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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; George Jochnowitz</title>
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		<title>Tiananmen Square: 25 Years Since a Failed Revolt for Democracy in China</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/george-jochnowitz/tiananmen-square-25-years-since-a-failed-revolt-for-democracy-in-china/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=tiananmen-square-25-years-since-a-failed-revolt-for-democracy-in-china</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 15 Apr 2014 04:20:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[George Jochnowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[1989]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[25 years]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anniversary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chinese students]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tiananmen Square]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223401</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Reflections on the torch of freedom that Chinese students lit on April 15, 1989.
 ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/tian.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-223406" alt="tian" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/tian.jpg" width="300" height="300" /></a><em>T</em><i>ian </i>(heaven). <i>An </i>(peace). <i>Men </i>(gate). The Gate of Heavenly Peace is the entrance to the Forbidden City, where China&#8217;s emperors lived and where the movie <i>The Last Emperor</i> was filmed. Tiananmen Square, the front yard of the Forbidden City, was enlarged by Chairman Mao into the largest public space in the world, so that he could organize mass demonstrations of his supporters. Irony of ironies. Twenty-five years ago, the square was the scene of the biggest spontaneous demonstration is history, part of a movement that almost brought down the regime Mao had created. I was there on May 13, when the hunger strike began; on May 19, when the students prepared for an invasion by the People’s Liberation Army that was turned back before it ever got near the Square, and on June 2, when the Goddess of Democracy had been erected but a sense of doom pervaded the atmosphere.</p>
<p>The Beijing Spring Movement was a relatively rare phenomenon in human history: a struggle between good and evil. Mao Zedong had created a vicious regime, which taught people to betray their friends and relatives, which launched mad policies (ordering farmers to melt their tools in order to manufacture steel in backyard furnaces) that led to the most catastrophic famine in human history, and which continued to export grain during that famine.</p>
<p>Radical evil is more familiar and therefore less surprising than radical virtue. Nevertheless, outbreaks of radical virtue occur. After the funeral of Party Secretary Hu Yaobang on April 22, 1989, and even more so after the start of the hunger strike in Tiananmen Square on May 13, human nature changed in China. A drop in crime, fires and accidents was reported. &#8220;Criminals are on strike for freedom and democracy,&#8221; people joked. A steady stream of trucks went in and out of the square&#8211;the citizens of Beijing supplying the million or so demonstrators with food and beverages. Railroad employees, famous for their rudeness, became polite. Students and other demonstrators riding to and from Beijing were allowed to ride free. At Hebei University in Baoding, where I taught, the students took over the campus loudspeakers and played Beethoven symphonies, alternating with appeals for contributions for an independent newspaper. A peasant woman walked up to the university gates and put 50 yuan into the collection box&#8211;the equivalent of half a month&#8217;s salary at the time.</p>
<p>I often think of my student—let me call her Miss Qin. She was the shyest person I ever met. No matter what I asked her, she whispered &#8220;yes.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;How old are you?&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Yes.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Do you understand me?&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Yes.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;<i>Ni duo da</i>?&#8221; (How old are you?)</p>
<p>&#8220;Yes.&#8221;</p>
<p>Miss Qin&#8217;s parents lived in my building. Her father was a Party member. She and her parents seemed to have a very cold relationship with each other. One day, she approached me voluntarily, already a surprise. &#8220;I&#8217;ve been to Tiananmen,&#8221; she said in perfect English. &#8220;I spent three days there.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;My God, does your father know?&#8221; I asked, shocked.</p>
