Tag Archives: Anti-Semitism

The Psychological Scar of the Six Day War

25 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by in Current Events, History, War

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Six Day War Western Wall

“After years of rhetorical attacks on Israel, Nasser demanded the removal of UN peacekeepers in the Sinai and then blockaded the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping. [In the summer of 1967] Israel responded with an overwhelming preemptive attack that destroyed the entire Egyptian air force within two hours. When Jordan, Iraq, and Syria joined the war against Israel, their air forces were also wiped out that same afternoon. In the next few days Israel captured all of the Sinai, Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, while crushing the forces of the frontline Arab states.

It was a psychological turning point in the history of the modern Middle East. The speed and decisiveness of the Israeli victory in the Six Day War humiliated many Muslims who had believed until then that God favored their cause. They had lost not only their armies and their territories but also faith in their leaders, in their countries, and in themselves. The profound appeal of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt and elsewhere was born in this shocking debacle. A newly strident voice was heard in the mosques; the voice said that they had been defeated by a force far larger than the tiny country of Israel. God had turned against the Muslims. The only way back to Him was to return to the pure religion. The voice answered despair with a simple formulation: Islam is the solution.

There was in this equation the tacit understanding that God sided with the Jews. Until the end of World War II, there was little precedent in Islam for the anti-Semitism that was now warping the politics and society of the region. Jews had lived safely — although submissively — under Muslim rule for 1,200 years, enjoying full religious freedom; but in the 1930s, Nazi propaganda on Arabic-language shortwave radio… infected the area with this ancient Western prejudice. After the war Cairo became a sanctuary for Nazis, who advised the military and the government. The rise of the Islamist movement coincided with the decline of fascism, but they overlapped in Egypt, and the germ passed into a new carrier.

The founding of the state of Israel and its startling rise to military dominance unsettled the Arab identity. In the low condition the Arabs found themselves in, they looked upon Israel and recalled the time when the Prophet Mohammed had subjugated the Jews of Medina. They thought about the great wave of Muslim expansion at the point of Arab spears and swords, and they were humbled by the contrast of their proud martial past and their miserable present. History was reversing itself; the Arabs were as fractious and disorganized and marginal as they had been in jahiliyya times. Even the Jews dominated them. The voice in the mosque said that the Arabs had let go of the one weapon that gave them real power: faith. Restore the fervor and purity of the religion that had made the Arabs great, and God would once again take their side.”

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Pulled from the second chapter of Lawrence Wright’s 2006 book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. The above photo shows Motta Gur’s paratroopers, the first wave of Israeli troops to reach Jerusalem’s Old City during the conflict.

I apologize for the brief hiatus. I’ve been busy in my time off, reading (Pale Fire, the news) and adding to an already massive drafts folder. Your regular programming will resume this week.

You can watch Wright discuss the subjects of Tower with the University of California’s Harry Kreisler below. It’s lulling to listen to such mellowed, Peter Sagal-type tones describe the world’s most notorious barbarians.

Then read on:

Lawrence Wright

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What Is Mein Kampf about?

12 Saturday Sep 2015

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Adolf Hitler in Color

“Mein Kampf is fundamentally a text about nature. About what belongs in nature and what doesn’t belong in nature.

It describes nature as a conflict of races; everything else is incidental. The only things which truly exists in the human world are races, and the only thing they’re supposed to be doing is competing for land and resources.

In this text, the Jews figure not as a race — not as an inferior race, not as a superior race — but as something totally supernatural which has somehow come into the world and introduced evil.

The Jews have an ability which is, in effect, superhuman. They can do one thing that no one else can do, and that’s bring ways of thinking into the world.

So from Hitler’s point of view, the Jews are not actually subhuman. They’re more like superhuman, though that’s not quite right either. From Hitler’s point of view, and from the point of view of several leading Nazis, the Jews are not really human at all. They’re para-human: they only appear to be human, but are actually something else.

The evil that the Jews have introduced into the world — and this strikes me as very important — is ethical thinking. What the Jews have done which is so wrong, is to confuse our minds by introducing ideas which are not about racial struggle. They’ve introduced ethical life to the world.

So Hitler presents capitalism as Jewish; he presents communism as Jewish; he presents Christianity as Jewish.

Why? Because all of these ideas, different though they might seem, have the common feature that they allow people to see each other in non-racial terms. Whether I’m signing a contract with you, making a revolution with you, attending mass with you, it’s not race that matters. It’s some kind of other reciprocity.

