The Cuban Compromise—A Sustainable Model For The Jewish Lobby

Two quotable quotes:

•  "The fact that a
  great many Jewish
  
  neoconservatives—people like Joe Lieberman and the
  crowd over at
  
  Commentary—plumped for this war, and now for an even
  more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of
  divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives
  and money, to make the world safe for Israel."

— Joe Klein,

Time, June 24, 2008

• 
  "Against the
  insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to
  believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free
  people ought to be constantly awake, since history and
  experience prove that foreign influence is one of the
  most baneful foes of republican government. …
  Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the
  favorite
  
  [foreign nation] are liable to become suspected and
  odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and
  confidence of the people, to surrender their interests."
  

—George Washington,

Farewell Address, 1796

(Links helpfully added by

VDARE.COM).

As survivors of one of the

great historical crimes of the mid-20th Century,
this

American ethnic group has gained a veto power over

American foreign policy toward their

historical homeland—with seriously detrimental
impact on America`s reputation in that important part of
the world.

Moreover, out of concern for their
co-ethnics abroad, they have obtained strong influence
over

America`s immigration and refugee policy.

I`m talking, of course, about …
Cuban-Americans!

Who`d you think I was talking about?

The best thing about Cuban political
power in America is that you`re free to talk about it.
(Well, at least outside of

Miami.) Heck, Cubans want you to talk about
how much clout they have. It makes them seem stronger
than they may actually be.

Moreover, they are upfront about
their motivations. If you say, "You want to extend
the trade embargo on Cuba because Fidel stole your
grandfather`s sugar plantation," they`ll reply,
"Well, duh."

Do Cuban-Americans display "dual
loyalty?"

Well, first, let`s toss in all the
caveats about the diversity within any ethnic group.

That said, the answer is, more or
less: Sure.

(Cuban-Americans are seldom loyal to
the

present government of Cuba, of course. Instead, they
tend to be loyal to their vision of the future
government of Cuba.)

Is this pattern of Cubans promoting

Cuban ethnic interests through our political system
good for America as a whole? Probably not. But it has
been so narrowly focused that it hasn`t been a disaster
for the country.

American policy toward Cuba has been
knuckleheaded, but less so than Castro`s policy toward
Cuba. Only this year, for example, Fidel`s brother Raul


finally allowed microwave ovens
to be sold in Cuba—three decades after
they went on sale

in the free world!

The relevant point: any single
foreign country, even one as nearby as Cuba, isn`t all
that important to America`s national interest.

What is important is that our
political and intellectual life not be sapped by a
single ethnic group`s determination to promote its
interests at any cost. The

Cuban-Americans have played by the rules, at least
on the national stage (as opposed to in Miami, where
they`ve intimidated local critics). They`ve won on the
trade embargo through reasonably open and transparent
activism because they just care more about it than
anybody else does.

Most importantly, Cubans don`t
inflict on the national debate their intellectual
paranoia about slippery slopes. Lenin said: "He who
says A, must say B." By this logic, nobody
can be allowed to say A. Fortunately, Cubans aren`t
obsessive or powerful enough to impose this kind of
reasoning on the rest of the country.

For example, you can write "The

subprime mortgage meltdown shows the need for

more government regulation of the financial industry",
without fear of being shouted out of the Main Stream
Media by all the Cubans in important positions in the
business who worry that if anybody is allowed to say
that in public, it will

inevitably lead to the government expropriating the
sugar plantations and banning the sale of microwave
ovens.

Perhaps some anti-Castro Cubans
would like to ban all criticism. But they don`t
have the mojo to impose their taboos on the rest of
American society.

Similarly, on immigration,
Cuban-American political muscle has mostly been exerted
to get special treatment for Cubans, rather than to

open our borders in general. Of course, some
Cuban-Americans, such as Florida Senator

Mel Martinez, have allowed the Bush Administration
to use them as

Designated Hispanics in its amnesty campaigns.
Still, those are mostly just unscrupulously ambitious
individuals. As a group, as long as Cubans are legally
treated as

refugees rather than immigrants, Cuban-Americans
don`t much care about other
Hispanics and their immigration problems, let alone
anyone else.

So far, at least, granting special
immigration privileges to Cubans has been less
catastrophic for America than if the Cubans had used
their political leverage to agitate for more open
borders in general.

But in striking contrast to
Cuban-Americans, you`re not supposed to write about

Jewish influence on American government and culture
at all. While the Cubans ethnocentrically exert strong,
but open and sharply delimited influence over the U.S.,
Jewish-Americans have tended to mandate that nobody
mention their power.

