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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Sol Stern</title>
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		<title>The New Popular Front</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/sol-stern/the-new-popular-front/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-new-popular-front</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 30 Sep 2013 04:50:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sol Stern]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill de Blasio]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Sol Stern]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=205695</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Bill de Blasio mayoralty would revive the city’s far-left coalition.]]></description>
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<div><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/bill.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-205698" alt="bill" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/bill-450x300.jpg" width="315" height="210" /></a><strong></strong></div>
<div><strong>Visit <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/index.html">City Journal</a>.</strong></div>
<div></div>
<div>The early political careers of President Obama and Gotham’s likely next mayor, Bill de Blasio, have followed similar trajectories. Both Obama and de Blasio emerged from the radical activist wings of their respective big-city Democratic parties. Both achieved broad political success despite their leftist backgrounds, winning big electoral victories against the odds. Both have attractive, mixed-race families that have added to their political allure.</div>
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<p>Each candidate also has had to deal with potentially damaging revelations about past involvement with violent anti-American radicals. Obama had personal and political ties to the ex-Weather Underground domestic terrorist William Ayers and the virulently anti-American and anti-white Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Earlier this week, the <i>New York Times</i> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/nyregion/a-mayoral-hopeful-now-de-blasio-was-once-a-young-leftist.html?pagewanted=1&amp;ref=javierchernandez" target="new">reported</a> that, when he was 26, de Blasio went on a political pilgrimage to Nicaragua—then ruled by the Marxist-Leninist Sandinistas—and came back to the United States a dedicated “Sandalista” (as leftist American supporters of the Sandinistas were then called). Several years later, de Blasio and his wife illegally honeymooned in Communist Cuba.</p>
<p>This is where the similarities end. Barack Obama ducked and weaved about Bill Ayers, saying he recalled his bomb-throwing friend as just a “guy in the neighborhood,” who he “thought” was an English professor. (In fact, Obama knew Ayers was a radical education professor who taught future K–12 teachers how to use their classrooms for leftist indoctrination.) And the future president claimed not to have been listening in the pews when his pastor Jeremiah Wright launched into hate-filled sermons against the United States. Obama managed to get away with these fibs because the reverential liberal media refused to pursue either story seriously. He got even luckier when his 2008 Republican presidential opponent, Senator John McCain, declined to press him on his associations for fear of being labeled (by the same pro-Obama media) as a McCarthyite.</p>
<p><strong>To continue reading this article, <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/2013/eon0927ss.html">click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Hannah Arendt and the Origins of Israelophobia</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/sol-stern/hannah-arendt-and-the-origins-of-israelophobia/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hannah-arendt-and-the-origins-of-israelophobia</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 16 Jan 2012 04:25:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sol Stern]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hannah Arendt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israelophobia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jewish state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=119312</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The great anti-totalitarian thinker was no friend to the Jewish state.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/hannah.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-119314" title="hannah" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/hannah.jpg" alt="" width="392" height="572" /></a></p>
<p><strong>This article is reprinted from <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/">City Journal</a>.</strong></p>
<p>In last year’s extensive commentary marking the 50th anniversary of the Eichmann trial, one name—Hannah Arendt—was mentioned nearly as often as that of the trial’s notorious defendant. It’s hard to think of another major twentieth-century event so closely linked with one author’s interpretation of it. Arendt, who fled Nazi Germany at 27, was already an internationally renowned scholar and public intellectual when she arrived in Jerusalem in April 1961 to cover the trial for <em>The New Yorker</em>. Arendt’s five articles, which were then expanded into the 1963 book <em>Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil</em>, proved hugely controversial. Many Jewish readers—and non-Jews, too—were shocked by three principal themes in Arendt’s report: her portrayal of Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion as the cynical puppet master manipulating the trial to serve the state’s Zionist ideology; her assertion that Eichmann was a faceless, unthinking bureaucrat, a cog in the machinery of the Final Solution rather than one of its masterminds; and her accusation that leaders of the <em>Judenräte</em> (Jewish councils) in Nazi-occupied Europe had engaged in “sordid and pathetic” behavior, making it easier for the Nazis to manage the logistics of the extermination process.</p>
<p>Since the publication of <em>Eichmann in Jerusalem</em>, serious scholars have debunked the most inflammatory of Arendt’s charges. Nevertheless, for today’s defamers of Israel, Arendt is a patron saint, a courageous Jewish intellectual who saw Israel’s moral catastrophe coming. These leftist intellectuals don’t merely believe, as Arendt did, that she was the victim of “excommunication” for the sin of criticizing Israel. Their homage to Arendt runs deeper. In fact, their campaign to delegitimize the state of Israel and exile it from the family of nations—another kind of excommunication, if you will—derives several of its themes from Arendt’s writings on Zionism and the Holocaust. Those writings, though deeply marred by political naivety and personal rancor, have now metastasized into a destructive legacy that undermines Israel’s ability to survive as a lonely democracy, surrounded by hostile Islamic societies.</p>
<p>One might imagine the young Hannah Arendt as the heroine of a Philip Roth novel about a precocious Jewish undergraduate having an affair with her famous professor. According to her late biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Arendt grew up in a completely assimilated middle-class Jewish family in Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia. She identified herself as fully German by virtue of her love of the <em>Muttersprache</em> (mother tongue) and of German <em>Kultur</em>. The word “Jew,” Arendt would later recall, “was never mentioned” in her home; the only religion there was her mother’s ardent socialism.</p>
<p>In 1924, at 18, Arendt went to study philosophy at the University of Marburg, where Martin Heidegger was establishing his reputation as the most important continental philosopher of the twentieth century. Like many of Heidegger’s brilliant Jewish students (Herbert Marcuse was another), Arendt was mesmerized by his lectures. Heidegger, in turn, quickly recognized Arendt’s intellectual gifts and agreed to mentor her dissertation. He also became her secret lover, though he was more than twice her age and married with children. A decade later, Heidegger became a committed member of the Nazi Party and the head of the University of Freiburg, where he encouraged his students to give the Nazi salute and enthusiastically carried out the party’s directive to purge all Jews from the faculty.</p>
<div><img src="http://www.city-journal.org/assets/images/22_1-ss2.jpg" alt="Arendt's former lover, philosopher Martin Heidegger (marked with an X), at a Nazi gathering in 1933" /></div>
<p>Fearing a public scandal if their relationship were discovered, Heidegger sent Arendt to Heidelberg to finish her studies with his friend Karl Jaspers, who became Arendt’s second dissertation advisor and her lifelong friend. Arendt was just 23, and had been trained by two of the world’s greatest philosophers, when her treatise on Saint Augustine was accepted by one of Germany’s most prestigious academic publishers and was reviewed in several leading philosophical journals.</p>
<p>Up to this point, the young woman seems hardly to have given a thought to the “Jewish question” in Germany. But the rise of Nazism forced Arendt to act and think as a Jew for the first time in her life. Many of her university friends believed, in traditionally Marxist fashion, that the way to fight anti-Semitism was through the broader struggle for international socialism. Arendt had the foresight to see that if even deracinated Jews like herself found themselves under attack as Jews, they had to fight back as Jews. She praised the German Zionists for doing just that. In Berlin in 1933, she courageously carried out an illegal mission for her friend Kurt Blumenthal, the German Zionist leader. Her assignment was to collect material from the state archives documenting the Nazi-dominated government’s anti-Jewish measures, which would then be presented at the next Zionist Congress in Prague. Arendt was caught, arrested, and sent to jail for eight days.</p>
<p>That experience led Arendt to make the painful decision to flee Germany. Later that year, she illegally crossed the Czech border and settled temporarily in Prague. Eventually, she joined the growing community of stateless, destitute German Jewish refugees in Paris. There she worked for Youth Aliyah, the Zionist group that sent the children of Jewish refugees to Palestine. She studied Hebrew and declared to a friend: “I want to get to know my people.” She wasn’t committed to any Zionist party or even to the necessity of a sovereign Jewish state. But she now believed that immigration to Palestine and building the Jewish homeland there were honorable responses to the Nazi assault on the Jews.</p>
<p>Soon after the fall of France, Arendt and her husband, the communist Heinrich Blücher, were among the lucky few to obtain visas to the United States. Arendt was penniless when she arrived in New York in May 1941, but for her first few months in America she maintained herself with a $70 monthly allotment from the Zionist Organization of America, which helped Jewish refugees. Though she wasn’t fluent in English, her absorption into New York intellectual circles was seamless. Within a year, she had mastered the language well enough to write a scholarly article on the Dreyfus Affair for the prestigious academic journal <em>Jewish Social Studies</em>. She was then offered a regular column in the German Jewish weekly <em>Aufbau</em>. For the duration of the war, she used that platform and other publications to comment on the two most important issues facing the Jews—the struggle against Nazism and the future of the Jewish homeland in Palestine after the war.</p>
<p>During much of that period, Arendt wrote as a committed Zionist. She referred to Zionism as “the national liberation movement of the Jewish people,” for example, and she praised the socialist Zionist parties representing “the workers” in Palestine: “<em>For if the Jews are to live in Palestine by right and not by sufferance, it will only be by the right they have earned and continue to earn every day with their labor</em>” (the emphasis is hers, and these translations of the <em>Aufbau</em> columns are from a collection of her work called <em>The Jewish Writings</em>). Arendt’s intentions in supporting Jewish settlement in Palestine were sincere, but her writing displayed an astonishing lack of political judgment—as in her belief that the accomplishments of Jewish “labor” might somehow win Arab acceptance of Jewish rights in Palestine.</p>
