My Dinner with Pamela Gross-Finkelstein

At a sugar magnate’s posh dinner party in New York City last week, the lady on my right had just called Ariel Sharon a war criminal and a terrorist. I looked at her place card: Pamela Gross-Finkelstein. “You’re not German, by any chance?” I asked her. “No, I’m New York Jewish—and not a self-loathing one either,” came the answer. Pamela and I hit it off after that, as I did with the rest of the table—most of them very rich and Jewish—who happened to agree. Now I don’t usually report on private dinner conversations, but this was a breakthrough. It’s not everyday that someone, Jewish or otherwise, can criticize Likud and stay standing.

The fact that a few educated people in New York are starting to see the light gives me hope, however slight. Israel is acting in an outrageous, illegal, and criminal manner. Sharon is a disgrace, and the only thing he has managed to accomplish is to scare both Bush and Kerry into keeping their mouths shut, until Nov. 2, that is. Then he will begin his blackmailing all over again. At the American Israel Public Affairs Committee convention in the nation’s capital a couple of weeks ago, both Tom DeLay and George W. Bush made it very clear: as goes Israel, so goes America. New York’s Mayor Bloomberg repeated the mantra during the Israel parade on Fifth Avenue a few days later.

If one had been asleep for the last 56 years and had just woken up, a-la-Rip Van Winkle, you’d think Colorado was under attack. The only trouble is that Israel is not America’s 51st state, AIPAC or no AIPAC. Israeli soldiers, backed by tanks and helicopter gunships, fired on a peaceful demonstration killing 40 people and injuring hundreds, most of them teenagers and children, and Bush called the massacre “troubling,” a telling reaction. I have not heard Bush’s response to the killing of a 3-year-old Palestinian girl the day after the demonstration, and it’s just as well. He most likely would have asked for a clarification. Was the 3-year-old playing with her pigtails, or was she crawling on all fours?

However you cut it—and believe me, the Israeli lobby and the neocons are spinning like they’ve never spun before —this was an unprovoked attack against unarmed and peaceful demonstrators. Raanan Gissin, spokesman for Sharon, expressed regret at the deaths but denied that Israeli forces had planned to shoot into crowds. So there you have it. Shoot first, express your regrets, deny meaning to do it, and everything is hunky-dory.

The name of the raid into Gaza speaks volumes: Operation Rainbow. Some rainbow for the Palestinian mothers who lost their children. When Bob Novak expressed outrage about this on his “Capital Gang” program, National Review’s Kate O’Beirne countered with the story of an Israeli mother who was murdered along with her three children in cold blood a week before. It was a good response but had nothing to do with an army, mostly financed by Uncle Sam, shooting tank shells and missiles from a gunship against unarmed demonstrators. One was a cold-blooded murder committed by a terrorist, the other was cold-blooded multi-murder committed by a terrorist regime.

Therein lies the difference. One party kills with impunity in the name of self- defense; the others are all terrorists. Sharon and his fellow Likudniks, Begin and Shamir—terrorists too, it should be said—have been playing this card since the birth of Israel. Accidents do happen during civil unrest, but no army shoots unarmed demonstrators. During the German occupation of Greece, when the hunger marches would take place, children and wounded soldiers in wheelchairs were in the front of the demonstrations. No German trooper ever fired. In Gaza, the Israelis even managed to kill some 70 animals, including a parrot, a couple of jaguars, and a few ostriches. ’Twas a famous victory against a zoo.

Some 2,018 houses in Gaza have been bulldozed by the Israelis, and 18,382 people are now homeless. The Israeli Defense Force plans to demolish hundreds more homes. And this is in Gaza, where Sharon has decided to pull out. I wonder what it would be like if he had stayed?

In his poignant review of Richard Ben Cramer’s wonderful book How Israel Lost in these pages two issues ago, Scott McConnell explained how Israel went from a noble experiment to an oppressor of three million mostly innocent Palestinians. The state of Israel was established by an act of international brigandage with America and Europe assuaging their guilt by forcing their will upon an innocent Palestinian people. Instead of Israel now pulling back and compensating the Palestinians for their suffering and for their loss of dignity and humanity, the settlers and their right-wing extremists want more. Time to pull the plug, Uncle Sam.

