No More Watergates

  

Labor saving devices have been with us since the broom, and every year brings more. You can throw away your bookshelves, for example. Amazon has a device called the Kindle, a convenient, portable device that weighs about 10 ounces, and allows you to download some 90,000 volumes on its screen. And a British publisher has invented a periodical that eliminates journalism. It’s called The Week, and according to Felix Dennis, his magazine is “going to be a huge global brand.”

David Carr, a New York Times reporter who describes himself as having “the attention span of a gnat,” is very bullish on that brand. In a recent article he pointed out that The Week has posted double-digit growth in the last eight reporting periods of the Audit Bureau of Circulations. “It has hit a nerve, coming at a time when the familiar American newsweeklies are struggling to maintain their footprint.”

Chortling at the distress of Time and Newsweek, which suffer from diminished circulation and shrinking ad lineage, Dennis imagines that Henry Luce would be delighted with The Week. Why? Because his “original idea was offering readers a précis of what was happening around the world in a given week.”

True enough. But after a shakedown cruise, Luce realized he’d have to do something more than present a red-bordered Reader’s Digest four times a month. That was when Time’s “back of the book” began to run sparkling reviews of art, theater, cinema and books.

It was also when Time, and later Newsweek, began to run investigative journalism as well as informed and original commentary from overseas and Beltway bureaus. But Dennis is not interested in such frippery. In his view, “The American magazine industry has been massively overstaffed for years and years.  It is one of the most inefficient businesses in the history of the world.”

Yes indeed, and Pennsylvania Station, the old Metropolitan Operahouse and thousands of cathedrals were examples of wasted space. How much better it would be in Dennis’s world, to eliminate all such inefficiency, to have a crowded railroad terminal with low ceilings, a Lincoln Center arena with lousy acoustics, and a series of storefront churches. Who needs all that unused air? It could be rented out, earn a little cash. And who needs all those journalists wasting time by tracking down leads that might—or might not—pan out? 

How much better to let others do it. Thus The Week picks up stuff from the De Moines Register, the Politico, Slate, the Wall St. Journal, et al, with not a single original article of its own. 

The sad thing is that Dennis is probably right: this could very well be the future of journalism. A few weeklies would parasitically live off the labor of other publications. But these hosts would soon diminish, because fewer and fewer publications would be on the newsstands. And those would have smaller and smaller staffs to do vigorous original work.

Inevitably there would be more Watergates, and these would go undiscovered because there would be no Woodward and Bernstein. After all, those two were allowed to dig around “inefficiently” for months before they uncovered the Nixon scandal. If Dennis had his way, the new Woodward and Bernstein of The Week (or for that matter, Time, Newsweek and U.S. News) would not be allowed such squandering. They’d be put on something meaningful, like How Fergie Kicked Crystal Meth, a big feature in this week’s issue of The Week—picked up, of course, this time from Allure.

                                    

                                     

              UN-SAFE FOR CHILDREN

                                          

 After 50, wrote George Orwell, everyone has the face he deserves.

Thus it is that Manuel Noriega acted like the legitimate political leader of Panama, but, as his repellent visage showed, and the court later proved, was actually a drug lord, extortionist and lethal tyrant. Closer to home, Bernie Kerik seemed to have the façade of a tough cop, but now looks like a seamed and surly guy sweating under 15 indictments. And Jimmy Carter, who once had the smile of an honest and lucky man, now displays the empty rictus of a mean and bitter failure.  

Buildings also have the faces they deserve after the passage of years. Some acquire the patina of dignity, overlaid on a good design. Others show the unflattering evidence of age, as if they were revealing the corruption within.

The latest example: the United Nations building in Manhattan. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has just declared the place a fire hazard, and he has given notice to UN authorities that sprinklers, exit signs, extinguishers, emergency lighting and other fixtures had better be in place by January, 2008—or else.

Or else what?

Or else he will refuse to allow school children to make the scene on field trips. A splendid idea under any circumstances.

In fact, there has never been a major conflagration at the UN. But the edifice has been flagged for 866 violations and, according to the Mayor’s office, less than 20 percent have been addressed.