<p>In her very first <em>Aufbau</em> column, Arendt suggested the creation of a Jewish army—independent of any nation, but under Allied command—to fight the Nazis. The project reflected the political lesson that she had learned from her own experience with Nazism: “<em>You can only defend yourself as the person you are attacked as.</em> A person attacked as a Jew cannot defend himself as an Englishman or Frenchman” (again, the emphasis is hers).</p>
<p>But Arendt damaged the Jewish-army cause by unremittingly attacking the one organization already lobbying for it. Long before she embraced the idea, the Zionist Revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky had formulated a detailed plan for a military force composed of Palestinian Jews and Jewish refugees. One of Jabotinsky’s lieutenants in America, a Palestinian Jew named Peter Bergson, created an organization called the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews. The committee, supported by such popular writers as Ben Hecht and Max Lerner, launched a lobbying campaign in Congress and succeeded in getting a resolution introduced in the House of Representatives supporting the creation of a separate Jewish army.</p>
<p>Arendt’s response was to attack Bergson and other activists associated with his committee as “Jewish fascists.” The charge was a canard. As almost every objective historian of the period has acknowledged, Jabotinsky was a classic nineteenth-century liberal nationalist. He supported separation of religion and state and civil rights for non-Jews in a future Jewish state. According to the model constitution that he wrote for that state, in every government department headed by a Jew, the deputy minister had to be an Arab, and vice versa. There wasn’t a fascist bone in his body.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, with little thought or evidence, Arendt repeated the inflammatory accusations regularly made by the labor Zionists against their nonsocialist rivals in Palestine. In published comments that a later era would have called “McCarthyite,” Arendt suggested that “Jewish fascists” had duped the prominent personalities supporting the committee. “One can surely assume that people like . . . [the actor] Melvyn Douglas, Max Lerner, . . . [and] Reinhold Niebuhr . . . would wish to protect their names from any fascist stain,” Arendt wrote in one of her <em>Aufbau</em> columns. Even Arendt’s admiring biographer conceded that Arendt’s charge of fascism was “too extreme.”</p>
<p>On November 24, 1942, Rabbi Stephen Wise, America’s most prominent Zionist leader, convened a press conference in Washington to make a shocking announcement. Wise had been authorized by the State Department to confirm that the Nazis were carrying out a plan to exterminate European Jewry. More than 2 million Jews had already been murdered, he said.</p>
<p>It was hardly a secret that the European Jews had been targeted for elimination. In one of her <em>Aufbau</em> columns earlier that year, Arendt herself wrote about Hitler’s intentions: “In the National Socialist weekly <em>Das Reich</em>, Goebbels has explained that the extermination of the Jews in Europe ‘and perhaps outside of Europe’ is about to begin.” But the Wise press conference marked the first time that the U.S. government had verified the Final Solution.</p>
<p>Reporters covering the press conference were handed the biggest mass-murder story in history. Unfortunately, their editors didn’t think that the extermination of European Jewry had much news value. The <em>Washington Post</em> gave the revelations four inches on page six. The <em>New York Times</em> buried the extermination story in the back pages, while its front page featured a story about holiday shoppers on Fifth Avenue.</p>
<p>This deliberate inattention was a stunning confirmation of the low value that the democracies placed on Jewish lives in Nazi-occupied Europe. Both newspapers, though owned by Jews, took their cues from the Roosevelt administration, which deliberately downplayed the announcement of Hitler’s Final Solution by handing it to Rabbi Wise rather than an administration official. For the duration of the war, the government, believing that “rescue through victory” was the only reasonable policy, tried to head off public agitation for special efforts to rescue European Jewry. And for the duration of the war, both newspapers cooperated by burying details of the Holocaust.</p>
<p>Wise, sometimes called the “King of the Jews” because of his leadership of an incredible array of Jewish organizations and umbrella groups, might have been expected to press for rescue efforts and for lifting immigration restrictions on Jewish refugees. But Wise had a close personal relationship with the president (whom he called “boss”) and never attained the independence of judgment to recognize that his hero, despite public expressions of friendship for Jews in general, was acquiescing in the murder of the European Jews. Only a popular grassroots campaign, bypassing the official Jewish leadership, might have overcome the administration’s hostility and the indifference of the mainstream media.</p>
<p>That is what the Committee for a Jewish Army pledged to do. The Bergson group, as it came to be called, shifted its efforts toward pressing the administration to authorize concrete military and diplomatic efforts to save as many European Jews as possible. In July 1943, Bergson organized a major conference exploring opportunities for rescue, featuring panels of experts in the fields of diplomacy, psychological warfare, and refugee-relief logistics. Each panel recommended practical rescue actions by the Allies that would have saved lives without harming the war effort.</p>
<p>Out of that meeting came a new bipartisan organization, the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, to lobby for the adoption of the rescue proposals. Bergson and Ben Hecht emerged as effective publicists with a flair for recruiting key politicians and major celebrities. Among the public figures who joined their cause were liberal congressman Will Rogers, Jr.; conservative newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, Jr.; and the leader of the left-wing American Labor Party, Dean Alfange. The Emergency Committee staged public protests on the plight of the European Jews, including a pageant, scripted by Hecht and produced by Broadway impresario Billy Rose, that filled Madison Square Garden twice.</p>
<p>The committee’s most important practical achievement was mobilizing support for a joint congressional resolution urging the creation of a U.S. government rescue agency. Just as the resolution was about to pass—in the election year of 1944—the Roosevelt administration withdrew its opposition and established the rescue agency on its own. Named the War Refugee Board, it recruited operatives in occupied Europe to save Jews from deportation to the death camps. One of those agents, the heroic Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, managed to pull thousands of Hungarian Jews from trains bound for Auschwitz during the war’s waning months. Unfortunately, the administration’s efforts were too little and too late. (Roosevelt’s moral failure has been thoroughly documented in historian David S. Wyman’s 1984 study <em>The Abandonment of the Jews</em>.)</p>
<p>Inexplicably, Hannah Arendt was AWOL during the desperate two years from 1942 to 1944, when the cause of rescuing European Jews needed the support of every person of influence. The Bergson group urged the Zionist parties to put aside their differences over the future of Palestine and, at least for the duration of the emergency, focus entirely on rescue. But Arendt continued attacking the leaders of the group as “charlatans,” “fascists,” and supporters of “terrorism”; the Democratic and Republican congressmen who supported the rescue committee were dupes, she wrote.</p>
<p>The troubling question is why Arendt herself never advocated for the cause of rescue. According to Arendt’s biographer, “There was no practical action that [she] could take for her people without a base in the Zionist community.” This is an unconvincing rationalization. Arendt did have a “base” in the <em>Jewish</em> community: her <em>Aufbau</em> column and her access to other important publications. Other Jewish writers, such as Hecht and Lerner, used their columns in the popular liberal newspapers <em>PM</em> and the <em>New York Post</em> to apply pressure to the Roosevelt administration on the rescue issue; another famous writer, Varian Fry, wrote a December 1942 cover story for <em>The New Republic</em>, “The Massacre of the Jews,” condemning the U.S. and British governments for inaction.</p>
<p>But Arendt never commented on the congressional rescue resolution. President Roosevelt appeared in just one of her wartime columns, a 1945 article praising the president for his support of Saudi king Ibn Saud’s proposal for settling the Arab-Jewish dispute over Palestine (a “settlement” that would have prevented the establishment of a Jewish state, by the way). Arendt was one of the lucky few Jews fleeing Nazism to gain admission to the United States, yet she never used her platform in <em>Aufbau</em> to protest the State Department’s shameful refusal to fill even the small official quota of immigration visas for European Jewish refugees.</p>
<p>Years later, Arendt pilloried European Jewish leaders facing the Nazi murder machine for their “pathetic” behavior. But what did she do for the cause of rescue while living safely in the United States? According to Young-Bruehl, Arendt and her husband took long, melancholy walks in Riverside Park and thought about the catastrophe in Europe. She wrote a poem, “Park on the Hudson,” describing her thoughts. It ends with the lines:</p>
<blockquote><p>A loving couple passes by<br />
Bearing the burden of time.</p></blockquote>
<p>During the war, Arendt did continue to write about internal Zionist politics. She attended the Biltmore Conference (named for the New York hotel where the conference was held), in which a wide spectrum of Zionist groups endorsed the establishment of a “Jewish commonwealth” in Palestine after the defeat of Hitler. But in her <em>Aufbau</em> columns, she attacked every Zionist party that expressed support for a Jewish state in Palestine—an entity that could not survive, Arendt predicted, without an agreement with the Arabs. She derided world Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann as a lackey of the British imperialists. The Revisionists were, of course, “Jewish fascists.” Not even her favorite Zionist factions, the “workers’ parties,” were now immune from her withering criticism. Arendt’s contempt for the Labor Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion was particularly intense.</p>
<p>If all the Zionist parties, from left to right, were on the wrong track, who <em>did</em> understand how to deal with the Jewish national question? In the most bizarre, ill-considered political judgment of her career, Arendt settled on Joseph Stalin. During a wartime visit to the United States, the writers Ilya Ehrenburg and Itzik Pfeffer described in glowing terms the status of their fellow Soviet Jews. Arendt fell blindly for the propaganda. In two columns in <em>Aufbau</em>, she reported that the Soviet Jews were the “first Jews in the world to be legally and socially ‘emancipated,’ that is, recognized and liberated as a nationality.” The Soviet Union’s constitution, according to Arendt, “equates antisemitism with an attack on one of the nationalities of the USSR and pursues and punishes it as a crime against society, like theft or murder. [This constitutes] a national liberation of Russian Jews—because they are the first Jews to be emancipated as a nationality and not as individuals, the first who did not have to pay for their civil rights by giving up their status as a nation.” So the scholar who would later be recognized as the leading theorist of twentieth-century totalitarianism and its propaganda techniques accepted at face value the Soviet regime’s claims about its benevolent treatment of the Jews.</p>
<p>Before World War II and the Holocaust, Zionism remained a minority movement among American Jews. The Jewish-state idea was dismissed by socialists and communists as a diversion from the international proletarian struggle; by the ultraorthodox as a profanation of God’s plan for the Jews; and by liberal assimilationists, such as the owners of the <em>New York Times</em> and the <em>Washington Post</em>, because of fear that Zionism would create the specter of “dual loyalty” for American Jews. Hannah Arendt also worried about the dual-loyalty issue, particularly if the Zionists pushed for immigration of American Jews to Palestine. Mostly, however, she focused her critique of Zionism on what she regarded as the Zionist leadership’s colonial policies toward the native Arab population in Palestine.</p>
