Review: Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights

Clive Webb, Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights
Clive Webb, Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights

Dixie

Clive Webb’s Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights complicates the traditional White Nationalist narrative of the Civil Rights Movement and the Jewish Question.

At the outset, Webb takes us on a tour of Southern history and reminds us that Jews were staunch supporters of secession, served in prominent roles in the Confederate government, never played much of a role in the abolitionist movement, and even condemned and in some cases opposed Reconstruction.

The South was settled by Sephardic Jews in the 17th and 18th centuries who were accustomed to the culture of slavery and white supremacy due to their background in the slave trade in the Caribbean and Latin America. Ashkenazi Jews settled in Southern cities in smaller numbers in the 19th century and typically embraced the traditional pattern of harmonious Jew-Gentile relations.

By the early twentieth century, the South was the least anti-Semitic region of the United States. In the Old South, the planter class had traditionally opposed ethnic and religious bigotry, and accepted Jews and Catholics into the Southern elite in order to maintain a united front for slavery and white supremacy. In the New South, Protestant Christians admired Jews as God’s “Chosen People.”

Southern Jews reciprocated by accepting the South’s traditional racial mores (even if they privately objected to those mores) as the price of access to the commercial and social opportunities in mainstream White Southern society. It was also a way of deflecting attention away from Jews and onto blacks as the region’s threatening minority.

When the Civil Rights Movement erupted in the 1950s, Southern Jews had done almost nothing to advance the cause of negro equality. Instead, they had grown rich during the Jim Crow era by specializing in retail trade where they had enforced the local segregation laws for generations in their department stores in Southern cities like Little Rock, Atlanta, Birmingham, and New Orleans.

When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. became a celebrity during the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, Montgomery’s own Jewish community refused to support the boycott. When the Freedom Riders arrived in Birmingham in 1962, they were condemned as uninvited outside agitators by Birmingham’s Jewish community.

In the 1963 demonstrations in Birmingham in which Bull Connor used water hoses and attack dogs on black school children, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Fred Shuttlesworth were attempting to integrate several of the Jewish-owned downtown department stores. In fact, Rabbi Milton Grafman was one of the White moderates condemned by the Rev. Martin Luther King in his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.”

In 1965, hundreds of Northern Jews came to Selma to participate in the Selma-to-Montgomery March, where Jews owned the downtown department stores which were being boycotted and disrupted with sit ins by local civil rights activists. Selma’s Jews resented the national Jewish organizations which were supporting the Civil Rights Movement and attracting negative publicity to the city.

In Mississippi, the hundreds of Northern Jews who came to Hattiesburg to participate in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer aroused the ire of the local Jewish community. In the Mississippi Delta, the local Jews created their own Jewish organization, and denounced the New York Jews who were fomenting social revolution in their midst.

In South Carolina, the Jewish Speaker of the South Carolina House of Representatives, Solomon Blatt, was a key leader in the massive resistance movement. A minority of Southern Jews like Sol Tepper of Selma, Charles Bloch of Georgia, and Al Binder of Mississippi were outspoken segregationists. The majority of Southern Jews were social chameleons like Dick Rich of Atlanta and Louis Pizitz of Birmingham who privately supported the Civil Rights Movement, but who did almost nothing to advance the cause.

Of the approximately 200 Southern rabbis who could have taken a public stand in favor of desegregation, a total of 9 were active participants in the Civil Rights Movement: 3 of them were born outside the United States, 3 were born in the South, and 3 were Northern transplants. In Atlanta alone, 312 White ministers supported Rabbi Jacob Rothschild in opposing the closing of Atlanta’s public schools.

The White resistance in the South was divided over the Jewish Question and how to respond to desegregation. The Citizens’ Councils were mainstreamers who believed in economic boycotts, social ostracism, and electing strong segregationists to public office. They accepted Jews as members and purged anti-Semites from their ranks in order to maintain an air of respectability.

