I have felt compelled to write about this issue for some time, after discovering various online cesspits that spewed the grossest of anti-Semitic poppycock, all in an effort to prove the unique monstrosity of the Jews, deeply embedded in their genes, and ranting about their subversive influence on American society, and European civilization more broadly. By talking about subversive influence, we are assuming that all the values and traditions in America and in Europe ought not be subverted or changed. This is a faulty assumption. Slavery was a tradition in the United States for nearly two centuries, white supremacy was a prevailing value, a value that reinforced the tradition, and is one reason that this infernal enterprise was kept alive as long as it was, even when the blossoming American republic built itself up as a bastion of human liberty. The founding fathers blamed the presence of slavery on British colonialism, but did little to abolish it themselves, not officially until the 13^{th amendment, strangely left out of the Bill of Rights. Religion has perverted America to an alarming extent, and loony conservatives have helped this along by insisting that church and state are not separate, even though James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Ben Franklin, and John Adams suggested otherwise, knowing that in Europe, it was the church that controlled the government, and that this had allowed for appalling examples of theocratic tyranny; the kind of tyranny that had driven many different religious groups to America in the first place, including the Quakers, the Calvinists (especially the Amish), and even Jews. Later, we would become a nation that preferred Protestants to Catholics, and thus looked down on immigrants from Ireland, Poland, and Italy. But before that unfortunate turn of events, we welcomed victims of persecution and bigotry, offered them refuge in a new and wonderful country. Of course, this new and wonderful country also engaged in genocide against its indigenous population, and denied rights to Africans and women, and favored elitist marginalization of the poor. So, there were certain national pathologies we had to overcome, some alterations that had to be made, and we made them, though the process of change was actively opposed by those who had reaped the benefits of the status quo, and were reluctant to relinquish power.}

The Jews had been in America from the very beginning, and most of them supported the American Revolution, Haym Salomon donated much of his personal wealth to Washington’s army, a rather significant contribution. Salomon and fellow Jews also played a role in drumming up support for the Revolution by appealing to friends and acquaintances in Holland and France; it was the French navy that blockaded Cornwallis at Yorktown, one of the key factors in his eventual surrender. George Washington honored one of the first Jewish communities in America by promising them “to bigotry, no sanction, to persecution, no assistance”. It is a popular claim among anti-Semites today that Washington harbored animosity towards Jews, though nothing he ever said or wrote reflects this. When confronted with that, they often turn to the absurd Franklin Prophecy, supposedly uttered by Franklin three years before his death, recorded in the diary of a delegate from South Carolina, an original copy of which (or any copy of which) has yet to be produced. That this Prophecy is a hoax should be obvious to anyone who cares to examine it closely, or think about it logically. But anti-Semitism thrives on such nonsense, whether it allegedly came from Franklin’s mouth, or the pages of the New Testament.

When it comes to the subject of Jewish persecution, the shit they have put up with for three millennia, my sympathies lie mostly with them, though Judaism contains within it many objectionable doctrines that have caused irreparable harm to Jews as a whole, but this is the fault of rabbis, who do as much damage as clerics in any other religion. To me, Jewish persecution has been the result of a campaign against them by wily gentiles who simply have been unable to tolerate their presence, due in part to their refusal to assimilate properly, they are perfect scapegoats, because as a minority, they are highly visible in terms of their economic success, which is all the more admirable when one considers the limitations placed upon them, not being allowed to own land, restricted from certain professions, and they were vulnerable because they had no powerful organization or institution to protect them, as Catholics had in the Vatican, or the Muslims had in the Ottoman Empire. Their uniqueness as a people made them easy targets. Their frequent periods of persecution have both a religious and racial component. Jews were not always Jews; they used to be known as Hebrews, and probably came from some ancient Middle Eastern province like the Sumerians and various others. I would call Abraham the first Jew, a convert to monotheism, spiritual father not only to Judaism, but to its craven derivatives Christianity and Islam.

