Helen Thomas and the Polish homeland of the Jews

The New Neo Posted on by

Perhaps you’ve already seen the video of Helen Thomas giving the Jews of Israel some decidedly unfriendly advice about just where they should go:

And you’ve probably seen the calls for Hearst to fire Helen Thomas and encourage her none-too-early retirement. You may even have seen Thomas’s expression of regret (not apology) about her remarks.

Many have written about the incident, focusing on Thomas’s anti-Semitism and bile. I note those phenomena, too. But I’m also interested in certain other things. The first is the fact that this woman has been shaping public opinion on politics for half a century. The second is her startling and abysmal ignorance (or deliberate twisting; we don’t know which) of history.

Born in 1920, Thomas is old enough to remember WWII and Israel’s subsequent founding back when they were current events rather than history. That ought to cause her to understand exactly why her comments are so absurdly, ironically venomous. Asking Jews to “get the hell out of Palestine” and go back “home” to Germany and Poland would be almost laughable (one could imagine the Onion writing it as a parody) if Thomas hadn’t meant the remarks so seriously, and if they didn’t invoke the memory of such deeply horrific, hateful, and barbaric historic events.

Thomas’s reference to Germany and Poland as the original “home” of the Jews of Israel also expresses, among other things, her adherence to the false and misleading anti-Israel party line that Israel is composed of European Jews, which ignores the vast numbers of Jews from Arab countries who have settled there since its founding. And her particular mention of Poland as the Jewish “home” made me think of the complex yet ultimately sorrowful history of the Jews in that country.

Take a look; though lengthy, it makes for fascinating as well as sobering reading. The Jewish presence in Poland lasted for about a thousand years—not as long as their presence in Israel, of course, but still quite a long time. Jews came to Poland because they lost their ancestral homeland in Israel and then were expelled from country after country in Europe. Poland was for a while a welcoming port in a storm, relatively tolerant and accepting, especially during what was known as the golden age of the sixteenth century.

In general, the Polish kings wanted the Jews around for their own purposes—mostly economic—and the clergy didn’t, and the two groups were at odds on the issue for quite some time. This caused wild oscillations in the Jews’ acceptance and treatment in Poland over the centuries. But compared to what was happening in other places—Russia, for example, or Spain, as well as many other countries—Poland was an intermittently safe spot.

This caused Jewish numbers to increase there on the whole, although they waxed and waned in response to disease and periodic massacres. Jews never were a huge segment of the population (the maximum appears to have been 9.5%, right before the Holocaust). But in the city of Warsaw—somewhat like the city of New York now, and resembling Baghdad during the early part of the 20th century—Jews comprised about thirty percent of the inhabitants in later, pre-Holocaust, years.

The Nazis’ war against the Jews was especially ferocious in that “homeland,” Poland. Ninety percent of Polish Jews were murdered after the Nazis invaded and occupied that country. It is a further irony that some of the few surviving Polish Jews who tried to return “home” postwar were murdered for their pains when they got there. Then, many of those who were left were persecuted and then forced out by the Soviets, belatedly finishing Hitler’s goal of making Poland virtually Judenrein.

Where did that small number of surviving Polish Jews go? The answer, for quite a few, was “Israel”—the only country on earth that was/is bound to take them. But for the Helen Thomases of the world, the Jews must leave there as well—that is, if they are allowed to live at all.

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Rough-around-the-edges spambot with a heart of gold:

Great job, more people must to share things like this on the internet. Would seem almost too hard to find information anymore because everybody is just posting crap. At last a blog I can pursue with no crap!

Does the world—and the US—want Israel to survive?

The New Neo Posted on by

When I began blogging I was surprised—although I shouldn’t have been—to find that virtually every time I wrote about Israel it drew the trolls.

And not just any trolls, either; a very specific type of anti-Semitic troll. And I don’t mean “anti-Semitic” as a synonym for “anti-Israeli,” although the two can often coexist in the same body/mind. I won’t bother to give you examples of what these trolls write, but suffice to say it’s not equivocal and it’s very vicious.

Most of you will never see these comments, due to various mechanisms I’ve put in place to delete and/or block them. But since that process is not fail-safe, every now and then one slips by. Other than that, however, you’ll just have to take my word for it.

There is no other topic on earth that predictably draws this volume of venom. And we can’t blame the internet; anti-Semitism has the longest and most illustrious history of any hatred on earth.

Countless volumes have been written about the causes of the phenomenon, so I feel no need to add to the speculation here. But suffice to say that, despite all the theories, no one really knows for sure. It’s probably a case of overdetermination—“all of the above.”

