Posted on 12/16/2002 4:26:31 PM PST by SJackson
Perhaps you haven’t heard, but there’s a new controversy percolating in the Jewish world; or in the "hate-Jews world," to be exact. A little 15-year-old Italian girl of Egyptian extraction, Randa Ghazy, has written a book, Dream of Palestine, which, among other things, laments the death of "just five" Jews by a suicide bomber as an insufficient kill and describes Israeli soldiers ransacking mosques and raping Arab women. In case you were wondering, the book is fiction.
We can safely assume that at least two years elapsed from concept to publication of her 207-page novel this spring. Which means sweet Randa Ghazy, who has never been to "Palestine," was dreaming up her opus at around the age of twelve, while the Oslo process was still going strong and peace was at hand. What a marvelous imagination this youngster possesses. A regular prophetic visionary, too. As her Italian publisher, Rizzoli, put it, "She’s a really clever girl."
For some reason, the book flopped when it came out in Italy, selling a mere 13,000 copies. But it’s been at the top of the charts in France ever since its publication there. My guess is the French instinctively feel closer to the book’s sophisticated theme than the Italians do. In any event, while Dream of Palestine was collecting dust in Rome no one seemed to care. But its French popularity has now raised the ire of Jewish organizations from the Simon Wiesenthal Center to the French Council of Jewish Institutions to the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism. With one voice, they’re condemning the book, threatening lawsuits, calling for its removal from French bookstores, and of course, from the French Amazon website.
I hope the French courts, the Italian publisher and the Parisian booksellers all tell our Jewish do-gooders to get lost. I hope the book is translated into a dozen languages (including Hebrew), becomes a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, gets plugged on Oprah, outsells Catcher in the Rye on college campuses, and gets made into a Hollywood blockbuster. I want cute, shy Randa Ghazy popping up on Leno, Letterman, Regis, Good Morning America and Wake Up Tel Aviv, her hands in her lap and her legs dangling sweetly from a chair. Nothing would serve the cause of Jewish well-being better. I can’t wait for her sequel. I’ll write an endorsement for the book jacket - free of charge.
Who in their right mind thinks you can make cancer go away by covering it with a Band-Aid and getting it out of sight? Driving anti-Semitism underground, into the sewers, is the environment where it breeds best. If you want to suffocate it, I say, give it light and air to breathe. Make Dream of Palestine, Mein Kampf, the Protocols, the PLO Charter, Jenin, Jenin, et al, required reading and viewing for every Jewish kid, taught alongside their haftorah portions. Every tract that comes along to deny the Holocaust deserves a full-page ad in the Book Review section of the Sunday Times - paid for by the Anti-Defamation League and the Orthodox Union. Enshrine each and every one in the Holocaust memorials and museums around the world, alongside the gold teeth and life-sized boxcars. Just don’t teach them as history, teach them as current events.
Waving a magic wand, or a lawsuit, and trying to make evil disappear is much more dangerous than the evil itself, because it gives Jews a false sense of security we just can’t afford. When I look back a few thousand years, I think I have every right to be anxious, and angry, and I don’t want anyone, least of all well-meaning Jews, taking that away from me. Anything that keeps me on edge and on my toes is providing me with a great service. The minute I let my guard down and allow myself to believe that truth, justice, reason, goodwill or French law will save me, is the minute my goose is cooked. Bless you, Simon Wiesenthal, but while the oldest Nazi is 95, the newest one is 15.
No, let all the poisons seep out of their bottles and let all the snakes come out from under their rocks. Yes, give me a thousand Dreams of Palestine and two thousand Merkava tanks, 100 PLO Charters and one strong Israel from the river to the sea. Suppressing Jew-hatred is not the way to eliminate it. Making it a fruitless, self-destructive enterprise is.
Randa Ghazy, I want to give you a hug.
And then send a donation to Jews For the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.
Who has that poll handy... the one about which Euro country will be the first to implement Sharia?
Poll Results |
 |
Which European or Scandinavian country do you think will be first to institute Islamic law (shari'a)?
|
England |
232 |
6% |
 |
|
France |
1742 |
44.7% |
|
|
Belgium |
262 |
6.7% |
|
|
The Netherlands |
815 |
20.9% |
|
|
Sweden |
346 |
8.9% |
|
|
Norway |
205 |
5.3% |
|
|
Denmark |
293 |
7.5% |
|
|
Total votes: 3895 |
|||
Sadly, they vote en-masse for the other side.
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