Occidental Quarterly 21.1 (Spring 2021)

6/28/2021 Mark Leibler: Powerbroker for Australia’s Jewish Plutocracy :: Reader View
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Mark Leibler: Powerbroker for

Australia’s Jewish Plutocracy
Brenton Sanderson • December 8, 2020 • 19,400 Words • 131
Comments • Reply
115-145 minutes
In writing about the pivotal Jewish role in Australia’s

demographic revolution (triggered by the liberalization of
immigration laws and institutionalization of multiculturalism), I
have had regular occasion to mention the name “Leibler.”
Among Jewish leaders in Australia in recent decades, none have
enjoyed greater prominence than brothers Isi and Mark Leibler. I
had long intended to devote an entire essay to the Leiblers and
their impact on Australian politics and society, and was recently
prompted to do so by the publication of the book The
Powerbroker: Mark Leibler, An Australian Jewish Life by the
Jewish journalist Michael Gawenda. After sampling some
excerpts, I ordered the book and powered through it in a couple
of days. While already familiar with the most of its contents, the
biography contains some fascinating (and surprisingly
revealing) material.
Gawenda’s stated reason for writing The Powerbroker is

strangely paradoxical. He claims to have been impelled to write
about Australia’s most powerful and politically well-connected
Jewish leader by the rise of anti-Semitism in Australia and
elsewhere. “The time was right,” he claims. “Anti-Semitism of
the right and the left was on the rise. … For the first time, I had a
growing sense of foreboding about the future of the Jews. I
wondered whether that time after the Holocaust – the time in
which Leibler and I grew up and lived most our lives, when anti-
Semitism was totally unacceptable and anti-Semites were given
no oxygen, no legitimacy – was over.”[1] Gawenda’s bizarre
response to this alleged phenomenon was to pen a work
confirming the veracity of various anti-Semitic “tropes” and
“canards.” The Powerbroker unashamedly affirms the
extraordinary power, wealth and political influence of organized
chrome-extension://gjhmajellcaeediogokhjjgffojhcnkb/reader/index.html?id=1583 1/69
Jewry in Australia – and its most prominent leader. For

Gawenda:
Leibler’s life is a story about Jews and power. Making that

connection is fraught with risks, for it is one that has
been made throughout history by anti-Semites and by
those who think Jews somehow have an almost magical
ability to influence and change – always for self-interest
and for the worst – the course of history. Questions about
Jewish power have consumed Jew-haters, and their
answers have led to discrimination and hatred and,
sometimes, to unspeakable, historically unprecedented
violence. But just because anti-Semites believe the Jews
have power does not mean it is untrue. Leibler’s story
cannot be told without an examination of the way he has
developed and used power and influence.[2]
Gawenda’s willingness to openly discuss the extraordinary

power and influence of Jews in Australia, despite this endeavor
being “fraught with risks,” troubled one reviewer of The
Powerbroker, the Jewish academic Phillip Mendes, who warned
that “This narrative may excite some conspiracy theorists on the
far left and right who believe that Jews per se control finance.”[3]
Mendes falsely claimed in his review that 30 percent of
Australian Jews live in poverty.
Gawenda’s first interactions with his biographical subject were

when, as editor of The Age newspaper in Melbourne in the
1990s, the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), the
lobby group then (and still) chaired by Leibler, contacted him
“regularly to complain rather robustly about the newspaper’s
coverage of the Middle East.”[4] Gawenda did not always need
AIJAC’s “robust” advice to sway the newspaper’s coverage of the
Middle East in his own ethnic interests. As editor he censored
political cartoons critical of Israel, a practice that prompted one
observer to demand he openly declare his Jewish ethnicity.
Gawenda found this deeply offensive, with its suggestion that “a
Jew writing about another Jew was somehow problematic. And it
could only be considered problematic if you thought that Jews
stuck together, that their first loyalty was always to each other,
that Jews, in other words, had dual and even conflicting loyalties.
For Jews, this is an association with a long and bloody history,
and it has, no doubt, been leveled at Mark Leibler.”[5]
Michael Gawenda
Gawenda identifies as a child of “Holocaust survivors” despite
the fact his parents sat out World War Two in the far-east of
Russia. They were, he claims, part of “the influx of more than
20,000 Holocaust survivors [to Australia] after the war, more of
whom settled in Australia proportionately than in any other
country other than Israel.”[6] The father of his biographical
subject arrived in Australia just prior to World War Two. An
Orthodox religious Zionist and diamond dealer from Antwerp
who arrived in 1938 on a business trip, Abraham Leibler was
prompted to stay by the situation in Europe, and was joined by
his wife Rachel and firstborn son Isi in Melbourne later that year.
At that time, there were then no obstacles for Jews leaving
Belgium to sell their property and take their wealth with them.
Isi Leibler’s younger brother, Mark, was later born in Melbourne
in 1943.
Abraham set up his diamond business in Melbourne at the time

when, under the influence of the White Australia policy,
Australia was one of the Whitest countries in the world with the
non-European population, other than Aborigines, being
measured at around 0.25 per cent of the total. The population
was predominantly of Anglo-Celtic origin and Australians of the
other European ethnicities were thoroughly assimilated into the
Anglo-Australian mainstream. Apart from the Protestant-
Catholic sectarian divide, Australia was a culturally-cohesive
nation devoid of significant social tensions. Reflecting on this,
Gawenda sourly observes that “In those days the word ‘diversity’
pertained only to plant and animal species, not to human beings,
and the word ‘multicultural’ was still many decades away from
being a description of Australian society.”[7] Gawenda’s own
ethnic group would play a pivotal role in that social
transformation.
Abraham Leibler arrived in an Australia that was “was

monocultural and before the arrival of hundreds of thousands of
migrants from Europe in the 1950s, ethnically homogeneous.”[8]
Even this post-War influx of some 200,000 European migrants to
Australia did not, however, greatly change things. Northern
European migrants were prioritized and expected to assimilate
into the general Australia community as quickly as possible
(which they did). Moreover, throughout the 1950s more migrants
continued to arrive in Australia from Britain than from any other

place.
At the time of Abraham Leibler’s arrival in 1938, the Australian

Jewish population were predominantly “Anglo Jews” – the
descendants of German Jews who arrived in Australia during the
gold rushes of the mid to late-nineteenth century. These Jews
were well integrated into the political and administrative
structure of the colonies and gained social acceptance through
adoption of British customs and displays of loyalty to the British
Empire. Sir John Monash (1865–1931), for example, became a
general in the Australian army and was, according to Goldberg,
“the only Jew in the modern era outside Israel (with the
exception of Trotsky) to lead an army.”[9] Sir Isaac Isaacs (1855–
1948) became Australia’s first native-born Governor-General. In
Australia under the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, these
highly-assimilated Anglo-Jews were regarded as “White,” while
Jews of Middle-Eastern origin were regarded as Asian and
therefore barred from entry.
Alongside these culturally-assimilated Anglo Jews was a smaller

group of Eastern European Jews noted for their ferocious
ethnocentrism and political radicalism. These Jews arrived as
refugees from Tsarist Russia from 1880 to 1914, and from
Poland after 1918. The numbers arriving with each of these
waves were, however, comparatively small and Australian Jewry
remained a tiny isolated outpost of world Jewry until the 1930s.
[10] In this decade, Australia accepted an influx of 7,000 Jews as
refugees under the Australian government’s quota for Jews
fleeing National Socialist Germany. Gawenda notes how these
new Jews, and the post-war Jewish influx of “Holocaust
survivors” from Eastern Europe, “were radically different to the
Anglo Jews. They spoke mainly Yiddish and were steeped in
Yiddish culture and traditions. Critically, they did not define
their Jewishness narrowly, as a matter of religious adherence.
Many were Zionists who believed in Jewish nationhood.”[11]
Many were also avowed communists who created and supported

a communist front group called the Jewish Council to Combat
Fascism and Anti-Semitism. Formed during the war, this
organization became a major force in Australian Jewish
community politics, with its leaders and members being
overwhelmingly “either communists or fellow travelers.”[12]
From these politically radical Eastern European Jewish migrants
emerged one of the Soviet Union’s most successful spy rings. In

his book Traitors and Spies: Espionage and Corruption in Hugh
Places in Australia, 1901–-50, former intelligence officer John
Fahey describes how “respected Jewish businessmen” Jack
Skolnik, Hirsch Munz and Solomon Kosky “established
themselves as what I believe is probably the most successful spy
ring that’s ever operated in Australia. I have no doubt they stole
vast amounts of information.”[13] This trio passed on valuable
military and political secrets to Moscow, undetected, from
government offices in Melbourne from the late 1920s right
through to the 1950s.
The Anglo Jews feared the intense ethnocentrism and political

radicalism of these new Jewish arrivals would provoke an
increase in anti-Semitism — and their fears were not without
foundation. The new migrants had the effect of making the
Anglo-Jews more visible as a group through their association
with the new European Jews. They also provoked hostility from
significant sections of the Australian community, who (correctly)
sensed that these psychologically-intense and politically-radical
newcomers posed an existential threat. The Anglo-Jewish
leadership feared these new Jews, who were “Zionists of the
most visceral kind,” would provoke the charge of dual loyalty
recurrently made regularly against Jews in Europe: that Jews
were only loyal to each other and not to the countries in which
they lived. Gawenda observes that:
Sometimes the dual loyalties charge was expressed as an

accusation that Jews were a fifth column of traitors
hidden in the population. Hitler famously ranted about
the Jewish stab-in-the-back of the German people during
World War I. It was, however, a relatively new concept in
Australia, where, until the arrival of the refugee Jews in
the 1930s, Australia’s Anglo Jews had, in the main, done
everything they could to avoid being accused of such a
terrible thing. After the establishment of Israel, the dual
loyalties’ charge morphed into a charge that Jews were
more loyal to Israel than to countries where they lived
and often had lived for generations.[14]
The battle between the established Anglo-Jewish community

and the newcomers from Central and Eastern Europe was
essentially a battle between proponents of cultural assimilation
and proponents of Jewish separatism. The new Jewish migrants
were “not about to ‘complete Hitler’s work,’ as many of them put

it, by assimilating.”[15] Even when in Europe they had
considered themselves Jews first and foremost. “They were well-
versed in Jewish scholarship, often deeply religious and in many
cases, passionately Zionist,” notes the Australian-Jewish
historian Suzanne Rutland.[16] The new Jews, through the
activism of community leaders like Walter Lippmann (who
arrived in Australia in 1938), were to be pivotal to entrenching
cultural pluralism and “multiculturalism” as official Australian
government policy from the 1970s.
Lippmann resented the expectation to assimilate into the Anglo-

Australian mainstream. In his advocacy of the multiculturalism
in Australia, he tore a page out of the writings of the pioneering
Jewish-American multiculturalist Horace Kallen. Lippmann
believed Jewish immigrants had left one type of oppression
behind only to be subjected to another – the Australian
expectation to assimilate. Kallen described the corresponding
expectation in the early twentieth-century United States as “the
Americanization hysteria” or the “Americanization
psychosis.”[17] The multiculturalism espoused by Lippmann,
which ultimately became the basis for social policy in Australia,
implied “a rejection not only of the attempts to promote an
amalgam of cultures but also of any assumptions of Anglo-Saxon
superiority and the necessary conformity to English-oriented
cultural patterns.”[18]
The Leiblers, as Orthodox Jews and Zionists, openly flouted the

expectation to assimilate and lived in a completely Jewish milieu
sealed off from the surrounding Australian society. This stance
was intensified by their involvement with Mizrachi, a religious
Zionist organization that functioned like a self-contained
community, with its own synagogues, day schools and youth
movement, Bnei Akiva – named after Rabbi Akiva, a rabbinical
authority on Judaism’s major texts, who was executed by the
Romans after the failed Jewish revolt against Roman rule in AD
66.
The Leiblers were far from alone in their determination to resist

assimilation and promote Jewish genetic and cultural separation
from the general Australian community. A group of businessmen
and activists raised money to establish a Jewish day school in
1949, Mount Scopus College, in Melbourne – which eventually
grew into the largest Jewish day school in Australia and one of
the biggest in the world. Mark Leibler attended the college,

which catered to “a wide range of parents, from the Orthodox to
those who wanted their children to go to a Jewish school in order
to minimize the chances of their ‘marrying out.’” These parents
were most concerned about “maximizing the chances of their
children getting good Year 12 exam scores and marrying other
Jews.”[19] Such was the insularity of the Mark Leibler’s
upbringing and early life in Melbourne that he observed: “I don’t
think I had any non-Jewish friends. I was basically mixing with
Jews all the time.”[20]
Despite this, reflecting back on his time as a student at Mount

Scopus, Leibler thought the school had not done enough to foster
a “deep sense of their Jewish identity, a knowledge of and love
for Judaism as bulwarks against assimilation and
intermarriage.” He believed Australian Jewish children needed
“schools with clear ideologies that fostered their particular kind
of Jewish identity.” He later supported and sent all of his
children to Yavneh College – a Zionist and Modern Orthodox
school absolutely committed to producing “Jews secure in their
Jewishness, knowledgeable about and able to practice Judaism
with an unshakable commitment to Israel.”[21]
Mount Scopus College: not doing enough to foster a “deep sense

of their Jewish identity, a knowledge of and love for Judaism as
bulwarks against assimilation and intermarriage
Mark Leibler first interacted with non-Jews when he studied law

at the University of Melbourne. Even there, he was, however,
taught and mentored by several Jewish academics including
Zelman Cowen, the Dean of Law who helped get him into the
Masters program at Yale. Jewish ethnic networking also played
an inevitable role in determining where Leibler launched his
legal career: he did his articles at the law firm of Arnold Bloch in
1966, whose eponymous owner was “a family friend and Jewish
community leader who had known Mark since he was a boy.”[22]
Leibler subsequently joined the firm and was quickly made an
associate. Within a decade and a half, many of the firm’s mostly
Jewish clients were among Australia’s richest people. One of
Bloch’s first clients in the 1950s was John Gandel, the now
billionaire property developer and leading funder of Jewish
causes.
In the decade to 1957, the Australian Jewish community had

almost doubled in size, from about 32,000 to more than 55,000
with the vast majority living in Sydney and Melbourne. By 1957,
the new Jewish migrants from Central and Eastern Europe
outnumbered the Anglo Jews and had taken over the leadership
of all Jewish organizations. It was out of this group that Isi and
Mark Leibler emerged as leaders in the 1960s and 1970s. Mark
focused his leadership ambitions on the Australian Zionist
organizations – the State Zionist Council of Victoria and the
national Zionist Federation of Australia, which was affiliated to
the World Zionist Organization. His brother Isi had already risen
to become president of Victorian Jewish Board of Deputies and
an internationally recognized leader of the campaign to allow
Soviet Jews to migrate to Israel. His activism is said to have been
strongly shaped by “the Holocaust” which was always
“uppermost in Isi Leibler’s mind.”[23]
Since the late 1990s, when Isi settled in Israel, Mark Leibler has
been recognized as “Australia’s most influential and powerful
Jewish leader, and has become increasingly influential in
international Jewry.”[24] The Jerusalem Post accorded him the
status of one of the world’s 50 most influential Jews – a leader of
Jews both in Australia and around the world. Gawenda notes
that while Leibler “is not well known to most Australians,” his
influence “far exceeds his public profile” and he is “regularly
sought out by powerful people in all walks of life.”[25] Ultimately,
this power and influence is “built on the strength of the 120,000
in Australia’s Jewish community.”[26] In the subsequent parts of
this essay, I explore Mark Leibler’s impact on Australian politics

and society.
Mark Leibler with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison
Lawyer to Australia’s Ethno-Plutocratic

Elite
Leibler has been a partner at the law firm Arnold Bloch Leibler
(ABL) for almost fifty years. Of the 200 richest people and
families in Australia, around one-in-five are clients of ABL. In
2018, thirty-five of Australia’s wealthiest individuals and
families were clients of ABL and 19 of these were Jewish. The
man topping the rich list, Anthony Pratt, with an estimated
fortune of $12.9 billion, is one of them. These clients help make
the firm one of Australia’s most profitable. ABL has close
connections with several major New York firms — especially
those established and run by Jews like Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen &
Katz and Skaddan Arps. The lawyers of these New York law
firms, which refer many cases to ABL, are said to “feel
comfortable dealing with ABL, a firm with origins in the Jewish
community that still retains a significant Jewish client base.”[27]
Most of ABL’s wealthy Jewish clientele reside in the wealthy

inner suburbs of Melbourne. Sydney has fewer Jewish
billionaires than Melbourne, although businessman Sir Frank
Lowy and apartment mogul Harry Triguboff ranked in the top 10

of the of the 2018 rich list, and Jewish wealth in Sydney is
growing rapidly due to “the business success of South African
Jewish migrants, most of whom settled in Sydney and Perth from
the 1970s to the 1990s.”[28] A long-time pillar of Melbourne’s
Jewish establishment and client of Leibler is Jewish shopping
center magnate John Gandel who is Australia’s seventh richest
person with a fortune estimated at $6.45 billion in 2018. Gandel
has made large donations to Jewish organizations closely linked
to Leibler, such as Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council
(AIJAC) and the United Israel Appeal. Gandel also finances the
Anti-Defamation Commission’s propaganda program for schools
“Click Against Hate” — an “early intervention” program for
schoolchildren from Years 5 to 10. The program is offered free of
charge to schools due to this funding.
John Gandel (center right) and ADC chairman Dvir Abramovich

(far right)
Gandel also funds Taglit-Birthright Israel, a program that

provides free ten-day tours of Israel for young Jews who are
“currently unaffiliated with the Jewish community and have
never visited Israel.” Announcing his financial support, Gandel
declared that “My family strongly believes in supporting a range
of programs that can foster and enhance Jewish continuity and
identity, and help develop the future leaders in our community.”
The Zionist Federation of Australia (led by Leibler’s son Jeremy)
thanked Gandel and extoled Birthright Israel as “a critically
important Israel program” that serves to “engage many young
Jewish adults with the powerful connection to Israel, Judaism
and other young Jews they meet during and after the
program.”[29] Thus, while seeking to increase Jewish
ethnocentrism and ethno-nationalism through his funding of

Birthright Israel, Gandel simultaneously funds “Click Against
Hate,” a program specifically designed to reduce White
ethnocentrism and promote the virtues of “diversity” and
“multiculturalism” among Australian schoolchildren.
Leibler, Australia’s most prominent tax lawyer, fiercely defends

their interests of his Jewish clients like Gandel, and has had the
ear of every Australian Treasurer since John Howard had the job
in the 1970s. Former Australian Tax Office (ATO) officials who
have dealt with Leibler attest to his “reputation as a bully who
intimidates junior staffers conducting audits of his clients.” He
has a reputation for being “arrogant and a formidable and
difficult opponent.”[30] The ATO’s Chief Tax Council, Kevin
Fitzpatrick, confirmed Leibler’s reputation as “a person who had
influence and as someone who used this perception to bully
more junior auditors by threatening to go over their heads to the
Commissioner or some other senior official in order to get his
way.”[31]
Leibler certainly exemplifies the qualities Kevin MacDonald

identified as typical background traits for Jewish activism:
hyper-ethnocentrism, intelligence, wealth and psychological
aggression.[32] Those who have dealt with Leibler attest that he
was “often arrogant, often angry, and that he would regularly
swear during arguments with opponents.” Interviewing Leibler
for his book, Gawenda could readily see “why some of the
politicians he had dealt with, and some in the Jewish community
who had opposed him politically, might have felt that Leibler was
brash, arrogant, a bully.”[33]
In 1984, when he became president of the Zionist Federation of

Australia, the Australian Jewish News described Leibler as “an
angry young man.”[34] One anonymous Jewish source noted “a
massive vicious streak running through the genes of both
[Leibler] brothers.”[35] Isi Leibler’s attacks on opponents, or
people he considered opponents, “were legendary for their
bluntness and vitriol.”[36] Gawenda notes that while Isi would
sometimes be open to reconciliation after he attacked someone
(if it was politically expedient), Mark “is a much more
uncompromising and dangerous foe.”[37] The Leiblers
invariably referred to those Jews who questioned their right to
speak for all Australian Jews as “enemies of the Jewish people,
or even self-hating Jews.”[38]
In the 1980s, ABL became a locus for Jewish ethnic networking

when young Jewish lawyers of the firm were targeted by wealthy
Jewish businessmen for lucrative jobs. One was Joe Gersh who
was offered a highly-paid job at packaging company run by the
late Jewish billionaire Richard Pratt. Pratt had ‘’heard that Gersh
was a bright Jewish boy and, according to Gersh, Pratt was then
trying to hire every bright young Jewish boy in Australia.” In the
end, Gersh opted to stay at the law firm after Leibler told him
“things were happening at ABL.”[39] Gersh was quickly made a
senior associate, and, at the end of that year, aged 26, a partner.
These days Gersh is executive chairman of his investment
banking firm Gersh Investment Partners. He is also a director of
the Liberal Party think-tank The Sydney Institute, and a long-
time friend of former Australian Treasurer Peter Costello. In
2018, Gersh was appointed to the board of the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation.
The Powerbroker recounts how Arnold Bloch, the founder of

ABL, left the firm in 1981 to go into business with his wealthy
Jewish clients Marc Besen and Abe Goldberg. The latter, at one
time Australia’s fourth richest man, was a notorious fraudster
whose business continued to operate for three years while
insolvent. Gawenda recounts how:
In early 1990, Goldberg’s bankers appointed KPMG to

look over Goldberg’s books. The auditor discovered that
Goldberg’s companies had liabilities of $1.7 billion with
assets of $425 million. In other words, Goldberg had
been technically bankrupt since the [2013] stock market
crash. But before he could be held accountable for the
hundreds of millions of dollars he owed the banks and
other creditors, he fled to Poland where he renewed his
Polish citizenship. At the time Australia did not have an
extradition treaty with Poland. Goldberg went back into
business in Poland, amassing a significant fortune as a
property tycoon before he died there in July 2016, having
not paid back a cent of what he owed his creditors in
Australia.[40]
In her 1987 book, The New Boy Network, Jewish journalist Ruth
Ostrow chronicled the rise to wealth of the post-war Jewish
migrants to Australia. Less than thirty years after arriving in the
country, some were among the nation’s wealthiest people.
Included in her book were Marc Besen, John Gandel, Eddie
Kornhauser, Maurice Alter, George Herscu, Abe Goldberg, and

the Smorgon, Liberman, Rockman and Werdiger families.[41] All
were clients of Arnold Bloch Leibler. Herscu and Goldberg were
later exposed as criminals and Herscu ended up in jail. The
majority, however, survived the 1987 stock market crash and
“went on to accumulate wealth beyond their own
imaginings.”[42]
Bottom-of-the-Harbor Tax Avoidance

Schemes
These clients expected ABL to provide not just legal services, but
to advise them on how to maximize their chances of building
successful businesses. A key priority was to structure their
business to avoid paying tax. A 1980 Royal Commission
uncovered a vast tax avoidance industry among these
businessmen. These so-called “bottom-of-the-harbor” schemes
“were blatant in their intent — to avoid paying what should have
been a legitimate tax bill on company profits.” At its simplest, it
involved a series of paper transactions in which a company was
stripped of its assets and accumulated profits, leaving no tax
payable. These assets were then transferred to a new company
that carried on business as before. The original company was
then metaphorically dispatched to the bottom of the harbor
through a transfer to someone with no assets and no idea of
what was actually happening. Often the old company’s records
were simply “lost.”[43]
Leibler’s clients used a variety of schemes designed to avoid tax,

and an Australian Taxation Office official attested to Leibler’s
reputation as a lawyer “deeply involved in the blatant, artificial
and contrived schemes.”[44] As mentioned, Leibler also had a
reputation for going over the heads of ATO auditors to more
senior officials (or threatening to do so) if the result of a tax audit
looked unfavorable for one of his clients. Leibler refused to tell
Gawenda how many of his clients had been involved in bottom-
of-the-harbor schemes, “but there can be little doubt that the
number was significant.” These clients needed Leibler’s help,
especially when, in the wake of the Royal Commission, the
federal government signaled a willingness to pass retrospective
legislation to recoup tax that had been avoided by his clients.
New laws made it a criminal offence to create a company or trust
unable to pay taxes or to assist a company or person to do so.
The new law meant those who took up the tax avoidance
schemes or promoted them would be criminally liable.
As Treasurer in the Hawke government (1983–91), Paul Keating

(Hawke’s successor as Prime Minister in 1991) initially
supported a further crackdown on such tax avoidance. In early
1983, the government introduced legislation that gave the
Commissioner of Taxation the power to treat a company’s
income and capital reserves (i.e., retained undistributed profits)
as dividends and, therefore, to tax those reserves. This was an
attempt to recoup tax revenue that had been lost through
bottom-of-the-harbor schemes. Mark Leibler was incensed by
the legislation. He knew that if the legislation passed, some of
his wealthiest clients would be liable for many millions of dollars
in tax. This would, in turn, seriously reduce a major source of
funding for Jewish and Zionist causes.
Leibler initially tried to set up meetings with the then Finance

Minister John Dawkins who was spearheading the legislation,
but to “Leibler’s frustration and anger” Dawkins refused to see
him. The bill passed the House of Representatives in June 1983.
As the Opposition opposed the legislation, only one vote — that of
the independent Senator Brian Harradine — would determine
whether the legislation would pass or fail. While the legislation
was being debated in the House of Representatives, Leibler
launched an aggressive lobbying campaign to convince
Harradine to vote against the legislation when it came to the
Senate. Gawenda notes how:
He flew to Canberra to see him. He sent Harradine notes

that explained why the legislation was very bad, and
might lead to an economic downturn and a significant
increase in unemployment. Leibler knew that Harradine
was inclined to support the legislation. He was in many
ways an old-style Labor man who was not naturally
inclined to support wealthy businessmen. … Politically,
there was nothing in it for Harradine to vote against the
legislation; in fact he was likely to be accused of being on
the side of business and the wealthy. He wavered, torn
between following his political interest and his
understanding, shaped by Leibler’s lobbying, that it was
bad legislation.[45]
In the end, Harradine caved in to Leibler’s demands and blocked

the legislation. While this was “a major victory for Leibler,” a few
years later the High Court of Australia ruled that this legislation
was actually unnecessary and that the Commissioner of
Taxation already had the power to tax the capital reserves of
companies involved in the bottom-of-the-harbor schemes and
other forms of tax avoidance. After the ruling, Leibler called the
then Commissioner of Taxation, insisting that “urgent remedial
action was required” and that it was open to the Commissioner
to make a ruling that would, in essence, ignore the High Court
decision. The Commissioner of Taxation indicated to Leibler that
he wouldn’t act without the support of Treasurer Paul Keating.
[46]
Leibler immediately started lobbying Keating. Gawenda notes

that it “was relatively easy for a tax lawyer of Leibler’s
reputation, who represented so many wealthy clients, to
organize meetings with senior politicians on both sides of
politics.” The political risks for Keating were substantial if it
became known he had met with Leibler to discuss the particular
tax assessments of Leibler’s wealthy clients because most Labor
MPs supported the High Court ruling. Despite this, as Leibler
recorded in his notes from the time, “Keating did respond and
very positively. He said quite specifically that he was in
agreement with the line I was putting and that he would take the
matter up with [tax commissioner] Boucher.”[47] In the end, the
Commissioner of Taxation agreed to issue an administrative
order whereby “the financial threat” to Leibler’s clients “was
significantly diminished.”[48] Leibler was triumphant. To this
day, he “nourishes his contacts at the ATO’s senior levels,
including with the Commissioner, and his contacts with senior
politicians on both sides of politics. The networking and
schmoozing never stops; it’s part of his DNA and he has helped
to instill it in many lawyers at ABL.”[49]
Cultivating Australia’s Senior Politicians

Mark Leibler has cultivated and sustained close relationships
with senior Australian politicians over several decades: from Bill
Hayden, when he was foreign minister in the Hawke government
in the 1980s, to Prime Ministers John Howard, Paul Keating and
Julia Gillard. The walls of his office and study are adorned with
“photographs of Leibler with Australian and Israeli prime
ministers and foreign ministers and senior cabinet ministers:
John Howard, Paul Keating and Malcolm Turnbull, and Israeli

Prime Ministers Itzak Shamir, Shimon Peres and Benjamin
Netanyahu.”[50]
The perceived imperative of cultivating close relationships with

Australia’s senior politicians can be traced back to events that
occurred when Mark Leibler first took on leadership roles in
Zionist organizations. From the time of Israel’s founding in 1948
through to the election of the Whitlam Labor government in
1972, both major Australian political parties proclaimed
bipartisan support for Israel. In 1973, Whitlam declared his
government would be more even-handed, which, for Australian
Jewry, “meant that Australian government support for Israel
could no longer be taken for granted.”[51] Leibler and other
Jewish activists were incensed at Whitlam’s stance.
In the lead up to the 1974 election, the Australian Labor Party

was concerned wealthy Jewish donors would abandon the party
because of Whitlam’s Middle East policies. A meeting was
organized between Whitlam and prominent Jewish leaders,
including Mark Leibler. Whitlam angered them by refusing to
apologize for his public stance. After the event, Whitlam told ALP
supporters he felt “ambushed” and accused the Jewish
leadership of “trying to blackmail him into supporting Israel.”
For Leibler, Whitlam’s intransigence signaled the necessity of
establishing “better, more professional connections with leaders
of both parties.” Gawenda notes that:
It is now a commonplace accusation that the so-called

Jewish Lobby — or Israel Lobby as it is sometimes
described — has undue influence on Australian
government policies toward the Israel-Palestinian
conflict. It has also become common practice to accuse it
of being powerful and bullying. Bob Carr, former Labor
premier of New South Wales and Foreign Minister in
Julia Gillard’s last years as prime minister, is perhaps the
most prominent politician to engage in such accusations.
Their genesis inside the ALP goes back to that breakfast
in Melbourne in 1974.[52]
Leibler led by example and assiduously cultivated relationships

with senior Labor Party figures — in particular with Bill Hayden
when he was federal leader of the opposition in the early 1980s.
Leibler was at the time president of the Victorian State Zionist
Council. It was a difficult time to be a Zionist leader. The Israeli

invasion of Lebanon had provoked protests around the world. An
incursion into southern Lebanon to push the PLO out of the
region had turned, under the direction of Ariel Sharon, into a
full-scale invasion of the entire country. Hundreds of Palestinian
men, women and children had been massacred in the Sabra
neighborhood of Beirut and in the nearby Shatila Palestinian
refugee camp by the Phalangist militia allied with Israel. A
United Nations commission concluded that Israel bore ultimate
responsibility for the massacre.
Despite such events, Leibler was (and remains) adamant that no

Australian Jewish leader should ever “indulge in any public
criticism of Israeli Government policy.” Gawenda notes that “In
those days Mark and Isi Leibler saw themselves as policemen of
the extent to which members of the Jewish community could be
critical of Israel. If anyone crossed the Leibler line, the brothers
reacted with the sort of trenchant, even personal, criticism that
made enemies of the Jews and non-Jews who found themselves
on the receiving end of their often vitriolic attacks.”[27] Leibler
has continued to aggressively police “the boundaries of what his
fellow Jews could legitimately say about Israel.”[54]
Mark Leibler cultivated Hayden at a time when his brother Isi

had already forged close ties with Bob Hawke, then stalking
Hayden for the Labor leadership. Given Isi’s close personal
relationship with Bob Hawke, his younger brother thought it
most expedient to focus his attention on Hayden and,
subsequently, Hawke’s logical successor as Prime Minister, Paul
Keating. Hayden personally disliked Isi, thinking him “difficult
to deal with, prone to angry outbursts, and quick to make
threats” and was initially reluctant to speak to his younger
brother who had trenchantly criticized him after he had gone to
Israel in 1980 and, “despite intense lobbying by Jewish
community leaders,” had gone to Ramallah in the West Bank to
visit Yasser Arafat.
Mark Leibler schmoozing with Bob Hawke in the 1980s
Leibler thought Hayden’s attitude to Israel and Australian Jewry

was amenable to change and was, to some degree, a product of
his rivalry with Bob Hawke, who, according to former Jewish
leaders and Labor politicians, told “whoever would listen that he
was a hero to the Jewish community, that the Jews were on his
side and wanted him [as opposed to Hayden] to lead the ALP in
parliament.”[55] According to Leibler, “Hayden’s difficulties with
the Jewish community were due in part to Hayden’s ‘paranoia’
over the relationship between Hawke and the Jews.”
After his initial meeting with Hayden, Leibler assessed that

Hayden was “amenable to building a closer relationship between
himself and the Jewish community.” In his notes, Leibler
stressed the importance of “frequent informal contacts between
the Jewish community and Zionist leaders and the top
leadership of the ALP.” Leibler’s overtures to Hayden were “the
beginning of his successful cultivation of senior government
figures of both political persuasions.” His efforts bore tangible
fruit when the Hayden was appointed Foreign Minister by Hawke
in 1983. Leibler now “had access to the cabinet minister who
was in a position to determine Australia’s stance on the conflict
between Israel and the Palestinians.”[56]
Overturning the UN Resolution Equating

Zionism with Racism
This access became an important strategic asset in Leibler’s
campaign to promote the rescinding of the United Nations
resolution, passed by the General Assembly in 1975, stating that
Zionism was a form of racism. Leibler as ZFA president fervently
backed Israeli President Chaim Herzog’s international campaign
to annul the UN resolution. The campaign would be led the
World Zionist Organization and the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and
Leibler would run the Australian campaign through the ZFA. He
wrote to politicians, public figures and leading journalists
insisting that “the Zionism-equals-racism resolution had
contributed to both anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism worldwide,”
and asked them to support the resolution’s annulment. Bill
Hayden, formerly a critic of the Israeli government, now backed
Leibler’s campaign.
In August 1985, the U.S. Congress passed a motion denouncing

the UN Resolution stating Zionism was racism. Leibler noted: “It
immediately occurred to me that perhaps the principle objective
of the Australian campaign should be to bring about a similar
result, a resolution of both houses of parliament denouncing
resolution 3379 but more than that, calling for its
rescission.”[57]
Key Leibler lobbying targets Paul Keating and Bill Hayden
He went to Hayden, not Hawke, with the proposal. Such

resolutions were rare in the Australian parliament, and a
resolution on a foreign affairs issue had never been passed.

