My views on the Jews Many people expect arguments concerning the biological reality of race to be followed with a dollop of anti-Semitism. This is because of people/organizations like the John Birch Society, Strom Thurmond, American Renaissance, David Duke, and others of their ideological ilk. However, it's my opinion that this association only holds for one of the two classes of people that aren't afraid to talk about race. I've previously said that the only ones who regularly stand up to the inevitable slur of racist are real racists and rationalists . I've gone into the many differences between these two camps before (Summary: rationalists are interested in facts, and racists are not), but I want to state that in my opinion, rationalists are not anti-Semitic. There are people on the message boards who regularly inveigh against the Jewish control of academia. Indeed, I think the one substantive claim that can be levied against the Jews as a population is that they have a lot of crazy left-wing intellectuals who like to stir things up. (Most readers already know my position on Israel - suffice to say that I support Israel in the main, if not on every detail.) But the assuredly negative effect of these intellectuals has to be balanced against the unmatched contributions of Jews to science and engineering. I mean, subtract the Jews from history and out the window goes much of mathematics and physics as we know it...along with the attendant applications that make our technological world go 'round. From their contributions to science and engineering alone, I doubt any other single population has contributed as much to the welfare of humanity as the Ashkenazi Jews. Now, I think that there are Indian and European and Asian subpopulations who can probably hang with the Jews intellectually, but the promise of future performance notwithstanding, I don't know whether these subpopulations have achieved anything comparable to the Jews. Pound for pound, perhaps the only population on earth that can match the Jews' "accomplishments per capita" are the Kalenjin of Kenya (albeit in an entirely different arena). Finally, I think much of the animosity to the Jews is really "player hating"...much as many blacks dislike whites largely because the latter have supposedly undeserved material wealth/affluence/power, many whites dislike Jews because the latter have supposedly undeserved material wealth/affluence/power. Of course, these are the inevitable features of any comparison of populations that are a standard deviation apart in IQ. Disclaimer: I am not Jewish or related by blood or marriage to Jews. Even if I was, I think the facts presented above stand for themselves independent of the qualities of the speaker. Correction: I've been advised that the Birchers and AmRen are not anti-Semitic. I shouldn't have grouped the Birchers there - their official position contains a repudiation of anti-Semitism. It's been my experience that Birch members don't always abide by the organization's precepts, but one can't well condemn an organization for the positions of some of its members. (The link I pointed out is a case in point - many wannabe-fascists are sympathetic to the Birch anti-communism stance, though this isn't Birch's fault. Look at the glowing adjectives with which the IHR writer describes life under the Third Reich...) AmRen, on the other hand, is a different matter. While 20% of AmRen writers may indeed be Jewish, I don't think that the organization is fully rational on the topic of race. I think it likely that the 80% non-Jewish contingent mutters about the 20% Jewish contingent when they aren't around...my views on Amren are here.