My friend Taki has gone too far
By Conrad Black March 3, 2001 (The Spectator)

The Spectator's social writer, Taki Theodoracopulos, has often graciously referred to me as an indulgent proprietor. Our relations have been cordial for 15 years and we have frequently been each other's guests, have been friendly with each other's spouses and have many mutual friends. Long before I knew him I was aware of his penchant, sometimes entertaining but sometimes excessive, to denigrate certain ethnic groups, most often the Jews. With such a bonhomous character there is a natural tendency to overlook his lapses of judgment and give him the benefit of the doubt that he is only railing against the prissy hypersensitivities of political correctness. It is hard to imagine that a person with whom you are friendly and have had many memorably agreeable times is a racist who wishes and incites violence against innocent people because of their ethnicity or religion….

I defended Taki when he was attacked by the Mayor of New York for a very insulting column about Puerto Ricans in 1997. His remarks were outrageous but, as the Puerto Ricans did make a mess on Fifth Avenue, they contained a kernel of truth and did not incite violence against Puerto Ricans. Nor are Puerto Ricans under any particular external threat. Nor do they have a history of being savagely oppressed. In the same spirit I defended one of our other writers, William Cash, against the wrath of the entire US film industry in 1994, when he published an article about the leading Jewish figures in that industry which was somewhat insulting but well short of an incitement to racial hatred.

These were not among my most enjoyable moments as a publisher, but it is the duty of a publisher to defend his writers unless they are, for whatever reason, indefensible. Writers, like everyone else, have the right to dislike individuals and whole nationalities and ethnic groups.

They have the right to express their dislike if they do so rationally, are not legally defamatory, and if they are within the bounds of civilized taste. Our publications will never be hounded into politically correct avoidance of any forceful opinion touching ethnicity, sectarianism, gender or sexual orientation. To do so would be to accept a muzzle on freedom of expression and to prevent comment on large and interesting aspects of life. My associates and I would shut down our publications rather than submit to such restrictions.

Unfortunately, last week in this magazine, Taki's reflections were indefensible. He expressed a hatred for Israel and a contempt for the United States and its political institutions that were irrational and an offence to civilized taste. In the process, I am afraid he uttered a blood libel on the Jewish people wherever they may be.

He wrote that the United States had intended to invade French air space to force down fugitive financier Marc Rich's aeroplane (on orders ultimately from the same commander-in-chief who has now pardoned Rich); that Israeli intelligence knew more of US Air Force activities than the Pentagon did and shared this information with Rich because Israel's favor had been bought by Rich. For Taki, the United States was not yet 'Israel-occupied territory'; that is, occupied by 'those nice guys who attack rock-throwing youth with armor-piercing missiles'. He acknowledged his anti-Semitism but implicitly defined it as 'daring to protest about soldiers shooting at kids', and he asserted that 'the way to Uncle Sam's heart runs through Tel Aviv and Israeli-occupied territory'.

In both its venomous character and its unfathomable absurdity, this farrago of lies is almost worthy of Goebbels or the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Jews, according to Taki, have suborned the US government, direct that country's military like a docile attack dog, and glory in the murder of innocent or mischievous children. He presents the universal Jewish ethos as brutish, vulgar, grasping and cunningly wicked.

It is a fearful thing to contemplate that someone with whom I have had such long and cordial relations should use a publication of ours for such malignant purposes, however veiled in his familiar recourse to harmless excess, or even amplified by his frequent and publicly confessed intake of intoxicating substances.

I wouldn't suspect Taki of co-ordinating his views with anyone else's. But his opinions are not greatly more extreme than those of large sections of the British media which habitually apply a double standard when judging the Israelis and Palestinians. Behind the spurious defense of merely seeking justice for the Palestinians, most of the relevant sections of the BBC, Independent, Guardian, Evening Standard and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office are rabidly anti-Israel. I doubt that most of the people involved would be hostile to someone merely because that person was Jewish, though some would, but they are almost all, wittingly or not, stoking the inferno of anti-Semitism.

