By Stuart Littlewood

Jeremy Corbyn taking the night bus home after a hard day in the Commons. How many other top politicians do this? The answer is none, they are all in it for the money.

They are the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council, members of various Friends of Israel and assorted Israel lobby dogsbodies and flag wavers including Tony Blair.

The opening shot was a letter from the Board of Deputies to the chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party, saying: “Today, leaders of British Jewry tell Jeremy Corbyn that enough is enough. We have had enough of hearing that Jeremy Corbyn ‘opposes antisemitism’, whilst the mainstream majority of British Jews, and their concerns, are ignored by him and those he leads.”

It went on to complain that there was “repeated institutional failure to properly address Jewish concerns and to tackle antisemitism” and concluded that Corbyn issues empty statements about opposing anti-Semitism and cannot seriously deal with it because “he is so ideologically fixed within a far left worldview that is instinctively hostile to mainstream Jewish communities”.

The insults continued with this gem: “Hizbollah commits terrorist atrocities against Jews, but Corbyn calls them his friends and attends pro-Hizbollah rallies in London. Exactly the same goes for Hamas.”

Has the BoD forgotten why Hezbollah and Hamas were founded in the first place? The idea that it’s OK to support Israeli terror and occupation but not OK to talk with those who resist it, is preposterous and Corbyn needs to rub their noses in it. Moreover Israel’s values are not necessarily ours, and their sworn enemies are certainly not ours.

Corbyn is also accused of being “repeatedly found alongside people with blatantly antisemitic views, but claims never to hear or read them”. The letter ends with the suggestion that Corbyn is part of “a conspiratorial worldview in which mainstream Jewish communities are believed to be a hostile entity, a class enemy”.

Corbyn sent an apology in which he was sincerely sorry for the pain caused by “pockets of anti-Semitism” in the Labour Party. But, he reasoned, “criticism of Israel, particularly in relation to the continuing dispossession of the Palestinian people, cannot be avoided”. Nevertheless, comparing Israel or the actions of Israeli governments to the Nazis, or attributing criticisms of Israel to Jewish characteristics or to Jewish people in general, or calling supporters of Israel ‘Zio’, all count as contemporary anti-Semitism, he said. And Jewish people must not be held responsible or accountable for the actions of the Israeli government.

Back came BoD president Jonathan Arkush and JLC chair Jonathan Goldstein with a statement saying that after almost three years of Corbyn’s leadership “words are no longer enough – now we need action. The Labour Party must finally demonstrate that it has the genuine will and determination to act effectively against the hate in its membership. We will not be silent and we will continue to hold it to account.”

Who are the Israel lobby? And should we listen?

This attack on Corbyn and the Labour Left in the run-up to Easter is a reminder of the deep racism and the religious war being waged in the Holy Land.

The place where Christianity was born is defiled by a brutal and illegal military occupation that has gone unpunished for 70 years and turned a beautiful and very special historic region, precious to three religions, into a swamp of racial hatred resulting in unspeakable crimes against the native Arab population hundreds of thousands of whom have been cruelly dispossessed of their homes and lands and forced to flee.

The Israel Project was a Zionist political initiative of the late 1800s given a huge boost by the murky scheming behind the Balfour Declaration of 1917, actually drafted by Zionist Leopold Amery. It caused Lord Sydenham to remark: “What we have done is, by concessions, not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, to start a running sore in the East, and no one can tell how far that sore will extend.”

Well, now we know. And it suits the Israel lobby to confuse the issue by conflating anti-Zionist views with anti-Semitism.

The Israel lobby insists Israel is not an “apartheid state”. But this puts it at odds with a recent UN report and the facts on the ground. The lobby is also furious about the success of BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions), the non-violent movement by civil society as a result of the international community’s failure to act. It aims to persuade Israel to comply with international law and UN resolutions, recognise the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and end its occupation and colonisation of their lands.

Theresa May warns she’ll “have no truck” with people who support BDS. But 200 legal scholars and practising lawyers have pointed out that it is a lawful exercise of freedom of expression and outlawing it undermines a basic human right protected by international convention.

Who are the Israel lobby anyway? Essentially the Friends of Israel groups that are allowed to flourish within our political parties (except the SNP which has resisted pressure to let them in), backed by the BoD and the JLC who claim to speak for the Jewish community. This is a noisy coalition that certainly isn’t supported by all Jews. A growing number of Jewish organisations are highly critical of the Israeli state and its policies. Not all Jews are Zionists – and not all Zionists are Jews; indeed a very large number are Christians, especially in the US.

Discontent about the conduct of the Jewish State and its military is spreading even among Israelis. At the Labour Party conference last year Miko Peled told activists that Israel is “terrified” of Jeremy Corbyn becoming British prime minister. “They are going to pull all the stops, they are going to smear, they are going to try anything they can to stop Corbyn from being prime minister….

