Despite the Support of North West Zionists – Tommy Robinson is Heavily Defeated in the Euro Elections

Britain’s leading neo-Nazi expresses his admiration for Israel as Britain’s Zionist establishment keeps quiet

Can anyone put a name to these Orthodox Jewish scumbag supporters of Tommy Robinson?

In an excellent result in the NW England Constituency, Tommy Robinson gained little more than 2% of the vote, forfeiting his deposit. The working class of Manchester and Liverpool and the Lancashire mill towns rejected this foul fascist and Zionist and his racist politics.

However this did not prevent many Zionists from giving Robinson their support and votes on the basis of his support for Israel’s ethno-nationalist state.  It is no surprise that someone who is a by-word for racism should find Zionism so attractive and equally it is no surprise that so many Zionists find Tommy Robinson attractive.

One of his main supporters is Avi Yemini, a neo-Nazi supporting Australian Zionist who has a blog on The Times of Israel. [See e.g. Why I’m proud to be a ‘F**king Jew]’ Yemini has been running  Robinson election campaign.

The Israeli settler news agency Arutz Sheva led with its story ‘UK Orthodox Jews mobilize for Tommy Robinson’ which reported that ‘A group of British Orthodox Jews’ had launched a ‘mass outreach campaign’ in support of Tommy Robinson. Thousands of flyers were distributed throughout Manchester calling on "our fellow Orthodox Jews" to vote for Robinson and calling Robinson "a staunch friend of our people".

Tommy Robinson  on top of an Israeli tank

Tommy Robinson in an IDF shirt

These Orthodox Zionists asked their supporters to "Please open your hearts and consider giving your vote to Tommy Robinson’  Arutz Sheva revealed that many UK voters were afraid of losing their jobs if it were made public that they support Robinson. The Zionist flyer explained to fellow Jews that

"We all know that in the last few years England has become unrecognisable from the decent country we grew up in… Who among us has not reacted in horror as each month brings new levels of moral decline and self-destruction in the name of 'diversity' and 'human rights'?

This is what Zionism has become.  An echo chamber for all that the fascists used to say about Jewish immigrants. Manchester was one of the main centres of Jewish immigration. The flyer continued

‘how long will we wring our hands helplessly, our activists trying to do their best, while the country carries on this awful march to the worst places, led by foolish, corrupt, 'educated' leaders?"

The Board of Deputies President Marie van der Zyl issued a statement condemning the Zionist campaign supporting Robinson saying that ‘"anti-Muslim propaganda will never gain support of the mainstream Jewish community" Unfortunately that is not true.  

Anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiments are the staple of Zionist propaganda.  Every time criticism is made of Israel’s human rights abuses, the standard retort of the Board of Deputies is to shout ‘Hamas’ with the suggestion that all Palestinians are somehow Muslim fundamentalists. 

It was the Board of Deputies who last summer justified and supported the mowing down of unarmed demonstrators in Gaza last summer using Hamas as the pretext.  All those mowed down, all the thousands shot by Israel were held to be Islamists.  Marie van der Zyl is a racist hypocrite.

Nearly two years ago, Arutz Sheva, which functions as the Israeli mouthpiece for the openly fascist wing of British Zionism spoke of ‘Fear and loathing grip England Jewish establishment over meeting attended by twelve private citizens.’  

At the same time, Robert Festenstein, a far-Right solicitor who is the founder and sole member of the misnamed Jewish Human Rights Watch, whose purpose is to ensure that Palestinians don’t gain access to human rights, was forced to issue a statement that Tommy Robinson is not his client after having appeared in a propaganda video for Robinson. 

Festenstein is also a member of the Board of Deputies.  See:  Independent letter to Jews in the North West of England: Vote for Tommy Robinson

Brian of London and his friend, David Collier

Tommy Robinson has a strong support base amongst Britain’s Zionists.  E.g. Brian of London, with whom people like David Collier, the so-called independent investigator and Jonathan Hoffman, former Vice-President of the Zionist Federation and a member of the current Zionist Council, keep company.