Therefore Hitler could say, as he did say, that Saint Paul was basically the same person as Leon Trotsky…

Nature can only be pure if the Jews are gone, because Jews are the special, supernatural beings who make us something that we’re not.”

__________

Timothy Snyder, speaking in Krakow at the “Unimaginable” conference earlier this year. (He also touches on these themes around minute 20 in this 2013 talk at the Graduate Institute of Geneva.)

Snyder, who teaches history at Yale, has a new book out, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Writing. I can highly recommend not only his talks like the one above, but his written work, which is dynamic and crisp, and shows a true mastering of the broad political, cultural, and military forces of the early 20th century. His last effort, the highly acclaimed, subversive history of the second world war Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, has a place at the top of my shelf.

To get a condensed version of Snyder’s take on the ideology of the Reich, you can check out his article soon to be published in the New York Review of Books, “Hitler’s World”. In it, he gives depth to some of the concepts detailed above (Snyder has clearly been fixated on the project of clearing up Hitlerite ideology for some time). The following slice is among the most informative of the piece, and it lays bare the claims of those on both sides of the religious-atheist debate who try to claim the Führer as their opponents’ ally:

Hitler’s presentation of the Jewish threat revealed his particular amalgamation of religious and zoological ideas. If the Jew triumphs, Hitler wrote, “then his crown of victory will be the funeral wreath of the human species.” On the one hand, Hitler’s image of a universe without human beings accepted science’s verdict of an ancient planet on which humanity had evolved. After the Jewish victory, he wrote, “earth will once again wing its way through the universe entirely without humans, as was the case millions of years ago.” At the same time, as he made clear in the very same passage of My Struggle, this ancient earth of races and extermination was the Creation of God. “Therefore I believe myself to be acting according to the wishes of the Creator. Insofar as I restrain the Jew, I am defending the work of the Lord.”

Continue on topic:

Timothy Snyder

Why Stalin Hated Trotsky

01 Monday Jun 2015

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Three Famous Russians

“One wonders whether Stalin’s hatred of Trotsky, one of the most passionate in history (with three floors of the Lubyanka [KGB headquarters] devoted to his destruction), was to some extent ‘racial.’ It is, anyway, all of a piece. Anti-Semitism is an announcement of inferiority and a protest against a level playing field – a protest against talent. And this is true, too, of the most hysterical, demonizing, millenarian versions of the cult, according to which a tiny minority, the Jews, planned to achieve world domination. Now how would they manage that, without inordinate gifts? It is said that anti-Semitism differs from other prejudices because it is also a ‘philosophy.’ It is also a religion – the religion of the inadequate. When tracing the fateful synergy between Russia and Germany, we may recall that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the ‘warrant for genocide’ as it is called in Norman Cohn’s book of that name, was a fiction composed by the Tsarist secret police. […]

The proximate cause of [Stalin’s] final delirium was evidently the emergence of the state of Israel in 1948 and the arrival, later that year, of the new ambassador, Golda Meir, who attracted a crowd of 50,000 Jews outside the Moscow synagogue. This was a shocking display of ‘spontaneity’; it also confronted Stalin with an active minority who owed an allegiance other than to ‘the Soviet power’. He is supposed to have said: ‘I can’t swallow them, I can’t spit them out.’ In the end, it seems, he decided to do both. The Jews who survived the gauntlet were meant to end up in Birobidzhan on the Chinese border and in other parts of Siberia where, according to Solzhenitsyn, ‘barracks had already been prepared for them’… Solzhenitsyn believes that the pogrom was to be launched at the beginning of March by the hanging of the ‘doctor-murderers’ in Red Square. But then, too, at the beginning of March something else happened: Stalin died.

It is perhaps controversial to suggest that Iosif Stalin in his last years was capable of further spiritual decline. But one is struck by the loss, the utter evaporation, of his historical self-consciousness, suggesting some sort of erasure in a reasonably important part of Stalin’s brain. ‘Anti-Semitism is counterrevolution,’ Lenin once claimed. Anti-Semitism was the creed of the Whites, of the Tsarists… against whom the young Stalin might have stood in line on the streets of Russia’s cities. Anti-Semitism was for the rabble and the Right. In turning to it, the world’s premier statesman, as he then was, also squandered the vast moral capital that the USSR had accumulated during the war: Hitler’s conqueror, incredibly, became Hitler’s protégé.”

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Pulled from Martin Amis’s engrossing short history of Stalin and the origins of the Soviet Union Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million.