Public safety is of course the main issue, but there are many other valid reasons for school children to stay far away from the United Nations, just as they would be discouraged from playing in, or near, an open sewer.

It is, after all, a place where the UN Commission on Sustainable Development elected Zimbabwe as its chair. In seven years that country went from prosperity to poverty—the economy has shrunk 40 percent—thanks to its corrupt racist leader, Robert Mugabe.

It is also the place that made sure the repressive dictatorship of Libya would chair the Commission on Human Rights.

It is also the place where Iran was named Vice Chair of the Disarmament Commission, a body charged with the prevention of nuclear proliferation.

It is also the place that was either responsible for, or turned a blind eye, toward UN peacekeeper rapists, an oil-for-food scandal in Iraq, and a regular, Jew-hating condemnation of Israel. Meanwhile, it could not bring itself to call the lethal chaos in Darfur by its proper name: “genocide.”

So even when the fire alarms are put in place, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of reasons for keeping innocent children away from the structure on Turtle Bay. At least until someone invents a moral alarm.

                 OUT OF THE DARKNESS

 

 “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love—they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

             Harry Lime

            The Third Man

 

 

Well, now they’ve produced something else: a successful political group called the People’s Party. It claims that foreigners are responsible for rising crime in Switzerland. To dramatize their anti-immigrant platform, they displayed posters featuring several white sheep kicking out a black sheep. Melodramatic? Biased? Unfair?

Maybe.

But also an acknowldgement of something native-born Europeans are worried about—foreigners. With good reason.

And the People’s Party is not alone. The anti-immigrant push is the untold story of politics all over Europe and the U.S.

In Portugal the Popular Party won 14 seats by promising to introduce tighten laws against immigration and immigrants.

In the Netherlands, where an anti-immigration politician was murdered for his views, the late Pym Fortuyn’s party won 26 parliamentary seats.

In Norway, where theft and rape committed by immigrants has become a regular news item, the far right Progress Party also won 26 seats by promising to cap immigration at 1,000 people per year.

In Denmark, the Danish People’s Party is now the country’s third largest. It advocates harsh policies against those seeking political asylum, as well as a demand to curb aid to the third world.

In France, the rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen lost in the final elections. Nevertheless, it was his best showing. Some six million French men and women voted for him, underscoring the popularity of his anti-immigration policies in the wake of Muslim riots.

This suspicion and hostility to foreigners is not exclusive to the other side of the pond. The Bush administration crashed and burned when it announced that a United Arab Emirate company was in line to guard U.S. ports.

New York governor Eliot Spitzer recently announced plans to grant undocumented immigrants their own drivers’ licenses. This plan to “bring illegals out of the darkness” was pitilessly mocked, pilloried and hooted down. Spitzer’s remarkable rise came to a full stop. It will be very difficult for him to restart the engine.  

Hillary Clinton’s John Kerry moment (“I voted for it before I voted against it”) came when she ambiguously defended Spitzer’s move. Her rivals for the Democratic presidential candidacy made much of this; she is still in the recovery room while her aids administer oxygen and adrenalin to a once-confident campaign.

Why such hostility to foreigners?

Statistics.

Until there’s an eruption, the chattering classes of Paris, Antwerp, Lisbon, Copenhagen etc. don’t see the trouble in the slums where Muslim youth smolders. Beltway politicians rarely glimpse the barrios of the West Coast where Latina illegitimacy has become an epidemic, and gang violence is spreading by the day. Nor do they care to make too much of the Islamic threat at home and abroad.

But the people know what the journalists and politicians don’t. They express themselves inside the voting booth, when the curtain is drawn and they don’t have to fake their enthusiasm for an inclusive curriculum.

When the November 2008 rolls around, that unpublicized feeling will have a profound effect on the American elections. As in Europe, the party that refuses to acknowledge reality is condemned to defeat, or to a short and ineffective rule. The cuckoo clock is ticking.