Leibler invited Hayden to be keynote speaker at the ZFA’s
Biennial Conference in April 1986. Hayden accepted, and told
Leibler that he would announce his support for a joint
parliamentary resolution in his speech. Having lobbied
aggressively to secure cross-party support for the resolution,
Leibler then wrote to Hayden “enclosing a draft resolution for
him to consider and asked whether he could meet relevant
members of Hayden’s staff to discuss the final form of the
resolution.”
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The resolution (which was basically Leibler’s) that was put to

parliament — which went further than the motion passed by the
U.S. Congress and called for the UN resolution to be rescinded —
was, according to Leibler, “more than satisfactory.”[58] Leibler
was present in the House of Representatives when the
resolution, carried unanimously in the House and the Senate at
the same time, was passed. The Australian resolution was used
by the Israel’s president, Chaim Herzog, and Jewish leaders and
activists around the world as a model for other jurisdictions. The
U.S. Congress subsequently passed a resolution sponsored by
Senator Patrick Moynihan identical to the Australian one. The
French and European Parliaments later did the same. For
Leibler, this showed Australian Jewry “could have influence in
international Jewish affairs way beyond its small size.”[59] In
December 1991 the United Nations General Assembly revoked
the 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism.
Mark Leibler in the early 1990s
Having Their Cake and Eating It Too – The

Dual Citizenship Campaign
By the mid-1980s Mark Leibler had established the Zionist
Federation of Australia as “a political lobbying powerhouse.” The
organization was centrally involving in ensuring 7,000
Australian Jews who had made Aliyah to Israel retained their
Australian citizenship. Under the Citizenship Act, Australians
could not become citizens of another country without giving up
their Australian citizenship, as Rupert Murdoch had done to
become an American citizen. Under Israel’s Law of Return, Jews
who settled in Israel automatically became Israeli citizens –
meaning they had implicitly renounced their Australian
citizenship. This was not enforced by Australian authorities
prior to 1986. That year, however, the Labor government
introduced legislation to amend the Citizenship Act to clarify the
prohibition on dual citizenship. The bill prompted Immigration
Department officials to rule that those who had settled In Israel
before 1981 and become Israeli citizens would have their
Australian citizenship revoked and passports cancelled. So too
would Australian Jews who had arrived after 1981 and been
granted permanent residency by Israel.
Among Australian Jews there was outrage and panic, and the
“ZFA was inundated with demands for help. Contrary to what
Australian immigration officials had always told them, not only
would adult Australians in Israel lose their citizenship, but so too
would their children who had been born in Israel.”[60] These
Jews, noted Gawenda, who Leibler and the ZFA regarded as a

Zionist success story, wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
This situation might have “raised the old charge of dual loyalties,
a long-standing anti-Semitic trope in which Jews are a sort of
fifth column, with greater loyalty to their fellow Jews than to the
country in which they live and are citizens. Here were Jews
committed to Israel, living and raising children there, even
serving in the Israeli army, and yet determined to hang on to
their Australian citizenship.”[61]
Leibler coordinated an intensive lobbying campaign to have

Jews granted a special exemption to the dual citizenship laws. A
“sense of urgency” gripped Leibler during this campaign; he
“was a man possessed, furiously working on this issue, and
sometimes furious when he didn’t get his way, as, for instance,
when an Immigration Department official refused to see the
logic and force of the case Leibler was putting to him.”[62] In his
notes, Leibler recalled that “The conversation was very heated
and I was quite abusive.” Leibler was adamant “this problem
would have to be resolved even if it meant I had to go and see the
Prime Minister for the second time that day.” Leibler had met
with Bob Hawke earlier that day as part of a delegation organized
by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.
Leibler insisted on seeing [then immigration minister] Chris

Hurford who “interrupted a lengthy meeting with a rather
important lobby to see me.”[63] Hurford caved in to Leibler’s
demands/threats and, in April 1986, with Opposition support,
announced amendments to the government’s proposed
citizenship legislation that restored the citizenship of all the
Australian Jews living in Israel. Leibler’s victory was complete.
[64] In 2002, the Howard government made dual citizenship
legal, “in recognition of Australia’s diversity and
multiculturalism.”[65]
Courting Paul Keating and John Howard

When Paul Keating successfully challenged Prime Minister
Hawke for the leadership of the Labor Party in 1991, there was
consternation among the ranks of Jewish activist organizations.
At the time “there was a wave of grief through some sections of
the Jewish community at Hawke’s departure,” and Jewish
leaders “effusively praised the former prime minister.” Bob
Hawke was “particularly close to the Jewish community” and, in
particular, to influential Jews like Isi Leibler, multicultural

activist Walter Lippmann, and wealthy businessmen like Eddie
Kornhauser and Peter Abeles. All “had direct access to the prime
minister.”[66] Bronwyn Hinz noted the far-reaching social policy
implications of Walter Lippmann’s close association with Hawke:
In the 1980s, the ECCV [Ethnic Communities Council of

Victoria] worked closely with Prime Minister Bob Hawke,
a personal friend of ECCV founding Chairperson Walter
Lippmann. As the representative of Melbourne’s most
ethnically diverse electorate, Hawke was especially
cognizant of the value of close connections with the peak
council, its activists and member groups, accepting most
invitations to their functions, and providing Lippmann
and other ECCV activists with direct access to his office.
In the first year of the Hawke government, the ECCV’s
lobbying culminated in the reduction of citizenship
waiting period to two years, the replacement of the term
alien with “non‐citizen” in the 1983 Migration Act, and
an increase of the refugee intake.[67]
Leslie Caplan, president of the Executive Council of Australian

Jewry, lamented Hawke’s political demise, describing him as a
man of “extraordinary ability, intellect, compassion and charm
who had a special relationship with the Jewish community.”
Mark Leibler, then president of the ZFA, likewise extolled Hawke
as “a giant among men, a great prime minister, a close friend of
the Jewish people and a constant supporter of the security and
integrity of Israel.”[68] While making this public statement, he
had been busy behind the scenes courting Hawke’s successor.
After Paul Keating’s first unsuccessful challenge to Hawke,
Leibler had sent him the following handwritten letter:
Dear Paul,
Strange isn’t it that the loser on the votes emerges

looking very much the winner in all other respects, But
then perhaps not surprising at all!
Congratulations on the performance. I look forward in

anticipation to the Second Act – its final and successful
completion.
Wish you much luck
With best wishes
One of your many admirers
Mark
Keating wrote back, thanking Leibler for his note, and for his
“words of encouragement and support.”[69] Sniffing the
changing political winds, Leibler carefully positioned himself as
Keating’s Court Jew. Keating’s defeat of Hawke left the field open
for Mark Leibler to assume a position hitherto occupied by other
Jewish leaders like his brother Isi, “Almost all of whom had
developed a relationship with Hawke, whom they considered the
community’s and Israel’s greatest friend in the Labor
government.” Given Isi’s particularly close relationship to
Hawke, and the latter’s defeat “was particularly hard for Isi to
handle” and “with Hawke gone his contacts in and access to the
government were severely diminished. He had no real
relationship with Keating, and developing one would be difficult,
given his well-known closeness to Hawke. His brother Mark was
really the only Jewish leader with a significant relationship with
the new prime minister.”[70]
Former Prime Minister Paul Keating in the United States in 1993
In an article in the Australian Jewish News from the time of

Keating’s successful challenge to Hawke, Leibler declared that he
was confident that “In light of my contacts with Paul Keating over
many years … there is no reason to believe that there will be any
shifts in government policy which would be adverse to the

interests and concerns of the Australian Jewish community.”[71]
This signaled to other Jewish leaders, including his brother, that
he was uniquely placed “to make the case to Keating on any
issue that concerned the Jewish community.”[72]
One such issue emerged early in Keating’s tenure as Prime

Minister. There was widespread concern, even alarm, among
organized Jewry regarding Keating’s foreign minister Gareth
Evans’ stance towards the conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians. Gawenda notes that “Many Jews had been alarmed
by the Scud missiles that Saddam Hussein had rained down on
Israel during the Gulf War [in 1991] and by the sight of Israelis
wearing gas masks out of fear that the missiles would be armed
with poison gas.” The PLO had organized demonstrations in
support of Saddam Hussein, and many Western nations had, as
a result, cut contact with the PLO.
A year after the end of war, Australian foreign minister Gareth

Evans decided the Australian government should restore contact
with the PLO. Keating, who had little personal interest in the
conflict between the Israel and the Palestinians, publicly
supported this decision. A month after the announcement,
Evans visited a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank and
criticized the expansion of illegal settlements by the Israelis.
Evans even expressed support for United Nations Resolution
194, passed at the end of the 1948 war, which called for the right
of return of Palestinians who had fled or been forced out of their
homes (i.e., ethnically cleansed) by the war. Mark Leibler was
“enraged” at Evans’ stance, which, interpreted one way, could
result in the return of all Palestinians and their descendants
which “would have meant the end of Israel as a Jewish state.”[73]
Hitherto, both major political parties in Australia had followed
the United States position on the resolution: that it only allowed
for a token number of Palestinians to return in the event of a
peace settlements, thus preserving the Jewish demographic
supermajority in Israel.
Leibler met Evans on his return to Australia and “according to

people with knowledge of the meeting, Leibler and Evans
exchanged views in a very robust fashion. Insults were
exchanged.”[74] Jewish Labor MPs joined Leibler in attacking
Evans, with former Whitlam and Hawke government minister
Barry Cohen telling The Australian the foreign minister’s stance
risked the loss of political donations from wealthy Jews, and that
Australian Jewry had always been a source of ideological and
financial support for the ALP, noting, “That [support] will be
weakened whenever a government appears to be antagonistic
towards the state of Israel.”[75] The bad optics of Cohen’s open
threats troubled some Jews at the time, including Leibler. While
fiercely critical of Evans, Leibler was adamant “Jewish leaders
should not make any [public] threats about donations to political
parties or threaten to urge the Jewish community to vote against
the government because of its policies in the Middle East.”[76]
Leibler’s next gambit was to invite Keating to speak at the ZFA’s

biennial conference in 1992. In his speech, while not
repudiating Evans’ views, Keating focused on “the ALP’s historic
commitment to Israel and emphasized his government’s
unwavering commitment to Israel’s security.”[77] Shortly after
Keating’s speech, Evans’ stance on Israel and the Palestinians
suddenly became irrelevant. Yitzhak Rabin led the Israeli Labor
Party to victory in the 1992 general election. Many senior
Keating government figures had ties to the Israel’s Labor Party
and personally knew Rabin and members of his government like
Shimon Peres. The result was that “criticism of Israel’s
settlement policies was significantly toned down.” This was
particularly so after the Oslo Accords between Rabin and Yasser
Arafat were signed on the White House lawn on September 13,
1993.
Rabin was assassinated in November 1995 by Yigal Amir, a

radical Zionist opposed to the Oslo process. Keating attended
Rabin’s funeral and, three months later, was defeated in a
landslide by John Howard at the 1996 election. Despite Keating’s
defeat, Leibler continued to cultivate a close relationship with
Keating. Meanwhile, Zionist activists in the United States and
Australia were secretly happy to see Rabin disappear from the
scene. As Gawenda notes:
Shortly after he was elected, Rabin told American Jewish

leaders, including AIPAC officials, that they needed to
modify their lobbying for Israel. That was code for his
view that their lobbying was counter-productive and that
Israel was perfectly capable of developing its own
relations with Congress and the President without their
interventions. Rabin’s message was a stunning
repudiation of the work of AIPAC. An Israeli prime
minister was telling the most influential Jewish lobby

group – perhaps the most influential lobby group in
Washington – to back off, that he did not need their help.
[78]
Following a meeting with Rabin in Israel, Isi Leibler had reported

back to the Australian Jewish media that Rabin had asked him to
inform Jewish organizations in Australia (including the ZFA) that
they should “drop the quasi-diplomatic role they have adopted in
Australian-Jewish affairs of state.”[79] Instead, government-to-
government relations should be left to the Israeli embassy in
Canberra, and Jewish organizations should focus on trade with
Israel and fighting anti-Semitism. For Mark Leibler, Rabin’s
remarks (as reported by his brother) “were a repudiation of his
life’s work, of the years he had spent building up his political
contacts in Canberra so that he could put the best case for Israel
to whatever government was in power.”[80]
Paul Keating was ideologically predisposed to embrace the

agendas of organized Jewry in Australia. A Cultural Marxist and
economic neoliberal, Keating harbored with a deep-seated
animus toward the traditional Australian nation, and was a
strong proponent of Australia’s economic and demographic
integration into Asia. In an interview for The Powerbroker,
Keating explained that he “believed in a cosmopolitan Australia”
and was bemused why some “Jewish people ever vote for
someone like [former Prime Minister John] Howard.” This was
especially so given Howard’s putative support for some of the
positions of Pauline Hanson in the mid-1990s – part of his
successful attempt to steal votes from her then politically-
ascendant party.[81]
Howard’s faux White Nationalism was utterly cynical and

strategic, and he later oversaw the biggest expansion in non-
White immigration in Australian history. His government
created the Section 457 Visa for temporary workers – a visa
program designed to be uncapped and totally driven by the
putative needs of the Australian labor market. The 457 Visa led
to a massive increase in cheap non-White labor brought into the
country. It was also the Howard government that, from the early
2000s, encouraged overseas students to apply for permanent
residence after completing their courses in Australia. The
inevitable result was an explosion in overseas student
enrolments, and by 2017–18 overseas students had become the
largest contributor to Australia’s very high level of Net Overseas

Migration (NOM) which numbered 271,700 people in 2019.
Howard also presided over Australia’s shameful involvement in

the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and probably even exceeded
Bob Hawke in his fawning philo-Semitism and subservience to
Israel. Dan Goldberg, the editor of the National Jewish News,
observed in 2006 that:
From his first encounter with Jews, as a nineteen-year-

old at the Sydney law firm of Myer Rosenblum, Howard
has, especially over the last decade, cemented his
alliance with the Jews, and has arguably eclipsed even
the great Bob Hawke as the most pro-Israel prime
minister in Australian history. Most of his empathy is a
function of his foreign policy, pivoted on the US alliance,
which translates in the Middle East arena to unequivocal
support for Israel, regardless of which prime minister is
in power in Jerusalem. Of course, Australia’s role in the
war in Iraq was no doubt seen by most Australian Jews as
yet another significant milestone in the long history of
relations between Canberra and Jerusalem.
It is no coincidence therefore that Howard has received

major awards from three Jewish community
organisations in the last couple of years. It is also no
coincidence that he speaks regularly to Jewish
audiences, and that he is closely allied with a clutch of
Jewish powerbrokers. … Understandably, most Jews were
in favour of eliminating Saddam Hussein and his regime
if only because he bankrolled families of Palestinian
suicide bombers to the tune of US$25,000 each, not to
mention the fact that it would neutralise the threat to
Israel’s eastern flank. The fact that Australian SAS forces
took out Saddam’s stockpile of Scuds aimed at Tel Aviv in
the early hours of the war only augmented the bond
between Canberra and Jerusalem.[82]
Despite Howard’s cynical willingness to appeal (like Donald

Trump) to implicit White interests to win elections, Leibler
retains “a huge amount of respect and affection for Howard, who
was unshakeable in his support for the Jewish community and
Israel.”[86] For Gawenda, Howard’s government was “probably
the most pro-Israel government in a long time.”[87] Howard
himself spoke of his “long association with the Jewish

community of Australia of which I am unapologetically
proud.”[88]
In 2000, Prime Minister John Howard asked Mark Leibler to

become a director of the newly established body called
Reconciliation Australia to promote the welfare of Australia’s
Aborigines. Leibler accepted, and speaking on behalf of
Australian Jews, claimed: “We’ve suffered 2,000 years of
persecution and we understand what it is to be the underdog
and to suffer from disadvantage.”
Former Prime Minister John Howard (second from right): leader

of “probably the most pro-Israel government in a long time.”
Seemingly oblivious of all this, Keating claims to be bewildered

why “the Jewish community here could ever vote for the
Coalition whilst Howard-type views abounded. … So I got a bit
short with [the Jewish community], still am I suppose. I tell them
that ‘the one party that would actually stick with you through
thick and thin on the question of identity, your identity, is the
Labor Party.” Moreover, it was Labor governments, he insisted,
“who helped you make all the money.”[89]
It has been a longstanding strategy of wealthy Jewish

businessmen and activists to cultivate relationships with prime
ministers on both sides of politics: in the words of Mark Leibler:
“John Howard certainly, and Bob Hawke of course, and yes, Paul
Keating, and so too Malcolm Turnbull.”[90] Wealthy Jewish
businessmen and Jewish activists often coordinate their
lobbying efforts. Leibler notes how he could reliably “call one of
these business people who I knew had a close relationship with
politicians on both sides of politics. I would ring up and explain

that there was a problem and that they needed to sit down with
the PM and explain the problem. They would always be very
helpful doing that.” While these Jewish tycoons often weren’t
comfortable issuing public statements, they “had the sort of
relationships with prime ministers and foreign ministers too,
that allowed them to intervene.”[91] When asked whether this
level of access was a unique situation for a Jewish community of
such a small size (Australia’s 120,000 Jews make up less than
half of one percent of the Australian population), Leibler’s
response was unambiguous: “The answer is, yes.”[92]
Leibler’s Campaign against Pauline

Hanson’s One Nation Party and the
Extension of the Racial Vilification Act
Mark Leibler played a key role in the Jewish attack on Pauline
Hanson and her “exclusionary form of nationalism” in the
1990s. Andrew Markus notes how Hanson’s “campaign evoked
widespread condemnation within the Jewish community and
calls for mobilisation to challenge the growing influence of her
movement. Concern was at its peak following the success of One
Nation in the 1998 Queensland election, which opened the
prospect of a One Nation dominated Senate.”[93] In response to
Hanson, more than thirty Jewish organizations signed a
statement denouncing “racism,” and supporting the formation
of a new Jewish activist front group called “People for Racial
Equality.” Jewish organizations that vehemently opposed
Hanson included the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and
the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council led by its
chairman Mark Leibler. The “People for Racial Equality”
campaign aggressively targeted political parties and politicians,
demanding they put One Nation last on their “how to vote cards,”
as well as individual voters, urging them all to put One Nation
last under Australia’s system of preferential voting.
In an effort to shame and intimidate Hanson’s supporters, the

B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission doxed 2000 people
associated with the One Nation Party. The list was published
with Mark Leibler’s consent in AIJAC’s Australia/Israel Review
under the headline “Gotcha! One Nation’s Secret Membership
List.”[94] In keeping with the tactics of organized Jewry
throughout the Western world, the attempt by Hanson and her
supporters to ensure that White Australians retained
demographic, political and cultural control of Australia was

represented as racist, immoral, and indicative of psychiatric
disorder. Central to the Jewish response to One Nation, notes
Markus, “was repugnance at public expressions of bigotry and a
sense that while the focus of the Hanson movement was not on
Australian Jews, it would not be long before they were
targeted.”[95]
The rivalry between the Leibler brothers over who had the right
to speak on behalf of Australian Jewry was often fierce. One
catalyst for a rift between the two brothers was when Mark
Leibler and a delegation of ZFA officials met with the Keating
government’s immigration minister Nick Bolkus when the
government was considering the introduction of “racial
vilification legislation” into the federal parliament. Mark
Leibler’s Zionist Federation of Australia made a virtually
identical submission to the government as Isi Leibler’s Executive
Council of Australian Jewry. Gawenda notes that “Both
organizations had long advocated for such legislation; both
urged the government to include criminal sanctions for extreme
forms of racial vilification.”[96]
The Racial Hatred Act was passed in 1995, adding to the Racial
Discrimination Act of 1975 (itself a direct result of Jewish
activism) the totalitarian Section 18C, which made it unlawful to
offend, insult and humiliate or intimidate a person or group on
the basis of color, race or ethnic origin. The 1995 legislation was
a victory for Leibler and his communications director Helene
Teichmann who had organized the meetings of leaders of ethnic
communities that had “led to a unified position on the need for
racial vilification legislation.”[97] It was clear to immigration
minister Bolkus that “Leibler had been more active than any
other Jewish leader in the campaign for the proposed extension
of the Racial Discrimination Act.”[98]
Conservative commentator Andrew Bolt later fell afoul of Section

18C for some columns he had written questioning the ethnicity
of light-skinned “Aboriginal” activists. Bolt, hitherto a Zionist
shill and sycophant of organized Jewry, was stunned when his
appeal to Mark Leibler to support the elimination of Section 18C
was flatly declined. Gawenda observes that “Bolt seemed
unaware that Leibler had played an important role in getting the
1995 legislation passed and would never support the repeal of
Section 18C, not even to support Bolt, who had always seen
himself as a strong supporter of Israel, unlike the left-wingers

who opposed any change to 18C.”
Journalist Andrew Bolt: jilted paramour of organized Jewry
A frustrated Andrew Bolt predicted that Jewish leaders would

ultimately regret opposing changes to the Act, noting that: “The
Jewish leaders now should look very, very deeply into their souls
at what they have helped wrought and ask themselves, are you
seriously safer now as a result?” Bolt’s reasoning is that under
Section 18C Australian Jews will in future be precluded from
criticizing the beliefs and actions of a growing and increasingly
militant Australian Islamic community which will be
increasingly hostile to Israel and the interests of Australian Jews.
Bolt fails to mention the only reason there are any Muslims in
Australia at all (with all their myriad problems and social
dysfunctions) is because Jewish activism succeeded in ending
the White Australia policy and establishing multiculturalism as
the basis for social policy. As the Jewish academic Dan Goldberg
proudly acknowledges: “In addition to their activism on
Aboriginal issues, Jews were instrumental in leading the
crusade against the White Australia policy, a series of laws from
1901 to 1973 that restricted non-White immigration to
Australia.”[99] As throughout the West, it is clear that the Jewish
fear and loathing of White Australia trumps any concern about
the anti-Semitic tendencies of the non-White immigrants that
are being imported into the nation.
In 2014, the then Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott

abandoned an election pledge to repeal Section 18C after
coming under sustained attack from Jewish activist
organizations. Gawenda observed at the time how “the repeal of
section 18C was vigorously opposed by the leadership of

virtually every ethnic community in the country. But it would be
fair to say – without wishing to give succor to those who reckon
the Jews are too powerful – that Jewish community leaders have
played a crucial role in organizing the opposition to any
potential change to the RDA. It is the opposition of the Jewish
communal leaders that had been of major concern to [then
Attorney General] Brandis and, to a significant extent, Tony
Abbott.”[100]
Thanks to Australia’s Jewish-led demographic revolution and

legislation like Section 18C, the Jewish lawyer and activist Ruth
Barson is now confident that “the chances of the Holocaust
occurring in Australia today are remote,” but cautions that
history shows Jews are never truly safe, and consequently, “we
should have no tolerance for even the shadows of racism and
xenophobia. These are dangerous in any guise.”[101] Dvir
Abramovich, chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission
(Australia’s version of the ADL), contends that “The horrors of
the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers – but with
hateful words of incitement and contempt, and with the
demonizing of anyone who was deemed unworthy by the Nazis.”
Accordingly, in addition to supporting the prosecution of “hate
speech” through Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, he
insists “it’s time that compulsory teaching about the Holocaust
is introduced in all Australian schools, to not only develop an
understanding of the dangerous ramifications of racism and
prejudice, but to heighten awareness of the value of diversity,
religious freedom, acceptance and pluralism.”
In early 2020, the Victorian government acceded to

Abramovich’s demands and study of the Holocaust became
mandatory in Victorian schools. Leibler’s friend and ABL client
John Gandel will fund the development of new teaching
resources which will be based on existing resources from Israel’s
Yad Vashem memorial and lesson plans produced by the World
Holocaust Memorial Centre in Jerusalem. Holocaust “education”
has been compulsory in New South Wales schools since 2012.
In the 1990s, Mark Leibler successfully lobbied the Keating

government immigration minister Nick Bolkus to have British
historian David Irving banned from entering Australia. He
reiterated the views of his brother Isi, then Executive Council of
Australian Jewry President, who had described Irving as “a beer
hall rabble-rouser and hero to the German neo-Nazis.” Both

urged the government to follow the example of Canada and deny
Irving entry into Australia. These overtures were successful and
Irving was banned for being “likely to become involved in
activities disruptive to the Australian community or a group
within the Australian community” and for not being “of good
character.” The entry ban was imposed despite Irving’s daughter
residing in Australia.
Mark Leibler with former Prime Minister Julia Gillard: “A wholly-

owned subsidiary of the Israel Lobby”
Australian Foreign Policy: Hijacked by

AIJAC
The Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), chaired by
Leibler, is undoubtedly the most aggressive Jewish lobbying
organization in Australia. Gawenda describes it as “the most
formidable lobbying outfit for Israel and for what AIJAC
perceives to be Jewish community interests in Australia.”[102]
AIJAC emerged out of Australia/Israel Publications (AIP) which
published Zionist literature and organized venues for Israeli
politicians and commentators to speak in Australia. By the early
1990s, the Jewish academic and activist Colin Rubinstein (later
Prime Minister John Howard’s Court Jew), who had been
involved with AIP since 1977, was “telling people, Leibler
included, that AIP was not viable and needed to be

professionalized along the lines of the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of the most powerful lobbying
bodies in Washington.”
An indefatigable networker, Rubinstein went to see a number of

wealthy Jews in Melbourne and Sydney who “quickly agreed to
support his vision of a professionally run and well-resourced
replacement for the AIP.”[103] Among the wealthy Jews who
responded enthusiastically to Rubinstein’s appeal was the retail
mogul Solomon Lew, who had once been Rubinstein’s
schoolmate. Lew contributed significant funding and persuaded
some of his fellow Jewish billionaires to help bankroll AIJAC.
Mark Leibler joined the organization as chairman at the urging
of Solomon Lew — who was a client of ABL. Asked who AIJAC is
supposed to represent, Lew replied “It represents Australian
Jewry and it represents Israel. We are recognized by more
politicians in Australia from all sides. They never make a speech
without checking with us.”[104]
Mark Leibler, Colin Rubinstein and Solomon Lew with Prime

Minister Scott Morrison
With an impressive suite of offices in Melbourne, and with a staff

of 17, eight of them full-time policy analysts and journalists,
Gawenda notes that “No Jewish representative body in Australia
has such resources, contacts and clout.” AIJAC’s Sydney office is
run by Jewish activist Jeremy Jones whose current focus is on
“developing relationships with Australia’s Muslim community, a
process still very much in its infancy.”[105] Leibler and Colin
Rubinstein, a Monash University lecturer in Middle East Studies
(and rabid Zionist) built the body into “one of Australia’s most
formidable lobbying outfits.” When there’s lobbying to do in
Canberra, Leibler is invariably part of the AIJAC delegation.
Leibler has visited Israel continuously for 25 years, and has

close relationships with Israeli politicians, including prime
ministers, and senior Israeli public servants, among them Yuval
Rotem, head of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and close advisor to
Prime Minister Netanyahu. While AIJAC officially claims to
support a two-state solution to the conflict between the Israelis
and Palestinians, it “has consistently argued that the peace
process is stalled indefinitely” for which it blames the
Palestinian leadership.[106] In reality, AIJAC has “publicly
disowned any prospect of a two-state solution to the conflict
between Israel and the Palestinians.”[107] While vehemently
rejecting the feasibility of Israel as an ethnically-diverse,
multicultural state, AIJAC is, however, deeply committed to
multiculturalism in Australia, and relentlessly “lobbies on issues
that affect Australian Jews, such as anti-Semitism and the health
of multiculturalism.” Rubinstein insists that “multiculturalism
has served the Jewish community well” and responds
vociferously to any critiques of a policy that is deliberately
designed to harm the group genetic interests of the White
Australian majority.[108]
AIJAC is also committed to silencing those who don’t share its

views, including fellow Jews, and “their criticism of people who
held views they didn’t like was almost always extreme and
sometimes personal.”[109] Gawenda personally attests to the
accuracy of such claims, and notes that during his tenure as
editor of The Age in the 1990s:
I would receive, at times almost daily, AIJACs criticism of

the work of its Middle East correspondent, either by
email, phone or in meetings at newspaper offices. The
AIJAC spokespeople were smart, relentless, knew their
stuff, and were blunt, sometimes to the point of

rudeness, in their criticism of the paper and some of its
journalists and commentators. I also received emails and
phone calls, some of them abusive and hostile, from
people whose views on Israel were to the far right of
AIJAC, about some aspect of our coverage of the Middle
East. Invariably, I was accused of being an anti-Semite or
a self-hating Jew.[110]
Subscribe
The effectiveness of Leibler and Rubinstein’s activism can be

gauged by the fact that “over 70 per cent of Australian Jews in all
age groups, no matter their religious affiliations — even secular
Jews — describe themselves as Zionists.”[111] More than 90 per
cent of Australian Jews over the age of 18 have visited Israel
(often through programs like Birthright), many more than once.
Two in three have close family living there. These figures are
higher than in any other diaspora Jewish community. Around
10,000 Australian Jews have made Aliyah (while retaining their
Australian citizenship), proportionately more than any other
Western country.[112] Australia’s Zionist youth movements “are
thriving and membership is growing,” an achievement that is
“unparalleled anywhere in the world.”
Capturing Elite Opinion through Rambam