Abraham probably never existed; he is but a mythological figure, like Perseus or Achilles, but much less interesting or heroic. He was willing to kill his own son, Isaac, to prove his loyalty to God, in a depraved expression of piety. Some patriarch, but he is at least as great as Muhammad, the creator of Islam, an illiterate Arabic merchant to whom the Koran was dictated. Judaism was likely the first monotheistic faith, and it thus stood apart in an ancient world full of polytheists, whether Egyptians, Greeks, Phoenicians, or Chinese. The flood story of Noah was borrowed practically verbatim from the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh; the creation myth is similar to many others from surrounding lands, but Judaism is less plagiarized than the major monotheisms that followed it. So, their monotheism set them apart. And their worship of one single god was particularly fierce; death awaited those who bowed down to other deities; the god of Judaism, the god of the Torah and the Old Testament, is a homicidal, racist maniac, willing to kill anyone for any apparent reason.

They had strict laws to follow; dress and dietary codes to adhere to, animal sacrifices to make, and this made them conspicuous, and made them an annoyance to those like the Romans who demanded a mammalian emperor be revered as a god. The Romans slaughtered large numbers of Jews on several occasions, most famously in 70 CE, when the armies of Titus descended on Jerusalem and destroyed their temple, enslaving thousands of them and marching them to Rome. Hadrian led another massacre, to put down the Bar Kochba revolt. This was consistent with how the Romans neutralized any perceived threat or conquered territory, just look at what they did in Carthage and Gaul. Christians would suffer terribly under Roman rule, as well, until Constantine’s “conversion” in 312. Jewish resistance to the Roman Empire is often ignored, and while it was never successful, should their efforts not be duly recognized as courageous, if futile? Christians have a thing about martyrdom, those Christians who died because of their beliefs, and because they refused to renounce them. Martyrs are often made into saints; so Christian resistance to Roman oppression is to be remembered forever; while Jewish resistance (or Jewish martyrdom) is forgotten.

The Jews were also occupied by the Babylonians, Assyrians, and Persians; Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar demanded of captured Hebrews that they serve him and worship Babylonian gods; many of them refused to do so, and suffered the consequences. Persian king Darius is mentioned in the book of Daniel. So, Judea had a long history of foreign invasion and occupation. The Persians proved to be the most tolerant; the harshest treatment would come from Christian Europe, especially the Byzantine Empire under Justinian, and by the Catholic Church after the 4th Lateran Council of 1215, which placed many senseless and cruel restrictions on Jews. The self-imposed insularity of Jews made them resist assimilation, at least the kind of assimilation desired by their Christian and Muslim masters. We have another double standard here; Jews had to accept total assimilation, meaning that they convert either to Christianity or Islam, abandoning every vestige of Judaism. Meanwhile, Christians believed only in partial assimilation for themselves; they would keep their religion fully intact, and may only learn a second language, but this was usually optional. Christians were thus expected to remain Christians, hardly assimilating at all, and the same was true of Muslims, who subjected non-Muslims to special taxes and various other forms of discrimination until they converted to Islam. The Jews typically minded their own business, but had to choose a side in ethnic/national/religious conflicts, that they identified as Jews was not enough, they had to identify with one group or another, as Germans, Italians, French, Spaniards, or Poles. They often wanted to stay out of such meaningless struggles, but could not. And if they still identified themselves as Jews, then they were singled out and subjected to horrific abuse, murdered by the hundreds or thousands, defenseless to fight off the mobs that attacked them, dragged Jewish families into the streets and beat them to death, razed their homes to the ground, destroyed their property and vandalized their shops.

If these kinds of things happened to anyone else, it would provoke outrage, but when it happened to Jews, it was deemed acceptable, if not necessary; after all, they deserved it. And that they apparently deserved it is one reason I have invested time and effort into this essay. They did not deserve it. David Duke wrote a whole book about elements of supremacism within the Jewish community, and he is not wrong, there has been a persistent and nauseating sense of superiority within the Jewish community for much of its history, but any intrinsic value his book may have decreases when he starts to argue that the Jews have deserved their persecution, that they are persecuted because of their behavior, which is detrimental to their “host” nations.

The problem may lie with both Jews and gentiles; but certainly not exclusively with the Jews themselves, I have never seen anything to suggest that their behavior has been more hideous or destructive than that of Christians or Muslims. I mentioned the assimilation double standard, and the double standard applied to the idea of martyrdom. Jewish economic success also made them visible; they are very good with money, very business-oriented, and even those who may not like them much readily admit this; Otto von Bismarck was glad to have a Jewish banker, and Jews were invited into many countries to stimulate the economy, Charlemagne invited them rather cordially to his Frankish kingdom, they were also invited to Poland, and thrived immensely in Italy, especially Venice. They gravitated towards urban areas, where they become merchants and traders; interestingly enough, Arabs, Persians, and Armenians dominated these professions, too, in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and elsewhere.

