CHAPTER ONE

A SHORT HISTORY OF JEWISH INSOLENCE

 

 

In the world of Hollywood, few risk confronting the dominant influence of American Jews.  One notable exception is actor and director Mel Gibson.  His 2004 film The Passion of the Christ was roundly condemned by Jewish groups for its unflattering portrayal of the Jewish authorities of that time.  Gibson responded by saying that he was simply giving a literal reading to biblical text.  But then in 2006, he was arrested for a minor DUI.  During the arrest, he allegedly issued this surprising statement:  “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.”  There followed the predictable storm of anti-anti-Semitism, ad hominem attacks, and various other slanders against Gibson’s character.  But virtually no one asked the question:  Is he right?  Or rather this:  To what degree could he be right?  Clearly Jews can’t be responsible for all the world’s wars, but might they have played a significant role in many wars in history?  The Jews?  That beleaguered minority in all nations of the world save Israel—could it be that they had a hand in many of the major conflicts in human history?  And if so, what lessons can we learn from this?

 

We can begin to answer these questions by starting with a few indisputable facts.  Consider first of all Jewish influence.  Jews today have massively disproportionate influence in every nation in which they constitute more than a fraction of the populace, and they have so for millennia.  This in itself is an astonishing fact, one that deserves more discussion than I can give here.  Present-day Jewish populations are, percentage-wise, quite small.  Apart from Israel, the largest Jewish minorities are in the US (1.8%), Canada (1.1%), France (0.74%), Uruguay (0.5%), Australia (0.5%), Hungary (0.48%), and the UK (0.45%).[1]  And yet their power and influence far outweighs such figures, most notably in the US, where Jews exercise a remarkable amount of control.  That Jews control Hollywood is well-known, but they also hold leading executive positions at all the major American media corporations.[2]  Their influence in US government is likewise dominant, given that Jewish money accounts for 25 to 50% of all federal campaign contributions.[3]  In terms of sheer financial assets, Jews constitute half of the wealthiest Americans, and may well own or control half of all private wealth in the US—which would mean an astonishing $50 trillion at their disposal.[4] 

 

Given their undeniably disproportionate influence in all nations where they exceed even a fraction of a percent, Jews must be responsible, to some degree, for much of what government does, both good and bad.  They love to praise themselves as brilliant managers, economists, and strategists, and they grant themselves endless awards and honors.  But one who claims credit for successes also gets blame for the failures.  And there are few greater failures in the life of nations than war; the financial and human costs are incalculable.  Hence the need for the present study.

 

Gibson’s charge must be examined, then, with a hard eye to the truth.  Nothing less will do justice to the situation.  The first step in the process must be a recap of some very relevant history, in order to better understand Jewish motives and actions.

 

Ancient Historical Context

 

For literally thousands of years, since the beginning of recorded history, we find a persistent trait among the Jewish people:  wherever they settled among other peoples, they made enemies.  Jews were trouble-makers, agitators, and war-mongers.  They lied and deceived.  When they had access to power, they were ruthless.  Thanks to their narcissistic religion, they were arrogant and domineering.  In sum, they hated other peoples, and were hated by them in turn.  On this point the historical record is unambiguous and indisputable. 

 

Furthermore, Jews seem to have held one overriding strategy, a strategy that has served them well in all places and at all times.  And it is this:  Find people in distress, and profit from their suffering.  And then there is the logical corollary:  If you can’t find people in distress, put them in distress—and then profit from their suffering.  In times of crisis, people do extreme things.  Great change presents great opportunities, especially for those with the least noble principles.  Shifts in power structures provide an opening for those seeking to increase their power.  Normal rules of buying and selling are invalidated, and opportunities for tremendous profits appear.  Desperate people will borrow money at extravagant rates, sell goods below true value, buy things on an irrational basis, and generally make rash decisions—optimal conditions for the profiteer.  A man or a nation in distress is one ripe for the taking.

 

This universal strategy is found repeatedly throughout Jewish history, at least as far back as the Book of Genesis.  Recall the story of the possibly-fictional Joseph, son of Jacob.  Joseph was a Jew who was sold into slavery in Egypt.  His reputation as an interpreter of dreams reached the ear of the Pharaoh, who was duly impressed—so much so that he made Joseph the second most powerful man in the land:  “You shall be over my house, and all my people shall order themselves as you command…  Behold, I have set you over all the land of Egypt” (Gen 41:40).  In anticipation of a coming seven-year famine, Joseph built up a huge surplus of grain.  The famine hit, and for two years there was enough grain, and enough money in the land for the people to buy it. 

