OSAMA
ON MTV?
Oh,
please! Does she
really expect us to believe that
Osama's infamous videos denouncing the "Jews and
Crusaders" are the "in" thing with the hip
cognoscenti? Lay off the crack pipe, lady, and get real: anti-Semitism
is less respectable than pedophilia. After all, hordes of
people aren't buying The Protocols
of the Elder of Zion the way they're snatching up those
Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs,
now are they? Amiel's essay is just one breathtaking inversion of reality after another. Getta load-a
this:
"For
the past 25 years, I've watched sad-faced Israeli activists
trudge around Western capitals with heavy hearts beating under
ill-fitting suits. They carry folders of transcripts and videotapes
to document the misrepresentations in the press and the moral
hypocrisy of the world towards Israel. They want to win the
war of ideas on its merits. Their attention to detail in translating
the hate literature of the Middle East and the hate-filled
speeches of its leaders is commendable."
FOLLOW
THE MONEY
One
can only wonder what "Western capitals" she means:
surely not Washington, D.C. Everyone
acknowledges that the Israel lobby is among the most powerful
in the Imperial City. How else have they managed to get their
hands on a grand total of $90 billion-plus
in American military and economic aid since Israel's inception?
A
STRANGE IRONY
Aside
from US exporters, Israel is the single largest beneficiary
of our "foreign aid" program: US tax dollars paid
for a booby-trap bomb planted near an Arab elementary school,
which blasted a group of Palestinian children – children! – to bits. American tax dollars also pay for Israeli "settlements"
inhabited by violent, fanatical fundamentalists intent on
provoking war no matter what. This image of sad bedraggled
little underdogs making their rounds, desperately fighting
an uphill battle against overwhelming odds, is nothing but
a bad joke – either that, or it is meant to be ironic.
I
SHOULD BE SO POWERLESS
If
the Israeli lobby is so powerless, then why this American
largesse? We not only arm Israel, but we also prop up their
shitty little socialist economy with constant infusions of
cash. Whatever those Israeli "activists" are carrying
around in their folders, whatever is on those videotapes,
it must be some pretty powerful stuff. Given the Fox News
revelations about the
extent of Israeli spying in the US, I don't even want
to hazard a guess as to what's in them.
THE
ONEIDA PURGE
They
want to "win the war of ideas on its merits"? Tell
that to Jean Ryan, former managing editor of
the Oneida (NY) Daily
Dispatch, and city editor Dale Seth (a 15-year veteran
of the paper), who were both fired when
a delegation of Israel Firsters approached the editor and
then the owner demanding the paper retract an allegedly "anti-Semitic"
post-9/11 editorial written by Seth. Seth's crime was to recall
the terrorist origins of the Jewish state – as if no one
had ever heard of the Irgun and the Stern
Gang, both of which waged war on the Arab civilian population – and without which the state of Israel would never have
come into existence. He also made the true but politically
incorrect observation that the whole region is rife with religious
fanaticism, and Israel is no exception to the rule:
"The
United States, through its close association with Israel since
its inception, has now been dragged kicking and screaming
right into the middle of that centuries-old Middle Eastern
conflict. From that position, it would behoove that party
in the middle to consider the hearts of the warring parties.
Neither can be simply beat into submission."
UNCONDITIONAL
SURRENDER
A
local attorney, Randy
Schaal, demanded a meeting with Ryan to protest the editorial:
Ryan refused to meet with him, pointing out that that if the
staff met with everyone who disagreed with an editorial, they
would never get a paper out. She told him to write a letter
to the editor, which he did. But Schaal also contacted local politicians,
as well as the Anti-Defamation League, and it wasn't long
before pressure was brought to bear on the paper's management,
which then ordered its editors to come up with a "clarification."
This was published alongside Schaal's letter, a letter from
Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY),
and a missive from the mayor of Oneida. Still, Schaal and
his fellow Ameners weren't satisfied. They went to the President
of the Journal Register Co., and demanded a retraction and
an apology: it was unconditional surrender, or nothing.
GROVELING
TOWARD BETHLEHEM
After
a series of meetings with various self-appointed representatives
of the Jewish community, the owners of the Daily Dispatch caved and published a groveling mea culpa: "We
understand many felt [the editorial] expressed anti-Semitic
sentiments," it said. "We will not further offend
our readers by attempting in any way to justify what was written;
we can only assure readers that The Dispatch is not anti-Semitic and that we
acknowledge the editorial should not have been published."