The Jews were thus typically a lot richer than their gentile neighbors; they were literate, surrounded by illiterate, poorly educated masses. They educated their own children in yeshivas, having them study the Torah and the Talmud, learning Hebrew at an early age, being able to memorize holy laws and recite them at Bar Mitzvahs. Anti-Semitism was, in many ways, the envy and resentment of the underachiever, found amongst the ranks of those who could not compete with Jews in the economic realm. The Jews succeeded even when the deck was stacked against them; they could not own land, could not be lawyers or doctors, were excluded from universities, yet they managed to overcome these obstacles, much to the chagrin of those seeking to drive them into poverty and obscurity. Their resilience is remarkable. The practice of usury, or the charging of loans at interest, is historically linked to Jews, even if it is not much of an issue. Let us regard usury as a business; intended to generate a profit. One did not have to borrow money from the Jewish lender; if he did, he had a legal obligation to pay the money back, a point made eloquently by Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. The Christian Church hypocritically condemned usury while engaging in disreputable financial practices itself; and the fact that usury was never officially banned anywhere proves how vital it was to the economy.

Usury was entirely optional; only wealthy Jews took it up as a career, as it had high risks, no guarantee that they would get their money back, as the law did not favor them. Like Shylock, they may have been forced to go before a judge and argue for their rights, and their pleas would most likely fall on deaf Christian ears. Christians held the same general attitudes of Jews; it was OK for instance, for Christians to enslave non-Christians, and Muslims non-Muslims, for non-Muslims to pay higher taxes, it was harder for non-Christians to own land or hold certain jobs, so religious bigotry is found in all three groups, but only bigotry against Jews is acceptable.

Papal bulls encouraging the banning and burning of the Talmud, forcing Jews to wear humiliating headgear and distinctive yellow badges, herding them into ghettos, placing them on a curfew, forbidding them from traveling or entering certain cities or regions within a particular country; with decrees like these, the term papal bull is fitting, more so if one were to add shit to the end of it. Many of these decrees were issued after the 4th Lateran Council of 1215, presided over by Innocent III, arguably one of the most powerful popes in the history of the Catholic Church. His pernicious anti-Semitism was perhaps balanced by his skill at warmongering, and his skill at exterminating heretics. Having a warlord and mass murderer in the Vatican with the name Innocent is really quite ironic.

Now, Catholics have always praised Innocent III, which is not terribly surprising, other decrees he set forth at the 4th Lateran Council dealt with the creation of schools, and the responsibilities of the priesthood. But this does little to diminish his villainous, treacherous character. The Crusades were religiously inspired conflicts between Christians and Muslims, both hoping to reclaim the Holy Land, most of which was modern-day Israel and Palestine. Jerusalem was the major prize, and Muslim and Christian armies spared no expense in their efforts to annihilate one another in order to claim it. The Jews were caught in the middle.

Islam and Christianity are so much alike that they are bound to engage in such activities; they thrive on conquest and conversion; depraved, violent cults of this magnitude, with this many devout adherents, are inevitably going to clash, and the Crusades marked the biggest clash of all. The First Crusade of 1096 led to the deaths of 3000 or more Jews, killed because they were non-Christians on the belief that this would merit some kind of divine reward. The Vatican did not intervene. The Vatican did nothing to stop Crusades in general; nor did it try to curb excesses against Jews or Muslims; Muslim authorities responded in kind. The Vatican could not in good conscience object to the mistreatment of non-Christian groups; its own behavior toward perceived heretics within the Christian community was just as bad, if not slightly worse. Pogroms accompanied each and every Crusade, with predictable papal silence. Could the papacy simply not control these mad mobs of pious psychopaths, most of whom were sent to occupy the Holy Land by the Vatican in the first place, or by Catholic monarchs acting on its behalf? The Crusades continued intermittently for nearly two centuries, before the Christians turned their attention to other things, notably deadly epidemics and new types of heresy.