See Tommy Robinson visited Israel: A response to the Jewish Chronicle’s attack

According to the Guardian Robinson’s former employer Rebel Media said this week that it had paid for Avi Yemini to fly from Melbourne to cover his campaign. See Australian Israeli Jew Avi Yemini campaigns with Tommy Robinson to be MEP for North West England.  Yemini was recently denied entry to the US. He has described Islam as a “barbaric ideology” that has taken over England and called Muslim countries “Islamic shitholes”. Yemini is little known in the UK but has been ever-present at Robinson’s rallies, often as a warm-up act on stage.

Lisa Barbounis

Another person heavily involved in Robinson’s campaign is Lisa Barbounis a senior executive of the conservative US think tank the Middle East Forum. She has been present at many of his rallies. Barbounis has worked on several Republican campaigns including John McCain’s run for president in 2008. She has been on Robinson’s campaign for about a fortnight. The Philadelphia-based group, which is well funded by a number of US rightwing donors, says its goal is to defend “anti-Islamist authors” and last year spent tens of thousands of pounds on Robinson’s demonstrations and legal fees when he was jailed for contempt of court.

Yemini is friendly with a variety of neo-Nazis. See Australia’s Jews Against Fascism expose ‘7+ Times Avi Yemini consorted with Neo-Nazis’ on the willingness of Yemini to work with prominent neo-Nazis.  As JAF say ‘Avi Yemini is a useful idiot in the endless soap opera that is Australia’s far-right melodrama.’

Erikson (third from left)

They give 7 examples of the neo-Nazis that this Zionist workers with:

1.           Neil Erikson

Cottrell middle

2.           Blair Cottrell / United Patriots Front. Cottrell’s  belief that “There should be a picture of this man [Adolf Hitler] in every classroom and every school, and his book should be issued to every student annually” doesn’t prevent Yemini working with him.

3.           Milo Yiannopolous and Avi Yemini – Milo Yiannopolous was the assistant Editor at Brietbart News, the far-Right and anti-Semitic magazine of the alt-Right and Steve Bannon in the United States until Yiannopolous’s advocacy of paedophilia became too much even for his far-Right backers. He is an open supporter of Jewish conspiracy theories.

4.           Then there are the Soldiers of Odin and Avi Yemini. Soldiers of Odin was founded in Finland by neo-Nazi Mika Ranta (criminal convictions for racist assaults), and is an offspring of the Nordic Resistance Movement. Avi Yemini met with Soldiers of Odin to garner their support. He made them a promo video for their efforts:

Tommy Sewell attending Yemini's make Victorial safe again

5.           Tom Sewell / The Lad’s Society / Antipodean Resistance and Avi Yemini The Lad’s society is a neo-Nazi spin off from the United Patriots Front). It is brainchild of Thomas Sewell, a faithful servant of Blair Cottrell.

6.           Chris Shortis / Australia First & Avi Yemini Chris Shortis says he is definitely not a Nazi, just a national socialist!! Perhaps someone will tell him that Nazi is simply short for ‘national socialist’!! Shortis (now ex-UPF) is member of Jim Saleam’s little Nazi mob, the Australia First Party. He is an online antisemitic ranter, Jewish conspiracy theorist, all round Christian extremist, with the usual multiple interests of day-to-day neo-Nazis at the minute. When Shortis got charged (and convicted) for racial vilification along with Blair Cottrell and Neil Erikson, Avi Yemini showed up to the court to shake Chris Shortis’ hand:

Moger making white power signs

7.           Stuart von Moger / Lad’s Society / Antipodean Resistance & Avi Yemini. Stuart von Moger has been lurking around the neo-Nazi Lad’s Society, now indistinguishable from its youth wing Antipodean Resistance, since it’s inception. Von Moger is second from left in the earlier photo in this article of the Lads celebrating Hitler’s birthday. Below (top) he is photographed making ‘White Power’ hand signals with fascist Lauren Southern, alongside mates from Lad’s Society and Antipodean Resistance. Stuart and Lad’s Society Nazis provided security for the event. Below (bottom) he is photographed with Blair Cottrell and Tom Sewell at the Milo Yiannopolous event, which, as noted, Avi Yemini attended/promoted.