Among the most renowned Anglo-American historians of the Soviet Union is 98-year-old Hoover Institute fellow Robert Conquest, a familial friend of Amis and the first Western scholar to describe Stalin’s terror-famine as a purposeful, premeditated genocide. The book in which he makes that claim, The Harvest of Sorrow, opens with the following:

We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.

That single sentence is 3,040 lives. His book runs over 400 pages.

Pictured: Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky at the Eighth Bolshevik Conference in March, 1919.

Go on:

Inside the Mind of Muhammad Atta

14 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by in History, Religion, War

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9:11 Security Camera

“What the [9/11 hijacking] recruits tended to have in common — besides their urbanity, their cosmopolitan backgrounds, their education, their facility with languages, and their computer skills — was displacement. Most who joined the jihad did so in a country other than the one in which they were reared… The imams naturally responded to the alienation and anger that prompted these men to find a spiritual home. A disproportionate number of new mosques in immigrant communities had been financed by Saudi Arabia and staffed by Wahhabi fundamentalists, many of whom were preaching the glories of jihad. […]

Although they would often be accused of being a fascistic cult, the resentment that burned inside the al-Quds mosque, where Atta and his friends gathered, had not been honed into a keen political agenda. But like the Nazis, who were born in the shame of defeat, the radical Islamists shared a fanatical determination to get on top of history after being underfoot for so many generations.

Although Atta had only vaguely socialist ideas of government, he and his circle filled up the disavowed political space that the Nazis left behind. One of Atta’s friends, Munir al-Motassadeq, referred to Hitler as ‘a good man.’ Atta himself often said that the Jews controlled the media, banks, newspapers, and politics from their world headquarters in New York City; moreover, he was convinced that the Jews had planned the wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya as a way of holding back Islam. He believed that Monica Lewinsky was a Jewish agent sent to undermine Clinton, who had become too sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

The extreme rigidity of character that everyone detected in Atta was a Nazi trait, and no doubt it was reinforced in him by the need to resist the lure of this generous city. The young urban planner must have admired the cleanliness and efficiency of Hamburg, which was so much the opposite of the Cairo where he had grown up. But the odious qualities that Sayyid Qutb [the founder of modern Islamism] had detected in America — its materialism, its licentiousness, its spiritual falsity — were also spectacularly on display in Hamburg, with its clanging casinos, prostitutes in shop windows, and magnificent, empty cathedrals…

Atta was a perfectionist; in his work he was a skilled but not creative draftsman. Physically, there was a feminine quality to his bearing: He was ‘elegant’ and ‘delicate,’ so that his sexual orientation — however unexpressed — was difficult to read…

On April 11, 1996, when Atta was twenty-seven years old, he signed a standardized will he got from the al-Quds mosque. It was the day Israel attacked Lebanon in Operation Grapes of Wrath. According to one of his friends, Atta was enraged, and by filling out his last testament during the attack he was offering his life in response.

Although the sentiments in the will represent the tenets of his community of faith, Atta constantly demonstrated an aversion to women, who in his mind were like Jews in their powerfulness and corruption. The will states: ‘No pregnant woman or disbelievers should walk in my funeral or ever visit my grave. No woman should ask forgiveness of me. Those who will wash my body should wear gloves so that they do not touch my genitals.’ The anger that this statement directs at women and its horror of sexual contact invites the thought that Atta’s turn to terror had as much to do with his own conflicted sexuality as it did with the clash of civilizations.”

__________

An excerpt from Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

If you’re yet to see it, spend two hours watching the new HBO documentary Going Clear, based on Wright’s book of the same title. It’s an eerie, engrossing, and absolutely scandalizing look at the Church of Scientology and its hucksterish origins and practices.

Wright is interviewed throughout the film. His speech is always clear, never hyperbolic, and tuned to challenge viewers’ easy assumptions and reflexive piety. His command of the material shows through. I was impressed and liked the guy, so I decided to read his book on 9/11 — and I encourage you to do the same. It reveals the origins of not only that day — the most important day of any of our lifetimes — but also of the kind of fiendish, extremist worldview (what Martin Amis once called “the dependent mind”) that we’re now confronting in nearly every country on earth. It’s a stranger and even less coherent creation story than you’d expect.

Read on:

Lawrence Wright

Christopher Hitchens: Their Hatred Towards Us Is a Compliment

24 Tuesday Feb 2015

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Hitchens


“Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people alone, but as the common enemy of humanity, and of civilization, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason. Most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad.