The Muslims succeeded, ultimately, in taking Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, and secured their domain in the Middle East and North Africa. Judaism was seen as a heresy, but Jews went the extra mile of actually rejecting the divinity of Christ, which made them more reviled than most other heretical sects. Coupled with this was the charge that they had killed Jesus, the charge formally known as deicide, which means killing God, and of course Jesus was the physical embodiment of God. The New Testament has been one of the traditional sources of anti-Semitism, because it emphasizes the Jewish role in the murder of Christ; take, for instance, verses from three of the Gospels, Matthew 27:25, John 19:6, and Luke 23:21. The Jews demand that Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, release the notorious criminal Barabbas so that Jesus can be crucified; Pilate believes Jesus is innocent, and yet agrees to have him crucified anyway, apparently afraid to go against the wishes of the Jewish mob. This should strike most rational readers as being hopelessly silly. There is no evidence to suggest that the New Testament is in any way an accurate account of these events; almost all of the information in it is hearsay, written by superstitious people several decades after Jesus’ death. Pilate, as a Roman official, would have made the final determination about Jesus’ guilt, and if he had found Jesus not to be guilty, he would have released him, and the Jews would have accepted it. What exactly could they have done? Rioted? Revolted? Pilate had legions at his disposal that would have swiftly put down such demonstrations.

And we are led to believe that most ordinary Jews, the vast majority of those living in Judea, were horrified by what happened to Jesus; the true villains of this story are the Pharisees, the Jewish religious elite, who, like their counterparts in every other religion, sought to control and intimidate the laity, enforcing adherence to the laws of Old Testament. If anything, Jesus spoke out against this manifestation of organized religious authority, even though the scriptures indicate (especially the Gospel of John) that he likened the Jews as a whole to vipers and devils, and not just the Pharisees. The crucifixion of Jesus was indeed a dastardly crime, if it ever happened at all. The Gospels describe it in gruesome detail, perhaps summoning up that masochism so deeply entrenched within the Christian mentality, as evidenced by Tertullian, Augustine, and other towering Christian apologetics who reveled in the thoughts of people suffering forever in the afterlife, and enjoyed the notion that Jews were eternal outcasts, left wandering the world, scattered about in the Diaspora, because they chose to reject Christ.

Let us think seriously for a moment about which group should bear more responsibility for Jesus’ murder? Supposedly, a Jewish mob located Jesus and dragged him before Pilate; his disciple Judas betrayed him with a kiss for a bag of silver, later hanging himself. Pilate finds no fault with Jesus; symbolically washes his hands of the matter, the Jews insist, rather conveniently, that his blood will forever be on their hands and the hands of their descendants, a statement of collective guilt that Christians use to illustrate that the Jews wanted to kill Jesus so badly they are willing to accept total blame for it, for the rest of time. Pilate releases Barabbas in Jesus’ stead, and Jesus is handed over to Roman centurions, who lash him repeatedly, until strips of flesh are removed from his body, he is covered in blood, and writhes in pain so unbearable he can hardly stand upright. These same Romans, after this grueling bout of torture, force him to carry a large wooden cross up a path to the site of his execution, called Golgotha. A young Jewish man emerges from the crowd to carry the cross as Jesus collapses under its weight, and the stinging torment of additional lashings. When Jesus reaches the end of the path, the Romans once again drive large nails through each of his hands, and both feet, and then his crucifixion officially begins. He is to hang there until he dies, from exposure, dehydration, or starvation; then the birds would most likely have picked his bones clean. While hanging there, the Romans mock him, stick him with spears, and place a crown of thorns on his head, as spectators gasp at the sheer brutality of it all.

So, the Romans do far more to Jesus than the Jews do, if I were a Christian, I would reserve my indignation for those Roman thugs, who forced Jesus to endure a nearly unimaginable gauntlet of suffering, as visualized by Mel Gibson in his blockbuster film The Passion of the Christ. There are many Christians who have supported the historical persecution and murder of Jews, who deny the Holocaust, and express horror at the thought of imbuing Jews with a special victimhood status, yet view Jesus as a unique and special person, whose life invariably means more than that of an ordinary individual who may also have been crucified by the Romans; and thousands were most likely crucified by the Romans monthly or annually, for a variety of offenses, great and small. Does the death of Jesus deserve special remembrance and reverence? The answer is resoundingly negative, yet Christians would maintain otherwise. Christianity is essentially a cult of death; Jesus performed feats of magic and necromancy, yet Christians raise such a fuss over the content of Harry Potter and Wiccan groups at prominent universities; only Jesus is allowed to practice magic and witchcraft, the good kind that comes from God, instead of from the Devil, if there is a discernible difference. We apparently live in a world where people still believe in such absurd things. Jesus rose from the dead like the zombies associated with voodoo; voodoo incidentally is as plausible and as valid a faith system as Christianity, and has wrought less destruction on the world.