The Klan and other vanguardist elements preferred to bomb synagogues and black churches and engage in other types of violence. In most cases, the synagogues which were targeted had refused to support the Civil Rights Movement, and the strategy backfired by creating sympathy for Jews which only further emboldened them. The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was a public relations disaster that expedited the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In the end, the White resistance failed to preserve segregation, but its demise had little to do with Southern Jews who were paralyzed by fear and sat on the sidelines through most of the conflict. The plight of the segregationists can be seen most clearly in the career of George Wallace who was defeated, not by Alabama’s Jews, but by federal court orders, federal troops, federal laws, a federal electorate and finally by a bullet in the back from a deranged Northern leftist.

If George Wallace had been running for President of the Confederacy, he would have won in a landslide and Jim Crow would have been saved. Instead, Martin Luther King Day is now a federal holiday in Alabama and the  “Stand in the Schoolhouse” door has become something we apologize for in this state.

Clive Webb reminds us that Jim Crow was destroyed from the outside, not sabotaged from within.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
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51 Comments

  1. Maybe the Mediterranean/Latin/Romanist approach works for better for both uppity Jews and women. The Sephardim were broken by their Spanish Inquisition experience. Ghetto is an Italian word. Segregation works.

    Protestant Germanics and Orthodox Russians never effectively solved their problems with the Ashkenazim (German and East European Jews) even with all the purges. Romanized Germans (Rhineland, Bavaria, and Austria) suffered less from Jewish influence. Unfortunately, the Romanist antidote to Jewish influence died with Vatican II, when the “Rhine flowed into the Tiber.”

    The Russians did eventually get a handle on the Ashkenazim, but that was the work of Stalin and his cronies.

    At one time Celts spanned the entire European continent. Celts were early opponents who eventually joined Roman civilization. The Celts who did not join are no longer around. Irish were the last to join, becoming Romanized through the efforts of St. Patrick. Despite invasion by Germanic Angles, Saxons, and Jutes along with Nordic Vikings, most Britons, and hence Southrons, are mostly Celtic.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/world/europe/05iht-web.0305BRITS.full.4803645.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

    Swarthy Sean Connery probably has more than just a little Mediterranean blood mixed in with his Celtic blood. Hence his instinctively correct response to uppity women.

    Leo Frank was an Ashkenazi Jew from the north who came down to be part of the managerial class of the industrializing “New South” (not to be confused with the post-CRM “New South) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

    It comes as no surprise to me that the beginnings of white pushback in Europe are emerging from Mediterranean countries like Greece and France. White civilization began in the Mediterranean, after all.

    Romanized and Orthodox Europe fought Muslim encroachment through the centuries without assistance from Pagan/Protestant Germanic Europe. It is good to see Orthodox Russia back on its feet these days.

    The only question is when or even if the Germanics will ever join the fight. I don’t hold out much hope for them. They destroyed Rome and Christendom, after all.

    Deo Vindice

  2. A Southerner knows where “the South” begins and where “the South” ends.

    A few counties in Northern Virginia are no longer part of the South. Most of Virginia is definitely part of the South. Some parts of Maryland are overrun by transplants but other parts are still Southern.

    It is the same way with Florida and Texas. There isn’t much difference between Northern Louisiana and West Virginia.

  3. Maybe the problem with the Ashkenazim is that they are a particularly toxic combination of German and Jew.

    Ever wonder why Amish and Hasidim resemble each other so much?

    Deo Vindice

  4. “The Mediterraneans are racial brothers of Syrians, Lebanese etc.”
    Sea peoples, Canaanites, Philistines, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians are ancient names for these same people. Most Mediterraneans have some of this blood.

    This map will help you sort it.
    http://dnatribes.com/images/dnatribes-europa-map.jpg

    Puritan England was born in the Nordic part of England. During the English Civil War, the fiercest resistance to the Roundheads came from Celtic Cornwall, Wales, and Northern England. Puritanism eventually evolved into yankeedom, as we all know.

    Come to think of it Quakers and Puritans also resemble Hasidim.

    Deo Vindice

  5. Great post, Apuleius. Though I hope/suspect your bioreductionism of 007 is partly cheeky. The fact is the Celts were far more culturally advanced than the Germanics, that’s why they took relatively well to civilization after JC’s fucking brilliant double-seige; it was an enhancement of what they already had, not a total break with primitivism. The ancient celtic area of alpine Europe lines up pretty well with the more cultured, thoroughly European German speaking regions today such as Bavaria, Switzerland, Austria.