<p>As the war in Europe was grinding to a close, Arendt finally broke with Zionism. Her romance with what she had called the “national liberation movement” of the Jewish people began with the rise of Hitler and ended abruptly, 12 years later, with Hitler’s defeat. In a series of strongly worded essays in America’s most influential Jewish publications, Arendt now depicted mainstream Zionism as reactionary, blood-and-soil nationalism.</p>
<p>In a 1944 column in <em>Menorah Journal</em>, Arendt returned once again to her obsession with the “fascist” Revisionists. Though Jabotinsky’s followers were a minority within the Palestinian Jewish community (their political party, Herut, would soon win just 14 out of 120 seats in the first Knesset), Arendt couldn’t get it out of her head that Revisionist ideas had somehow managed to win out in Palestine through the policies carried out by the perfidious Ben-Gurion. “Why ‘general’ Zionists should still quarrel officially with Revisionists is hard to understand,” she wrote, “unless it be that the former do not quite believe in the fulfillment of their demands but think it wise to demand the maximum as a base for future compromises, while the latter are serious, honest, and intransigent in their nationalism.”</p>
<p>Arendt willfully ignored the fact that Ben- Gurion had accepted a British partition plan in 1938 that proposed giving the Jews only a tiny sliver of the territory west of the Jordan River—a plan that horrified the Revisionists, who envisioned a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan. Time after time, the mainstream Zionists supported territorial compromise, while the Palestinian leadership rejected every proposal to divide the land. Nevertheless, in “pushing ahead” for a Jewish state, Arendt charged, Ben-Gurion “forfeited for a long time to come any chance of <em>pourparlers</em> with Arabs; for whatever Zionists may offer, they will not be trusted.”</p>
<p>Arendt repeated the same false claims about the Arab-Jewish conflict for the rest of her life. She accused the Zionists of deliberately ignoring the Arab presence in the land and held them solely responsible for the failure to reach any agreement. She ignored the grim reality of Palestinian rejectionism and Jew hatred. While repeating ad infinitum her characterization of the Revisionist Zionist movement as “fascist,” her articles never mentioned that the official leader of the Palestinian national movement—Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem—was an ally of the Nazis who spent the war years in Berlin, recruited Bosnian Muslims for the Wehrmacht and the SS, and consulted with Hitler and Heinrich Himmler about extending the Final Solution to the Jews of Palestine.</p>
<p>After her brief flirtation with Zionism as a legitimate national liberation movement, Arendt experienced a failure of nerve. The Jewish state now looked like a bridge too far into the Arab heartland and could never become viable, other than by imperialist intervention. “Zionism will have to reconsider its whole obsolete set of doctrines,” Arendt declared in <em>Menorah Journal</em>. “It will not be easy either to save the Jews or to save Palestine in the twentieth century; that it can be done with categories and methods of the nineteenth century seems at the very most highly improbable.”</p>
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		<title>No Springtime for Palestinians</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/sol-stern/no-springtime-for-palestinians/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=no-springtime-for-palestinians</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 27 May 2011 04:06:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sol Stern]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[When will Obama call for the Palestinians to have a new beginning of consensual government? ]]></description>
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<p><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://www.jidaily.com">Jewish Ideas Daily</a>.</strong></p>
<p>In his May 19 speech celebrating the Arab Spring, President Obama  expressed enthusiasm for the &#8220;movements for change&#8221; that have  been unseating tyrants previously supported or tolerated by the United  States. In language echoing that of his despised rival George W. Bush,  he adopted as his own the idea of promoting democracy in the Middle  East, not only as a bedrock principle of American foreign policy but as  an approach that will actually increase the chances for peace and  stability.</p>
<p>In outlining his new vision, an abrupt if  unacknowledged departure from his earlier policy, the President  propounded six &#8220;principles&#8221; that will henceforth guide the American  response to the region: opposition to repressive government combined  with support for the rights of free speech, freedom of peaceful  assembly, freedom of religion, equality of men and women under the law,  and &#8220;the right to choose your own leaders.&#8221; It &#8220;will be the policy of  the United States,&#8221; he summed up, &#8220;to promote reform across the region,  and to support transitions to democracy.&#8221;</p>
<p>Among those commentators  otherwise gratified by the President&#8217;s turnabout, some focused on  conspicuous omissions from his list of regional problem areas, notably  Saudi Arabia. Many more focused on the last third of his speech, where  he illogically and unhelpfully pivoted from the issue of democracy to  the stalled Israel-Palestinian peace negotiations. Less noticed but even  more striking is that in doing so, he tossed overboard his own major  theme: the transformative power of Arab democracy.</p>
<p>Do not the  Palestinians themselves, at least as much as any of the other peoples of  the Middle East, need a new beginning of consensual government? And  might not a springtime of freedom among them blossom into a force for  peace and reconciliation in the Holy Land? Either the thought never  occurred to the President or his advisers—a sign of criminal  negligence—or it occurred and was, correctly, dismissed as fatal to  their misbegotten plans for a rapid &#8220;solution&#8221; of the conflict with  Israel.</p>
<p>Consider Gaza, where more than a million Palestinians  suffer under a regime so repressive that Mubarak&#8217;s Egypt seems like a  bastion of liberty by comparison. How did this regime come about? In  August 2005, the Israeli government led by Ariel Sharon went beyond what  the President is now pressuring Benjamin Netanyahu to do: namely,  accept as a negotiating principle the return to the pre-June 1967 lines  with &#8220;land swaps.&#8221;</p>
<p>Six years ago in Gaza, Israel voluntarily  withdrew its forces all the way back to the pre-1967 lines, without even  asking for land swaps that would have preserved the Jewish settlements  there. Not only did the withdrawal from Gaza make possible the birth of a  Palestinian mini-state, but, in an added bonus, Israel turned over to  the Palestinians a thriving flower industry to help jumpstart the local  economy. Their response: first they destroyed the donated greenhouses,  then they systematically destroyed any semblance of democracy or civil  rights in their &#8220;liberated&#8221; territory.</p>
<p>Following the practice of  the Muslim Brotherhood, itself consciously modeled on the practice of  20th-century European fascism, the Hamas terrorist  organization participated in one election, one time. In its lightning  coup, leaders of the rival Fatah party were murdered in their offices  and thrown from the roof of the parliament building.</p>
<p>Hamas&#8217;s  official 1988 charter calls explicitly for the replacement of Israel by a  Palestinian Islamic state. Through its indiscriminate rocketing of  Israeli towns, Gaza&#8217;s ruling party has made clear that it means what it  says. For Hamas, the 1967 line is of little interest; the struggle has  always been, and remains, over the <em>1947</em> lines, set by the UN in  the partition plan calling for a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian  Arab one. To ensure that all Palestinians remain steadfast in that armed  struggle, Hamas rapidly stamped out the last vestiges of freedom of  speech, press, and religion, and consolidated its control over  independent civic institutions.</p>
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		<title>Misdirected Palestinian Rage</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/sol-stern/misdirected-palestinian-rage/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=misdirected-palestinian-rage</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/sol-stern/misdirected-palestinian-rage/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Feb 2011 04:00:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sol Stern]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=86175</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A political demonstration keeps Palestinians focused on the wrong issues.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="story_text">
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/palest.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-86178" title="palest" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/palest.jpg" alt="" width="367" height="242" /></a></p>
<p><strong>This article is reprinted from <a href="http://www.city-journal.org">City Journal.</a></strong></p>
<p>Palestinians on the West Bank were summoned by  their government to attend a “Day of Rage” demonstration last Sunday.  What were the demonstrators so angry about? Curiously, the Day of Rage  wasn’t directed against the tyrannical regimes currently brutalizing  Muslim and Arab protesters in a half dozen Middle East countries. Nor  did the Palestinian demonstrators express rage over the fact that they  don’t yet have an independent state of their own. Rather, it seems that  Palestinian leaders are angry because the Obama administration dared to  vote against a United Nations Security Council resolution declaring that  Israel’s settlements on the West Bank are “illegal.” U.S. leaders “are  liars who pretend to support democracy and peace,” said Al Fatah  official and former Palestinian intelligence chief Tawfik Tirawi, in  calling for the demonstration.</p>
<p>Here in a nutshell is everything that is wrong with the Obama  administration’s approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict and the  so-called “peace process.” When Obama arrived in office in January 2009,  he was aware that just four months earlier Israeli prime minister Ehud  Olmert had offered Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas an  independent state on a silver platter. With land swaps from Israel, the  Palestinians would have received the equivalent of all the territory the  Arabs controlled before the 1967 war, and they could have built their  capital in East Jerusalem. Only one significant concession was demanded  of President Abbas in return—a declaration that the Palestinians were  giving up the “right of return” to Israel for the refugees from the 1948  war and their millions of descendants. But Abbas rejected Olmert’s  generous proposal without the courtesy of an explanation or even a  counteroffer—just as Abbas’s predecessor, Yasser Arafat, walked away  from a similar deal <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/2009/bc0828ss.html">proffered</a> by President Clinton at Camp David at the end of 2000.</p>
<p>I suppose it represents some degree of progress that—unlike Arafat in  2000—Abbas didn’t respond to the 2008 Israeli peace offer by launching a  violent intifada against Israel’s civilian population. Instead he went  on the political offensive, trying to shift the conversation from the  Palestinian refusal to compromise on the “right of return” to the  alleged “threat to peace” of continued Israeli construction activity  inside the existing West Bank settlements. Abbas’s diplomacy found a  willing partner in the new American president, who was already offering  apologies to the Arab world for America’s purported sins in an effort to  prove that he was no George W. Bush. Obama then pressured the new  Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, to accept a one-year  moratorium on all new settlement construction—even forbidding the  addition of a single bedroom to existing family homes. This unilateral  Israeli concession would supposedly entice Abbas to resume the direct  negotiations that he had abruptly broken off in September 2008. But  Obama’s gambit didn’t work. Abbas didn’t return to the bargaining table  until there was just one month left on the construction moratorium. As  time ran out, the negotiations were aborted once again.</p>
