Read both Part I and II by Edmund Connelly. As readers of Davidduke.com know, for years I have been exposing why Jewish control of the media is perhaps the single most important factor in the destruction of our heritage. The following is an excellent article by Edmund Connelly thoroughly exposing the real source of the “war on Christmas.” It appeared on the VDARE.com website. We can all be thankful that there a number of excellent websites and publications in addition to Davidduke.com and stormfront.org that tell the truth without fear or favor. — Dr. David Duke
VDARE.com is again running their wonderful War on Christmas series, begun in 1999. Various contributors there document how an overwhelmingly Christian America which for centuries celebrated Christmas as both a religious and cultural holiday has in recent years moved vigorously first to quash religious observance of Christmas in the public square and is now mopping up the remaining secular symbols.
While much has been written and reported about this assault, few want to situate the attack on Christmas within a larger set of conflicts between Jews and white Christians. But to understand the hostility toward Christmas in America, one must do just that, as Jewish Townhall.com columnist Burt Prelutsky bluntly did in his 2004 column The Jewish grinch who stole Christmas.
The blame for the brisk departure of Christmas observations in so many parts of American life now, Prelutsky argued, can be blamed on “my fellow Jews. When it comes to pushing the multicultural, anti-Christian agenda, you find Jewish judges, Jewish journalists, and the American Civil Liberties Union, at the forefront. . . . But the dirty little secret in America is that anti-Semitism is no longer a problem in society – it’s been replaced by a rampant anti-Christianity. ”
One could spend a year, from one Christmas to the next, reading about the Gentile-Jewish basis of the War on Christmas. Some accounts are scholarly, while others are more popular. Some overtly point to the religious split as the source of the hostility, while others cautiously skirt around the issue.
Rush Limbaugh’s younger brother David is at pains not to name the source of the powerful anti-Christian bias he sees in our culture. Thus, in his 2003 work Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity, he can open a chapter by writing “In the documented bias against Christians and Christianity in our modern culture, Hollywood and Big Media play very major roles.” But he ignores the highly Jewish nature of the American media in general and Hollywood in particular. In fact, the words “Jews” and “Judaism” do not even appear in his extensive index.
The same can be said for Bill O’Reilly – another culture warrior on the good side of the War on Christmas who never mentions the Jewish angle. But I love his poster anyway, even though he doesn’t want to say whom he is really fighting against. This silence is, of course, a wonderful comment on Jewish power in America.
Incidentally, the Jewish dominance of Hollywood is so obvious and undeniable that Los Angeles Times’ columnist Joel Stein recently made it official. What else can you say when all eight major film studios are run by Jews. And Abe Foxman seems to agree. So I guess it’s okay for us at TOO to say it.
But, according to Foxman, these Hollywood Jewish executives just “happen to be Jewish,” as if the Jewishness of Hollywood really doesn’t make any difference. But of course it does make a difference, and the War on Christmas is Exhibit A for that proposition.
In The Culture-Wise Family: Upholding Christian Values in a Mass Media World, Theodore Baehr and Pat Boone have assembled a collection of Christian writings on the perils they and their families face in an increasingly anti-Christian America. Arguing that “whoever controls the media controls the culture,” they too avoid direct discussion of Jewish roles. Still, by including a chapter such as William Lind’s excellent “Who Stole Our Culture,” it is obvious to even the halfway informed reader what civilizational rival they are discussing.
Lind goes as far as anyone in this book to frame the conflict:
The Frankfurt School was well on the way to creating political correctness. Then suddenly, fate intervened. In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, where the Frankfurt School was located. Since the Frankfurt School was Marxist, and the Nazis hated Marxism, and since almost all its members were Jewish, it decided to leave Germany. In 1934, the Frankfurt School, including its leading members from Germany, was re-established in New York City with help from Columbia University. Soon, its focus shifted from destroying traditional Western culture in Germany to doing so in the United States. It would prove all too successful.