Often in criticisms of Judaism, like in David Duke’s book Jewish Supremacism, which constitutes a portion of his larger opus entitled My Awakening, and is constructed in part from his doctoral dissertation; one finds reference to the hateful nature of the Talmud, whose authorship is credited to numerous rabbis, codified over the course of several centuries into one standard text. The question now should be whether that should come as a surprise to anyone. Every religious text that has ever existed contains some form of supremacist, racist, or sadistic ideology; that Duke is silent on this indicates his bias towards Judaism, no Christian has the moral high ground in this debate, neither does any Muslim. The Koran, which is not supposed to exist in any language other than Arabic, even though fine English translations are available to the diligent researcher, though they may be difficult to find.

The Koran contains within it the notion of Arabic supremacy, the inherent superiority of Islam as a religion, and the Arabs as an ethnic group; Allah, after all, favors the Arabic language above all others, choosing that language to communicate his words to Muhammad via an angelic servant. Yet Islam is a universalist faith; it seeks to conquer and subdue others, and has imperialistic ambitions; the Muslims wasted no time in expanding their domain into North Africa, where they made slaves of the people they found there, six centuries or more before Europeans arrived. Muslims may treat non-Muslims however they wish; their lives are meaningless. If non-Muslims are not turned into slaves, they may endure discrimination in various professions, be constantly pressured to convert, pay special taxes and be vulnerable to random or systematic acts of violence; the Armenians experienced this repeatedly for hundreds of years at the hands of their Ottoman masters, culminating in the massacres under the cruel and thuggish sultan Abdulhamid II in the 1890s and their attempted genocide during World War I by Turkish nationalists (some of whom it must be noted were secularists), Islamic fanatics who wished for an expansion of Ottoman territory to include the lands of Central Asia and the predominantly Muslim nations of North Africa, which by now were under the European control.

The Muslim role in slavery and the slave trade is worth bringing up because of the Nation of Islam, a racist crackpot organization currently headed by Louis Farrakhan; the sole purpose of which seems to be to persuade black people in America and around the world to convert to Islam. The NOI was once headed by a corrupt charlatan named Elijah Mohammad, who fathered many illegitimate children with women far younger than himself; it arranged the assassination of its greatest orator, the fiery, charismatic Malcolm X whose epiphany late in life allowed him to see the NOI for what it really was. The NOI has published material that “exposes” the Jewish role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which claimed millions of African lives, as it brought them from Africa to Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Caribbean and Latin America.

The NOI calls this the secret relationship between blacks and Jews; it has also endorsed lectures by Tony Martin, a historian who has written extensively about this same topic, in a less polemical way than the NOI itself. Farrakhan would be willing to denounce and demonize both Jews and white Europeans for their respective contributions to African misery and plunder, but the NOI is conveniently silent about how the Muslims were exploiting and traipsing Africans across the desert to Arab slave markets in the 800s and 900s, and that most of the countries in the world today that still practice slavery have Muslim governments that base their behavior on the Koran. Sudan would be a fine example in this case, but also a fine example of how Islam espouses Arabic supremacy, often with a homicidal, even genocidal, bent. The al-Bashir regime in Sudan has worked hard to make sure that Islam is forever linked with genocide; the situation in Darfur is one of the most egregious human rights crises of recent years, it is an ongoing campaign of murder against Christians and animists who live in the southern regions of Africa’s largest nation; but there is also a racial and ethnic component to the slaughter; Muslims of Arab descent are massacring Muslims of African descent. Black Africans are considered less than human by their Arabic rulers and neighbors, and the NOI has not bothered to offer any real criticism of this, nor have any of the world’s Islamic states.