So much for the Israeli lobby winning the war of ideas on the "merits"
of their case. Clearly, another strategy is at work here:
not debating their opponents but silencing them.
ODE
TO BRUTE FORCE
The
rest of Amiel's essay is really a kind of paean to the efficacy
of brute force. While those poor bedraggled Israeli "activists"
may have been fighting an uphill battle, according to Amiel,
in the post-9/11 era the tide seems to be turning, and she
can hardly keep herself from gloating that now the Arabs are
really going to
get it:
"Powerful
as the truth may be, it needs a nudge from 16,000lb daisy
cutter bombs once in a while. The Arab/Muslim world's intransigence
comes into sharper focus when we see the Americans liberate
Afghanistan from the Taliban in six weeks and a cornered Arafat
unable to go to the bathroom without the risk of being blown
into the next world."
Here
is the kind of Zionist who clearly enjoys the brutality and indignity of the Israeli occupation. Such
people now feel free to publicly exhibit and even flaunt their
perversity, which seems like something straight out of Kraft-Ebbing. What else
can one call Amiel's odd interest in controlling Arafat's
bowel movements other than a shitty little perversion?
THE
TERRORISTIC IMPERATIVE
"Nothing
succeeds like powerful bombs," exults this war goddess,
"as bin Laden explained in his latest video release.
'When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature
they will like the strong horse,' he said." How natural
for her to approvingly cite bin Laden on the terroristic imperative:
but then that is what tribal warfare is all about, no matter
which side one fights on.
CHOO-CHOO
Yes,
it is force, not reason or negotiation, that is decisive,
avers Ms. Amiel, who gleefully predicts that "All those
people badmouthing the Jews and Israel will quieten down."
Or else be quieted down, involuntarily, like Jean Ryan, Dale
Seth, and
now perhaps Carl Cameron, of Fox News.
"You are looking," Amiel continues, "at
the tail end of the train but the engine has already turned
a corner and is going in the opposite direction" –
and anyone who shows up at one of those ritzy parties she's
always attending had better get on board, or else.
AMIEL'S
JIHAD
No
one would think to label denunciations of, say, Robert Mugabe,
as the equivalent of anti-black racism: but we are expected
to just accept that virtually all criticism of Israel and
Ariel Sharon is due to "anti-Semitism." Amiel's
blatantly dishonest and self-serving jihad is naturally bound to cause resentment
among all thinking people – an emotion that could, easily,
turn into genuine anti-Semitism. But that, I believe, is the
point: anti-Semitism serves the interests of the most extreme
wing of the Zionist movement, and always has.
100
YEARS AFTER DREYFUSS
Founded
as it is on the permanence of Jewish victimology, and the
idea that anti-Semitism is inevitable, Zionism thrives
when Jewish persecution grows. It is a natural tendency of
Zionist propaganda to exaggerate hostility to Jews. The founder
of Zionism, Theodore Herzl,
was confirmed in his opinion that it was "futile"
to combat anti-Semitism when the infamous
Dreyfuss case was at the center of a storm of controversy.
Today, however, with the rapid decline and marginalization
of anti-Semitism everywhere but in the Middle East, the pressing
need for a Jewish state requires more justification.
WHY
A JEWISH STATE?
Anti-Semitism
in the West, as "hate crime" statistics and other
research has shown in recent years, is practically nonexistent.
This good news was hailed by Jewish
organizations in the US when it was first announced, but
the extreme Zionists were no doubt made uneasy. For if anti-Jewish
prejudice is distinctly beyond the pale, at least in the civilized
world, i.e., the West, then what do we need a Jewish state
for? This is a question many Jews, when faced with an appeal
to emigrate to Israel, must ask themselves, and, at least
up until Ms. Amiel's outburst, the Zionists have had no good
answer. Now they appear to have solved the problem by simply
redefining "anti-Semitism" to mean any criticism
of Israel's expansionist policies and its current radical
right-wing government.
THE
OLD ANTI-SEMITISM
Anti-Semitism
used to mean legal and cultural proscriptions directed against
Jews. In
medieval Europe, Jews were forced into ghettos, in Nazi
Germany they were branded with the yellow star and exterminated, and, in America and Europe, it used to be that some establishments, both high and
low, would not do business with Jews. Certain hotels and men's
clubs would not admit them, and anti-Semitism was especially
rife in the universities where an unofficial Jewish quota
kept their numbers and influence limited. This is real
anti-Semitism, and, today, it is not only illegal but socially
and politically unacceptable: anyone deemed an anti-Semite
in this, the original sense, is in effect a pariah, and rightly
so.