Of course, this is primarily
testimony to the relative strengths of the two groups.
The Cubans have been pounding their chests over the
crucial role they played in the 2000 Presidential
election for eight years now. Jewish organizations, such
as

AIPAC [the
America Israel Political Affairs Committee], try to
(and generally succeed in) intimidating gentiles into
not mentioning how much control they have.

Pay no attention to that Lobby
behind the curtain!

It`s comically self-contradictory.
But it works.

It`s impossible to understand how
America functions today without understanding
the sizable role played by Jews in elite positions.
In their 1995 book Jews and the New American Scene,
Seymour Martin Lipset, a Senior Scholar
of the

Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies, and
Earl Raab, Director of the Perlmutter Institute for
Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University, pointed out that

"During the last three decades, Jews have made up 50% of
the top two hundred

intellectuals, 40 percent of American

Nobel Prize Winners in science and

economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading
universities, 21 percent of high level civil servants,
40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New
York and Washington, 26% of the reporters, editors, and
executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59
percent of the

directors, writers, and producers of the fifty
top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58
percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or
more

primetime television series." [pp 26-27]

This is an extraordinary record of
achievement because Jews make up only about three
percent of the adult American population. It`s
attributable largely to

higher average Jewish IQs, strong work ethics,

sobriety, heavy investment in their children,
self-confidence, networking, and

nepotism.

As one influential Jewish

writer aptly put it: "With great

power comes great responsibility". Yet
the standard response by Jewish spokesmen has been to
deny the existence of their power and to use the
"anti-Semite" smear on anyone who publicly spills
the beans, as the distinguished foreign affairs scholars
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby,
have discovered.

People can lose their jobs for even
mentioning something as

bleedingly obvious as

Jewish leadership in Hollywood. In 2003, veteran
liberal journalist

Gregg Easterbrook in 2003 was fired from his
ESPN.com job by then-Disney boss Michael Eisner after
Easterbrook mentioned "Jewish executives" in a
posting about a violent movie on the blog of the
Jewish-owned

New Republic. Most commentators, being
well-trained, said Easterbrook

had it coming.

In contrast to Cuban activists,
whose goals are straightforward—control American foreign
and immigration policy regarding Cuba—Jewish activists
have convinced themselves that, rather than openly
pursue their ethnic goals in the marketplace of ideas,
they must control the marketplace itself. They must rule
out of the bounds of discussion any ideas linked to
Jewish influence by even the most

Rube Goldbergian logic.

No group, not even

African-Americans, are as shielded from appraisal
and criticism as are Jewish-Americans. For example, it`s
clear that some American Jews, such as former number
three man in the Pentagon,

Douglas Feith, feel loyalties divided between the
U.S. and Israel. After all, Feith and his father shared
the

Zionist Organization of America`s 1997 Man of the
Year award. Feith`s longtime law partner,

Marc Zell, is a spokesman for extremist Zionist
settlers on the West Bank. America`s third richest man,
casino mogul

Sheldon Adelson, invests heavily in both

George W. Bush`s Republican Party in America and

Binyamin Netanyahu`s Likud Party in Israel

Yet, it`s precisely because so many
influential Jews clearly do have the dual loyalties that
George Washington warned us against that the whole topic
has long been off limits, especially to gentiles.

A week after veteran Time
reporter Joe Klein, the once "Anonymous" author
of the bestselling roman a clef novel about the
Clintons, Primary Colors,
mentioned Jewish neoconservatives`
"divided loyalties", Easterbrook`s old friend Mickey
Kaus noted:

“Max
Boot,

Pete Wehner,

Jennifer Rubin,

Paul Mirengoff and

Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League all
wrote confidently outraged responses to Klein`s raising
of the `divided loyalties` possibility–and, indeed,
it`s not the sort of assertion that has typically gone
unpunished in the past. When Klein stubbornly

failed to back down in a second post, Wehner
somewhat smugly

anticipated his near-certain demise:

`It`s like watching a movie that you now know is going
to end very badly, and very sadly.`

“But here`s the thing: It`s now a week later, and as far
as I can tell Klein still has his job. … He hasn`t been
forced to issue a

groveling apology.

“Can it be that the rules have changed?”

Perhaps. But the key test would be
when it`s safe for non-Jews, as well as Jews like Joe
Klein, to criticize Jewish activists, like the

neoconservatives, in the same way that it`s always
been safe to criticize Cuban activists.

This censorship leads to profound
ignorance, and disastrous results. For example, as

Andrew Cockburn reported:

"One day during that holiday, according to friends of
the [Bush]
family, 43 asked his father, `What`s a neocon?`"

"`Do you want names, or a description?` answered 41."