<p>&#8220;They&#8217;re not opposed,&#8221; she answered in Chinese.</p>
<p>Unbelievable! About an hour later, I saw Miss Qin and her mother walking and talking together, their arms around each other. The Beijing Spring Movement had brought the Qin family together.</p>
<p>I remember the sound of the ambulances in Beijing, carrying hunger strikers to the hospital, just as I had heard them on May 19. Whenever I think of that time, tears come to my eyes—even now as I type these words. But even in Baoding, the smoky, drab industrial city I lived in, demonstrations took place every day. At 6:30 A.M. on May 16, 1989, I woke up in my apartment in a faculty residence building at Hebei University. My younger daughter, Miriam, had already left the apartment to join a student demonstration in front of the Communist Party headquarters. After breakfast, I got on my bicycle to see what was happening. The main street of Baoding was packed with demonstrators, who began to ask me questions in Chinese:</p>
<p>&#8220;What do you think of China&#8217;s students?&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;China&#8217;s hope,&#8221; I answered as well as I could in Chinese. I got big smiles and thumbs-up signs in response. This encouraged me.</p>
<p>&#8220;What do you think of the Communist Party?&#8221; someone asked.</p>
<p>&#8220;It serves no purpose.&#8221;</p>
<p>Thumbs up. &#8220;And what do you think of Marxism?&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;<i>Goupi</i>&#8221; (bullshit, literally &#8220;dog fart&#8221;), I replied. I did not know that I was being filmed by a television crew and would appear on the local evening news later that day. The following day, two police cars drove up to the campus to warn me, very politely, not to interfere in China&#8217;s internal affairs.</p>
<p>The popularity of the movement was not enough. There was no organization to build on. There were no independent clubs or groups of any kind in China in 1989. The protesters in Tiananmen Square had no office and no telephone. There was no way for leaders to be elected by the ever-changing population in the square. There was no way to establish authority. Totalitarian regimes are designed to prevent competition of any kind from arising. Even the Catholic Church—the pro-contraception, pro-abortion Chinese Patriotic Catholic Church—was, and still is, run by the government.</p>
<p>The absence of civil society gives the Communist Party a monopoly on all political activity. When the Party falls, as it will some day, the lack of a political opposition will be a great danger to the country. Had there been some sort of legal organization outside the government, there would have been a way to settle the issues raised by Beijing Spring.</p>
<p>And what were those issues? Rule of law was tied for first place with an end to corruption. &#8220;Rulers should not be above the law,&#8221; I was told repeatedly by my students. Separation of powers was an issue as well. There was a great deal of political sophistication expressed to me by people I spoke to, mostly my own students.</p>
<p>What would the government have done had the protesters left the square on, let’s say, May 30? The great majority of the casualties of June 4 did not take place in Tiananmen Square at all. The bloodshed occurred about three miles to the west, on Chang&#8217;an Avenue, a major east-west street, part of which forms the northern boundary of Tiananmen Square. Many of the victims were simply residents of the apartment buildings and old courtyard houses in the neighborhood who took it upon themselves to block the tanks. Would plans to enter the city have been canceled if the students had left the square? I don&#8217;t think so. Would the residents of Chang&#8217;an Avenue have come out to stop the army even if there were no students in the square? I think the answer may be yes.</p>
<p>There are no &#8220;what-if&#8217;s&#8221; in history. The demonstrators did not withdraw on May 30, and the People&#8217;s Republic of China killed unarmed civilians who, during the seven weeks of Beijing Spring, had been extraordinarily peaceful and good humored.</p>
<p>On June 4, 1989, tanks of the People&#8217;s Liberation Army crushed Beijing Spring, the movement for democracy in China. The whole world watched, even in Communist East Europe. Demonstrations took place in front of the Chinese Embassy in Warsaw. Mikhail Gorbachev had witnessed the movement personally when he visited China in May. It is no coincidence that the Berlin Wall fell later that year.</p>