 

 

                                  DIRTY JOKE

"The hyena, hermaphroditic, self-eating devourer of the dead, trailer of calving cows, ham-stringer, potential biter-off of your face at night while you slept, sad yowler, camp-follower, stinking, fowl, with jaws that crack the bones the lion leaves, belly dragging, loping away on the brown plain, looking back, mongrel dog-smart in the face… the hyena was a dirty joke."

 Ernest Hemingway                                                 

 Green Hills of Africa                                                

                                                                     

Princess Diana’s violent death in an automobile crash has been endlessly parsed. Was she murdered? Was it a staged accident? Was her driver operating under the influence of drugs?

What's rarely discussed anymore is the ravening pursuers who triggered the incident in the first place. The journalists in question were not investigative reporters or columnists or even stringers. They were paparazzi who reap rich rewards (sometimes more than a million dollars a year) for photographs and illustrations of, and gossip about, film and rock stars, royalty, debutramps, athletes, hustlers, gamblers and others who are rich and famous or wannabes.  

The word paparazzi was popularized in La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini’s 1960 film about the wealthy and indulged slackers of Rome. The villains of the piece are the ravening journalists who destroy any vestige of propriety or privacy. The director said that he used the paparazzi as a private reference to a paparazzo, an annoying kid he knew in school who reminded him of a loud persistent mosquito.

As brilliant as Fellini was, he chose the wrong animal. It would be much more accurate to compare today’s paparazzi to hyenas in human form. Particularly in England, where their work makes the National Enquirer look reticent.

These are creatures who live off the energy and distress of others. They much prefer misery to joy because their readers, whose lives are as empty as a moviehouse in the morning, have ravenous appetites for stories about unhappy princesses, divorcing actresses, alcoholic directors, doped-up players and the like.

In pursuit of their quarry, the paparazzi know no bounds. Recently a young man and his girlfriend were followed by a pack of these predators in search of rumor, innuendo and, of course, pictures of the fleeing couple. The man’s associate noted that “Having already been photographed leaving a club, he and Kate Middleton were then pursued in his car by photographers on motorcycles, in vehicles and on foot.

“The aggressive pursuit was potentially dangerous and worrying for them. It seems incomprehensible, particularly at this time, that this behavior is still going on.”

Paranoia? Undue shyness? Hardly. The 26-year-old who was being tailed so avidly has no visible talent, has never appeared in a film or rock video, has lived, as far as anyone can tell, a clean and featureless life. He has only one attribute the hyenas find of interest.

He is the son of Diana, the very same Princess they ran after until she died.

The hyenas are now going for the next generation, abetted by their readers. It is difficult to know which is more contemptible. Let's call it a dead heat.

 

                                      

            OZ AT COLUMBIA  

                

Columbia University president Lee Bollinger has been condemned from every quarter. This is unfair. He may be a classic exemplar of academic moral squalor, but as an impressionist he belongs up there with Rich Little. Who else can mimic the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow so well?

Take, for example, his welcoming of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the Columbia campus, where the Iranian president can score another photo op and propaganda victory.

Bollinger insists that he will ask “sharp questions” about

A: Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Holocaust.

B: His public call for the destruction of the state of Israel.

C: His reported support for international terrorism that targets innocent civilians and American troops.

D: Iran’s pursuit of nuclear ambitions in opposition to international sanction.

D: His government’s widely documented suppression of civil society and particularly of women’s rights.

E: His government’s imprisoning of journalists and scholars.

Bollinger’s pseudo-guts actually provides Ahmadinejad with a priceless opportunity to pose as a victim of a bad press, and to proclaim that he actually is a man of peace who is frightened by the Jewish state but loves Jews, and who wants to use his nuclear centrifuges for nothing more than energy for street lights and refrigerators.

A truly courageous executive would refuse admittance to the most dangerous fascist since Hitler.

Thus, the Columbia Lion roars but fools no one. Bollinger is simply restating the immortal words of Yip Harburg:

I’m afraid there’s no denyin’

I’m just a dandylion

A fate I don’t deserve.

But I could show my prowess

Be a lion not a mowess

If I only had the nerve.