 

But Joseph had a plan.  As the grain was being purchased, he “gathered up all the money…and brought the money into the Pharaoh’s house” (47:14).  In effect, he took the currency out of circulation.  In due time, “the money was all spent,” and the people began to starve.  Joseph then held all the cards.  In the third year, he agreed to accept livestock in exchange for grain.  By the fourth year, the people had neither money nor animals to give—only themselves and the land on which they lived.  “Buy us and our land for food,” they said (47:19).  And he did.  First he acquired all the land.  “As for the people, he made slaves of them from one end of Egypt to the other”—and thus the people were sold into slavery, in their own country.  Granted, Joseph did all this on behalf of the Pharaoh, but it was, after all, his plan; to the masses, he was the Jewish face of exploitation.  And Joseph himself clearly profited.  There was assuredly no starvation for his clan, as they were allowed to live in the “land of Goshen,” the best and most fertile part of Egypt.  After bankrupting and enslaving the Egyptian people, Joseph lived quite happily—so the story goes—to the ripe old age of 110.[5]

 

Not that this tale should be surprising.  It was in Biblical times that the Jews first declared themselves to be favorites of God, thereby automatically relegating the rest of humanity to a lowly, second-class status.  The Old Testament is replete with self-important references to Jews and their power over others.  The Book of Exodus declares them to be “distinct…from all other people that are upon the face of the earth” (33:16); Isaac says to Esau, “Let peoples serve you, and nations bow down to you” (Gen 27:29); Moses tells his fellow Israelites, “you shall rule over many nations…  [T]hey shall be afraid of you” (Deut 15:6); and we read in Isaiah, “foreigners shall build up your walls, and the kings shall minister to you…that men may bring you the wealth of nations” (60:10-11); furthermore, and ominously, “you shall eat the wealth of nations” (61:6).  Jews clearly viewed all other peoples with disdain, and over time this amounted to a functional misanthropy:  a hatred of humanity.

 

The events of the (alleged) Exodus provide another instance of Jewish militancy.  Arriving in Egypt circa 1300 BC, the pharaoh found it necessary to “deal shrewdly” with the Jews (Ex 1:10); “if war befalls us,” he said, “they [might] join our enemies and fight against us.”  Hence “the Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel.”  Eventually the pharaoh decided to end the suffering and drove the Jews out of Egypt. 

 

The Old Testament is not historically reliable, but we do have some concrete evidence that Jews of that time were indeed causing trouble for the pharaoh.  Among the Amarna Letters, dating to roughly 1350 BC, are nine letters to pharaoh Akhenaten complaining of a certain fellow, Labayu, who was attacking his neighbors in the region of present-day Israel.  One local ruler complained that “Labayu has waged war against me…  Labayu has no other purpose; he seeks simply the seizure of [my city]”.[6]  Notably, Labayu was acting in collaboration with “the Habiru,” which some scholars have identified with the Hebrews.  Paul Johnson (1987: 23) argues that Labayu and his sons were “coreligionists and racial kin” to the expelled Jews of Egypt. 

 

Further objective evidence of Jewish belligerence is found in two carved stone tablets or stele.  The first, called the Merneptah Stele, dates to around 1200 BC, and refers to an evidently aggressive but defeated Jewish people.  One line in it states:  “Israel is laid waste, and his seed is not.”  Apparently the Egyptians came into contact with a people called “Israel,” engaged them in war, and defeated them badly.  The second engraving, the Tel Dan Stele of 850 BC, refers to a King Hazael and his victory over the warlike “House of David.”  Such incidents are at least consistent with Biblical descriptions of massive Jewish slaughter of the Canaanites and allied people.  The books of Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua describe multiple incidents in which Jews, under the leadership of Moses and Joshua, destroyed the indigenous people of that region—at the behest of their God. 

