Comments
17 Oct 2008
Hugh Fitzgerald
"They [American Jews]have entirely swallowed hook, line and sinker the distorted totally unbalanced vilification of Senator Joseph McCarthy is part of the Hollywoodized rewriting of events that cast their shadow down to our generation."
The attempt to apply maquillage to Joseph McCarthy disturbs. He, and his admirers, and that unseemly crew that is listed (Roy Cohn et alia), were in their methods, in their manners, in their everyhting, simply beyond the pale, and with the drunken sot McCarthy did much damage to the cause that they claimed to be furthering. There is no need to drag in McCarthy -- there is every reason to stay well away from defending him -- in order to make a point about a wilful ignoring of warning signs about Obama and his likely administration (understanding of the Middle East derived from Rashid Khalidi and Zbigniew Brzezinski, with advice also offered by Robert Malley, and with Senators Hagel and Lugar possible choices -- supposedly "reassuring" because they are Republicans, but not "reassuring" at all because of their demonstrated antipathy (Hagel a bit more than Lugar) to Israel and its plight (as it defends itself against a never-ending Jihad), and that antipathy bears a close relationship, may even largely explain, their failure to grasp the nature of the threat of Jihad, especially through the Money Weapon, Da'wa, and demographic conquest, in Western Europe.
Depicting McCarthy in a good light, or trying to, does not help, but hurts, the attempt to convince others to be more wary of Obama.
9 Nov 2008
al lando
Citing Joe Lieberman twice in his"band of intellectuals, writers and politicians" and invoking Joe McCarthy are classical signs of right-wing hysteria. If Berdchevsky's aim is to persuade any thoughtful Jews, better he shouldn't list all those cranky conservatives with whom so few of the many esteemed pro-israeli Obama supporters refuse to be identified. Nor is it such a good idea to bad-mouth Roth, Malamud and Bellow as part of a drive-by smear. All it does is contribute to the very type of chasm Mr. Berdichevsky finds so distressing.
14 Nov 2008
Norman Berdichevsky
to Al Lando and others,
Apparently the following are all “hysterical” and “Right-wing Jews” who cannot be “thoughtful” and all of whom are “cranky conservatives” who cannot persuade “thoughtful Jews” like him and who all initially welcomed the candidacy of Barak Obama with varying degrees of approval or enthusiasm and all of whom became progressively and ultimately thoroughly disenchanted and suspicious of his associations, tactics and multiple shifts in policy.
For the record, they are…..news commentator Charles Krauthammer, former White House Press secretary Arie Fleischer, Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Joshua Muravchik, columnist and editor of the Weekly Standard Bill Kristol, political analyst and former campaign advisor to President Bill Clinton, Dick Morris, Editor of Frontpage Magazine, David Horowitz, National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg, Senator Joe Lieberman, author and columnist Dennis Prager, writer Monah Charen, editor of Commentary Norman Podhoretz, author Hillel Halkin who now resides in Israel, writer Bernie Goldberg, columnists Bert Prelutsky and Michael Medved, film producer David Zucker comedian Jackie Mason among many others including Natan Sharansky in Israel. I will also humbly include myself.
Let me acquaint Mr. Lando with the recent editorial from October 26, 2008 in The Jewish World Review by Dr. Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, probably the most respected Afro-American scholar and philosopher in the United States and author of “Are Jews Generic”, a powerful chapter (pp. 65-110) attacking anti-Semitism, and notably Black anti-Semitism, in his recent book Black Rednecks and White Liberals. I quote the article in its entirety below.
Sowell is even more contemptuous of Obama than the Jewish critics cited above. But for Mr. Lando and others who pride themselves as progressives or liberals and have closed their minds on even debating questions and issues that are crystal clear for them – obviously Sowell cannot be taken seriously because he is not a demagogue like the Reverends Jesse Jackson (Hymie-town), Wright and other “Black leaders” who pander to reverse racism and anti-Semitism.
Unlike many of my many Liberal Jewish friends who are already pointing to the Zionist background of Rahm Emanuel as “proof” that Obama has only friendly intentions towards Jews and Israel, I know from much experience that it is folly to count on the adage “Like father, like son”. Look at his first appointments in the field of Middle East policy and you will know which way Obama is heading.