  6. “Metal Gear / Iceman says:

    June 15, 2013 at 6:58 pm

    Leo Frank didn’t actually commit the crime.”

    Yes he DID you sick effing SOB.

  7. “Great post, Apuleius. Though I hope/suspect your bioreductionism of 007 is partly cheeky.”

    You are most correct, No man. Just demonstrating the reductio ad absurdam that is so often employed here can cut both ways.

    Deo Vindice

  8. Maybe the problem with the Ashkenazim is that they are a particularly toxic combination of German and Jew.

    Left to their own devices, that is when they reject the med. (European) culture both German and Jew are barbarian culture destroyers. Eg: Varus.

    It’s no surprise they can’t get along. Europe can civilize a Jew (Sephardim), it can civilize a German (HRE where there was no pride in despicable pagan “Germania”)…

    The German cannot civilize a Jew. The Jew cannot civilize a German. Chimps gonna chimp.

  9. I really can’t recommend reading Feliks Koneczny enough…. Apuleius, I think you’d thoroughly enjoy Plurality of Civilizations. By the way, thanks for turning me on to the creepy book JewAmongYou translated.

  10. Hugh – there are certain crimes that boil my marrow. I can feel the red blood surging in my eyeballs. The Jewish slaughter of the Romanovs is one of these crimes. For those of you who want to blame Whites – their blood cousin the VILE George V is a good case in point. He refused entry of his young cousins, the Prince Alexei, and the beautiful Princesses, into England, when their naïve, insulated, and very foolish parents tried to them out of Jewish Russia at the Hour 11, minute 55 . His Court Jews advised him that accepting “Russians” – his blood kin – I would be “unpopular”. The craven sniveling vermin listened. He allowed this young kinfolk to be slaughtered by Jews from start to finish – a blood sacrifice to the Jew Devil God Moloch – because he would never ever have disobeyed the Rothschild Masters of England. The Land is the King and the King is the Land. And England is what it is today…..a Nation of Lee Rigby’s waiting for the knife to descend.

    One of the OTHER Cosmic Crimes is the murder of Mary Phagan, by the Jew fiend Leo Frank. The Classical Greeks believed that physiognomy indicates the nature of the spirit. Frank is a flawless example of their veritas.

    http://ts3.mm.bing.net/th?id=H.5026225165895942&pid=15.1

    What do you need to know about the Frank atrocity? That’s one of my special subjects. His foul Kike egg-layer of a female spawner called the State Solicitor Hugh Dorsey a “Christian dog”. In Atlanta. In the South. She got away with it. Why did she get away with it?

  11. @Not-a-man/Tamer of Savages writes

    “BRA, the stupidest poster here that can’t even spell ’emasculate’..”

    – FUCK you and fuck your spell-check, you little Jew sissy. Didn’t you enlist in the army? What are you still hanging around here for?

  12. Chris – I think No Balls has a gig as a sort of NSA trainee. I’ve been watching his posts for awhile now….

  13. “You wouldn’t know how the process works, would you?”

    – Nope. I have a real job.

    “At least you know you’re the dumbest person here.”

    – Maybe. But at least I’m not a confused little mischling who’s pretending to be a “Christian bad-ass”. Now go dry your tears, fix your yarmulke and say thank-you to the nice Indian taxi driver. You’re a fucking joke.

  14. Srs. Who is dumber than 313Chris?

    I’m actually curious but the consensus is that you’re an all around idiot that learns details about other’s personal lives from conversations you’re not involved in. Then you proceed to interrupt threads you’re also, not involved in, by blurting things out what you’ve managed to remember about people.

  15. Brutus and I were adhommed by some of the WN crocodile birds you like to have pick your teeth, Hunter. It’s all there for anyone to read. This is the way flames happen.

  16. By the by – if any-one needs info on the Phagan murder – this article is a beautiful and concise compilation:

    http://theamericanmercury.org/2013/04/100-reasons-proving-leo-frank-is-guilty/

    It touches on the general goodwill that White Christians had for Jews, in the South, as well. This is salient to poster posts, on this site.

