integrity and blame
Howard M. Kaminsky of 6130 Ridge Lane, Ocean Ridge, Florida 33435
writes in a letter to the
TLS regarding Bernard Wasserstein’s Commentary on Hannah Arendt:
As for his charges relating to Arendt’s use of Nazi authors and her inadequate love of the Jewish people, I admit, Jew that I am, to believing that some Nazi authors had important things to say not unrelated to their Nazism, above all the viciously anti-Semitic but incomparably brilliant Carl Schmitt (whom Arendt used even more than she says), and I also believe that Jews have created gentile hostility by demanding equal rights but refusing to surrender their ethnic integrity. Books have been written about this by a number of authors who are not overtly anti-Semitic—e.g. Kevin MacDonald and Albert Lindemann—and Arendt’s analysis of Jewish “responsibility” for anti-Semitism can hardly be dismissed as due to her “perverse world-view”, let alone her “combination of ira et studio [sic]”.
Setting aside the insinuation of covert anti-Semitism, the notion of the Jews having created gentile hostility by demanding equal rights but refusing to surrender their ethnic integrity is baffling. Is it likewise possible to blame women for having created male hostility by demanding equal rights but refusing to surrender their sexual integrity? For that matter, is it possible to blame any man for having elicited the hostility of his peers by demanding equal rights but refusing to surrender his personal integrity? If the claim is that ethnic descent or religious confession are somehow unlike biological sex and personal identity in their moral implications, why is that the case, and how so?