Needless to say, this emphasis on the Frankfurt school moves the discussion in the same direction as Kevin MacDonald does in The Culture of Critique, where MacDonald describes the broad range of Jewish movements arrayed against the culture of the West, including Christianity.
Perhaps one of the best books on this kulturkampf is Fox News Channel host John Gibson’s 2005 The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought. One need not read too intently between the lines to realize that the bulk of the “secular liberals” Gibson blames for the assault on Christmas are Jews.
He does this by bookending his tale with stories about Christians and Jews. In his preface, he relates the pain a Christian father recently experienced upon learning that his four-year-old son had learned to paint a menorah in preschool but not a Christmas tree. This was because the school had no “Christmas” tree, only a “friendship” tree. In contrast, the school displayed large drawings of menorahs with big block letters spelling out HAPPY HANUKAH. It’s pretty clear which culture is dominant these days.
Gibson closes the book with a debate with Ira Glasser of the ACLU, displaying the “hairsplitting” style of argumentation that Glasser so forcefully wielded in a debate. “Hairsplitting,” of course, could just as easily be what many people mean when they say reasoning is “Talmudic.”
Finally, if one is so inclined, a perusal of law professor Stephen M. Feldman’s Please Don’t Wish Me a Merry Christmas: A Critical History of the Separation of Church and State may be informative. What does it say, for instance, when someone who writes a book with such a title opens with the sentence “I am Jewish”? The scorching hostility toward everything Christian in this New York University Press book is inescapable, which is why Richard John Neuhaus called Feldman “relentless,” if not “fanatical.”
In everyday parlance, this debate is often referred to as the one over “A Neutral Public Square,” and it has been going on for a long time. “Happy Holidays” and “Season’s Greetings” were not always ubiquitous greetings at the end of December. For instance, back in 1952, George S. Kaufman appeared on a popular television show one week before Christmas and was asked what he wanted for the holiday. He replied, “Let’s make this one program on which no one sings ‘Silent Night.'” The response from the audience (largely Gentile, one would presume) was fast and furious: Kaufman was removed from the show.
Fast-forward to 1982 and the popular Saturday Night Live could feature a skit called “Merry Christmas, Dammit!” This skit portrayed the relationship between Donny and Marie Osmond, two non-Jewish sibling pop singers, as incestuous, and the Virgin Mary was described as “that virgin chick” in a jazzed up version of “Silent Night.” Eddie Murphy – in his popular “Gumby” guise – reads a children’s story in which Santa tears out the lungs of one of his elves because the elf asked for a sip of Santa’s hot chocolate. He ends the skit by saying “And to everyone out there – a merry Christmas! And to my producer, my director, my manager, and my lawyer – Happy Hanukkah, boys!” Obviously sensibilities had changed by then, and the people calling the shots were Jews.
Indeed, Jewish aversion to Christian symbols has resulted in a much more neutral public arena. As political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg, in his much under-appreciated 1993 work The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State, wrote:
Religious symbols and forms of expression that Jews find threatening have been almost completely eliminated from schools and other public institutions. Suits brought by the ACLU, an organization whose leadership and membership are predominantly Jewish, secured federal court decisions banning officially sanctioned prayer in the public schools and crèches and other religious displays in parks and public buildings.
Writer Mark Steyn light-heartedly described how Jews created a gradual division between religious and secular Christmas symbols, making America a society where “Jesus, Mary and Joseph are for home and for church; Santa, Rudolph and Frosty the Snowman-the great secular trinity-are for everybody.” He continues:
It’s 1934 . . . and it falls to a Jew to introduce Tin Pan Alley’s first Christmas pop standard. Isidore Israel Itkowitz-or Eddie Cantor-doesn’t much like the song, but his wife talks him into it:
‘He’s making a list
And checking it twice,
He’s gonna find out
Who’s naughty or nice.
Santa Claus is coming to town . . .’