<p>In China, the government decided that it could placate the people by giving them capitalism instead of democracy. Although democracy ordinarily coexists with capitalism, China now has Marxist Capitalism—the pursuit of wealth and relatively free markets but no free speech and no freedom of thought. Money, however, will not buy human rights.</p>
<p>China&#8217;s current leaders have achieved a certain degree of prosperity, but the regime they have created is repressive and, like all dictatorships, it is unstable, having no established process for leaders to succeed each other.</p>
<p>Democracies are inherently stable, because they have established procedures for governments to change. They are inherently rich, because creativity is an essential element of a prosperous society, and to be creative one has to have freedom of thought. Democracy is the Gateway to Heavenly Peace.</p>
<p><i>George Jochnowitz was born in New York City, in 1937. He became aware of different regional pronunciations when he was six, and he could consciously switch accents as a child. He got his Ph.D. in linguistics from Columbia University and taught linguistics at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. His area of specialization was Jewish languages, in particular, Judeo-Italian dialects. As part of a faculty-exchange agreement with Hebei University in Baoding, China, he was in China during the Tiananmen Massacre. He can be reached at <a href="mailto:george@jochnowitz.net">george@jochnowitz.net.</a></i></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<item>
		<title>United For Death</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/george-jochnowitz/united-for-death/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=united-for-death</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/george-jochnowitz/united-for-death/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 02 Jan 2012 04:05:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[George Jochnowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jamie glazov]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left's terror ties]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tyranny and terror]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United In Hate]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=117715</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The ties that bind leftism with Islamism. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/fideloliver.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-117719" title="fideloliver" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/fideloliver.jpg" alt="" width="410" height="276" /></a></p>
<p><strong>This review is reprinted from the Winter 2011 issue of <em><a href="http://www.midstreamthf.com/">Midstream</a>.</em></strong></p>
<p><em><strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602">United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror</a></strong>.  By Jamie Glazov.  Los Angeles: WND Books, 2009.  xxxii + 264 pp.</em></p>
<p>Jamie Glazov was born in the USSR in 1966. His parents were both dissidents, who felt they had to flee. They left the USSR in 1972 and settled in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1975. Glazov grew up in a family that knew about the horrors of totalitarianism. He eventually earned a Ph.D. in history and is now the managing editor of <em>Frontpage Magazine</em>, an online political journal that fights totalitarian tendencies in leftist thinking. To a certain extent, Glazov is continuing a fight against totalitarianism and anti-Semitism that was begun by Hannah Arendt.</p>
<p>In 1951, Arendt wrote a book, <em>The Origins of Totalitarianism</em>, which has since become a classic, exploring the 20th-century phenomenon of totalitarianism. One-fourth of this work is devoted to the question of anti-Semitism.<sup>1</sup> Arendt wrote the book shortly after World War II, but her decision to link an ancient prejudice to a modern political ideology is as valid today as it was then. Glazov, in his book, provides us with a quotation to illustrate this connection. Ulrike Meinhof, one of the founders of the terrorist Baader-Meinhof Gang, said, “Auschwitz meant that six million Jews were killed … for what they were: money Jews. … Anti-Semitism is really a hatred of capitalism.”<sup>2</sup> Meinhof was proud of her anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>Meinhof, to be sure, was a terrorist. Unfortunately, many leftists who have never committed acts of violence take positions approaching hers. Noam Chomsky, for example, would never describe himself as an anti-Semite and became famous for his writings on linguistics before he had published anything about politics. Chomsky visited Hezbollah in 2006 despite the fact that its leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, had said about Jews, “If they all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”<sup>4</sup> Chomsky showed by his visit that he had chosen not to understand that Nasrallah was calling for genocide.</p>
