From the Hollywood Reporter, here’s yet another example of a major trend of 2015: an ethnocentric Jewish liberal in the media getting worried about trends that he has played a role in bringing about:

Harvey Weinstein Urges Jews to Take on Anti-Semites: “Kick These Guys in the Ass” 11:49 PM PDT 3/24/2015 by Scott Feinberg, Tina Daunt “We’re gonna have to get as organized as the mafia,” the mogul told the audience at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s national tribute dinner, where he was introduced by friend and competitor Jeffrey Katzenberg as “a really nice Jewish boy.”

Like I said in my Taki’s Magazine article about the growth of the anti-Israeli BDS movement on California campuses — “Are Jews Losing Control of the Media?” — ethnocentric liberal Jews are on the fault line in 2015.

Their public ideology of Diversity and Immigration Uber Alles has never combined terribly logically with their Jewish ethnocentrism, but the contradiction wasn’t a big deal when all that mattered was guilt-tripping nice white gentiles into not noticing. But now that America and Europe are filling up with immigrants from non-guilt cultures, many of them traditionally anti-Semitic, and some of them fanatically anti-Israel, the future looks more worrisome.

“We better stand up and kick these guys in the ass,” movie mogul Harvey Weinstein said about present-day anti-Semites as he accepted the Humanitarian Award at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s National Tribute Dinner on Tuesday night at the Beverly Hilton. “We’re gonna have to get as organized as the mafia,” he continued. “We just can’t take it anymore [from] these crazy bastards.” … Weinstein, 63, then went off-script to speak about his father, who was a sergeant stationed in Cairo during World War II. The elder Weinstein aided the Haganah (the precursor to the IDF before Israel was a state) and later taught his sons about anti-Semitism. Weinstein emphasized his concern about anti-Semitism around the world, which Wiesenthal Center studies indicate is at its highest levels since the end of World War II. “I’m upset when I read The Atlantic Monthly’s headline that says, ‘Should the Jews leave Europe?’ — a resounding ‘no’ on my end — and [New York Times columnist] David Brooks today talking about how to combat anti-Semitism,” Weinstein said. “It’s like, here we go again, we’re right back where we were [before the Holocaust]. And the lessons of the past are we better stand up and kick these guys in the ass.” The co-head of The Weinstein Company continued, “I think it’s time that we, as Jews, get together with the Muslims who are honorable and peaceful — but we [also] have to go and protect ourselves. We have to build, once again, back into the breach. There’s a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s book The Sirens of Titan and it always was the motto of Miramax and now The Weinstein Company. It says, ‘Good can triumph over evil if the angels are as organized as the mafia.’ That’s how we built our company! And, unfortunately, we [Jews] are gonna have to get as organized as the mafia. We just can’t take it anymore. We just can’t take these things. There’s gotta be a way to fight back.” “While we must be understanding of our Arab brothers and our Islamic brothers,” he added, “we also have to understand that these crazy bastards [Arab and Islamic extremists] are also killing their own — they’re killing neighbors, they’re killing people from all sorts of different races. And, unlike World War II, when we didn’t act right away and we paid the price, we better start acting now. Trust me, I’m the last guy who wants to do anything about it, but I realize if we don’t, we will perish. We can’t allow the bad guys to win. So, as they say in The Godfather, ‘back to the mattresses,’ and back to the idea that we will not ever forget what happened to us.”

I had never heard the phrase “back to the mattresses” before and figured Weinstein was getting it confused with the wrestling phrase “take it to the mat.” But, no, it’s an old Italian figure of speech for going to war with a rival clan or region. Here’s Tom Hanks explaining “go to the mattresses” to Meg Ryan in “You’ve Got Mail:”

Actually, don’t watch this. I’d forgotten how lame this movie is.

[Actor Christoph] Waltz handled the actual presentation of Weinstein’s award. Calling Weinstein a man with “a heart of gold,” Waltz pointed out that the honoree has handled the distribution of a great number of films connected to Jews, Nazis and/or the Holocaust — not just Basterds, but also The Truce, Life Is Beautiful, The Reader, Sarah’s Key, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, The Imitation Game and the upcoming Woman in Gold. (He then introduced a clip from Woman in Gold — a film about an elderly Jewish woman seeking the return of artwork stolen from her family by Nazis — which opens next week.) … This year’s gathering took on a particular somber tone in the wake of the ongoing unrest in the Middle East. … Tuesday’s gala featured the surprise announcement that an additional $50 million has been raised toward construction of a sprawling Museum of Tolerance complex in Jerusalem. Katzenberg said the $50 million includes “a gift of $26 million — the largest gift in the history of the Simon Wiesenthal Center — from Dawn Arnall to name the building in memory of her late husband, Roland,” the billionaire businessman and former U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center and L.A.’s Museum of Tolerance were co-founded by the late subprime mortgage robber baron Roland Arnall, who got extra rich talking Latino immigrants into taking on high interest mortgages they couldn’t afford. I give Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide and Kerry Killinger of Washington Mutual a lot of grief, but they were really quality businessmen who were slowly seduced over to the dark side by their greed, their ambition, and modern America’s diversity mindset. In contrast, Arnall, as far as I can tell, was a pirate, the worst of the worst in making subprime mortgages into a national catastrophe.