 

But Bollinger is multi-talented. He can not only out-Lahr Burt Lahr, he can also do an excellent imitation of Ray Bolger’s Scarecrow, giving the world his unwitting confession:

 

I could while away the hours

Conferrin’ with the flowers

Consultin’ with the rain

And my head I’d be scratchin’

While my thoughts were busy hatchin’

If I only had a brain.

 

Still, Bollinger’s greatest mimicry and, in a sense, his saddest, is his take on Jack Haley.

A University President could perhaps be forgiven his role as enabler of evil, as well as his spinelessness in the face of villainy. He might also be indulged in his foolishness and lack of fundamental political sophistication.

But the one attribute no critic can overlook is Bollinger’s insensitivity to his fellow countrymen and women, every one of whom present targets to the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Thus Bollinger as the Tin Man, as hollow as his speech in favor of the First Amendment:

Just to register emotion, jealousy, devotion

And really feel the part

I could stay young and chipper

And I’d lock it with a zipper

If I only had a heart.

 

Should Bollinger lose his job for being gutless, brainless and heartless (an event as likely as Ahmadinejad’s conversion to Scientology), not to worry. Vegas will always have room for a great impersonator who can do impressions of everyone except a wise and decent academic administrator.

                                      

                                          KNOWLEDGE IS RUIN

 

TO: ADOLF HITLER

FROM: JULIUS STREICHER 

DATELINE: HELL

 

My Fuehrer, I will never forget your encouragement as I went about my propagandizing, creating images of the Jew as devil, pushing the anti-Semitism that lay at the core of Naziism. Alas, though we began well, we made a central error. What went wrong? The answer is becoming clear. 

Newspapers and networks report that a new Jew-hatred is transfiguring our old stomping grounds. And not just in Germany, the historical epicenter of Jew-hatred. In France, there has been numerous attacks and murders of Jews.

And such incidents have taken place in Sweden, in Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, even England!

Indeed, a Briton named Denis MacShane (the name does not sound Jewish, but conspirators are everywhere) recently chaired a parliamentary committee on the new anti-Semitism in the UK. He reported “a pattern of fear” among Britain’s 3,00,000 Jews. With good reason. There were:

“Synagogues attacked, Jewish schoolboys jostled on public transportation. Rabbis punched and knifed. British Jews feeling compelled to raise millions to provide private security for their weddings and community events. On campuses, militant anti-Jewish students fueled by Islamic or far-left hate seeking to prevent Jewish students from expressing their opinions.”

As we know, the left has always been of great help. Joseph Stalin is down here; he can testify that though he was our enemy in World War II, he had much in common with us. The old Bolshevik was, after all, the exterminator of many Jews. Had he not died many more would have been annihilated.

And so many more of our friends have come from the left since the War. Why, there are even useful Jewish idiots in their number, like Norman Finkelstein (The Jewish elites “alongside Israel, are the main fomenters of anti-Semitism in the world today. Coddling them is not the answer. They must be stopped.”)

And of course, the ever-dependable Noam Chomsky (“The U.S. and Israel have demanded that the Palestinians recognize Israel’s abstract ‘right to exist,’ a concept that has no place in international law or diplomacy.”)

No doubt there will soon be more of these kapos, on and off campuses. The idea of a democracy in the Middle East drives them mad. And historically, my Fuehrer, haven’t madmen been our most loyal allies?  

But allow me to return to the MacShane report: “Europe is reawakening its old demons, but today there is a difference. The old anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism have morphed into something more dangerous.

“Anti-Semitism today is officially sanctioned state ideology and is being turned into a mobilizing and organizing force to recruit thousands in a new crusade—the word is chosen deliberately—to eradicate Jewishness from the region whence it came and to weaken and undermine all the humanist values of rule of law, tolerance and respect for core rights such as the free expression that Jews have fought for over time.”

And when those “humanistic values” go, we know what rushes in to replace them, do we not, my Fuehrer?

Jackboots!

In your own immortal words, “A violently active, intrepid brutal youth—that is what I am after… I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin for my young men.”

And speaking of brutality and a lack of knowledge, the best I have saved for last. In the United States—the United States, my Fuehrer!—a former senator, one James Abourezk, told Hizbollah TV  that “The Arabs who were involved in 9/11 cooperated with the Zionists, actually. It was a cooperation. They gave them the perfect excuse to denounce all Arabs.”