    I read through all the source documentation prior to discovering this compilation. The Pinkerton analysis is particularly interesting.

  17. As to why Southerners didn’t secede in the 1960s, I have addressed the matter a million times in the archives over the years.

    Do you have a specific link? I’m genuinely curious about this. Anytime I’ve seen it discussed here the Cold War is usually blamed, but that doesn’t make any sense when you consider all the flourishing independence movements elsewhere in the world at the same time. Why weren’t the examples of South Africa and Rhodesia followed?

    Doesn’t it seem strange to you that secession was never even used as an idle threat, a bargaining chip or a bluff just to get the federal government to back off from interfering in the internal affairs of the Southern states? I mean hundreds of thousands of men fought and died for Southern independence in the 1860s, yet by the 1960s the subject of secession was completely taboo, off the table and utterly unmentionable by anyone of note throughout the entire Southland. This conundrum calls for a comprehensive explanation.

    The U.S. government did send troops into Birmingham and Little Rock … and Tuscaloosa and Oxford.

    How many white civilians did they kill? As far as I know it was none because they only offered a half-hearted, passive resistance. How many civilians did the Soviets kill when the tanks rolled into Prague and (especially) Budapest? Thousands, because they really did resist. If the Southerners of the time truly wanted to protect their institutions, like their ancestors did a hundred years previously, then they would have forced the federal troops to either spill blood or back down. But they didn’t.

    A few counties in Northern Virginia are no longer part of the South. Most of Virginia is definitely part of the South. Some parts of Maryland are overrun by transplants but other parts are still Southern.

    If we’re going write off huge swaths of territory that are “no longer part of the South” because they’ve been overrun by immigrants and transplants, then you better also include Florida south of Daytona Beach, all of South Texas, the coast of South Carolina, the Hampton Roads area, the metro areas of Raleigh-Durham, Charlotte, Atlanta, Nashville, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Austin and probably a lot of other places that I’m forgetting right now.

    The point I made stands: The Southern states have far less in common with one another than they did 50 years ago, while at the same time the South as a whole has much more in common with the rest of America than it did back then. Is it really that controversial to say that the South has become less distinctively Southern and more generically American by 2013 compared to 1963?

  18. We get you, jeppo. You don’t fool anyone here.

    You’re just another nigger-loving BRA yankee gloating over your nation riding roughshod over our people. Probably why you have a nigger for your avatar as well. Piss off, you anti-white trash. Half-hearted resistance is better than overwhelming support for BRA, that’s for sure.

    Deo Vindice

  19. I’d rather not exchange barbs with Denise. Her heart is definitely in the right place. Hopefully sometime she’ll woman-up and make the trek to historic Bucks county for drinks.

    *hugs*

    Thanks for blowing the whistle, Hunter.

  20. the Cold War is usually blamed, but that doesn’t make any sense when you consider all the flourishing independence movements elsewhere in the world at the same time. Why weren’t the examples of South Africa and Rhodesia followed?

    It only doesn’t make sense if you’re not properly contextualizing. This could be because you are Canadian. States that depended on relationships with the Anglosphere were hardly “examples” to their patrons, they were dependents that were only made possible by a united America.

    Not to mention BRA was stridently anti-Communist on the homefront in the sixties out of sheer necessity… Golden Circle full of Soviet nukes was not desirable for Southrons.

  21. Twenty years ago, the South voted more like the rest of America when Clinton was president than it does today. There was a two party system in the South and the Northeast. As recently as 2000, Al Gore lost the presidential election to W. because he couldn’t carry Tennessee.

  22. I’m not writing off huge swathes of territory.

    The changes in Virginia and South Carolina are due to unsustainable levels of military spending. Florida and Georgia were booming Sunbelt states. As the American economy crumbles, I fully expect that future population shifts will dwarf what we have seen in recent years.

  23. “jewpo is making substantial points.”

    Bullshit. His points are full of disingenuous anachronisms and other solipsistic delusions.

