It says it right in the article... "A key subject of the book Spam Kings by Brian McWilliams, Hawke was a Jewish-born American who’d legally changed his name from Andrew Britt Greenbaum. For many years, Hawke was a big time purveyor of spam emails hawking pornography and male enhancement supplements, such as herbal Viagra."
The man also posed as a "progressive vegan rockclimber", so I wouldn't be willing to conclude much about his true political beliefs based on what this article tells us. For all we know, he just picked alternate personas as varied as possible in order to not be discovered.
> A key subject of the book Spam Kings by Brian McWilliams, Hawke was a Jewish-born American who’d legally changed his name from Andrew Britt Greenbaum.
so yeah, that's got to be a very messed up psyche, to take on the identity of your enemy.
I think we see sufficient evidence in our current time that self-loathing is a very useful fuel for self-righteous piety and zeal. If you can be persuaded your very identity is evil, you will do horrifying things to fight it.
Sounds like he was maybe just being an opportunistic capitalist.
> Under the pseudonym of "Bo Decker," he began selling Nazi merchandise and offering membership to his internet neo-Nazi group "Knights of Freedom" and later the American Nationalist Party.
Oh dear I seem to have fallen into a rabbit hole here.
Adolf's father, Alois Hitler [0] was born illegitimately and his parentage was never established, meaning that Adolph couldn't establish his own "aryan" descent. Alois Hitler was born as Alois Schicklgruber, but he requested to be legitimized in the name of his stepfather Hiedler, which for some reason was registered as Hitler. In the 1930's, Hitler had his cronies dive into his genealogy and Declare that there was no Jewish ancestry in his family. The rumour went though that Alois' mother (Adolph's grandmother) was working as a servant / cook for a Jewish family, and that the father may have been one of the family members. That's a lot of speculation though.
Adolf's mother, Klara Hitler [1] (nèe Pölzl), was Alois' first cousin once removed (yikes); not sure about any Jewish heritage there.
TL;DR we can't be sure because his paternal grandfather is unknown, but there's rumours abound.
I hesitate to post this (I'm no authority, and lack a handy citation), but IIRC it's widely believed that Hitler was aware that he had a Jewish maternal grandparent. It doesn't surprise me too much that these hateful people have plenty of self-directed hate at the core of their sociopathy.
No known ancestor of Hitler is Jewish. His paternal grandfather is unknown, and that led some people to speculate that he was Jewish.
Hitler had his minions try to clear that up to dispel the rumours, but nobody could find the real father. They concluded of course that he was a pure Aryan.
Same thing was said about Reinhard Heydrich. I don't really understand the appeal of these rumors. Regardless of the origin of their motivations these guys were really messed up.
Secular Jews go more by ethnicity/culture, not so much by religion. I don't know who made you the police of all Jews, but many people don't follow your so-called rules.
To be fair, it was kinda vaguely implying a universal truth of all religions. I was surprised to find such a short comment suggesting something so far-reaching in potentiality with absolutely no evidence. I was like "is this some wild thing about child development I never knew?" I had no idea this was something specific to Judaism.
Reform Judaism asserts that for patrilineal descent, a person needs to affirm his Judaism, before he reaches maturity, by becoming a Bar/Bat Mitzvah, a Brit Milah, and they have their own concept of "confirmation.
That's certainly true, but it's not right to speculate that the subject of this story is "Jewish" when he lacks a Jewish mother (according to Wikipedia at least) and he hasn't affirmed his Judaism.