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		<title>The New York Times Revises the Peace Process</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/sol-stern/the-new-york-times-revises-the-peace-process/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-new-york-times-revises-the-peace-process</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 16 Feb 2011 04:05:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sol Stern]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=85026</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Israel is once again to blame. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/times03309.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-85119" title="times03309" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/times03309.gif" alt="" width="375" height="281" /></a></p>
<p><strong>This article is reprinted from <a href="http://www.jidaily.com/nyt/e">Jewish Ideas Daily</a>.</strong></p>
<p>&#8220;The Peace Plan that Almost Was and Still Could Be&#8221;: blazoned over the entire cover of the February 13 <em>New York Times Magazine</em>,  the sensation-seeking headline comes accompanied by a photograph from  the back of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian  Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, each with his arm around the other.  The two men, declares the <em>Times</em> excitedly, &#8220;almost made a historic deal in 2008,&#8221; and now—right now—&#8221;is the moment to resuscitate it.&#8221;</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/magazine/13Israel-t.html?hpw">article</a> within, by Bernard Avishai, follows closely on a news story that appeared in the <em>Times</em> as a front-page &#8220;scoop&#8221; on January 27. In that story, written by the  paper&#8217;s Israel correspondent Ethan Bronner, readers had early word of  just how tantalizingly &#8220;close to a peace deal&#8221; Olmert and Abbas had been  toward the end of 2008, only to have the deal put on hold because of  Olmert&#8217;s legal problems and the start of the Gaza war. According to  Bronner, progress toward peace was then finally stopped in its tracks by  the election in early 2009 of a new hard-line Israeli government led by  Benjamin Netanyahu.</p>
<p>Bronner&#8217;s account was itself based on an  interview with Olmert (and a similar one with President Abbas) that had  been conducted for the <em>Times</em> by the same Bernard Avishai—a  freelance writer, peace activist, and proponent of transforming Israel  from a Jewish state into a secular &#8220;Hebrew republic.&#8221; It is Avishai&#8217;s  own 4,700-word account of the Olmert-Abbas negotiations that has now,  complete with illustrations and maps, been sprawled across several pages  of the <em>Times Magazine.</em> Thus, within a period of two weeks, the  paper has twice put its weight behind pieces of copycat journalism that,  by coincidence, happen to fortify its own editorial position on  which party is most responsible for the Israel-Palestinian impasse and  how best to resolve it.</p>
<p>As Avishai&#8217;s is intended to be the fuller  and more &#8220;authoritative&#8221; account, let us focus on his telling of the  story. According to him, both Olmert and Abbas have separately confirmed  that they did indeed meet many times in 2007 and 2008—and that the  critical breakthrough toward a peace agreement and a two-state solution  came on September 16, 2008. On that day, at the prime minister&#8217;s  residence in Jerusalem, Olmert presented Abbas with a large map showing  how Israel could retain 6.3 percent of Palestinian land on the West Bank  and thus avoid evacuating most of the Jewish settlements. To  compensate, Olmert proposed transferring an equivalent amount of Israeli  land to the future Palestinian state. He also agreed to divide the city  of Jerusalem, with a five-nation consortium controlling the Old City  and the Jewish and Muslim holy places. For their part, the Palestinians  would have to drop their historic demand for the &#8220;right of return&#8221; to  Israel of the 1948 refugees and their descendants—although Olmert  offered to admit 5,000 refugees over five years on &#8220;humanitarian&#8221;  grounds.</p>
<p>As for Olmert&#8217;s map, Abbas assured the Israeli prime  minister that it was worthy of study and further negotiations, and the  two men parted on that note. But then, according to Olmert, Abbas &#8220;went  silent&#8221; on him—although discussions with the Palestinians continued at a  lower level until the election of Netanyahu tragically turned the clock  back. Abbas&#8217;s version of the same events is that Olmert, distracted by  the corruption charges being brought against him and by the pending Gaza  war, failed to send a representative to a meeting in Washington called  by Condoleezza Rice, but that he, Abbas, had been ready to resume talks  anyway, even after Israel invaded Gaza.</p>
<p>And what is the urgency in  publishing such an article now? As Avishai puts it, the further passage  of time, together with the current turmoil in the Arab Middle East, has  raised the breakthrough possibility of reviving those talks, abandoned  just at the moment when &#8220;the gaps appear[ed] so pitifully small.&#8221; In  self-aggrandizing mode, Avishai touts his &#8220;exclusive&#8221; revelations as  themselves constituting a new opportunity for peace—particularly, he  pointedly adds, if President Obama now steps into the breach, picks up  where the Israelis and Palestinians left off more than two years ago,  and with the aid of the international community pushes through a deal  that Israel has no choice but to accept. Otherwise, Avishai quotes a  frustrated Abbas as saying, &#8220;If nothing happens, I will take a very,  very painful decision. Don&#8217;t ask me about it.&#8221;</p>
<p>There are only two  problems with Avishai&#8217;s narrative and the conclusions he draws from it.  One is that what&#8217;s true in the material the <em>Times</em> has published twice in as many weeks isn&#8217;t new; the other is that what&#8217;s new isn&#8217;t true.</p>
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		<title>Now City</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/sol-stern/now-city/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=now-city</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/sol-stern/now-city/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Nov 2010 04:02:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sol Stern]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=77579</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Tel Aviv, a modern, capitalist-built oasis in the Middle East.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/tel.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-77581" title="tel" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/tel.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="532" /></a></p>
<p><strong>This article is reprinted from <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/">City Journal</a>.</strong></p>
<p>On April 11, 1909, a group of 66 Jews  gathered on some barren sand dunes north of the ancient port city of  Jaffa for one of history’s most improbable real-estate lotteries. A  watchmaker from Lodz, Akiva Weiss, passed around a tin can filled with  numbered seashells designating plots on which the participants were  expected to build houses. Many were immigrants from Eastern Europe who  lived in Jaffa’s crowded, fetid Arab neighborhoods. They were lured to  the lottery not only by the promise of garden cottages and sea breezes  but also by the dream of national renewal—though the project’s strictly  Zionist aspect had to be played down. After all, the land on which the  Jews hoped to build was part of the Ottoman Empire. It would have been  imprudent to incur the displeasure of the Turkish sultan, claimant for  the Muslim caliphate and defender of Islam.</p>
<p>The prospectus for the housing development did, however, hint at its  historic purpose. It declared that the new neighborhood by the  Mediterranean Sea would eventually develop into the “first Hebrew  city”—where, by hard work and enterprise, Jews could disprove the  anti-Semitic stereotypes that depicted them as urban parasites. This was  a controversial undertaking even among Jews living in Palestine. Many  worried that the development would become just another vulnerable Jewish  ghetto. According to a contemporary account, a Yiddish-speaking  kibitzer stood by on the lottery morning, shouting out to his fellow  Jews that they were “building on shifting sands.” The prospects became  even unlikelier after World War I broke out and the Ottoman authorities  evacuated the Jewish residents from the coastal area.</p>
<p>Yet less than 40 years later, David Ben-Gurion read out Israel’s  declaration of independence at the Tel Aviv Museum on majestic,  tree-lined Rothschild Boulevard, not far from the spot on the beach  where the lottery drawing had taken place. Israel’s founding father  could take the gamble of proclaiming independence in part because the  first Hebrew city—its population expanded to more than 250,000—had  become the economic and political bulwark of the nascent Jewish state.  Tel Aviv would then serve as the military command center and arsenal for  Israel’s yearlong war against five invading Arab armies.</p>
<p>Last year, the first Hebrew city celebrated its centenary.  Celebrities and dignitaries from around the globe joined the  festivities, often expressing admiration at Tel Aviv’s emergence as a  dynamic world city. The foreign commentators noted Tel Aviv’s reputation  as the “nonstop city” and recalled its designation by UNESCO as a World  Heritage Site for its abundant Bauhaus architecture. Contrary to the  skeptics, the neighborhood in the dunes did not become a ghetto: Tel  Aviv is now the most affluent, tolerant, and culture-soaked city in the  Middle East.</p>
<p>A recent testimonial to Tel Aviv’s success, albeit a perverse one, came from <em>Time</em>. On the eve of September’s renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, the magazine answered the question suggested on its cover—WHY ISRAEL DOESN’T CARE ABOUT PEACE—by  citing the country’s booming economy, which had supposedly made its  citizens complacent. The prime evidence of that economic energy? Tel  Aviv. Five of the six photographs accompanying the article depicted  young Israelis enjoying the good life in the nonstop city by the sea.</p>
<p>From an idea in the sand dunes to an  economic and cultural dynamo a century later, Tel Aviv is the most  impressive testament to the Zionist movement’s practical  accomplishments. Yet the city also represents something of a resolution  to one of Zionism’s most consequential philosophical schisms.</p>
<p>Many early Zionist thinkers, strongly influenced by the utopian  writings of Tolstoy and the European socialists, placed their hopes for  Jewish national revival on the ideas of collectivism and of working the  land. The influential writer A. D. Gordon, for example, abhorred cities  and commerce, believing that urban life forced Jews into parasitic,  nonproductive occupations. The best response to European anti-Semitism  was thus for Jews to return to Israel and remake themselves, physically  and spiritually, in communal agricultural settlements called kibbutzim.</p>
<p>The kibbutzim also offered the strategic advantage of expanding the  area of Jewish settlement in Palestine. As frontier garrison  communities, they provided defense against the Arab armies that attacked  the new state at its birth in 1948. By then, the 200-plus kibbutzim  represented just 7 percent of Israel’s Jewish population, but they had  an outsize influence on how the world perceived the case for a Jewish  state. In the words of philosopher Martin Buber, the kibbutz was the  world’s only “socialist experiment that did not fail.”</p>
<p>Buber’s judgment proved wrong; the kibbutzim are now undergoing a  profound economic and social crisis. But at the time, the possibility of  a truly successful socialism in Israel helped win crucial international  political support—particularly from the Left—for the Zionist cause.</p>