Fellowships
AIJAC funds and coordinates trips to Israel for journalists,
editors, academics, public servants and politicians. These trips
are part of the organization’s Rambam Israel Fellowship
program which is named after the twelfth-century Jewish
philosopher Moses Maimonides — Rambam being an acronym of
his full name and title. Participants travel to Israel to be
propagandized by senior Israeli politicians, journalists,
commentators and military and security officials. Gawenda
notes how:
AIJAC has funded Rambam fellowships for scores of

Australian politicians, including [current Prime Minister]
Scott Morrison and [former Opposition Leader] Bill
Shorten when they were backbenchers, and [former
Prime Minister] Julia Gillard when she was Shadow

Minister for Health. About 500 journalists,
commentators, senior public servants and academics
have also participated in the program, which is funded
by donations, mostly from some of Australia’s wealthiest
Jewish families.[113]
The journalists involved in this “cultural exchange” program

(including prominent News Limited journalists Greg Sheridan,
Andrew Bolt, Rita Panahi, and Janet Albrechtsen) are lavished
with hospitality in Israel and intensively propagandized by the
Zionist establishment there. The goal is to foster a sense of
obligation and loyalty to Israel which is, in turn, reflected in
these journalists’ strict adherence to a pro-Jewish and pro-
Zionist line. The only real “exchange” involved with this program
is journalists trading their intellectual and journalistic integrity
for the strategically-bestowed hospitality of organized Jewry.
Lawyer and journalist Greg Barns noted the obvious parallels
between the old Soviet Union and the Israel Lobby in their
courting of Western journalists:
Back in the days when the hammer and sickle flew

proudly, the Soviet Union would spend big dollars on
paying for journalists, academics and diplomats to see
for themselves the “workers’ paradise.” It was part of a
long term and relentless strategy by the Communists to
win the propaganda war against the West. Today the
heirs and successors of those Soviet-sympathising
journalists head to Israel. … The Israelis have clearly
learnt a thing or two from the Soviets. They understand
how important it is to roll out the red carpet for the
media, by offering them carefully choreographed trips to
Israel and in return ensure that their spin on events is
planted in the minds of the Western media.
The Israelis also know that they have the upper hand in
this game, because the impoverished Palestinians will
not be able to outdo them when it comes to lavishing
hospitality on a willing media. That the Israeli
propaganda strategy of handpicking journalists and
others to come to Israel works was made abundantly
clear when The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen visited
Israel last November as a guest of the Israeli government
and the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies. …
Albrechtsen is not alone in being feted by the Israeli

propaganda machine. The Sydney MorningHerald’s Paul
Sheehan is another. Just as the Soviets carefully selected
the journalists they wanted to show around the country,
so is the case with the Israelis. The Soviets would go for
leftist sympathizers in papers such as TheNew York
Times, The Guardian and other influential mastheads.
The Israelis also favour sympathetic writers. Greg
Sheridan as recently as May 6 was comforting poor Israel
because “second to the US, Israel is the most acute object
of the hostility to the West that flourishes in Western
intellectual life.” One is tempted to evoke the immortal
phrase “useful idiots,” attributed to Lenin, and used
against Western journalists who fell for Soviet
propaganda in the 1930s, to describe Western journalists
who accept paid trips from the Israeli authorities.[114]
It’s not only journalists who are targeted with these elaborate
bribery schemes. During the 2013–2016 Australian
Parliamentary term, Leibler’s organization sponsored more
foreign trips for members of the House of Representatives than
any other country. AIJAC also brings high profile guest speakers
to Australia, mainly from Israel but also from the United States.
For example, Alan Dershowitz (of Jeffrey Epstein fame) spoke at
an AIJAC function held at the offices of Arnold Bloch Leibler in
2018. Australia’s premier Zionist lobby group also brings
politicians and officials from India, China and Southeast Asia to
Australia (as a proxy for Israel) because some are unable to take
up Rambam Fellowships because their Muslim-majority
countries forbid travel to Israel. AIJAC also funds and organizes
propaganda programs for these people in their home countries.
[115]
Clashing With and Then Removing Prime

Minister Rudd
Those in public life who have had disagreements with AIJAC
report that the “experience can be bracing to say the least.”[116]
Among those who have felt the wrath of AIJAC is former Prime
Minister Kevin Rudd. The strong relationship Leibler forged with
Prime Minister’s Paul Keating and John Howard did not extend
to the latter’s successor Kevin Rudd. The catalyst for the
breakout of actual hostility between Leibler and Rudd was their
respective attitudes to a major crisis between Israel and
Australia. In May of 2010, Rudd ordered the expulsion of an

Israeli diplomat, who was also a senior Mossad agent, after the
Israeli spy agency used fake Australian passports to enter Dubai
and assassinate Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, an arms dealer with a
close relationship with Hamas.
Rudd declared Israel’s use of fake Australian passports to be

“outrageous” and particularly egregious given that Mossad had
used Australian passports for another operation in 2003 — the
details of which neither Israeli nor Australian security officials
have ever disclosed. After the 2003 incident, the Israelis gave the
Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) an
undertaking never to use Australian passports for any Israeli
security operation again.
One of the faked Australian passports Israel used to assassinate

Mahmoud Al Mabhouh in 2010
The passports affair came just before an operation from the

Israeli military where they boarded one of the six ships of the
Gaza Freedom Flotilla, launched by a coalition of pro-Palestinian
human rights groups to break the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of
the Gaza Strip. Nine people were killed when Israeli soldiers
landed on the ship from helicopters. All six ships were escorted
to an Israeli port and everyone on board was detained for several
days before being expelled from Israel. The incident sparked
international outrage, and then Prime Minister Rudd
condemned “any use of violence under the circumstances that
we have seen.” He called for the blockade of Gaza to be lifted,
and for the setting up of an independent inquiry into the
incident.
Leibler was apoplectic over Rudd’s comments and his expulsion

of the Israeli diplomat. Nevertheless, Gawenda notes how the
passports incident was “especially difficult, time-consuming and
troubling for him, because it was specifically about the
relationship between Australia and Israel, and because it was
hard to defend what the Israelis had done.”[117] He wanted to
settle the passports issue and for things to “move on.” In this
endeavor, Leibler worked closely with the Israeli Ambassador in
Canberra, Yuval Rotem, to repair the diplomatic relationship. He
reached out to cabinet ministers and senior public servants,
including the head of ASIO, “who invariably took his calls or
agreed to see him,” while Rotem “lobbied members of the Rudd
and Gillard governments.”[118]
Reflecting back on the passports incident in the second volume

of his memoirs, The PM Years, published in 2018, Rudd observes
that the Israel Lobby tried to “menace him” for his strong
response to the passports affair. Rudd describes a meeting of the
National Security Committee of Cabinet after the second
passports incident. Dennis Richardson, head of ASIO at the time
of the first incident and now head of the Department of Foreign
Affairs, had urged them to “act firmly and decisively.” All agreed
with this recommendation, except for Julia Gillard regarding
whom Rudd “knew for a fact that Julia had been cultivating the
Israeli Lobby in Australia.”[119] Leibler had first met Gillard
after she visited Israel on a Rambam Fellowship in 2001, and
had cultivated a close relationship with her.
In June of 2010, Jewish Labor MP Mark Dreyfus (later Gillard’s

Attorney-General) called Leibler, whom he had known for many
years, to organize, at Rudd’s request, a dinner with Leibler and
other Jewish community leaders to discuss the passports issues
and the Gaza flotilla. Rudd was keen to repair his strained
relationship with organized Jewry. Rudd writes in his memoir
that he agreed to put on the dinner out of respect for Labor’s
Jewish MP’s Michael Danby and Mark Dreyfus, who had lobbied
him to put on the dinner for the Jewish leaders. According to
Rudd, he sat politely at the table while Leibler berated him for
committing the “hostile act” of expelling the Israeli diplomat.
When Rudd offered Leibler a briefing with Richardson, Leibler
turned angry and made a “menacing threat.” Rudd records
Leibler as saying, “Julia is looking very good in the public eye
these days, Prime Minister. She’s performing very strongly. She’s
a great friend of Israel. But you shouldn’t be anxious about her,

should you, Prime Minister.”[120]
Kevin Rudd with Mark Leibler
In his contemporaneous notes of the meeting, Leibler

acknowledges he was blunt with Rudd, telling him the Jewish
community was “pissed off” by the expulsion of the Israeli
diplomat, which he characterized as an “overreaction.” In his
notes, Leibler only mentions Gillard once, praising her for
comments she made saying Israel was justified in responding
militarily to missile attacks by Hamas in 2009. According to
Leibler’s notes: “Rudd responded by saying that he discussed
and approved the statement by Julia Gillard. I said, ‘Don’t be so
sensitive — this is something we assumed.’ For about 30 seconds
there was dead silence and I thought Rudd’s eyes were going to
pop out of his head, and then we reverted back to normal
conversation.”[121]
Three weeks after Leibler’s threat to Rudd, Julia Gillard defeated

Rudd in a leadership ballot and became Australia’s first female
prime minister. Leibler and the Israel Lobby supported Gillard’s
challenge to him, and were, to a significant extent, responsible
for his defeat—reportedly plotting Rudd’s removal for at least a
year prior to Gillard’s successful challenge. In his book, Rudd
notes that “the meticulous work of moving Gillard from left to
right on [Middle Eastern] foreign policy had already begun in
earnest a year before the coup.”[122] Gawenda claims to be
bemused at Rudd’s belief that “Jews were so powerful they could

play a role in deciding the fate of an Australian prime minister.”
For Gawenda, “the idea that a Jewish leader, even a tough one
like Leibler, could intimidate or seriously threaten politicians
like Rudd or Carr seems far-fetched.”
Julia Gillard — A Wholly-Owned Subsidiary

of the Israel Lobby
The validity of Rudd’s view was confirmed by the close
relationship Leibler forged with Gillard during her tenure as
Prime Minister. In The PM Years, Rudd describes how Gillard
became a “wholly-owned subsidiary of the far-right Australian
Israel Lobby.”[123] Gawenda is troubled by Rudd’s language
regarding the actions of Australia’s Israel Lobby, seeing it as
“verging on a conspiratorial darkness.” Echoing this view,
Leibler responded with fury to Rudd’s version of events, labelling
his accusations as “far-fetched conspiracy theories.”[124] Other
Jewish leaders (inevitably) came to Leibler’s aid and disputed
Rudd’s version of events at the Canberra dinner. In 2018,
Michael Danby and Australian Jewish businessman Albert
Dadon said the incidents Rudd described “had not happened, at
least not in our presence.”[125]
Dadon’s comments are significant for Gawenda because of

Dadon’s former role as Rudd’s Court Jew, and as someone Rudd
found “far more congenial than some other Jewish community
leaders, especially those at AIJAC, including Leibler.”[126]
Journalist Jason Koutsoukis observed in 2009, regarding Dadon,
that: “In the small but competitive world of Australian Jewish
politics, the ultimate test of esteem is whether or not you have
the ear of the Prime Minister of the day.” Dadon took on the role
of that AIJAC bigwig Colin Rubinstein had assumed during John
Howard’s tenure as Prime Minister. He spotted Rudd’s potential
soon after he entered parliament in 1998 and “courted the
future Prime Minister assiduously.”[127] It was under Dadon’s
direction that Rudd inaugurated the annual Australia-Israel
Leadership Forum in Jerusalem — a two-day talkfest for
Australian and Israeli politicians, academics and
businesspeople designed to further consolidate the Australia-
Israel alliance.
Gillard claimed her close relationship “to some people in the

Jewish community, including Dadon and Leibler, was never an
issue between her and Rudd before the leadership

challenge.”[128] Those who, like Rudd, believed Gillard had been
captured by Jewish interests noted, in support of this
contention, that her partner, Tim Mathieson, had been employed
since 2009 as a property sales consultant by Ubertas Group, a
fund management and property development company owned
by Albert Dadon. Mathieson was given the position after he and
Gillard attended the first Australia-Israel Leadership Forum in
Jerusalem — an initiative of Albert Dadon.
Gillard with her partner Tim Mathieson and Albert Dadon
It was in this context that Gillard flatly refused to criticize Israel

for its Operation Cast Lead in 2009. Gillard’s Jewish alliances
even extended beyond Australian Jewish leaders and
businessmen. In The PM Years, Rudd points out that Gillard’s
“ever-loyal American factotum, Bruce Wolpe, her lifeline to the
Australian and American Jewish communities,” exercised a
Svengali-like influence on her, even before she had taken over
from Rudd as Prime Minister.[129] Wolpe, a Jewish-American
political operative married to an Australian, had settled in
Australia and played an important role in moving Gillard to a

position of uncritical support for the Israel Lobby’s views.
Gillard’s Court Jew Bruce Wolpe
Wolpe had been senior advisor to Democratic congressman

Henry Waxman, with “seriously impressive contacts in the
United States Congress and in the Democratic Party.” He was
appointed as Gillard’s senior advisor (i.e., Court Jew) in 2010,
soon after she became Prime Minister. His role was twofold: “to
develop contacts and interaction with the Australian business
community, and to be the contact person between the Prime
Minister and the Jewish community.”[130] Gillard justified
giving Wolpe the liaison role with the Jewish community on the
basis that “there was increasing dissatisfaction with that
community about the way Rudd was behaving.”[131]
Three months after she became Prime Minister, Gillard

reluctantly appointed the defeated Rudd as her Foreign Minister
due to his previous experience in the role. Several times, she
vetoed press releases from Rudd on Israel and Palestine that she
claimed did not reflect her government’s position. By this time,
Leibler “had come to seriously distrust Rudd,” finding him
“frustrating to deal with.” In his contemporaneous notes, Leibler
claims Rudd was “courting the Arab bloc” at the UN by signaling
that Australia might vote for a resolution in the General
Assembly declaring Palestine a state, though with non-voting
status. Gillard had privately rebuffed Rudd and instructed
Australia’s Ambassador to the United Nations to vote against any
resolution on statehood for Palestine.
In February 2012, Kevin Rudd resigned as Foreign Minister to

challenge Gillard for the Labor leadership, and therefore for
prime minister. His first challenge failed, and with Rudd now out
of the Gillard Cabinet, former New South Wales Premier Bob
Carr was enlisted by Gillard to fill the vacant position of Foreign
Minister. In making this appointment, Gillard was unaware that
Carr’s position on Israel and the Palestinians had changed over

the years. Leibler, on the other hand, was aware of Carr’s shift in
perspective, and was apprehensive about the appointment.
Despite this, he was reassured by the fact “his relationship with
Gillard was strong” and that “she would have the final say on her
government’s policy on Israel and the Palestinians.”[132]
Former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr
Bob Carr — Friend then Exasperated Foe of

the Israel Lobby
In his memoir, Run for Your Life, published in 2018, former
foreign minister Bob Carr outlined his journey of
disillusionment with Israel and with its supporters in Australia.
Carr’s first clash with Rubinstein and Leibler’s AIJAC was in
2003 when Sydney University’s Peace Foundation awarded its
annual Sydney Peace Prize to veteran Palestinian activist and
politician Hanan Ashwari, citing her commitment to human
rights and the peace process in the Middle East. Rubinstein,
outraged at the decision, claimed Ashwari was “an apologist for
violence and terrorism,” and called on Carr (then Premier of
New South Wales) to refuse to present the prize to Ashwari. Carr
refused.
The City of Sydney, one of the sponsors of the prize, which came
under fire from AIJAC, suddenly announced it would boycott the
ceremony. Professor Stuart Rees, head of the Sydney Peace
Foundation, was subjected to “severe pressure” including
abusive phone calls over the Ashwari decision. Rees noted that
threats were made to “our supporters to the effect that their
interests might be affected if they pursue their association with
the peace prize.”[133] Based on his experience as editor of The
Age, Gawenda has “no doubt Rees and Carr were subjected to
abusive phone calls from individuals who see anti-Semitism and
hatred of Israel everywhere.”
Looking back on the Ashwari episode, Leibler regards the

AIJAC’s militant approach that resulted in alienating the likes of
Carr (hitherto a strong supporter of Jews and Israel) as a
strategic mistake. He claims that, if AIJAC had its time again, it
would not have been so concerned about Ashwari’s Peace Prize.
“It was not that important. Sometimes, we have to know when
silence is best. I think I have certainly learnt not to react to
everything. And I think I have learnt to say things in a more
measured way.”[134] When asked whether AIJAC’s actions
turned friends (like Carr) into enemies, Leibler claimed “Making
us responsible for our enemies is to blame Jews for anti-
Semitism. I utterly reject that.”[135]
Recalling the hysterical reaction of organized Jewry to his

presenting the Sydney Peace Prize to Ashwari in 2003, Carr
writes:
The storm of criticism that then occurred was a shock …

and an insight. Soon after my participation was
announced, Jewish leaders launched an international
campaign to force me to withdraw from the award. There
were threats of funding being withdrawn from the
University. … Letters of protest were dispatched about
the awards going to a Palestinian, switchboards were set
aflame with indignation.[136]
This incident underscored for Carr the power of the Israel Lobby
in Australia to distort and control Australian foreign policy.
Particularly egregious, in Carr’s view, was the influence exerted
by the people who ran AIJAC — Leibler and Rubinstein in
particular. Of the Lobby, Carr wrote:
The hold of the Israel Lobby over Australian politicians is

based on two facts. First, the donations to political
parties from the Jewish community leadership; second,
paid trips to Israel extended to every Member of
Parliament and journalists [i.e, Rambam Fellowships].
From the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council
(AIJAC) over 700 trips alone. … No other community,
treats politicians as their poodles.[137]
One of those treated as a poodle, Carr implies, was Prime

Minister Gillard, in whose Cabinet he served as Foreign Minister.
Eight months after his appointment to this position, in
November 2012, his relationship with Gillard became strained
over a looming United Nations vote on a resolution to grant non-
member status to Palestine. Carr supported voting in favor of the
resolution, while Gillard was “adamant that Australia should
vote against it.”[138] Carr lobbied colleagues in favor of the
resolution and in the end, with a significant bloc of Labor MPs
sympathetic to Carr’s stance, Gillard decided Australia would
abstain from voting on the resolution.
Carr was convinced that Bruce Wolpe, Gillard’s Court Jew and
“liaison with the Jewish community,” was Leibler’s spy in the
Prime Minister’s Office. Carr shared this view with Leibler at a
meeting at the ABL offices in Melbourne. According Leibler, Carr
spent an hour “ranting and raving and yelling to the point that it
could be heard all over the office.” Wolpe’s name got several
mentions. Afterwards, “the two men hardly spoke to each other
again and avoided each other as much as possible, such was the
level of distrust between them.”[139]
Julia Gillard with Bruce Wolpe, “Leibler’s spy in the Prime

Minister’s office”
In Diary of a Foreign Minister, published in 2014, Carr describes

how the Israel Lobby made his life hell whenever he wanted to
issue a statement on any issue involving Israel. He found it
exasperating that he couldn’t even issue a “routine expression of
concern about the spread of settlements” without aggressive
push back from the Lobby. As she had done to Rudd when he was
Foreign Minister, Gillard vetted — and sometimes vetoed — his
statements on Israel and the Palestinians. Carr notes that some
of his proposed statements “merely repeated government policy,
for instance that the settlements were obstacles to peace.”[140]
Gillard expressed surprise at Carr’s exasperation on these issues
when surely Carr “must have known of the issues she had with
Rudd about Middle East policy and that she was on good terms
with Leibler.”[141]
Indeed, Carr knew at the time of his appointment that Gillard

had been captured by organized Jewry. Critical to this capture
was when, in 2001, while Shadow Health Minister, Gillard “first
went to Israel in a group of Labor and Liberal politicians chosen
for AIJAC’s Rambam Israel Fellowship.” The effect of this trip on
Gillard was far from unique, with Carr noting how “the program
has produced scores of politicians and journalists who are
poodles of AIJAC.”[142] Due to such influence, both Rudd and
Carr came to believe that the Israel Lobby was a malign force
that “distorted Australia’s policies on the conflict between Israel
and the Palestinians, and turned many politicians and

journalists into the Lobby’s puppets, or, to use Carr’s word,
‘poodles.’”[143]
To gauge the propagandistic effectiveness of Rambam

Fellowships, “participants are asked to provide feedback of their
experience. Some are invited to a function to talk about what
they saw, whom they spoke to, and the impact the visit had on
them.”[144] Gillard first met Leibler at one of these debriefing
sessions. Over subsequent years, “Leibler’s relationship with
Gillard continued to grow. After Australia’s abstention in the vote
in the United Nations, the two met. Gillard had come to
appreciate Leibler’s keen sense of what was happening in
politics and she appreciated his encouragement and concern for
her.”[145] When asked whether she thought AIJAC, and Leibler
in particular, were powerful, Gillard was unequivocal:
Look, yes in the sense that the Jewish community in

Australia — the Melbourne community in particular,
because I know it best — is well connected. Put it another
way, the community has done a good job over many years
of developing deep connections across both side of
Australian politics. They therefore have the networks and
the access to put a particular point of view.[146]
In 2010, Gillard appointed Leibler to co-chair her Expert Panel

on Constitutional Recognition of Indigenous Australians. In 2017
a proposal from the Expert Panel recommended that an
Aboriginal advisory body be included in the Australian
Constitution. Aboriginal activist Marcia Langton claimed that
Leibler told her “that his own history, being Jewish, gave him a
great understanding of the genocide of the indigenous people
and you know, there’s no question that it did.”[147]
Leibler and the Abbott, Turnbull and

Morrison Governments
The power of AIJAC has not waned since Gillard’s tenure as
Prime Minister. This reality is clear to Gawenda who notes the
fact that “a meeting between Prime Minister Scott Morrison and
AIJAC’s three most senior leaders could be arranged not long
after Morrison replaced Malcolm Turnbull as leader of the
Australian government [in 2018] is evidence of an organization
at the height of its influence.”[148] These leaders were Leibler,
Rubinstein and Solomon Lew, the billionaire retailer and long-

time funder of AIJAC. Rubinstein had proposed the meeting and
was surprised how quickly Morrison responded. For Gawenda,
Morrison’s swift response was “not really surprising.”
Although Leibler did not know Morrison well, he had met

him several times when Morrison was Treasurer, and
Leibler was close to Josh Frydenberg, the Liberal Party’s
Deputy Leader and newly elected federal Treasurer,
whom he had known for 20 years or more, since
Frydenberg had worked as an advisor to John Howard.
By the time Leibler and the delegation met with
Morrison, Frydenberg had become the most senior
Jewish politician in Australian history. There is little
doubt that Frydenberg had briefed Morrison about a
possible meeting with the AIJAC people. What’s more,
Morrison would have been aware of Leibler’s connections
in Canberra, probably remembering that his predecessor
as Prime Minister [Malcolm Turnbull] had chosen Leibler
to MC at the official lunch for Benjamin Natanyahu in
Sydney in February 2017.[149]
The AIJAC leaders took a list of demands to the meeting with

Morrison. Their top priority was for Australia to officially
abandon its previous support for the Iran nuclear deal (a purely
symbolic gesture given Australia was not a party to that
agreement). The second priority was for Australia to move its
embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Three days after the
meeting, Morrison announced that the government was
examining the possibility of moving the Australian embassy
from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. At the media conference Morrison
refused to say whether he had been briefed by Foreign Affairs or
by his own department on the consequences of the embassy
move. Clearly, the Morrison acted purely at the urging of the
AIJAC triumvirate and his deputy leader Frydenberg “who made
it clear that he favored its move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.”
Frydenberg said he “would not comment on any meeting he
might have had with the Prime Minister” in relation to this issue.
[150] Before the 2019 federal election, Morrison announced his
government was committed to moving the Australian embassy
to West Jerusalem when the time was right.
Australia’s current Treasurer Josh Frydenberg (front left)
Gawenda observes there “is little doubt that Leibler and AIJAC
push on open doors when it comes to having access to the Prime
Minister and senior ministers in his government.” This has been
the case for many years now: at an AIJAC function held at the
offices of ABL in 2013, then Prime Minister Tony Abbott was
asked what his position was on some aspect of the conflict
between Israel and the Palestinians. “Oh, my position is
whatever Mark and Colin’s position is,” he answered.[151]
Chair of the United Jewish Appeal

By the early 1990s, Isi and Mark Leibler had become senior
leaders not only of Australian Jewry, but also in the
organizations of world Jewry. Isi had served numerous terms as
President of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and was
co-chairman of the World Jewish Congress. Mark had been
president of Zionist Federation of Australia for a decade, and was
a Jewish leader with “unmatched political contacts in Canberra
and a record of getting things done.” By the late 1990s, in
addition to his chairmanship of AIJAC, he was president of the
United Jewish Appeal.
The United Jewish Appeal determines how money raised in

diaspora communities will be spent on projects in Israel and,
increasingly, in diaspora Jewish communities, especially the six-

million-strong community in the United States. For more than
25 years, Leibler has flown to Israel for meetings of Keren
Hayesod, the Israel-based institution that governs United Israel
Appeal (UIA) organizations that operate worldwide except in the
United States, and of the Jewish Agency for Israel. The Jewish
Agency, with an annual budget of around $US400 million
(mainly raised by American Jewish organizations) is the most
financially powerful Jewish organization in the world.
Increasingly, it funds “projects in the diaspora that are

designed to bolster Jewish identity and connection to
Israel in communities where assimilation looms large
and where there is evidence of weakening ties to Israel. It
funds the Birthright programs that send young Jews on
organized tours to Israel and around 1,800 shlichim, the
young Israeli emissaries sent to diaspora communities to
work in schools, universities and Zionist youth groups in
order to promote the migration of young Jews to Israel.
The Jewish Agency also funds diaspora Zionist
organizations such as ZFA.[152]
In Leibler’s six years as President of the United Jewish Appeal

from 1995 to 2001, its Australian affiliates raised around $200
million. In some years they sent more money to Karen Hayesod
than equivalents in Canada (which has a Jewish population three
times larger than Australia) and more than any Jewish
community in Europe (including France). These fundraising
results gave Leibler significant influence and power in
international Zionist organizations.
Under Australian law, donations to charities that run programs

in developing nations were tax-deductible. Despite the fact Israel
is a wealthy country, Leibler “with his expertise in tax law,
managed to win an exemption for the UIA.” UIA’s tax-deductible
status was threaten in 1998 when Israel was officially classified
as a First World country. In response:
Leibler went to see [then] Foreign Minister Alexander

Downer and told him that despite Israel’s First-World
status, the funds raised by the UIA were going to refugee
resettlement in Israel and to Jews living in difficult
circumstances in Eastern Europe, Ethiopia and the
Balkans. Downer was convinced and shepherded through
amendments to the Income Tax Assessment Act that

allowed UIA to retain its tax deductibility and, therefore,
its position as the world’s biggest fundraiser for Israel
outside the United States. This achievement helped
ensure Leibler’s standing as one of the world’s
outstanding Zionist leaders.[153]
Leibler’s networking and connections with senior Australian and

Israeli politicians, together with the very large donations of
wealthy Australian Jews to the UIA, gave him great clout in world
Jewry. It has long been clear to Leibler that “there would never
be a mass Aliyah from the prosperous and increasingly
assimilated Jewish communities of the West,” and that “donating
to Israel was a way to express support and even love for the
country.”[154]
Leibler’s successor as chairman of the Jewish Agency, Natan

Sharanksy, who held the position from 2009 to 2018, changed
Leibler’s strategic focus, shifting away from projects in Israel to
“projects that strengthened Jewish identity, particularly in the
United States,” which become a “first-order priority” for the
Agency.[155] Sharansky’s successor, former Israeli politician,
Isaac Herzog, reaffirmed this focus on the “American Jewish
community, so large and powerful, but so vulnerable, at least in
terms of Jewish continuity.”[156] Regarding Australian Jewry, by
contrast, Herzog noted there was “no other community like it in
the world. So united, so strongly Zionist.”[157]
Contemporary Demographics of Australian

Jewry
Australian Jews are overwhelming middle to upper class, with
surveys finding 78 per cent of Australian Jews were “comfortable
or better.” Around one-in-five Australian Jews had an annual
personal income of $104,000 or more, compared to 7 per cent of
the general population. Australian Jews mostly live in the
middle-class or upper-middle-class suburbs of Melbourne and
Sydney. The socioeconomic profile of Australian Jews is
reflected in voting patterns. Around half vote for the Liberal
Party, as opposed to the Labor and other minor parties. The
Liberal Party gives them the neo-liberal economic policies
(including tax cuts) that benefit them financially, while also
being more enthusiastically pro-Zionist than the Labor Party.
The Liberal Party is also fully on board with the mass
immigration and multiculturalism that comprise the central

pillars of the Jewish ethno-political strategy for the West.
Disputes within Australian Jewry over the last several decades
(many involving Isi Leibler) have not been about this agenda,
according to Gawenda, “but about tactics and personal status,
about who speaks for the community and, above all, about who
has access to prime ministers and senior government
ministers.”[158]
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While equally wealthy, American Jewry, a community three or

four generations older than Australian Jewry, is more
assimilated with higher rates of intermarriage — a trend which,
according to Gawenda, threatens the world’s largest Jewish
community. The intermarriage rate in Australia is less than half
that of the United States, with rates among Orthodox Jews close
to zero.
This trend has been bolstered over the last few decades by the
arrival, since the end of apartheid, of over 15,000 South African
Jews in Australia. These Jews “are the world’s most educated
émigrés, 70.8 per cent at tertiary level, the most well-heeled, the
most cosmopolitan in the way they travel, the only migrant
group capable of spending time and money coming on visits
before selecting their relocation spots.”[159] They are also
among the most ethnocentric Jews in the world, with Tatz noting
how their mentality is encapsulated in “daily pontification about
the Jewish-goyishe divide” and in his grandfather’s refrain that
“The worst of ours are better than the best of theirs.”[160] Even
other Australian Jews have been taken aback by the insularity of
these newcomers, how “socially, spatially, culturally, religiously,
they huddle in enclaves of their own creation.” “Marrying out”
for these intensely parochial Jews means marrying a non-South
African Jewish spouse.
Tatz ascribes this hyper-ethnocentric mentality to the fact “the

shtetl remains engraved in their immigrant souls.” From the
time of the mass Jewish exodus from Lithuania to South Africa
in the early twentieth century, these Jews were, he notes,
“saturated” with the notion of separateness. He also attributes
their extreme ingroup preference to “the specter of anti-
Semitism, the dark shadow of rejection by an anti-Semitic and
intolerant world.” It is only among themselves, he maintains,

that they can “relax at least for a while — laugh, cry, be brash,
busy, creative, funny and not worry about what the goyim
think.”[161] The reputation of South African Jews in Australia
took a significant hit in 2009 when the Sydney Morning Herald
reported that Barry Tannenbaum, a South African Jewish
immigrant, had scammed investors out of $1.5 billion in a Ponzi
scheme that was likened to Bernie Madoff’s crime in the United
States.[162]
Given this infusion of South African Jews, and the high fertility
rates of existing groups of Orthodox Jews, Markus predicts the
proportion of Australian Jews “who are ultra-Orthodox or
Modern Orthodox will increase, and the community might
become even more conservative.”[163] Unlike in America,
Reform Jews, even today, represent only a small minority of
Australia’s Jewish population.
Preventing his own children and grandchildren from marrying

non-Jews was a first order priority for Mark Leibler, and
Gawenda notes “how important it was for him that his children,
and now his grandchildren, married Jews. He can be pretty sure
that his family, his children and grandchildren will be
committed Jews, committed to their Judaism and to the sort of
religious Zionism in which three generations of the Leibler
family have played such as prominent role.”[164] Each of his
children “have followed in their parents’ footsteps: each married
a Jew; none has weakened his commitment to Zionism and to
the continuity of the Jewish people; none has ever doubted that
they would.”[165] Leibler’s son Yehuda has Australian, American
and Israeli citizenship — but sees himself unequivocally as an
Israeli. “When he thought about Australia,” notes Gawenda, “he
thought about his family and the Jewish community. The fact
that he was a citizen of Australia, or of America, did not mean
much to him.”[166]
The Leibler Dynasty Continues