The Sudanese regime is the spiritual successor of the Taliban, whose rule in Afghanistan could best be described as medieval, marked by a reversion to tribalism and barbarism, with religious oppression on a scale unparalleled in that region or much anywhere else. Iran, once the site of the vibrant and remarkable civilization of Persia, faces a similar scenario, under the leadership of the Ayatollah; Khomeini’s ascension to power in 1979 drove many Iranians into exile, saw women expelled from universities, deprived once again of their rights and dignity, the press once again brought under state control, with dissenting journalists arrested, tortured, or executed, along with homosexuals and any other free-thinking individual who may have squirmed under the yoke of Islamic fascism. The repugnant demagogue Ahmadi-Nejad is little more than a Marionette whose strings are pulled by the clerics who rule the roost in Tehran.

Arabs and Muslims decry the racism of Jews in Israel; this is a valid concern, as there have been rabbis who have compared Palestinians and all Arabs by extensions as vermin worthy of extermination. However, if one complains about racism, he cannot engage in it himself and still expect to be taken seriously, or receive sympathy. Arabs have violated this simple principle by reviving the most noxious forms of Nazi propaganda, including Arabic language editions of Mein Kampf, issues of Julius Streicher’s Der Sturmer, and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, using public TV networks in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere to broadcast messages of hatred against Jews, comparing them to vermin, and encouraging children to become suicide bombers and pray for the destruction of the Jews as a whole. Incidentally, Syria and Egypt both employed officially-sanctioned campaigns terrorism against their respective Jewish communities to drive them to Israel; a fact that is ignored by most commentators on the Israeli-Palestine conflict emphasizing the Jewish acts of terrorism and ethnic cleansing directed at the Palestinians. The Jews in Syria had lived there for 2500 years and had no desire or reason to leave, until the Syrian government gave them one. Syria, along with Egypt and Jordan, had hoped to colonize Palestine, which proved not to be a pleasant experience for the Christians who lived there and faced numerous restrictions on travel and worship. The Barbary pirates justified their abduction of American sailors and looting of American ships by referencing the Koran, and how it instructs Muslims to deal with non-Muslims.

There is perhaps no greater work of racism and ethnocentrism than the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, though the New Testament is not to be excluded here. This is a terrific opportunity to introduce a racist form of Christianity called Christian Identity, another name really for British Israelism, pioneered by Wesley Swift in the 1950s, now elucidated by folks like “pastor” James Wickstrom, and his disciple Hal Turner, an obnoxious, loud-mouthed radio host from New Jersey, along with sects of the KKK and the Phineas Priesthood, which is linked with the Aryan Nations. It is difficult to discuss the basic beliefs of this vile and ridiculous ideology without bursting into uncontrollable bouts of laughter, but I shall try to restrain myself as I offer a summary.

Christian Identity does not reject the notion of a “Chosen People”; but claims that the “Chosen” are actually white Western Europeans instead of Jews. Jews, in fact, are the children of Satan, and are all destined to die and thrash about in hell forever; Wickstrom goes so far as to call for the murder of every Jew on earth, which is in accordance with Yahweh’s will. Yahweh is what they call their made-up god, which created them as a superior and separate race. They preach a dual seedline theology, stemming supposedly from an interpretation of Genesis 3:15, which reads thus:

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Where does this dual seedline concept originate from? What is meant by this particular piece of scripture? According to Christian Identity scholars, the talking snake in the Garden of Eden (a very real manifestation of Satan), seduces Eve and impregnates her; the resulting fetus is Cain. Cain’s half-brother, Abel, is the child of Eve and Adam. Cain, of course, kills the pure, innocent Abel and is cursed by God, with the so-called Mark of Cain, which Turner has stated is the hooked nose of the Jew. Other Christians took the Mark of Cain to mean dark skin, which was then applied to Africans especially, but also to the various indigenous peoples of the Americas, Caribbean, and South Pacific. Those bearing the Mark of Cain deserve to be hated for their ancestor’s sin; their lives are meaningless, and they can be killed with impunity, until they are completely exterminated. Turner and Wickstrom have a more fanciful explanation for black inferiority; blacks and all non-whites are failed creations, made by God before Adam, like all the other lower animals; disappointed by them, he created Adam, the father of the Adamic race, or Aryan race, so named because of their ability to show ruddiness (or color) in their cheeks.