In just 60 years, those words have become as familiar to most Americans as the Pledge of Allegiance. ‘Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer’ has gone down in his-to-ree in only 45 years. He’s not just for Episcopalians and Catholics-and who better to teach little girls ‘that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity’ regardless of the colour of their nose? Johnny Marks had such a hit-it’s one of the biggest sellers of all time-that he founded his own publishing house, St Nicholas Music, and devoted the rest of his life to composing seasonal songs, from ‘Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree’ to a beautiful setting of Longfellow’s Civil War poem, ‘I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day’. . . . In the New World, the most potent Americana-observational or aspirational-is created by Jews. Perhaps the Yankees took the sleigh rides and winter wonderlands for granted, but you had to have grown up in the lowest East Side ghetto to see that
It’s a happy feeling nothing in the world can buy
As they pass around the coffee and the
pumpkin pie . . .
Jule Styne . . . was born in the Jewish slums of Bethnal Green and liked to say that it was coming from that background that made him understand the dreams of ordinary Americans. With Sammy Cahn, he wrote:
Oh, the weather outside is frightful
But the fire is so delightful
And since we’ve no place to go
Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!
. . . Irving Berlin understood. . . . Today, the calendar turns to Berlin anthems, to ‘Easter Parade’; and ‘God Bless America’ and ‘White Christmas’. They had white Christmases in Temun, Siberia, where he was born, but it’s not about the weather: a white Russian Christmas wouldn’t be the same. . . . (See M. Steyn, “A Triumph of Miscegenation,” The Spectator, December 17/24, 1994.)
Of course, this “compromise” to take Christ out of popular culture was a great victory for Jews, for it allowed the hostility many Jews felt toward a Christian majority to find vent without the Gentiles really noticing. Philip Roth, however, knew exactly what it meant:
The radio was playing ‘Easter Parade’ and I thought, But this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas.’ The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ-the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity-and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow. Gone is the gore and the murder of Christ-down with the crucifix and up with the bonnet! He turns their religion into schlock. But nicely! Nicely! So nicely the goyim don’t even know what hit ’em. They love it. Everybody loves it. The Jews especially. Jews loathe Jesus.
Sadly, Jews have been able to translate this hatred of Christ and his birthday into increasingly scandalous imagery, thanks to their domination of Hollywood and TV studios. The progression of Christmas images from overwhelmingly positive to secular and even vicious imagery is something I’ll discuss-and show-in my next column in a few days.
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas Movies . . . NOT!
Part 2 – Anti-Christmas Movies
Edmund Connelly
December 25, 2008
Earlier this week, in Part One of this column about the War on Christmas, I wrote that “the Jewish dominance of Hollywood is so obvious and undeniable that Los Angeles Times’ columnist Joel Stein recently made it official. What else can you say when all eight major film studios are run by Jews.” I’ve written on this theme extensively in The Occidental Quarterly (here, here, and TOQ Spring 2008). Or you could read Jewtopia: The Chosen Book for the Chosen People, based on the surprise hit play by Bryan Fogel and Sam Wolfson. Or you could listen to David Mamet: “For those who have not been paying attention, this group [Ashkenazi Jews] constitutes, and has constituted since its earliest days, the bulk of America’s movie directors and studio heads.”
In The Culture-Wise Family: Upholding Christian Values in a Mass Media World, Theodore Baehr and Pat Boone argued that “whoever controls the media controls the culture.” And a lynchpin of that media is Hollywood and its associated TV studios and networks.
Why does it matter that Jews control Hollywood? In essence, it matters because it represents the loss of power of one group-majority white Christians-to a group with a long history of hostility toward the people and culture of the West. Jewish control of Hollywood has been a crucial means for dispossessing majority whites from their place in the country they built. As some have argued, the twentieth century was “a Jewish century,” and much of this was because Jews controlled the image factory known as Hollywood.