In 2018 when neo-Nazi as well as the full spectrum of far right groups took over the German town of Chemnitz, chanting Nazi era slogans such as “luegenpresse” and other Nazi slogans, doing Hitler salutes, spreading moral panics and inspiring vigilantism. They were clearly using these protests to build a neo-Nazi movement. Yemini lept to their defence:

punch a Nazi 

However despite all this finance and support from an international Zionist/neo-Nazi network Robinson flopped badly tonight!

Zionism is and always has been a Jewish form of Anti-Semitism

Steve Bannon to Speak at Annual Zionist Organization of America Gala: 'He's So pro-Israel'

Steve Bannon is Donald Trump’s former Strategic Advisor, once the most powerful man in the White House after Trump himself.  Having been fired he has gone back to edit the far-right Breitbart News, house magazine of America’s White Supremacist Alt-Right.  Bannon perhaps more than any other figure represented all that is toxic in Trump’s Administration – the racism, the misogyny and bigotry.

It is also clear that Trump was loathe to dismiss Bannon and he only did so only because his new Chief of Staff, General John Kelly, insisted on it as the ‘globalists’ (for which read military hawks and  imperialists) isolated the ‘economic nationalists’.

The disputes between one set of warmongers and another are unimportant.  Both  factions are equally despicable.  What is of note however is how Bannon has been adopted by the Zionists, in particular the Zionist Organisation of America headed by Mort Klein.

Last year the ZOA also invited Bannon but a large Jewish demonstration, led by Jewish Voices for Peace and IfNotNow, two left-wing anti-Zionist Jewish organisations, led him to stay away. Despite this ZOA have renewed their invitation to Bannon for thisyear's gala dinner.

What one wonders are the attractions of Bannon and the movement he represents to the Zionists. It is barely in dispute that Breitbart is a sewer of racism, misogyny and bigotry with articles such as that by Milo Yiannopoulos, a former Associate Editor, Does Feminism Make Women Ugly?

Yiannopoulous, before he was forced to resign as a result of his advocacy of paedophilia was, despite his half-Jewish parentage, a died in the wool anti-Semite.  In an interview with David Rubin he explained how “Like the Jews run everything. Well we do. The Jews run all the banks. Well we do. The Jews run the media. Well we do. You know they’re right about all that stuff.”  Yiannopoulos insisted that Jewish control over finance and the media is “not in debate,” explaining that “Jews completely dominate the media. Vastly disproportionately represented in all of these professions. That’s just a fact, it’s not anti-Semitic to point out statistics.”

Milo Yiannopoulous

It is quite understandable that Yiannopoulous was looked on favourably at Breitbart given the views of his Bannon himself.  Bannon’s former wife, Mary Louise Piccard, testified during her 2007 divorce proceedings that Bannon didn’t want his children going to school with ‘whiny Jews’ and complained that there were too many Jewish students at the elite Archer School for Girls.

“The biggest problem he had with Archer is the number of Jews that attend,” Bannon’s ex-wife said.   The  comments were first reported by the New York Daily News.

“He said that he doesn’t like the way they raise their kids to be ‘whiny brats’ and that he didn’t want the girls going to school with Jews,” Piccard wrote.

Bannon complained that another elite school had too “many Hanukkah books” in its library. [Steve Bannon Didn’t Want Children Going to School With ‘Whiny’ Jews, Forward 14.11.16.]  See also Will Steve Bannon Be the Anti-Semitic Firebrand in Donald Trump’s Inner Circle?, Forward Staff November 14, 2016

But if Bannon and Breitbart are anti-Semitic and supporters of White Supremacism they are also ardently pro-Zionist and pro-Israel.

Liberal Zionist papers like Forward found this hard to understand and there were articles, subsequent to Trump’s election asking how this could be.  Zionists who had spent the best part of their lives equating ‘anti-Semitism’ and anti-Zionism found it a shock that you could be ardently pro-Israel and Zionist  and still dislike Jews.    