<p>Tel Aviv’s founders championed a very different path to Zionist  fulfillment: commerce, entrepreneurial capitalism, and bourgeois values.  The land on which the first Tel Aviv homes went up was purchased from  Arabs by the Jewish National Fund, but this wasn’t a collective,  organized-from-above enterprise. Individuals bought property, started  businesses, won and lost. A severe financial crisis in the mid-1920s  caused many residents to leave the area. Then a new wave of Jewish  immigrants, with money to invest, arrived from Poland. Later, as Hitler  took power, thousands of German Jews with capital and talent departed  for Tel Aviv, perhaps reluctantly at first. There they founded banks and  industrial and engineering firms and created the Tel Aviv Stock  Exchange.</p>
<p>Some of these new arrivals literally built the city. In 1933, the  Nazis shuttered the world-famous Bauhaus art school. Several Jewish  architects associated with the modernist movement immigrated to Tel Aviv  and pioneered a wave of Bauhaus construction in the city. Today, more  than 3,000 Bauhaus buildings still stand there, more than in any other  city in the world.</p>
<p>Another refugee from Hitler was Berlin department-store magnate Salman Schocken. He purchased the daily newspaper <em>Haaretz</em> for his son Gershom and created a successful book-publishing  company—private enterprises that became part of the city’s cultural  fabric. Salman’s grandson, Amos Schocken, is now <em>Haaretz</em>’s  publisher and, apart from his paper’s leftist slant on political issues,  supports the free market. “The welfare of people grows because of  private initiative, not a managed economy,” he declared recently.</p>
<p>In 1923, Meir Dizengoff, an original backer of the lottery on the  dunes, became the city’s first mayor. He was a towering, autocratic  figure who daily toured his expanding city on horseback. Dizengoff stood  up for the business community, even as the official Zionist line  proclaimed the moral superiority of the kibbutzim and the “workers’  movement.” Against socialist accusations that the blatant commercialism  of Tel Aviv reflected the corrupted values that Jews had learned during  their exile, Dizengoff unapologetically promoted entrepreneurship and  private capital. To believe that commerce warped the Jewish character,  he argued, was to accept anti-Semitic premises. “Tel Aviv was founded by  the initiative of private citizens,” he wrote. “The victory of Tel Aviv  is the victory of the middle class.”</p>
<p>In the first Hebrew city, no contradiction existed between the realms  of commerce and of high culture. In the 1920s and 1930s, Tel Aviv was a  magnet for European writers, painters, and musicians. Tel Avivans fell  in love with their Hebrew poets, and children recited their poems and  songs in the city’s schools. Israel’s poet laureate, Hayyim Nahman  Bialik, arrived from Odessa in 1924. His imposing two-story house  overlooking the beach became a mecca for the city’s leading artists and  writers, who met to discuss culture and the political issues of the day.  Their arguments also played out in the pages of the city’s array of  newspapers and literary journals. By the late 1930s, Tel Aviv’s 150,000  residents could choose from six daily newspapers (three privately owned  and three affiliated with the leading political parties), plus several  cultural weeklies.</p>
<p>Tel Aviv is an “asynchronic city,” says the Israeli geographer Maoz  Azaryahu. “It has no history and no future. It’s the now city.” The  implication is that Tel Aviv—unlike Jerusalem, for example—isn’t trapped  by its past and constantly reinvents itself, as its citizens also  constantly remake their lives. Azaryahu’s idea helps account for the  adventurous life of my wife’s grandfather, Yitzhak Katz. As a young  child, he fled with his parents from the Russian pogroms of 1905, first  settling in Cairo and then, at 19, in Tel Aviv. Lacking higher education  or a profession, he found a productive niche in a community that  created civic institutions as fast as it added new streets. He invented a  position for himself as Belgium’s vice consul in Tel Aviv and then  founded the city’s first chamber of commerce. Katz then appointed  himself promoter of the city’s modernist painters—including such future  luminaries as Reuven Rubin, Yosef Zaritsky, and Tsiona Tagger—and  launched venues for their work. In 1983, ten years before his death, he  received the Tel Aviv Prize for his role in the city’s cultural  efflorescence.</p>
<p>Tel Aviv wasn’t shaped by commerce and  polite discourse alone; the city arrived through fire and blood. There  was hardly a time when Yitzhak Katz and his children, grandchildren, and  great-grandchildren didn’t find themselves threatened by violence and  war. In 1921, Jaffa’s Arabs rioted against further Jewish immigration  and murdered dozens of Jewish residents, causing hundreds to flee to Tel  Aviv. In the late twenties and thirties, Tel Aviv’s Jews were  themselves the targets of violent outbreaks by the Jaffa Arabs.</p>
<p>Because their city faced the Mediterranean, Tel Avivans also became  painfully aware of the last-ditch, mostly futile, efforts by European  Jews (in many cases, their relatives) to escape the Nazi murder machine.  To appease the Arabs, Britain had cut off Jewish immigration to  Palestine at a time when the Jews had no other means of escape. Leaky  ships full of desperate Jews tried to run the British naval blockade.  (Arthur Koestler called them “the little death ships.”) Most were  intercepted near the coast and sent back to the inferno.</p>
<p>In November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted to  partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. Almost  immediately, units of the Arab Liberation Army slipped into Jaffa and  launched deadly assaults against neighboring Tel Aviv. During the  ensuing War of Independence, Egyptian warplanes bombed Tel Aviv, and the  Egyptian army advanced to a point just 20 miles south of the city.</p>
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		<title>The Intellectuals Keep Flying</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/sol-stern/the-intellectuals-keep-flying/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-intellectuals-keep-flying</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 25 Oct 2010 04:00:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sol Stern]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=75022</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The New York Review of Books seeks to discredit Paul Berman.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/RobertSilversx.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-75115" title="RobertSilversx" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/RobertSilversx.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="362" /></a></p>
<p><strong>[This article is reprinted from <a href="http://www.city-journal.org">City Journal</a>.]</strong></p>
<p>In almost half a century at the helm of <em>The New York Review of Books</em>, Robert Silvers has crafted the essential journal for America’s liberal intellectual elite. Silvers is celebrated by his distinguished writers as a scrupulous, old-fashioned editor who fusses over their every word. The British historian Timothy Garton Ash tells of receiving a transatlantic phone call from Silvers just as his family was sitting down to Christmas dinner: the editor wanted to discuss a dangling participle he had spotted in the galley of Garton Ash’s next article. Silvers subjects manuscripts to “pitiless” scrutiny, says <em>New York Times Book Review</em> editor Sam Tanenhaus. So the last thing you would expect to see in <em>The New York Review</em> is a factually challenged hit job on a serious contemporary writer—and a writer of the left and former <em>New York Review</em> contributor, at that. Yet that’s exactly what appeared in the <em>Review</em>’s August 19 issue in the guise of a <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/aug/19/righteous-wrong/" target="display">review</a> of, among other books, Paul Berman’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1933633514/manhattaninstitu/" target="display"><em>The Flight of the Intellectuals</em></a>.</p>
<p>It’s understandable that the book—and, indeed, all of Berman’s work since the 9/11 terrorist attacks—would discomfit <em>The New York Review</em>. Just as his 2003 bestseller <em>Terror and Liberalism</em> did, Berman’s new volume criticizes liberals for their frequent denials when confronted with violent assaults against their own democratic societies by radical Islamist movements. This failure of nerve Berman attributes partly to political correctness (excessive multiculturalism and moral relativism) and partly to cowardice. Berman’s main exhibit for the intellectuals’ “flight” from universal liberal values is two members of <em>The New York Review</em>’s all-star team: the aforementioned Timothy Garton Ash and the Anglo-Dutch journalist Ian Buruma. Berman skewers both writers for bestowing respectability on the self-proclaimed Islamic “reformer” Tariq Ramadan, despite his abhorrent views on women and gay rights and his tortured apologetics for radical Islam. While going easy on Ramadan, Garton Ash and Buruma scorn the courageous Muslim dissident Ayaan Hirsi Ali for her “enlightenment fundamentalism.” These impeccable liberals, writes Berman, “sneered at Ayaan Hirsi Ali for having taken up the ideas of Western liberalism and celebrated Tariq Ramadan for having done nothing of the sort.”</p>
<p><em>The Flight of the Intellectuals</em> also summarizes recent archival findings by three historians—Jeffrey Herf, Klaus-Michael Mallmann, and Martin Cuppers—who provide the clearest picture to date of the fascist roots of violent twentieth-century Islamist movements, beginning with the World War II collaboration between the Nazis and the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. The victorious Allies should have tried the mufti as a war criminal. Instead, he escaped to Egypt and formed a bloody-minded alliance with the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna (the grandfather of Tariq Ramadan). Al-Banna welcomed Husseini to Egypt and called him “the hero who challenged an empire and fought Zionism with the help of Hitler and Germany. Germany and Hitler are gone but Amin al-Husseini will continue the struggle.” Berman describes the Nazi plan (in which Husseini would play a key role) for the physical destruction of the Jewish community in Palestine after Rommel’s expected victory at El-Alamein. Rommel’s defeat aborted the plan, but al-Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood fought side by side with the mufti’s cadres in the 1948 Arab and Palestinian war against Israel with the same goal of destruction in mind. The Muslim Brotherhood is alive and well today, with hundreds of thousands of followers in many parts of the world. In Gaza, the movement is called Hamas, and its charter mimes the World War II symbiosis between Nazi eliminationist anti-Semitism and radical Islamism.</p>
<p>Berman’s reason for pointing out the disturbing connections between Nazism and Islamist extremism is to remind Western liberals of their honorable antifascist traditions, challenging them to apply the same principles to the contemporary world. But his call to arms goes against everything that <em>The New York Review</em> stands for now. Instead of seriously debating the issues that Berman raises, the journal summoned Malise Ruthven, a sometime contributor to the magazine on Islam and the Middle East, to deliver the hit. His review of <em>The Flight of the Intellectuals</em>, which was featured on the journal’s cover under the headline THE TERROR OF PAUL BERMAN, began:</p>
<blockquote><p>At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, stands an exhibit that is for some more unsettling than the replicas of the Warsaw Ghetto or the canisters of Zyklon B gas used at Auschwitz and Treblinka. Next to blown-up photographs of emaciated corpses from the death camps there is a picture of the grand mufti of Palestine, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, reviewing an honor guard of the Muslim division of the Waffen SS that fought the Serbs and antifascist partisans. The display includes a cable to Hajj Amin from Heinrich Himmler, dated November 2, 1943: “The National Socialist Party has inscribed on its flag ‘the extermination of world Jewry.’ Our party sympathizes with the fight of the Arabs, especially the Arabs of Palestine, against the foreign Jew.” There is also a quote from a broadcast the mufti gave over Berlin radio on March 1, 1944: “Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This is the command of God, history and religion.”</p>