Mr. Lando cannot countenance or even reply to the fact that whatever his many faults, Senator Joe McCarthy was not an anti-Semite. But for the Jewish liberal, he must be because he is the arch-enemy of the gospel of Woody Allenism that requires all “to see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil of Liberals” and to consider McCarthy an American Hitler ( no matter what the revelations of the Venona Papers).
I had my own deeply personal experience that cured me of liberal white Jewish guilt – a close romantic relationship with a “Black” woman whose skin color was no darker than Obama’s . Her father was a successful real estate dealer in a New York suburb and horror of horrors – he was the Chairman of the local branch of the Republican Party! She was mercilessly attacked and ostracized in high school and college because she did not identify with the then growing currents of Black nationalism and radicalism. Unlike Obama, she did not bend with the blowing of the wind but remained an individual with no pre-set fixed loyalty to any group, or race.
Obama and The Left 10/26/08 by Thomas Sowell
Although Senator Barack Obama has been allied with a succession of far left individuals over the years, that is only half the story. There are, after all, some honest and decent people on the left. But these have not been the ones that Obama has been allied with — allied, not merely "associated" with.
ACORN is not just an organization on the left. In addition to the voter frauds that ACORN has been involved in over the years, it is an organization with a history of thuggery, including going to bankers' homes to harass them and their families, in order to force banks to lend to people with low credit ratings.
Nor was Barack Obama's relationship with ACORN just a matter of once being their attorney long ago. More recently, he has directed hundreds of thousands of dollars their way. Money talks — and what it says is more important than a politician's rhetoric in an election year. Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger are not just people with left-wing opinions. They are reckless demagogues preaching hatred of the lowest sort — and both are recipients of money from Obama.
Bill Ayers is not just "an education professor" who has some left-wing views. He is a confessed and unrepentant terrorist, who more recently has put his message of resentment into the schools — an effort using money from a foundation that Obama headed. Nor has the help all been one way. During the last debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, Senator McCain mentioned that Senator Obama's political campaign began in Bill Ayers' home. Obama immediately denied it and McCain had no real follow-up.
It was not this year's political campaign that Obama began in Bill Ayers' home but an earlier campaign for the Illinois state legislature. Barack Obama can match Bill Clinton in slickness at parsing words to evade accusations. That is one way to get to the White House. But slickness with words is not going to help a president deal with either domestic economic crises or the looming dangers of a nuclear Iran.
People who think that talking points on this or that problem constitute "the real issues" that we should be talking about, instead of Obama's track record, ignore a very fundamental fact about representative government.
Representative government exists, in the first place, because we the voters cannot possibly have all the information necessary to make rational decisions on all the things that the government does. We cannot rule through polls or referendums. We must trust someone to represent us, especially as President of the United States. Once we recognize this basic fact of representative government, then the question of how trustworthy a candidate is becomes a more urgent question than any of the so-called "real issues." A candidate who spends two decades promoting polarization and then runs as a healer and uniter, rather than a divider, forfeits all trust by that fact alone.
If Ronald Reagan had attempted to run for President of the United States as a liberal, the media would have been all over him. His support for Barry Goldwater would have been in the headlines and in editorial denunciations across the country. No way would he have been able to get away with using soothing words to suggest that he and Barry Goldwater were like ships that passed in the night.
If Barack Obama had run as what he has always been, rather than as what he has never been, then we could simply cast our votes based on whether or not we agree with what he has always stood for. Some people take solace from the fact that Senator Obama has verbally shifted position on some issues, like drilling for oil or gun control, since this is supposed to show that he is "pragmatic" rather than ideological.
But political zig-zags show no such moderation as some seem to assume. Lenin zig-zagged and so did Hitler. Zig-zags may show no more than that someone is playing the public for fools. Some people who see the fraud in what Obama is saying are amazed that others do not. But Obama knows what con men have long known, that their job is not to convince skeptics but to enable the gullible to continue to believe what they want to believe. He does that very well.
17 Nov 2008
Hamud Hamudstein
Berdichevsky is engaging on several levels, not the least of which being his artless enthusiasm for self-contradiction and paradox.
Those pleasures are so abundant in his piece, so deeply woven into his remarkable logic, that it's difficult to extract just one for special mention. However, it seems Berdichevsky's most vivid concern is that "liberal Jews" accused Sarah Palin of being ignorant because they desire nothing less than Israel's utter annihilation and the genocide of the Jewish people everywhere else.