Thus even when crimes are done against humanity, by an adroit use of the Big Lie, the Jews are to blame.

Are there more Abourezks in the U.S.? Well, I don’t make a habit of quoting American authors, but in this case the words of Mark Twain are of immense comfort. “Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side?” asks the King in Huckleberry Finn. “And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”

My Fuehrer, our trouble was only that we peaked too soon.

Prosit!

                                         

 

      CHIMP OFF THE OLD BLOCK

 

In his most recent harangue, Bin Laden dropped a name much favored by USA-bashers here and abroad. The retired M.I.T. Professor Noam Chomsky, he maintained, is “among the most capable of those from your own side.”

Capable of what, he didn’t say. But there’s plenty on the record to see why the Prof appeals to the mad totalitarian mind. For those who have neither Bin Laden’s leisure or his cave, here are a few biographical items of interest:

Chomsky’s initial fame came from his work as a linguist. He challenged B.F. Skinner’s theory of language as a learned skill, insisting that the structures of grammar were hard wired into our DNA. Defending his thesis endlessly in symposia and as scholarly reviews, he established his name worldwide. So much so, that in the late 1970’s biologists at Columbia University named their experimental monkey Nim Chimsky. 

But that was just the beginning. In a tragic irony, the farther Chomsky wandered from his area of expertise, the better known he became.

The country he loathes has two kinds of celebrity, horizontal and vertical. The vertical celebrity owes his fame to one thing and one thing only: cellist Yo Yo Ma, for example, is known for his extraordinary musicianship. Period.

The horizontal celebrities assume that their mastery of one field is instantly transferable to another. Thus the pop singers Barbra Streisand and Bono go public with their uncredentialed expertise on foreign policy; thus the linguist Chomsky offered his geopolitical analyses.

These began as rational critiques of the Vietnam War, but soon wandered to the far shores of reason—and kept going. In Chomsky’s General Theory of American Evil, things started going bad in 1812 when the U.S. began a process that “annihilated the indigenous population, conquered half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world.”

Not a word about some inconvenient truths: the U.S. saved the Philippines during World War II; Hawaiians voted to become the 50^th state; every day Mexicans across the border to take part in the economy of the vilified U.S. 

But a disregard for accuracy is only one thing that Chomsky holds in common with Bin Laden. Along with the Great Satan both have a Little Satan they regard with identical fear and loathing—Israel.

In addition to defending Robert Faurisson, a notorious Holocaust denier, Chomsky spearheaded a group calling for universities to divest from any stock connected with the Jewish State. Here, fortunately for decency and democracy, he got nowhere. He obtained some four hundred signatures; Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, gathered four thousand signatures in support of Israel.

Harvard Prof Alan Dershowitz challenged Chomsky to debate him “on the morality of this selective attack against an American ally that is defending itself—and the world—against terrorism that targets civilians.” He went on to point out that institutions of higher learning have traditionally invested in companies headquartered in foreign nations with unsavory reputations—countries whose citizens don’t have the freedom that Israelis enjoy, or the suffer the terror they endure. “Yet Chomsky’s petition “focused only on the Jewish State, to the exclusion of all the others, including those which, by any reasonable standard, are among the worst violators of human rights. This is bigotry pure and simple.”

Chomsky, who has his own cave, a house in suburban Massachusetts, predictably declined the challenge.

When 9/11 occurred the Prof thought it unfortunate—because “the atrocities of September 11 were a devastating blow to the Palestinians, as they instantly recognized.” (Some other group, disguised as Palestinians, musts have been dancing in the streets that day.) Otherwise, the U.S. was asking for it, because of its rapacity, racism and imperialistic designs.

Up until now, it was possible to categorize Chomsky as a campus celebrity, much quoted on the Internet but of no relevance to what was actually going on in the world. That is no longer the case. The chimp off the old block has been praised by Bin Laden. Save for some sophomores and useful fools, everyone is now aware of the ugly reality:

Humanity’s list of foes is one name longer today.  