In 2018, Mark Leibler’s son Jeremy, a partner at ABL, was
elected president of the Zionist Federation of Australia.
Meanwhile Colin Rubinstein’s son, Paul, ABL’s managing partner
in Sydney, is the New South Wales chairman of AIJAC and is
touted as a likely successor to Mark Leibler as AIJAC’s national
chairman. Gawenda claims the next generation of Jewish
leaders will face daunting challenges which include “the rise of

anti-Semitism around the world, including in Australia.”[167]
Prime Minister Scott Morrison being presented with the

Jerusalem Prize by Jeremy Leibler (current president of the
Zionist Federation of Australia)
Mark Leibler is more sanguine than his brother Isi about the
future of Jews in the diaspora. Nevertheless, he thinks Jews are
far less safe in some diaspora communities, including the
United States, than he thought possible a decade or two ago:
Anti-Semitism has been on the increase for three

decades and has accelerated in the past few years. Who
could imagine even a few years ago that a major party in
Britain would be led by an anti-Semite or, at least, by
someone who has made numerous anti-Semitic remarks
and has tolerated the growing number of anti-Semites in
his party? I still can’t believe it, that Jeremy Corbyn was
the leader of the British Labor Party and could well have
been Prime Minister. … But as far as grassroots anti-
Semitism is concerned, it’s probably worse in France
than in England. In America, there has undoubtedly been
an alarming increase in violent extreme anti-Semitism
from the left and right. What is happening there was
unimaginable a few years ago.[168]
As a rabid Zionist, Leibler is particularly concerned about

growing anti-Zionism on university campuses in the United
States. He insists this “so-called anti-Zionism invariably traffics
in anti-Semitic canards about the money power of Jews for
instance.” The irony of his making these remarks as the leader of
Australia’s wealthiest, most politically well-connected and
powerful ethnic group seems to have escaped Leibler. Leibler
believes Islamist anti-Semitism, encouraged and supported by
the far left, poses a bigger threat to Australian Jews than right-
wing anti-Semites.
Mark Leibler’s brother Isi had also expressed concern at the

growing threat of Islamist anti-Semitism. In an article for the
Jerusalem Post entitled “European Meltdown Threatens Jews,”
he lamented the negative impact of large-scale Muslim
immigration to Europe on Jewish communities there. He notes
that: “With the indigenous population shrinking and the Muslim
birthrate alarmingly high, unless the flow of migrants is
stemmed, there is every possibility that by the end of the century
the foundations of European civilization will be destroyed.”
Through “dramatically destabilizing the social cohesion and
security of countries harboring them,” Muslim migrants have led
to Diaspora Jewish communities “suffering severe trauma as
they experience the erosion of the acceptance and security they
have enjoyed over the past half-century.” What makes this all the
more concerning for the elder Leibler is the fact this influx of
Muslims is, to a great extent, the direct result of Jewish ethnic
activism.
Yet ironically, many liberal Jews are at the forefront of

campaigns to open the door to widespread immigration
of Muslim “refugees” and even make ridiculous bleeding-
heart analogies to the plight of Jews during the
Holocaust. In so doing, they are facilitating the entry of
hordes of embittered anti-Semites who have been
brought up to consider Jews as the “offspring of apes and
pigs.”
For Leibler, flooding Europe with these “hordes” is regrettable,

not primarily because, if the trend continues, “by the end of the
century the foundations of European civilization will be
destroyed,” but because the end result will be that Jews in
Europe are increasingly forced to “live in societies where
horrific terrorist attacks against their schools, synagogues,
museums and supermarkets have necessitated military or

armed guards to provide security.”
Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott with Isi Leibler
The mass importation of Muslims into Europe also presents a

danger to Jews, according to Isi Leibler, in fueling the rise of the
far-right. He notes that activist Jews, in advocating and
facilitating the influx of Muslims into Europe, inevitably “enrage
many of their neighbors who loathe these ‘refugees’ and fear
that this flood of immigration will destroy their way of life.” The
result has been “the meteoric rise of radical right-wing
movements in all European countries — Jobbik in Hungary and
the Golden Dawn in Greece [which] are outright anti-Semitic and
neo-Nazi movements.” Despite nationalist leaders like Marine Le
Pen having “vigorously condemned and disassociated her party
from its former anti-Semitism,” Leibler insists the rank and file
members of parties like the National Front that notionally
“support Israel” remain “unreconstructed traditional anti-
Semites.”
Leibler is part of the distinct (though growing) minority of

activist Jews who regard the Jewish strategy of transforming
Europe through mass Muslim immigration as “bad for the Jews.”
In 2010 he voiced his strong support for non-White immigration
and multiculturalism for Australia while rejecting these policies
for Israel. He thus accepts it to be in the interests of Jews to
dilute and weaken the identity of the majority European-derived
nations in which many live. For Leibler, however, this non-White
diversification strategy for is only good for Jews providing
“hordes of embittered anti-Semites” from Muslim nations aren’t
the primary means of achieving it.
A silver lining of the rapidly-accelerating destruction of Europe

for Isi Leibler is that, unlike vulnerable Europeans, Jews can
always flee to an ethnically-homogeneous “Jewish state” that
provides “a haven for all Jews.” As an ultra-Zionist he naturally
hopes that, as European societies become increasingly violence-
plagued, dysfunctional and inhospitable to Jews, “many will
leave and join us in Israel and participate in the historic
renaissance of our people.”[169] As a result of Jewish activism,
millions of White people are also increasingly fearful of their or
their children’s future. Unlike Jews, however, they don’t have the
option of fleeing to the relative safety of an ethnostate.
Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on

Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism,
available here and here.
Notes
[1] Michael Gawenda, The Powerbroker: Mark Leibler, An

Australian Jewish Life (Melbourne: Monash University
Publishing, 2020), 6.
[2] Ibid., 11-12.
[3] Philip Mendes, “The many sides of Mark Leibler,” The Sydney
Morning Herald, September 11.
https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/the-many-sides-of-
mark-leibler-20200903-p55s5a.html
[4] Gawenda, The Powerbroker, 9.
[5] Ibid., 10.
[6] Ibid., 7.
[7] Ibid., 16.
[8] Ibid., 20.
[9] Dan Goldberg “After 9/11: The Psyche of Australian Jews,” In:
New Under the Sun – Jewish Australians on Religion, Politics &
Culture, Ed. Michael Fagenblat, Melanie Landau & Nathan Wolski
(Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006) 140-152, 151.
[10] Suzanne Rutland, The Jews in Australia (Melbourne:

Cambridge University Press, 2005), 22.
[12] Ibid., 24.
[13] Jen Kelly, “How three Melbourne businessmen became one

of the Soviets’ most successful spy rings, Herald-Sun, October 9.
[15] Ibid., 36.
[16] Rutland, The Jews in Australia, 77
[17] Horace Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States

(New York: Arno Press, 1924; reprint 1970), 165; 167.
[18]
http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/multicultural/confer/06/speech
[20] Ibid., 33.
[21] Ibid., 81.
[22] Ibid., 48.
[23] Ibid., 23.
[24] Ibid., 4.
[25] Ibid., 2.
[26] Ibid., 4.

[28] Ibid., 296.
[29] Unsigned, “Zionist Federation of Australia Welcomes Gandel

Philanthropy’s ongoing commitment to Jewish continuity,”
Zionist Federation of Australia Official Statement, September 30,
2014. http://www.zfa.com.au/zionist-federation-of-australia-
welcomes-gandel-philanthropys-ongoing-commitment-to-
jewish-continuity/
[31] Ibid., 239.
[32] Kevin MacDonald, “Background traits for Jewish Activism,”

The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 3 No. 2, 2003, 5-37.
https://www.toqonline.com/archives/v3n2/TOQv3n2MacDonald.pdf
Subscribe
[34] Ibid., 345.
[35] Ibid., 169.
[36] Ibid., 170.
[37] Ibid., 169.
[38] Ibid., 173.
[39] Ibid., 88.
[40] Ibid., 70.
[41] Ruth Ostrow, The New Boy Network: Taking Over Corporate
Australia (Sydney: William Heinemann, 1987).
[43] Ibid., 94-5.
[44] Ibid., 235.
[45] Ibid., 136.
[46] Ibid., 138.
[47] Ibid., 139.
[48] Ibid., 140.
[49] Ibid., 307.
[50] Ibid., 6-7.

[51] Ibid., 103.
[52] Ibid., 104.
[27] Ibid., 107.
[54] Ibid., 11.
[55] Ibid., 108.
[56] Ibid., 113.
[57] Ibid., 118.
[58] Ibid., 119.
[59] Ibid., 122.

Publishing, 2020), 127-28.
[61] Ibid., 128.
[62] Ibid., 129
[63] Ibid., 130
[64] Ibid., 131
[65] Ibid., 128
[66] James Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera – The Story

of Australian Immigration (Melbourne: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 46-47.
[67] Bronwyn Hinz, “Ethnic associations, networks and the

construction of Australian multiculturalism,” Paper presented at
the Canadian Political Science Association Annual Conference,
Corcordia University, Montreal, 1‐3 June, 2010, 9-10.
http://www.bronwynhinz.com/wp-
content/uploads/2009/06/Hinz-2010-Australian-
multiculturalism-paper-for-CPSA-v4.pdf
[69] Ibid., 147.

[70] Ibid., 150.
[71] Ibid.
[72] Ibid.
[73] Ibid., 152.
[74] Ibid., 153.
[75] Ibid.
[76] Ibid., 154.
[77] Ibid., 155.
[78] Ibid., 174.
[79] Ibid.
[80] Ibid., 175.
[81] Ibid., 143.
[82] Dan Goldberg “After 9/11: The Psyche of Australian Jews,”

In: New Under the Sun – Jewish Australians on Religion, Politics
& Culture, Ed. Michael Fagenblat, Melanie Landau & Nathan
Wolski (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006) 146-47 & 149.
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[87] Ibid., 199.
[88] Ibid., 200.
[89] Ibid., 144.
[90] Ibid., 145.
[91] Ibid.
[92] Ibid., 146.
[93] Andrew Markus, “Multiculturalism and the Jews,” In: New

Under the Sun – Jewish Australians on Religion, Politics &
Culture, Ed. Michael Fagenblat, Melanie Landau & Nathan Wolski
(Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006), 99.
[94] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary

Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth‑Century
Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport, CT: Praeger,
Revised Paperback edition, 2001), 303.
[95] Markus, “Multiculturalism and the Jews,” 99-100.
[96] Ibid., 178.
[97] Ibid., 179.
[98] Ibid., 180.
[99] Dan Goldberg, “Jews key to Aboriginal reconciliation,”

Jewish Telegraphic Agency, February 2, 2008.
[100] Michael Gawenda, “The real reason Abbott broke his

promise on Section 18C,” The Australian, August 6, 2014.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/business-
spectator/the-real-reason-abbott-broke-his-promise-on-
section-18c/news-story/bc977f7be04dc1dab8eb1db52a5707ed
[101] Ruth Barson, “Holocaust remembrance teaches lessons for

humanity,” The Sydney Morning Herald, January 26, 2016.
https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/holocaust-remembrance-
teaches-lessons-on-human-rights-20160126-gmdy21.html

[103] Ibid., 253.
[104] Ibid., 254.
[105] Ibid., 251.
[106] Ibid., 254.
[107] Ibid., 254-55.
[108] Ibid., 255.
[109] Ibid., 256.
[110] Ibid., 258.
[111] Ibid., 312.
[112] Ibid., 323.
[113] Ibid., 250.
[114] Greg Barns, “Israel’s ‘useful idiots’ in the Australian

media,” Crikey, May 27, 2009.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2009/05/27/israels-useful-idiots-in-
the-australian-media/
[116] Ibid., 248.
[117] Ibid., 262.
[118] Ibid., 262; 263.
[119] Kevin Rudd, The PM Years (Sydney: MacMillian Australia,

2018), 400.
[120] Ibid., 266.
[121] Ibid., 267.
[122] Rudd , The PM Years, 430.
[123] Ibid., 431.
[125] Ibid., 270.
[126] Ibid., 270.
[127] Jason Koutsoukis, “New figure steals into the limelight of

Jewish affairs,” The Sydney Morning Herald, June 25, 2009.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/new-figure-steals-into-the-
limelight-of-jewish-affairs-20090624-cwyp.html
[129] Rudd, The PM Years, 442.
[130] Ibid., 273.
[131] Ibid., 274.
[132] Ibid., 276.

[134] Ibid., 260.
[135] Ibid., 260.
[136] Bob Carr, Run For Your Life (Melbourne: MUP, 2018), 177.
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[137] Ibid., 178.
[139] Ibid., 280.
[140] Bob Carr, Diary of a Foreign Minister (Sydney: NewSouth,

2014), 388.
[141] Gawenda, The Powerbroker, 283-84.
[142] Ibid., 285.
[143] Ibid., 3.
[144] Ibid., 285.
[145] Ibid., 286.
[146] Ibid., 286.
[147] Ibid., 208.
[148] Ibid., 335.

[149] Ibid., 336-37.
[150] Ibid., 338.
[151] Ibid., 341.
[152] Ibid., 310-11.
[153] Ibid., 313.
[154] Ibid., 316; 315.
[155] Ibid., 317.
[156] Ibid., 320.
[157] Ibid., 319.
[158] Ibid., 75-76.
[159] Colin Tatz, Human Rights and Human Wrongs: A Life

Confronting Racism (Clayton, Victoria; Monash University
[160] Ibid., 16.
[161] Ibid.
[162] Nick O’Malley & Thomas Graham, “Exposed: the Sydney

man accused of $1.5 billion scam, The Sydney Morning Herald,
June 13, 2009. https://www.smh.com.au/national/exposed-the-
sydney-man-accused-of-15-billion-scam-20090612-c640.html
[164] Ibid., 334.
[165] Ibid., 360.
[166] Ibid., 352.
[167] Ibid., 335.
[168] Ibid., 356-57.
[169] Isi Leibler, “European meltdown threatens Jews,” The

Jerusalem Post, December 20, 2026.
https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/European-meltdown-threatens-
Jews-476004
6/28/2021 Global Jesus versus National Jesus: The Political Hermeneutics of Resurrection [Pt. I] - Sydney Trads :: Reader View
sydneytrads.com
Global Jesus versus National Jesus:

The Political Hermeneutics of
Resurrection [Pt. I] - Sydney Trads
Posted By: Andrew W. Fraser
21-26 minutes
Introduction
Jürgen Moltmann
Biblical interpretation is, if not the only, certainly the core task of
theological hermeneutics. Unfortunately, religious conflict and
biblical interpretation have always been joined at the hip. Is it
therefore the case that theologians engage in “politics” when
they offer authoritative interpretations? Is it too much of a
stretch to characterize biblical hermeneutics as a branch of

political theology? It does seem that biblical interpretation fits
comfortably within almost any definition of the “political”.
Politics is commonly associated with power. And he who controls
the interpretation of the Word of God sets boundaries between
Christian orthodoxy and heresy; he also shapes and sanctifies
the ecclesiastical role in relationships between faithful
Christians and their triune God. Indeed, the “political” nature of
theological hermeneutics becomes self-evident the moment
priests, pastors, and professors try to define what they mean by
“politics”.
When Christian thinkers in the modern West turn their minds to

politics, they generally fall somewhere along a spectrum
stretching from those most attracted to cosmopolitan humanism
to those characterized by a more parochial or patriotic political
realism. The humanists, perhaps typified by the German
Reformed theologian Jürgen Moltmann, espouse a future-
oriented, eschatological vision of politics. Moltmann portrays
politics as “the search for forms of human association and for
uses of the powers of nature which foster the realization of full
human life”.1 This global vision of Christian politics stands in
stark contrast to the more national focus of another famous
German political theologian, the Catholic jurist Carl Schmitt.
Highly sceptical of liberal humanism, Schmitt believed that the
political has to do with the existential conflict between friend
and enemy.2
II
The Resurrection as a Problem in Political Hermeneutics
In effect, Moltmann’s political “theology of hope” grounds

Christian faith in an ontology of peace set in opposition to the
ontology of violence he saw in Schmitt’s hard-nosed historical
realism.3 Whether such differences over the definition of the

political are ontological or merely historical, the tension
between cosmopolitan and parochial perspectives is baked into
the cake of biblical hermeneutics. Even scholarly disputations
over the resurrection of Jesus Christ are filtered through
explicitly political interpretations of biblical texts. Political
theology cannot be swept under the rug. The stakes are too high.
The survival of Christianity as we know it depends upon its
capacity to maintain the faith in the risen Christ set out, inter
alia, in the Nicene Creed:
For our sake [Jesus Christ] was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he
suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in
accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is
seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no
end.
Individual believers, no less than various branches of the church

universal, have vital interests, spiritual and material, in the
perceived truth and/or utility of their version of the resurrection
story. Theological hermeneutics is, has been, and forever will be
in search of the “proper” interpretation of the “paschal mystery”
at the heart of the Easter story.
Carl Schmitt
Certainly, it is becoming painfully obvious that the ongoing quest

for the “true” meaning of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection
cannot be separated from the central political conflict of our
time: globalism versus nationalism. Can it be mere coincidence
that interpretations of the Easter story portraying the crucified-
and-resurrected Messiah as a “global Jesus” are a staple of
mainline Protestant preaching? “Global” Christianity teaches
that the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ represents the hope
of a still-future resurrection of the dead for the whole of
“humanity”. Accordingly, most professing Christians would greet
the very idea of a “national Jesus” as an oxymoron at best and a
heresy at worst. But just as secular nationalism has arisen in
opposition to the process of globalization in the temporal realm
of politics, a growing number of Christian scholars, across a
range of disciplines, now offer a “national Jesus” as a compelling
alternative to the globalized interpretation of the resurrection
story.
In the emerging story of “national Jesus,” neither the historical

Jesus nor his apostle Paul offer a vision of the future extending
beyond the then-imminent, spiritual restoration of national
Israel. Among historians it is not at all controversial to observe

that “Jesus’ God was the national God of Israel, not some
abstract universal deity”.4 Moreover, Jesus made it clear that his
impending death “concerned Israel as a nation”. He did not want
to create a “new religion. He wanted to consummate God’s
promises to Israel, and he saw this taking place in the land of
Israel”.5
Outside the historical profession, a dissident band of biblical

exegetes reject the traditional church doctrine that the
crucifixion-and-resurrection represent the fulfillment of Israel’s
covenantal history.6 These “preterist” (from the Latin, præter,
meaning “past”) scholars locate both the Easter story and the
subsequent parousia (a.k.a. the Second Coming) of Jesus Christ
in the first century AD. The story of Jesus, they say, is an epic
narrative inextricably bound up with the historical destiny of
national Israel. If they are right, the covenantal eschatology
inscribed in the biblical metanarrative tells us nothing about the
future of “humanity”.
Brian Robinette
The resurrection of Jesus Christ was, as the creeds affirm, a

shadow or a type of a second, general resurrection. But,
preterists contend, the resurrection of the dead of which the
apostle Paul spoke was a spiritual process occurring there and
then in the first century; he was not expecting the physical
bodies of dead people to climb out of the grave. Jesus did not
appear in bodily form to Saul or his companions on the road to
Damascus (Acts 9:3-8). His spiritual presence represented “the
firstfruits of them that slept” (1 Cor 15:20); namely, the Old
Testament saints together with those in Paul’s generation who
had “fallen asleep” in Christ. The resurrection body of Christ was
transfigured into the fulfilled telos of national Israel according to
the flesh. On this biblical hermeneutic, the vindication of the
martyrs, the spiritual restoration of Israel, was consummated
with judgement at the Day of the Lord marking the end of the
Mosaic Age. In short, the apocalyptic destruction of the temple in
Jerusalem in A.D. 70 inaugurated the new heaven and a new
earth.7
Anyone who reads the Easter story faces a hermeneutic choice:

global Jesus or national Jesus. Whether or not we recognize the
fact, the hermeneutic judgement we render on that issue has
political significance. Historical criticism and covenantal
eschatology, separately and together, provide growing support
for a hermeneutic of resurrection centred on a national Jesus.
Thus far, however, those who challenge the hermeneutical
hegemony of “global Jesus” have been, for the most part, blind to
the implications that a national Jesus carries into the realm of
contemporary political theology. On the other hand, the
progressive champions of global Jesus have been much less
reticent. Indeed, like Moltmann, the “postmodern critical
Augustinians” who now carry the torch for the political theology
of hope wear their politics proudly on their sleeves.8
III
Global Jesus as Universal Victim
For Brian Robinette, “the language of resurrection is cosmic in

scope,” extending in time and space far beyond the Sitz im
Leben of biblical Israel. He upholds the traditional view that the
crucifixion-and-resurrection of Jesus was “the precondition for
Israel becoming the ‘light unto the nations’”. In the course of his
ministry, Jesus had demanded righteousness and obedience
from his followers. He insisted that Israel’s hope for restoration
was crucially dependent upon repentance and forgiveness of
sin. Flying in the face of such warnings, “Jesus’ crucifixion
stands as the ultimate expression of human sin and guilt”. God’s
response is utterly astonishing: by raising Jesus from the dead,
God extends an “offer of forgiveness to Israel”. God made Israel a
light unto the nations, first, by raising Jesus from the dead,
thereby serving “eschatological justice to an innocent victim
whilst unmasking the guilt of his accusers and murderers”. At
the same time, by resurrecting Jesus from the dead, God acquits
“those responsible for this death, using their own ignorance and
sin as the very means to save them from self-condemnation” by
welcoming the return of the risen victim.9
Robinette maintains that this acquittal applies to every human

person. All of us who have denied hospitality to the Other now
have the opportunity “to participate in a new community, the
ecclesia, founded upon the welcome of the victim”. Within the
redemptive logic of Israel’s own story, therefore, God’s offer of
forgiveness is “universal in its breadth”.10 The death of the
“risen victim […] manifests the sin of the world in which all are
implicated”.11 The Easter story is not just about an historical
event long ago and far away for which we carry no responsibility.
Both justice and mercy are extended to all human persons when
God vindicates “an innocent victim from the dead”.12 The
human spirit bears collective guilt for an historical crime even

though we were not physically present where and when it was
committed. The sin, guilt, and forgiveness of which Robinette
writes are ontological, not historical, in nature.
Saint Augustine (354-430 AD)
In effect, like Augustine of Hippo long before him, Robinette

rewrites the metanarrative of biblical Israel as the as-yet-
unfinished story of humanity-at-large. He presents the
crucifixion-and-resurrection story as an ahistorical, onto-
theological drama. It was not just the disciples who were
passively complicit in “Jesus’ lynching”. All of us “are
entrenched in the dynamics that led to Jesus’ death—including
you, dear reader”. We may not be “literally contemporaneous
with the events that led to Jesus’ crucifixion in first-century
Jerusalem” but “we are contemporaneous insofar as the
dynamics involved in his crucifixion are operative in our own
lives. Had we been there, the text is urging, we would have done
the same thing”.13 We, too, would have violently expelled Jesus
from Israel’s midst. Sharing in the ontological guilt of the
historic perpetrators of deicide, we, too, must pray for
forgiveness.
For Robinette, the bodily resurrection of Jesus was both a

demonstration of God’s power and a “universal offer of
forgiveness to humanity”. By raising Jesus from the dead, God
“overcomes death itself. It transforms death’s absolute non-
presence into God’s self-presence to us in the crucified-and-
risen One”. God triumphs “over those structural powers,
including death itself, that led to the brutal death of God’s
eschatological prophet; thus, the message of Easter draws our
attention to God’s solidarity with the victims in our history”. Two
thousand years after the empty tomb was discovered, Robinette
believes, the “eschatological counter-gaze of the forgiving
victim” still invites us to perceive just how deeply engrained are
the processes by which we obtain our “identity, whether
individually or in groups, through the expulsion of the Other”.
Christian reflection on the resurrection “unseals the collective
amnesia that has allowed us to suppress the injustice of our
violent exclusions, showing once and for all that the effort to
build our identities through the denial of hospitality to the
human Other—is in fact a rejection of the divine Other”.14
Whenever and wherever Christians welcome “the Gift of the

risen victim,” the heavenly ontology of peace finds its earthly
abode. Historically speaking, the ontology of violence gave way
incrementally to an ecclesiastical realm of peace on earth.
Robinette holds that the second, general resurrection is a real
historical process which began in the first century church and
continues today. The already-but-not-yet resurrection of the
dead has guided us “into a new story whose truth can set us free
for full human flourishing”.15
IV
Global Jesus and the Christian Hermeneutics of Mission
Robinette is convinced that the “human person” becomes a

“catholic personality” by allowing “the Spirit of the risen Christ
to graciously penetrate our self-enclosed patterns of perception

and behaviour, and to disarm those many defences that prevent
us from allowing the Other to be welcomed as co-constitutive”.
Openness to the Other promises an “enrichment of the self” as
we become “a personal microcosm of the eschatological new
creation”. In that way, “we anticipate (or ‘analogize’) the general
resurrection of the dead in which God will be all in all”. Human
personhood is sanctified through a transition from a life
“dominated by sinful existence to genuine freedom,” a transition
which “comes only by welcoming an Other whose alterity is not
an obstacle to human flourishing but the condition of possibility
for it”.16
Alasdair John Milbank
On this interpretation, the cross and resurrection are not mere

signs of forgiveness. Like Robinette, John Milbank believes that
“Jesus’ death is efficacious […] also as a material reality”. This is
“because it is the inauguration of the ‘political’ practice of
forgiveness; forgiveness as a mode of ‘government’ and social
being”. Milbank describes this practice as “itself ongoing
atonement”. In other words, if atonement is “to be materially
efficacious it cannot be ‘once —and for all’, like the sign or

metaphor of atonement,” it “must be continuously renewed”.17
Both Milbank and Robinette turn to political thought and action

as a means of making atonement effective in the real world.
Robinette suggests that because “sin replicates itself through
interpersonal, social, and cultural relations,” the central theme
of atonement is the idea of a divine victory over the evil powers
of the world. He warns us never to “lose sight of the fact that
Jesus was crucified by a political power”. Of course, Jesus
himself had no interest in obtaining political power but “his
ministry was profoundly political insofar as it sought to reorient
our social construction of reality”. Indeed, Jesus was put to
death “as a political criminal because he represented a
thoroughgoing challenge to the way we order interpersonal and
social relationships, above all the way we order our world
through the production of victims”. By participating in God’s
“alternative Kingdom” we aim to embody the risen victim by
means of solidarity “with the victims of our world”. It means
associating “with those who are deemed the outsiders, the
contaminants, the monsters, the prisoners, the dispensable, and
the unclean according to the dominant purity maps in any given
social-cultural setting”.18
In today’s political climate, Robinette’s vision of Christian

political practice seems indistinguishable from fashionably
progressive purity spirals. He is unlikely to face ostracism from
academic colleague when he declares that the “ministry of
reconciliation is one that puts the Christian in a mode of service
to the Other”. All right-thinking people — especially people of
European heritage or descent — are under constant pressure “to
become highly sensitized and responsive to those social
mechanism that produce victims”. Not even the most
enthusiastic globalist or leftist proponent of mass Third World
immigration would object to Robinette’s claim that “[b]y offering

hospitality to those who suffer expulsion or want, we offer
hospitality to Christ himself (Matt. 25:34-46)”.19 Indeed,
Robinette simply follows in the footsteps of Jürgen Moltmann’s
footsteps when he offers a “political interpretation of biblical
eschatology […] indebted to the philosophy of revolution of
Hegel, Marx, and Ernst Bloch”.20
Karl Marx (b. 1818 d. 1883)
Contrary to popular misconceptions, Marx’s attitude towards

Christianity was not exhausted by his famous dictum that
“religion is the opium of the people”. Far from being opposed to
religion per se, Marx sought to make “the living protest garbed
in religious myth practically effective”. Recognizing the power
latent in religious mythology and ritual, Marx aimed to bring
about “an historical realization of religion …] by translating myth
into action”.21 The political hermeneutic utilized by both
Moltmann and Robinette parallels radical Marxist protests
against oppression. Both proclaim “the liberation of the
suffering creation out of real affliction”.22 Both believe that the
“proper interpretation of the gospel is its historical realization”.
Robinette shares Moltmann’s conviction that Christian

hermeneutics is an inescapably political “hermeneutics of
mission”.23
Biblical interpretation thus becomes a way of promoting

revolutionary change in historical time in the name of the risen
victim. Moltmann, like Robinette, uses the biblical images of the
“needy and the outcast, and foremost of the crucifixion and
resurrection of Jesus as clues to the purpose and goal of God’s
activity and his summons to man”. The image of global Jesus as
universal victim transforms the gospel into “a power which
intensifies and universalizes the quest of man for an all-
embracing community of justice and freedom”. By arousing the
hope of “God’s coming universal reign,” the gospel of the risen
victim “provokes men to resist the institutional stabilization of
present conditions”.24
But it is not just institutional life that will be destabilized by this

Christian humanist dialectic of atonement. Human beings no
longer “have to try to cling to their identity through constant
unity with themselves, but will empty themselves into non-
identity […] into what is other and alien”.25 Robinette insists that
Christians must set out to undermine “every tendency to build
our identities according to ‘us’ and them’”. Atonement requires
“a ‘catholic’ identity that welcomes the Other in hospitality”.
Robinette acknowledges that such a political hermeneutic flatly

denies the existential distinction between “friend” and “enemy”.
In fact, the truly radical character of Christian hospitality toward
the Other only “comes into focus when we consider that this
Other may be our ‘enemy’”. We imitate global Jesus most
faithfully “when we engage with love those who persecute us”.26
Here, however, we should be aware that, as a matter of fact, Jesus

did not ask his listeners to “love” their persecutors in the
Sermon on the Mount; rather, he urged prayers on their behalf. It
is even more important to realize what Jesus meant when asked
the audience to love their enemies. In the Greek, he refers
specifically and only to “private” enemies (echthros) not to
“public” or “alien” enemies (polemoi).27 Unless one keeps such
distinctions in mind, a Christian hermeneutics of mission can
easily degenerate into pathological altruism.28 The existential
distinction between friend and enemy cannot be dissolved by
transforming Christianity into a deracinated, cosmopolitan cult
of the Other. National Jesus knew better than to mistake
historical choice for ontological essence.
[Part II will be published this coming Friday]
Andrew Fraser was born, raised, and educated in Canada

and the United States of America. He taught constitutional law
and legal history for many years at Macquarie University, Sydney
Australia and is the author of The WASP Question, an inquiry
into Anglo-Saxon identity in the context of the modern,
globalising world. His Dissident Dispatches is based on his
recent experience earning a Bachelor of Theology degree from
Charles Sturt University.
Endnotes:
1. Daniel L. Migliore, “Biblical Eschatology and Political

Hermeneutics” Vol 26 No. 2 Theology Today (1969) p. 116, at
p. 118.
2. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political George Schwab

(trans.) (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
1976) p. 26.
3. Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (New York: Harper &
Row, 1967); Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters
on the Concept of Sovereignty George Schwab (trans.)
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).
4. Scot McKnight, A New Vision for Israel: The Teachings of
Jesus in National Context (Grand Rapids, MI: William B.
Eerdmans, 1999) p. 69
5. Ibid., p. 6
6. Cf. Brian D. Robinette, Grammars of Resurrection: A
Christian Theology of Presence and Absence (New York:
Crossroad Publishing, 2009) p. 294.
7. One of the most prolific preterist scholars is Don K. Preston
who has published too many books to list here. One useful
introduction to his work is: Don K. Preston, We Shall Meet
Him in the Air: The Wedding of the King of Kings! (Ardmore,
OK: JaDon Management, 2009).
8. Cf. John Milbank, “‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism’: A
Short Summa in Forty Two Responses to Unasked
Questions” Vol. 7 No. 3 Modern Theology (1991) p. 225.
9. Robinette, op. cit., pp. 309, 294-295.
10. Ibid., pp. 293-294.
11. Ibid., pp. 309-310 emphasis in original.
12. Ibid., p. 309.
13. Ibid., pp. 293-294.
14. Ibid., pp. 296, 309-310, 301.
15. Ibid., p. 293.
16. Ibid., pp. 309, 305.
17. John Milbank, “The Name of Jesus: Incarnation, Atonement,
Ecclesiology” Vol. 7 No. 4 Modern Theology (1991) p. 311, at
p. 327.
18. Robinette, op. cit., pp. 304, 312-313.
19. Ibid., p. 307.
20. Migliore, op. cit., p. 122.