While this "liberal Jewish" effort seems somewhat self-defeating, one wonders whether Berdichevsky isn't similarly at odds with himself. To this point, one might consider Sarah Palin's St. Paul speech in which she quoted directly and at length from Westbrook Pegler, an ardent McCarthyite whose Jew-hatred was so lurid as to encourage the John Birch Society to show him the door.
While Berdichevsky may ignore Reagan's wreath-tossing at Kolmeshöhe Cemetery, and James Baker's puckish irreverence toward Jews, and Pat Buchanan's cheeky defense of Kurt Waldheim and a great many other Nazi war criminals, is it wise for Berdichevsky to persist in his boosterism even though, yea and verily, Ken Adelman voted for Obama because McCain's choice of Palin "showed appalling lack of judgement"?
Or ought one caution "wisdom" to Berdichevsky, a man who fails to see that the characters played by Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman in Meet the Fockers were burlesques? What could "wisdom" possibly mean to a self-professed Zionist who uses "progressive" as a pejorative and who regards as disloyal those Jews who identify themselves as secular or "culturally Jewish"?
Is Berdichevsky somehow magically unaware that the great majority of Jews who devoted their lives to, and died for, the founding of the State of Israel held economic views rather less than laissez-faire? Is Berdichevsky somehow ignorant of the fact that aggressively secularist right-wing Zionism has traditionally played an important role in Israeli politics? Did Berdichevsky fail to notice the eerie absence of "secular," "progressive," and "culturally Jewish" Jews at Ahmadinejad's "Let's Make Fun of the Holocaust Festival"?
Berdichevsky makes me despair. And not only because his inchoate carrying on finds a welcome place beside Theodore Dalrymple's work. As someone once fortunate enough to sit-in on Talmud lectures given by Adin Steinsalz, and learn chumash, or the Hebrew Bible, from MK Hanan Porat, and spend time with people who'd been involved in the ideological formation of the Religious Kibbutz Movement, I know first-hand that conservative streams within Jewish politics and religion were once characterized by a formidable intellectual and moral sophistication.
We're now reduced to folks like Berdichevsky, like Mona Charen, who obviously can't be bothered to listen to what they themselves say. If they bothered even half-way, they'd realize that what they said makes no sense whatsoever.
18 Nov 2008
Norman Berdichevsky
To Hamud Hamudstein or whomever chooses to hide behind this name:
I admit to the charge of being engaging on several levels and even of an occasional paradox with the possibility of self-contradiction. This is the inevitable result of having lived abroad for 30 years, speaking five languages and being intimately familiar with the diverse cultures and societies of Great Britain, Denmark, Israel and Spain (and their respective Jewish communities) as well as my native country (The USA) .
I defined myself proudly for decades as a Liberal, progressive and secular Jew before these terms became the apparent plaything, shield and badge of numerous self righteous and arrogant scoundrels who have come to exercise a dominant voice in the democratic Party and who would today cause former leaders such as Harry Truman, JFK, Hubert Humphrey and Senator Henry Jackson to spin in their graves as well as forced Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman to abandoned the Party that has abandoned them.
In the time worn tactic of putting words in my mouth and on an article I never penned, HH claims I accuse “liberal Jews” of “nothing less than Israel’s utter annihilation and the genocide of the Jewish People everywhere. These words are not put into quotation marks because I never uttered or write them. What words I ask were used at the St. Paul convention speech that HH remembers which ere used by Sarah Palin allegedly borrowed from Westbrook Pegler that are full of Jew-hatred?
He further brings in President Reagan (whom I criticized for laying a wreath at a German military cemetery), Pat Buchanan and Kurt Waldheim none of whom I have written about for New English review or anywhere else. I have no idea who Ken Adelman is or why he is mentioned. As for “Meet the Fockers”, I do indeed think this is a dreadful film and that no self-respecting Jew would wish to engage in portraying the repulsive types that make their son (in the film) cringe in shame. If this is burlesque, it is still self-hatred - but taking their lead from Woody Allen (no comment on my remarks about him from HH), this is to be expected as no Jewish character has ever been sympathetically portrayed by him (apart from “victims of McCarthyism”).