 

                                     

*

THE DAY THE PENTAGON STOOD STILL

One statute lies beyond the powers of the Executive, the Legislative and the Judicial. It’s called the Law of Unintended Consequences, and it is about to do some serious damage.

The Active Denial System (ADS) seems to have come from a Galaxy far, far away. In fact, the device has been around for at least fifteen years. During the first Iraq war, U.S. commanders wanted to use it. Their requests were turned down. The field generals want to use it now. Again they are being denied.

What is ADS?

It’s a non-lethal weapon that beams electromagnetic radiation at targets as far away as 500 yards. Located on a flatbed truck or Humvee, those rays can be directed to go through windows. They can easily penetrate clothing. They breach the skin slightly but painfully, causing out-of-control rioters to stop their actions before somebody gets killed or valuable property is destroyed.

That’s all they do. They don’t kill. They don’t maim. They don’t disable, save for the moment.

The system was developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico, and during twelve years of testing, only two injuries occurred—second degree burns that healed quickly.

So why is the Pentagon set against the use of the Active Denial System?

Because in the Beltway, PR trumps ADS.

The brass is concerned that the weapon would be perceived as a torture device, an electronic extension of Abu Ghraib.

And so it would be by every group seeking to portray the U.S. military as a bunch of Torquemadas out to persecute the enemy. George Soros, no doubt, would be among the plaintiffs, as would the People for the American Way, Nation magazine, Noam Chomsky, Jimmy Carter and other reliables who would rather foment than think.

In fact, ADS would stop Iraqis from hurting or slaying each other, and from doing the same to the American troops. So the Pentagonians, in their wisdom, are providing the latest demonstration of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, will be injured or murdered because the folks in Washington are more worried about perception than about protection. 

Once again, in the military, as in politics (and who can tell the difference these days?) the road to hell is being paved with good unintentions.   

       

                       

 

                                              ROLL BRITANNIA

 

 The people who now run the British Broadcasting System deserve some sort of deep sea diving award. They never manage to touch bottom. There’s always some new low toward which they plunge, some new shade of yellow they display to the world, some new move to disgrace their heritage of writers like George Orwell and T.S. Eliot who established the BBC’s reputation for honesty and scruple.

This week English newspapers noted an interesting change made in the script of a fictional program called “Casualty.” According to reports, the show’s stars “won’t be dealing with an explosion caused by Islamic extremists in case it offends Muslims. Now the bomb will be set off by animal rights campaigners instead.” 

Translation: Folks like the members of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) are notorious for offensive and sometimes obscene statements—comparing the slaughter of chickens to the Holocaust, for example.

But they don’t explode bombs in subways in hopes of maiming or killing women, children and unarmed men. They don’t behead those who don’t share their beliefs, don’t riot, don’t call Britons satanic, don’t demand have special schools to preach hate to the young, don’t mock the Judeo-Christian tradition, don’t enjoy destruction, don’t condemn those outside their orbit as infidels who must be converted or be expunged. In brief:. roll Britannia, groveling in the general direction of the oil-rich countries of the Middle East.          

Of course, the Beeb is in many ways a reflection of its host country. Britain, lest anyone forget in today's fast-moving news cycle, surrendered to Iran only a few months back. The country that once held off the Luftwaffe allowed its sailors to be arrested by an enemy force.

Without firing a shot.

Iran eventually gave back the sailors, having enjoyed a propaganda victory handed to them by the spine-free Blair government.

So it comes as no surprise to see the BBC in its present state of disgrace. This is, after all, the corporation that only uses the word “terror” when describing Israeli retaliation for suicide bombers, never when Palestinians kill Jews. This is the corporation, one of whose employees privately circulated an e-mail petition ending, “Save us from Israel” after his name.

This is a corporation that calls Saudi-Arabian Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais a respected leader who works for “community cohesion” and “building communities”—never mentioning that the Sheik made public statements saying that Jews must be “annihilated” because they are “the scum of the human race, the rats of the world…the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs.”   