THE
NEW ANTI-SEMITISM
This,
however, has nothing to do with the French ambassador's purported
"hate crime." To begin with, in describing Israel
as "a shitty little country," Ambassador Bernard
is at least half right in that it is little. That, after all, has been the
chief complaint of the more extreme Zionists, who dream of a Greater
Israel and claim such a small sliver of a country is militarily
indefensible. As for being "shitty," perhaps the
ambassador was referring to the attitude of Israel's leaders,
and, again, who can contest this?
Wasn't it
Ariel Sharon who compared the President of the United
States to Neville Chamberlain,
and declared that he would not let the US sell out Israel
like Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia? Isn't it the Israelis
who are openly
wielding a nuclear stick, threatening the whole region
with annihilation if anyone dares stand in Sharon's way? Wasn't
it the Israelis Carl Cameron was talking about
on Fox News last week when he said that a certain foreign
intelligence agency had been watching the hijackers or their
associates closely –
and may have failed to tip off the US to their plans?
THE
RIGHT WORD
I
think Ambassador Bernard has chosen just the right word: shitty. This is not an ethnic slur, but
an entirely accurate description of Israeli government policy.
The New Anti-Semitism, however, as unveiled by Ms. Amiel,
would forbid the public expression of such obvious truths,
because it has nothing, really, to do with dislike of Jews
or Jewishness per se.
The way Ms. Amiel means it, the charge of anti-Semitism is
a smokescreen that conceals a campaign to delegitimize all
critics of Israel, and rule them out of order.
NO
MORE SCOOPS?
Speaking
of the Israeli spy operation uncovered by Fox News: when
Carl Cameron turned over that rock, what
wriggled
out wasn't pretty, and it didn't take long for the drumbeat
to start: has Fox News gone "anti-Semitic"? A JTA
story on the
response of some Jewish organizations and the Israeli government
reiterates their contention that the story is "totally
baseless," and notes that "virtually no other American
media organization has run a piece on the Fox allegations
– a sign that the story lacks merit, Jewish leaders say."
Oh, really? This defines the idea of a "scoop" out
of existence, and reduces journalists to a pack of conformists,
ruled not by a desire to discover and report the truth but
by a primitive herd instinct. If not for the scoop, we would
never have known
about Watergate, Cointelpro,
Monica-gate,
or any other news stories that erode blind faith in government
and the wisdom of our glorious leaders.
FIXING
FOX
The
JTA piece slyly raises the subtle suggestion of anti-Semitism
when the author avers that "American Jewish and Israeli
officials are baffled about what might have led Fox or Cameron
to pursue so controversial a story on the basis of evidence
they regard as so flimsy," especially because Fox has
been seen by Jewish groups as "fair in its reportage
on Israel." The clear implication being that the problem
is Cameron, not Fox. Ominously, the article also reports that
"American Jewish leaders and Israeli officials said they
are holding conversations with Fox News representatives."
Will Cameron meet the same fate as Dale Seth and Jean Ryan?
A
Fox News spokesman is quoted as saying, "We stand by
the story" – but apparently not enough to keep it on
their website. As I reported the other
day, all four parts of the Cameron piece were summarily
pulled from the Fox News website: visitors to the previous
url get a smiling picture of Carl Cameron and the Orwellian
message: "This story no longer
exists." Indeed.
This,
of course, is what Israel's amen corner in the US and Great
Britain would ultimately like to see: they want to make it
a "hate crime" to criticize Israel, even as that
evil dwarf Sharon drives us to the brink of World War III.
In Tony Blair's Britain they've gone to great lengths to outlaw
and prosecute "hate speech," and are now going after
the anti-Muslim neo-Nazi British
National Party with new proposals extending
"anti-racist" defamation laws to include religion.
But there is nothing to prevent this kind of left-wing political
correctness from being used against critics of Israel, and
the Israeli lobby, so that the dinner party conversation Babs
Amiel so avidly denounces could be grounds for legal prosecution.
For the new definition of "anti-Semitism," if it
is to be properly enforced, requires a political police, and
this is really the role Amiel and her fellow Israel Firsters
in the US are ideally suited for: police spies.
SINCE
WHEN?
If,
like Congressman Darrel Issa (R-CA), Carl Cameron escapes
a Jewish Defense League bombing, such as the one that was thwarted
the other day, will his career survive this controversy?