Naomi Zeveloff  almost seemed to be in shock as she explained that ‘though it would seem impossible to hate Jews but love the Jewish state, these two viewpoints are not as contradictory as they appear.’  She interviewed Steven M. Cohen, a sociologist at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, who explained to her that ‘There is actually “little correlation” between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, according To be sure, anti-Semitism is found among the anti-Zionist left. But it is also found among the Zionist right’  

You could almost see the scales falling from Zeveloff's eyes as Cohen told her that ‘many people who dislike Jews like Israel and many people who are critical toward Israel are affectionate toward Jews,”  This was clearly not what she had been brought up to believe.  [How Steve Bannon and Breitbart News Can Be Pro-Israel — and Anti-Semitic at the Same Time, Forward 15.11.16.]

Steve Bannon - racist, anti-Semitic but ardently pro-Zionist

To those of us who are longstanding anti-Zionists this is nothing new.  Historically Zionists and anti-Semites have got on like a house on fire, even if it was Jews who did the burning.  From Theodor Herzl, with his trip to see von-Plehve, the author of the Kishinev pogroms in Russia to Ze’ev  Jabotinsky, who allied with the White Russian leader, Petlyura who had up to ¼ million Jewish deaths on his hands, Zionists have always found a strategic ally in anti-Semites.  The collaboration between Zionism and Nazism was not an aberration.  On the contrary it was simply a continuation of this historic relationship.

Why is this the case?  Primarily because Zionism began as a separatist reaction to anti-Semitism which accepted the terms of debate that the anti-Semites set.  Zionis began from the premise that anti-Semitism couldn't be fought, the non-Jews were inherently anti-Semitic and therefore you had to come to terms with them.  The anti-Semites said that the Jews didn’t belong and the Zionists agreed.  

Mort Klein of the Zionist Organisation of America - has no problem working with neo-Nazis and anti-Semites as long as they are Zionists

The anti-Semites were more than happy to support Zionism.  Indeed they were often passionate about the fact that Jews should go to Palestine.  In Poland and elsewhere in Europe anti-Semites demonstrated with the chant 'Jews to Palestine' just as today Israeli Jews chant 'Death to the Arabs.'  The belief that Jews belonged in Palestine, not the countries of their birth, was the fundamental basis of their agreement and sometimes, if you didn’t know who was speaking, it could either be a Zionist or an anti-Semite. 

To take but 3 examples Israel’s first Justice Minister, Pinhas Rosenbluth described Palestine as ‘an institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin’.[1] Chaim Weizmann, the longstanding President of the World Zionist Organisation and 1^st President of Israel  described German Jewish refugees as ‘the germ-carriers of a new outbreak of anti-Semitism.’[2] Jacob Klatzkin, editor of Die Welt and co-founder of the Encyclopedia Judaica, held that Jews were ‘a people disfigured in both body and soul - in a word, of a horror… some sort of outlandish creature… in any case, not a pure national type.... some sort of oddity among the peoples going by the name of Jew.' [3]

When Bannon was appointed, the Anti-Defamation League, a thoroughly Zionist group initially spoke out against the appointment but the major pro-Israel lobby group, AIPAC, kept quiet and refused to say anything.  The Zionist Organisation of America, which boasted Alan Dershowitz as a guest at its last dinner, has welcomed Bannon, despite (or maybe because of?) his anti-Semitism.

Sebastian Gorka

Their PR adviser, Arthur Schwartz, wrote "we're honored to have him as a guest."  His tweet was quoted by Sebastian Gorka, another former Trump adviser who was dismissed from the White House and like Bannon, is close to the American far right. "Can't wait," Gorka wrote. "Thank you to Mort Klein and all his team. Patriots, all."  

Gorka has been a life lmember and adviser to far-Right anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi Hungarian groups.  Other speakers at the ZOA dinner alongside Bannon will be American ambassador to Israel David Friedman and former Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman.

“Steve is one of the best friends that Israel has had in any administration,” claimed Schwartz.  Also on the guest list is Gorka.  Vanity Fair described how Gorka was a member of Vitézi Rend, a far-right Hungarian military organization that supported the Nazis during World War II and how he wore a medal honoring the group to an inauguration party.  Gorka defended the group as historically anti-Communist, which of course could be said for any neo-Nazi group. “First I am an Islamophobe, then I’m an anti-Semite, then I am a fascist. Next I am going to be a Martian, you know, subversive,” he said to The Telegraph, calling himself a political victim.