21. Ibid., p. 122.
22. Moltmann, quoted in ibid., p. 123.
23. Ibid., p. 123.
24. Ibid., p. 128-129.
25. Moltmann, quoted in Robinette, op. cit., p. 309.
26. Ibid., p. 311.
27. Cf. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p. 28-29.
28. Cf. Barbara Oakley, et. al., Pathological Altruism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012).
SydneyTrads is the web page of the Sydney Traditionalist Forum: an association of young

professionals who form part of the Australian independent right (also known as “non-
aligned right”).
6/28/2021 Global Jesus versus National Jesus: The Political Hermeneutics of Resurrection [Pt. II] - Sydney Trads :: Reader View
sydneytrads.com
Global Jesus versus National Jesus:

The Political Hermeneutics of
Resurrection [Pt. II] - Sydney Trads
Posted By: Andrew W. Fraser
24-30 minutes
[Part I was published Monday]
N. T. Wright on Paul’s Resurrection Theology: Global or

National?
Nicholas Thomas Wright
Nicholas Thomas Wright, the former Anglican bishop of

Durham, is an influential scholar-theologian-priest and the
author of many gargantuan studies of the historical Jesus and

the apostle Paul. He, too, maintains that the meaning of the cross
and resurrection is not to be found in theological abstractions
but in “certain very specific and concrete aspects of the history
of Israel”. Such a forthright challenge to the conventional
wisdom has provoked much interest and some consternation. In
Alister McGrath’s summary of Wright’s argument, the “pattern of
cross and resurrection, reflecting that of exile and restoration,
has determinative significance for Israel rather than a universal
significance for all humanity”.1
In other words, Wright agrees that, linked as it was with the idea
of the covenant, the death of Jesus had a “corporate significance”
for Israel, rather than an “individual significance” for either
sinners or victims in other times and places. The crucified-and-
resurrected Jesus should be understood, therefore, “as a
redemptive representative of Israel, bearing her specific curse
and making it possible for her as a people to achieve her
intended national destiny”.2 In Jesus and the Victory of God,
Wright thus aligns himself with historical critics who have found
a “national Jesus” hidden beneath deeply-encrusted
ecclesiastical creeds and Tradition.3 In his more recent, studies
on Paul, however, the “global Jesus” literally rises from the grave
of “national Jesus”.
Wright presents the apostle Paul as a proto-Augustinian,

Judaeo-Christian “theologian”. On Wright’s reading, Paul’s
“freshly-inaugurated eschatology,” projects the second, general
resurrection of the dead far beyond the fall of Jerusalem and into
our own twenty-first century future.4 In doing so, Wright credits
Paul with the invention of a Christian theology in which “global
Jesus” reigns over the whole of humanity. According to Wright,
“Paul’s expectation of ‘the day of the Lord’ included the
expectation that on the last day, that which was already true
would at last be revealed: Jesus is lord, and Caesar is not”. On

Wright’s interpretation of Paul’s vision of final eschatology, then,
“the creator and covenant God will, at the last, put the whole
world to rights”.5
Alister McGrath
Wright presents Paul’s allegedly rock-solid faith in the bodily

resurrection of Jesus Christ as the foundation for his
eschatological vision of the resurrected bodies of all those who
have fallen asleep in Christ. Wright’s emphasis upon the
physical resurrection of Jesus presupposes that “national Jesus”
was a genuinely historical, human person, deeply rooted in the
covenantal history of national Israel according to the flesh. The
death of “national Jesus,” the man, entailed his descent into
nothingness. Jesus’ resurrection, thanks to his reading of Paul,
brings Bishop Wright back within the bounds of credal
orthodoxy. As Brian D. Robinette puts it, the post-Easter
narrative shows the creativity of God “in a significantly new
light. Creation from nothing is logically coherent with (and in
Christian theology historically dependent upon) a view of God
who raises to life what has succumbed to the nihil of death”.6
Wright and Robinette continue to espouse the Augustinian
doctrine that creatio ex nihilo underwrites the credal promise of

the physical resurrection of the body. Just as the earthly city was
created out of nothing, so, too, Augustine expected that at the
end of the world Christian believers would rise from the dead, in
a newly embodied form, to enter the heavenly city of God.
The resurrection was an unprecedented physical event that set

aside the laws of nature. Wright’s historical investigation of the
crucifixion-and-resurrection aims to explain how Christians
came to believe in the reality of such an event. He concludes that
early Christians themselves offer the most convincing historical
explanation for an empty tomb “previously housing a thoroughly
dead Jesus” and subsequent reports “that his followers saw and
met someone they were convinced was this same Jesus, bodily
alive though in a new transformed fashion”. He says simply “that
something happened, two or three days after Jesus’ death, for
which the accounts in the four gospels are the least inadequate
expression we have”. Beyond that point, “the historian alone
cannot help”.7
Brian Robinette
It was the apostle Paul who went beyond history to provide a

theological account of a resurrection-event so unexpected that
not even the teachings of “national Jesus” had prepared his
followers to understand, the world-historical, indeed cosmic,
significance of the empty tomb. Wright finds in 1 Corinthians 15
one compelling example of just how Paul transfigures “national
Jesus” into “global Jesus”. For Wright, “there can be no doubt
that Paul intends this entire chapter to be an exposition of the
renewal of creation, and the renewal of humankind as its focal
point”. Paul’s resurrection theology presupposes both a God not
only capable of creating the world out of nothing, but a just God
determined to defeat the power of death. But if death is to be
defeated, then “[a]nything other than some kind of bodily
resurrection, therefore, is simply unthinkable”.8
Wright flatly rejects the suggestion that Paul was concerned with
any sort of “non-bodily survival of death”. Paul had no need,
Wright argues, to argue for the immortality of the soul: many
people in Corinth “believed in that anyway”. After all, even two
thousand years later, no such resurrection has occurred; history
has not witnessed millions of Christian believers rising from
their graves. Naturally enough, therefore, many in Corinth found
it hard to swallow the idea of a physical resurrection of the dead:
“everybody knew dead people didn’t and couldn’t come back to
bodily life”. Chapter 15, Wright argues, was intended to answer
that challenge. According to Wright, Paul’s argument ran “as
follows: what the creator god did for Jesus is both the model and
the means of what he will do for all Jesus’ people”. Throughout
the chapter, Jesus’ resurrection serves as “the prototype and
model for the future resurrection”.9 When Paul describes the
body into which Christians hope to be resurrected, “the unique,
prototypical image-bearing body of Jesus” is identified as “the
model for the new bodies that Jesus’ people will have”.10 Even
those presently alive on the last day, when the kingdom finally
arrives, Paul promised, “will not lose their bodies, but have them
changed from their present state to the one required for God’s
future”.11
Saint Augustine (354-430 AD)
Paul, according to Wright, portrays the parousia of “global Jesus”

as the moment when “all those who belong to him are
themselves raised bodily from the dead”. Wright describes the
result as “the establishment of a final, stable ‘order’ in which the
creator and covenant God is over the Messiah, and the Messiah is
over the world”. In the new creation, humans are destined to
play “an intermediate role between creator and creation”. The
“human task and the messianic task thus dovetail together: the
Messiah, the true Human One, will rule the world in obedience to
God”.12
The following questions suggest themselves: If Paul’s

resurrection theology did indeed take this universalist form,
could he have expected the parousia to arrive anytime soon?
Would he have been likely to identify it with the fall of Jerusalem
in the lifetime of his followers? Wright’s response is clear. He
long ago dismissed the idea of an imment parousia as an “old
scholarly warhorse” that “can be put out to grass once and for
all”.13 So too, Wright rejects “the suggestion that Paul was
hoping to bring about […] some kind of large-scale last-minute
conversion of Jews, and perhaps even the parousia itself […] Paul
did not think the parousia would necessarily happen at once,
and he certainly was not trying to provoke or hasten it by his
missionary work”.14 In Wright’s interpretation, Paul’s
cosmopolitan theology and over-the-horizon perspective were
firmly fixed on the transfiguration of the entire cosmos; Paul was
definitely not a present-minded apostle of “national Jesus”
warning of the apocalyptic judgement soon to fall upon Old
Covenant Israel according to the flesh.
St Paul the Apostle
Nonetheless, the vision of “global Jesus” attributed to Paul by

Wright is a far cry from the mindset of “national Jesus” as he
hung upon the cross in Jesus and the Victory of God. Jesus and
Paul do not seem to be on the same page. Wright is annoyed by
those for whom such divergence is cause for concern. He
regards it “as illegitimate in principle, and very difficult in
practice, to conduct historical Jesus research” as if Paul and
Jesus both saw the world in the same light. He asserts that
“[p]recisely because the resurrection made such a huge

difference to everything” Paul simply must have viewed the
world differently from the way that “national Jesus” had viewed
it prior to the Easter event.15 This is a plausible position: but is
Wright’s interpretation of 1 Corinthian 15 really about history at
all?
Arguably, Wright’s forty-page exegesis of chapter 15 is more a

defence of credal orthodoxy than an analysis of the historical
context of a Biblical text written in first-century Corinth (about
which we learn next to nothing). In Wright’s interpretation, Paul
is portrayed as a Hellenized, Judaeo-Christian preacher-
theologian laying the doctrinal foundations for medieval high
Christology. Wright describes Paul’s message as simplicity itself:
Jesus is Lord. The point of Paul’s theology, therefore, “was to
name the Messiah, to announce him as lord, in the culture-
forming places, the cities to and from which all local or
international roads ran”.16
Anyone looking more deeply into the situation facing Paul in

Corinth as he wrote chapter 15 may well doubt whether Paul had
enlisted in the service of Wright’s “Human One”. Just as
plausibly, Paul was working to vindicate the Old Testament
saints of national Israel. It is just possible that the resurrected
Messiah, “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor.
15:20) remained a “national Jesus,” still determined to rescue
his people from the death-like grip of sin. Perhaps, a more
truthful and useful understanding of Paul’s account of the
resurrection of the dead can be achieved by treating him as a
deeply patriotic historical actor actively engaged in the political
art of scriptural hermeneutics.
II
The Resurrection of the Dead in Covenantal Eschatology
Don K. Preston
The covenantal eschatology of national Israel offers a much

more persuasive hermeneutical framework within which to
interpret Paul’s understanding of the resurrection body. Samuel
G. Dawson, an American preterist scholar, has written at even
greater length than Bishop Wright (no mean feat!) on 1
Corinthians 15. In doing so, he portrays a “national Paul” very
different from the “global Paul” one meets in Wright’s work (or in
mainstream theology generally). This should not come as a
surprise. Paul publicly declared that he “was saying none other
things than those which the prophets and Moses did say should
come” (Acts 26:22). Dawson points out that “Paul’s concept of the
resurrection wasn’t that fleshly (or even transfigured) bodies
would come out of holes in the ground at all, because that’s not
what Moses and the prophets taught”. He taught, instead, “the
resurrection of Old Covenant Israel from the death of its
fellowship with God”.17
The problem Paul faced with his “brethren” in Corinth was not
that some doubted the resurrection of Christ or that others
denied the resurrection of anyone. Rather, some doubted the
resurrection of the Old Covenant saints. Paul’s concept of the
resurrection “depicted the ongoing translation of the body of

death headed by Adam (which would, of course, contain Old
Covenant Israel) to the body of life headed by Christ”. It follows
that “[i]f Israel, the rest of the firstfruits, was not being raised
when Paul wrote these words, then Christ wasn’t raised, for his
own resurrection was the first of the firstfruits”. As Paul was
writing to the Corinthians, those who denied that the Old
Testament saints were being raised were, in effect, denying the
resurrection of Christ. In other words, Paul taught that “the
faithful Old Covenant Jews were going to be the rest of the
firstfruits, and the dead in Christ were going to be the rest of the
fruit at the harvest”. Gentile Christians in Corinth were
generating dissension by saying that “Israel’s last days had come
and gone, because God was through with them since the cross”.
Paul replied, according to Dawson, that “God’s promises to Israel
were irrevocable, so that the salvation of Gentile Christians was
linked to theirs at the coming of the Lord (which the Corinthians
were eagerly awaiting, 1:7)”.18
Archbishop Rowan Williams
Dawson contends that when Paul turns to the nature of the

resurrection body, he raises the question as to how the dead
ones are being raised (n.b., not how are the dead raised) and
with what manner of body are they coming (n.b., not do they
come). Now, if some Corinthian Christians expected “a
resurrection of biological bodies to certain dead persons,” such
questions would not arise. Dawson attributes a spiritual concept
of the resurrection to Paul breaking sharply with Wright’s
insistence on the transfigured but still bodily nature of the
resurrection. Dawson breaks even more dramatically with
Wright when he points out that Paul never speaks of resurrected
“bodies”. Instead, Paul refers only to “the resurrection of one
body, the Old Covenant faithful who were being transformed into
the body of Christ”. Dawson observes that the “prophets [e.g.
Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, and Isaiah] from which Paul preached
had foretold the resurrection of a single body”. The hermeneutic
problem here, Dawson concludes, “comes down to whether the
resurrection Paul spoke of was of one body in his present time or
of billions of bodies more than two thousand years in the
future.19
A fair-minded person who compares Wright’s exegesis of 1

Corinthians 15 with that offered by Dawson could conclude, at
the very least, that the strength of the case for “global Paul” has
been seriously compromised. Dawson reinforces the strength of
that proposition by his discussion of how the politics of
hermeneutics manifests itself in the translation of 1 Corinthians
15. His seemingly arcane argument as to the importance of the
present passive verb tense in chapter 15 gives rise to the
suspicion that translators committed to “global Paul” have
(perhaps unconsciously) put a thumb on the hermeneutic
scale.20 It is beyond my linguistic competence to adjudicate on
this matter but, if Dawson is correct, generations of English-
speaking Bible readers have been nudged ever so subtly to
believe in a “global Jesus” as well as a “global Paul” presiding
benignly over the church universal until the time of the end.
Translation bias is a form of hermeneutical—and thus political

and cultural—warfare. Dawson points out that:
The present active tense shows how the subject of the sentence
is acting. An entirely different concept, the present passive tense
shows how the subject of the sentence is being acted upon. Yet
[in most translations of 1 Corinthians 15] this present passive
tense is often ignored, or completely changed to a future!21
Athanasius of Alexandria (296-373 AD)
Although the present passive is used “relatively rarely, it’s a

precise verb form. Paul meant to use it instead of a future, yet in
many cases, Paul’s intention has not been honoured. He spoke of
the subject (the dead ones) receiving the action (rising) at his
present time, not at some future time at least two thousand years
later”. For example, the New King James Version of the Bible
renders 1 Corinthians 15:16 as” “For if the dead do not rise, then
Christ is not risen”. Dawson would translate this passage as: “For
if the dead are not [lit., being] raised, neither hath Christ been
raised”.22
Translation bias is but one hurdle that a hermeneutic grounded

in covenantal eschatology faces. A stubborn adherence to the
ecclesiastical traditions that underwrite the futurist eschatology
to which mainstream Christianity adheres is another. Such
powerful commitments to tradition pose a threat to
ecclesiastical integrity in many other ways as well. Preterist
scholars have been driven to the fringes of the ecclesiastical and
academic world. Don K. Preston, to name but one prominent
preterist, has been attacked as a heretic and shunned by the
mainline Protestant churches in his home town.23 Theological
colleges and seminaries simply ignore covenant eschatology in
their Bible studies classes despite the obvious sincerity and skill
with which the massive contributions made by preterist scholars
to Biblical exegesis have been undertaken.
Scot McKnight
Indeed, the poisoned relationship between preterism and

mainstream theological scholarship represents a case study in
the erosion of theological integrity plaguing contemporary
Christianity. Even Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of
Canterbury (as he then was), acknowledged that when theology
“resists debate and transmutation, claiming that it may
prescribe exactly what the learning of its skills lead to, it is open
to the suspicion that its workings are no longer answerable to
what they what they claim to answer to […] and thus integrity
disappears”.24 This is a political problem eating away at the
heart of theological hermeneutics. Unfortunately, those who
have done so much to re-discover “national Jesus” and “national
Paul” have failed to mount an effective political challenge to the
institutional defenders of “global Jesus” and “global Paul”.
Such a challenge would have to consider the possibility that the

incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ were
inextricably bound up with the national history of Old Covenant
Israel. Israel became a holy nation precisely because it served as
the corporate womb giving birth in history to a divinely inspired
Messiah. If Jesus really died as the representative of national
Israel, it follows that some nations are more open than others to
what Orthodox Christians call the process of theosis or
deification.25 According to Athanasius of Alexandria, global
Jesus became Man so that we might be made God.26 Or, in light
of covenant eschatology, perhaps Jesus Christ became incarnate
in-and-through the nation of Israel so that at least some other
nation(s) might be made in the image of God. And so, our
salvation, too, could become corporate, national, and spiritual
rather than personal, individual, and biological—much like the
resurrection of “the whole house of Israel” envisioned for the
valley of the dry bones in Ezekiel 37:1-14.
III
Conclusion
One might imagine that, having restored “national Jesus” to

historical memory, scholars such as Scot McKnight could help
contemporary Christians reconceive the political hermeneutics
of resurrection. As it happens, however, few historical
revisionists display much faith in the spiritual vitality of

mainstream Christianity. McKnight, for example, denies that his
own findings are of any use to the church—even if they are
true.27 The traditional ecclesiology of global Christianity rests
upon the eschatological hopes and ecumenical dreams of a long-
dead civilization. Awaiting their long-delayed Day of the Lord,
Christian churches have no interest in a philosophy of religious
history grounded in the rise and fall of nations in a world
without end. This observation holds true even among Christian
Biblical scholars who reject futurist eschatology. Samuel
Dawson, for example, rests content in the hope that when he dies
his reward “will be blessedness or happiness, and rest, in the
presence of Christ!” Even preterists, it seems, cannot do without
the vision of a “global Jesus” as our universal, heavenly
overlord.28 Sadly, those whose only hope lies in death rather
than in the historical opportunity to prepare the way for our own
“national Jesus” have resigned themselves to national suicide.
Dr. E. Michael Jones
Perhaps it is time to take the advice of the nineteenth century

English historian, J. R. Seeley, who urged the Church of England
to give its parishioners a break from endless sermons on the
remote and obscure history of ancient Israel. Suggesting “that

every nation’s true Bible is its history,” Seeley urged the church
to draw moral lessons and spiritual insight from England’s own
storied past.29 Already, one hundred and fifty years ago, he
recognized that the imperial Augustinian vision of the church
universal had reached its use-by date. Nowadays, the notion that
Christendom ever did or could in times yet to come unite the
whole of humanity under the reign of “global Jesus” has lost all
credibility. Another great reformation may be necessary if the
post-Christian West is to reverse the nation-destroying forces of
secular, increasingly satanic, globalism. Traditionalist Catholic
E. Michael Jones justly observes that “ethnos needs logos”.30 But
it is no less true that “logos needs ethnos”.
Is it already too late to reconstitute churches throughout the

Anglosphere and the wider Western world as the religious
foundation for a federation of autonomous, European-
descended ethno-nations? This need not mean a complete break
with the “global Jesus” historically associated with the rise of
European Christendom. Building upon their Christian past, the
peoples of the Anglosphere should continue to venerate the
Bible and national Israel’s historical Messiah. Both can serve as
sources of spiritual and political wisdom, providing a warrant for
the distinct, ethno-religious identity of every European people,
as well as a warning of the dreadful fate awaiting nations that
stray from the path of righteousness. Should the Anglican
church, at home and in the old white dominions, ever heed
Seeley’s call “to draw largely upon English [and Australian,
Canadian, and New Zealand] history and biography for
illustrations of their moral teaching,” God might well be
prepared to gift us our own Patriot King!31 Under such a
dispensation, a restored Angelcynn church could begin to hope
and pray for the resurrection of our own dead ones.
Andrew Fraser was born, raised, and educated in Canada

and the United States of America. He taught constitutional law
and legal history for many years at Macquarie University, Sydney
Australia and is the author of The WASP Question, an inquiry
into Anglo-Saxon identity in the context of the modern,
globalising world. His Dissident Dispatches is based on his
recent experience earning a Bachelor of Theology degree from
Charles Sturt University.
Endnotes:
1. Alister E. McGrath, “Reality, Symbol, and History:

Theological Reflections on N.T. Wright’s Portrayal of Jesus,”
in Carey C. Newman (ed.) Jesus and the Restoration of Israel:
A Critical Assessment of N.T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory
of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999) p. 176.
2. Ibid. pp. 176-177.
3. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God: Christian Origins
and the Question of God Vol. 2 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
1996).
4. N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2013) p. 408.
5. Ibid. pp. xvi, 26-31, 1085.
6. Brian D. Robinette, “The Difference Nothing Makes: Creatio
Ex Nihilo, Resurrection, and Divine Gratuity” Vol. 72
Theological Studies (2011) p. 525, at p. 527.
7. N. T. Wright, “Jesus’ Resurrection & Christian Origins” Vol.
16 No. 1 Stimulus (2008) p. 41, at p. 49.
8. N. T.Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God: Christian
Origins and the Question of God Vol. 3 (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 2003) pp. 313-314.
9. Ibid. p. 316.
10. Ibid. p. 54 (emphasis added), p. 348.
11. Ibid. p. 357.
12. Ibid. p. 336.
13. N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God:
Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1992) p. 462.
14. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, p. 1497.
15. N. T. Wright, “In Grateful Dialogue: A Response,” in Newman,
Jesus & the Restoration of Israel p. 267.
16. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, p. 1503.
17. Samuel G. Dawson, Essays on Eschatology: An Introductory
Overview of the Study of Last Things (Amarillo, TX: SGD
Press, 2009) pp. 105, 109.
18. Ibid. p. 144-146.
19. Ibid. p. 177-178, 184.
20. Ibid. p. 136.
21. Ibid. p. 135.
22. Ibid. p. 136, 145.
23. See, e.g., Samuel M. Frost, “Taking on Don K. Preston’s Jesus”
Vigilate Et Orate (blog) (22 February 2017) <vigil.blog>
(accessed 18 May 2020).
24. Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell,
2000) p. 5.
25. See, e.g., Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, One with God: Salvation as
Deification and Justification (Collegeville, MI: Liturgical
Press, 2004).
26. Saint Athanasius, On the Incarnation (Yonkers, N.Y.: St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011) p. 167.
27. Scot McKnight, “Why the Authentic Jesus is of No Use for the
Church,” in Chris Keith, et. al., Jesus, Criteria, and the
Demise of Authenticity (London: T&T Clark, 2012) pp. 173-
185.
28. Dawson, op. cit., p. 455.
29. J. R. Seeley, “The Church as a Teacher of Morality” in Rev.

W.L. Clay (ed.) Essays in Church Policy (London: Macmillan,
1868) p. 278, 267.
30. E. Michael Jones, “Ethnos Needs Logos” Vol 34 No. 7 Culture
Wars (2015) p. 12.
31. Seeley, “The Church as a Teacher of Morality,” op. cit. p. 278.
See also: Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751),
“The Idea of a Patriot King,” in David Armitage (ed.)
Bolingbroke: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997). For my own take on the
contemporary significance of Bolingbroke’s “Idea of a Patriot
King,” see my own piece: “Monarchs and Miracles:
Australia’s Need for a Patriot King” Vol. 5 No. 1 The
Occidental Quarterly (2005) p. 35.
SydneyTrads is the web page of the Sydney Traditionalist Forum: an association of young

professionals who form part of the Australian independent right (also known as “non-
aligned right”).
6/28/2021 White Politics and Secession in South Africa :: Reader View
www.unz.com
White Politics and Secession in South

Africa
Patrick McDermott • January 3, 2021 • 3,800 Words • 150 Comments •
Reply
21-26 minutes
It seemed like an act of desperation. Twenty-five years after the

fall of apartheid, South Africa’s Whites were counting on a Black
man to save them from the corruption and malignancy of Black-
majority rule. Its failure should have surprised no one.
By all appearances, Mmusi Maimane was a South African Barack

Obama. Smooth and polished, he seemed like the ideal
candidate to win just enough Black votes from the tottering ANC
to fulfill the promise of a multi-racial democracy.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) had long been viewed as the party
of White people, but that was a handicap when Whites were just
eight percent of the population. The party traced its roots back
to the Progressive Party, the liberal opposition during the
apartheid era, but few Black voters cared about that. Instead, the
party drew most of its non-White support from the nation’s
“coloured” population, a mixed-race group that shared just one
thing in common with the nation’s Whites: a mutual fear of Black
domination in the allegedly harmonious “Rainbow Nation.”
Maimane was supposed to be the DA’s ticket out of this electoral

dead end. The “Obama of Soweto” would lead them in the 2019
elections to a promised land where everyone would be treated

equally and race no longer mattered.
It blew up in their faces.
The Afrikaners
It all could have worked out very differently. Nearly 30 years ago,
in November 1993, President F.W. de Klerk convened his cabinet
to inform them that he had accepted Nelson Mandela’s demands
for majority rule in the new government. Upon hearing the news,
Tertius Delport, one of his negotiators, was stunned. They had
given in on virtually everything. Resolved to resign, he walked
down the hall to confront the president directly.
When de Klerk opened the door Delport grabbed him by his

jacket lapels and cried out, “What have you done? You have
given the country away! You allowed children to negotiate!”
“What are you going to do?” de Klerk asked coolly.
“I intend to rally enough colleagues,” Delport answered.

“Together with the Conservative Party caucus, you will no longer
have a majority.”
“Then there will be civil war,” de Klerk responded.
It was not out of the question. De Klerk had always viewed the
military with a mixture of suspicion and disdain. Many of them
viewed him as a traitor. He had already removed Magnus Malan,
his widely respected defense minister. In late 1992, he resolved
to clean out the rest of the dissidents in the military ranks.
“We are not playing with children,” one of his ministers warned
him. “We are governing because the Defense Force allows us to
do so. … The top command could decide to get rid of us and seize
power. And where are we then?”
That did not dissuade de Klerk. The following day, he suspended

or forcibly retired 23 senior army officers in what later came to
be known as the “Night of the Generals.”
When retired General Constand Viljoen entered politics in 1994

to launch the Freedom Front, some viewed him as the country’s
last chance. Many thought him capable of raising an army of up
to 50,000 men from various defense forces and civilian
paramilitary units that were loyal to him. Anticipating this,
General Georg Meiring warned de Klerk and then met with
Viljoen to sound him out.
“You and I and our men can take this country in an afternoon,”
Viljoen reportedly told him. “Yes,” Meiring replied, “but what do
we do in the morning after the coup? The internal resistance and

foreign pressures and the stagnant economy will still be there.”
For Viljoen, the lack of support from the armed forces was
decisive. “I could have stirred things up in 1994—but for what
purpose?” he later said. “I don’t think any action from my side
would have resulted in a major part of the Defense Force siding
with me.”
Viljoen’s decision was controversial among some Afrikaners,

many of whom were more than willing to fight and die to save
their country. Instead, Viljoen decided to use the threat of war to
win an Afrikaner homeland — a volkstaat — by peaceful means.
To placate him and his supporters, de Klerk and the ANC readily
agreed to create a council to review the options. But it was just a
ploy. Neither de Klerk nor the ANC ever took the idea seriously.
In the 1994 elections, the first held after the end of apartheid,
Viljoen’s Freedom Front earned a little over two percent of the
vote. The party was, and remains, an important voice for
Afrikaners, as are advocacy organizations like AfriForum and
Suidlanders, a civil defense group. But their power is limited by
numbers. Whites are a small minority in South Africa.
Conservative Afrikaners are just a minority within the minority.
Viljoen never had any illusions about this. His primary focus had
always been the creation of an Afrikaner homeland. Consistent
with the accord he signed with the ANC, a council was soon
created to consider the creation of a such a volkstaat. But then,
as now, the council soon faced a major obstacle: Afrikaners were
spread too thinly across too many areas of the country for any
single region to stand out as the obvious location.
The council considered several options, including one based

primarily in the Northern Cape that eventually drew the
endorsement of the Freedom Front (shown in the map below).

