Louise Mensch and I continue to debate anti-semitism, Ann Coulter, and the #AltRight on Heat Street:
Louise Mensch: So you don’t care that the left was correct about your racism and sexism?
Vox Day: We don’t care what they say or what they think, at all.
Louise Mensch: You obviously do care because you’re employing tactics against this, you’ve just described.
Vox Day: No, we don’t care what they do or what they think, but we are certainly engaged in a cultural rhetorical war against them, but we don’t care what they think about us. We’re their enemy, they’re our enemy, and that’s fine.
Louise Mensch: But you’re not employing this against the enemy. I never see these memes employed against the left, ever. I only see them employed against people on the right. John Podhoretz, Ben Shapiro, Cathy Young, people who are 100% on the right. You don’t seem to bother with anyone of the left. Not that … By the way, God forbid that should be taken as an encouragement to go off to burn Hillary supporters with this stuff, but it’s red on red fire.
Vox Day: I’m pretty sure they get sent to anyone who attacks them.
Louise Mensch: You’ve put Ann Coulter in a difficult position, because she has said, not convincingly at all, that she isn’t anti-Semitic. And you’ve just described how …
Vox Day: I don’t believe she is anti-Semitic.
Louise Mensch: Right …
Vox Day: She’s not anti-Semitic.
Louise Mensch: … but then a whole bunch of anti-Semites are running to her defense by tweeting Holocaust cartoons at Jews?
Vox Day: That’s what you’re not understanding is that the fact that one is not anti-Semitic does not mean that you have any obligation whatsoever to disavow anyone.
Louise Mensch: Ann Coulter though, is being defended by a bunch of anti-Semites who as their weapon use anti-Semitism. In order to try and prove she’s not anti-Semitic, that’s not very helpful, is it?
Vox Day: Well, but again I don’t think that that’s the objective or the concern.
Louise Mensch: Do you guys even have an objective?
Vox Day: Absolutely.
Louise Mensch: What is it?
Vox Day: The chief objective for … I probably … I don’t speak for the entire alt-right because the alt-right doesn’t have leaders, but I am alt-right, and my objective is the preservation of Western civilization.
Read the whole thing there. Jerry Pournelle did, although he’s been finding the whole thing a little hard to follow:
I’m afraid I wasted my time in trying to follow yet another debate about anti-Semitism, but I never did understand what they were debating about. While America has a small number of genuine anti-Semites (under any definition of the term), they are pretty well irrelevant. As Irving Kristol once said, America is a safer and generally more pleasant place for Jews than Israel is ever likely to be. Now of course there are organizations, mostly but not all Jewish, that equate any criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, but serious people, including Kristol, found that absurd.
There are of course places where there is real anti-Semitism, but most of them are Semitic now that the National Socialists no longer rule Germany. Fascism isn’t even anti-Semitic although the Nazi’s (who weren’t really Fascists) were. Mussolini had many high ranking Jews in his Fascist regime right up until he gave up trying to prevent the Anschluss with Austria and made alliance with Hitler. At Hitler’s insistence he began persecuting Jews, but it was not part of the Fascist – rods and axe – agenda until imposed by Germany.
But Islam certainly is anti-Jewish, right down to their Holy Koran; since many Islamic nations are Semitic – certainly not all, since neither Persians nor Kurds nor Turks are Semitic – the term anti-Semitic has more political meaning than descriptive accuracy, and is rather useless in rational debate – but on a practical level anti-Semitic in the Middle East means anti-Jewish, and at least to those who believe the Koran, means war to the knife. After the end of days, the rocks will cry out, O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him. Now that’s anti-Semitic. Only of course the Muslim who is to do the killing is likely to be a Semite.
Adding to the confusion is the very real problem I mentioned in the debate, which is that the only thing as potential dangerous to the Jewish population in the United States as 1940s-era German-style anti-semitism is insufficient anti-semitism. After all, DNA is destiny.