This is the corporation that stands as a symbol of Britain today, the inheritor of Tony Blair's geopolitical errata, a nation of loud self-appreciation, grand gestures, glorious history, timorous presence—and a future as bleak as November in London. Alas, when George Bernard Shaw said the U.S. and Britain were separated by a common language, he spoke wiser than he knew.

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

     

 

  

                                           A GIANT AND A DWARF

 

 Can a man be a giant and a dwarf at the same time? Indeed he can. There can be few sadder exemplars of that paradox than the late Raoul Hilberg, who died this month at the age of 81.

A longtime professor at the University of Vermont, Hilberg was famous for his answer, when asked what he did for a living: “I write about dead Jews.”

The Jews he wrote about were the victims of the Holocaust, the historical crime that Hilberg made into a life study. With dogged research, including interviews and examinations of papers kept by the Germans—always meticulous recorders, even when committing mass murder—he was able to document the reality of the Nazi genocide.

He titled his book on the subject The Destruction of the European Jews, and it remains one of the monuments of rigorous 20^th century scholarship.

Alas, somewhere along the line, Hilberg, who was not senile or deranged, got it into his head to back the pseudo-scholarship of Norman Finkelstein, one of the most virulent Jewish anti-Semites now in operation.

Finklestein is a bad, tasteless joke to honorable academics and journalists. (“He’s poison,” wrote New Republic editor Leon Weiseter, “he’s a disgusting, self-hating Jew, he’s something you find under a rock.”)

The downgraded professor (recently refused tenure at DePaul University) has made a career of belittling the Jewish state (“I can’t imagine why Israel’s apologists would be offended by a comparison with the Gestapo”) and calling most Holocaust survivors “bogus.”

This rabid rhetoric has left him isolated. But he is not without a few friends. Israel-hating, Palestinian apologist Noam Chomsky, for example. “I’m a person of the left,” Finkelstein once declared, “and when you get a call from Chomsky, his wish is your command.” Few Stalinists were more abject when they spoke in hushed tones of the Generalissimo.

Another of Finkelstein’s admiring colleagues was…Raul Hilberg. How could this be? How could a decent man and profound scholar lose his moral compass so completely?

One theory is that Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners, had become the new academic star, taking a lot of attention away from the man who regarded himself as the doyen of Holocaust studies. Goldhagen, who found ordinary Germans complicit in the genocide, was of course attacked by Finkelstein (who incidentally cannot read German) and this might have driven a pseudo-scholar and a genuine one together.

Whatever the case, Hilberg’s achievement cannot be diminished, but neither can the betrayal of his fellow Jews. The man whose tenure he backed, for example, finds that disgraced Holocaust denier David Irving, “made an indispensable contribution to our knowledge of World War II.”

The same man also characterizes Elie Wiesel as, “the resident clown of the Holocaust circus…the expression, ‘There’s no business like Shoah business’ is literally coined for him.”

Perhaps Hilberg agreed with Finklestein. But if that were the case, why did he travel to Auschwitz and Babi Yar with the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, headed by Wiesel? Why did he declare himself honored to be Wiesel’s colleague and friend? Was it opportunism? Or did he change his mind once the focus of Academia left him for others? At a time when Jews are under attack in Europe and the Middle East, those questions, alas, remain bigger than the late and once distinguished professor who provoked them. 

 

 

 

 

             

                   

   

   

                           

SAUDI ARABIA:

HYPOCRISY CENTRAL

 

The world knows that 15 out of the 19 mass murderers of 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia.

Now comes news that at least two of the doctors involved in a plot to kill and maim Britons are said to be doctors from Saudi Arabia.

Yet that Islamic nation is considered to be an ally of the U.S. and its leaders are perennially praised by the President and his cadre. 

Fossil fuel has a way of clouding common sense, and promoting duplicity in the desert and along the Beltway.

Exhibit A: Schools in Saudi Arabia. From the U.S. government, not a word about these academies of fear and loathing. For that you would have to go to Freedom House, a private concern with a conscience and a series of reports to prove it. According to FH, textbooks in Muslim studies courses “teach the infamous anti-Semitic forgeries, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as fact.”