<p>Glazov feels that there are two basic reasons that the left has joined Muslim terrorists to oppose Jews and Israel. “First … leftism, like Islamism, detests modernity, individual freedom, and any value placed on <em>individual</em> human life. … In addition, Jews are seen as being synonymous with the oppressive structures of corporate capitalism and globalization.”<sup>5</sup> Oddly, nowhere in the book are Israel’s kibbutzim ever mentioned. Before Israel became an independent state, its cultivated land consisted of either kibbutzim (communal farms) or moshavim (cooperative farms). A kibbutz was unambiguously a socialist enterprise; a moshav was partly private and partly communal. Since farms take up much more space than cities and towns do, most of the land owned by Jews during the days of the British Mandate was either entirely or partially the property of socialist communities. Corporate capitalism indeed! Leftist opponents of Israel have chosen not to know this fact, and Glazov has not reminded them or us about this piece of history.</p>
<p>Glazov&#8217;s book is divided into four sections: (1) The Believer, (2) Romance with Tyranny, (3) The Death Cult Cousin: Islamism, and (4) Romance with Terror. The first part sets the tone for the whole book. Believers don&#8217;t question. They have faith. Marxism is not a religion, but it does demand belief—blind belief—in the doctrines it teaches. Leftists today may ignore Marx&#8217;s writings about economics, but they support and have always supported regimes that suppress free thought. As we saw above, Glazov says that rejecting modernity and individuality is what links leftism to Islamism.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/united.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-117721" title="united" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/united.jpg" alt="" width="245" height="361" /></a><strong>[To order <em>United in Hate</em>, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602">Click Here.</a></em></strong>]</p>
<p>Some readers may disagree with Glazov’s allegation that leftism detests modernity, individual freedom, and the value of individual human life. At this point, we should remember that a liberal is not a leftist  For example, Nadine Gordimer, responding to an interviewer who described her as a white liberal, said, “I happen to be white, but I&#8217;m not a liberal, my dear. I&#8217;m a leftist.”<sup>6</sup> Glazov writes of many leftists who certainly are not liberals but rather supporters of totalitarianism, the various systems of thought control that Arendt talked about in her 1951 book.</p>
<p>Hannah Arendt’s good friend, Mary McCarthy, praised North Vietnamese society because she felt it had controlled thought and recreated human nature. McCarthy wrote, “The phenomena of existential agony, of alienation, don’t appear among the Vietnamese—probably in part because they lack our kind of ‘ego,’ and our endowment of free-floating guilt.”<sup>7</sup> It is amazing that a novelist as informed and sensitive as McCarthy could actually believe that North Vietnam had ended ego and free-floating guilt; it is even more amazing that she could believe this was a good thing. McCarthy certainly was not alone. Shirley MacLaine, who visited China in 1972, wrote that she had never seen a quarrel in China and went on to say that “it slowly dawned on me that perhaps human beings could really be taught anything, that we were simply blank pages upon which our characters are written by parents, schools, churches, and the society itself.”<sup>8</sup> MacLaine is unambiguously cheering the idea of thought control and the desirability of erasing human differences. I should add a personal note here: I lived in China twice, during the spring semesters of 1984 and 1989, and I saw and heard lots of quarrels. MacLaine, of course, is echoing Marx and Engels, who said that after the final stage of communism was achieved, people would no longer have any disagreements and the state would wither away.</p>