"`Description.`"

"`Well,` said the former president of the United States,
`I`ll give it to you in one word: Israel.`"

Yet it`s important to remember that
the two most fundamental Jewish ethnic policy
interests—promoting
Israel`s territorial integrity and ensuring that

Jewish refugees would be admitted to America—are not
particularly worse for America than the policies
successfully pushed by Cuban-Americans.

Unfortunately, the way
Jewish-American power promotes its interests in this
country—by imposing a code of silence about Jewish
power, by blackballing anybody who speaks out on any
issue even tangentially related to Jewish influence, and
by

demonizing immigration restrictionists—has
far-reaching debilitating effects on America.

Our country would be better off with
a "Cuban Compromise"—giving Jewish interests
roughly the same privileges as Cubans currently enjoy,
but no more:

1. 
   The U.S. would agree to follow Israel`s lead on the
   
   Palestinian problem (but not, of course, to
   attack Israel`s various enemies for it).
    
2. 
   Jews fleeing
   
   genuine persecution would be guaranteed refugee
   status in the U.S.
    
3. 
   In return, Jewish activists would be open to
   analysis and criticism by non-Jews.

Of course, Jewish representatives
would have no reason to accept Point 3 of the Cuban
Compromise, since they already have their cake and eat
it too. My point, however, is to illustrate what a
reasonable compromise would look like—protecting
specific Jewish interests, while liberating American
intellectual and political life from the stifling

Political Correctness now imposed upon it.

For example, consider how the
question of differences in
average IQ among hereditary groups has been driven
out of polite society. The fact in itself may not seem
important, but it turns out to touch on so many
issues—for example, education—that the ban on writing
about it pervasively degrades the quality of American
thought.

You might imagine that the

kibosh was put on IQ by blacks to cover up

lower mean black IQs. Yet the record shows
relatively little contribution by black intellectuals to
the debate.

Thomas Sowell has

had some

important things to say, and

Claude Steele and

John Ogbu have offered theories of possible value.
But that`s about it.

Instead, when the mob of media
yahoos is hounding somebody for crimethink on IQ and
race, there`s usually a leftist Jewish intellectual at
the forefront.

For example, when America`s most
eminent man of science,
James Watson, was forced out of his job last year
for violating the taboo, the
effective leader of the vigilantes in Britain was

Steven Rose, co-author with

Leon Kamin and

Richard Lewontin of Not In Our Genes.
Rose already had a track record of
silencing dissident scientists: back in the 1980s, he
persuaded his friends in the East German

communist dictatorship to

crack  down on IQ researcher

Volkmar Weiss.

And the Holy Writ of IQ

Know-Nothingism [VDARE.COM
note:

Peter Brimelow objects that this misuse of the term
is UNFAIR TO THE

KNOW-NOTHINGS!] remains Stephen Jay
Gould`s 1981 bestseller

The Mismeasure of Man.

This is not to say that Jewish
intellectuals line up on only one side of this issue.
Richard Herrnstein, the co-author of

The Bell Curve, is an

outstanding counter-example. Nonetheless, the most
strident and destructive of the IQ Know-Nothingists have
tended to be far leftist Jews.

Why are so many Jews hypersensitive
to empirical investigations of IQ differences?

As Harvard psychologist Steven
Pinker noted, when he asked his Yiddish-speaking
grandfather why he reserved the tricky tasks at his
small Montreal garment workshop for himself rather than
leaving them to his Canadian employees:

"He shrugged, tapped his forehead, and said, "Goyishe
kop," a term of condescension that literally means
`gentile head.`"[The
Lessons Of The Ashkenazim| Groups and Genes,
The New Republic, June 26, 2006]

Pinker explains:

"Jews have long had an ambivalent attitude toward their
own intelligence, and toward their reputation for
intelligence. There is an ethnic pride at the prevalence
of Jews in

occupations that reward brainpower. …But pride has
always been haunted by fear that public acknowledgement
of Jewish achievement could fuel the perception of
`Jewish domination` of institutions."

In other words, the chain of logic
run like this:

• If the Goyishe kops
  aren`t allowed to hear that the
  
  Shvartze kops aren`t as smart on average,

• 
  Then, they won`t notice that on average the
  Yiddishe kops are
  
  smarter than the Goyishe kops;

• 
  And, then, they won`t kill all of us Yiddishe kops
  for being smarter.

• So, to prevent another
  Holocaust, it`s our moral duty to crush anybody
  who tells the truth about anything at all
  related to
  
  human diversity.

When you lay it all out like this,
it seems ridiculous: absurd paranoia.

But that is the problem—nobody lays
out the logic.

Because they are scared.

This isn`t sustainable in a free
society. Why not an honest Cuban-style compromise?