Although Bannon and Gorka are welcomed by Zionist organisations in the United States Jewish anti-Zionist and socialist groups can be expected to demonstrate outside the ZOA’s annual gala dinner come November.

Tony Greenstein

---

[1]           1. Joachim Doron, p.169, ‘Classic Zionism and modern anti-Semitism: parallels and influences’ (1883-1914), Studies in Zionism 8, Autumn 1983.

[2]           2.  Edwin Black, p.259, The Transfer Agreement, citing Palestine Post 5.7.33.

[3]           3.  Arthur Herzberg, The Zionist Idea, p. 322/323, Temple, Atheneum, New York 1981.

The Dilemma of America’s Liberal Jewish Zionists

White Zionism – Why The ‘Alt-Right’ Hates Jews But Loves Israel

It has become almost an apocryphal tale of America’s liberal Zionists and their PEP (Progressive Except for Palestine) attitudes.  America’s Jews generally support liberal politics and the vast majority of them voted against Donald Trump.  Why?   Because racial intolerance and bigotry aren’t in their interest.  They know enough to know that anti-Semitism and white supremacism have always gone hand in hand.

Netanyahu is so enthralled by Trump that he even adopts his language style

The problem though is that the majority of them, even today, support to a greater or lesser extent the State of Israel.  The State of Israel is not a liberal haven but the bastion of a far-Right openly racist government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu.  Netanyahu it was who tweeted to Donald Trump that Israel had already built a wall to keep out asylum seekers.  He was referring to the wall across the border with Egypt to keep out African refugees.  Netanyahu explained that non-Jewish refugees, especially Black Africans, explained that ‘"If we don't stop their entry, the problem that currently stands at 60,000 could grow to 600,000, and that threatens our existence as a Jewish and democratic state," Israel PM: illegal African immigrants threaten identity of Jewish state

So when Rabbi Rosenberg, who heads the Zionist organisation for students, Hillel at Texas A&M told Richard Spencer of the alt-Right that “My tradition teaches a message of radical inclusion and love,” Spencer responded by asking how radical this inclusion was.  Maybe all of the Middle East could come to Tel Aviv he asked mischievously.  The good Rabbi was more than aware that Israel is anything but inclusive.  It hasn’t taken a single Syrian refugee.  It refuses to give citizenship to any of the thousands of migrant labourers from Asia.  It even prevents its own Palestinian citizens from marrying anyone in the West Bank.  And of course in order to ensure that the Jewish race maintains its ‘identity’ and purity, there is no religious marriage either.

The good rabbi was literally stunned into silence - he had no answer.  How could he support segregation and the racist Law of Return when it came to Israel but support liberal immigration policies and anti-racist in America.  He simply had no answer to this dilemma and the writer of the article has no answer either.

It is not any wonder that Israel  presents a model to most of the American far-Right, just as it is a model for most of the European far-Right?  Of course there are dedicated neo-Nazis like Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer for whom any Jew is an enemy.  But Anglin and fully blown neo-Nazism represents a minority current within the American alt-Right.  For those like Spencer and Breitbart News, anti-Semitism and dislike of Jews co-exists quite happily with strong support for Israel.  Israel is not only the ideal pure racial state but it is also the hammer of Muslims.  The fact that it is Jewish is neither here nor there.

Below is another anguished article in the Jewish Forward magazine, which is finding it hard to come to terms with the fact that the alt-Right which has come into the political mainstream thanks to Trump, combines both love of Israel and a dislike and worse of ordinary Jews.  It proves though once again that being an anti-Semite is no barrier to being a Zionist. 

Milo Yiannopoulos

That is why people like Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos former senior editor of Breitbart, who has openly said that Jews control the media and the banks, call themselves White Zionists.  Israel provides the perfect model for white supremacists (who like Jewish supremacists call themselves nationalists).   Hence why Spencer says that his ‘white “homeland,” he said, would be “very similar to how Jews conceive of Israel.”

That of course is why those who claim there is any correlation between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are either outright liars or mainstream fools (or both).

Tony Greenstein

The ‘Alt-Right’ Hates the Jews. But It Also Loves Them — and Israel.