<p>Glazov, as we saw above, said that the left had joined with Islamism to oppose Jews since Jews were linked to globalism and capitalism. But there is a more profound factor in the hostility that totalitarians feel toward Jews: Jews argue. They think dangerous thoughts. Marxist regimes reject thinkers and intellectuals. Chairman Mao exiled teachers and writers to the countryside to learn from the peasants. Pol Pot simply killed them. Mao and Pol Pot didn’t attack Jews because there weren’t any in China and Cambodia (the Jews of Kaifeng, China, had assimilated and become invisible long before Mao ruled the country). Hitler, to be sure, never explained why he had to kill people who were Jews or descended from Jews. Perhaps he felt that the genetic flaw he had to eradicate was the argument gene.</p>
<p>Since Jews argue, a variety of beliefs may be found among them. There have certainly been Jews who were Communists; there are even Jews today who are sympathetic to Islamism. All the same, it is logical that argument and free thought are a problem for totalitarians. Totalitarians hate Jews. Hitler’s decision to try to eradicate Jews from the world was nevertheless irrational. Germany was a country that always respected scholars and intellectuals, and Hitler did not eliminate scholars the way Mao and Pol Pot did. Jews were heavily represented among Germany’s academics and scientists. Hitler knew he needed scientists because he wanted Germany to be able to produce atomic weapons, but anti-Semitism took priority over this need. Einstein fled Germany; Edward Teller and Szilard fled Germany’s ally, Hungary. Enrico Fermi, who was not Jewish but was married to a Jew, fled Europe when Mussolini extended Hitler’s racial laws to Italy. Hitler, for reasons that will never be fully understood, felt that killing Jews was virtuous and that virtue took precedence over his country’s military needs.</p>
<p>Hitler was a music lover who admired the music of Anton Bruckner, Richard Wagner, and Richard Strauss. He almost certainly would have adored the music of Gustav Mahler, but anti-Semitism came first. Mahler had been born a Jew, and so his music was banned, as was the music of Mendelssohn, another composer of Jewish descent. Jewish musicians fled, if they were lucky and able to do so. Those who didn’t escape were murdered.</p>
<p>Today, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is echoing the irrationality that Hitler put into effect 70 years ago. Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons has led many nations to impose sanctions against it. Israel may decide that it has to launch a pre-emptive attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Ahmadinejad has no practical need for these weapons, which are threatening his country’s security rather than protecting it. But he is amassing atomic bombs as part of a policy announced by moderate President Ali Akhbar Rafsanjani, who has in effect suggested that Iran should turn itself into a suicide bomb. In the annual Al-Quds (Jerusalem) sermon given on December 14, 2001, Rafsanjani said that if one day the world of Islam comes to possess nuclear weapons, Israel could be destroyed. He went on to say that the use of a nuclear bomb against Israel would leave nothing standing, but that retaliation, no matter how severe, would merely do damage to the world of Islam.<sup>9</sup></p>
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		<title>Why Totalitarians Hate Jews</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/george-jochnowitz/why-totalitarians-hate-jews/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-totalitarians-hate-jews</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 11 Mar 2011 04:11:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[George Jochnowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=87039</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The unholy ties that bind leftists and Islamists.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/ahmadinejadchavez.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-87041" title="Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad greets Venezualan President Hugo Chavez in Tehran" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/ahmadinejadchavez.jpg" alt="" width="378" height="293" /></a></p>
<p><strong>This review is reprinted from the Winter 2011 issue of <em><a href="http://www.midstreamthf.com/">Midstream</a>.</em></strong></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602"><em>United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror</em></a>.  By Jamie Glazov.  Los Angeles: WND Books, 2009.  xxxii + 264 pp.</p>
<p>Jamie Glazov was born in the USSR in 1966.  His parents were both dissidents, who felt they had to flee.  They left the USSR in 1972 and settled in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1975.  Glazov grew up in a family that knew about the horrors of totalitarianism.  He eventually earned a Ph.D. in history and is now the managing editor of <em>Frontpage Magazine</em>, an online political journal that fights totalitarian tendencies in leftist thinking.  To a certain extent, Glazov is continuing a fight against totalitarianism and anti-Semitism that was begun by Hannah Arendt.</p>