Exhibit B: A report in the Telegraph. It focuses on a Saudi-funded Islamic school in London. Yes, the very same London where the MD terrorists and their helpers were out to slay the defenseless—preferably, of course, women.

According to the British newspaper, “The schoolbooks presently in use describe Jews as ‘monkeys’ or apes,” and young pupils are asked to “give examples of worthless religions, such as Judaism.”

This information is particularly compelling when contrasted with a Saudi Arabian law. It states that Muslims on the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca must have polio immunization certificates before entering the country.

The polio vaccine currently in use in Saudi Arabia, and also in the civilized world, was developed by one Jonas Edward Salk. He was the oldest son of Russian Jewish immigrants to New York City.

Other medical specialists who professed a “worthless religion” include Selman Waksman, who discovered the antibiotic streptomycin. And Paul Ehrlich, who developed the “magic bullet” to cure venereal disease. And Rosalind Franklin who developed X-ray diffraction photographs of DNA. There are many, many, more. To retrieve their names and backgrounds, all any Saudi Arabian has to do is google “Medicine and Jews.” A long list of Nobel laureates and outstanding scientists and physicians will pop right up.

But this would produce a sheik shock, and that would be unkind to the Arab nation. Why not choose a simpler way? All the Saudis have to do is forsake the products of those “monkeys and apes.” Not all would die of syphilis, or succumb to polio and other ailments. The survivors, who might well number in the hundreds, could go on reading the Protocols of Zion to their hearts’ content.

Or they could go on doing what they’re doing—providing an example of how an entire nation can hate Jews and use the benefits they produced at one and the same time.

No doubt the Saudis will stick with Plan B, and the craven, fossil fuel-dependent nations will go along with them. Hate and hypocrisy are sometimes difficult to swallow, but they go down quite easily with the proper amount of oil.      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

              

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                           

                                              

                                               PRIVATE GORE

  

Like most one-note hysterics Gore Vidal, 81, spends a large part of his days in a snit. His latest hissyfit concerns a play entitled Terre Haute, which recently completed a run in England. It concerns the relationship of a homosexual writer, evidently not unlike Vidal, and a killer evidently not unlike Timothy McVeigh.

According to the London Observer, Vidal recently threatened playwright Edmund White: He “will yet be feeling the wrath of my lawyers. It’s unethical and vicious to make it very clear that this old faggot writer is based on me, and that I’m madly in love with Timothy McVeigh, who I never met.”

No doubt Vidal meant “whom.” He’s hipped on grammatical propriety. He’s also hipped on bizarre political theories, which is perhaps what gave White the idea in the first place.

In point of fact, after McVeigh’s arrest and conviction for the Oklahoma City bombing that claimed the lives of 168 people, many of them minors, Vidal began a correspondence and obligingly fell for McVeigh’s line, informing the world that the prisoner “denies any foreknowledge of children in the Murrah building.”

As for Lee Harvey Oswald, McVeigh, 9/11 etc., Vidal offers the world his Unified Field Theory of crimes, assassinations and wars. “Osama was chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the frightening logo for our long-contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan…. The administration is convinced that Americans are so simple-minded that they can deal with no scenario more complex than the venerable, lone, crazed killer (this time with zombie helpers) who does evil just for the fun of it ‘cause he hates us because we’re rich ‘n free and he’s not.”

In short, Gore can suggest, imply, attack, use innuendo; he need offer no proof to back up his assertions; he can be unethical and vicious, (defenders of Israel are a “predatory people…busy stealing other people’s land in the name of an alien theocracy”)—he can do all that and more, and get away with it. And why not? The man is an aristocrat, part-time expatriate, scion of a political family, and prolific novelist, playwright and essayist. Shouldn’t an octogenarian be allowed to explore a new genre: nonsense literature? 

But let a writer suggest something in fiction about the predilections of a male Rosie O’Donnell and immediately attorneys are summoned and the press informed of the ghastly disruption of Mr. Vidal’s inviolate privacy.

Ah, well, when Gore graduated from Phillips Andover back in the Jurassic Era, he was named Class Hypocrite.

Even then they knew.