 

Later in time, and midway through the Old Testament, we read in the Book of Esther about events that allegedly occurred circa 475 BC.  Esther, the Jewish queen of Persian king Xerxes, came into conflict with the king’s second-in-command, Haman.  In response, Haman “sought to destroy all the Jews” (Esther 3:6).  His plot failed, however, and in an atrocious act of vengeance, the Jews “got relief from their enemies, and slew 75,000 of those who hated them” (9:16)—in other words, they killed not only Haman, but they also took the opportunity to dispose of thousands of their opponents.  This bloody event is today celebrated as the Jewish holiday Purim. 

 

By 300 BC, Egypt was on the decline, and thus it was taken over by Macedonian general Ptolemy I.  Ptolemy needed a mercenary army in the region, and the local Jewish population was a ready supply of manpower.  As Emilio Gabba (1984: 635) explains, the general was able to voluntarily conscript some 30,000 “well paid” Jews, who “served to keep the native population at bay.”  Thus we see them readily siding with an invading power, against the indigenous people, for money and power.  Once again, violence and aggression pays.

 

Amidst this context, we can certainly understand the words of Greek scholar Hecateus of Abdera.  Writing circa 300 BC, he observed that “Moses introduced [to the Jews] a way of life which was, to a certain extent, misanthropic and hostile to foreigners”.[7]  This was an unusual remark, coming from the normally tolerant Greeks.  There seems to be no other comparable statement on other peoples of the time.  Jews were apparently unique—just as they themselves had claimed.  But for the wrong reasons.

 

A related sentiment comes 50 years later, from the Egyptian high priest Manetho.  He writes of the time when Jews invaded Egyptian territory, abusing native peoples “impiously and savagely,” setting their towns and villages on fire, and “mutilating images of the gods without restraint”.[8]  There was clearly something unique in this behavior that caused Manetho to comment as he did.  Perhaps it was just such belligerent action that caused Seleucid king Antiochus VII Sidetes to consider, for the first (but not last) time in history, the extermination of the Jews.  In the year 134 BC, the king was called on “to destroy the Jews, for they alone among all peoples refused all relations with other races, and saw everyone as their enemy” (Gabba 1984: 645).  His counselors cited “the Jews’ hatred of all mankind, sanctioned by their very laws.”  A related critique appeared sometime around 75 BC, when the Greek intellectual Apollonius Molon wrote an entire book opposing the Jews—the first in history, in fact.  His work Against the Jews contained a number of hostile remarks, including calling them “the very vilest of mankind” and “atheists and misanthropes”.[9] 

 

Less than a decade later, Rome would conquer Judea, bringing the Empire into direct conflict with the small Hebrew tribe.  Shortly thereafter, sometime around the year 50 BC, historian Diodorus Siculus wrote his monumental Historical Library.  It included a retelling of the Exodus, commenting that “the Jews had made their hatred of mankind into a tradition” (HL 34,1).  Diodorus later refers to a plan by Seleucid ruler Antiochus Epiphanes “to wipe out completely the race of Jews, since they alone, of all nations…looked upon all men as their enemies”.[10]  Here we have a striking statement; if “they alone, of all nations” hated mankind, then again we have strong evidence of a malicious in-bred Jewish trait—of a vicious animosity toward others that is unlike anything else in the known world.  With such an attitude, it’s easy to exploit others, to prod and deceive them into wars, and to profit from their suffering.

 

The last major commentator of the pre-Christian era was Lysimachus.  He offered yet another account of the Exodus, writing that the Jews were instructed by Moses “to show goodwill to no man,” to offer “the worse advice” to others, and to plunder and destroy native temples.[11]  The persistency of these negative comments is truly remarkable; no other minority merits anything close to such reprimand.

 

From the Christian Era to the Enlightenment

 

Into the new millennium, the Jewish reputation for trouble-making and exploitation continued.  In the year 41 AD, Roman emperor Claudius issued his third edict, condemning the Jews of Alexandria for abuse of privilege and sowing discord; he charged them with “fomenting a general plague which infests the whole world.”  Eight years later he expelled them from Rome.  Ever dissatisfied, the Jews revolted in Jerusalem in the years 66-70, and again in 115 and 132.  Of that final uprising, Cassius Dio made the following observation—the first clear evidence of Jews causing a major war:

 

Jews everywhere were showing signs of hostility to the Romans, partly by secret and partly overt acts…  [M]any other nations, too, were joining them through eagerness for gain, and the whole earth, one might almost say, was being stirred up over the matter.[12]

 

The Hebrews were evidently paying foreigners to help them fight their wars; one can see in this a precedent for the later practice of bribing government officials in order to encourage them to declare war on their behalf.  Thus it was not without good reason that notable Romans denounced the Jews—among these Seneca (“an accursed race”), Quintilian (“a race which is a curse to others”), and Tacitus (a “disease,” a “pernicious superstition,” and “the basest of peoples”).[13]  Prominent German historian Theodor Mommsen (1856/1871: 643) reaffirmed this view, noting that the Jews of Rome were indeed agents of social disruption and decay:  “Also in the ancient world, Judaism was an effective ferment of cosmopolitanism and of national decomposition.”