<p>As the Israeli historian Tom Segev suggests, “the visitor is left to conclude that there is much in common between the Nazis’ plan to destroy the Jews and the Arabs’ enmity to Israel.” Paul Berman’s new book, <em>The Flight of the Intellectuals</em>, makes the connection even more explicit. Although defeated in Europe, the virus of Nazism is, in his view, vigorously present in the Arab-Islamic world, with Hajj Amin the primary source of this infection. Instead of being tried as a war criminal, Hajj Amin was allowed to leave France in 1946, after escaping from Germany via Switzerland. A trial, Berman suggests, might have “sparked a little self-reflection about the confusions and self-contradictions within Islam” on matters Jewish, comparable to the postwar “self-reflections” that took place inside the Roman Catholic Church.</p></blockquote>
<p>Ruthven’s piece continued at length, going on to consider volumes by Hirsi Ali, Buruma, and Garton Ash. But the story’s opening was perhaps its most telling part. Why, you might wonder, would a writer introduce a review of Berman’s work with Yad Vashem’s Husseini exhibit? The reason is that a staple of today’s anti-Zionist polemics is the idea that Israel manipulates the Holocaust for narrow political purposes. What better way to discredit Berman than to associate his thesis—that “the poison of European anti-Semitism was subsumed in the broader eddies of Muslim totalitarianisms,” as Ruthven puts it—with Yad Vashem’s allegedly much broader contention that all Arab hostility to Israel has Nazi roots?</p>
<p>Though that guilt-by-association tactic would be unworthy of <em>The New York Review</em> even if Yad Vashem did make that contention, the fact is that the museum goes out of its way not to. To begin with, the Husseini exhibit is not in the museum’s Holocaust memorial, as Ruthven claims, but in its new Holocaust History Museum. There are no “blown-up photographs of emaciated corpses from the death camps” at the exhibit. The two panels on the mufti, which constitute a tiny portion of the museum, do include two small pictures of SS mobile killing units shooting Jews in the Balkans and Russia. That’s entirely appropriate, because it’s where the mufti recruited Bosnian and Croatian Muslims for the Waffen-SS. The exhibit has no Himmler cable to Husseini, and there is no quotation from the mufti’s Berlin broadcasts.</p>
<p>More significant is that the exhibit doesn’t come close to suggesting that Arab “enmity to Israel” has anything to do with Husseini’s wartime collaboration with the Nazis. An informational panel offers a short summary of the mufti’s activities in the thirties and forties:</p>
<blockquote><p>Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, incited the Arabs of the Land of Israel against the British and the Jews. As far back as 1933, he expressed support for the Nazi regime. In October 1939, Husseini fled to Iraq where he played a central role in organizing the pro-Nazi uprising in April 1941. After the uprising was suppressed, he went into exile in Germany where he served the Axis states in their war against the Allies. Husseini conducted virulent anti-Jewish propaganda and tried to influence the Axis powers to expand their extermination program to the Middle East and North Africa. In the spring of 1943, he mobilized and organized Bosnian Muslim units in Croatia, who fought in the ranks of the S.S. in Bosnia and Hungary.</p></blockquote>
<p>In fact, the exhibit actually downplays Husseini’s involvement with the Nazi murder machine. For example, the exhibit doesn’t mention Holocaust historian Christopher Browning’s revelation that the mufti was the first non-German with whom Hitler shared plans for the Final Solution. At a private meeting in Berlin in November 1941, Hitler informed Husseini about the coming elimination of European Jewry and added, according to an official summary memo of the meeting: “Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power.” Nor does the exhibit remind visitors that in 1943, the Nazis considered a proposal to release 5,000 Jewish children in return for captured German soldiers held by the Allies, but that Husseini lobbied Himmler against letting the children go. The children were eventually deported to the death camps.</p>
<p>But to notice these omissions—to suggest that Yad Vashem goes out of its way <em>not</em> to connect the Arab world’s hatred of Israel to the Nazis—would, of course, ruin Ruthven’s preconceived notions about Israeli manipulation of the Holocaust. After I e-mailed Ruthven and asked for the source of his inaccurate description of the exhibit, he answered: “My description of Yad Vashem came from a visit (actually two visits) I made in 2004, so the exhibits may have changed.” I take him at his word. But a writer less eager to prove his prejudices would have made sure that his story fit the facts before publishing it.</p>
<p>There’s also the matter of Ruthven’s citation of “the Israeli historian” Tom Segev to support the charge that Yad Vashem associates Israel’s current enemies with the Nazis. It’s deceptive, to say the least, to describe Segev as just another Israeli historian—something like identifying Howard Zinn as just another American historian. Segev is one of Israel’s most prominent “post-Zionist” journalists. His work seeks to “deconstruct” and ultimately undermine the Jewish character of the state. He has an ideological axe to grind, indicting the entire Zionist leadership, starting with David Ben-Gurion, for cynically using the catastrophe of European Jewry to achieve the state’s political objectives. Ruthven told me, by the way, that he drew his citation of Segev from Norman Finkelstein’s book <em>The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering</em>. In that notorious book, Finkelstein offers his own fabrication about the Husseini exhibit, writing that “the Mufti gets top billing at Yad Vashem.”</p>
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		<title>Mr. Abbas, Tear Down This Wall!</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/sol-stern/mr-abbas-tear-down-this-wallx/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=mr-abbas-tear-down-this-wallx</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 29 Sep 2010 04:10:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sol Stern]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Where are the human-rights advocates demanding that the Palestinian refugees be freed from their crowded camps?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Balata1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-72905" title="Balata" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Balata1.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="264" /></a></p>
<p><strong>[This article is reprinted from <a href="http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/">JewishIdeasDaily.com</a>.]</strong></p>
<p>While the world&#8217;s headlines focus with exaggerated alarm on Israel&#8217;s   lifting of its ten-month building freeze within Jewish West Bank   settlements, an issue of far greater moment for the prospects of peace   in the Middle East goes determinedly unaddressed. This is the matter of   the &#8220;right of return&#8221; of Palestinian refugees—a subject on which the   Obama administration, a fierce promoter of the building freeze, has been   strikingly silent.</p>
<p>In Cairo a little over a year ago, President Obama proclaimed &#8220;a new   beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.&#8221;  After  reminding his Arab audience that &#8220;six million Jews were killed&#8221;  by the  Nazis, he added immediately that, for their part, the  Palestinians too  &#8220;have endured the pain of dislocation&#8221; and many still  &#8220;wait in refugee  camps . . . for a life of peace and security that they  have never been  able to lead.&#8221; At the time, a number of commentators  objected to the  President&#8217;s seeming equation of the abundantly funded  refugee camps run  by the United Nations with Nazi death camps. Few,  however, pointed out  that his explanation of the plight of the  Palestinian refugees was  false, confusing historical cause and effect.</p>
<p>For it is not the absence of peace that keeps Palestinians &#8220;waiting&#8221; in refugee camps. Rather, most<strong> </strong>Arab   leaders since 1948, including the current Palestinian leadership   itself, insist that the refugees—originally numbering between 500,000   and 750,000 but now swollen through natural increase to over four   million—must remain in those camps until allowed to return en masse to   Israel. This insistence in turn makes it impossible to achieve any   resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, let alone a &#8220;new   beginning&#8221; in the Middle East.</p>
<p>A few years ago I briefly visited the Balata refugee camp with its   20,000 residents. The camp is inside the West Bank city of Nablus—that   is, within the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority (PA). It is   where many of the Arabs of Jaffa settled when they fled the armed   conflict that flared up immediately after the November 1947 UN partition   resolution dividing Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states.   Most of Balata&#8217;s current residents are the children, grandchildren, and   great-grandchildren of the original refugees. Thus, a new baby born in   Balata today is still designated by the United Nations Relief and Works   Agency (UNRWA) as a refugee dislocated by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war  and  hence entitled to substantial material benefits for life, or at  least  until the conflict is settled. That infant will grow up and  attend a  segregated school run by UNRWA. In UN schools and cultural  clubs  financed by American tax dollars, Balata&#8217;s children, like the  children  in similar camps in Gaza and neighboring Arab countries, are  nurtured on  the myth that someday soon they will return in triumph to  their  ancestors&#8217; homes by the Mediterranean Sea.</p>
<p>While awaiting redemption, Balata&#8217;s Palestinian residents are prohibited, <em>by the Palestinian Authority</em>,   from building homes outside the camp&#8217;s official boundaries. They do  not  vote on municipal issues and receive no PA funding for roads or   sanitation. As part of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad&#8217;s &#8220;economic   renaissance&#8221; and state-building project, a brand new Palestinian city   named Rawabi is planned for the West Bank near Bethlehem. But there will   be no room at the inn for the Balata refugees. Sixty years after the   first Arab-Israeli war, Balata might accurately be defined as a   UN-administered, quasi-apartheid, welfare ghetto.</p>
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		<title>The Ramparts I Watched</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/sol-stern/the-ramparts-i-watched/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-ramparts-i-watched</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Jan 2010 05:08:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sol Stern]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Our storied radical magazine did transform the nation—for the worse.]]></description>
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<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-46947" title="ramparts" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/ramparts.jpg" alt="ramparts" width="450" height="547" /></p>
<p><strong>[This article is reprinted from <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/">City Journal</a>]</strong></p>
<p><span>I</span>n 1965, I was a Berkeley graduate student, on track to become a tenured radical. Instead, I dropped out and joined an obscure, liberal Catholic magazine called <em>Ramparts</em>, headquartered in the sleepy Bay Area suburb of Menlo Park. A little more than a year later, I wrote a story exposing the CIA’s secret penetration and financing of the National Student Association (NSA). The article helped catapult our now-radical, San Francisco–based monthly to national attention and to a catalytic role in the protest movements of the time. The mainstream press celebrated my leftist colleagues and me as heroes of American journalism. <em>Ramparts</em>’ rise to celebrity status seemed to herald a new era of the media’s speaking truth to power. The reality was far less luminous, and <em>Ramparts</em>’ legacy, which a new book celebrates, was not a positive one for the country.</p>