Again, what Kevin MacDonald demonstrates in The Culture of Critique, cannot be repeated too often: “The Judaization of the West means that the peoples who created the culture and traditions of the West have been made to feel deeply ashamed of their own history – surely the prelude to their demise as a culture and as a people.” And, as I argued earlier, the treatment of Christmas shows how Jews “have been able to translate this hatred of Christ and his birthday into increasingly scandalous imagery, thanks to their domination of Hollywood and TV studios.”
Today I’ll talk about how that has affected the kind of Hollywood films we get with respect to Christmas. In essence, it means that in the last forty or so years, the Christian aspect of the holiday has vanished on screen. The best we can hope for is a positive, feel-good portrayal of the season, such as we had in Tim Allen’s The Santa Clause (1994) or Tom Hanks’ The Polar Express ten years later.
Too often, however, films have associated the Christmas season with negative or even horrific stories. Perhaps the best example of this is Silent Night, Deadly Night. This is a 1984 slasher film that begins with a young boy named Billy witnessing the murder of his parents by a man dressed as Santa Claus. Billy ends up at St. Mary’s Orphanage, where he is beaten by Mother Superior. Later, morphing memories of his punishment at her hands with images of Santa, Billy grows up to become a killer teenage Santa. At work, for example, he strangles a co-worker with Christmas lights and then dispatches the girl with whom the co-worker was having sex.
After a string of other Santa murders, Billy returns to the orphanage, with the police hot in pursuit. Tragically, they shoot and kill Father O’Brien, a deaf priest dressed as Santa. Sneaking into the orphanage, Billy, dressed as Santa, swings his ax at Mother Superior, but a policeman shoots him down. Imparting his central message, Billy assures viewers, “You’re safe now… Santa Claus… is gone.” Not exactly a happy message at Christmastime.
In 1984, such imagery was still able to rile the population. Siskel and Ebert condemned the film, going “so far as to read the film’s production credits on air, saying ‘shame, shame’ after each one.” Angry mothers protested the movie around the nation, and TriStars Pictures, its distributor, quickly ceased advertising the film.
Silent Night, Deadly Night did have antecedents. Black Christmas was a 1974 movie set in a sorority house during Christmas break. A maniac is making calls from within the house, killing the coeds one by one. The movie also takes every opportunity to pair beloved Christmas songs with chilling scenes, a phenomenon that was later repeated in Gremlins, as we will see. Another, Christmas Evil (1980), features a delusional Santa stand-in who murders three church-goers in front of a church. (He stabbed one man in the eye with a toy.) Later, while wearing a ragged Santa outfit and being chased by an angry mob, our main character drives his van off a bridge, imagining himself to be Santa in his flying sleigh.
As Austin Pearl, a Jewish reviewer, approvingly wrote, “Christmas Evil ruins Christmas unlike any other movie.” In particular, this reviewer liked “all the vividly disturbing images of Santa sprinkled throughout the movie.”
It’s no surprise that Pearl also liked the 2003 Billy Bob Thorton film Bad Santa, which was a concerted ethnic effort to trash Christmas. Jewish director Terry Zwigoff made the film under producers Ethan and Joel Coen for the Disney subsidiary Miramax, run by two more Jewish brothers, Bob and Harvey Weinstein. Billy Bob Thornton stars as the bad Santa of the title, going about his life boozing and swearing with abandon. At one point he has anal sex with an overweight woman in a changing room, while elsewhere he goes to a mall drunk and destroys a reindeer display in a drunken rage. Ho ho ho.
Near the end of this dark film, he is shot by a group of policemen but survives. Despite his obvious guilt in numerous crimes, he is pardoned because “the Phoenix police department shooting an unarmed Santa Claus in front of children was more fucked up than Rodney King.”
According to Wikipedia, critics described it as an “evil twin” of Miracle on 34th Street, the inspirational Christmas classic. No wonder Austin Pearl wrote glowingly that “Bad Santa is perhaps the most subversive, offensive Christmas movie ever made-with Thornton as a truly despicable character who, for once, does not receive a total personality transplant by the movie’s end.”