 

Even before the end of the classical age, Jews took to money-lending, usury, and other shady business practices in Europe.  In 387, church leader John Chrysostom condemned them for, among other things, “their plundering, their covetousness, their thefts, their cheating in trade”.[14]  By the time of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, it was deemed necessary to specifically target exploitative Jewish lending practices:  “The more the Christians are restrained from the practice of usury, the more are they oppressed in this matter by the treachery of the Jews, so that in a short time they exhaust the resources of the Christians”.[15]  Thomas Aquinas was concerned about nobles who allowed Jews to continue their money-lending because they received a share of the profits:  “it would be better for [royalty] to compel Jews to work for a living…than to allow them to live in idleness and grow rich by usury”.[16]  In 1543, Martin Luther felt compelled to issue a scathing rebuke; among his many concerns was that “they are nothing but thieves and robbers who daily eat no morsel and wear no thread of clothing which they have not stolen and pilfered from us by means of their accursed usury”.[17] 

 

Into the Enlightenment era, it went from bad to worse.  Baron d’Holbach declared that “the Jewish people distinguished themselves only by massacres, unjust wars, cruelties, usurpations, and infamies.”  He added that they, “the most unfortunate people that ever existed,…lived continually in the midst of calamities, and were, more than all other nations, the sport of frightful revolutions”.[18]  But few critics were harsher than the French litterateur Voltaire.  He made dozens of biting remarks over the years, including this observation from 1771:  “[the Jews] are, all of them, born with a raging fanaticism in their hearts…  I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not some day become deadly to the human race”.[19]  In this we have perhaps one of the most troubling and prescient warnings in all of history.

 

German intellectuals held the Jews in equally low regard, and were equally concerned about their detrimental effect on society.  The great philosopher Immanuel Kant had this to say:

 

[The Jews] have through their usurious spirit since their exile received the not-unfounded reputation of deceivers.  It seems strange to think of a nation of deceivers; but it is just as strange to think of a nation made up of nothing but merchants, which are united for the most part by an old superstition that is recognized by the government under which they live.  They do not seek any civil honor, but rather wish to compensate their loss by profitably outwitting the very people among whom they find protection, and even to make profit from their own kind.  It cannot be otherwise with a whole nation of merchants, who are nonproductive members of society (for example, the Jews in Poland). … Their condition, sanctioned by ancient precepts and recognized even by us, cannot be altered by us without serious consequences, even though they have made the saying “buyer beware” the supreme principle of morality in their dealings with us.  (1798/1979: 101-102)

 

Once again we see the recurring theme:  Jewish deception and exploitation, leading to personal gain—or as I suggested above, ‘profit through distress.’  It was this very quality that led another prominent German philosopher, Georg Hegel, to remark that “the only act Moses reserved for the Israelites was…to borrow with deceit and repay confidence with theft”.[20]  For Johann Fichte, the threat posed was so great that the only appropriate action was banishment:  “To protect ourselves against them, I see no other way than to conquer for them their promised land and see them all there”.[21] 

 

This must suffice as a short historical prelude.  We see a consistent trend, over literally thousands of years, in which the Jews deceive, exploit, and even kill, in order to achieve their ends.  Despite individual exceptions, and official proclamations notwithstanding, they collectively operate with little evident sense of remorse, pity, fairness, or justice.  And even as they may couch events in terms of lofty or humanitarian ideals, Jewish self-interest is the primary driving factor.  These are not hasty conclusions, and they are not my conclusions; they are the considered opinion of many of the most brilliant and insightful individuals in our history.  And this is but a fraction of such observations.[22]  I trust that the point is clear:  Jews will stop at nothing to achieve their ends—even world war.

 

​