Nice

Candidate takes "Jewish money."

Via

'The gullible, the obtuse and the treacherous'

David Solway looks at self-hating, stupid and otherwise noxious Jews with high profiles and big mouths. A sampling:

• Jurist Richard Goldstone, who fathered the heinous UN report largely blaming Israel for its conduct during Operation Cast Lead — the same man who accepted a judicial appointment during the apartheid era in south Africa and who, according to reports, was responsible for sending 28 blacks to their death.
  
• Political careerist Martin Indyk, who is harshly critical of the beleaguered Jewish state he apparently once supported. Academic maven Neve Gordon, who denounces his home country, sides with the Palestinians, and offered comfort to Yassir Arafat in the Mukataa compound during the last Intifada.
  
• Visual artist Jan Egesborg circulating maps with Israel blanked out and featuring the phrase “Final Solution.” Journalist Uri Blau of the Haaretz newspaper in illegal possession of sensitive state documents.

Johann Hari's shitty little story

Looking ahead to Israel's 60th anniversary:

When you hit your 60th birthday, most of you will guzzle down your hormone replacement therapy with a glass of champagne and wonder if you have become everything you dreamed of in your youth. In a few weeks, the state of Israel is going to have that hangover.

She will look in the mirror and think – I have a sore back, rickety knees and a gun at my waist, but I'm still standing. Yet somewhere, she will know she is suppressing an old secret she has to face. I would love to be able to crash the birthday party with words of reassurance.

...

But I can't do it. Whenever I try to mouth these words, a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison.

HonestReporting responds.

In a modern day "poisoning the wells" libel, Hari accuses Israel of sole responsibility for polluting West Bank groundwater supplies. It is no secret that Israel has a chronic water problem and lags behind many other developed nations in environmental protection. However, the Palestinians are equally to blame for polluting the environment in the West Bank, which has, in turn, also caused damage to Israel's own water supplies. The West Bank mountain aquifer is one of the largest freshwater sources supplying both Israelis and Palestinians. Indeed, Israelis and Palestinians have jointly tackled such pollution and Israel has used its own expertise to provide Palestinian population centers with sewage treatment facilities. Why would Israel purposely destroy its own limited water supply?

Continuing his sewage analogy, Hari simplisticly accuses Israel of punishing Gaza's population for voting "the wrong way". Has Hari forgotten the continuing terrorism and missile attacks on Israeli population centers such as Sderot? Or the refusal of Hamas to conform to the international community's demands to renounce terror, recognize Israel and adhere to previously signed agreements?

Get over it

Mahatma Gandhi's grandson has some advice for the Jews.

Jewish identity in the past has been locked into the holocaust experience -- a German burden that the Jews have not been able to shed. It is a very good example of a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends. The holocaust was the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful. But, it seems to me the Jews today not only want the Germans to feel guilty but the whole world must regret what happened to the Jews. The world did feel sorry for the episode but when an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on the regret turns into anger.

Just like grandpa, who didn't think a war against Germany was necessary in 1938.

The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the god fearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.

Both Gandhis agree that the Jews are to blame for the violence in the Middle East. Grandpa thought a Jewish homeland an affront to the Arabs.

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.

His grandson sees the Jews as the world's foremost killers.

We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity.

Thanks to David Hazony, who wonders: "At what point does this qualify as anti-Semitism?"

Iran's version of Schindler's list

Surprise , surprise: "Zero Degree Orbit," an Iranian miniseries about the Holocaust that the AP described as sympathetic to the Jews, is anything but.

Allah has the clips, which kept causing my computer to crash. Memri transcript is here. As Memri explains, the Iranians had two motives in making the film.

By means of this series, the Iranians hope to dispel allegations that they deny the persecution of the Jews during World War II and hope to discard their image as Holocaust deniers. The series was presented as an historical drama which aims to depict the suffering of the Jews during World War II, and which is even aimed at educating the Jews about their history. In several newspapers, it is stated that the series sheds light on the way the Jews fled several countries, thus becoming refugees.

At the same time, the series presents the "Zionist lie": The Jewish state is a Zionist invention, the result of collaboration between the Zionists and the Nazis in an effort to coerce Jews to emigrate to Palestine.

It also enables the Iranian regime to stick it to the Pahlavi dynasty.

Iranian police captain Asgari: These are files on students who have passed the exam in order to study overseas.

[...]

There are two problematic files. One is about a young man called Taghi Navadeh, whose brother is in jail, charged with having ties with a Communist group called "the 53 people."

Major: And the other file?

Captain Asgari: It is on a young man called Habib Parsa, the son of a doctor called Ali Parsa. According to the information in the file, the father of this student served as a top Foreign Ministry official in the Iranian consul in Egypt and Syria. Towards the end of 1931, he helped to organize and participated in an Islamic conference in Jerusalem, held at the initiative of Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, the Mufti of the Muslims in Palestine. The conference was intended to denounce the Zionist movement and British policy in Palestine. Because he did not receive the Iranian government's permission to participate in the conference, he was demoted to the position of consul-general in Palestine. A few years later, after Mahmoud Jam was appointed prime minister, and at the recommendation of former Foreign Minister Enayatollah Samii, he was designated to head a special office in the Shah's court, in charge of the policy supporting the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. He resigned in protest, and he has been working for some time now as a doctor.

Does it matter? Artists and anti-Semitism

Does it make a work less worthy if the artist was an anti-Semite?