“The reason anti-Semitism is used is because they [the Israelis] have no argument, there is nothing to say. How can a call for justice and tolerance be conflated with anti-Semitism? I don’t know if they realise this but they are pitting Judaism against everything good and just.”

Peled is an Israeli Jew, the son of an Israeli general, and a former soldier in the Israeli army.

I’d be more impressed with Corbyn if he turned on his tormentors and told them straight: “You yourselves need to condemn the horrendous crimes committed by the Israeli regime against the Palestinians, and urge the Jewish State to end its occupation, recognise Palestinian independence, restore the refugees to their homes (or provide compensation), and issue a fulsome apology for past wrongs. That’s when I will begin to listen to you.”

I’m also waiting for him to demand an explanation for the Israelis’ anti-Semitism. It turns out, or so we’re told, that the true Semites are the Arabs, and most Israelis are Ashkenazi coverts with no ancestral links to the Holy Land at all.

That’s not all. The Israel lobby might like to reflect on the desperate cry for help from over 30 Christian organisations in occupied Palestine to the World Council of Churches and the ecumenical movement recently. They had issued a similar heart-wrenching plea 10 years earlier. Their message now is stark: “Things are beyond urgent. We are on the verge of a catastrophic collapse. The current status-quo is unsustainable. This could be our last chance to achieve a just peace. As a Palestinian Christian community, this could be our last opportunity to save the Christian presence in this land…. We need brave women and men who are willing to stand in the forefront. This is no time for shallow diplomacy….”

But shallow diplomacy is all they get still. Response from the WCC, which represents 500 million Christians in more than 110 countries, has been heavily muted or non-existent. Feeble leadership means that Western Christendom could soon say goodbye forever to the wellspring of their faith, Jerusalem, which is being stolen from under their noses. Do they care? Apparently not.

The Israel lobby is no doubt celebrating.

The illegal occupier also restricts access to Islam’s third most holy place, the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Do Muslim rulers care? They are so divided they cannot mobilise effectively to deal with it.

As someone who has witnessed the racial abuse of Palestinian Arabs (Christian and Muslim) and seen how their homeland – the Holy Land – has been made a living hell, I’d love to know what the 500 million Christians and 1.8 billion Muslims in this world are going to do about it.

Stuart Littlewood
27 March 2018

Here’s a quote from a friend just today about the topic of meritocracy in our school system: “Just like the Catholic church in the middle ages recruited the smartest peasants in order to forestall revolutionary potential, and to learn mind bending religious dogma to befuddle the remaining peasants, current practice is much the same.”

We can substitute economics dogma to the befuddlement mix. The bottom line is every ruling elite has co-opted the top 1%-5% of high IQ, high wage earners, to make the pyramid work. Sociology writing is all over this. Veblen, Weber, etc. We can see this little group created everywhere natural resources are coveted by private empires.

The universities are doing exactly what they are supposed to do to protect the interests of the Trustees and Donors who run them for a reason. They are a tool of, not a cause of, the inequality and over-concentration. It is interesting how the story goes into hairsplitting and comparing Asians to others, etc. But, the real story is a well understood sociology story. This explains why Napoleon established free public education after the French Revolution.

Regarding the declining Jewish achievement, it looks like it can be primarily explained through demographics:

“Intermarriage rates have risen from roughly 6% in 1950 to approximately 40–50% in the year 2000.[56][57] This, in combination with the comparatively low birthrate in the Jewish community, has led to a 5% decline in the Jewish population of the United States in the 1990s.”

Jewish surnames don’t mean what they used to. And intermarriage rates are lowest among the low-performing and highly prolific Orthodox.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews#Demographics

Jewish birth rates have been falling faster than the white population, especially for the non-Orthodox:

“In contrast to the ongoing trends of assimilation, some communities within American Jewry, such as Orthodox Jews, have significantly higher birth rates and lower intermarriage rates, and are growing rapidly. The proportion of Jewish synagogue members who were Orthodox rose from 11% in 1971 to 21% in 2000, while the overall Jewish community declined in number. [60] In 2000, there were 360,000 so-called “ultra-orthodox” (Haredi) Jews in USA (7.2%).[61] The figure for 2006 is estimated at 468,000 (9.4%).[61]”

http://www.jewishdatabank.org/Reports/RecentTrends_Sheskin_2011.pdf

“a very low fertility rate of 1.9, of which 1.4 will be raised
as Jews (2.15 is replacement rate)”

http://www.aish.com/jw/s/48899452.html

“As against the overall average of 1.86 children per Jewish woman, an informed estimate gives figures ranging upward from 3.3 children in “modern Orthodox” families to 6.6 in Haredi or “ultra-Orthodox” families to a whopping 7.9 in families of Hasidim.”