Sam KestenbaumJanuary 16, 2017Illustration by Kurt Hoffman

When Rabbi Matt Rosenberg went to a speech presented by one of the country’s leading white nationalists, he hoped to make a statement about the power of Judaism. During a question-and-answer session after the talk, Rosenberg, who heads Hillel at Texas A&M, asked Richard Spencer, the self-styled ambassador of the “alt-right,” whether the two could sit down and study together.

“My tradition teaches a message of radical inclusion and love,” Rosenberg said. “Will you sit town and learn Torah with me, and learn love?”

“Do you really want radical inclusion into the State of Israel?” Spencer asked, a smile spreading across his face. “And by that I mean radical inclusion. Maybe all of the Middle East could go move into Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Would you really want that?”

Rosenberg fell silent. Spencer did not. He went on, saying the Jewish people have prevailed because they resist assimilation — and he respected that.

“Jews exist precisely because you did not assimilate,” he said. “I respect that about you. I want my people to have that same sense of themselves.” The two men were speaking about different Jewish paradigms: Jews as nation versus Jews as citizens of the world. One of them Spencer praised; the other he sneered at.

New Face: White nationalist and leading ‘alt-right’ figure Richard Spencer addresses a crowd at Texas A&M University in December.

To be sure, the “alt-right,” a contemporary label preferred by white separatists, traffics in xenophobia and nativism of all sorts, including anti-Semitism. Jews are hardly its only, or most prominent, target, but the specter of imagined Jewish control, in which Jews seek to undermine white civilization, is a constant boogeyman.

Yet messages like Spencer’s at Texas A&M reveal another layer of this latest brand of white nationalism. Spencer says his dream of building a “white ethno-state” is “very similar to how Jews conceive of Israel.” He even describes his vision as something like “white Zionism.”

Spencer’s complicated relationship with Jews is illustrative. In the sprawling and divided world of the “alt-right” there are multiple factions. All groups imagine whites as an embattled group, whose white power and control is under threat from non-whites. But they are divided on the next part: Are Jews an enemy to the white nation, a model to emulate, or some combination?

In a glossy promotional video for Spencer’s organization, the National Policy Institute, a pro-Israel march flashes across the screen as Spencer reads aloud, “At a time when every other people is asserting its own [identity]… are we ready to become who we are?”

‘Jesus Christ Was A Jewish Klansman.’

Spencer isn’t the first white separatist to hold seemingly contradictory views on the Jews. Earlier white supremacists like the Ku Klux Klan had a similar love-hate relationship; Spencer and his cohort are building on these foundations.

In a 1926 tract on “religious and patriotic ideals,” one KKK-affiliated minister praised Jews as “a wonderful people,” particularly the way in which they have maintained the “purity of their racial blood, refusing to intermarry with other races.”

White Terror: Hooded Ku Klux Klan members meet, circa 1920. One leader of the white supremacist group praised Jews for being ‘Klannish since the days of Abraham,’ even as Jews were denounced as ‘an evil influence.’

The minister, a Texan named W. C. Wright, called Jesus Christ a Klansman — because he “belonged to the oldest Klan in existence, the Jewish theocracy.”

In Wright’s imagination, Jesus promoted a type of Jewish supremacy — just as the KKK fought for white supremacy. “Jews have been Klannish since the days of Abraham,” Wright wrote.

When the Ku Klux Klan Loved the Jews       Sam Kestenbaum

Even an Imperial Wizard of the KKK’s heyday had praise, of sorts, for Jews. Alabama-born Hiram Wesley Evans, who presided over the KKK in the 1920s, called Jews “healthy, morally alert, energetic, loyal and reverent.”

But there always has been — and still is — a flipside to this admiration of the Jews.

In 1923 address titled “The Menace of Modern Immigration,” Evans called Jews “alien and inassimilable,” a breed of people who demonstrated an “evil influence.”

“There [was] admiration but also a nervousness about what Jews mean for larger national culture,” Kelly J. Baker, author of “Gospel According to the Klan,” told the Forward. “They were saying: ‘We can admire that they have not assimilated, that they have stayed separate — and immediately follow it, ‘But I think they are primarily evil.’”

‘I Began Rethinking Everything.’

