I pointed out previously that persons of Jewish descent in anti-Semitic societies sometimes become openly anti-Semitic themselves to prove their lack of loyalty to the Jewish community. The flip side is that people with no Jewish descent (e.g., with very high probability, Hitler) are often alleged by their political enemies to really be Jews, an allegation that fits in with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that Jews run the world via stealth. To take an absurd example, neo-Nazi websites were circulating a phony genealogy last Fall claiming that Sarah Palin’s ancestors were Jews.
David M. Nieporent says:
I thought that was O.J. Simpson.
October 7, 2009, 9:37 amJMA says:
Tangentially related: who saw that Family Guy episode last week-ish?
October 7, 2009, 9:46 amSkyler says:
This was an old claim, and it doesnt get truer because it gets repeated by a British tabloid.
Shame on all who bought this blatantly bogus bull.
Not only is it embarrassng, it is also bigoted and irrelevent. Is the implication that only Jews can be monsters? Or were people thinking that maybe he would change his views if he were exposed as a Jew? Hardly.
Shame on you, Bernstein, for adding to this debacle.
October 7, 2009, 10:01 amChrisTS says:
Why didn’t the neo-nazis like Palin?
October 7, 2009, 10:09 amDaniel Chapman says:
Looks like you still have 5 minutes or so to delete that comment, TS… You probably should.
October 7, 2009, 10:11 amanonymous says:
“How d’ya like that, boys? A non Jew and his name is Ahmadinejad. And we went for it. I went for it.
Treated him like a kid brother…”
Daniel C.? Pipe down now and don’t fear being exposed to other points of view in this here marketplace of ideas.
You don’t have to buy yourself, but we like to see a lot of products displayed, to evaluate for ourselves which ones we want to buy. Go shop somewhere else if you’re offended by what’s served up here?
October 7, 2009, 10:21 amDavid Bernstein says:
FWIW, I pointed out when I linked to the story that “it may just be disinformation.”
October 7, 2009, 10:29 amPersonFromPorlock says:
And what was all the hoo-raw about, anyway? All the Ahmadinejad story would show (if true) is that Muslims don’t hold the origins of converts against them – a frequently-made claim, although one I have my doubts about.
October 7, 2009, 10:39 amanonymous says:
DB:
October 7, 2009, 10:47 amRelax. It’s not like you were writing about yellow-cake uranium or anything.
Malvolio says:
Why particularly should they dislike her — more than they dislike, say, Joe Biden? And why is it particularly unlikely that she’s Jewish?
Speaking only for myself, I wanted the Ahmadinejad story to be true just because because it would make Ahmadinejad himself uncomfortable.
October 7, 2009, 11:12 amRecovering Law Grad says:
One implication of Bernstein’s post appears to be that, by virtue of the political beliefs at issue, neo-Nazis are the natural enemies of Sarah Palin. When one considers that Palin is, very obviously, a political enemy of liberals, the resulting conclusion is that liberals are somehow closer, politically, to neo-Nazis than are conservatives.
The only other reading is that Bernstein understands neo-Nazis to view themselves as being equally opposed to both liberals and conservatives.
Maybe Prof. Bernstein will weigh in and let us know which of these two views he holds.
October 7, 2009, 11:23 amSteve says:
It would not shock me to find out that neo-Nazis basically hate everyone. This certainly makes more sense than the alternative theory that they were trying to undermine the McCain/Palin ticket because they preferred the alternative.
October 7, 2009, 11:26 amGabriel McCall says:
Maybe that’s just what they want you to think. Maybe it was all a clever ruse to lure anti-Nazis to vote Republican.
October 7, 2009, 11:45 amChrisTS says:
Indeed, I wondered why the neo-nazis should want to go after Palin, in particular. (Painting someone they hate as being of Jewish descent is probably an obvious move for neo-nazis.)
I still don’t understand it, although Steve’s suggestion – It would not shock me to find out that neo-Nazis basically hate everyone – makes some sense.
October 7, 2009, 11:59 amRene Barnes says:
Uhh, Gentlemen,
According to this, the leader of the American Nazi party did support Obama over McCain, for reasons that sort of make sense if you believe in racism in the National Socialist sense.
http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/racists-support-obama-061308
If you think that the US “far-right” has any truck with with the Republicans, you need to actually read what these guys say and not use your liberal imagination to make it all up. To use a parallel example from the left, do Maoists really think that the Democrats are any less capitalist lackeys than the Republicans?
October 7, 2009, 12:02 pmTamerlane says:
Actually, my experience suggests that not only is this true, but that Muslims are exceptionally welcoming of converts. Limpada de sangria is a European conceit.
October 7, 2009, 12:04 pmwooga says:
Uh… neither. The idea (which should have been obvious) was that Ahmadinejad was motivated out of some ‘seekret’ self-loathing. You know, the standard Hollywood meme that all bigots are hypocrites. I seriously doubt that David Berntein maintains either (a) only Jews are monsters, or (b) Ahmadinejad is likely to change his views about anything.
