IHR Christmas Gathering A Huge Success
The Institute for Historical Review’s fifth annual Christmas party was held in the organization’s offices in Orange County, California. Socializing, a potluck supper and four talks filled a pleasant evening of fellowship and friendship.
IHR Director Mark Weber led off with a review of the past year. The IHR held nine meetings, including one in Virginia, this year with a roster of distinguished speakers, including Professor Tom Sunic and British lawyer Adrian Davies. The IHR maintains an active website . Mr. Weber has given numerous interviews with the U.S. and international press and has spoken at several meeting in Europe, including an enthusiastic reception at the London Forum. The IHR has produced a number of important videos and has increased its distribution of books.
Injecting fairness and reasoned historical commentary is the IHR’s role, he said. “If the U.S. judged Israel by the same standards we hold Afghanistan and Serbia to, we’d be sending bombers to Tel Aviv.”
Attorney Bill Halsey represented the IHR in the turbulent 1980s and 1990s, when their conferences were under attack by the radical terroristic Jewish Defence League (JDL). Venues were cancelled because of terror threats. The IHR’s offices were bombed and a warehouse filled with revisionist books destroyed, he recalled. The two main JDL culprits died in prison (on other charges), he noted. Mr. Halsey recalled how Congressman John Schmitz , an outspoken conservative on whose campaign he had worked, came to an IHR meeting and vouched for them to a frightened hotel owner, thus saving 
their conference. “All the IHR has ever tried to do is bring ‘history’ in tune with the facts,” he concluded.
Paul Fromm, the Director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression, discussed the attack on Christmas. This feast, he noted, “is among the most welcoming and inclusive, in the good sense of the word. The vast majority of Americans and Canadians celebrate Christmas, most as a religious event, but many who are not religious celebrate it as a cultural event as well. Yet, most government officials and many conformist businesses avoid the word and feel they must substitute ‘Seasons Greetings’ or ‘Happy Holidays’, as if the word Christmas itself was an obscenity.”
The fact is, he added, the word “Christmas” is an obscenity for militant Jews who have led the assault over the past six decades, Mr. Fromm explained. The attack on Christmas is the result of growing Jewish media and cultural influence in the past 70 or so years.
Quoting Edmund Connelly’s writings on the subject in Occidental Quarterly (2008), Mr. Fromm said: “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. “
He then referenced work by historian Michael Hoffman III: “Christmas is a problematic time for Orthodox rabbis and their followers since it celebrates the birth of the Jesus they hate. The rabbinic term for Christmas Eve is Nittel Nacht, a night they regard as accursed. There is a rabbinic tradition of refraining from marital relations on Nittel Nacht. According to Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism, to conceive a child on Nittel Nacht will result in the birth of either an apostate or a pimp.
The most prominent rabbinic custom commonly observed on Christmas Eve is to abstain from “Torah” (Talmud) study. There is an anxiety that one’s Talmud study may unwillingly serve as merit for Jesus’ soul, corresponding to the teaching that Talmud study gives respite to the souls of all the wicked. Refraining from Talmud study on Nittel Nacht also serves as a sign of mourning corresponding to the rabbinic belief that Jesus “was a false messiah who deceived Israel, worshipped a brick, practiced the magic he learned in Egypt and was born of a harlot who conceived while she was niddah (menstruating).”
There is a Talmudic custom of eating garlic on Nittel Nacht. The reason for this is attributed to the odor of the garlic which is reputed to repel the demonic soul of Jesus, which is supposed to wander on Christmas Eve like Scrooge’s dead partner Marley (cf. the rabbinic text Nitei Gavriel Minhagei Nittel). Another widespread rabbinic custom in Orthodox Judaism is to make toilet paper on Christmas Eve, a practice made popular among Hasidic Judaics by the Chiddushei Harim (cf. Reiach Hasade 1:17).
Contrast these grostesque Nittel Nacht mockeries from the lowest septic tank in hell, with the heavenly story of the Holy Family in Bethlehem — the radiant Virgin and child, humble shepherds, and angels offering glad tidings of peace on earth to men of good will. Frankly, there is no comparison between Talmudic Judaism and true Christianity, and those who attempt to assert that Christianity has ecumenical similarities with the religion of the Talmud, are more deluded than the degraded practitioners of Nittel Nacht themselves.”
Again, quoting Edmund Connelly, Mr. Fromm noted: “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. 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.”
The first wave of the assault on Christmas, occurred from the late 1930s to the 1960s, Mr. Fromm explained. In 1934, at the urging of his wife Israel Itkovitz (better known as Eddie Cantor) wrote Santa Claus is Coming to Town. Jule Steyn, a Jewess from Bethnall Green in London, England, wrote the song Let It Snow, and Ivring Berlin, in the late 1940s, wrote the iconic White Christmas. “Now, there is nothing in and of themselves wrong about these songs. They celebrate the externals of the Christmas time, but neatly avoid the core meaning — the birth of Jesus Christ. By the 1960s, many Christian groups were rightly complaining that Christ had been taken out of Christmas: Jesus, Mary and Joseph had been replaced by Santa, Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman,” he added.
But the attack was heating up, Mr. Fromm explained. Then, quoting Edmund Connelly, he added: “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 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.”
Now, we have a concerted effort to remove “Christmas” while all the while wanting us to spend carloads of shekels to give gifts for the feast that dares not say its name. “Luckily, there’s been a strong push back from Christians and others. I urge you to give cards that say, ‘Merry Christmas.'” Mr. Fromm said. “I urge you to return with a stern note any ‘Seasons Greetings’ cards from politicians. Finally, when shopping, patronize stores that mention ‘Christmas’ and, where you can, tell the management of stores that insist on ‘Seasons Greetings’ that you won’t buy their cheap imported Chinese junk, if they won’t acknowledge the name of the date the vast majority of us celebrates. You are not being ‘inclusive’,” he added, ” excluding yourself and your beliefs.”
The evening concluded with a provocative slide show by IHR Director, Tom Berrington. “We are in the period of Kali Yuga, in Hindu mythology, an evil time of turmoil and fever,” he warned: “We are never going back to that golden era of the 1950s of rising living standards and endless opportunity. While there are many forces ranged against our people, we have certain advantages, especially our Faustian creative spirit,” he concluded.
Frederick Fromm