Years ago, before his David Duke affiliations, “Hail Trump” Nazi salutes and rise to fame amid the campaign of Donald Trump, Spencer attended elite private schools in Dallas. Some of his classmates and friends were Jewish.

“The Jews were the kids that told me Santa Claus wasn’t real. They were kind of nerdy and little different,” Spencer said. “I didn’t have any major problems with them.”

Spencer didn’t reflect too much on Jewishness or on race at all.

Kurt Hoffman

He was a dedicated student, and in 2005, Spencer entered a doctoral program at Duke University, studying European intellectual history.

But he dropped out, his website reads, “to pursue a life of thought-crime.”

He had flirted with far-right ideology, but in the next years he would make a more dramatic shift. “I knew there was something wrong with the world,” Spencer told the Forward. “I began rethinking everything.”

In 2010 he founded a website called AlternativeRight.com and around the same time took the helm at the NPI think-tank, which is “dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States.”

Among his influences he cites Jared Taylor, the white nationalist editor of the website American Renaissance, which describes itself as the “premier race-realist site” on the internet. An early mentor of Spencer’s, Paul Gottfried, the inventor of the term “alternative right,” is Jewish and is a graduate of Yeshiva University.

Taylor describes himself as a “white advocate,” but he has made clear that he has no problem working with Jews; one time, he even banned discussion of the so-called “Jewish question” from online forums associated with American Renaissance.

And Spencer has said he respects some Jewish nationalists, including the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.

“I would say, if I were to have a beer with Netanyahu I bet we would agree on everything. I think we would see eye to eye,” Spencer said. “If I had a beer with Jon Stewart, he would be horrified and I would be annoyed.”

Spencer’s “white ethno state” is his long-term goal. It’s just a dream, he says, and he’s not sure how to get there. But he evokes the success of the Zionist project. His white “homeland,” he said, would be “very similar to how Jews conceive of Israel.”

Theodor Herzl conceived of his Jewish state as a solution to the imperiled condition of Jews in the Diaspora. Herzl and his cohort feared that something catastrophic was on the horizon. The horrors of the Holocaust — millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis — were the heinous culmination of European anti-Semitism. The mass killing helped galvanize support for the Jewish national project in the Middle East.

‘Alt Right’ Model? Members of the pre-state Haganah defense movement gather at Kibbutz Brenner in British Mandate of Palestine in 1938.

Israel’s founding document, its Declaration of Independence, while declaring the country a Jewish state, also made a “striking embrace of all peoples and religions,” said Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University.

“It would be difficult to square that with the notion of a white nation,” Sarna said. “That is the very opposite of what the white nationalists want.”

For “alt-right” members who see Zionism in a positive light of sorts, it may have little to do with the country of Israel itself.

“For a lot of people, Israel is a Rorschach test,” Sarna said. “What they see in Israel tells us more about them than it does about Israel.”

Spencer compares himself to pre-state Zionist thinkers, seeing his role as a dreamer — not necessarily as someone who would build his whites-only nation, but one who would lay conceptual groundwork for a state.

“A similar thing could be said of Jews. Jews were imagining Zionism there is a Jewish state in the Middle East,” Spencer said in a radio interview with the website Reveal. “You have to dream it before you build it.” he said, trying his hand at a very Herzlian-sounding mantra.

There “is often talk about ‘Zionism’ as being a horrible evil that intends to take over the world,” author Brett Stevens wrote in August on the website Alternative-right.blogpost.com, “forgetting that Zionism is an assertion of Nationalism — the idea that Jews need their own state, and all Jews belong there, where they can control their destiny and live according to their ways.”

‘There Are Two Alt-Rights.’

Still, Spencer’s admiration for Jews is mixed with repulsion — particularly the belief that Jews have played a negative and outsize role in the decline of white civilization. And this attitude can be found across the contemporary white nationalist camp, which is beset with internecine disputes.

He calls the so-called “Jewish question” (or “JQ,” in contemporary “alt-right” lingo) among the most “complicated and difficult” topics for white nationalists. The term “Jewish question” of course is best known for its use in Nazi Germany, where leaders gathered on the shores of Lake Wannsee outside Berlin to plan the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe.”