Other proposals included carve-outs in and around Pretoria,
where the largest numbers of Afrikaners live.
But each of these proposals would have required large numbers

of Afrikaners to uproot and move to the new state for it to be
viable. Instead, a 1993 poll indicated that just 29 percent of
White South Africans backed the creation of such a homeland.
Just 18 percent said they would consider moving there if one
were created.
“Afrikaners do not want their own homeland,” Johann Wingard,

chair of the council, eventually concluded. “They want to live
anywhere in their beautiful country where they can make a
decent living.” Interest in the idea soon dissipated and the

council was dissolved. For many, the dream of a volkstaat
seemed dead and buried.
Carel Boshoff, son-in-law of former South African Prime

Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, had different ideas. In 1990 he
bought a patch of land on the banks of the Orange River at the far
eastern edge of the volkstaat proposed by the Freedom Front.
The first few residents of the new Afrikaner town, called Orania,
arrived the following year. The population has since grown to
over 1,700, over a third of whom are children.
“They initially drew support from idealists,” said Dan Roodt, an

Afrikaner activist. “They struggled financially in the beginning.
In the early 2000s, you could buy a plot of land for a couple a
hundred dollars. Now the price is 50 times that much.”
The town’s growth was powered by a strong desire for shared

community and growing disenchantment with the rest of South
Africa. It would have grown even faster if not for its commitment
to using Afrikaner labor. “Orania does not use black labor,” Roodt
said, “so it can’t build fast enough to build all the new housing
they need.”
Orania had shown that the idea could work. And before long,
public opinion would change.
Democratic Alliance
The Freedom Front — later renamed the Freedom Front Plus

after it merged with the Conservative Party — was never the
primary party of South Africa’s Whites. In the 1994 election, that
distinction fell to the Nationalists under F.W. de Klerk. But there
was also a third party contending for the White vote that year.
The Democratic Party was barely a footnote, receiving fewer
votes than the Freedom Front. But in time — and with the
backing of most of the White establishment, the media, and a

healthy dose of luck — it soon propelled itself forward to become
the nation’s primary party for Whites, second in size only to the
ANC.
In 1994, however, it was caught in a bind. Its traditional base of

support had always been urban, politically liberal Whites. That
became a problem when de Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC.
Suddenly the party found itself being squeezed on both sides —
by the ANC on the left, which drew away some of its White liberal
support, and by the Nationalists on the right, who were viewed
by most Whites as the only viable check against the ANC’s
growing power.
Instead of capitalizing on this advantage, however, de Klerk

fumbled it away. Thinking he could retain power and influence
by working with the ANC, he allied with them in a post-election
“unity government.” But this only alienated the Nationalists
from their base of White voters. Worse, they were blamed for
failing to stop the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which
persecuted numerous White officials and military officers for
their role in apartheid.
The Democratic Party took full advantage of the situation,

challenging the Nationalists from the right in the 1999 elections.
With the rallying cry “Fight Back!,” the party gained ground
among White voters. After the election, the Nationalists
continued to hemorrhage White support until 2005, when the
party finally disbanded.
With its principal competition for White voters now gone, the
newly renamed Democratic Alliance was free to expand its
outreach to other racial groups, first to the “coloured” vote and
later to the Black middle class. Like White establishment parties
just about everywhere, it downplayed race and emphasized
colorblind individualism and classical liberalism to maximize its

cross-racial appeal. Using this strategy, it gained support in
every subsequent election until 2014, when it peaked at 22
percent of the overall vote.
After that election, Helen Zille, the party’s leader, began looking
for a successor. Her ideal candidate would be someone like
Barack Obama, who was then closing out his second term.
Mmusi Maimane seemed to fit the bill. With Zille’s backing, he
drew overwhelming support from the party in 2015. The party
then marketed him in ways that amounted to virtual plagiarism
— including blatantly copying Obama’s “Hope” poster and
substituting Maimane’s image instead.
But Maimane did not play along. He was not interested in being
the Black face of a White party. If the DA wanted his leadership to
reach Black voters, then he would force it to swallow his message
— and that message was one of Black nationalism.
In his acceptance speech, he warned the party that

colorblindness was not enough. “These experiences shaped me,
just like they shaped so many young Black people of my
generation,” he said, echoing the criticisms of South Africa’s
woke left. “I don’t agree with those who say they don’t see color.
Because, if you don’t see that I’m Black, then you don’t see me.”
It was not long before Maimane was locked in a power struggle

with senior members of his own party, advocating for affirmative
action and straying from its emphasis on non-discrimination.
Under his command, the party soon came to be seen as ‘ANC-
lite,’ and the DA’s White leadership was not happy.
Neither were some of its other Black leaders, but for different
reasons. ”I feel powerless when my activists come to me and say
they are victims of racism from senior people in the party, who
say they should be grateful that the DA keeps them busy because
otherwise they would probably be out stealing and killing people
somewhere,” one grumbled. “I mean, what is that?”
The DA paid the price for these divisions at the ballot box. In the
2019 elections, the party lost ground for first time since 1994,
failing to gain any traction against the ANC and losing White
voters on the right to the Freedom Front Plus. The ANC also lost
ground, but not to the “colorblind” DA. Instead, it lost votes to
the explicitly Black nationalist Economic Freedom Fighters
(EFF) under Julius Malema, who had pledged to “cut the throat of
Whiteness.”
The lesson from the election was clear. In an increasingly

chaotic nation, Black nationalism was the future. White voters
and their parties had gone as far as they were going to go.
After the election, the knives came out. Helen Zille, the DA’s
previous leader, was elected to a powerful party position by the
old guard and she quickly challenged Maimane from within. Her
predecessor, Tony Leon, chaired an internal party review that
laid the blame squarely at Maimane’s feet. The Institute for Race
Relations, an establishment-backed think tank, said he had

abandoned the party’s cherished principles.
Maimane saw the writing on the wall, but he did not go quietly. At
his resignation speech he called out the DA’s White leadership in
explicit terms. “Over the past few months it has become more
and more clear to me that there exists those in the DA who do
not see eye-to-eye with me, who do not share the vision for the
party and the direction it was taking,” he said. “There have been
several months of consistent and coordinated attacks on me and
my leadership, to ensure that this project failed, or I failed.”
Other Black party leaders followed him out the door. “I cannot
reconcile myself with a group of people who believe that race is
irrelevant in the discussion of inequality and poverty in South
Africa,” said Herman Mashaba as he resigned from the party and
as mayor of Johannesburg, the nation’s largest city.
Malema’s EFF released a gloating statement calling the DA a

“White political party in which Whites and their interests as
Whites must always dominate and come first.” Maimane was
later seen hobnobbing with Julius Malema in what some called
an emerging ‘bromance.’
Last November, the party overwhelmingly elected a new White

leader, John Steenhuisen. He trounced his primary Black
challenger, Mbali Ntuli, with 80 percent of the vote. The party, it
seemed, was no longer pretending. Some are now questioning
how it could possibly avoid a backlash by non-White voters in
the next election.
Secession
Two decades ago, the idea of a White homeland in South Africa

seemed dead in the water. Any area reserved for Whites that was
too far away from the cities or from employment opportunities
seemed impractical. Many Whites at the time also believed, or at

least hoped, that South Africa would soon become the
harmonious and prosperous multiracial nation that had been
promised.
That hope is now gone. A worsening economy, ever-present

crime, and rising corruption have all left their mark (detailed in
my previous article, South Africa’s Protection Racket). According
to public opinion polls, South Africans have grown increasingly
pessimistic. The situation briefly stabilized when Cyril
Ramaphosa replaced Jacob Zuma as president in 2018, but his
promised reforms never materialized. Now public sentiment
seems to be worsening again. The DA’s failed “colorblind”
political strategy has only further darkened the mood among
those who had hoped for more.
These negative views are most prevalent among Whites in

general and in the Western Cape in particular, one of the few
regions in the nation where Blacks are not a majority. In 2009,
Whites in the province allied with the local coloured population
and ousted the ANC in local elections. It has been ruled by the
DA since then.
“Ever since the DA came to power in Cape Town and in the

Western Cape one has heard a growing chorus from visitors that
‘It feels like a different (and better) country down here!’” wrote
one local observer. “The public hospitals and schools work far
better here than anywhere else in South Africa, the traffic lights
work better, the city center is safer, there is less litter and
generally there is better governance.”
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Local rule was a step in the right direction, but some activists
wanted more. In 2007, they formed the Cape Party to fight for
genuine independence. The party never gained traction in the

few elections it contested — partly because the timing was wrong
and partly because voters inclined to support separatism
already had a political home in the Freedom Front Plus.
Nine years of Jacob Zuma’s presidency changed that, however,

and several new organizations have emerged. Following the
success of the Brexit vote in Britain, CapeXit was founded in
2018 to seek independence through international law. Another
organization, the Cape Independence Advocacy Group (CIAG),
was launched in 2020.
It seemed like public opinion had changed, but independence

advocates decided to sponsor a poll to be sure. Unsurprisingly,
the poll found overwhelming opposition among Black voters. But
it also showed that Whites now strongly supported the idea,
especially those who were supporters of the Freedom Front Plus.
Coloured voters — who constitute a majority of the Western

Cape’s population — were more divided. While most were not yet
ready to endorse full independence, the majority (68%) agreed
that the Western Cape should be given more power to choose its
own policies. Advocates now believe that this bloc of voters can
be won over, particularly if the nation’s economy continues to
deteriorate.
These poll results, which drew wide attention, have put the DA in
a box. Much of its White leadership privately supports
independence, but it has remained publicly silent to avoid
alienating voters both inside and outside the province who do
not support the effort. The Freedom Front Plus, which has
endorsed independence, sees this as an opportunity. They plan
to challenge the DA on this issue in the upcoming 2021
municipal elections.
Despite this growing support, however, some have condemned

the independence movement as unrealistic. “Fringe groups have
long advocated for the secession of the Western Cape from the
rest of South Africa,” wrote Pierre De Vos, a constitutional law
professor at the University of Cape Town. “Obviously, the
Western Cape is not going to secede and there is no chance of
the creation of an independent state.”
“Even if the Western Cape Premier calls a referendum (he won’t),

and even if a majority of voters vote for secession (they won’t
either), the referendum will have absolutely no impact as the
president and his party will have no legal or ethical obligation to
adhere to the results,” he wrote. Critics argued that the ruling
ANC would inevitably reject Cape independence, not least
because the Western Cape and Gauteng, the two provinces with
the bulk of South Africa’s White population, provide most of the
tax dollars that line the ANC’s pockets.
Supporters counter that international law, not the South African

constitution, is the final word on the matter. “Countries secede
on a regular basis, and the constitutional law of the parent state
is almost never an insurmountable object if the other conditions
required by international law are in place,” wrote Phil Craig,
CIAG’s co-founder. Political will, not constitutional law, would
decide this issue, as it has in nearly every other case of
secession.
Bangladesh seceded from Pakistan despite the latter’s

objections. Kosovo seceded from Serbia despite Serbia’s
objections, and with the International Court of Justice
advising that there is no prohibition of the (unilateral)

declaration of independence under international law.
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Croatia, Slovenia, East Timor,
South Sudan. The list goes on.
Closer to home, did the previous South African

constitution prevent the end of apartheid, or Namibian
independence? Countries secede on a regular basis, and
the constitutional law of the parent state is almost never
an insurmountable object if the other conditions
required by international law are in place.
Whatever the objections, the politics of the issue are clearly

trending in the supporters’ direction. Numerous economic
experts and political analysts now see South Africa entering a
death spiral. Last year, the nation lost its last investment-grade
credit rating when Moody’s downgraded it to “junk” status.
Investors have been fleeing the country for years. According to
IMF estimates, unemployment is fast approaching 40 percent.
The Covid crisis has only made matters worse, contributing to
widespread protests. At least one analyst estimates that if its
existing economic policies are not reversed, the country faces
economic and political collapse by 2030.
Despite such warnings, President Cyril Ramaphosa seems

powerless to implement needed reforms. According to analysts
at the establishment-backed Institute of Race Relations, power in
the ANC has now shifted decisively to leftist Black nationalists. If
Ramaphosa were to challenge the party’s top leadership in any
meaningful way, they would remove him from office.
This worsening economic and political outlook will only

heighten public support for secession over time. The final trigger
could be an independence referendum in the Cape, an IMF
bailout that imposes cuts on ANC-favored spending priorities, a
forced removal of Ramaphosa by the ANC leadership, or a
national election that forced the ANC into a governing coalition
with the far-left EFF to maintain Black majority rule.
Regardless of the cause, if the Western Cape seceded, it would

probably trigger similar efforts in other parts of the country.
This might include some or all of the Northern Cape, which has
similar demographics and is home to Orania. Another possibility

is the Whiter regions in and around Pretoria and Johannesburg,
which might also demand increased local autonomy. Absent
that, many of these Whites might flee to a newly independent
Western Cape, just as Whites fled Zimbabwe to South Africa
during Robert Mugabe’s reign.
The Rainbow Nation’s days may be numbered, but now there is

something new to hope for. An independent Western Cape would
not be the volkstaat — nor indeed an ethnostate of any kind. But
it would at least free the nation’s White population from the
worst excesses of majority Black rule and reestablish the right of
self-determination.
When reporters travel to Orania, they sometimes ask the

residents why they chose to move there. “We want to build a
better place for our children and ourselves,” one recently said.
It is a simple answer, one that anyone could have given, but now
more people are beginning to realize that it is something that
cannot be taken for granted. Self-rule has long been an
aspiration for many White South Africans. Now, after all these
years, it may finally be within reach.
Patrick McDermott is a political analyst in Washington, DC.
6/28/2021 Review of Josh Neal’s <i>American Extremist</i> :: Reader View
www.unz.com
Review of Josh Neal’s American

Extremist
Andrew Joyce • February 24, 2021 • 6,700 Words • 8 Comments • Reply
39-49 minutes
American Extremist: The Psychology of Political

Extremist
Josh Neal
Imperium Press, 2020.
About a year after Charlottesville, I noticed the emergence of a

new breed of young alternative thinkers in our circles. I’m more
of a reader than a listener and, because these individuals were
overwhelmingly engaged in podcasts and YouTube videos, my
familiarity with them and their ideas was only developed
gradually. At the inevitable risk of omitting someone of
importance, I don’t think I’m terribly mistaken in listing them as
including, for the most part, the staff of the Euro Bureau of
Literaturo podcast—Tyler Hamilton, Josh Neal, Joel Davis,
“Fashy Žižek,” and Jefferson Lee—as well as Keith Woods, and a
handful of Twitter personalities and other podcasters roughly in
the 25-35 age range.[1] Although each brings their own
perspective and expertise to a broad range of subjects, these
thinkers share a number of characteristics which make a form of
common association logical. One of the most obvious is their
departure from prior, more reactionary, perceptions of Marxism,
Cultural Marxism, and Americanism. As the “Far Right” has
evolved, it has inevitably and eventually come to include a
younger generation educated in the jaws of the beast, by which I

mean a generation educated long after the “long march” through
the institutions had taken place.
This younger generation, which, having representatives from

Canada, Australia, Central Europe, and Ireland, is less wholly
American in staffing if not in following, is more distant from
“Red Scare” politics, yet has also been confronted with some of
the most radical social changes in a century. The result is that
these figures have arguably developed a very nuanced
perspective of our contemporary problems and their origins
when compared with what might have been offered previously.
Other commonalities include the fact these thinkers emerge
predominantly from the fields of philosophy and psychology,
often with graduate degrees, and combine a renewed and
focused criticism of capitalist neoliberalism with a qualified
repurposing of some of the arguments of the Frankfurt School,
especially the work of Adorno and, to a lesser extent, Marcuse.
One need not agree in toto with the approach or theoretical

grounding of these young thinkers to understand that they are
performing very important work. One of the consequences of the
alienation of our ideas from practical politics in the Anglosphere
is the resort to a war of ideas rather than a practical electoral
politics based on immediate material interests (e.g., the direct
community engagement of the British National Party at its peak).
The rise of the social media “movement,” the podcast scene, and
the rise of online “personalities,” sometimes disparagingly
termed “e-celebs,” has largely followed in the wake of the death
of that politics, and it seems to be a received wisdom that
cultural metapolitics is necessary to pave the way back to
practical engagement.
Be that as it may, the question remains as to which metapolitical

path, or battle, is the surest route to success. Here we have a
quandary. It’s in the nature of each person to believe that his

particular expertise holds the key to unlocking the puzzle of the
age. The historian steps forth with a revision of the received
narratives of the past in the belief that it will help bring about an
awakening. The philosopher sees instead a philosophical
revolution as the means to renewal. The geneticist or the
anthropologist dissects the dysgenic fall of man and calls for a
eugenic program to reverse decline. The psychiatrist diagnoses
the pathologies of the masses in the hopes of lifting the veil and
ushering in a transformation. The truth, of course, is that all
hands are required on deck, and that all keys are required for a
Great Unlocking. In this spirit, so long as certain basic principles
remain unviolated, I’ve always been relatively open-minded
towards novel approaches to the terrible times in which we
happen to live. And the revisiting and repurposing of the work of
Adorno, Marcuse, Freud, and Žižek is certainly novel.
If I had any problem with these podcasters at all, it was that they
didn’t write enough, because putting opinions systematically to
paper, where one’s sources can be scrutinized and one’s logical
progression of thought more clearly laid bare, certainly makes
such opinions more personal, vulnerable, and accountable.
Being something of a Luddite, I also harbor a personal antipathy
to what I see as the transience of the podcast as opposed to the
permanence of the essay or the book (it being much easier in my
view to turn to a page for a quote than to click through a
succession of time-stamps).
It was a great personal pleasure, then, to see Josh Neal emerge

late last year as the first of his emergent cohort to systematically
set down a worldview in book form. In fact, in American
Extremist, Neal offers one of the most interesting, thoughtful,
and challenging (in several respects) works I’ve read in about a
decade. This is a sizeable text, coming in at just under 300
densely-packed pages, divided into four “books,” all of which are
aimed at reshaping our understanding about how political

extremism begins, and what it really is.
Yet, in my reading of this exceptionally written text, it was also

much more than that. First, although it is painstakingly objective
throughout, this is an intensely personal work and, intentionally
or not, it bears the stamp of Josh Neal’s personal journey
throughout. This isn’t a bad thing, and it adds considerably to its
significance and gravitas in my opinion. Second, American
Extremist is one of the most, if not the single most, thorough
elucidations of the nature of contemporary society that I’ve ever
read. Such was the startling clarity of some of Neal’s dissections
that at times I felt as though I wasn’t so much reading the book
as being beaten about the head with it. Third, the book is a
timely call for self-reflection on the part of all of us who, having
spent so much time working against our opponents, should take
care not to sacrifice who we are in the process. This is therefore
a work of profound political conscience.
Beginnings
The book opens appropriately with an introduction titled “From

There to Here,” in which Neal outlines his journey into thought
criminality. I think I first saw Josh sometime in 2018, when he
recorded an episode of the McSpencer Group with Richard
Spencer. He was very well-spoken, authoritative, and seemed a
natural in front of the camera. Although some of the media
scaremongering around Richard has now dissipated somewhat,
especially in the discovery of new bogeymen following the
Capital “invasion,” I remember thinking it was very brave for
someone who appeared to be a successful young scholar to
publicly show his face in a podcast with a figure then regarded as
Public Enemy Number 1. In the introduction to American
Extremist, we find out just how Neal came to be in this position.
A psychology graduate with ambitions to become a licensed
clinical psychologist, he spent the period 2015/2016 knee-deep

in doctoral applications but also reconsidering his life path and
the world around him. Academic psychology was dominated by
“academics of a certain persuasion,” and as Neal began to re-
evaluate what he understood about the world, “I couldn’t shake
the nagging feeling that there would be significant compatibility
issues. I wanted to practice my craft, but the cost seemed too
high. Cautiously, I began searching for potential off-ramps to
liberate me from the highway of stagnation and conformity I saw
unfolding before me.”
The Trump campaign, and more specifically the response of

Neal’s colleagues to it, accelerated his journey into the kind of
wrong-think that places a man in professional jeopardy. But
Neal’s journey had begun a little earlier, precipitated by, among
other things, the removal of Muammar Gaddafi, the Trayvon
Martin affair, the shooting of Michael Brown and subsequent
assassination of five Dallas law officers by Micah Xavier Johnson,
the migrant crisis in Europe, and the rash of domestic terror
attacks in California, Florida, and New York during the second
term of the Obama administration. Faced with a challenging
political and cultural climate, Neal and a friend entered the
world of podcasting. He abandoned most of his earlier media
consumption habits, and sought out new perspectives—a
journey that would eventually lead him to content produced by
the then “Alt-Right.” In relation to his growing distance from his
older worldview, his transformation was quite sudden. In Neal’s
words, “the depth of my ignorance was dispelled in spectacular
fashion. … I was introduced to alternative ways of thinking, texts
I never knew existed, and whole ideological movements I was
utterly and completely unaware of.” Together with this was
another realization:
Intellectual journeys are often more perilous than the

kind your average adrenaline junkie might pursue.
People won’t disown you for scaling a mountain, but

perhaps they will should they catch you reading the
wrong book.
Undeterred, Neal pushed ahead with his own broadcast, hoping

to make a contribution through his interests in psychology,
philosophy, and art. He began an interview series, during which
he recorded conversations with figures like Kevin MacDonald,
and found it thrilling to work with genuinely heterodox
intellectuals as opposed to the kind of fake rebels offered up by
the mass media. Neal was soon enjoying a viewership in the tens
of thousands, and eventually entered into a broadcasting
partnership with Richard Spencer—the McSpencer Group.
Although I am unfamiliar with the precise details of what next
occurred—and they are only really hinted at in the book—I think
Neal was then caught in the crossfire of lingering hostility from
some factions of the American movement over Charlottesville.
Neal explains that his new broadcast association with Spencer
was “not exclusively” the cause of a subsequent clash with “the
wrong kinds of people,” but that it was a significant element in it.
In any case, it was disgruntled members of the American
movement, and not Leftists, journalists, or Antifa, who started
the ball rolling in terms of revealing the full details about Neal’s
life—a doxxing in other words. What followed was the predictable
sequence of media hit-pieces, and Leftist activism designed to
ruin Neal’s employment and career prospects and his life in
general.
I’ve related this section of the book at length for a number of

reasons, the most important being that I think the episode was
crucial not only to the production of the book, but to its
approach as well. Neal’s entry into our circles was nothing less
than a rollercoaster, involving first a sequence of revelations
about issues from the Left, followed by a stunning dropping of
the veil in relation to some on “our own side.” In Neal’s words,
Just because you think you share beliefs with someone

doesn’t mean that you actually do. The alt-right was (and
to some degree remains) the place to find some of the
most courageous, intelligent, and talented people you’ll
ever meet—but it is also a den of thieves and scoundrels.
Foolishly, I had gotten into bed with a bunch of snakes
and paid the price for it. A tiny but vocal group had
gathered all of the information they could find, and hand
delivered it to their supposed mortal enemies—
antifascist activists and their sympathetic friends
working as journalists.
In the aftermath, Newsweek and the New York Post both

attempted hit-pieces on Neal, while his Graduate School
professors declared that his political affiliations suggested he
had succumbed to a “dangerous insanity.” Meanwhile, in the
midst of allegations of his own extremism, and confronted with
escalations of extreme and often irrational behavior from both
the Left and Right, Neal was presented with an important
question: What is extremism, and where does it really come
from?
In American Extremist, Neal attempts to answer this question

while taking clinical aim at extremists of both the Left and Right.
The central thesis of the book is that extremism is built into
American neoliberalism, and that it is essentially an inescapable
top-down phenomenon that draws almost all citizens into its
vortex in one fashion or another. While one can take the Left
path or the Right, the result in most cases is a suffocating inertia
interrupted occasionally only when certain alienated or
disturbed individuals spiral off into chaotic and nihilistic
violence. While “extremism” has become a talking point, as a
societal problem it has become unsolvable thanks to the failure
of psychology to even approach the issue objectively. Neal
argues that, beginning with Freud, psychology has dedicated
itself only to the “erasure of limits, an aggrandizement of the

self, and the overthrow of authority and ritual. Eager to depose
the Gods of old, deicide became an end in and of itself.” In the
postwar period, psychology became a “scientific attack dog”
which “legitimized the sociopolitical developments that
weakened the family, weakened the community, and weakened
the country.” The Frankfurt School and its links to the OSS (an
early incarnation of the CIA) prefigured an intensifying
relationship between the State and the University, with the result
that experiments in depersonalization techniques, and attempts
at mind control, paved the way for later co-operation in the
development of advanced interrogation techniques following
9/11. Since academic mainstream academic psychology is
thoroughly entrenched in the neoliberal system that incentivizes
and directs it, a radical redefinition of extremism can only come
from outside the paradigm. This is the fundamental goal of
American Extremist.
Systemic Alienation
The first “book” of American Extremist is an attempt to explain

the ways in which extremism is created and perpetuated by
neoliberal elites. Decades of propaganda have steadily eroded
mental and cultural links to the past, with devastating
consequences. Neal points out that “if a people can be ripped
from their inherited narratives, or merely have their narratives
re-written in a way that is disempowering, then they necessarily
become psychologically vulnerable to the slings and arrows of
malevolent storytellers and cognitive colonizers.” What we see
today, in average citizens, are “victims of this mythological theft”
becoming “alienated from their own identities, thus producing a
kind of false consciousness and the development of an othered
self-concept.” In attempting to locate the fons et origo of
extremism, we would be mistaken to look among individual
people alienated from themselves and should instead place the
responsibility on “those members of society who possess the

power to influence entire civilizations,” and who have greatly
benefited from the fact “the subversion of religious, national,
and ethnic mythos grants a tremendous capacity for political
and social control.”
As an example of myth-robbing subversion, Neal points to

Donna Zuckerberg’s Not All Dead White Men (2008), a text
dedicated to “de-fanging classic texts (such as those of the
Stoics) who, in her view, served as a legitimating force that aided
far-right misogyny.” Other subversive figures pointed to by Neal
include Hugh William Montefiore, a British Jewish convert to
Anglicanism, and later Bishop of Birmingham, whose primary
“contribution” to Christianity appears to have been his claim
that Jesus Christ was a homosexual. With millions of dedicated
and motivated activists chipping away at collective memory like
this, a quiet revolution has taken place. Neal stresses that,
The revised slavery mythos sets Black Americans in the

role of ‘true’ Americans and Whites in the role of
oppressive coattail riders. The narcissism of modern
sexual identity allows religious figures to be desacralised
and reconfigured as counter-culture heroes for sexual
minorities. Novel psychological and sociological
paradigms are cast retroactively upon classic texts, thus
removing their genius and necessitating their
decontextualisation so as to accord with contemporary
sensibilities. In all such cases only one group truly
benefits: the powerful.
In the widespread absence of the development of secure identity,

resentment has become the prevailing feeling of our time and a
general atmosphere of falsehood is rampant. Although we’ve
heard a lot about “fake news” over the last four years, Neal
points out that false collective fictions have long been rampant
in American society thanks to the malicious activity of the mass

media. Neal uses the cases of Trayvon Martin and Michael
Brown to demonstrate the way in which the press is far from
“free and independent” in relation to neoliberal hegemony.
Media misrepresentation of these cases, and later that of George
Floyd, led to nationwide riots, racial strife, and the deaths or
protestors and police officers alike. In other words, press action
was extremist, and in turn led to extremism. The book then
offers a remarkable and damning psychological profile of the
average journalist, revealed to be overwhelmingly left-wing with
“a high need for power, sensation seeking, and binge drinking.”
As the foot soldiers for neoliberal ideology, journalists and other
media figures saturate the general population with a malevolent
framing of reality that excludes real dissent, with the result that
America has witnessed instead a “total convergence between
leftism (neoliberalism) and rightism (neoconservatism)—two
ideologies birthed by the same mother, differentiated only by
aesthetic and temperamental particularities.” Neal continues,
Points of disagreement between the two ideologies rarely

scratch the surface of political discourse, instead opting
to pedantically bicker over matters both optical and
practical, thus limiting the scope of what can possibly be
achieved. The theatrical nature of their dispute gives the
impression of opposition, whereas on matters of political
significance the two invariably march in lockstep.
Journalists keep this theatre in motion because they are “easily

controlled people; their hunger for power makes them ideal
minions.” The left-journalist is notable for his/her “arrogance
and gluttony, narcissism and pedantry,” as well as their habit of
being “passive-aggressively confrontational, and possessing a
uniquely religious quality of pettiness and vengeance-seeking.”
Journalists are often of the “lowest quality and character,” and
represent biological types as well as certain perspectives. Neal
remarks that, “while their employment does not offer them

much in the way of meaningful compensation, they out-earn
others when it comes to catharsis, self-righteousness, and
visibility.” Equally important, however, is Neal’s assertion that
mainstream right-wing journalism is equally sociopathic, and
both hysterical and self-serving, with only the object of
hystericism differing in each case. Neal explains that “both the
American right and left believe they hold a monopoly on truth
and moral self-righteousness.” Locked in powerlessness, the
media of the Right has descended into “neurotic escapism and
counter-narrative creation.”
All media, of course, is essentially monopolized. Neal points to

the fact “most of the media any American will ever consume, be
it digital, print, or otherwise, is effectively owned by six
corporations.” Press centralization means genuine dissent can
be dealt with very efficiently either by directly attacking ideas or
groups dangerous to the status quo or by maintaining a policy of
silence in order to starve these ideas or groups of social oxygen.
The media monopoly, in both its mainstream Left and Right
arms, is united against genuine opposition, as well as a series of
other presuppositions. Neal argues that the idea that progressive
neoliberalism and reactionary neoconservatism are wholly
distinct and antagonistic is a myth.
Both are system ideologies with a great deal of epistemic

agreement, and as such uniformly share the same goals
though they may achieve them through different
methods. Axiomatically, both accept the primacy of the
individual and share the belief that he can be improved
or realised through the application of economic
techniques. Both tend to view contemporary moral
debates in terms of America’s history with slavery and its
participation in the Second World War. Both accept a
linear, progressive view of history (that is to say,
humanity always moves forward, improving along the

way). Neither side fundamentally takes issue with
America’s imperial practices, especially if the military is
used as a force for “spreading democracy.”
The American Ideology
Perhaps most important of all is the fact both Left and Right
insist that Americanism itself “is not bound in anything real, but
rather is simply a result of the choice to live in America.”
Because of this deeply problematic, but ubiquitous,
understanding of what it means to be American, we are forced
into the realization that “the problem of political extremism is to
understand that the problem is America.” Here I was reminded
strongly of Sam Dickson’s remarkable NPI 2013 speech on
“America: The God That Failed.” When I mentioned this speech
to Dickson several years ago, he told me that he had been
criticized for it at the time. Now, however, it seems prophetic, at
least in the sense that a growing segment of the younger
American, and indeed international, movement is rejecting what
it perceives as an American imperialism and internationalism
that enriches elites and individualistic traitors while destroying
the ethnic and cultural fabric of the nation. In fact, Neal, echoing
Dickson, insists that “the country can only be regarded as a
dismal failure.” One can only add that any nation that reduces its
self-concept to merely “a choice to live in ‘X’” is a failure, and
this goes for every country in the Anglosphere, and, increasingly,
most of the nations of Europe, that have redefined themselves in
the image of the ideology of Americanism.
Beginning with a discussion of the myth of democracy, Neal then

moves to a discussion of American mental paralysis. Although
much ink has been spilled on authoritarianism and anti-
authoritarianism, Neal argues that most Americans in fact
“struggle to find an actionable equilibrium between the two
positions.” Rather than being clearly Fascist-leaning, or anti-

Fascist, Americans endlessly fumble in the middle, as
demonstrated by the Right’s screeching about fascist overreach
under Obama, and the Left’s identical refrain under Trump. Neal
asks, “What does this tell us? Are Americans hopelessly
confused? Is every political actor a fascist or a fascist-in-
democratic clothing? I believe that we can confidently say yes to
the former, but no to the latter.” Americans are hopelessly
confused because of the way in which democracy obscures the
true nature of authority. The result of this confusion is a fear of
all authority, as well as a breakdown in authority itself and of its
accountability. Neal mentions that,
Parents fail to exercise the rightful authority over their

children; teachers do not discipline their students; hedge
fund managers, investment firms, and executive boards
routinely engage in unethical and illegal conduct but
frequently go unpunished; and to the degree that
Americans engage in the political process, we find that
they support the same policies and the same actors time
and time again.
A fundamental feature of American society is that of disunity.