Daniel Pearl’s revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college and was the chair of the Islamic Students Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people have been reported from all over Europe today as I’m talking, and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure our own defenses are not neglected.

Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, by its right name, to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it’s probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that their hatred towards us is a compliment and resolving some of the time at any rate to do a bit more to deserve it.”

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The closing of Christopher Hitchens’s fantastic Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture, given in March 2010.

Daniel Pearl, one of the first Americans killed at the hand of Islamic extremism in the post-9/11 era, was murdered 13 years ago this month. His death looks more and more like our most stark, literal harbinger of the kind of barbarism we now see everyday in the Middle East and around the world.

As a supplement to Hitch’s talk, I recommend reading Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Who Killed Daniel Pearl?. In it, BHL argues convincingly that Pearl was murdered not only for his Jewish/American roots, but also because he had uncovered hidden connections between the Pakistani nuclear program and al-Qaeda.

Daniel Pearl

Mark Twain on the Jews

28 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by in Essay, History

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Mark Twain

“If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one quarter of one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk.

His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine and abstruse learning are also very out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world in all ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself and be excused for it. The Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Persians rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greeks and Romans followed and made a vast noise, and they were gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, and have vanished.

The Jew saw them all, survived them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert but aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jews; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

__________

Mark Twain, writing in his short essay “Concerning the Jews” (1898).

Though his essay is almost entirely philo-Semitic, Twain did include within it his view that the Jewish people, “like the Christian Quaker,” were unwilling servicemen – that they had “an unpatriotic disinclination to stand by the flag as a soldier.” However, after the War Department figures showed Jewish overrepresentation in the U.S. military, Twain issued a retraction which he titled “The Jew as Soldier.”

In 1867, a mere eight decades before the state of Israel’s formal declaration, Twain traveled to Palestine and chronicled his trip in The Innocents Abroad. One particular quote sheds adequate light on his assessment of the place:

[It is a] desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds-a silent mournful expanse… A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action… We never saw a human being on the whole route… There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of the worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.

Go on:

  • Twain’s hilarious, furious letter in which he calls the recipient, “An idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link”
  • Twain’s daily routine

Hooman Majd on the Difference Between Sunnis, Shias, Arabs, and Persians

05 Thursday Jun 2014

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Hooman Majd

“It is notable that Arabs, when and if they wish to disparage Iranians, more often than not will also refer to them as Persians: the ‘other,’ and, because they’re Shia, the infidel. Some Sunni Arabs in Iraq have taken it one step further, calling all Shias, including Iraqi Shias, ‘Safavids,’ the name of the Persian dynasty that made Shiism the state religion of Iran, and a clear move in sectarian times to associate non-Sunni Arabs with the non-Arab Persians. Shia Islam, however, because of its beloved saint Imam Hossein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad and an Arab, conveniently bridges the Arab-Iranian schism through Hossein’s wife, a Persian princess he wisely (as far as Persians are concerned) wed and who bore him the half-Iranian great-grandchildren of the last Prophet of Allah.

The often contradictory Iranian attitudes toward Arabs can be difficult to explain. What can one make of Iranians who shed genuine tears for an Arab who died fourteen hundred years ago, who pray in Arabic three times a day, and yet who will in an instant derisively dismiss the Arab people, certainly those from the peninsula, as malakh-khor, “locust eaters”? As one deputy foreign minister once said to me, lips curled in a grimace of disgust and right before he excused himself to pray (in Arabic), ‘Iranians long ago became Muslims, but they didn’t become Arabs.’ His scorn was meant, of course, for desert Arabs who brought Islam to the world, and not necessarily Syrian, Egyptian or Lebanese Arabs, whom the Iranians place a few degrees higher on the social scale than their desert brethren. The disconnect between Arab and Muslim for Iranians is not unlike the disconnect between certain anti-Semitic Christians and Jews — a disconnect that conveniently ignores not only that Christ was a Jew but also that Christianity, at least at its inception, was a Jewish sect. (The peculiar Iranian disconnect can work both ways, though, for many Arabs today, or at least Arab governments, would rather Israel remain the dominant power in their region than witness, Allah forbid!, a Persian ascent to the position.)”

Hooman Majd

__________

Hooman Majd, writing in The Ayatollah Begs to Differ.