I lived in Israel for 11 years and have a deep attachment to the country and its people. I am not a Zionist today - if I were, I would choose to live there. I leave it for HH to explain what he means by ….”the great majority of Jews who devoted their lives to, and died for, the founding of the State of Israel held economic views rather less than laissez-faire”
Does he mean by that they were supporters of socialism. That was true but I fail to see what the relevance is to anything I have written. Maybe HH did not see the absurd interview Larry King granted to Ahmadinejad. If he had and followed the talk given at Ahmadinejad at Columbia University, he should ask himself, who apart from those who identify with the far Left, believe that these supposed demonstrations of free speech were anything but a farce. I am proud to be associated with Theodore Dalrymple and Mona Charen. I admire them and their work and would recommend both Our Culture - And What’s Left of It and Useful Idiots as two of the most insightful works analyzing contemporary politics and society .
I certainly know and admire Talmudic scholar Adin Steinsalz, MK Hanan Porat*, and greatly respect the Religious Kibbutz Movement. I therefore take the liberty of quoting MK Hanan Porat. I agree wholeheartedly with his sentiments.
Above all, I am fearful of the feeling of people who say that now this is no longer our enterprise - that it is not the "beginning of our redemption". I hear people speaking this way in various settlements and in a number of congregations. I do not accept that. The break is not between the Land of Israel and the State of Israel, it is between the Land of Israel and the state leadership. The state is the great enterprise of the return to Zion in terms of its national and state meaning, and it continues to exist and be valuable as the "foundation of G-d's throne on earth", even when the leadership spoils matters and betrays its mission. We pray for the well-being of the State of Israel, which is not Sharon or Peres personally. If I am in opposition to the government, it is because I am in a coalition with the state, with the enterprise, with the idea. The state is more than a public company that reflects the shares of the public as a whole. It is not only an instrument of a precept, but an instrument in its own right. The fact that its leadership has betrayed its mission does not prevent me from extolling it, loving it, and thanking the L-rd daily for its existence.
I find it difficult to believe that HH or Jews who voted for Obama given all his past associations, would feel comfortable with. Besides all the Jews I cite in my most recent article in New English Review, Afro-American scholar Thomas Sowell (Black Rednecks and White Liberals) probably most accurately sums up why he is utterly undependable and why many gullible liberals of today will overlook all the past contradictions.
*Hanan Porat was expelled as a child with his family from Kibbutz Ein Tzurim in Gush Etzion when it was overrun by the Jordanians in the War of Independence. He grew up on the relocated Kibbutz Ein Tzurim, and after the Six-Day War, along with other children of the kibbutz, re-established Kibbutz Rosh Tzurim in Gush Etzion.
18 Nov 2008
Hamud Hamudstein
Mr. Berdichevsky says, “I admit to the charge of being engaging on several levels...This is the inevitable result of having lived abroad for 30 years...”
His long absence from the U.S. no doubt explains why his views on American politics have an arresting Rip Van Winkle quality, not so much due to their folklorish dream-logic as to their failure to engage individuals and issues well-known to even casual followers of current events whose attentions have been rather more consistent.
In this precise regard, Berdichevsky’s faith in Sarah Palin recalls Rip’s declaration of loyalty to King George III. Just as Rip was unaware that the American Revolution had been fought and won, Berdichevsky was apparently in the Land of Nod, or at least in Ibiza or the Tivoli Gardens, when Ken Adelman, a lifelong and supremely hawkish conservative ideologue who worked closely and famously with President Gerald Ford, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and President Ronald Reagan, made international headlines by declaring his support for Obama in the New Yorker.
It’s Berdichevsky’s distance from the realities of American life that perhaps also best explains his eerie insistence on Woody Allen’s relevance to the 2008 presidential race, as well as his touching faith in Thomas Sowell’s rejection of Obama, although Colin Powell, who embraced Obama, has an experience of national defense and security that should be judged somewhat more vital, hands-on, and extensive than that of Sowell.
Might we similarly find Berdichevsky distracted by Tivoli’s biergarten when Newsweek and the New York Times reported on Sarah Palin’s quoting of Westbrook Pegler in her St. Louis speech? I think so. A biergarten is a swell place to get away from it all. And Rip Van Winkle, in the end, wasn’t an object of scorn but of envy. The old Dutch settlers came to see Rip as exceptionally fortunate.
They yearned to escape into dreamland, far away from this world which they found too demanding, too complex, and so sadly at odds with their wishes and hopes.