In recent decades the actual, human, imperfect-but-trying-its-best country of Israel, besieged on all sides by enemies sworn to destroy it, has come to be criticized for every single effort to survive and to defend itself. The flotilla incident is no different, but there is something new in the mix: the United States, Israel’s historical ally, has sent subtle and not-so-subtle messages through Obama and his underlings that it will wink at or even support efforts to undermine Israel’s security.

Mona Charen connects the dots for us and lists ways in which Obama subtly gave the flotilla “activists” a green light to provoke Israel and to assume afterwards that there will be no bad consequences forthcoming from this administration:

By 1) declaring through Secretary of State Clinton that the blockade of Gaza is “unsustainable and unacceptable”; 2) joining the United Nations Security Council in “condemn(ing) those acts which resulted in the loss of at least 10 civilians and many wounded”; and 3) having a White House official tell the Washington Post that there is now a “general sense in the administration that it’s time to change our Gaza policy”…

The administration [also] let it be known that it had “warned” Israel to “use restraint” against the Gaza convoy. There was no corresponding warning to Turkey about supporting and supplying the illegal flotilla.

Charon leaves out the preparatory steps of (1) changing policy on whether Israel should be allowed to build in its own capital, Jerusalem; and (2) insulting and humiliating Israel’s leader Netanyahu when he visited the US (this sort of message is especially well-understood in the mideast).

Charles Krauthammer sums up the picture nicely:

…[T]he blockade is not just perfectly rational, it is perfectly legal. Gaza under Hamas is a self-declared enemy of Israel ”” a declaration backed up by more than 4,000 rockets fired at Israeli civilian territory. Yet having pledged itself to unceasing belligerency, Hamas claims victimhood when Israel imposes a blockade to prevent Hamas from arming itself with still more rockets…

Oh, but weren’t the Gaza-bound ships on a mission of humanitarian relief? No. Otherwise they would have accepted Israel’s offer to bring their supplies to an Israeli port, be inspected for military materiel and have the rest trucked by Israel into Gaza ”” as every week 10,000 tons of food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies are sent by Israel to Gaza.

Why was the offer refused? Because, as organizer Greta Berlin admitted, the flotilla was not about humanitarian relief but about breaking the blockade, i.e., ending Israel’s inspection regime, which would mean unlimited shipping into Gaza and thus the unlimited arming of Hamas.

Israel has already twice intercepted weapons-laden ships from Iran destined for Hezbollah and Gaza. What country would allow that?

But even more important, why did Israel even have to resort to blockade? Because, blockade is Israel’s fallback as the world systematically delegitimizes its traditional ways of defending itself ”” forward and active defense…The whole point of this relentless international campaign is to deprive Israel of any legitimate form of self-defense.

Krauthammer is not optimistic about the prospects. Those who demonize Israel and hate Jews will call his article typical inflation of Jewish victimhood (and hey, those crematoria didn’t really exist, right?). Others will simply say that he is being depressingly realistic:

The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, six million ”” that number again ”” hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists ”” Iranian in particular ”” openly prepare a more final solution.

A little background on the BP oil spill

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s BP’s side of the story, presented by its CEO, Tony Hayward.

I’m not offering this because I believe it’s the truth, the whole truth,and nothing but the truth (hardly), but because it’s of interest in terms of some of the possible technical solutions. Equally interesting—or perhaps more so—are many of the comments, some of which detail BPs negligence prior to the spill, and some of which discuss the economics of the whole thing.

Obama and the oil spill: why would anyone expect leadership from him in this crisis?

The New Neo Posted on by

Even many of Obama’s supporters have became impatient with his lack of energetic leadership on the Gulf oil spill.

But why would they have expected any different? Obama has almost never shown that characteristic—and he’s been praised for that fact in the past.

One prominent example was his passivity on the financial meltdown during his candidacy. While John McCain seemed to buzz around like an angry fly trying (impotently, it turns out) to solve things and tackle problems and act, Obama’s perceived calm caused people to praise his coolness and first-class temperament.

The right has always thought little of Obama. But as coolness has morphed to coldness, and restraint has come to seem paralysis, even liberals and the left are frustrated with him. Obama has never successfully run a bake sale, let alone a country. Nor has he shown leadership or executive abilities (except in the service of his own career advancement; that he’s very good at)—even in the absence of a crisis, much less during one.

Did his supporters think there are no special executive skills involved in being president? That giving speeches and looking cool were attributes that would be transferable to handling an environmental disaster and coordinating the response to it? That anyone could do it?

Perhaps so. After all, stupidhead Bush dealt with 9/11, so how hard could it all be?

[NOTE: The Hillbuzz guys ask an excellent question.

And here’s a piece that details Obama’s schedule since the oil spill crisis. He hasn’t exactly focused like a laser on it.]

[ADDENDUM: The Anchoress has a good roundup of oil spill news.]