Every now and again, the pictures on this blog make it look like one of those innumerable, indistinguishable “style” Tumblrs that that college friend of yours made, promoted on Facebook, and maintained for about a week before exhausting her collection of Jon Hamm pictures. I try not to be so superficial, but denying the impulse is ridiculous: some people just look cool, and Majd is one of them. If cool-looking people have something sharp to say, well then that’s even better — and plus, there’s enough weighty stuff here to get you through the day’s pensive minutes.

But about the substantive part. Several pages prior, Majd offers a telling personal detail which should color his above clarification:

I had discovered two years earlier, and there is no way to verify it because Iranians didn’t have surnames, let alone birth certificates or even records of births prior to the reign of Reza Shah in the 1920s, that I am a descendant of his and, more interesting, that he was a Jew: a brilliant mathematician and scholar… In my father’s village of Ardakan, moreover, some people apparently still think of my family as “the Jews.” During my Ashura week visit to my cousin Fatemeh’s house, where a few people I hadn’t met before seemed to drop in from time to time, as is not unusual in small towns in Iran, I was introduced to one older woman who asked, “Majd? Ardakani Majd?”

“Yes, Majd-e-Ardakani,” I replied, using my grandfather’s original name (which just means “Majd from Ardakan,” and Majd actually being the single name of my great-great-grandfather).

“Oh,” she said. “The Jews.”

It is worth keeping this in mind if you to decide to open the book, because many of its conversations and interactions, especially with Iranian officials, revolve around then-President Ahmadinejad’s public denials of the Holocaust and his highly touted, “scholarly” conferences on the subject. Majd confronts these officials, in a restrained but unmistakable way, with the treatment they deserve: disbelief, contempt, and muted ridicule.

Above all of this, however, Majd is an important voice on Iran because although he was born in Tehran to a well-established family (his maternal grandfather was an Ayatollah), he gravitated to the West — first to St. Paul’s school in London, then George Washington University in Washington, then to live in New York City, where he still resides. So there is a very literal sense in which he traverses the boundary between East and West.

If you want to read a shorter piece of non-fiction, check out his essay on rediscovering his childhood home, “The House on Iran Street”. If you came here for the look, click on his style blog The House of Majd, which he maintains with fashion photographer Ken Browar.

Hooman Majd

Hooman MajdHooman Majd Bag

Hitler Kicks out Einstein

30 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by in History, Science

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Adolf Hitler in Color

“Early in April 1933, the German government passed a law declaring that Jews (defined as anyone with a Jewish grandparent) could not hold an official position, including at the Academy or at the universities. Among those forced to flee were fourteen Nobel laureates and twenty-six of the sixty professors of theoretical physics in the country. Fittingly, such refugees from fascism who left Germany or the other countries it came to dominate — Einstein, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf, Hans Bethe, Lise Meitner, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Otto Stern, Eugene Wigner, Leó Szilárd, and others — helped to assure that the Allies rather than the Nazis first developed the atom bomb.

Planck tried to temper the anti-Jewish policies, even to the extent of appealing to Hitler personally. ‘Our national policies will not be revoked or modified, even for scientists,’ Hitler thundered back. ‘If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!’

Among those fleeing the Nazi purge was Max Born, who with his tart-tongued wife, Hedwig, ended up in England. ‘I have never had a particularly favorable opinion of the Germans,’ Einstein wrote when he received the news. ‘But I must confess that the degree of their brutality and cowardice came as something of a surprise.’ Born took it all rather well, and he developed, like Einstein, a deeper appreciation for his heritage.

The Germans were all a bad breed, Einstein insisted, ‘except a few fine personalities (Planck 60% noble, and Laue 100%).’ Now, in this time of adversity, they could at least take comfort that they were thrown together with their true kinsmen. ‘For me the most beautiful thing is to be in contact with a few fine Jews — a few millennia of a civilized past do mean something after all.’

Having found himself deposited in Belgium… [Einstein] rented a house on the dunes of Le Coq sur Mer, a resort near Ostend, where he could contemplate, and Mayer could calculate, the universe and its waves in peace…

Peace, however, was elusive. Even by the sea he could not completely escape the threats of the Nazis. The newspapers reported that his name was on a list of assassination targets, and one rumor had it that there was a $5,000 bounty on his head. Upon hearing this, Einstein touched that head and cheerfully proclaimed, ‘I didn’t know it was worth that much!'”

Albert Einstein at Princeton

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From Walter Isaacson’s biography Einstein: His Life and Universe.