    Deo Vindice

  24. “The point I made stands: The Southern states have far less in common with one another than they did 50 years ago, while at the same time the South as a whole has much more in common with the rest of America than it did back then. Is it really that controversial to say that the South has become less distinctively Southern and more generically American by 2013 compared to 1963?” – Jeppo

    This is an interesting point. We should look at this trend from both perspectives though. The primacy of race in BRA, though not on our terms is itself indicative of the reality of “Southernization” hidden behind a Yankee Political Thesaurus.

    The United States is becoming like the South rather than the South being transformed into a non-racist area. This transformation is being large ignored by American sociologists, and, worse, is being justified in the name of multicultural separatism. By the time American sociologists and other intellectuals wake up to this process of southernization, it will probably be too late for them to change it and they will have to accept it as a reality. Indeed, once fully established, the few American intellectuals who protest against the new southernized America will be largely ignored and punished into quietness.

    The conservatives firmly reestablished control with the election of former Governor of California Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980. With this election, the conservative backlash turned into a major assault on not only civil rights, but on the welfare state itself. Reaganism went beyond backlash to a restoration of some of the inequalities that the nation had eliminated in earlier increases in equality. Indeed, one could say that the United States to some extent has retreated to the Age of the Robber Barons under the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush (see Barlett and Steele, 1992). The backlash went so far as to constitute a counter cycle, one that increased rather than decreased inequality. While legal apartheid had been largely abolished, discrimination has become so widespread and sociological racist theories so popular that blacks have been even more heavily segregated in the centers of the nation’s cities.

    In a 1974 book entitled The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America, the writer John Egerton examined the homogenizing processes that were steadily eroding the distinctiveness of the South and making North and South increasingly alike. “The South is no longer simply a colony of the nation, an inferior region, a stepchild; it is now rushing to rejoin the Union, and in the process it is becoming indistinguishable from the North and East and West. The Union is meeting the South at the front door with overtures of welcome.” (Egerton 1974:xix cited in Grantham 1994:278)

    But what has been more ignored is that the entire United States is becoming like the South. The South has become so integrated into racist-capitalist America that it is leading the way in many areas. Atlanta, Georgia has become a major media center with innovations such as the twenty-four hour news service and now has become a mecca for many black Americans returning to the South.

    The South is in the vanguard of the racist counter movement, but it is being assisted by California. California is in the vanguard because it is rapidly becoming a society of numerically equal groups of color, brown, yellow, black and white. This scares a lot of whites and they have been actively fighting so-called multiculturalism. And many of the minorities are actually helping in this endeavor. In fact, California is currently being used as a scare tactic to frighten white America. Our most populous state is now seen as a scary example of what can happen if we continue to follow liberal policies on immigration and multi-culturalism. And this has increased the degree of conservatism in the entire United States.

    The actual trends are toward more segregation at the same time the intellectual and civil rights leaders are calling America a multicultural society. Talk about wishful thinking.

    http://www.vernonjohns.org/vernjohns/sthsthrn.html

  25. George Wallace had campaigned for governor in Alabama on the slogan, “Stand Up For Alabama.” When he ran for president, he changed the slogan to “Stand Up For America.”

    In essence, Wallace believed that he could get himself elected president. He believed that he could win over White working class voters in the Northern states. That’s why he began diluting his overt rhetoric into dog whistling about “free association” and “law and order” and the like.

    Wallace believed he could work within the system, win over Northern Whites, and “Take Back America.” He had far more confidence in our Northern friends – at least until he was almost assassinated by one of them – than we do today.

  26. In the 1960s, America was almost 90 percent White. The long term demographic changes caused by the Immigration Act of 1965 were still in the future.

    What essentially happened is that White Southerners believed that Yankees would come to their senses. They believed that in a 90 percent White country that they could work through the system to “Take Back America.”

    After the race riots of the late 1960s, Yankees began to retreat from their previous enthusiasm for the Civil Rights Movement. It was reasonable at the time to believe that voting for Northern conservatism could turn the tide.

    Even “White Nationalism” didn’t develop until the late 1970s and early 1980s when white supremacists began to finally give up on taking back the entire country. “White Nationalism” didn’t become dominant over white supremacy until the early 1990s.

