Sam Hamod's 'Good Jews' Opinion; Posted on: 2003-12-01 09:34:38 [ Printer friendly ]
by Paul Westman
The myth of the “good Jew” is a pervasive one. The “good Jew,” of course, is the Jew(s) the speaker knows personally, and those he interprets as being committed to “humane” values—unlike misguided Jews (typically, but not always, identified as “Zionists” today).
Jewish power is one thing. But the remarkable psychological effect Jews have on Gentiles, White and non-White alike, strongly suggests that Gentiles possess a fatal psychological blindness that Jews exploit to their advantage. Every ethnic group on earth falls prey to Jews in precisely the same way. They all make the same mistakes.
An example of Levantine strategic misjudgment is displayed in a June 25, 2003 editorial by poet H. S. “Sam” Hamod entitled “The Myth of Tiny, Little Israel: Zionist Tentacles Everywhere.” http://tinyurl.com/x787 The Indiana-born Hamod (1936- ), a Lebanese-American, is a fairly typical Establishment activist intellectual. Trained at the Writer’s Workshop of the University of Iowa, he is the author of eight books of poetry, and director of the National Communications Institute in Washington, D.C. He is also a former advisor to the U.S. State Department, former editor of Third World News, and a frequent contributor to CounterPunch.com and todaysalternativenews.com.
For the most part, Hamod’s editorial is straightforward and inoffensive. He speaks of American Jewish power in the media, academia and government. By contemporary standards, his anti-White asides, at least in this article, are bland. For example, he maintains that South Africa’s police and military “terrorized Blacks and Browns in that country for years,” denounces Hitler and, like everyone else, cherishes a child-like belief in the “Holocaust.” Hamod expresses scorn for “wacko right-winger” fundamentalist Christians, an “ignorant and crazy right wing” he believes controls the media jointly with “Zionist” Jews and possesses the power “to keep Muslim scholars out of interfaith forums and out of university speaking engagements.”
Even so, he is broad-minded enough to have sympathetic words for Richard Nixon and Pat Buchanan, and makes note of one-sided media depictions of Italian-Americans as gangsters, while Jewish men (including even mobsters like Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky) are invariably portrayed as “warm and generous” or, at the outside, “good men who went wrong.”
Far and away Hamod’s most arresting observation is the following: “Because of the long reach of the Israeli tentacles, I would say that even American presidents and congress people are afraid to speak openly or to act strongly against Israel because they may fear exposure that would ruin their career. Politicians up to presidents, according to FBI agents I spoke with in the 80s while I was Director of the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C., were afraid of assassination by Mossad or their related agents within even the American security apparatus. Some may scoff at this because they’ve never been inside this big game, but having seen it at work close up, one has to see it to believe it.”
Something to think about.
However, Hamod opens his article with the following assertion: “Let me say at the outset this article is not anti-Jewish, but is anti-Zionist. . . . There are many Jews as well as others who abhor this [Sharon’s and the Zionists’ murderous behavior], in fact, these Jews are among the most heroic in fighting this brutality that is being used against the Palestinians and the espionage Mossad is perpetrating all over the world. This group includes such people as Nurit Peled (the winner of the Sakharov Prize for Peace in Israel), Anthony Lewis, Professor Noam Chomsky, Rabbi Michael Lerner and many other courageous and moral people. . . . This article pertains to those who are Zionists who support the brutal tactics of Sharon and his predecessors in Palestine and the U.S. . .”
Hamod makes two common mistakes here.
First is the projection of the now-familiar good Jew/bad Jew dichotomy onto Jews, a distinction about as valid as the one between good cop and bad cop in the interrogation room. The fact that Jews disagree among themselves about how best to pursue Jewish interests does not mean that one set of Jews is pure and good, or cares about Arabs or Palestinians. Although Nurit Pelid is unfamiliar to me, Lewis, Chomsky, and Lerner are typical anti-White Jews, and any sympathy they express for Arabs is doubtless incidental to their real aims, which concern the direction of Jewish policy.
Hamod’s second common error is to identify socially and materially successful Jews as somehow extraordinarily “heroic,” “courageous,” or “moral” for simply taking a stand that should be expected of them as a matter of course. After all, Whites for decades have routinely taken positions directly contrary to the interests of their own people, sometimes at significant personal cost, but are never regarded as “heroic” or “courageous” for doing so. On the contrary, they are ritually humiliated and abused by the non-Whites they abjectly serve. Comfortable, successful Jews like Lewis, Chomsky, and Lerner hardly merit Hamod’s extravagant praise.
Such Arab and Levantine psychological shortcomings with respect to Jews have always existed. In a hilarious 1953 letter written from Egypt, Francis Parker Yockey makes them quite plain:
“These people [the Egyptians] are terribly stupid and incorrigible (not capable of being enlightened) . . . They’re simply too roasted by the sun to be able to accomplish anything. . . .
“[A] few days ago an important fellahin journalist said to me, about the Jews, ‘I regard the Jews as cousins.’ And the country is now at war with the Jews. But the officials say: not against the Jews, against the ZIONISTS. . . . Even the Gods contend in vain against stupidity. The synagogues here are very large, and they’re all on the rise. The big businesses are Jewish. On the streets the Jews can’t be distinguished from the others—except in a few cases—these people come from Europe—and they say ‘I’m a European.’ And they [the Egyptians] believe it, too.”
Jewry’s success, it seems, always depends heavily on the blindness and stupidity of its victims.