I certainly hope so, but the removal of the story from the
Fox News website – and now this news of "conversations"
taking place between Fox News, unnamed American Jewish leaders,
and the Israeli government – does not bode well for his future
in journalism. By the way, since when does an American media
outlet engage in "discussions" or negotiations
regarding the content of its news coverage with any
government, let alone a foreign one?
DEBUNKING
THE DEBUNKERS
Cameron's
debunkers claim
that the use of anonymous sources automatically discredits
Cameron's work. So Woodward and Bernstein were wrong to have
relied on "Deep
Throat"? I don't think so. Such a standard would
eliminate 95 percent of the journalism done today: there would
be no "leaks" of embarrassing information by government
whistleblowers, and government officials would tell us what
they think we need to know, while reporters record their words
verbatim. That's not journalism, however: it's taking dictation.
BEYOND
BETRAYAL
Cameron's
story came straight from the lips of law enforcement officials
who clearly have inside knowledge of the direction the 9/11
investigation is taking. These investigators are convinced
that Israeli intelligence had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks,
and Cameron's reports demonstrated that they certainly had
the means to acquire it. Israeli penetration of the phone
system -- and even supposedly "secure" phone lines in
the White House, the Department of Defense, and the
Justice Department, as well as local law enforcement
-- has long been
suspected: Cameron showed how it operates through Israeli
hi-tech companies which are practically arms of the Israeli
government.
But
even this kind of penetration would hardly come as a surprise
to anyone, really: the Mossad is well-known for its boldness,
and the history of Israeli spying in the US is notorious.
But the core of Cameron's story goes waaay
beyond that. While "there is no indication that the Israelis
were involved in the 9-11 attacks," Cameron avers,
"Investigators
suspect that the Israelis may have gathered intelligence about
the attacks in advance, and not shared it. A highly placed
investigator said there are 'tie-ins.' But when asked for
details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, 'evidence
linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell
you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified
information.'"
YOU
WANT THE TRUTH?
You're
not allowed to know the truth about 9/11 – why, that's classified
information, sir! Now this is bound to arouse a certain
amount of resentment, just like Ms. Amiel's smear campaign.
But that's the idea, you see. If anti-Semitism is not a problem,
then that is a problem for the Zionist project, and so the
idea is to provoke it, create it where it never before existed.
One way to do that is to redefine "anti-Semitism"
in such broad terms that it could include practically anybody
but Norman Podhoretz.
THE
COLLABORATORS
Another
method is to evoke anti-Semitic sentiments and reactions by
means of a deliberate provocation. Remember that the notorious
"Stern gang," the Zionist equivalent of Hamas, collaborated with
the Nazis on the grounds that they shared a common goal:
the expulsion of the Jews from Europe. They thought this strategy
would encourage emigration to Palestine and help establish
the state of Israel. Chaim Weizmann, put in charge of selecting
which German Jews would emigrate to Palestine – and later
to become Israel's first president – made the argument
that, in choosing between establishing a Jewish state and
rescuing the Jews from the Nazis, the Zionist project had
to come first. His intellectual and political heirs are entirely
capable of justifying and executing the same tactics.
FUELING
THE FIRE
The
possible firing of Carl Cameron, and/or the spiking of his
story, would certainly give real anti-Semites plenty of ammunition
to repeat the tired old canard that the media is "controlled
by the Jews." But that is precisely what the nuttier
Zionists want. They know that time is not on their side: Israel
is demographically
doomed if more Jews don't emigrate, and here is where
the symbiotic relationship between anti-Semitism and Zionist
extremism comes into play.
A
BAD STRATEGY
At
its current rate, the
Arab birthrate will overwhelm the Jewish state sooner
rather than later, just on the strength of sheer numbers.
By objectively encouraging anti-Semitism, and building it
up into this looming mass movement, Zionist ideologues can
appeal to their own people to come "home."
What other hope do they have of holding off the rising
demographic tide? Apart from whatever moral qualms one may
have with this tactic, just in practical terms the great mistake
of such a strategy is that it may succeed all too well –
and that would be a tragedy. Regardless of her intent, Ms.
Amiel's complaint of anti-Semitism could easily turn out to
be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A
NOTE
I
want to apologize for the rather intimidating length of this
column, but I think the subject is important enough to merit
using up so much bandwidth. This should answer, then, all
those fervent letter-writers, including supporters of Israel
who accuse me of anti-Semitism, and also those anti-Semites
who berate me for ridiculing their psychopathology.
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