  27. “why didn’t Wallace or any other prominent politician advocate for Southern independence during the civil rights era?”

    Nothing more than a tactical mistake. Most Southerners were taken by surprise by the yankee post-war betrayal and wrongly assumed they could prevent the eventual outcome, not unlike the millions of people who still believe the political system in this country can be reformed.

    Caught flatfooted, they never had and were never able to gain the initiative in this struggle. There was no lead-up to the CRM like there was for the WBTS.

    In addition, many had benefited from New Deal programs such as rural electrification and TVA. This and WW2/Cold War propaganda gave many the false belief that Southerners were more than mere subjects of a foreign regime.

    “During the 1945-1970 era of decolonization, scores of nations worldwide became independent, some peacefully, some not.”

    Another disingenous lie, you sack of shit. Those nations became independent not from their own efforts, but only from the British retreat from empire. Without British loss of will during this period none of this would have happened. At the same time, East and West Indians began to immigrate to England, resulting in the mess we see right now.

    “Wal-Marts, McDonalds, Exxons, Holiday Inns, Costcos, Applebees, Meineke Mufflers”

    All of these looked pretty good to the impoverished Southerners emerging from eighty years of northern economic exploitation. This was the South of agricultural subsidies, small towns, two lane highways, and no air conditioning. In a lot of cases still without electricity and running water. The Great Depression still loomed large in the minds of Southerners. Pampered pricks like you will never understand.

    It is easier to be reflexively anti-white and anti-Southern.
    They are both really the same thing. jeppo is a case in point.

    Deo Vindice

  28. After 50 years of ethnic cleansing and yankee propaganda, it is a miracle any Southerners are left to object to BRA.

    jeppo, I would say I would enjoy seeing you raped by your beloved black savages, but knowing you for who you really are, I know you would enjoy it, too.

    Deo Vindice

  29. Apelius – I wasn’t using scare quotes to insult Watson. I think his stuff is wonderful! I used the quotation marks as a sort of..ironic commentary, as many media types would have a problem with a Southern Patriot.

  30. Correction:
    The south may break off in the future, but it will be due to massive Mexican immigration, it will be a Mexican venture.

  31. “Leaving Las Vegas” isn’t just an execrable movie, Sean. It is your destiny.
    Mexification is a foregone conclusion out there. Not so in the South. Here the calculus is rather simple: no federal government teat=no mestizo deadbeats in the bright sunny South.

    We need to overcome neocon propaganda and the residue of Cold War propaganda among our folk. We have much in common with post-Communist Russia. The only worry is the Cultural Marxist rot that plagues most of our religious sects.

    A successful independence movement/insurgency needs a “big friend.”
    Likely candidate? Developments such as this indicate our natural affinity.
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22862210

    Waiting until negro fatigue among yankees has hit its zenith is also advisable. We should not repeat the mistake of making common cause with them, however. Betrayal would be the inevitable and quite predictable result.

    Don’t hold your breath waiting for any of these yankee critics to come up with anything constructive, either. They lack any sincerity or commitment. Big talk, no action.

    Mosin is Denise? Who knew?

    Deo Vindice

  32. The experience of the Southern Jews is interesting but still the exception the proves the rule about Jewish subversion.

    The question is, what do we need to do to create a 21st century version of the South’s cultural conditions that both controlled Jews and gave whiteness a bit of significance?

  33. @Apuleius

    “Not so in the South. Here the calculus is rather simple: no federal government teat = no mestizo deadbeats in the sunny South.”

    – And how is that any different from any other region of America. The federal government forces the same crap on us that it does on the South. Unlike you though, we don’t forever cry about it like a bunch of ass-raped jailhouse bitches.

    If the federal government was gone, Detroit would be rid of it’s niggers faster and cleaner than the South, with it’s MILLIONS of them (plus all the new Mexicans), could ever dream of.

  34. “The federal government forces the same crap on us that it does on the South.”

    Not so. You all wanted it that way. At least now you can see why freeing the darkies and giving them cibbil rights was a really bad idea. You’re learning, albeit slowly.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od9JQI-FjLo

    Deo Vindice

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