Mainstream Christianity wisely and appropriately regards Christian Identity as a revolting apostasy, yet has internalized at least some of its racist tenets, albeit in different ways. The curse of Ham is a sufficient example. Ham was one of Noah’s three sons. According to Genesis, Ham discovered his father lying drunk and naked in a tent, and because he looked upon Noah’s nakedness (probably not an attractive sight, considering that Noah was supposedly at an advanced age by this point, hundreds of years old in biblical time), Noah cursed him after he recovered from his buzz; more precisely, he cursed Ham’s offspring, his son Canaan, whose descendants were presumably those of the African race, who were destined to be enslaved and forced to serve the descendants of Canaan’s uncles, Shem and Japheth. From Shem, one can derive Semite, so it is clear that Semitic tribes (especially Jews and Arabs) could interpret this as a justification for the enslavement of Africans, a justification only religion could provide, involving a status one could never escape.

Leviticus suggests to us that Ham may have had sexual relations with Noah’s wife; Leviticus 20:11 states that “If a man has sexual intercourse with his father’s wife, he has exposed his father’s nakedness”. Of course, Ham never existed, neither did Noah, and the flood tale is lifted almost verbatim from the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh, more compelling evidence that religion is manmade, and that the curse of Ham was created exclusively to justify the otherwise repellant practice of slavery, and provided a convenient excuse for its later continuance among European Christians. The defenders of slavery could have turned to the curse of Ham to find a biblical reason to oppose its abolition, along with the fact that the Old Testament repeatedly endorses slavery, and that, in the New Testament, Jesus offers no condemnation of it, along with Paul, he only encourages masters to treat their slaves more humanely; never does he advocate that slaves should be released. Paul suggests that one can be a Christian and have Christian slaves, Jesus informs the slave that he is not to be disobedient; and that punishment awaits the insubordinate slave. Jefferson Davis argued for the continued existence on religious grounds, undoubtedly referencing these key points. Slavery must be a divinely ordained institution; even Jesus had no objections to it. The most famous of pro-slavery advocates, John C Calhoun, argued that slavery should not be abolished because it was so vital to the southern economy; he undoubtedly believed there was a religious basis for it, as well. His Christianity may have also inspired his ignoble views on the inferiority of American Indians; he was an ardent supporter of policies to remove them from their tribal lands to locations further west. Southern churches hoped to maintain all-white congregations; excluding blacks from membership. Southern pastors shared Calhoun’s views, and espoused them from the pulpit. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s father, the famed preacher Lyman Beecher, who helped to usher in the Second Great Awakening, was a racist and anti-Catholic bigot, even if most of his children embraced the abolitionist cause. Harriet wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a literary expose on the horrors of slavery; her brother Henry Ward Beecher supported all of the great social and scientific movements of his time, including Darwinism and women’s suffrage. Charles Beecher’s Presbyterian Church in Newark, New Jersey, became a stronghold of abolitionist sentiment. Isabella Beecher and her husband John Hooker were early and influential suffrage and anti-slavery activists. Here are the offspring of one of America’s most famous religious figures, the Billy Graham of his day, all of them devout Christians, and all of them involved in the struggle to end slavery and the cruel plight of the African. So, of course, there are exceptions to every rule, even though, particularly in the case of Charles Beecher, these Christian abolitionists wanted the freed slaves to become Christians themselves, which is where a problem arises, and takes us back to the fundamental notion that Christian arrogance often drives their acts of charity. None of these freed slaves needed to worship Jesus, Christianity is what had held them in bondage, and had promoted the concept of their inferiority. Other prominent abolitionists included William Lloyd Garrison, whose inflammatory publication The Liberator opened the eyes of many northerners, and perhaps some southerners, as well, if they had access to it. Garrison had embraced abolitionism, by his own admission, after listening to a sermon by Reverend John Rankin (not to be confused with the notorious anti-Semitic congressman from Mississippi), a Presbyterian minister from Ohio. Reverend Rankin proved to be another clerical ally of abolitionism, much to the credit of the faithful. The story of John Brown and his raid on Harper’s Ferry is one of the staples of American historical study; Brown was a fanatical abolitionist, motivated in part by religious conviction, and a rather unwholesome affinity for violence. Religious conviction may not have played so significant a role in the abolitionist devotion of Senators Thaddeus Stephens and Charles Sumner.

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