<p><span>I</span> still remember the phone call I received one evening in February 1967 from an old classmate at the City College of New York. He had just picked up the next day’s <em>New York Times</em> at a Manhattan newsstand and noticed a front-page picture of me and fellow <em>Ramparts</em> editors Warren Hinckle and Robert Scheer. “It’s above the fold,” my friend exulted, and then read out the headline on the accompanying article: <span>ramparts: gadfly to the establishment</span>. The photograph, taken in <em>Ramparts</em>’ San Francisco office, was captioned <span>planning the next expose</span>.</p>
<p>There would be no more <em>Ramparts</em> exposés of CIA front groups. The media heavyweights now pursued the story far more effectively than our monthly magazine could have. Tom Wicker, the <em>Times</em>’s prizewinning D.C. bureau chief, assembled a team of experienced reporters to follow the money trail from the CIA-connected foundations named in my <em>Ramparts</em> article. The <em>Washington Post</em> jumped in with its own reporting team. Turning up new connections almost every day, the newspapers described how legitimate tax-exempt foundations laundered millions of dollars from the CIA and passed the funds to an agency-designated list of civic and cultural groups, labor unions, magazines, and book publishers.</p>
<p>It soon became clear that the CIA/NSA relationship was just one thread in an elaborate web of citizen front groups secretly supported, and sometimes even created, by the spy agency in the early days of the Cold War. Other beneficiaries of CIA largesse were highbrow magazines like <em>The New Leader</em> and <em>Encounter</em>; the international operations arm of the American Federation of Labor; and the American and European sections of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the anti-Communist organization founded in 1949 by public intellectuals such as Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The top-secret project had been approved at the highest levels of the U.S. government.</p>
<p>Until the <em>Ramparts</em> story broke, the government could count on the mandarins of Washington journalism to protect national-security secrets. But as details of the front groups spilled out, editorials in the <em>Times</em> and the <em>Post</em> skewered the secret funding arrangement and compared it with the methods used by America’s Cold War enemies. CBS News broadcast a program narrated by Mike Wallace, “In the Pay of the CIA: An American Dilemma,” which described the maze of CIA-connected foundations and civic groups that had received agency money. Wallace interviewed apologetic American liberals who had been active in the funded organizations, including feminist stalwart Gloria Steinem and socialist leader Norman Thomas. According to one CIA operative, the <em>Ramparts</em> scoop led to “the biggest security leak of the Cold War.”</p>
<p><em><span>R</span>amparts</em> won a prestigious George Polk Award in Journalism that year, and newsstand sales shot up to more than 200,000 per issue, unheard-of circulation for a leftist publication. Paid advertising picked up, and so did the number of wealthy liberals eager to invest in our exotic venture. For <em>Ramparts</em>, the mission continued to be part journalism, part radical activism. Student rebellions and antiwar protests were sweeping campuses, and the Black Panthers were stirring up inner-city ghettos. <em>Ramparts</em> reported on and advocated for these outbreaks with a flair for publicity that we leftists would otherwise have denounced as a malignancy of consumer capitalism.</p>
<p>The magazine’s resident marketing genius was our flamboyant editor in chief, Warren Hinckle. Still in his twenties, Hinckle was a third-generation San Franciscan with working-class roots, a former city reporter for the <em>San Francisco Chronicle</em>, and the only <em>Ramparts</em> editor with traditional journalism training. He wore a black eye patch (the result of a childhood injury), expensively tailored three-piece suits, and patent-leather dancing pumps. He looked like a dandy, yet hung out with cops in the city’s Irish bars.</p>
<p>When we had learned from our source inside the NSA that the student group was about to preempt our story by announcing that it had severed the CIA relationship, it was Hinckle who came up with a brilliant maneuver to save our scoop. The full article, scheduled for the March 1967 issue, was tied up in the monthly production cycle. So Hinckle purchased a full-page ad in the <em>New York Times</em> that detailed most of the exposé. His counterstroke caught NSA and CIA officials off guard, as reporters for the <em>Times</em> and other papers began calling with questions about the secret funding.</p>
<p><span>L</span>ater that year, some of us were sitting around Hinckle’s office, discussing how to dramatize the story of the young protesters burning their draft cards at antiwar rallies. I proposed that we burn our own draft cards in solidarity. Hinckle agreed and then put his P. T. Barnum gloss on the idea. He collected the draft cards of the four editors listed at the top of the magazine’s masthead—Hinckle, Scheer, myself, and art director Dugald Stermer—and shipped them off to Carl Fischer, one of New York’s leading photographers. Fischer hired professional models and shot a studio photo of four raised hands holding our burning draft cards, with our names clearly visible. The image became the cover—no text—of the December 1967 issue. Hinckle then ran the photo as an ad on the sides of New York City buses.</p>
<p>I don’t know if burning our draft cards advanced the antiwar cause, but it surely added to <em>Ramparts</em>’ media luster. <em>Time</em> blasted our “publicity stunt,” giving us lots more free publicity. Then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York apparently concluded that we had violated the Selective Service Act. His inclination to pursue the matter in court was doubtless reinforced after FBI agents visited our photographer’s studio and were told that our partly burned cards had been conveniently preserved in a drawer.</p>
<p>The four of us soon had invitations to appear at a federal grand jury convened at the Foley Square courthouse in lower Manhattan. The government paid our round-trip airfare from San Francisco. On the way, we stopped in Washington to hire Edward Bennett Williams, a celebrity defense lawyer and D.C. power broker. In New York, we checked into the stylish Algonquin Hotel for a few fun-filled days in Gotham. The Algonquin was virtually our second headquarters; we stayed there whenever we were in town, no doubt because Hinckle liked the association with the legendary <em>New Yorker</em> writers of the Algonquin Round Table of the 1920s and 1930s.</p>
<p>Even before our grand-jury date, <em>Ramparts</em> received yet another publicity boost from the <em>New York Times</em>. The paper’s legal reporter, Sidney Zion, was friendly with several <em>Ramparts</em> editors, so we gave him the scoop on the government’s draft-card investigation. His story ran on the <em>Times</em>’s front page and quoted legal scholars speculating that prosecution of the <em>Ramparts</em> editors would be a landmark free-press case. After the <em>Times</em> made us look like incipient First Amendment heroes, we appeared before the grand jury, took the Fifth Amendment on advice of counsel, and flew back to San Francisco. We never heard from the government again.</p>
<p><span>B</span>ut the press attention and the surging circulation couldn’t save <em>Ramparts</em> from a fall from grace—and it wasn’t government repression that brought us down (though CIA snoops did penetrate our office) but our own folly. The changing media climate could certainly have sustained a fiscally responsible mass-circulation New Left publication. But responsibility and restraint were alien words in the <em>Ramparts</em> offices. There were too many Algonquin Hotel junkets, flights around the world chasing stories that never panned out, and three-hour, booze-filled lunches at the priciest restaurants in our San Francisco neighborhood. Anyone who came to <em>Ramparts</em> with an “inside-the-establishment” exposé—like the Green Beret from Vietnam who wrote about why he had quit, or the ex–FBI agent who promised to prove that the CIA was behind President Kennedy’s assassination—not only wrote for the magazine but became a permanent staffer, adding to <em>Ramparts</em>’ ever-swelling payroll.</p>
<p><em>Ramparts</em>’ final binge came in August 1968. Throughout that politically tumultuous year, we had sought to cover the street protests and the antiwar insurgencies roiling the Democratic Party. Now, with <em>Ramparts</em> running on fumes and the great American credit card, Hinckle decided that we had to be in Chicago to do a special issue on the Democratic National Convention. After all the ferment that <em>Ramparts</em> helped stir up, it seemed inconceivable that we would miss the ruling party’s <em>Götterdämmerung</em>. Hinckle not only sent at least ten <em>Ramparts</em> writers, editors, and photographers to the Windy City; he also invited a cadre of our media friends to join the festivities, including Zion, future Pulitzer Prize winner Sydney Schanberg, and an about-to-be-famous writer named Hunter Thompson.</p>
<p>Our close ties to the radical antiwar movement led us to believe that we would have an insider’s perspective on the street combat. But we spent little time on the streets. Instead, we took a dozen rooms at the luxurious Ambassador East Hotel on the Gold Coast and often took our meals at the hotel’s Pump Room, where a huge black man, dressed in the full regalia (including scimitar) of a palace guard for an Ottoman sultan, greeted guests. Not surprisingly, our radical friends out on the streets expressed outrage at our flagrantly decadent quarters. After a week of bloody riots, Hinckle moved the entire operation to the Algonquin in New York—our home away from home—to write the Chicago story.</p>
<p>The project was doomed from the start. Even if <em>Ramparts</em> had been financially solvent, our monthly magazine had little chance of adding any insight to one of the decade’s most thoroughly covered events. Moreover, many mainstream reporters, now feeling liberated by the CIA revelations and their own newspapers’ increasingly critical coverage of the Vietnam War, were as sympathetic to the protesters as we were. And for political reasons, <em>Ramparts</em> was unwilling to publish the one story we <em>did</em> have exclusively: how Tom Hayden and a small group of radicals had set up shop in Chicago four months earlier to plan a massive violent confrontation with the “war machine,” otherwise known as the Chicago Police Department. When our 20,000-word convention spread came out at the end of September, it was stale news. By then, the creditors were pounding on <em>Ramparts</em>’ doors, and our financial backers were asking pointed questions about how their money had disappeared down the drain at places like the Pump Room.</p>
<p><span>I</span> never understood why Hinckle was so reckless with the magazine’s future. What I do know is that the miracle of the capitalist system’s bankruptcy laws insulated the editors from the consequences of that recklessness. Hinckle went off with Zion to start another muckraking magazine called <em>Scanlans</em>. The new monthly raised $1 million and published nine issues. The remaining <em>Ramparts</em> editors filed for protection and reorganization under Chapter 11. The court-ordered financial oversight allowed the magazine to continue publishing. But <em>Ramparts</em> soon found itself beset by internal strife—a common occurrence in the radical movements of the time. Scheer briefly became the new chief editor, but was ousted in a coup orchestrated by David Horowitz, Peter Collier, and other staffers, many of them former Berkeley graduate students whom Scheer himself had recruited.</p>
<p>I wasn’t around for the bloodletting. After the convention fiasco, <em>Ramparts</em> began to feel like a straitjacket, and I decided to try my hand at freelancing. I hadn’t yet broken with the Left, but it disturbed me that <em>Ramparts</em> would stretch or deny the truth to sell our counternarrative about America and the world. After all, we were keeping secrets for Tom Hayden as loyally as the mainstream-media barons had once kept them for the CIA. I winced when Scheer made a deal with the Cuban government for the rights to Che Guevara’s diaries that required us to publish a Fidel Castro rant, filled with Communist propaganda and denunciations of American “barbarism.” Other rosy articles we ran about the true socialism supposedly emerging in Castro’s Cuba also appalled me. Weren’t we supposed to be the <em>New</em> Left, as opposed to Communist tyranny as we were to U.S. imperialism?</p>