These statistics would suggest that half or more of Jewish children are being born into these lower-performing groups. Given their very low intermarriage rates, a huge portion of the secular, Reform, and Conservative Jews must be intermarrying (more than half if the aggregate 43% intermarriage figure is right). And the high-performing groups may now be around 1 child per woman or lower, and worse for the youngest generation.

So a collapse in Jewish representation in youth science prizes can be mostly explained by the collapse of the distinct non-Orthodox Jewish youth.

Incidentally, intermarriage also produces people with Jewish ancestry who get classified as gentiles using last names or self-identification, reducing Jewish-gentile gaps by bringing up nominal gentile scores at the same time as nominal-Jewish scores are lowered.

By RON UNZ

From my own perspective, I found these statistical results surprising, even shocking.

I had always been well aware of the very heavy Jewish presence at elite academic institutions. But the underwhelming percentage of Jewish students who today achieve high scores on academic aptitude tests was totally unexpected, and very different from the impressions I had formed during my own high school and college years a generation or so ago. An examination of other available statistics seems to support my recollections and provides evidence for a dramatic recent decline in the academic performance of American Jews

The U.S. Math Olympiad began in 1974, and all the names of the top scoring students are easily available on the Internet. During the 1970s, well over 40 percent of the total were Jewish, and during the 1980s and 1990s, the fraction averaged about one-third. However, during the thirteen years since 2000, just two names out of 78 or 2.5 percent appear to be Jewish. The Putnam Exam is the most difficult and prestigious mathematics competition for American college students, with five or six Putnam winners having been selected each year since 1938. Over 40 percent of the Putnam winners prior to 1950 were Jewish, and during every decade from the 1950s through the 1990s, between 22 percent and 31 percent of the winners seem to have come from that same ethnic background. But since 2000, the percentage has dropped to under 10 percent, without a single likely Jewish name in the last seven years.

This consistent picture of stark ethnic decline recurs when we examine the statistics for the Science Talent Search, which has been selecting 40 students as national finalists for America’s most prestigious high school science award since 1942, thus providing a huge statistical dataset of over 2800 top science students. During every decade from the 1950s through the 1980s, Jewish students were consistently 22–23 percent of the recipients, with the percentage then declining to 17 percent in the 1990s, 15 percent in the 2000s, and just 7 percent since 2010. Indeed, of the thirty top ranked students over the last three years, only a single one seems likely to have been Jewish. Similarly, Jews were over one-quarter of the top students in the Physics Olympiad from 1986 to 1997, but have fallen to just 5 percent over the last decade, a result which must surely send Richard Feynman spinning in his grave.

Other science competitions provide generally consistent recent results, though without the long track record allowing useful historical comparisons. Over the last dozen years, just 8 percent of the top students in the Biology Olympiad have been Jewish, with none in the last three years. Between 1992 and 2012, only 11 percent of the winners of the Computing Olympiad had Jewish names, as did just 8 percent of the Siemens AP Award winners. And although I have only managed to locate the last two years of Chemistry Olympiad winners, these lists of 40 top students contained not a single probable Jewish name.

Further evidence is supplied by Weyl, who estimated that over 8 percent of the 1987 NMS semifinalists were Jewish,[60] a figure 35 percent higher than found in today’s results. Moreover, in that period the math and verbal scores were weighted equally for qualification purposes, but after 1997 the verbal score was double-weighted,[61] which should have produced a large rise in the number of Jewish semifinalists, given the verbal-loading of Jewish ability. But instead, today’s Jewish numbers are far below those of the late 1980s.

Taken in combination, these trends all provide powerful evidence that over the last decade or more there has been a dramatic collapse in Jewish academic achievement, at least at the high end.

Several possible explanations for this empirical result seem reasonably plausible. Although the innate potential of a group is unlikely to drop so suddenly, achievement is a function of both ability and effort, and today’s overwhelmingly affluent Jewish students may be far less diligent in their work habits or driven in their studies than were their parents or grandparents, who lived much closer to the bracing challenges of the immigrant experience. In support of this hypothesis, roughly half of the Jewish Math Olympiad winners from the last two decades have had the sort of highly distinctive names which would tend to mark them as recent immigrants from the Soviet Union or elsewhere, and such names were also very common among the top Jewish science students of the same period, even though this group represents only about 10 percent of current American Jews. Indeed, it seems quite possible that this large sudden influx of very high performing immigrant Jews from the late 1980s onward served to partially mask the rapid concurrent decline of high academic achievement among native American Jews, which otherwise would have become much more clearly evident a decade or so earlier.

