It's not that I bear grudges, especially against AFSI members, but I do remember being criticized for "dissing" Edward Said in Outpost. A member was distressed that I referred to "a distinguished man of letters" as a "liar and scoundrel." Well, now we have documentation that the terrorists' favorite professor was caught on camera throwing rocks at Jews at the border between Israel and Lebanon. Since Israel surrendered and abandoned Lebanon, Arabs come from near and far to throw rocks and garbage at the Israeli border guards. We would not be surprised if somewhere in the Arab press hurling stones at Jews isn't billed as a tourist attraction, particularly since border guards are forbidden to do anything about it.
Although Said is a practiced prevaricator, the evidence was too strong, and he admitted throwing the rocks and apologized for having "gotten carried away with the excitement of the place." Further, he describes the stone throwing as a "symbolic gesture of happiness" at Israel's "conquest" being ended. As usual, words failed the phony scholar who remains a liar and a scoundrel.
Thanks to author, scholar and AFSI member Rita Kramer for drawing my attention to the second volume of William Manchester's biography of Winston Spencer Churchill, The Last Lion (Little, Brown and Company, 1988), which describes England in the early 1930s--and calls up the most vivid parallels to Israel today. The book, accurately subtitled Alone 1932-1940, describes an isolated and often derided Winston Churchill, and a nation lulled by the pacifist assurances of legislators and journalists. Churchill, unrelenting, anticipated Hitler's rise and the Nazi agenda, but his warnings fell on deaf ears, empty seats in Parliament, dozing MPs, a hostile media, and a pacifist public. In Parliament, five members supported him at most. In a scathing speech, he derided the "lethargy and blindness" of the political parties which had led to "One of those awful periods which recur in our history, when the noble British nation seems to fall from its high estate, loses all sense of purpose, and appears to cower from the menace of foreign peril, frothing pious platitudes while foemen forge their arms."
Hundreds of distinguished parliamentarians and commentators admired Hitler. In the Sunday Dispatch, Sir Thomas Moore, a respected professor and MP wrote, "In my personal knowledge of Hitler, peace and justice are the key words of his policy." In another later article, he declared the fuehrer was "absolutely honest and sincere." Others, such as the chief editorialists of the London Times, argued that Hitler's crude threats were from "sheer revolutionary exuberance." Other leaders in foreign policy, fellow Oxonians, argued that France and Russia were simply "conspiring to deny Germany her rank among great powers--a place to which she is entitled by her history, her civilization and her power." In fact, continued their argument, Nazi outrages were really the "reflex of external persecution to which Germans have been subjected since the war."
Accounts of atrocities, beatings, and desecration of synagogues were brushed aside. Fair play was continually evoked, drawing moral equivalence between the increasing bellicosity of Germans and the harsh terms inflicted upon them by the victors at Versailles. Chamberlain even assured a cabinet meeting that the accounts of storm troopers leading anti-Semitic pogroms were "rubbish," claiming that "if the persecutions were as widespread as Winston claimed, Hitler would get wind of it and jail those responsible." Lord Halifax continued to assure Parliament that Hitler was prepared to sign a binding peace agreement with England, respecting sovereignty and empire.
Churchill, to his eternal credit, accepted the political wilderness and the scorn, rather than accede to appeasement. As the decade stumbled on, England, despite the assurances of McDonald, Baldwin, Chamberlain, and Halifax began to awaken and public opinion began to shift. Lord Boothby described the English press that "did everything in its power to help Neville Chamberlain and his wretched government turn the whole country yellow." In Parliament, the change was less perceptible. Chamberlain's faith remained unshakable even when confronted with the following statement made by Hitler himself: "If I were Chamberlain, I would not delay for a moment to prepare my country in the most drastic way for a 'total' war and I would thoroughly organize it. If the English have not got universal conscription by the spring of 1939, they may consider their world empire as lost. It is astounding how easy the democracies make it for us to reach our goal."
The rest is, as they say, history, but one
cannot read this book without a sense of loss for what
might have been had Churchill been heeded earlier. One
also cannot help but make the comparison with Israel
since the Oslo infamy. In spite of every evidence to the
contrary--Arafat's speeches, the Arab press, the
ongoing violence, the unrelenting and overt enmity of the
entire Arab world, the dismal failure of all previous
agreements--Barak and his pathetic minions have
continued to appease and surrender. Camp David failed to
produce a formal agreement only because Arafat
decided to hold out for an even more abject surrender by Barak
[(Continued on p.11)]
Outpost - 10 - August-September 2000