[(Continued from p.9)]
Blame the Jews is also the mantra of a man named poet laureate in my own state of New Jersey. He reads his "poetry" to the young. They eat it up.
Who knew there was so much rage in our youth pool? Informed readers are aware of the "divestment" and "Israel-is-apartheid" hysteria sweeping from campus to campus. No need to repeat all that here for the list is long and this column is short.
These aren't just kids who've taken over university culture with blood libels. Well, they are kids but in a few years they'll be our newspaper publishers, journalists, network heads, corporate leaders, teachers, politicians, statesmen -- and one of them, one of those kids who is this moment sloganeering in favor of divestment from Israel -- will possibly become our president.
True, our presidents do not always come from Harvard nobility. Here in America anybody can become president and once in a while this happens. Jimmy Carter was about as "anybody" as it gets.
I must admit that I am naive. I thought our young were a blank page. It never occurred to me that young minds can be so quickened with hoary prejudices. At what age does all that begin and does it come from conditioning or is it, as I'm coming to believe -- is it genetic?
One writer (Saul Bellow I think it was) said it was transmitted from mother's milk. Maybe so. But my naivete is not confined to my own beloved country. What's happening in Israel plays a big part in my fears for the United States. It is a fact -- at least to me -- that a united and strong Israel casts a net, a chupah, over all Jews -- Jews around the world.
(Jack Engelhard is a former radio and newspaper editor covering the Mideast and former American volunteer in the Israeli Defense Forces.)
On this cold January Sunday in 2003, as the airways filled with anti-American, anti-capitalist tirades from "anti-war peace protesters," I was reminded of my earliest acquaintance, more than 60 years ago, with the contradictions of the human heart and mind.
It came as a youngster while I was dandled on my grandmother's knee. This beloved woman was an emigre from Minsk to the United States. She was also a devoutly committed Communist revolutionary who traded her family's Judaism for belief in the inevitable revolution of the proletariat. She worked tirelessly on behalf of local Communists seeking to undermine capitalism, even though America had given her opportunities undreamt of in her native Russia.
I recall fruitless debates she had with her son-in-law, my father, who mistakenly thought rational persuasion could alter her utopian views. I resented the persuasive logic of his arguments because I loved my grandmother and wanted her to be right, yet I couldn't help realizing how illogical her views were. For all her talk of "scientific socialism" and the iron laws of Marxist dialectic, I realized she possessed unshakable faith that resembled the religion she had renounced as "the opiate of the masses." I recall my father announcing to her one day that Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, and her denial that this was possible; he showed her the New York Times the next day but she dismissed the reports as capitalist lies. Soon thereafter, scarcely missing a beat, she was explaining how Stalin's brilliant tactical maneuver would help bring the happy day of world revolution when the proletariat would overthrow their capitalist oppressors. Her devotion to Uncle Joe was so unquestioning that I remember, like a bolt of troubling adult understanding, thinking that if Stalin gave the order for her to execute her family, myself included, she would do it for the cause.
Yet years later, there came a day when my grandmother lost her Communist faith. This woman was not changed by any rational argument but rather by Stalin turning against newborn Israel and following it with his purge of Jews -- the Jewish doctors' plot. Somehow she awakened from her lifelong utopian dream when her long forgotten Jewish identity was touched by Israel's birth.
I thought of this because again, totalitarians, this time Islamic fanatics, are bent on destroying Israel and, though Communism is the god that failed, the language of the left, numerous Jews among them, remains the same; as always, inculpating capitalism and Amerika. And again it is Jews who are the central target of a world wide tide of utopian fanaticism. But make no mistake, Western democracy along with the Jews must also be destroyed for its decadent tolerance of human failings and its rejection of totalitarian utopianism. Our enemies make this clear: Israel and America are two "Zionist entities" that must be destroyed. We are all infidels. Israel, surrounded by 21 Arab states is more vulnerable than America and is therefore the first target. It is attacked in the language of Communist totalitarianism as an "imperialist" colonial outpost of American capitalism.
So when we see war protesters in Washington dressed in Palestinian garb, they are continuing the 20th century's totalitarian enterprise. They are the worthy successors to Lenin's "useful idiots," ready to submit to the totalitarian temptation. Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are equally worthy successors to Hitler and Stalin. All the high minded prattle about peace, love and understanding cannot hide this simple truth: utopians must find a scapegoat for their failure to achieve utopia and Jews are the obvious target of this thwarted longing. Eric Hoffer said in 1968: "I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel, so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us."
Even my grandmother chose to abandon her utopian dreams when she realized this truth. Will our contemporary Jewish utopians remain asleep?
Stephen Rittenberg is a psychatrist.
Outpost - 10 - February 2003