<p>I also felt partly responsible for creating the myth of the Black Panthers as righteous rebels fighting off brutal police oppression. In 1967, I wrote a hagiographic profile for <em>Ramparts</em> of Huey Newton, the Panthers’ “minister of defense,” and then published basically the same article in the <em>New York Times Magazine</em>—yet another indication of the changes in the mainstream media. It soon become clear to anyone who cared to look, however, that Newton and the Panthers were clever street thugs who used revolutionary slogans to avoid accountability for their crimes. As one of the New Left’s favorite black criminals, Soledad Prison inmate George Jackson, once put it, “Marxism is my hustle.” After my Newton article, <em>Ramparts</em> ran three more celebratory cover stories on Panther leaders—Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, and (again) Newton.</p>
<p>When I learned that Horowitz and Collier had taken the <em>Ramparts</em> helm, I assumed that the magazine would become more intellectually serious, if somewhat duller. Unfortunately, Horowitz and Collier drank the Kool-Aid served by the Left’s most destructive elements. They published Hayden’s drivel calling the Black Panthers America’s “internal Viet Cong,” along with his exhortation for radical white youth to create “liberated zones” in cities and on campuses to serve as sanctuaries for their heroic Panther allies. <em>Ramparts</em>’ new editors then topped this foolishness with their own, proclaiming Hayden “one of the country’s most serious revolutionaries.” To me, the lasting image of <em>Ramparts</em>’ second incarnation was a cover depicting a burning Bank of America branch in Southern California. The radical students who firebombed it, said the accompanying text, “may have done more for saving the environment than all the teach-ins put together.”</p>
<p><span>I</span> was living and reporting in Israel in 1975 when I learned that <em>Ramparts</em> had finally closed its doors. I breathed a sigh of relief. By then, I no longer considered myself a leftist—in no small measure because of the Left’s growing hostility to Israel. In the early 1980s, Horowitz and Collier also had their much-publicized <em>Second Thoughts</em>, as they titled their book, and became prominent movement conservatives. In his powerful 1997 memoir, <em>Radical Son</em>, Horowitz devoted several chapters to his years at <em>Ramparts</em>. With brutal honesty, he explored the catastrophic consequences for the possibility of a decent Left that resulted from <em>Ramparts</em>’ misalliance with the Panthers and Hayden.</p>
<p>The more romantic assessment of <em>Ramparts</em>—that its spectacular rise in the 1960s represented a great leap forward for American democracy—runs through a new book by California writer and historian Peter Richardson. <em>A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of <em>Ramparts</em> Magazine Changed America</em> has stirred renewed interest in the magazine’s legacy, particularly in California, and has been reviewed favorably (twice) in the <em>New York Times</em>. To publicize the book, the author organized several public forums featuring Hinckle, Scheer, and other <em>Ramparts</em> alumni.</p>
<p>Collier, Horowitz, and I weren’t part of the conversation. Too bad, since we might have forced a reality check on the celebrations. At one recent session on the Berkeley campus, Scheer (who became the resident leftist columnist for the <em>Los Angeles Times</em> after leaving <em>Ramparts</em>) assured the audience that <em>Ramparts</em> not only smashed retrograde national taboos but “had very high standards. No question we were putting out as good a journal as anyone in the country. . . . We were edited by professionals, it had to be well written, fact-checked. And the fact is that we did not screw up. I can’t think of a major error.”</p>
<p>Richardson nodded approvingly as Scheer spoke. Yet as I watched the forum online, I wondered what he was really thinking. I knew Richardson only through a long telephone interview he did with me in March 2008. My impression then was that he was a California “progressive” and that his book would reflect the judgments of the vast majority of the magazine’s former staffers who remained on the left. Nevertheless, I shared everything I could remember with Richardson, gave him my view of <em>Ramparts</em>’ legacy, and hoped for the best.</p>
<p>When I read his book a few months ago, I was pleasantly surprised. Richardson gets most of the facts right about the major developments in the magazine’s 13-year history. He quotes at length my comments on the Chicago convention fiasco, which stand in the book without refutation. Perhaps unwittingly, Richardson also provides sufficient material to make a mockery of Scheer’s claims of rigorous fact-checking and no major errors. Readers can learn from the book, for example, that Hinckle indulged every crackpot conspiracy theorist on the JFK assassination. Early in 1967, <em>Ramparts</em> published staff member David Welsh’s claim that there were three assassins in Dallas in 1963. Our resident ex–FBI agent, Bill Turner, then wrote two articles supporting New Orleans DA Jim Garrison’s theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA agent controlled by conspirators deep within the U.S. government. “Very high standards,” indeed.</p>
<p><span>B</span>ut more important than <em>Ramparts</em>’ accuracy or lack of it is the historical claim in Richardson’s subtitle—that <em>Ramparts</em> “changed America.” Richardson argues that it was Scheer’s arrival at <em>Ramparts</em> in 1965 that “would change the magazine’s trajectory and the nation’s.” But when Richardson tries to specify what national changes Scheer and <em>Ramparts</em> actually stood for, the best he can offer is that for Scheer, “the main point of <em>Ramparts</em> was to apply what he had learned at City College about the American system, including the first amendment, limited government and checks and balances. . . . As for foreign policy Scheer’s main point was that other countries, including Cuba and Vietnam, should be allowed to make their own histories without interference from the United States.”</p>
<p>This is either naive or deliberately misleading. I speak with some expertise here, since Scheer and I were friends at City College in the late 1950s. We worked together in campus political groups in what was, for us, a prelude to the next decade’s New Left. We also took the same classes in the college’s government department, which did teach us about the Republic’s founding principles of checks and balances and limited government. But the passions that moved us were not those that moved the Founders. We were not liberals. We were socialists and anti-imperialists—though we distinguished our brand of socialism from that of the pro-Stalinist Left, which was still well represented at City College.</p>
<p>In 1962, Scheer and I reunited as Berkeley graduate students and, together with David Horowitz, started one of the first campus New Left journals, <em>Root and Branch</em>. Our signature issue was support for the Cuban Revolution, but it wasn’t because we thought Cubans “should be allowed to make their own history.” Rather, we believed that the revolution was a great leap forward for the socialist cause. We followed the lead of one of our intellectual heroes, Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills, in arguing that Fidel Castro was a new breed of revolutionary leader—more humanist, more open, even more hip than old-style bureaucratic Communists. In fact, we imagined Fidel and Che as fellow New Leftists.</p>
<p>Long before American liberals took up the cause, Scheer argued eloquently in <em>Ramparts</em> for getting out of Vietnam. I suppose you might say that such a withdrawal would have let the Vietnamese people “make their own history.” But the real reason that <em>Ramparts</em> was for total withdrawal of American troops was that we wanted the Communists to win and were sure that they would. In the view of most of the editors, the Communists were Vietnam’s rightful rulers. One of the most effective <em>Ramparts</em> covers was an illustration of Ho Chi Minh as George Washington crossing the Delaware.</p>
<p><span>T</span>he magazine’s liberal Catholic founder, Edward Keating, had chosen the name “<em>Ramparts</em>” in 1962 because it evoked the national anthem’s patriotic themes. Just so, Richardson argues, “<em>Ramparts</em> in its heyday was centrally concerned with American ideals—and especially the nation’s collective failure to live up to them.” I wish that were true. But like so much else about <em>Ramparts</em>, this claim is posthumous spin. Instead of urging Americans to take pride in the founding ideals of the Republic, <em>Ramparts</em>’ editors and writers were preoccupied with attacking America’s liberal institutions.</p>
<p>Above all, we hated the “Cold War liberals”—at times, even more than we did the political Right. Under assault from <em>Ramparts</em> and the rest of the youthful New Left, these liberals lost their nerve. The CIA revelations and the Vietnam debacle left them chagrined and repentant. Soon, many lost faith that American power could ever be used for good. That liberal failure of nerve has been harmful to the country. Worse, it rests on a faulty reading of history. Contrary to the <em>Ramparts</em> line, Cold War liberalism deserves credit for the greatest American achievement since World War II—winning the Cold War.</p>
<p>Philip Graham’s oft-quoted observation that journalism is the first draft of history applies with particular emphasis to the story of the CIA front groups. In the second draft of the story, historians plumbing the archives are learning that the American government’s secret decision to mobilize and fund anti-Communist groups was an indispensable part of the Truman administration’s policy of “containment” against the Soviet threat. George F. Kennan, the foreign-service officer who famously authored the policy, assigned to the CIA-funded groups the most crucial role in the strategy.</p>
<p>To understand why Kennan (with President Truman’s support) initiated the secret CIA program, recall that in 1949, Communist regimes, most of them closely allied with Moscow, ruled a third of the world’s people. The Soviets could count on a vast network of its own front groups, well organized from Moscow and already hard at work trying to undermine the fragile postwar democracies of Western Europe. The theory of containment assumed that America would block any Soviet military encroachments while carrying on the anti-Communist struggle in the political, economic, and cultural spheres. If the U.S. succeeded, we could defeat Soviet Communism without risking nuclear confrontation.</p>
<p>And that’s exactly what happened. One can argue about the ethics of the secrecy used to carry out the operation, but not about the results. It’s not a stretch to say that the full success of the containment policy, with its front-group component, was symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall two decades ago.</p>
<p><span>B</span>ut this wasn’t yet clear in 1967. In an early iteration of the moral-equivalency syndrome that many liberals today still embrace, <em>Ramparts</em> could pitch the CIA/NSA story as a morality tale exposing the perfidy of Cold War liberals. The CIA was no better than the KGB. They spy, we spy. They manipulate their students and intellectuals for national advantage, and we do, too. Logically, then, it’s the Cold War itself that’s the threat to American values, not our Cold War enemies.</p>
<p>The updated version of that syndrome maintains that the War on Terror, not the Islamist movement that seeks to bring down our civilization, is the greatest threat to our values. So I concede that Richardson is right in saying that <em>Ramparts</em> changed America, particularly the nation’s political and media culture. But the influence was mostly baleful. The liberal failure of nerve that <em>Ramparts</em> helped engender lives on, hampering the country at a time when our leaders must consider courageous policies, including the possible use of force, to prevent catastrophic threats to our nation and the West in far-off places like Iran.</p>
<p><em>Sol Stern is a contributing editor of </em>City Journal<em>, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of </em>Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.</div>
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