Shame on you, Skyler, for whipping out the ‘bigot’ card so quickly. Perhaps (under the Hollywood meme) this means you are the real bigot. [joke].
October 7, 2009, 12:28 pmroad2serfdom says:
“She had an Israeli flag, of all the things, mounted on her office wall, and I have that on film,” he said. “I was very surprised to see that and when I asked her about it, she said that she loves Israel and th[at] she had friends who visited the country and brought her the flag.”
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2008/09/021449.php
October 7, 2009, 12:31 pmJK says:
Another great example of why “old media” is still extremely important. On this blog (and this is a great blog in comparison to others) all we get is a repeat of a story with some cooked up armchair analysis on why it might be true and why it’s important, or at least interesting.
I do worry about the day when we no longer have any serious fact finding and are left with Glen Reynolds and Atrios linking to more and more fantastic story-telling.
October 7, 2009, 12:34 pmChrisTS says:
Rene Barnes:
Interesting story. Of course, the editors note that Sure, our methodology suffered from an extraordinarily low sample size–limited to four white supremacists and one black nationalist.
Also, it is not clear that more than one or two of those four are ‘neo-nazis.’ Finally, even if Maoists do not like Democrats any more than Republicans, would you not be surprised to find them sending out stories claiming that the Dem candidate is ‘whatever we most hate.’?
The question is not why extremists dislike non-extremist candidates; it is why the neo-nazis would have a particular issue with S. Palin.
October 7, 2009, 12:37 pmanonymous says:
I’m feeling for Glenn these days.
Wait until he has to disclose how many of those Gizsu knives, trips, hardware, Amazon products of all categories, and everything else he shills he takes money/goodies to promote.
Full disclosure seems to be feared by some biggie bloggers. I wonder why?
October 7, 2009, 12:38 pmyankee says:
Perhaps she was perceived as too pro-Israel? Neo-Nazis are anti-Semites, so presumably they’re none too fond of Israel. They’re probably less pro-Palestinian than anti-Israel, since I doubt they like Arabs either.
This is not inconsistent with the “neo-Nazis basically hate everyone” theory, though.
October 7, 2009, 12:39 pmroad2serfdom says:
You can find the answer two posts above yours.
October 7, 2009, 12:41 pmanonymous says:
I wonder how much he got for pushing those “Dangerous” books for boys and girls a few Christmases back. If he and his wife mentioned that thing once, they mentioned it 5 times a day leading up to the holiday. And really — they were pretty crummy compilations of jump rope rhymes, scouting basics, and tips on how to get kids to play outdoors.
At what point do you decide there’s just more money in marketing, and drop the law prof gig to into promotions full time?
October 7, 2009, 12:49 pmnevinscrna says:
Got nothing to do with jews. Everything to do with rich irony. It’s great fun to watch public figures turn out to be exactly what they excoriate in public. Jim Bakker preaches fidelity and diddles a secretary, Gary Hart asks the media to follow him only to have them find Donna Rice, Ted Haggard’s vitriol about gays then is found to be in a gay relationship himself, Eliot Spitzer and his high priced prostitutes, Mark Foley courting 16 year old boys, Dan Crane and Jerry Studds in congress doing the same two decades before….
October 7, 2009, 12:51 pmanonymous says:
Got nothing to do with jews. Everything to do with rich irony. It’s great fun to watch public figures turn out to be exactly what they excoriate in public.
Except he’s not Jewish. So no irony there. But it’s still fun to make false accusations though, and try to pin the Jew label on the donkey — is that what you’re saying? Something tells me the Iranian leader thinks a propaganda disinformation campaign like this actually makes him look more credible.
If you really got the goods on a guy (or a country), why would you need to employ a smear campaign or exaggerate?
October 7, 2009, 1:06 pmHarryEagar says:
Thank you, JK.
October 7, 2009, 1:45 pmCato The Elder says:
That Gary Hart reference makes me realize that quite a lot of potential Democratic presidential nominees were involved in sex scandals, in almost a continuous chain since the beginning of the 1980s. Sen. Kerry is the sole exception, correct?
October 7, 2009, 2:14 pmnevinscrna says:
Merely, that, like Malvolio also stated, I would have liked it if it were true because then it would have been full of rich irony. Were it not for Amidinijad’s quite publicly stated views, identification with judaism would otherwise be uninteresting.
October 7, 2009, 2:57 pmSteve says:
Sen. Kerry is the sole exception, correct?
I guess I’ve forgotten all about the Walter Mondale sex scandal, the Michael Dukakis sex scandal, and the Al Gore sex scandal.