The other bequests include “a gift of $10 million from the world-renowned philanthropist and chairman of the Milken Institute, along with his wife, Michael and Lori Milken” … The building will be surrounded by the Tikkun Olam Garden of approximately 24,000 square feet … The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with more than 400,000 member families in the United States. Its Museum of Tolerance on Pico Blvd. hosts more than 350,000 people annually, including 130,000 students. Its “Tools for Tolerance” programs have been the recipients of many awards, including the United Nations Peace and Tolerance Award. The museum also is a member of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience and part of their Immigration and Civil Rights Network Southwest Region Immigration Training Project.

So you can see the dilemma. Much of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s money originated in Roland Arnall tricking immigrant peons into ruinous loans (Arnall’s Ameriquest got fined $250,000,000 by state attorneys general, even while Congress was approving his nomination as ambassador), so immigration is good because it brings in Fresh Meat; but immigration into Europe is getting Jews murdered, so immigration is bad for the Jews.

This is hardly an insoluble dilemma, but it is disquieting to ethnocentric Jewish liberals in the media, few of whom had thought analytically about immigration before 2015. With their “huddled masses” schmaltz they’d largely succeeded in demonizing skepticism about immigration, shifting the Overton Window so far that sensible thinking about immigration security seems like Hitlerism to today’s youth of color.

But maybe media moguls have gone a little too far in hate-mongering against immigration restrictionists? Perhaps it would be more prudent to hedge their bets, to diversify their portfolios so that if it turns out that immigration needs to be restricted, they’ll have somebody to deal with.

You can see the problem in France after the anti-Semitic massacres in January, where ethnocentric liberal Jewish journalists, like Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic article cited by Weinstein, have had to make Strange New Respect pilgrimages to Marine Le Pen because the National Front is the only party that has dared to have practical policy proposals.

Anyway, Harvey’s demand that Jews “are gonna have to get as organized as the mafia” reminds me of the year when the mafia got as organized as the Anti-Defamation League. From Wikipedia:

The Italian-American Civil Rights League was formed as a political group in and around New York City in the early 1970s. Its stated goal was to combat pejorative stereotypes about Italian-Americans. The group began as the Italian American Anti-Defamation League on April 30, 1970, when approximately 30 Italian-Americans, led by Joseph Colombo, picketed the Manhattan headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They were there to protest the recent arrest of Colombo’s son, Joseph Colombo Jr., on a charge of conspiracy to melt down old U.S. silver coins … Prior to this, the senior Colombo had complained of unfair harassment of him and his family by various federal law-enforcement authorities, who alleged that Colombo was the boss of one of New York City’s five Mafia families — a charge he repeatedly denied. The 30 demonstrators who appeared at the FBI building were joined by others in successive days, and ultimately their number grew to more than 5,000. The group then adopted the name “Italian-American Civil Rights League” after Colombo’s attorney, Barry Slotnick, had suggested it. … Within two months, the organization claimed 45,000 dues-paying members, and held a large rally in Columbus Circle on June 28, 1970. The league gained further momentum when Frank Sinatra held a benefit concert in its honor at Madison Square Garden in November of that year. The group then turned its attention to what it perceived as cultural slights against Italian-Americans, using boycott threats to force Alka-Seltzer and The Ford Motor Company to withdraw television commercials the league objected to, and also got United States Attorney General John Mitchell to order the United States Justice Department to stop using the word “Mafia” in official documents and press releases. The league also secured an agreement from Al Ruddy, the producer of The Godfather, to omit the terms “Mafia” and “Cosa Nostra” from the film’s dialogue, and succeeded in having Macy’s stop selling a board game called The Godfather Game. The IACRL boycotted the Ford Motor Company because of its sponsorship of the television show The F.B.I. and its negative references to Italian-Americans as gangsters. Alka Seltzer was boycotted for its “Dat’s a Spicy Meatball” ad campaign. …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQhwNtY3N2k

Do watch this. It’s as good as you remember.