DRScoundrels

Helen Thomas, the legendary doyenne of the Washington press corps, recently resigned her position after making the remark that the Jews should decamp Palestine and set off for Poland, Germany, and the United States.  It was an impolitic and downright inappropriate comment to make.  It was also her right as a private citizen to say whatever she wanted.  She was expressing an opinion, as many of us do in the course of our day.

Abraham Foxman, the self-appointed arbiter of Semitism and all things thereof, predictably went into his usual histrionics.  He insisted on public contrition, but when Thomas apologized, Foxman decreed that her apology did not go far enough.  For Abraham Foxman, a sackcloth, ashes, and a public stoning outside the city gates would not be enough.  Foxman has made a career for himself of making it downright dangerous to express anything other than pro-Israel, pro-Zionist, pro-Jewish attitude.  He mauls and pillories anyone who dares to dissent from the line that the Jews are God’s chosen people and are therefore entitled to do whatever they must do in preserving their rightful claim to some arid piece of land in the middle of modern Palestine.  You can lose your career, your reputation, and your ability to work in your chosen field should you run afoul of Abraham Foxman and his allies.

Foxman fails to comprehend the irony of his existence: in Germany under National Socialism, failing to endorse wholeheartedly the line that the Germans were Aryan supermen who descended from a superior alien race and were therefore entitled to do whatever they had to do to purify their land and the world at large of all corrupted and lesser races was something that could cost you your livelihood and, in some cases, your very life.  The Nazis chased everyone from the public sphere who dared to dissent.

They executed people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German clergyman who had the temerity to put his professions into measurable action by joining a laudable conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler.  Today’s clergy lack the courage and conviction to do much of anything other than decry the means necessary to prevent today’s morally perverse ends.  They drive nice cars and live in fine houses, and they will never see the inside of Buchenwald as anything other than tourists.  There are never any martyrs among the clergy, for they see fit to send the young and the impressionable forth as the hands and fingers of God while they stay behind to pull the strings.  This is true of all three major religions which intersect in Palestine.

The Israelis have managed to construct a good existence out of what was once Palestine.  They are cemented and mortared in their position, and they aren’t going anywhere. As it stands, Israel is the one place in the Middle East where a Palestinian Arab can vote.  A vote isn’t the same as political self-determination, as any Palestinian can tell you.  All men cry out not for a vote, but for self-determination.  We have a vote here in the United States, and look at how meaningless our elections have become.

As a moral and philosophical matter, I may not like the way in which the modern state of Israel came to exist, but it is what it is. I do not deal in the way things ought to be, but rather in the way that they are.  The omelet has already been made, the eggs have been broken, and now the debate is over how best to season our breakfast.  And what I say is this: we ought to get out of Palestine.  The Jews can stay.  They’ve done a fine job of constructing a country, and they’ll learn to coexist with their neighbors as a matter of necessity once we’re out of the equation, at least as much as we can be out of the equation.  The Arabs will have to understand that our resolve is not going to waver on the matter of a Jewish right to exist or survive.  They need to understand that nuclear attacks will be met in kind.

But other than that, it’s really not our affair.  In point of fact, we’re holding the Jews back.  Let’s deal in reality: without U.S. pressure, Hamas would have long ago been obliterated in the Gaza Strip.  The Israelis withdrew not under international pressure, but under U.S. pressure.  And let’s face it: we don’t have another thirty years for Hamas to arrive at the realization previously arrived at by the Palestinian Authority: more is possible without guns.  It’s doubtful Hamas even wants to arrive at that epiphany.  The Israelis have an obligation to secure their own borders and provide safety to their citizens, and if wiping out Hamas complements either of those essential reasons for Israel’s security apparatus to exist, so be it.  It’s not for us to say one way or the other anyway.

Hamas is a dangerous organization which denies Israel’s right to exist, advocates the extinction of Jews worldwide, and seeks to kill as many Jews as possible as often as possible.  It’s the logical extension of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem’s long ago affiliation with the aforementioned National Socialists, who were quite effective at weaving in their brand of anti-Jew vitriol with the Mufti’s brand of Islam. In either case, I can readily buy into the notion that people who believe such nonsense are from another planet, but the whole bit about superior racial stock just doesn’t make sense to me.

Abraham Foxman is right to abhor Hamas.  He is wrong to abhor Helen Thomas.  The two are not even remotely equivalent.  Thomas is an elderly woman in her eighties who was probably up past her bedtime.  We’ve all had that elderly relative who slips up at night and utters some embarrassing remark.  We don’t take them out and give them a good thrashing for doing so.  We don’t berate them in public for doing so either.  We endure it, and we accept it as part of the process of old age, which is sometime accompanied by the onset of senility in varying degrees. I had a Jewish friend in high school who was mortified when her grandfather inquired as to what she was doing hanging out with a goy in front of the said goy. Helen Thomas expressed her opinion in an unfortunate manner, but what she said does not even begin to compare with the rhetoric of Hamas.

It is utterly dangerous to suggest that Helen Thomas is somehow equatable to Hamas or to other hardcore Anti-Semitic organizations and groups.  The reason is that doing so trivializes what those groups advocate: the extermination of an entire race of human beings.  What Thomas said was qualitatively different.  It was substantively different.  I may not hold Helen Thomas in high regard for her opinions, but to cry wolf over her remarks as though they somehow begin to compare to the vitriol and invective emanating out of various mosques and websites affiliated with extremist Islam is irresponsible.  It may make Abraham Foxman more money and it may even raise his profile, but it reduces the real and harmful Anti-Semitism of Hamas and other such organizations to the level of some parlor slip-up at a private event.  The two are not even close to one another.

Wiping out Hamas is something I can support without reservation.  Tarring, feathering, and running Helen Thomas out of town on a rail for expressing an opinion most of us do not share is not.  As I said before, there is a distinction to be made between what Helen Thomas suggested and what Hamas and other groups like it advocate.  The fact that I support the existence of Israel is not a token endorsement of everything that Israel does, just as my support of my own country should not be taken as a wholehearted endorsement of everything that its government engages in or supports.

Foxman and other shrill individuals like him represent the greatest threat to open discourse in our world, and they effectively paralyze the free expression so necessary to honest negotiations which might actually yield a result conducive to peace in Palestine and other areas of the world.  It is Foxman who ought to have been silenced long ago, and it is a testament to the idiocy of our times that people like Abraham Foxman, Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson can still speak with credibility on anything at all.