“Supposedly unified by our shared American values, our
freedoms, and our love of democracy (though not in actuality),
the line between friend and enemy grows murkier with each
passing year.” Americans are now united only by an increased
feeling of unease and uncertainty. Everywhere Americans look
they see failures of authority, “thus producing a conceptual
collapse whereby failures of authority anywhere become failures
of authority everywhere. Without anyone to show us how to act,
we struggle to devise constructive courses of action for
ourselves. Absent a rightful authority, agency and ethical
conduct collapses.” Neal thus implies that the remedy to our
current situation is not less authority, but an increase in
‘rightful’ authority. He contrasts this with the inertia of

conservatism, stressing that authority is “a wilful and vital
stance which seeks assertion, dominance, security—yes—but
more importantly a securing of desire, or some thing, be it an
object or a goal.” Locked in a holding pattern in which he/she
perpetually loses, the conservative is little more than a right-
liberal.
Another myth attacked by Neal is that of the individual. Neal

insists that extreme individualism is indistinguishable from
sociopathy. A key problem of our time is that extreme
individualism is now systemic, encouraging endless
“narcissistic line-pushing,” and endlessly shaping individuals in
this image:
America’s culture of transaction and domination, of

immediacy and short-sightedness, of ruthless
pragmatism, could produce little else in its population.
The speed with which recently migrated peoples
conform to this system surely indicates the verity of this
fact.
A society filled with individualistic sociopaths will inevitably

reproduce both extremists and novel forms of extremism.
Combined with alienation from one’s identity, what emerges is a
kind of oikophobia, a fear of one’s own house, or the
commonplace items one might find inside it, now transposed to
the cultural sphere, where the oikophobic individualistic
sociopath develops a disdain for all that is familiar in his
homeland and home life. From this emerges a fashionable
disdain for rural or “hometown” America, for one’s ethnic group,
and even for oneself. Such, argues Neal, is the one of the major
problems of our time.
What is Extremism? Who is an Extremist?

The first hurdle faced when dealing with extremism is the issue
of definition. Our conception of extremism is, for the most part,
set in stone by organizations like the ADL and the SPLC who use
it as shorthand for White, rightwing dissent from the
multicultural neoliberal status quo. This tunnel vision isn’t just
an issue of partisanship, but of wholly malicious intent, as
evidenced in the documentary Alt-Right: Age of Rage when a
chart illustrating White demographic decline was captured ‘in
shot’ during an interview with the SPLC’s Mark Potok. Of the
SPLC and the ADL Neal remarks:
We may say it is a metaphysical principle of certainty

that whenever an individual or group undertakes a
world-transformative mission of moral excellence that
their true intention probably has more to do with the
opposite of goodness and nobility. This is particularly
true when that mission is aided by State and Capital.[2]
The mission of the ADL and the SPLC has been boosted in recent
years by increasing cooperation from the press, with Neal noting
that “the language of the top press outlets radically shifted in
favour of extreme intersectional neoliberal ideology.” Thus,
while the mantra is that White nationalist extremism is on the
rise, “one can only conclude that, institutionally, the ideology of
the intersectional left rose to prominence, not White supremacy.
Ideological White supremacists, nationalists, immigration
skeptics, racists, and patriots (who are all regarded as
indistinguishable from one another and thus equally evil) hold
no sway in the media, the government, and are hard pressed to
locally organize.” Neal argues that the real nature of extremism
takes the form of a “high and low versus the middle” pincer
strategy, in which elites cooperate with the lowest (rank and file
anarchists, antifa, etc.) in order to mobilize against the middle
(working classes and members of the recently dubbed
precariat). The result is that the pincer “squeezes the center out
of political existence,” thus breeding extremism systemically.

But the only definition of extremism elites are happy with is one
that condemns “critics of global finance, open borders,
multiculturalism, radical individuality (feminism, identity
politics, etc.), scientism, institutionalised arts and media, and
the sexual revolution.” Whether individuals protest against these
things with a laptop, or with a semi-automatic rifle, is ultimately
of no consequence to elites, who insist that “lawful and
peaceable radicals are no different from the violent school
shooter, the rioter, the unhinged lunatic—they are extremists one
and all.”
Neal, on the other hand, asks why definitions of societal harm,

and extremism, are not much broader. He insists that
The university professor who betrays his role as

shepherd of his academic flock, the journalist who uses
his platform to spread maladaptive ideas or destroy the
lives of those he views as contemptible, the media
personality who engages in dishonest and destructive
speculation and reckless cheerleading, the tech guru
who indulges in post-human fantasies, the capitalist who
sacrifices his workers’ livelihood for greater earnings, the
physician who trades his role as healer for that of
political activist—they are all, no more and no less, every
bit the extremist that the school shooter and the online
anti-fascist/racist are. … Pathological and antisocial
extremism from on high breathes life into the lungs of
those down below. Their relationship is symbiotic.
The ubiquity of the “high-low” definition of extremism is,

however, severely limiting to the average individual, who
invariably fears social ostracism. The self-policing of thoughts is
therefore rampant. Neal remarks that “average people do not
fear being wrong, or philosophically and intellectually
inconsistent. The average person fears social censure; he fears a

disruption of employment. He fears, deeply fears, an inability to
find romance and friendship.”
How A Society Becomes Extreme
Again, Neal’s fundamental premise is that extremism is “a top-

down phenomenon, originating among the powerful and then
floating downstream through the various institutions of power
and influence.” Like all revolutions, the advent of neoliberal
extremism has not occurred “without the patronage of the upper
classes.” Neal borrows from the work of Polish psychiatrist
Andrzej Łobaczewski (1921–2008) to argue that our elites are
staffed predominantly by characteropaths, individuals who,
through biological condition or genetic predisposition, are given
to a psychological disposition to evil. Beneath the elites are
pathocrats—maladapts and political actors given to the
psychology of evil who are also skilled in the infiltration of
institutions. Since characteropaths cannot thrive under normal
conditions, they “must destroy what is good and healthy in order
to live.” The foot soldiers of both groups are schizoids; a lumpen
population of the hypersensitive, the distrustful, and the
eccentric. Also of assistance in this scheme are skirtoids (the
uncritical, the egotistical, and those drawn to the primitive), and
“jackals”—violent mercenaries. Neal illustrates these categories
with some interesting examples, most notably that of legal
scholar Cass Sunstein, who is presented as a quintessential
pathocrat skilled in subversion and the manipulation of
language. Neal points to the manner in which Sunstein, a
“spellbinder,” “has a long-standing preoccupation with the
control of information flow and human behavior. … [He] seeks to
nudge people away from their deeply evolved instincts toward
attitudes that favor the governing classes.”
Spellbinders like Sunstein, who “cannot function in a healthy

society, and feel wronged by it,” help suspend cognition in the
masses through changes in the meaning of terms like ‘racism’,
‘anti-Semitism’, etc. Since many reactions to the decline of
society and civilization (disgust, anger, etc.) are based in evolved
and natural responses to negative stimuli, changes in language
and the interruption of cognition results in the fact that “a whole
range of emotional responses (disgust, confusion, ambivalence,
reticence, self-preservation etc.) are no longer legitimated for
anyone outside of the spellbinding class.” In fact, through speech
laws and other legislation this narrowing is enshrined in law.
The project of delegitimizing identity is thus so total that it acts
as a catalyst to extremism among those deprived of natural
emotional responses.
In some pathological responses, the result is, of course, an

inversion of the suffocated emotions, and Neal remarks that “it
is possible to critique oneself out of existence”—something that
is clearly ongoing throughout the West. There is a very real
incentive, therefore, for hostile elites and spellbinders to
continue with the status quo. Neal points out that
once the central pillars of the individuation process are

toppled, we are all but helpless to make up the difference,
particularly when they are replaced with toxic simulacra
—psychological facsimiles—that are transient and wholly
inferior to the real thing. We become ripe for
exploitation.
White left-liberals are described by Neal as some of the most

prominent victims of elite extremism, since, through concept
creep, they have come to regard most of their own heritage as
either non-existent or uniquely evil. As explained in American
Extremist, these individuals, for a range of reasons, are capable
of great “sensitivity towards injustice directed towards others
but not the self.” Many, of course, also become ambitious for
advancement within the status quo, and are only all too aware of
the price for admission—one they are in many cases quite willing
to pay:
Without the ability to creatively construct his identity, to

conceptualise his experience in terms that he uniquely
understands for himself, contextualised by his
community, man becomes something easily molded and
controlled. Modern American identities are passively
accepted by the transformed consumer classes;
developed by academic spellbinders and reified by
figures of cultural influence, so chosen not because they
actually represent anything of significance or because
they are trusted members of some community, but rather
precisely because they are willing to compromise
themselves—to purge their consciousness and accept
another in its place—is what earns them the role of high
priest or priestess of the American empire.
In the second book of American Extremist, Neal profiles the

psychology of extremists of both the left and right while
maintaining the basic principle that “the extremist is a cultural
creation through and through.” The section begins with a
thorough denunciation of centrists and fence-sitters who view
themselves as somehow apart from the poles of the system. For
Neal, the static centrist is characterized by a numbing inertia
that renders one particularly vulnerable to the nudges of the
pathocrats. In short, the centrist believes he’s standing still while
the changing of definitions all around him means he is in fact a
pawn constantly moving in a direction dictated by the
spellbinders. “Time and again, he cedes territory because of his
habit of narcissistic ignorance and apathy.” From here, Neal
moves to a discussion of the antisocial extremist of the left (AEL)
and of the right (AER). Neal borrows somewhat heavily from
psychoanalysis in this section and, depending on their opinion

and knowledge of that subject, readers may or may not enjoy
this style of profiling, heavy as it is in references to the ego, the
id, and, in one case, even to the retention of feces. Freud is
employed with qualifications, but again, I think some readers
will find this approach difficult. For my own part, the use of this
approach caused some hesitancy, but wasn’t so overbearing that
I became dismissive. I was also aware of the fact that I’m simply
not well-read enough in psychoanalysis to be able to offer a
meaningful critique of this kind of discourse. My really rather
limited reading is skewed overwhelming to the writings of Jung,
and I haven’t read more than a couple of essays by Freud. I
nevertheless found the section very interesting, with much that I
couldn’t help but agree with. Neal’s description of the left
extremist as psychologically underdeveloped and addicted to
politics as part of a deranged pursuit of pathological pleasure
certainly has a ring of truth.
The Internet
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Book III, “The Digital Demiurge,” was one of my favorite sections

of the volume, and offers some piercing insight into the way in
which the internet, and social media in particular, has
accelerated extremism. Being an instinctive Luddite, I’ve long
regarded social media as an unmitigated disaster, and have
several times in the past advised people to remove themselves
altogether from the most data-intensive platforms. The internet
has swamped us with information, with the result that we know
more but act less. At the same time, the dynamic of Internet
news media is such that sensationalism is a built-in and
inescapable feature. For Neal, “the techno-informational age has
made hermits of us all.” We buy online, we date online, and more

and more of our social and political life is taking place
exclusively online. The result is a proliferation of online lives
that allow, to an increasing extent, ordinary people (especially
those opposed to the system) to be targeted as if they were
responsible for all the ills of the world. One need only look at the
glee that accompanied attempts to dox attendees at the torch-lit
rally the night before Unite the Right in Charlottesville. As Neal
puts it, “the will to transgress is being directed at people with no
influence whatsoever. … More and more, the average person is
invited to participate in this new social ritual—to vilify, degrade,
and shame the apostate of neoliberalism.” Neal continues:
The prevailing psychologies of our time (hopelessness

and loss, moral self-righteousness, narcissism, and rage)
combined with free and easy access to total strangers
creates the perfect storm of opportunity for irrational
(and consequence-free) retaliation. The retaliatory object
is symbolic, for it is almost never the case that the
transgressor was personally slighted by them. Rather
they are the image of the oppressor.
Social media in particular has resulted only in the formation of

herd mentalities, and has “permitted the control of global crowd
consciousness in a way that has never before been achieved in
human history.” Neal adds:
Corporate control of these social media platforms

simultaneously allows for the cordoning off of wrong
think, which keeps the larger crowd docile and removed,
while also permitting wrong thinkers and their ideologies
to fester in isolation, thus more susceptible to self-
cannibalisation and irrelevance.
Neal spends a fascinating few pages on the nature of censorship

that I found extremely enlightening, not least his
characterization of it as an “evolving technique of removal,” and
as a survival technique developed and implemented in a sick
society by “the disease-makers.”
Solving the Problem
The final book of American Extremist is devoted to discussions

around solving the problem of extremism. The section opens
with a very good critique of false, but heavily publicized,
“attempts” to address the issue, with special emphasis on Robin
DiAngelo’s White Fragility. Having reviewed White Fragility
myself, I agree with much that Neal has to say on the subject,
especially his discussion of DiAngelo’s “malicious” use of
language to describe White = and the “curiosity of an ethnically
Italian-Jewish woman championing the cause of Blackness.”[3]
Neal situates DiAngelo’s work, and her style of Capital-
sponsored “Whiteness education” as falling into the same
category as “corporate gym memberships, sports leagues,
psychological services, and hot yoga classes,” since “anti-racism
training promises to make the workplace a better environment
for everyone. In the mind of the neoliberal, raising political
consciousness has the same holistic value as any diet or fitness
regimen.” DiAngelo claims to be fighting against the
overwhelming strength of Whiteness, but, Neal asks, if this is the
case then we must ask how she got her book published, and how
she can command speaking fees in the tens of thousands of
dollars. Her message is promoted in every company, school, and
university. The answer, remarks Neal, is that extremism, or elite-
created perceptions of it, is profitable. There will therefore be no
genuine attempts to resolve it from within the system.
ORDER IT NOW
Neal then turns to his own proposals for a genuine

transformation of society, and these involve attacking extremism
at its root. He first suggests an attack on the pathocratic vision of
the future. He then stresses that Man must be provided
something meaningful from within to steer him from despair.
The entire moral framework of the elites must be rejected. A
more philosophical mode of thinking should be introduced to
the minds of troubled individuals. There should be a concerted
effort to promote the building of faith, family, love, and honor.
Finally, Neal calls for free and uncomplicated speech.
Final Remarks
Josh Neal’s American Extremist is a vast, wide-ranging,

nuanced, and incredibly thoughtful treatise on the decline of
American society and the rise of political extremism. The book is
a product of a tremendous amount of study and effort, and it will
require a similar level of study and effort from the reader if the
fullest extent of its wisdom is to be extracted. It’s a book to be
read and re-read, and I believe that, since we unfortunately may
be shackled to neoliberalism and its ideological poisons for
some time, it will continue to be of the utmost relevance. Its
author is to be congratulated and thanked in equal measure.
Notes
[1] Eric Striker and the TRS team share some of the thinking of
this group, but have a longer history of movement prominence,
and differ enough in approach, to be considered distinct from
this new grouping.
[2] One is also reminded of that famous line from Bukowski that
“the best at hate are those who preach love, and the best at war
finally are those who preach peace.”
[3] I myself was unable to confirm that DiAngelo had a Jewish

ethnic background.
6/28/2021 LARPing Towards Victory? – The Occidental Observer :: Reader View
www.theoccidentalobserver.net
LARPing Towards Victory? – The

Occidental Observer
Nelson Rosit
15-19 minutes
Retroculture: Taking America Back
William S. Lind
London: Arktos Media, 2019.
One of the defining characteristics of the Dissident Right has

been a scathing critique of American conservatism. The main
charge is that mainstream conservatism has failed to conserve
much of anything other than plutocratic wealth. For social
analyst Brad Griffin of the website Occidental Dissent, “The price
of admission [to conventional conservatism] is abandoning all of
your beliefs and going along with this disastrous status quo.” He
notes that a 2019 Pew Research Center study found that
traditional religious beliefs are declining at an accelerating rate
further eroding the utility of a conservative approach to our
problems. The conventional Right has been steamrolled in the
culture wars to the point where transgender access to the public
restroom of their choice is now the country’s cause célèbre.
Some argue that despite its deficiencies, conservatism serves as

an ideological gateway to more substantive views. Many persons,
including major thinkers of the post-1960s racial Right started
out as conservatives before becoming radicals.
Revilo Oliver began his activism writing book reviews for

William Buckley’s National Review and was a founding member
of the John Birch Society. By the mid-1960s he had broken with
conservatism. He describes his evolution in America’s Decline:
The Education of a Conservative (1981).
William Pierce also served a stint with the JBS during the 1960s.
In his well-known essay “Why Conservatives Can’t Win,” Piece
writes, “Some of my best friends are conservatives,” but he goes
on to state that conservatives do not understand the forces that
oppose them, and only a revolutionary counter force can defeat
the Left.
In 1960 Wilmot Robertson was a conservative business man. By

the time he wrote The Dispossessed Majority (1972) he had
come to realize that conservatism was part of the problem, not

the solution.
But what about activists who have remained conservatives

throughout their careers such as William S. Lind the author of
Retroculture, the book under consideration here. Is he a
different sort of conservative who deserves our attention?
Lind, a Baby Boomer (b. 1947) and self-described

paleoconservative, graduated from Dartmouth and earned a
master’s degree from Princeton. He began his career as a staffer
for Senator Robert Taft Jr. He is probably best known for
developing the concept of Fourth-Generation Warfare back in
the 1980s. The basic idea of 4GW is that future wars are likely to
involve non-state actors either against states in asymmetrical
conflict, or against each other. 4GW is rooted in the crisis of state
legitimacy.
In the 1990s Lind helped popularize the term “cultural

Marxism.” Lind is also somewhat of a race realist who discusses
the issue of Black crime. The Great Replacement is considered
an aspect of 4GW.
In 2009 Lind and the late Paul Weyrich co-authored The Next
Conservatism, a highly critical look at neo-conservatism. The
authors made a number of cogent points such as the primacy of
culture over politics. Election victories by so-called
conservatives have not stopped the Left’s cultural revolution, nor
have they halted demographic replacement. Neoconservative
economics favors Wall Street over Main Street, and its foreign
policy supports costly military interventions. Unlike most
conservatives Lind and Weyrich supported environmental
protection and the New Urbanism. Presently Lind writes for the
American Conservative and the online journal traditional Right.
More evidence that Lind’s Retroculture might embody a different

sort of conservatism is that the book was released by Arktos
Media. Founded in 2009, this company quickly established itself
as the leading publisher of rightwing thought. With more than
170 titles and publishing in sixteen languages, they have issued
works by Guillaume Faye, Alexander Dugin, and Pentti Linkola
as well as older works by authors such as Julius Evola.
The theme of Retroculture is established early in a brief Forward

by John J. Patrick, professor of education emeritus at Indiana
University, who asks: “Why can’t we restore old lifestyles in the
same way people are restoring gracious old houses? The answer
is we can” (xi). Really?
In the first chapter, “Signs of Change,” Lind lists some

indications of an emerging conservative cultural revolution: Old
neighborhoods are being restored, new “old towns” such as
Seaside, Florida are being built, admen are using the past to
market all matter of goods and services, ignoring the
displacement of Whites from advertising. “Young people,
especially young families, are going to church again” (7). This
last statement flies in the face of the Pew study mentioned above.
Unfortunately, the author makes a number of unsubstantiated
claims using anecdotal evidence at best.
At the end of the chapter Lind asks, “Is it all just nostalgia? Or is
something more happening here — something big?” (10). First,
this book is saturated with nostalgia, though several times Lind
denies indulging in those sentiments. Yet if nostalgia is strong
enough and widespread enough, it would indeed be something
big. Nostalgia is a form of alienation, and collective alienation
can be the first step towards fundamental change.
In Chapter Two Lind defines retroculture, a concept he and

Weyrich touched on in The Next Conservatism. “Retroculture
rejects the idea that ‘you can’t go back’” (11). Almost every
student of history would disagree. As with many paleocons, the
author sees the 1960s as the great watershed, so going back
means pre 1960.
No matter how radical, all rightwing thought contains some

elements of conservatism. Lind mentions that America should
not reject its inheritance, but rekindle a healthy national
identity. People should respect wisdom received from past ages
— the basics of civil nationalism. He decries the “selfism,” the
self-centered and self-indulgent ideology associated with the left
that gained currency during the 1960s. One problem he does not
mention: This selfishness has morphed on the Right into
libertarianism, thus occupying two poles of the political
spectrum, a two-headed monster.
In Chapter Three, “Getting Started,” Lind seeks historical

examples of retrocultural revolutions. He points to the
Renaissance as one case. Well, the Renaissance did use earlier
classical civilizations as a source of inspiration, but Renaissance
Italy was a far different place than ancient Rome. In an American
context the author wants to reestablish traditional values,
“civility, public spiritedness, charity, craftsmanship and
stewardship among others” (27). He advocates for walkable
cities. Hard to argue with any of this, especially walking. Walking
is great exercise and a form of active meditation. Of course,
integrated schools and housing helped create suburban sprawl,
an environment not conducive to perambulation.
At this point Lind suddenly asks rhetorically: “But wasn’t the

past bad?” A good question because throughout the book the
author tends to idealize the past. He answers that retroculture
captures the good and eliminates the bad. “No one seeks to
return to Jim Crow laws” (32). Permit me to mix metaphors: One
cannot cherry pick cultural practices. Culture is a whole loaf.
The traditional American way of life was only possible with a

significant degree of racial separation.
Chapter Four is about retro-homes. The book is full of good ideas

(a few silly ones also) for lifestyle choices. Unfortunately, these
individual decisions are not going to bring about the
fundamental social change we need. Lind advises buying an
older house in an established neighborhood. They “are less
expensive” and “have sidewalks and big trees” (40). My own
house is 115 years old, so I agree with the author. The problem is
that many of these old neighborhoods have changed so
demographically as to be uninhabitable, especially for White
families.
To his credit Lind is as close to being a renaissance man as you

are likely to find these days. He is one of the few persons who
can discuss military history and tactics, residential architecture,
sartorial issues, as well as classical music with authority.
In Chapter Five Lind decries the decline of domesticity in

American culture since the 1950s. Interestingly he does not
explicitly criticize feminism, but does write that kids need a
mom at home. Strong families produce well socialized children,
a worthy goal, but how do you achieve it? That would definitely
require a cultural revolution.
When Lind considers education, we see an example of a blanket

statement idealizing the good old days. “In the past, parents
were careful about what their young children learned. They saw
to it that stories taught sound morals, that good conduct was
rewarded and bad swiftly though fairly punished, and that
manners were inculcated right from the outset” (73). Well, some
parents in the past did not do those things, and some today still
do. That more parents in the past successfully socialized their
kids and fewer do today has less to do with individual parental
efforts and more to do with a lack of societal support. Again, we

need a cultural revolution.
Optics has been an issue for the Dissident Right, and in Chapter
Six Lind offers some sound sartorial advice. The decline in
American standards of dress has been precipitous across the
board. He recommends buying fewer articles of quality
conservative clothes. This will save you time and money in the
long run because your apparel will look better and last longer.
The author points out that men’s fashions have not changed
much in the last three generations. “Lapels shrink and grow,
shoulders fatten and thin, and the fashion trade tries to make a
big deal of it all. In fact, its piffle” (94). Some shopping advice:
“By needing fewer things, you can also frequent better shops
when you buy, thus avoiding the degradation of the discount
house and the silliness of the boutique.” In a decent men’s shop
“you get real value, good American and British stuff, not some
wog creation that makes you look like a pimp” (94). One last
fashion tip, leave Hawaiian shirts to Hawaiians in Hawaii.
Chapter Seven deals with entertainment. We can all agree that

much of contemporary popular entertainment is crass, ugly, and
downright offensive, but Lind goes ultra-reactionary when
discussing music. Many on the Dissident Right, myself included,
love the romantic classical genre of the nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century composers such, as Wagner and Sibelius.
Lind, on the other hand, believes these are much inferior to the
eighteenth-century greats such as Bach.
Other notes on entertainment: dinner parties are preferable to

cocktail parties “where people surreptitiously try to make a meal
of hors d’oeuvres while pretending to enjoy superficial
conversation with persons they’ve never met” (109). Lind
includes civic engagement as a form of retro entertainment. All
too often people on the Dissident Right, especial young people,
shun mainstream community involvement believing they will be

stigmatized and rejected. This is usually not the case if they
possess some people skills and live in a compatible community
(i.e., one with few of Edward Dutton’s spiteful mutants). Lind
recommends leisure reading to recapture lost worlds. Old
National Geographic magazines are excellent in this regard.
Concerning the present lack of civility and good manners,

“When did we go wrong? As usual, the answer is in the cultural
revolution of the 1960s” (122). That decade was a turning point,
and today our society is simply too diverse for a common
etiquette. Lind’s solution: “don’t frighten the horses.” Everyone
should at least be discreet when engaging in behavior that may
offend others. How likely is that to happen? A more practical
suggestion by the author: boycott businesses whose practices or
advertising is offensive. In the area of public behavior, Pandora’s
Box has been opened and we would need a cultural revolution to
set things right.
Lind has long been a supporter of train travel so it is no surprise

that he advocates that mode of transport, after all. on the
Chattanooga Choo Choo, “dinner in the diner, nothing could be
finer.” If motoring, the author suggests taking the scenic routes
rather than the interstates and having a picnic at a roadside park
rather than eating at “fast food joints, those gustatory cesspools
of the Interstate Era” (151).
In the chapter on retro business, Lind opines that there is an

untapped market for retro furniture and clothing. “Publications
are another major market where Retroculture could be good
business” (160). Really? It seems as though print media are
struggling. “What about the return of the great department
stores of the 1920s and 1930s?” (162). Brick and mortar retail is
another uphill battle these days. It appears the author’s acumen
may not extend to business and economics.
The final chapter, “Retro-America,” sums up Lind’s view of our

country: Where are we and where are we headed? He declares
that we have lost our confidence. “Americans have become
pessimistic. … people are not happy with the way things are or
where they seem to be going.” (177). Well, he’s half right. The
traditional core demographic of America has lost its confidence.
It has allowed its history to be rewritten, its heritage to be
denigrated, and its monuments to be torn down with impunity
by mobs of punks and thugs. Ethnic minorities, on the other
hand, are empowered, culturally and politically ascendant.
Yet the author is sanguine about the future. He believes the

counter-revolution has already begun, “it is already happening.”
This neo-reactionary movement will pick up steam during the
2020s and largely be accomplished by the late 2030s due to “a
great national rediscovery of our past” (182). The end product
will be “America as it was: quietly prosperous, well-tended,
harmonious and at peace” (190).
Lind’s belief in a great restoration is an illusion. There is no

returning to circa 1950. We are a vastly different country now,
demographically and culturally. Moreover, what would be the
impetus for such a restitution? Research suggests that a revival
of fundamentalist faith is unlikely. And increasing numbers of
diverse Americans do not share Lind’s reverence for our past.
Indeed, the American past is routinely vilified in all the cultural
high ground, from the mainstream media to the universities and
throughout the educational system.
I began this review by asking what role paleo conservatism

might play in our people’s instauration, offering that it may be a
useful portal to more radical ideas. It’s certainly true that
paleoconservatism can be an ideological halfway house. Unlike
neo conservatives who embrace disembodied ideals of a
universal propositional nation, paleocons appreciate the
primacy of culture over politics in shaping a society. Culture

informs politics rather than the other way around. But such an
ideology can also be a dead end of wishful thinking and
escapism. You can study the past, but you cannot live there. The
old common culture America once possessed has been
destroyed by the multi-cultural Left. There is no going back.
History never moves in reverse.
What many paleo cons have trouble accepting is the racial

foundation of culture. Ethnic change within a society will
inevitably bring about profound cultural change. You cannot
preserve the constitution without preserving the ethnic group
who conceived it, nor can you preserve the pre-1960s culture
with the ascendant non-White majority. Paleoconservatives have
a vision of what they want America to be. Lind lays out that
vision at the last chapter, but he, and his ideological fellows, have
no realistic route to arrive there. What is more critical — even if
by some miracle we could reconstruct 1950s America, it would
be insufficient for our project of promoting the welfare and
progress of Western peoples and their civilization. We should
aspire to do better than simply replicating the past. We can use
our science and our aesthetic to create a better world.
Retroculture contains some pithy criticisms of contemporary

culture along with a number of useful tips for individual and
familial living while waxing nostalgic for times past. It might be
a good suggested reading or gift for an older mainstream friend
or relative.
6/28/2021 Guillaume Faye Remembered – The Occidental Observer :: Reader View
Guillaume Faye Remembered – The

Occidental Observer
Andrew Joyce, Ph.D.
18-22 minutes
“Guillaume Faye was indeed an awakener.”
Pierre-Émile Blairon
Guillaume Faye: Truths and Tributes
Robert Steuckers, Pierre-Émile Blairon, and Pierre Krebs
Arktos, 2020.
Guillaume Faye’s posthumously published Ethnic Apocalypse,

or, to give it the original French title Guerre civile raciale (Racial
Civil War), was one of my top three reads of 2019, so it was with
great interest that I found out that Arktos was set to publish a
volume of memories of Faye and reflections on his work. Faye
passed away in March 2019, following a battle with lung cancer,
and I recall thinking while reading Ethnic Apocalypse that its

author seemed set to become one of those figures who make
their greatest impact only after their death. Other than brief
summaries of Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-
catastrophic Age (1999), my primary encounter with Faye before
reading Ethnic Apocalypse was a recording of the 2006 AmRen
conference, during which David Duke took an opportunity in the
middle of a question session following Faye’s speech to make
known several historical facts relating to the specific issue of
Jewish disloyalty. The footage shows Duke being interrupted and
subjected to foul language by Jewish social scientist Michael
Hart, apparently the sole malcontent, who then abruptly left the
venue. The episode was certainly dramatic, and my sympathies
firmly remain with Duke, but the chaos between Duke and Hart
unfortunately overshadowed a very sophisticated response from
the charismatic Faye that included the memorable line: “The
Jews are good tacticians but have bad strategy — they do always
too much, too much, too much.”
Faye’s relationship with the Jewish Question was very nuanced

and, it must be admitted, at times completely wrongheaded, as
illustrated by his handling of the topic in Ethnic Apocalypse
which derived heavily from ideas conceived in his La nouvelle
question juive (The New Jewish Question), published in 2007.
The latter resulted in Faye being denounced at one point as a
Zionist but, as I wrote in my 2019 review of the former text, “I
firmly believe that Faye is not guilty here of subversion or fear of
the Jewish lobby. If I did, I would hesitate to recommend this
book. Instead, I see a paralysis-like error in thinking, brought
about by a quite understandable reaction to the stark and visible
Islamisation of France.”
This was one of my primary takeaway thoughts from that volume

— that Faye was a great thinker, with wide interests and
aptitudes, who at the end of his life was so gripped by the scale of
the Muslim invasion of his beloved country that he could see no

other threat, and perceive no other enemies. As such, I had an
empathy for Faye, even where I could not agree with him, and I
couldn’t help but be impressed with his authorial intensity and
bluntness in expression. I was curious enough to start seeking
out translations of his essays, particularly those concerning
technology, civilization, and the system in which we now live.
These have been educational and entertaining. I remained
curious about the man behind them, however, and I therefore
welcomed this new literary memorial from Arktos, which acts an
illuminating, poignant, and unexpectedly tragic guide to Faye
and his very considerable body of work.
The volume opens with a short and elegant Foreword by Jared