Today marks the 69th anniversary of Hitler’s suicide and the Allies’ final push on Berlin. In his short biography of the Führer, A.N. Wilson establishes the bogus philosophical underpinnings of the Final Solution, reflecting on the ways in which these deranged justifications wound up backfiring in unexpected ways:

[Hitler] often discoursed upon… the fact that ‘the Jew’ was always on the look-out to destroy ‘the natural order’ by ‘sleight of hand’: ‘The Jew introduced Christianity into the ancient world — in order to ruin it — re-opened the same breach in modern times — this time taking as his pretext the social question. It’s the same sleight of hand as before. Just as Saul was changed into St. Paul, Mordechai became Karl Marx…’ He had decided that ‘the people that is rid of the Jews returns spontaneously to the natural order.’

Already, by the middle of the war, Germans were beginning to recognize what it felt like to be on the way towards achieving natural order. For one thing, they had toothache, since most of the dentists in Germany had been deported or gone into exile. For another, they had very few nuclear physicists left, and those who had gone were helping the Americans pioneer nuclear weaponry. The fortunate universities of Britain and America now had their Albert Einstein, their Ernst Gombrich, their Eduard Fraenkel to adorn their faculties, thanks to the German Leader’s belief that such individuals were undermining the natural order.

More on Einstein:

  • Young Albert breaks up with his first girlfriend
  • Einstein expounds his theory that God doesn’t play dice
  • Einstein, Orwell, and Steinbeck denounce the evils of militarism

(Below: Einstein with some other unnaturals)

Albert Einstein and Scientists

Racism, Israel, and a Public Lavatory in Budapest

21 Thursday Nov 2013

Posted by in Current Events, Interview, Politics

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z

Charlie Rose: In traveling last week through Hungary and Eastern Europe, what did you discover about anti-Semitism today?

Yair Lapid: That it exists. Listen, in Hungary, there’s Jobbik, which is an Anti-Semitic party – the party that has tried to push a bill mandating a countdown, a limit to how many Jews there are in Hungary. This is in 2013. They have 11% of the seats in the Hungarian parliament.

Yet when you live in America, you don’t feel it too much; especially in New York, which is still the largest Jewish city in the world. But when you are [in Europe] you feel it.

While I was there, I took my son to visit a weird place. I took my son to visit a public lavatory. Why?

Because in February 1945, my father was this thirteen-year-old kid in the Budapest ghetto, and he was living in a basement the size of this stage with 400 other people.

And by February, the Russians were approaching Budapest. So the Nazis along with the Hungarian Fascists started to take the Jews in death convoys to the Danube River. There they ordered the Jews to dig holes in the ice, and then they would shoot them into the Danube. And the Danube was red.

One early morning, they gathered the people from my father’s block. It was a death convoy of about 600 people, and they began to march them towards the Danube. At a certain point along the way, a Russian plane flew low over this convoy, causing turmoil – shouting and screaming. And my grandma was there – my grandfather was already dead in Mauthausen concentration camp – but my grandma was there, and she pushed my father into this little public lavatory and said, ‘You have to pee now.’…

And he did ‘cause he was a good kid, and she closed the door behind them.

And from this convoy of 600 people, 598 were dead under the ice of the Danube River by sundown.

But my father and my grandmother were standing, by themselves, in the middle of the street, next to this little public lavatory, and they were freed – they could go anywhere. The whole world was open to them. Here in America, the Midwest: there were thousands of miles that no one had settled. Or Australia from Melbourne to Perth, which you can fly over, and for five hours you won’t see a single soul.

Soon Paris was liberated and London was free, and yet my father – a thirteen-year-old Jewish kid – had no place to go to.

And many years later, he and I went to Budapest together, and we were walking down the street, when suddenly he stopped and he began to cry. I didn’t understand, because the street was empty and there was only a public lavatory. And he said, ‘This is it. This is where I was reborn. This is where you were born.

And this is the place I realized that I would survive and soon need a place to go.’

And this is why we need the state of Israel. Because we always need a place to go.

Yair Lapid

__________

From Charlie Rose’s October 7th interview with Israeli Minister of Finance Yair Lapid at New York’s famed 92nd St. Y.

In the above photograph: Lapid posing in his home office in Tel Aviv following an Associated Press interview.