October 7, 2009, 3:07 pmgreat unknown says:
What!!! Palin is really not Jewish???? And here I was
October 7, 2009, 3:11 pmwaiting for her to get divorced so I could pick her up
on the rebound.
rmd says:
I don’t recall any such accusations against Mondale or Gore. Nor Obama for that matter. (As an aside, the spellchecker for this window recognizes Mondale and Clinton, but flags Obama.) So it’s pretty much Hart, Clinton and Edwards. OK, Teddy I guess but I’m not sure he counted as a serious candidate. So really, it’s only Slick who both had a serious pants malfunction and got past the primaries. (Dang, somebody already said all this while I was hunt-and-pecking. Heh, and I totally forgot Dukakis.)
October 7, 2009, 3:12 pmCato The Elder says:
To be clearer: I meant every single election year contained at least one of them; I didn’t mean to imply that every single nominee front-runner was under suspicion of scandal.
October 7, 2009, 3:25 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
ChrisTS:
The fact that “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” doesn’t include “Candidate” might have something to do with it.
October 7, 2009, 3:25 pmCato The Elder says:
Actually, upon further reflection, my post is fairly specious/wrong. Ignore it.
October 7, 2009, 3:34 pmMarco says:
If they were sufficiently paranoid, they would also note that she was named for Abraham’s wife.
October 7, 2009, 3:48 pmDavid Bernstein says:
I’d say the Nazis went after Palin because of some combination of the fact that she seemed to represent the philo-Semitic wing of evangelical Christianity (as in the Israeli flag in her office), and even more so because they hate all mainstream candidates and think they are all Jewish or Jewish-controlled, and little enough was known about Palin that almost anything anyone said about her was considered believable by some (and indeed, there were plenty of other things said about her by non-Nazis that had only the most tenuous basis in fact, but were widely circulated and believed).
October 7, 2009, 4:44 pmSagar says:
well, he dodged that bullet; but he still could be a gay:)
October 7, 2009, 4:46 pm(not that there is anything wrong with that;
purely in the “rich irony” sense)
anonymous says:
Do the Nazis like strong appealing women in power?
Sarah seems to scare a lot of people, plenty of whom often cite biological studies about how women are weaker than men, less fit to lead, genetically inferior except for the birthing babies thing, less likely to succeed at math/leadership roles etc.
It’s hard to believe propaganda like nature says women should play a secondary role to men, if you have a physical specimen before you proving the opposite.
October 7, 2009, 4:55 pmHarryEagar says:
Thank you, Cato
October 7, 2009, 6:29 pmJK says:
I’ll second Harry Eagar. Good man Cato. OTOH I was working up a real zinger about how you had some “inside info” on the other scandals, so your good form killed my chance for snark. Bastard.
October 7, 2009, 9:40 pmVinny B. says:
A Jew? Not a Jew? I smell a Mossad trick, something they are great at. I am sure they were trying to get a freely-elected leader assassinated by his own people. How typical of Israel, which shouldn’t even exist in the first place because it stole all of Palestine’s land and wealth.
October 7, 2009, 10:11 pmpot meet kettle says:
i think this post by yglesias is related.
October 7, 2009, 10:25 pmRicardo says:
Regarding the neo-Nazi issue, it’s silly to try to ascribe any partisan dimension to this. I don’t see anyone in the neo-Nazi/Christian Identity/White Supremacist movement suggesting Pat Buchanan has Jewish ancestry.
October 7, 2009, 10:26 pmPyrrho says:
One of the nice things about the internet is that you can link to a false rumor with the caveat that it “may be disinformation,” and then avoid any responsibility for propogating that false rumor on the grounds that you explained it may not be true when you propogated it.
October 8, 2009, 2:31 amJ7654 says:
I guess I’ve forgotten all about the Walter Mondale sex scandal, the Michael Dukakis sex scandal, and the Al Gore sex scandal.
A sex scandal, amazingly enough, would have made those politicians more electable.
October 8, 2009, 4:02 amSandy MacHoots says:
Don’t get too carried away. The Guardian report is based on statements by (1) one of its reporters who visited the man’s village in 2005 and interviewed people, and (2) his biographer. While I doubt the man has Jewish ancestry and care even less, you would hardly expect in such a society that his own villagers and his biographer would necessarily tell the truth to a British reporter. Anybody think the people who grew up with Hitler would have been talking to American reporters about alleged Jewish grandparents in 1941? This strikes me as the typically lame manner in which traditional journalists go about doing research.
October 8, 2009, 10:20 amChrisTS says:
Ah. Thanks to several. I did not know about Palin’s pro-Israeli views.
I found the comments of the four wacko’s in the Esquire story intriguing: several liked Obama because of his ‘racial consciousness.”
October 8, 2009, 1:38 pmneurodoc says:
What a disappointment not to be able to claim him. But how about Qaddafi, what about his supposed Jewish antecedents? Surely one of these great human beings has some Jewish genes.
October 8, 2009, 10:17 pm