Taylor, who performed the same task for Ethnic Apocalypse.
Taylor, who also came relatively late to Faye but who appears to
have become very good friends with him around 2003, rightly
points out that “an intellectual history of Guillaume Faye is
nothing less than an intellectual history of both the New Right
and of the far bolder Dissident Right.” From there the text
proceeds to a series of essays dominated by four contributions
from Robert Steuckers, who knew Faye from the beginning of the
latter’s career in the movement, and is able to flesh out a
biography of his ideas and activism.
These essays by Steuckers are quite remarkable, and are

impressive not only in their handling of the context and origins
of Faye’s ideas, but also in the way the personality of Faye is
always brought to the fore throughout. These are essays laced
with sadness, even anger, however, because, in the perspective of
Steuckers, Faye emerges as someone passionate but tragically
naive — taken advantage of by organizational superiors. It must
be stated that Alain de Benoist does not emerge well at all from
this volume, described by Steuckers at various points in the text
as lacking sincerity, seeking stardom, pallid, hyper-nervous,
“the emblematic epitome of ingratitude,” and a boorish

movement ‘pontiff.’” Above all, we see the energetic and talented
Faye repeatedly pushed aside and paid minimal wages in order
that other stars could shine brighter. The volume is thus a kind
of fable for the darker side of movement politics and division
that will probably always remain relevant.
But what of Faye? In his first essay, “Faye’s contribution to the

‘New Right’ and a brief history of his ejection,” we join Steuckers
in the early 1970s, just as Faye was becoming politically active.
Then in his early 20s, Faye “entered the scene virtually alone
sometime between the departure of the partisans of the 1968
events and the arrival of the Reaganite ‘yuppies.’” His first
involvement was with the ‘Vilfredo Pareto Circle,’ a political
studies group loosely attached to, but later absorbed by,
G.R.E.C.E. (Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la
civilisation européenne (“Research and Study Group for
European Civilization,” a thinktank that promotes the ideas of
the New Right). Faye “was not attached to any branch of the
conventional French Right,” nor had he any ties “to any Vichy or
collaborationist circles, nor to those of the OAS [Organisation
armée secrète, a paramilitary organization formed during the
Algerian war] or the ‘Catholic-traditionalist’ movement.” Initially,
Faye was not a nationalist in our understanding of the term, but
rather a “disciple of Julien Freund, Carl Schmitt, Francois
Perroux etc.” Steuckers describes Faye, the intense young
political philosopher, as emblematic of a ‘regalian Right’ that
“cast upon all events a sovereign and detached eye, which was
not, however, devoid of ardour and ‘plastic’ will, sorting out in
some way the wheat from the chaff, the political from the
impolitic.”
In Steuckers’ eyes, “Faye was truly the driving force behind

G.R.E.C.E., the New Right’s main organisation in France during
the early 1980s.” He achieved this status through sheer hard
work on weak wages, driven by passion and a desire to shock the

‘old Right” out of its comfort zone. Steuckers scathingly
contrasts the idealistic Faye with a movement satisfied to
“content itself with hastily camouflaging its pro-Vichy attitude,
its colonial nationalism, its Parisian lounge-lizard Nazism, its
purely material ambitions or its caricatural militarism under a
few scholarly references.” Faye was quickly sidelined by the
comfortable figures in the hierarchy, but “he never cared much
about all those backstage intrigues; to him, what mattered was
that texts were being published, and books and brochures
spread to the public.” By the late 1970s, Faye’s charisma and
intelligence is credited with bringing G.R.E.C.E. into contact with
influential new circles, as well as students who “accepted the
novelty of his speech and the essential notions it conveyed.”
One of Faye’s primary contributions to G.R.E.C.E. was his

editorship of Éléments magazine, during which time he refined
many ideas that would become characteristic of his later work:
his criticism of the Enlightenment, his critique of Western
civilization as something that has evolved into a “system that
kills peoples,’ his concept of ‘ethnocmasochism,’ and his vision
of technological progress as something that can be harnessed by
nationalism rather than as something to be shunned or
prevented. (Faye in this regard runs counter to more popular
anti-technological positions adopted by Heidegger, Ellul, and
Kaczynski.) Steuckers goes so far as to remark that “the
glorification of technology and a rejection of archaising nostalgia
are truly the main traits of Neo-rightism, i.e., of Fayean neo-
rightism.”
Just how correct Faye was in this respect remains to be seen, but
it is clear, in this age of increasing surveillance technologies and
the mechanization of almost all aspects of life, that the question
of technology is only going to become ever more prominent.
Much as my own instincts tend to the anti-technological, it’s
difficult to understand how one nation or ethnic group can divest

itself from technological progress if this means ceding an
advantage to other groups who won’t do the same. We may thus
be locked into a technological arms race where our only option is
to attempt to surpass all rivals in pursuit of what Faye called
Archeofuturism.
In so many ways, Faye was a man ahead of his time — a fact that
rises to the fore in the volume’s second essay, “Farewell,
Guillaume Faye, after forty-four years of common struggle.” At a
time when the youngest generation appears to believe it more or
less invented shock humor tactics in politics, we gain some
insight from this essay on Faye’s outlandish detour into prank
comedy as the “Skyman” persona for the Skyrock radio station.
This occurred in part due to his declining fortunes in G.R.E.C.E.,
which was in turn a result of the suppression or sabotage of his
work. In one memorable instance, he was more or less forced by
his superiors to follow up an intellectual exploration of
Heidegger with an unironic piece on, of all things, Atlantis.
Operating on little more than enthusiasm, and lacking formal

networking skills, Faye had nothing in place to support his work
independently when he was finally ushered out in 1986 by a
‘core nucleus’ that had grown unhappy with his edgier direction
and popularity. He then put his charisma and enthusiasm into a
ten-year career in producing schoolboy-like sketches, hoaxes
and jokes, one of which involved his fooling a substantial
number of top-level French politicians by pretending to be on a
secret mission from Bill Clinton to select the latter’s own
secretary of state for European affairs. Faye played the role to a
tee, presumably enjoying himself very much as these venal
bureaucrats “jostled one another in a desire to get the job,
maligning their own colleagues.”
Faye returned to political activism in 1997 in an interview for

the then new magazine Réfléchir et agir. In the interview, Faye
advised an intensification of associative action against “anti-
European racism,” and when questioned about this in a later
interview he trenchantly accused the French Right of engaging
too much in infighting instead of pinpointing a common enemy:
The French national Right is undermined by the culture

of defeat, petty bosses, gossip: the different groups of
Muslims and Leftists can detest one other, but they have
each and all the same enemies against whom they unite.
Whereas for many people of our ideas, the enemy is at
first his own political friend, for simple reasons of
jealousy!
A year later, Faye returned to speaking engagements and

published Archeofuturism, his response to “the catastrophe of
modernity” and an attempt to provide an alternative to
traditionalism. Although somewhat welcomed back into the New
Right fold in 1998, when he published his edgy The Colonisation
of Europe: True Discourse on Immigration and Islam in 2000,
Faye attracted considerable hostile media and political
attention. A move was apparently then undertaken by de Benoist
and others to once against distance themselves from the more
radical Faye in order to save face and respectability. One
member was even discovered to have sent information on Faye
to scores of journalists in an attempt to smear him as a
“hothead” and “racist.” Steuckers alleges that de Benoist
proceeded to exclude him from all the bodies that he

sponsored and banned his flock from spending time with
him and publishing his books. Faye had thus suffered
another terrible blow, one from which he would never
recover and that would instill unabating despair into the
very depths of his heart.
Faye would toil in relative obscurity for several more years until
friendships with Americans like Jared Taylor and Sam Dickson,
and a new relationship with Arktos Publishing under Daniel
Friberg, brought Faye and his ideas into the Anglosphere in a
serious way for the first time. Unlike the French scene, “within
the vast American movement, no attempt to sabotage his books
has ever taken place.” Within the American scene, Faye’s work
received generous praise and treatment by websites like
American Renaissance and Counter-Currents, and there are 20
essays at the Occidental Observer that touch in some way upon
Faye’s writings. Anglosphere academics like Michael O’Meara
have also given major attention to Faye, with O’Meara publishing
his Guillaume Faye and the Battle of Europe in 2013. Faye’s
books have been very well-received in the Anglosphere, as my
own review of his last book indicates.
Although the biographical and bibliographical essays by Robert

Steuckers form the backbone of Guillaume Faye: Truths &
Tributes, I must say that one of my favorite essays in the volume
is Pierre-Émile Blairon’s “Guillame Faye, an Awakener of the
Twenty-First Century.” The tone is much little lighter than the
previous essays, with less focus on the ways in which Faye was
wronged, and a greater emphasis on his personal qualities as
friend and political adventurer. Blairon recalls meeting Faye in
the early days of his own activism and seeing in him “the
brilliant spokesperson and inventive theorist for what would
later be termed the ‘New Right’.” Blairon continues
I remember that, even back then, he was more than just

an intellectual; he also had a sense of theatrics and farce
and would delight us with improvised comedy playlets
that made us laugh. Now, however, more than forty years
later, History has issued its verdict — Guillaume Faye was
much more than that.
For Blairon, Faye was “an Awakener:
Awakeners are men who come from an immanent ,

immutable, and permanent world, that ‘other world’ that
lies parallel to ours, arriving here to accomplish a
mission. These men have no other concern than to pass
on their knowledge and energy; and their entire life ends
up being devoted to this transmission. Awakeners appear
in critical periods of history, when everything has been
turned upside down and all values reversed, and when
the situation seems desperate. They give their mission
priority over their own person, their personal interest
and comfort. Their rule of thumb is the following one: do
what you must, without anticipating success.
The essay then moves to a succinct but excellent assessment of

the main themes of Faye’s work: the fight against
standardization and globalism; Europe as an entity of blood and
soil rather than bureaucracy; Ethnomasochism; the convergence
of catastrophes as a fundamental aspect of civilizational
collapse; archeofuturism and technoscience; and, finally, Islam.
For anyone new to Faye’s work, or seeking a refresher on some of
the less well-known aspects of it, this volume is thus invaluable.
In addition to two poems by Pierre Krebs, the book significantly

benefits from a section titled “Annexes,” which contains direct
engagements with specific examples of Faye’s essays and books.
The best of these, in my opinion, is Robert Steuckers’ review
essay concerning Faye’s System to Kill People. In this work, Faye
had argued that, diluted by massification and depersonalization,
Western civilization no longer exists as a civilization but rather
as a system that is directly hostile to the nationality of peoples
and thus “kills” them. This basic idea is central to Faye’s anti-
Westernism, which is itself founded on Faye’s general hostility to
the Enlightenment. Faye lamented the reduction of our ethnic
identities in a way that rendered them “folklorised,”

“ornamentalised” and “transformed into a smoke screen that
conceals the ‘progress’ of planetary homogenisation; they shall
simply be a source of entertainment.” Some 30 or more years
after Faye wrote these words, of course, the situation is
immeasurably darker than even he predicted, since White
identities are no longer even permitted as folklore or
entertainment but are rather presented as oppressive and evil.
Faye was clearly, however, a prophetic and perceptive thinker.

He foresaw the gradual replacement of genuine political leaders
with “regulators,” adding that
the political decisions taken by states are therefore

replaced by strategic choices made within the framework
of various networks — those of large companies, banking
organisations, public or private speculators, etc. All these
separate strategies trigger a self-regulation mechanism
that allows the System to work towards satisfying its own
ends.
While my own tendency is to focus on “known actors,” by which I

mean decision-makers and influencers rather than action in the
abstract, Faye’s conceptualization of overlapping strategies
makes it easier to understand how something like, for example,
Jewish influence can seemingly persist and perpetuate “in the
open.”
If I could make one minor criticism of this collection of essays, it

would simply be that I would have liked to see at least one major
essay contributed from the Anglosphere. Truths & Tributes is a
translation of a French original, but the English edition may well
have benefited from a longer essay from Jared Taylor, and
perhaps also from Sam Dickson, who appears to have known
Faye quite well and I’m sure could have shared some choice and
entertaining anecdotes. I’d also have enjoyed reading a

perspective from Daniel Friberg, who appears to have put in
considerable work over the years in bringing Faye to English-
speaking audiences. Alas, these perhaps can be relayed at a later
time, maybe even in a further volume. Certainly, I do not believe
we have heard the last word on Faye.
My final thoughts in closing this review are that I believe we

could all benefit from adopting the attitude of this lively
Frenchman, because even if we might disagree with some of his
ideas, there is little doubting the benefits of embracing his
contemporary Heraclitism of “innovative mobility.” For Faye, our
situation is ever-changing and dynamic, and if we have any hope
of meeting that challenge then we too must respond with energy,
speed, and even joy, no matter how dark the context. Although
his last book was very dark indeed, I hope Faye was able to find
some of this joy in his final days. I leave the final word to Pierre
Magué:
In a replete and slumbering France, Guillaume Faye was

the one to raise the alarm, never worrying about whether
or not it was a suitable time to do so, whether he risked
interrupting idle chatter and academic speeches. … Such
is the characteristic of prophets.
6/28/2021 A Review of Alexander Jacob’s “European Perspectives” – The Occidental Observer :: Reader View
A Review of Alexander Jacob’s

“European Perspectives” – The
Occidental Observer
Nelson Rosit
17-21 minutes
Alexander Jacob
European Perspectives
Logik Publishing, 2020
Alexander Jacob is a bit of an oddity. An American-educated

Anglo-Indian, he writes from a continental European
orientation. His fourth book, European Perspectives, consists of
six essay chapters written between 2000 and 2019. Three of the
essays appeared online at Counter-Currents.com. The book’s
back cover suggests that one purpose for this volume is to
dissuade the European Right from adopting “vulgar populist
ideologies” originating from America. Jacob makes his distaste
for the Anglosphere, especially all things American, quite
evident. To find an authentic European ideology one needs to go
back one hundred years or so to the German Conservative
Revolution of the 1920s.
One useful feature of European Perspectives is its assessment of

a number of important European thinkers most of whom the
reader will have at least a passing acquaintance, plus a few less
familiar names: Werner Sombart (1863–1941), Oswald Spengler
(1880–1936), Erik von Kuehnelt–Leddihn (1909–1999), Julius
Evola (1898–1974), Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), Hans–Jürgen
Syberberg (b. 1935), Max Weber (1864–1920), Hannah Arendt
(1906–1975) and Theodor Herzl (1860–1904).
The first essay, “German Socialism as an Alternative to

Marxism,” originally appeared in the print journal The Scorpion.
It is interesting to note that the term “socialism” is now the
bugaboo of the American Right. Thirty-five years ago, I think, it
was the “L word” (liberal) that played that role. Jacob seeks to
differentiate Jewish-derived Marxist socialism from the
German-derived spiritual socialism. Although “a professed anti-
Semite,” Marx had a “Jewish mentality” that manifested itself in
a “materialistic view of life” (8). This is in contrast to what might
be called the communitarian ethos of Werner Sombart’s German
socialism and Oswald Spengler’s Prussian socialism.
Sombart, one of Jacob’s favorite scholars, believed “that the

modern system of commercial capitalism was due not mainly to
English Protestantism as Max Weber had proclaimed . . . but to
Judaism” (11). His German socialism was aligned with the
Conservative Revolution of the Weimar period and thinkers such
as Oswald Spengler. Jacob is an admirer of Prussian culture and
Spengler’s Prussian socialism which does not seek to destroy
capitalism. It is similar to corporatism, emphasizing the
common weal, collective structures, and cooperative goals. Early
on Spengler saw that “democracy, in general, is an unholy
alliance of urban masses, cosmopolitan intellectuals, and
finance capitalists. The masses themselves are manipulated by
the latter two elements through their specific agencies: the press
and the parties” (22).
Post-war developments have shown that both Sombart and

Spengler underestimated the power of world Jewry which “is
virulently opposed to national cultures and to the natural,
hierarchical, and autarkical ordering of European society” (25).
The author concludes that establishing an authentic version of
European socialism is the only path to salvation for the
continent.
The second essay looks at two books written in the early 1950s
by two “authentic noblemen.” One is Erik von Kuehnelt-
Leddihn’s Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Time and the
other Julius Evola’s Men Among the Ruins. Kuehnelt-Leddihn,
born into the Habsburg aristocracy of the early twentieth
century, was a Catholic monarchist who opposed both
democracy and capitalism. He believed there was an
“inextricable connection between democracy and tyranny,” and
that the “rule of money and technology . . . was culturally sterile”
(29). “Kuehnelt-Leddihn squarely places the blame for
democratic degeneration on Protestantism” (35). The solution
was not to be found in national socialism for he opposed a mass
movement based on ethno-nationalism. K-L was a true

reactionary who looked to the priest and the sovereign to restore
the cultural integrity of Europe.
The Sicilian nobleman Julius Evola, who wrote the second book
surveyed in this chapter, was critical of many of the same forces
that troubled Kuehnelt-Leddihn — liberalism, individualism,
materialism and utilitarianism — which he saw as originating
from the bourgeoisie. Yet he did see a role for mass politics, and
he was sympathetic to fascism, especially as expressed by the
philosopher and fellow Sicilian Giovanni Gentile. As do many on
the European Right, Evola favored a corporate economy:
“autarky should be encouraged rather than the internationalism
of global commerce” (42).
Men Among the Ruins purposes a specific governmental

structure with a bicameral legislature. The Lower House would
deal with economic issues, while “the Upper House should be
the sole representative of the political life of the nation” (44). Its
members would be men with life-time appointments selected
from a new elite based on the Männerbünde warrior ideal.
“Nationalism . . . should be avoided if it is of the popular sort,”
because, according to Evola, “nationalism has a leveling and
anti-aristocratic function” (49). Rather than the nation state,
Men Among the Ruins suggests an imperium perhaps similar to
the medieval Holy Roman Empire. For Evola racialism is too
naturalistic or material. He celebrates the sacred and the
spiritual.
Unlike Kuehnelt-Leddihn, however, Evola does not believe that

Catholicism can provide a political-religious foundation for
society. He has even less regard for “another international sect,
Judaism.” Jewry is largely responsible for “the disorder of recent
times,” and for the “thorough economisation of modern life”
(50–51). Evola also identifies Marxism, Darwinism, and

Nietzsche’s nihilism as useful tools of the Jews.
Jacob’s ideology synthesizes Kuehnelt-Leddihn and Evola’s

beliefs. He accepts Evola’s criticism of Jewry and the
bourgeoisie, but appears to reject his disparagement of
Catholicism. K-L plainly believed that the throne and pulpit were
essential for a return of authentic European culture. Considering
his ethnicity, it is not surprising that Jacob would concur with
Evola that race is more of a spiritual than a physical attribute.
In the next chapter, Jacob discusses post-war German culture

from two perspectives, that of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg a film
director and cultural historian, and Theodore Adorno, the
Jewish-Marxist co-founder of the Frankfurt School. Syberberg
realizes that despite its “economic miracle,” Germany has not
yet recovered from its defeat in 1945 because its culture is just a
hollow shell. One reason for this situation is that the nation has
not been able to do the work of mourning — Trauerarbeit.
“Germany had for too long been forbidden to grieve for its own
losses, while the Jews, on the other hand, have been allowed to
commemorate the massacre of their people as a turning point in
world history” (58).
Much of the responsibility for the deplorable state of German

culture can be traced to the efforts of Adorno and his colleague
Max Horkheimer who returned to Germany after the war. They
went to work for “the so-called ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’
funded by the CIA to de-Nazify the post-war German educational
system and cultural institutions” (63). Adorno is infamous for
his statement that, “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
Only the most insipid and discordant modern music and art
would be permitted in post-war Germany. Everything else would
be barbaric.
“According to Syberberg, art is virtually impossible without a

nationalistic and aristocratic social system” (64). And the
inspiration for art is found in nature, “blood and soil,” if you will.
Modern art prohibits beauty because National Socialism “was
considered as an ‘aestheticism of politics’” (64). Jacob concludes
that Syberberg wanted to use “art as a redemptive influence on
society,” while Adorno used it “as an instrument of revenge”
(66).
In the fourth essay Jacob shifts gears to examine two books, both
written in 2011, that analyze the success of Western civilization:
The Uniqueness of Western Civilization by Ricardo Duchesne
and The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson.
Duchesne’s thesis is that the West has always been different,

more creative, than other civilizations. The source of this
creativity is the “aristocratic egalitarianism” of Indo-European
societies. This unique aristocratic egalitarianism was made
possible by a political arrangement that provided “relative
freedom and autonomy from centralised authority” (79).
According to Duchesne, Western individualism was not the
product of Christianity, as conservative writer Charles Murray
proposed,[1] rather it has its origins on the Pontic steppe culture
of the fourth millennium BC. Jacob supports Murray’s position.
Jacob is dismissive of Duchesne’s thesis. Citing a lack of

evidence from early Indo-European cultures, he characterizes
the Pontic steppe theory “as an exercise in sociological fantasy”
(80). He sarcastically refers to Duchesne’s work as a “paean to
Indo-European individualism” (85) and disdains “his romantic
hypothesis about the migrations southward from the Pontic
steppe” (86) — despite what is now overwhelming
anthropological and historical evidence, much of which is
reviewed by Duchesne (see also Kevin MacDonald’s
Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, Ch. 2). Jacob,
who emphasizes the functions of the altar and the crown in

Western civilization, criticizes Duchesne for neglecting the roles
played by the priestly or religious caste and the monarchy in
supporting an aristocracy.
It appears that Jacob also finds Ferguson’s explanation of

Western ascendency unsatisfactory as well, though his criticism
is less theoretical. For Ferguson, the West’s greatness can be
found in: “competition, science, property rights, medicine, the
consumer society, and the work ethic” (92). Like Duchesne,
Ferguson sees a lack of centralized power as a Western asset as
opposed to the centralized bureaucracy of China. He believes
property rights are closely associated with “the rule of law and
representative government” (93).
While Ferguson celebrates “the triumph of jeans and rock music

— apparel and noise of the American proletariat,” Jacob
contends that “all these tawdry American productions are
precisely what a truly cultured person of the Old World — the
real West — finds so repulsive in American society” (96). The
consumer society that Ferguson applauds is the plebeian
capitalism manifest in “the general vulgarity and lack of style of
Americans” (96).
Ferguson is not, however, completely sanguine regarding the

future of the Occident. He warns that the greatest threat to the
West is “our own loss of faith in the civilization we inherited
from our ancestors,” while Duchesne expresses similar concerns
about the “nihilism, cultural relativism, [and] weariness” of the
West (98).
Speaking of triumphalism, in the next chapter Jacob confronts

Francis Fukuyuma’s The End of History and the Last Man
(1992). Writing at the end of the Cold War, Fukuyuma, the
Japanese-American neo-conservatove, sees the final victory for
a liberal-capitalist world order. To Jacob’s thinking, what

Fukuyama considers the end of history is Jewish “economic
utopianism which manifested itself in the twentieth century as
totalitarian Communism . . . [and] was transformed in the new
‘promised land’ of the Jews into totalitarian liberalism of the
‘American Dream’” (102). Jacob concludes that Fukuyama’s neo-
conservatism illustrates “the incompatibility of the American
with genuinely European systems of political thought” (103).
In the remainder of this essay Jacob traces how the English, and
later the Americans, deviated from traditional European values.
In essence: the rise of Puritanism and its anti-monarchical ideas
led to the English Civil War, the Revolution of 1688, the
American Revolution, and the French Revolution. Puritans with
their individualism and industry came to see “citizens as
economic units of production not unlike those of the later
Communist utopia of Marx” (106). Plus, according to Jacob,
Puritanism has always been heavily influenced by Judaism.
Then, increasingly during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, the Jews in America were able to transform the
remnant of Puritanism into their own political/economic system.
It was “the re-entry of the Jews into England during the Puritan
revolution” that began the unraveling of European culture, with
the end results that we see today (121).
The last essay in European Perspectives deals with Hannah

Arendt and Zionism. Arendt was a German-Jewish political
philosopher who studied under Martin Heidegger, among others,
before eventually emigrating to the US in 1941. Theodor Herzl,
the father of Zionism, saw Zionism as a solution to anti-
Semitism. Arendt became a socialist Zionist which she saw as
the joining of two of nineteenth-century Europe’s main
ideologies — nationalism and socialism. Some might say
nationalism + socialism = national socialism for Jews, but this is
not what she had in mind.
Jacob writes that from the beginning Zionism was much more of
a secular than a religious project, and there were, and are, some
anti-Zionist Jews. Also, in the early years there was the idea of a
one-state solution with an “Arab-Jewish bi-nationalism and [this
proposal] was supported by Arendt herself” (134). Over the
decades the left-wing socialist faction of Zionism has weakened
while the far-right parties gained ascendency. “Arendt thus came
to consider Israel as a capitalist and colonialist — and perhaps
also imperialist — state” (138).
Arendt realized that without reconciliation and cooperation

between Arabs and Jews continuing military and economic aid
from the US would be necessary for Israel’s survival. Alternative
renditions for a Jewish homeland, with or without a Jewish state,
are suggested by Jacob and Arendt. As expected, America shares
a large measure of blame for the present impasse. The neo-
con/neo-liberal US political establishment gives carte blanche
support to the Zionist rightwing. Jacob agrees with Arendt that if
Jews would retain or resume “their peculiar ‘pariah’ status as
Jews . . . and not attempt to distort European culture with
American-Jewish vulgarity . . . , it is possible that the Jewish
Question may yet be resolved in a reasonable manner” (143).
So, what can the reader take away from Perspectives? First a
couple of lesser criticisms: At this critical time, is it wise to
accentuate the religious and national divisions among
Westerners? Is there a need to refight the wars of religion? Jacob
supports the Catholic Church, but today Protestants are not
Catholics staunchest opponents. Plus, there is an inconsistency
here as Jacob has a particular regard for Prussian culture, yet
Prussia was a predominately Protestant nation. Second, as an
American who has lived and worked in Europe, I do not
minimize the cultural differences between these two branches of
Western civilization. Nor will I defend the disgusting American
political and cultural establishment. That said, there can be, and
should be, more that binds us together than separates us.
As mentioned at the start, the author is an unusual person and

the book has an unusual orientation. Though written in English,
it appears to be addressed largely to the German and Italian
Right. These two nations, losers in the tragic conflicts of the last
century, are also the home of some of Jacob’s favorite thinkers:
Sombart, Spengler, Gentile, and Evola. Jacob’s heart, if not his
head, belongs to the Conservative Revolution and reaction. The
back cover tells us that the author received a doctorate in
Intellectual history from Penn State, and Perspectives will
probably appeal most to students of European ideologies.
Jacob looks to the church and monarchy to save the West. But
look at the present Pope and the current royal families of
Europe. It is hard to see the practical application of Catholicism
and monarchism to twenty-first century Europe’s existential
crisis. Yet Jacob is an erudite analyst who makes some
perceptive points. There is a desperate need for a new
aristocracy in Western societies. It is a truism that every society,
except perhaps the most primitive, is ruled by one or more elite
groups. In social science, this is sometimes referred to as the
iron law of oligarchy. Not every elite, however, is aristocratic, and
aristocracies take time to develop, time the West does not have.
At present we are ruled by elites who are hostile to the interests
of Western peoples. Before an aristocracy can develop, we need
to create a revolutionary cadre from which a new elite will
emerge.
Jacob is also certainly correct that a spiritual rebirth is an

essential component for a Western renewal. Christianity,
theologically speaking, appears to be a spent force. If this is not
the case it is up to Christians to prove otherwise. The West is in
dire want of a new religion that is naturalistic and science-
based, yet still contains an element of faith that is part of all

religions.[2]
I respect Jacob’s scholarship, but his ideological prescriptions

will not suffice for the twenty-first century West. While we need
guidance and inspiration from the past, mass migrations and
globalized economies are rapidly and radically changing the
cultural landscape of the Occident. The historical peoples of the
West are now slated to become minorities in their own
homelands. We need new elites to propagate a new ideology that
will be part of a new spiritual awakening. That is a monumental
task. Nothing could be more difficult, yet nothing less will do.
[1] Charles Murray, Human Accomplishments: The Pursuit of

Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950 (New York:
HarperCollins, 2003).
[2] I briefly discuss some possible avenues for spiritual

development in: Nelson Rosit, “Ernst Haeckel Reconsidered,”
The Occidental Quarterly, 15. 4 (Summer 2015) 30-42.

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6/28/2021 Mark Leibler: Powerbroker for Australia’s Jewish Plutocracy :: Reader View

Mark Leibler: Powerbroker for

In writing about the pivotal Jewish role in Australia’s

Gawenda’s stated reason for writing The Powerbroker is

Jewry in Australia – and its most prominent leader. For

Leibler’s life is a story about Jews and power. Making that

Gawenda’s willingness to openly discuss the extraordinary

Gawenda’s first interactions with his biographical subject were

Abraham set up his diamond business in Melbourne at the time

Abraham Leibler arrived in an Australia that was “was

continued to arrive in Australia from Britain than from any other

At the time of Abraham Leibler’s arrival in 1938, the Australian

Alongside these culturally-assimilated Anglo Jews was a smaller

Many were also avowed communists who created and supported

emerged one of the Soviet Union’s most successful spy rings. In

The Anglo Jews feared the intense ethnocentrism and political

Sometimes the dual loyalties charge was expressed as an

The battle between the established Anglo-Jewish community

were “not about to ‘complete Hitler’s work,’ as many of them put

Lippmann resented the expectation to assimilate into the Anglo-

The Leiblers, as Orthodox Jews and Zionists, openly flouted the

The Leiblers were far from alone in their determination to resist

the biggest in the world. Mark Leibler attended the college,

Despite this, reflecting back on his time as a student at Mount

Mount Scopus College: not doing enough to foster a “deep sense

Mark Leibler first interacted with non-Jews when he studied law

In the decade to 1957, the Australian Jewish community had

this essay, I explore Mark Leibler’s impact on Australian politics

Mark Leibler with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison

Lawyer to Australia’s Ethno-Plutocratic

Most of ABL’s wealthy Jewish clientele reside in the wealthy

Lowy and apartment mogul Harry Triguboff ranked in the top 10

John Gandel (center right) and ADC chairman Dvir Abramovich

Gandel also funds Taglit-Birthright Israel, a program that

ethnocentrism and ethno-nationalism through his funding of

Leibler, Australia’s most prominent tax lawyer, fiercely defends

Leibler certainly exemplifies the qualities Kevin MacDonald

In 1984, when he became president of the Zionist Federation of

In the 1980s, ABL became a locus for Jewish ethnic networking

The Powerbroker recounts how Arnold Bloch, the founder of

In early 1990, Goldberg’s bankers appointed KPMG to

Kornhauser, Maurice Alter, George Herscu, Abe Goldberg, and

Bottom-of-the-Harbor Tax Avoidance

Leibler’s clients used a variety of schemes designed to avoid tax,

As Treasurer in the Hawke government (1983–91), Paul Keating

Leibler initially tried to set up meetings with the then Finance

He flew to Canberra to see him. He sent Harradine notes

In the end, Harradine caved in to Leibler’s demands and blocked

Leibler immediately started lobbying Keating. Gawenda notes

Cultivating Australia’s Senior Politicians

John Howard, Paul Keating and Malcolm Turnbull, and Israeli

The perceived imperative of cultivating close relationships with

In the lead up to the 1974 election, the Australian Labor Party

It is now a commonplace accusation that the so-called

Leibler led by example and assiduously cultivated relationships

Council. It was a difficult time to be a Zionist leader. The Israeli

Despite such events, Leibler was (and remains) adamant that no

Mark Leibler cultivated Hayden at a time when his brother Isi

Mark Leibler schmoozing with Bob Hawke in the 1980s