The origins of the Arab-Israeli problem are too complicated for easy summary, but among the points normally overlooked by most of the British media is that the government of the United Kingdom bears a unique responsibility for the problem. It sold the same real estate twice. In the direst moments of the first world war Britain promised the same territory to the Jews and to the Arabs.

Israel, after an unconscionable length of time, and with the exact borders still in dispute, has accepted the principle of two states in the territory it once hoped to occupy itself. The Palestinians have not accepted the right of the state of Israel to survive. They do not accept the Israelis as an indigenous people and still think of them as foreign colonial occupiers like the British, the Turks and the Romans. This and the implosion of Arafat's authority among his own people, and not the actions of the Israelis, are the sources of the present impasse, and every knowledgeable observer of the Middle East knows it.

The West Bank is now governed by groups of thugs, and Arafat has been afraid to go there for several months. The Palestinian Authority is a brutal dictatorship and one of the most financially corrupt regimes in the world. The PLO has not lived up to any of its significant obligations under the Oslo Accords, including expunging the anti-Israel clauses of the Palestine National Charter. Barak went as far as any Israeli leader could possibly go at Camp David and was rewarded with rejection by Arafat and the unleashing of a new insurrection. Large numbers of Palestinians have been persuaded that glorious eternity awaits them if they manage to die at the hands of the Israelis.

Fortified by this belief, mobs of stone-throwers have been pushed forward with snipers interspersed among them and children in the vanguard to take the brunt of the Israeli response. Sharon gave the Muslim leaders plenty of notice of his now famous ten-minute walk on the Temple Mount, and did nothing on it that was disrespectful of Islam or of the Palestinian people. Arafat has declared that he requires an almost unlimited right of return of designated Palestinians, including millions born after the initial departure in 1948, and the demographic inundation of Israel with Arabs. It is as if the UK were asked to receive 60 million people of a foreign nationality with which we had been at war for more than 50 years. Apart from Adolf Eichmann, Israel has never executed anyone, including terrorists - a refreshing contrast to the peremptory executions routinely conducted by the Palestinians and some other neighboring regimes.

We hear almost nothing of any of this from most of the British media or the Foreign Office. We hear only shrill orchestrated solicitude for the supposed underdog and relentless antagonism against Israel - ostensibly the Israeli government but, inevitably and implicitly, the Jews.

These Jews are the same people whom Pope John Paul II has recognized as 'not the cousins but the brothers and sisters of all Christians, the chosen people of the Old Testament', to whom the world should repent, as he did, for millennia of oppression. The Pope's own record in these matters is exemplary, but he repented for his one billion co-religionists and for the 2,000-year history of the world's foremost Church.

Israel has many failings, and of course the treatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis, by the Arab powers who keep them in the camps (breeding grounds for their terrorist cannon fodder), and by the United Nations is a crime in which we are all complicit. Of course the world must put this right.

But we will not put it right by returning to the ancient and evil practice of persecuting the Jewish people, to whom we owe so much for its genius in almost every field and its courage in heroic circumstances for nearly 6,000 years. The Jews, as much as any other people, have shown the world what human bravery and perseverance can achieve. It was pathetic and shaming that many of the distinguished leaders of London's Jewish community felt the need to tell me last week, after local performances of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, that they hoped that 'people will realize that Israel doesn't just quell Palestinian riots'.

All Israel really wants is to be like other countries, to be accepted in the world as a people with dignity and a right to a state. Israel has that right. It is a sophisticated democracy and a society of laws. Those neurotic racists who dispute that right should be forced to come out from behind the skirts of legitimate differences of opinion in Middle Eastern controversies. They should be made to face those who would be their victims.

And those who have assisted them, through lassitude or negligence or malice, should follow the Pope's inspiring example: they should repent. The Pharisees and hypocrites in the British press should repent their calumnies. A few days after Arafat cavalierly rejected generous concessions from Israel and unleashed his latest bloodbath, the Foreign Secretary was photographed walking hand-in-hand with Arafat and caused Britain to condemn Israel at the United Nations. He should repent and exorcise the institutional bias of his department. In our publications justice will be done.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.