In a review of TS Eliot by Craig Raine Terry Eagleton says Eliot's anti-Semitism doesn't take a thing away from his greatness as a poet.

Why do critics feel a need to defend the authors they write on, like doting parents deaf to all criticism of their obnoxious children? Eliot's well-earned reputation is established beyond all doubt, and making him out to be as unflawed as the Archangel Gabriel does him no favours. It is true that the poet was a sourly elitist reactionary who fellow-travelled with some unsavoury political types in the 1930s, and as a Christian knew much of faith and hope but little of charity. Yet the politics of many distinguished modernist artists were just as squalid, and some—Pound and Junger, for example—were quite a lot worse. There is no need to pretend that all great writers have to be uxorious, liberal-minded, philosemitic heterosexuals. Why does Raine write as though discovering that Eliot was a paedophile would change our view of Four Quartets?

There's currently a debate in literary circles about whether Irène Némirovsky, who perished at Auschwitz, was a self-hating Jew.

When Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française was published in English last year, something was left out. Just a few lines omitted from the introduction to the French edition that had appeared two years previously. Nothing to diminish the remarkable achievement of the writer's novel describing life in a French village under Nazi occupation. Nothing to undermine the ecstatic reviews - Le Monde called the book "a masterpiece ... ripped from oblivion" - and the fact that the novel has become a runaway bestseller.

And nothing to taint the story of the book's extraordinary appearance after 50 years tucked away in a French cellar, or the narrative of Némirovsky's tragic last years - stories that helped make Suite Française a literary sensation. Némirovsky, a Kiev-born Jewish woman, had settled in France with her wealthy family after the Russian revolution; become a literary celebrity on a par with Colette in 1930s Paris; was refused French citizenship shortly before the second world war broke out; and, in 1942, was deported to Auschwitz where she died, a stateless Jew, aged 39. For many years, the manuscript of her masterpiece, written on paper as thin as onion peel, had remained in a suitcase that she handed to her daughter Denise when she was arrested.

What was missing from the British Chatto & Windus edition was a passage in which Miriam Anissimov, a biographer of Primo Levi, suggested that Némirovsky was a self-hating Jew.

What's the point of all this self-hatred talk? Is it mere pyschobabble? Némirovsky certainly associated with some unsavory characters--and went out of her way to disassociate herself from Jews in an effort to save her life--but how does that affect her art? Although I've got to say Némirovsky's first novel, David Golder doesn't sound very appealing to me--primarily for its portrayal of Jews.

On the other hand, can an author who isn't Jewish create a disagreeable character who is Jewish without being an anti-Semite? That's question came up last week in a discussion of Trollope at The Corner. Like Peter Robinson, I'm inclined to give Trollope a pass.

It’s certainly true of Melmotte, the villain in The Way We Live Now, that he is an entirely disagreeable character, as also that his Jewishness is central to his identity. But what of Brehgert? He is an entirely sympathetic character—charming, generous, incorruptible; second only to Carbury himself as a model of virtue—whose Jewishness is likewise central to his identity. Could Trollope have made it any clearer that Georgianna is a fool for refusing Brehgert’s offer of marriage? And if The Way We Live Now were intended to foster anti-Semitism, surely Trollope would have proposed a neat divide between Jews, all of whom are to be disdained, and gentiles, all of whom behave admirably. Of course he does nothing of the kind, filling the book with gentile fools, liars, louts and poltroons.

Attacks on Jews in UK reach record high

Such attacks have tripled in the last decade. And whose fault is that? The government blames the Jews.

The Anti-Semitic Incidents Report 2006, compiled by the Community Security Trust (CST), responsible for combating anti-Semitism in the UK, blames the huge rise on a number of factors ranging from Israel's invasion of Lebanon last summer to the jailing of the historian David Irving in Austria for denying the Holocaust.

The threatened suspension of Ken Livingstone as Mayor for comments made to a Jewish Evening Standard reporter triggered 11 anti-Semitic incidents, according to the report.

Morally confused

Jimmy Carter doesn't know right from wrong.

Carter wants to do what's just. His heart's in the right place. He just can't figure out what the right is. He is, and always has been, a man of good intentions bereft of good judgment. He invariably finds himself defending tyrants and dictators at the expense of their oppressed peoples. Not because he is a bad man, but because he is a confused man.

CARTER SUBSCRIBES to what I call the Always Root for the Underdog school of morality. Rather than develop any real understanding of a conflict, immediately he sides with the weaker party, however wicked or immoral.

Israel has tanks and F-16's. The Palestinians don't. Therefore the Palestinians are being oppressed. Never mind that the Palestinians have rejected every offer to live side by side with Israel in peace and elected a government pledged to Israel's annihilation. Their poverty dictates the righteousness of their cause even if their actions speak otherwise.

If Israel builds a barrier to cordon off the Palestinians, it is not to prevent their suicide bombers from dismembering children but to punish them for having darker skin.

Not just an anti-Semite

But also a bit of a nut. Judith Regan, would be publisher of OJ Simpson's book, If I Did It.

According to the executives and another person involved in the incident, Ms. Regan was investigated in the spring of 2003 after an editor complained that she had boasted of removing the scrolls from her neighbors’ mezuzas and replacing them with torn pieces from dollar bills.

A mezuza is a small slender case containing a scroll inscribed with a prayer that many Jewish families place beside their front doors.

The two executives said the company’s investigation had corroborated the employee’s account and Ms. Regan was reprimanded at the time.

That's not only malicious, it's wacky. Who has the time and energy to go around ripping scrolls out of mezuzas?