Lapid is a fascinating political figure who, in his recent foray into government, stands as a model for what kind of leader a functioning democracy should attract. After a successful career as a writer and television personality, Lapid felt compelled to “put his money where his mouth was” and found his own political party, Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future”). This decidedly moderate party, which stands between the left-wing Israeli labor party on the one hand, and Netanyahu’s center-right Likud and Naftali Bennett’s conservative Jewish Home on the other, won 19 seats in the Knesset in the last election and is now the second-largest party (behind Likud) in the Israeli parliament.

Lapid, who maintains close ties with his counterparts on both sides of the ideological spectrum, steered Yesh Atid to partner in the governing coalition. He was then nominated to be the Israeli Minister of Finance, and just last week the Israeli government posted an “enormous budget surplus”.

Lapid’s meteoric rise and sustained popularity among the Israeli people may seem anomalous to us in the United States, where so often public figures (especially those from the entertainment industry) make ill-advised forays into politics, only to look plastic, inept, or overwhelmed when under the hot lights and mics of the media. Yet as you can see illustrated handsomely below, Lapid projects a suave authenticity and acuity that are both rare, reassuring, and compelling.

Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis on Antisemitism

16 Thursday May 2013

Posted by in History, Humor, Philosophy, Religion

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Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens

Excerpts from Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis discussing Judaism and Antisemitism at Jewish Book Week in London in 2007:

“Saul Bellow once said to me, privately, that without Israel, Jewish manhood would be finished. I don’t think he meant Jewish men; he meant Jewish self-respect. But it was a sort of atavistic way of putting it. He felt that this idea that we’re going to bring about a scenario where the Jews cannot be put to death, and institutionalize that in a state — he upheld that notion.

And during last summer, when these unpleasant portents for Israel were emerging, there was a great efflorescence of antisemitism here in England. If you remember those middle-class whities waddling around under placards saying WE ARE ALL HEZBOLLAH NOW. And my response to them then and now is:

Well, enjoy it while you can, because Hassan Nasrallah wants to kill you.”

____

“Antisemitism is a very, very serious cultural danger, and it’s only a fool who thinks that it is a threat only to Jews. Antisemitism is a very, very toxic threat to everything we can decently call ‘civilization’…

If someone says they don’t like West Indians, because of their — I don’t know what it might be — their music. Or they don’t like Indians because of the smell of their cooking. Or they don’t like Koreans for their Kimchi — whatever it might be. Every minority and majority in the world has a version of this kind of prejudice.

But, as Freud pointed out, they’ll all sink their differences when it comes to the Jews. And with the Jews it’s not their cooking or their sex lives or any of this, and it’s not just vulgar prejudice about skin color or smell.

It’s a theory.

It’s a paranoid theory that tries to explain quite a lot. It’s fascinated with gold, with secret documents, with missing codices in ancient treaties, with the idea of an invisible and secret government. It’s a very, very, very dangerous, pseudo-intellectual prejudice.”

____

“We might just talk a little bit more about what antisemitism is. You’ve described it as paranoia, and it is — it belongs with those sort of shithead conspiracy theories. And there’s a marvelous quote from Hitler saying that, after the Frankfurter Zeitung said there was an exposure of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as being a fabrication; Hitler said, ‘this alone proves it is genuine.’

Antisemitism is not quite a neurosis, it’s not quite a psychosis. Vasily Grossman in Life and Fate suggests that antisemitism is like a vast mirror, an ocean of insecurities. The cruising insecurities in the common mind, for some reason gravitate towards the Jew as the explanation of and reason for all frustrations.

The central paradox of it is that you may hate the Jews and think they’re insects, but you also suspect they’re running your life. The Jews, to the anti-semite, are both contemptible and all-powerful.”

____

“Nobody thinks West Indians are trying to take over Wall Street, for example. It’s just not alleged; people that hate them just don’t say they’re trying to take over the international financial system.

My grandmother, whose origins were in what is now Breslau, had a very simple explanation, she’d say, ‘Oh, come on darling, they’re just jealous.’ Well, of course, Goyim can be as jealous as they like. But it’s the protean nature of antisemitism that gets me.

If they can’t hate the Jews for being behind international finance capital, it will be because they’re behind international Communism. Often both at the same time.”

The Wailing Wall

__________

Watch Hitchens and Amis discuss the Jews, Israel, and antisemitism below. I highly recommend this talk as a crash-course on the subtleties and interrelationships between those three complex topics. It’s also really funny.

The photograph was taken in Jerusalem. It’s what you see if, on a Friday night, you walk up to the Western Wall then turn around.

