Monday, January 09, 2006

E. Michael Jones and the Jews

Author E. Michael Jones, publisher of Culture Wars, represents one of the foremost proponents of "religious" anti-Semitism in Catholic circles. Any normal Catholic, or conservative aware of the Church's invaluable moral leadership, will find such a connection obnoxious.

Jones has subtly disseminated his Jewish conspiracy-obsessed message to right-of-center Catholics since the late 1990s. An excellent discussion of this drift into extremism is detailed in an open letter by former Culture Wars editor John J. Reilly. Jones' shifting allegiances are all the more ironic since he claimed the moral high ground in his diatribes against traditional Catholics in the mid 90s, when his magazine Fidelity accused the latter of involvement in neo-Nazi politics. Some of the accusations were true. What is oddly amusing is that Jones tried to link traditionalists with the "holocaust revisionist" IHR (Institute for Historical Review) and only a few years later, he was a featured essayist in the Barnes Review, a spin-off of the IHR, run by racist "populist" publisher Willis Carto.

For those who really feel the need to delve into the feverish swamp of conspiracy mania, a sampling of Jones' worldview can be found in "The Revolutionary Jew and His Impact on World History" (Culture Wars, September 2003).

Jones may differ superficially from the hard-core racialist anti-Semites in that his Jewish fixation is "religious." But all this really does is to make hatred palatable to people who might have some remaining Christian scruples. It is hardly surprising that Jones' message is admired by virulent racists like the Vanguard News Network (see the post of "Shamir on the Jewish Question," reprinted from Jones' Culture Wars, September 2005). In 2004, the Catholic League issued a forthright expose of E. Michael Jones' soft-sell anti-Semitism in The Catalyst ("Playing Fast and Loose With Theology," July-August 2004).