<p>In 1951, Arendt wrote a book, <em>The Origins of Totalitarianism</em>, which has since become a classic, exploring the 20<sup>th</sup>-century phenomenon of totalitarianism.  One-fourth of this work is devoted to the question of anti-Semitism.<a href="#_edn1">[1]</a> Arendt wrote the book shortly after World War II, but her decision to link an ancient prejudice to a modern political ideology is as valid today as it was then.  Glazov, in his book, provides us with a quotation to illustrate this connection.  Ulrike Meinhof, one of the founders of the terrorist Baader-Meinhof Gang, said, “Auschwitz meant that six million Jews were killed … for what they were: money Jews. … Anti-Semitism is really a hatred of capitalism.”<a href="#_edn2">[2]</a> Meinhof was proud of her anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>Meinhof, to be sure, was a terrorist.  Unfortunately, many leftists who have never committed acts of violence take positions approaching hers.  Noam Chomsky, for example, would never describe himself as an anti-Semite and became famous for his writings on linguistics before he had published anything about politics.  Chomsky visited Hezbollah in 2006<a href="#_edn3">[3]</a> despite the fact that its leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, had said about Jews, “If they all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”<a href="#_edn4">[4]</a> Chomsky showed by his visit that he had chosen not to understand that Nasrallah was calling for genocide.</p>
<p>Glazov feels that there are two basic reasons that the left has joined Muslim terrorists to oppose Jews and Israel. “First … leftism, like Islamism, detests modernity, individual freedom, and any value placed on <em>individual</em> human life. … In addition, Jews are seen as being synonymous with the oppressive structures of corporate capitalism and globalization.”<a href="#_edn5">[5]</a> Oddly, nowhere in the book are Israel’s kibbutzim ever mentioned.  Before Israel became an independent state, its cultivated land consisted of either kibbutzim (communal farms) or moshavim (cooperative farms).  A kibbutz was unambiguously a socialist enterprise; a moshav was partly private and partly communal.  Since farms take up much more space than cities and towns do, most of the land owned by Jews during the days of the British Mandate was either entirely or partially the property of socialist communities.  Corporate capitalism indeed!  Leftist opponents of Israel have chosen not to know this fact, and Glazov has not reminded them or us about this piece of history.</p>
<p>Glazov’s book is divided into four sections: (1) The Believer, (2) Romance with Tyranny, (3) The Death Cult Cousin: Islamism, and (4) Romance with Terror.  The first part sets the tone for the whole book.  Believers don’t question.  They have faith.  Marxism is not a religion, but it does demand belief—blind belief—in the doctrines it teaches.  Leftists today may ignore Marx’s writings about economics, but they support and have always supported regimes that suppress free thought.  As we saw above, Glazov says that rejecting modernity and individuality is what links leftism to Islamism..</p>
<p>Some readers may disagree with Glazov’s allegation that leftism detests modernity, individual freedom, and the value of individual human life.  At this point, we should remember that a liberal is not a leftist   For example, Nadine Gordimer, responding to an interviewer who described her as a white liberal, said, “I happen to be white, but I&#8217;m not a liberal, my dear. I&#8217;m a leftist.”<a href="#_edn6">[6]</a> Glazov writes of many leftists who certainly are not liberals but rather supporters of totalitarianism, the various systems of thought control that Arendt talked about in her 1951 book.</p>