Again I Pause to Remember

11 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by in History, Journalism, Politics, War

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Daniel Pearl2The opening and closing of Christopher Hitchens’s Lecture in honor of Daniel Pearl, given at UCLA in 2010:

“If I lived in an uncivilized society, today could have been for me a kind of Martyr’s day. I was just taken, by some very courteous and gallant young cadets, to see the veteran’s memorial on the other side of this campus, where is commemorated Second Lieutenant Mark Daily. A young man who gave his life in Kurdistan a few years ago for the liberation of Iraq, and wrote very movingly to me about it and his service. A man I was hoping to meet, and whose family I am very pleased now to count — as I now can with great pride claim the Pearls — if not family, then very close friends. And I thought to myself: after I go to this memorial, I have to go speak for Daniel.

But just as it marks the scattering of his ashes, there will be, today, no ululations, no wailings, no shooting in the air, no tossing of the coffin on the shoulders of mob, no hoarse, brutal cries for revenge and suicide and murder. No. We won’t have that.

Instead, we’ll have honest, decent, modest, brave people trying to deal with their grief, and trying to apply reason to the crises that lead to their deprivation. And I think that marks, if you like, part of the boundary between civilization and barbarism that this lecture is designed to patrol — and I would say enforce.

At the scattering of Mark’s ashes, on a beautiful coastal spot in Oregon, I quoted from the last scene of MacBeth. And I think I can do it again — I had difficulty doing it that time.

Where, as you’ll recall, the tyrant is gone, the tyranny and the usurpation is over. But Old Siward, he doesn’t know it yet, but he’s lost his son. And I believe it’s MacDuff who has to say to him the following — and I’ll address it to the Pearl’s if I may:

Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier’s debt.
He only lived but till he was a man,
The which no sooner had his prowess confirmed
In the unshrinking station where he stood,
But like a man he died.

And that’s hard enough to get through. But it’s Shakespeare, so it isn’t ’til the next beat or so that you get it all, as MacDuff adds:

Your cause of grief
Must not be measured by his worth
For then it hath no end

That’s the best tribute I can offer you, and I’m very acutely aware of my own debt to a finer register of emotion.

Now one more thing: I was late in discovering my Jewish heritage, and I once wrote that anyone who wanted to defame the Jewish people would, if they were doing so, be defaming my wife, my mother, my mother- and father-in-law, and my daughters, and so I didn’t think I really had to say anything for myself.

But I did add that in whatever tone of voice the question was put to me — whether it was friendly or hostile — Was I Jewish? I would always answer Yes. Denial in my family would end with me.

But, of course, there was the most acute possible test of that question faced by the young Daniel Pearl, in the most appalling circumstances, and again I pause to remember how proudly, and how bravely, and how nobly he refused any sort of refuge in denial.

Again, setting a standard of a Shakespearean kind that’s very hard for me to approach without a feeling of a want of proportion…

And I’ll close by saying this: Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people alone, but as the common enemy of humanity, and of civilization, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason. Most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad.

Daniel Pearl’s revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college, the chair of the Islamic Students’ Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people have been reported from all over Europe today as I’m talking, and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure our own defenses are not neglected. Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, this pest, by its right name, to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it’s probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that its hatred towards us is a compliment and resolving some of the time at any rate to do a bit more to deserve it. Thank you.

__________

Daniel Pearl

American journalist Daniel Pearl was murdered on February 1st, 2002, in Karachi, Pakistan.

In the video that was taken of him immediately before his murder, Pearl is taunted by his captors and asked whether he is Jewish. His response:

“My name is Daniel Pearl. I’m a Jewish American from Encino, California, USA. I come from, uh, on my father’s side the family is Zionist. My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We’ve made numerous family visits to Israel. Back in the town of Bnei Brak, there is a street named after my great-grandfather, Chaim Pearl, who was one of the founders of the town.”

And those were Daniel Pearl’s final words. Contrast the bravery of Daniel Pearl — and his family’s legacy of construction and contribution to Israel — with the barbarism and cruelty and evil of the murderers who shortly thereafter took his life.

The life and death of Daniel Pearl is, in other words, a story about everything to love and fight for (intelligence, sincerity, family, Western Civilization) and everything to despise (racism, savagery, murder, violence, the slaughter of innocent people, fanaticism). Thus Daniel Pearl’s story is, in microcosm, a story about the battle between civilization and barbarism — and one could even say between good and evil.

Former mayor of New York City Ed Koch, who died last month, had his tombstone inscribed with Pearl’s last words: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.”

Watch Hitchens’s lecture below.