He sees some liberal Jews, like the Texan rabbi, as “duplicitous,” presenting their case in “gooey, universalistic” terms. “I think it is easy to understand black crime, illegal immigrants, that’s in your face,” Spencer said. “But the Jewish question is extremely complicated.”

Indeed, the question of just how the “alt-right” should relate to Jews is a frequent fault line among Spencer’s followers and fellow travelers.

In December, the divergent views of the “alt-right” on Jews came to a head after online personality Tim Treadstone (better known as “Baked Alaska”) was booted from an upcoming “alt-right” inauguration event called the Deploraball after a series of tweets he wrote about the media being “run in majority by Jewish people.”

“Alt-right” personality Mike Cernovich, the event’s organizer, was worried that Treadstone’s anti-Semitism would undermine the growing political influence of the “alt-right” after Trump’s win. “No Nazi salutes, no JQ bullshit,” Cernovich wrote privately to Treadstone, scolding him and removing him from the event bill shortly thereafter. Paul Joseph Watson, an editor of the conspiracist website Infowars, which is also associated with the “alt-right,” described the “two ‘alt-rights.’”

One likes to wear Trump hats, “create memes & have fun,” he wrote in a public Facebook post. “The other faction likes to fester in dark corners of subreddits and obsess about Jews, racial superiority and Adolf Hitler.”

‘At The End Of The Day, We Are Very Different.’

The most fiercely anti-Jew faction of the “alt-right” may be best personified in Andrew Anglin, who runs the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer.

In the ongoing battle for the trajectory of the “alt-right” movement, Anglin has offered his views bluntly: “The goal is to ethnically cleanse white nations of nonwhites and establish an authoritarian government. Many people also believe that the Jews should be exterminated.”

Troll King: Andrew Anglin, founder and editor of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website, has called for the ‘extermination’ of Jews.

And unlike Spencer, Anglin has no admiration for Israel or Zionism. He cheers terrorist attacks against Israelis, laments the special U.S.-Israel relationship and sees in that relationship an expression of ultimate Jewish power. Anglin’s website has billed itself as the “The World’s Most Visited ‘Alt-Right’ Website” and features stories on alleged Jewish world control and black-on-white crime. Anglin has mounted numerous online campaigns — dubbed “troll storms” — against Jewish public figures. (The attacks have provocative titles, like “Operation: Jew Wife” or “Operation: Filthy Jew Bitch.”)

Anglin’s most recent campaign calls for an armed march against local Jews in Whitefish, Montana, where Spencer lives part time. Montana is among the country’s whitest states and has a minuscule Jewish population; however, the Whitefish area is a Jewish hub of sorts, home to a community of more than 100 families and individuals.

Anglin’s anti-Jewish campaign is in response to local activism against white nationalism and Spencer in particular. But Anglin sees Spencer and his family as the true victims: the Jews, the persecutors.

“The Jewish relationship to the goyim in this country has for decades resembled a man lying on the ground and being kicked in the head. Well, the goyim are standing up,” Anglin — who said he no longer speaks with any Jew on the telephone — wrote in an email to the Forward.

Spencer and Anglin agree on a lot. Spencer imagines the Whitefish Jews as people who have “set up left-wing organizations on their behalf,” perpetually “alien” to the world they live in. Spencer said he appreciates Anglin’s support.

But Spencer has also called for the Whitefish fiasco to “come to an end.”

In his Forward interview, Spencer said he hoped to spend the next weeks around Washington, possibly working on a short documentary. He had no plans to be in Whitefish for the march, building his own movement.

While Anglin rants against Jewish control in rural Montana, Spencer wants to build his “white Zionism” in D.C.

Within the broad category of the “alt-right,” you have people who have “genocidal views and people who have views of admiration, both of which are based on stereotypes,” said Chip Berlet, an independent researcher of white supremacy.

“In the minds of some people, Jews are either exceptionally talented or in league with Satan,” Berlet said. “It’s a love-hate relationship.”

“Clearly there has been a Jewish role in white dispossession,” Spencer said in his Forward interview, echoing Anglin and others. “But the ‘alt-right’ can learn something from Jewish history.”

How, exactly? “We can build networks that are national and international,” Spencer said.

Then he added, “We can also be a bit duplicitous.”