<p>Hannah Arendt’s good friend, Mary McCarthy, praised North Vietnamese society because she felt it had controlled thought and recreated human nature.  McCarthy wrote, “The phenomena of existential  agony, of alienation, don’t appear among the Vietnamese—probably in part because they lack our kind of ‘ego,’ and our endowment of free-floating guilt.”<a href="#_edn7">[7]</a> It is amazing that a novelist as informed and sensitive as McCarthy could actually believe that North Vietnam had ended ego and free-floating guilt; it is even more amazing that she could believe this was a good thing.  McCarthy certainly was not alone.  Shirley MacLaine, who visited China in 1972, wrote that she had never seen a quarrel in China and went on to say that “it slowly dawned on me that perhaps human beings could really be taught anything, that we were simply blank pages upon which our characters are written by parents, schools, churches, and the society itself.”<a href="#_edn8">[8]</a> MacLaine is unambiguously cheering the idea of thought control and the desirability of erasing human differences.  I should add a personal note here:  I lived in China twice, during the spring semesters of 1984 and 1989, and I saw and heard lots of quarrels.  MacLaine, of course, is echoing Marx and Engels, who said that after the final stage of communism was achieved, people would no longer have any disagreements and the state would wither away.</p>
<p>Glazov, as we saw above, said that the left had joined with Islamism to oppose Jews since Jews were linked to globalism and capitalism.  But there is a more profound factor in the hostility that totalitarians feel toward Jews: Jews argue.  They think dangerous thoughts.  Marxist regimes reject thinkers and intellectuals.  Chairman Mao exiled teachers and writers to the countryside to learn from the peasants.  Pol Pot simply killed them.  Mao and Pol Pot didn’t attack Jews because there weren’t any in China and Cambodia (the Jews of Kaifeng, China, had assimilated and become invisible long before Mao ruled the country).  Hitler, to be sure, never explained why he had to kill people who were Jews or descended from Jews.  Perhaps he felt that the genetic flaw he had to eradicate was the argument gene.</p>
<p>Since Jews argue, a variety of beliefs may be found among them.  There have certainly been Jews who were Communists; there are even Jews today who are sympathetic to Islamism.  All the same, it is logical that argument and free thought are a problem for totalitarians.  Totalitarians hate Jews.  Hitler’s decision to try to eradicate Jews from the world was nevertheless irrational.  Germany was a country that always respected scholars and intellectuals, and Hitler did not eliminate scholars the way Mao and Pol Pot did.  Jews were heavily represented among Germany’s academics and scientists.  Hitler knew he needed scientists because he wanted Germany to be able to produce atomic weapons, but anti-Semitism took priority over this need.  Einstein fled Germany; Edward Teller and Szilard fled Germany’s ally, Hungary.  Enrico Fermi, who was not Jewish but was married to a Jew, fled Europe when Mussolini extended Hitler’s racial laws to Italy.  Hitler, for reasons that will never be fully understood, felt that killing Jews was virtuous and that virtue took precedence over his country’s military needs.</p>
<p>Hitler was a music lover who admired the music of Anton Bruckner, Richard Wagner, and Richard Strauss.  He almost certainly would have adored the music of Gustav Mahler, but anti-Semitism came first.  Mahler had been born a Jew, and so his music was banned, as was the music of Mendelssohn, another composer of Jewish descent.  Jewish musicians fled, if they were lucky and able to do so.  Those who didn’t escape were murdered.</p>
<p>Today, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is echoing the irrationality that Hitler put into effect 70 years ago.  Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons has led many nations to impose sanctions against it.  Israel may decide that it has to launch a pre-emptive attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities.  Ahmadinejad has no practical need for these weapons, which are threatening his country’s security rather than protecting it.  But he is amassing atomic bombs as part of a policy announced by moderate President Ali Akhbar Rafsanjani, who has in effect suggested that Iran should turn itself into a suicide bomb.  In the annual Al-Quds (Jerusalem) sermon given on December  14, 2001, Rafsanjani said that if one day the world of Islam comes to possess nuclear weapons, Israel could be destroyed.  He went on to say that the use of a nuclear bomb against Israel would leave nothing standing, but that retaliation, no matter how severe, would merely do damage to the world of Islam.<a href="#_edn9">[9]</a></p>
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		<title>Palestinians Without Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/george-jochnowitz/palestinians-without-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=palestinians-without-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Mar 2011 04:08:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[George Jochnowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The fate of the Palestinians if the Jewish state disappeared.
