, 34, was in Israel for President Shimon Peres' presidential conference "Facing Tomorrow," and visited Google's Israeli offices as well. 

He was born in Moscow in 1973 to a Jewish couple, who belonged to the city's intelligentsia. His father wanted to study physics at university in order to fulfill his lifelong dream and become an astronomer, but was turned down because the Communist Party banned Jews from physics departments, in order to prevent them from accessing the country's nuclear secrets.

Some of the criticism brewing in Canada against the state of Israel, including from some members of Parliament, is similar to the attitude of Nazi Germany in the Second World War, Prime Minister Stephen Harper warned yesterday.

"I guess my fear is what I see happening in some circles is (an) anti-Israeli sentiment, really just as a thinly disguised veil for good old-fashioned anti-Semitism, which I think is completely unacceptable," Mr. Harper said in an interview with CJAD/CFRB radio.

"We learned in the Second World War that those who would hate and destroy the Jewish people would ultimately hate and destroy the rest of us as well, and the same holds today." 

Kevin MacDonald. Photo by David Sprague

Kevin MacDonald, Cal State Long Beach, and the downside of academic freedom

Kevin MacDonald had just completed the first in a series of books that would come to define him. Awaiting feedback from his publisher 15 years ago, MacDonald sent his manuscript to a colleague in the psychology department at California State University Long Beach (CSULB). The feedback was not encouraging.

"What troubles me most is that your criticism of Jews may be taken seriously by groups and individuals who both fear and hate Jews," Martin Fiebert wrote in a 12-point reply. "Your manuscript, unintentionally perhaps, reinforces the stereotype that all Jews, be they assimilated or not, are clannish, deceptive, and exploitive. I'm sure you would be dismayed to find that your book has a treasured place in the bookcases of neo-Nazis along with 'Mein Kampf' and the 'Protocols of Zion.'"

Anti-Jewish sentiments will cause any individual to be accused of more bad motives and nasty deeds than a group of villains in a movie out of the film noir era. Ernst Zundel, Germar Rudolf, Fredrick Toben, David Duke, Fred Leuchter, Douglas Christie, Paul Fromm, Edgar Steele and other dissenters are not merely looked upon as “anti-Semites”, whatever that stretchy little buzzword now means, but as criminals, moral, intellectual and ideological criminals, simply because their words raise questions about historical events and their writings and statements indict Jewish groups for their censorship, their neo-Bolshevik methodologies, their kangaroo courts and their disdain for the freedoms once accorded autonomous men and women in open societies where all ideas were given a place at the table. Now it seems that the table has six sides and only seats the smarmy apparatchiks of the Ziogentsia. 

Anti-Jewish sentiments merely serve to point a finger at what I have dubbed the “expeditors of decline”, those pushing scat, snuff, and other bloody and diuretic excesses in our Talmudized entertainment, where passing gas, slicing sinew and celebrating the conjoining of the macabre and the erotically bent has become standard fare, almost “traditional” in the minds of those Jews who pen such oddities. That all of this misshapen weirdness is then wed so breezily to the pathologizing of traditionalist (mostly Catholic and Protestant) religiosity, makes it even more charged and insulting to Jewry’s overweening and overwelcoming host. Fundamentalist serial killers, crooked ministers, cannibalistic priests and mentally unbalanced parishioners have become, not rare and forgettable characters or side-notes in Jewish films, books and television offerings. No, they are now a steady dietary staple. One would be hard-pressed to watch more than a few movies without seeing these kinds of oddball archetypes.