This pattern of third or fourth generation American students lacking the academic drive or intensity of their forefathers is hardly surprising, nor unique to Jews. Consider the case of Japanese-Americans, who mostly arrived in America during roughly the same era. America’s Japanese have always been a high-performing group, with a strong academic tradition, and Japan’s international PISA academic scores are today among the highest in the world. But when we examine the list of California’s NMS semifinalists, less than 1 percent of the names are Japanese, roughly in line with their share of the California population.[62] Meanwhile, Chinese, Koreans, and South Asians are 6 percent of California but contribute 50 percent of the top scoring students, an eight-fold better result, with a major likely difference being that they are overwhelmingly of recent immigrant origin. In fact, although ongoing Japanese immigration has been trivial in size, a significant fraction of the top Japanese students have the unassimilated Japanese first names that would tend to indicate they are probably drawn from that tiny group.

In his 1966 book The Creative Elite in America, Weyl used last name analysis to document a similarly remarkable collapse in achievement among America’s Puritan-descended population, which had once provided a hugely disproportionate fraction of our intellectual leadership, but for various reasons went into rapid decline from about 1900 onward. He also mentions the disappearance of the remarkable Scottish intellectual contribution to British life after about 1800. Although the evidence for both these historical parallels seems very strong, the causal factors are not entirely clear, though Weyl does provide some possible explanations.[63]

In some respects, perhaps it was the enormously outsize Jewish academic performance of the past which was highly anomalous, and the more recent partial convergence toward white European norms which is somewhat less surprising. Over the years, claims have been widely circulated that the mean Jewish IQ is a full standard deviation—15 points—above the white average of 100,[64] but this seems to have little basis in reality. Richard Lynn, one of the world’s foremost IQ experts, has performed an exhaustive literature review and located some 32 IQ samples of American Jews, taken from 1920 to 2008. For the first 14 studies conducted during the years 1920–1937, the Jewish IQ came out very close to the white American mean, and it was only in later decades that the average figure rose to the approximate range of 107–111.[65]

In a previous article “Race, IQ & Wealth,” I had suggested that the IQs of ethnic groups appear to be far more malleable than many people would acknowledge, and may be particularly influenced by factors of urbanization, education, and affluence.[66] Given that Jews have always been America’s most heavily urbanized population and became the most affluent during the decades in question, these factors may account for a substantial portion of their huge IQ rise during most of the twentieth century. But with modern electronic technology recently narrowing the gaps in social environment and educational opportunities between America’s rural and urban worlds, we might expect a portion of this difference to gradually dissipate. American Jews are certainly a high-ability population, but the innate advantage they have over other high-ability white populations is probably far smaller than is widely believed.

This conclusion is supported by the General Social Survey (GSS), an online dataset of tens of thousands of American survey responses from the last forty years which includes the Wordsum vocabulary test, a very useful IQ proxy correlating at 0.71. Converted into the corresponding IQ scores, the Wordsum-IQ of Jews is indeed quite high at 109. But Americans of English, Welsh, Scottish, Swedish, and Catholic Irish ancestry also have fairly high mean IQs of 104 or above, and their combined populations outnumber Jews by almost 15-to-1, implying that they would totally dominate the upper reaches of the white American ability distribution, even if we excluded the remaining two-thirds of all American whites, many of whose IQs are also fairly high. Furthermore, all these groups are far less highly urbanized or affluent than Jews,[67] probably indicating that their scores are still artificially depressed to some extent. We should also remember that Jewish intellectual performance tends to be quite skewed, being exceptionally strong in the verbal subcomponent, much lower in math, and completely mediocre in visuospatial ability; thus, a completely verbal-oriented test such as Wordsum would actually tend to exaggerate Jewish IQ.

Stratifying the white American population along religious lines produces similar conclusions. An analysis of the data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth found that Americans raised in the Episcopal Church actually exceeded Jews in mean IQ, while several other religious categories came quite close, leading to the result that the overwhelming majority of America’s high-ability white population had a non-Jewish background.[68]

Finally, in the case of Jews, these assimilation- or environment-related declines in relative academic performance may have been reinforced by powerful demographic trends. For the last generation or two, typical Jewish women from successful or even ordinary families have married very late and averaged little more than a single child, while the small fraction of Jewish women who are ultra-Orthodox often marry in their teens and then produce seven or eight children.[69] As a consequence, this extremely religious subpopulation has been doubling in size every twenty years, and now easily exceeds 10 percent of the total, including a far higher percentage of younger Jews. But ultra-Orthodox Jews have generally been academically mediocre, often with enormously high rates of poverty and government dependency.[70]
Therefore, the combination of these two radically different trends of Jewish reproduction has acted to stabilize the total number of Jewish youngsters, while probably producing a sharp drop in their average academic achievement.