anti-semites, we don't need you anymore

Anti-Semites, We Don't Need You Anymore
by Jack Engelhard
Jun 14, '04

Dismissed. You can go home. It's being taken care of. We've got enough guys within the ranks, Jews themselves, who are doing your job. In fact, you're fired.

Who needs you when we've got… Well, we'll always have Noam Chomsky and Norm Finkelstein. Add, now, Jeffrey Goldberg and Richard Ben Cramer to this list of Jews who are not self-hating, gosh no, but appear ready to serve any master who needs a quick Bilam fix, to curse the Hebrews as they slumber in their tents.

Apologies to all those other Jeffrey Goldbergs who have the same (quite common) name as the Jeffrey Goldberg who writes for the New Yorker - yes, the New Yorker - and who blasted his own people in this most august of all journals. Goldberg, as alleged by many who've read him on the "settlers", did a (hatchet) job fit for Anthony Lewis. Oops, I think he's Jewish, too.

Oh well. Then how about that opinion-maker who was satisfied, in his column just the other day, that "very few Israelis have been killed" by Hezbollah since Israel retired from Lebanon. A few dead Jews in the name of "peace" - that suits Tom Friedman just fine. No problemo, as long as those "very few" Jews don't include Tom Friedman. Can it be? Yes, I think he is.

Then how about Nicholas Kristof, also of the New York Times?

Nick (may I?) referred to Ariel Sharon (not Yasser Arafat) as having bloodstained hands, so he must be Jewish. Maybe not. But "Kristof?" VeRRRry inteRRResting.

Goldberg, as is now well-known among pro and anti Semites, just "penned" - I am using tabloid lingo here - a rant that surely drew the applause of Vanessa Redgrave and Georgie Ann Geyer - and I don't think they're Jewish and that's a relief.

Quickly, let me note that these Jews who hate their own flesh are a tiny minority. I'd say five percent. But they get around.

The Gestapo and the SS used people just like this. Some 95 percent of the German/Jewish population were out-of-proportion contributors to medical science, the arts, commerce, prominent even in the military, and produced our Einsteins. (While Jews were a fraction of Europe's pre-WWII population, Jewish research scientists accounted for 25 percent of all Nobel prizes for medicine.) But those five percent who were violently insane were released from their asylums to perform as guards in the death camps, where they were sometimes as brutal as the Nazis. Kapos, these were called.

This Kapo mentality goes back even farther. The 18 Benedictions of Jewish liturgy are actually 19. Before codifying, the rabbis of some 2,000 years ago had to add an extra phrase: "May there be no hope for informers." That's because some prominent Jews slandered and betrayed their brothers and sisters to the Romans. Again, I'd say about five percent, but they did much damage.

Today, we call these types 'useful idiots'. Well, they sure are useful, but they are not idiots. These people know exactly what they're doing. That's different from the Sonderkommandos, themselves captives, who were used by the SS to dispose of the corpses. These Sonderkommandos "collaborated" only to live a few months longer. No such excuse for today's fellow travelers.

So along comes Jeffery Goldberg and writes this thing that bashes mostly the "settlers" and obsesses, negatively, about their appearance. Frankly, I have not read the piece. I don't need to. I don't have to step into fertilizer to know what it is. I can see it and smell it from a distance. Besides, I don't have the stomach for yet another "Get Israel" yarn.

But Israel's top-notch writer and artist, and settler, Ellen W. Horowitz, read it for me, for all of us, and reports that Goldberg is himself no Cary Grant, or even Richard Gere. You should read Ellen's excellent rebuttal as it appears on israelnationalnews.com, under "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly". (Ellen is Israeli, so a strong stomach, along with good looks, comes with the territory.)

Goldberg's New Yorker narrative is titled "Among the Settlers: Will They Destroy Israel?" That's enough. No need to read on. But Jeffrey, there were no settlers when Arabs went on a rampage in 1929, then again in 1948, then again in 1956, and even 1967. No settlers, no occupied territories, and still the Arabs and the rest of the world complained. Seems that there's always got to be some excuse to bash Israel and get Israel to capitulate, and this time around, the "settlers" are most handy.

Can we let Goldberg get away with this? So what I did was, I wrote to the New Yorker saying that I am ready to do a piece that may (now hold on!) portray Jews, Israelis and even "settlers" in a good light. (This would be an historic first.) I promised, in my e-mail, to employ novelistic and journalistic detachment, which, apparently, cannot be said for Goldberg. Not to brag, but my integrity may be just as good as Goldberg's. Yes, I can be impartial, or at least as impartial as Goldberg.

If Goldberg can slant one way and if I can slant the other way, maybe, in the wash, it will all come out clean -- in other words, journalism.

(Surely the famous fact-checkers at the New Yorker will be on the alert to add "occupied" to my territories, and "repressive" to any mention of Israel re: the Arabs.)

Or, if the New Yorker sends me to Israel, I may fall in love with Hanan Ashrawi, and there goes my objectivity as well. Obsessing negatively on Israel is a smart career move these days, especially if you want to get published or produced. Stories favorable to Israel fall between fat chance and no chance.

Anyway, to use the vernacular, I have a call into the New Yorker. Maybe the New Yorker is different. We shall see.

Richard Ben Cramer? I know him personally, almost. We must have crossed paths along the hallway when he was entering and I was leaving the Philadelphia Inquirer.

So he's out with a book. I haven't read that, either. I had my fill of Cramer when he was reporting from the Middle East for the Inquirer, back in the 1970s.

What I mean is this: Cramer won a Pulitzer for that reporting back in 1979, and he deserved it, just as Yasser Arafat deserved his Nobel Prize for Peace. This new book of Cramer's is another "Get Israel" scream, only this time between hard covers. I am trusting the Jerusalem Post's Bret Stephens on this. (Plus my own instinct.)

Cramer's book is named How Israel Lost. Here, too, why read the book when the title is so transparent and tells the whole story?

That's all I have to say on this subject for the moment, because I'm sitting by the phone waiting for that call from David Remnick, top gun at the New Yorker. I am going to sit here by the phone and wait. Yes, that's what I'm doing. I have drawn a circle around myself and won't budge.

Meantime, if you were watching those memorials for Ronald Reagan, you noticed that so many religious references came from the Hebrew Bible. Psalms, of course, but also Micah, Isaiah, King Solomon, and the Priestly Blessing. All that within a Christian ceremony that so elegantly paid tribute to President Reagan's Christian faith. That kind of harmony is what we mean by the Judeo-Christian Heritage. No wonder we can't be beat and no wonder God blesses America.