Director Zwigoff intended this film for impressionable teenagers, the vast majority of whom are, one would assume, Christians. When asked if he thought the film would do well, Zwigoff answered, “I think it might. Every teenager in America is dying to see this film. Though they won’t be able to get in unless they have a very open-minded parent.” Clearly he was aware of the film’s subversive content.
Two years later came another Jewish-directed anti-Christmas movie. The Ice Harvest, Harold Ramis’s “grisly black comedy/film-noir,” sees Billy Bob Thornton return to a mayhem-filled Christmas. One reviewer intoned that The Ice Harvest “is a must-see for fans . . . in the mood to see one of the worst Christmas Eves in the history of cinema.” Roger Ebert was also impressed. “I liked the movie for the quirky way it pursues humor through the drifts of greed, lust, booze, betrayal and spectacularly complicated ways to die.” In other words, Hollywood’s version of Merry Christmas stuff.
The Gremlins
Perhaps the most unsettling Christmas movie was the original Gremlins (1984). Though directed by Joe Dante, Steven Spielberg’s production company, Amblin Entertainment, released it. Time magazine characterized the film as being “developed and ‘presented'” by Spielberg and being one of his “children too.”
Stylistically, too, this film is completely Spielbergian, beginning with a typical suburban paradise. Snow is on the ground as local residents prepare for Christmas.
The drama begins when protagonist Billy receives a cute “mogwai” from his inventor father, but the creature spawns siblings that are far from full of holiday cheer. On the contrary, they bring violence, mayhem, and death to this otherwise happy time of year. Their mischief is methodically paired with normally positive symbols of Christmas. For instance, when Billy’s mom is home alone making Christmas cookies and listening to Christmas music, she is attacked by a squad of ghoulish gremlins, long in tooth and with murder on their minds. After stabbing one through the heart, she dispatches another with a deft push of the blender switch, turning the previously Christmas-cookie-aroma-filled kitchen into a bloodbath. Retreating to the living room, she is literally attacked by the Christmas tree, which is full of gremlins. This conflation of joyful Christian symbols with diabolical evil is a central device to the whole movie.
Another example comes when the police pass by Billy’s neighbor’s house and are greeted by the neighbor, dressed as Santa Claus, running about helplessly as gremlins eat into his brain. Next, Christmas-caroling gremlins arrive at grouchy old Miss Deagle’s door, only to send her flying out the second-floor window of her house in a malfunctioning motorized chair.
The scenes which most firmly tie this movie to a distinct Jewish sensibility, however, come with two extraneous dialogues between Billy and his girlfriend Kate. Passing a group of Christmas carolers singing “Silent Night,” Kate suddenly and soberly states that Christmas is a time when “a lot of people get really depressed. . . . While everybody else is opening up their presents, they’re opening up their wrists. It’s true. The suicide rate is always the highest around the holidays.” When she volunteers that she doesn’t celebrate Christmas, Billy asks, “What, are you Hindu or something?” Historically, the non-Christian group in America with mixed feelings toward Christmas is not Hindus, but Jews. Here the mask is in place but the true message is easily discernible.
Much later in the movie, after the gremlins have wreaked havoc on Kingston Falls, Kate launches into a startling horror story about Christmas, one that seems completely gratuitous since it is independent of the blood-thirsty gremlin theme. Surveying the rubble left by the marauding gremlins, Kate relates how she now has another reason to hate Christmas. It seems that when she was nine, she and her mother were decorating the tree on Christmas Eve, waiting for her father to come home from the office. They waited, but he never came.
Then, four or five days later, as the temperature dropped, Kate went to make a fire. “And that’s when I noticed the smell.” Thinking it was a dead cat or bird, they called the fire department to clean it out, but instead “they pulled out my father. He was dressed in a Santa Claus suit. He’d been climbing down the chimney on Christmas Eve, his arms loaded with presents. He was going to surprise us. He slipped and broke his neck, died instantly. And that’s how I found out there was no Santa Claus.”
“Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics”
Finally, we arrive at what must be the most blatantly hostile and offensive portrayal of Christmas ever found in the mainstream American media. The creators of the animated series South Park concocted a Christmas character to replace Santa. This new character is “Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo,” an animated human feces. Mr. Hankey was introduced in a 1997 episode that showed the young Jewish boy Kyle brushing his teeth. Mr. Hankey, wearing a Santa hat, jumps out of the toilet bowl and sings a song about Santa and Christmas. The starkest comment in the scene comes when this animated feces writes “Noel” in excrement on the mirror. (This early version can be viewed here.)
Two years later, the more extensive Mr. Hankey version was released as Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics. (A parallel CD of the songs includes the delightful “Merry Fucking Christmas”). Here Mr. Hankey besmirches the faces of children singing Christmas songs. He then introduces us to the next scene, Christmastime in Hell, where Hitler is shown crying over his Christmas tree. Later, when Jesus and Santa sing a duet, Santa gets miffed that there are far more songs about Jesus than about him, so he leaves the stage. When Jesus implores him to return, Santa speaks the cheery words, “Aw, fuck you, Jesus!” (Read the script here.)
This episode is a parody of the Charlie Brown Christmas Special in which everyone yells out “Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!” only after Charlie has realized the true meaning of Christmas-which has Christ at its center. In the South Park version, the characters wish Kyle a Merry Christmas only after he has taught everyone, through Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo, that Christmas and Christianity are shit.
No wonder Mr. Pearl, our Jewish reviewer, gleefully explained his motive for collecting anti-Christmas films in these terms: “It’s my wanting to recognize things that are deliberately anti-Christmas. It’s my wanting to take a big you know what on everyone’s Christmas spirit. . . . Each one of them is so anti-Christmas that I want to share them with the world, thereby forcing everyone to realize how liberating it is to rip off the Christmas mind control device and have some laughs in the process.” (Pearl provides embedded YouTube scenes of the anti-Christmas films he recommends).
Replacing Christmas with the culture of the Holocaust
Finally, this brings us to Christmas this year. More than ever, the focus will be on Jewish themes rather than Christian. As a recent New York Times article admitted, Holocaust-themed Christmas releases have been the norm for years. Sophie’s Choice, for example, debuted in December 1982, Schindler’s List was released in the same month in 1993, and The Pianist opened two days after Christmas in 2002.
This year is no different: On Christmas Day the new Tom Cruise movie Valkyrie will debut. This film features Cruise as a German officer who plots to kill Hitler, prompting Cruise to joke in an interview, “Go kill Hitler on Christmas!” We will also have Defiance and Good, two more Nazi-oriented films, which will premier a week after Christmas. Then there is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, “which tells the story of a forbidden friendship between the son of a Nazi officer and a Jewish boy imprisoned in a concentration camp.” And don’t miss The Reader, which features Kate Winslet being tried for her years as a concentration-camp guard. Finally, there is Adam Resurrected, starring Jeff Goldblum as a Holocaust survivor living in a mental institution. Perhaps we could say that the title posits the death of Jesus at Christmastime and his replacement with a Jewish resurrection.
Out with the old religion, in with the new. A friend wrote: “I’ve seen the previews for Valkyrie. Good grief! And to release it on Christmas Day – it really doesn’t get more obvious than this. Sort of like saying, ‘Don’t you realize, THIS is your new religion, not all this Jesus business!'”
Three years ago, Fox News Channel host John Gibson wrote The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought. Well, it has gotten worse than we thought. But Gibson’s parting words are still the only formula for a reversal in this war. “Those who would ban Christmas and Christians should not mistake the signs on the horizon. The Christians are coming to retake their place in the public square, and the most natural battleground in this war is Christmas. The war on Christmas is joined.”
And may the just win. Merry Christmas!
Edmund Connelly is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.
Permanent link: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Connelly-ChristmasI.html