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<p>The Arab world is fighting against an independent Palestinian state with its own citizens’ lives and the lives of its children. The Arab states rejected the UN vote of 1947, which would have created a Palestinian Arab state in half of the British Mandate of Palestine–bigger than anything they could ever have gotten since then. Between 1948 and 1967, when Jordan and Egypt ruled the Arab parts of Palestine, there was no movement for a Palestinian state. The cease-fire lines that were established in 1948 were recognized by one country in the whole world: Great Britain. Today, on the other hand, the pre-1967 lines are considered holy in most of the world.</p>
<p>Why are there settlements? Because in 1967 the Arab states, meeting in Sudan, unanimously voted for the Three No’s of Khartoum. Had they not done so, Israel would have been willing to cede most of the territories it had conquered during the Six-Day War. Since there was no hope of doing so, those who wanted to settle were allowed to go ahead with their plans.</p>
<p>In 2000 and 2001, Clinton negotiated a deal that would have given the Palestinians pretty much everything they could hope for. Arafat rejected the deal.</p>
<p>In 2005, Israel created and independent Palestinian mini-state in Gaza. Settlers were removed kicking and screaming. The Gazans responded by electing Hamas and launching rockets aimed at Israeli civilians.</p>
<p>When I visited Israel in 2009, I saw Arab women with headscarves strolling down Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem along with all the other Israelis and the tourists. I saw members of Hare Krishna singing and dancing along the beach in Tel Aviv. I saw copies of a Hebrew-language edition of the Falun Gong newspaper “Epoch Times.” Most impressive of all, I saw a vigil in Jerusalem–not Tel Aviv–after murders had taken place at a gay counseling center in Tel Aviv. There were people with yarmulkes at the vigil. And of course there were gay-pride flags.</p>
<p>Israel has an annual gay-pride parade not only in Tel Aviv but in Jerusalem. Israel drafts openly gay men and women into its armed forces. Nevertheless, gay-rights organizations all over the world are anti-Israel. Organizers of gay-pride parades in Canada and Spain announced before their parades that Israelis were not welcome to march.</p>
<p>Women are victims of honor murders everywhere in the Arab world. Israel, on the other hand, elected Golda Meir to be its Prime Minister before any other woman in the world who was not the wife (like Sirimavo Bandaranaike) or the daughter (like Indira Gandhi, daughter of Nehru) of a previous head of government had attained such a position. Despite this, feminists everywhere are anti-Israel.</p>
<p>Almost all of the so-called settlers live in East Jerusalem or its suburbs. The fight about settlements is a fight to retain East Jerusalem, including the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital. Israel has made it clear time and time again that it is eager to withdraw from most of the West Bank. “But the 1967 borders are holy,” says the world.</p>
<p>Fighting for the 1967 borders is a way of fighting against the creation of a Palestinian state. After all, such a state would legitimize Israel’s existence. If the Palestinians wanted a state, they could have one tomorrow–the same state they could have had in 2001 at Taba.</p>
<p>The way to support the Palestinians—the only way—is to support Israel.  The Arab world has done only one thing to help Palestinians: arm them.  The Palestinians have been allowed to remain in refugee camps for an unprecedented 62 years.  Israel, on the other hand, not only has Arab members of the Knesset and an Arab in its cabinet, but is the country where it is easiest for an Arab woman to become a doctor.  In addition to Arab physicians, Israel has Arab musicians.</p>
<p>We all know what would happen to the Palestinians if there were no Israel.  The neighboring states would subjugate them.  It is true that at the moment, Jordan and Egypt are not interested in annexing Gaza and the West Bank.  In the case of Egypt, it is because the government doesn’t want a violent minority in the country.  In the case of Jordan, which already has a Palestinian majority, the government fears it would be overthrown. But if there were no Israel, the Palestinian issue would go away and the land would be fought over by Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.  What would happen to al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock?  Rival groups of Muslims would blow them up—preferably at a moment when there were lots of worshipers within the buildings, just as they do in Iraq and Pakistan.</p>
<p>Nowadays, Arabs from anywhere in the world can choose to be treated in Israeli hospitals.  Some of them agree to make the sacrifice of temporarily recognizing Israel in order to get medical treatment.  Then they have to live with their moment of weakness for the rest of their lives.</p>
<p>It is easy to jump on the bandwagon.  It is easy to condemn Israel for its real, its debatable, and its imagined moral failings.  Doing so does not help anybody.  It is merely an easy way to feel superior.</p>
<p>Only Israel can allow a Palestinian state to exist.  It tried to do so in the past and failed.  Its critics want it to keep on failing.</p>
<p><strong>George Jochnowitz is a Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the College of Staten Island, CUNY.</strong></p>
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