The Crazy Lobby

It is perfectly normal to talk about the dismemberment of any state in the United States. Take, for example, that prominent figure called Joe Biden asking for the division of Iraq into three “regions,” which in practice would have amounted to three independent quasi-states, as if the civil war the country was then suffering wouldn’t be combined with a stronger wave of ethnic cleansing if the country were to be divided into three independent governments.

Biden had the intellectual support of Peter Galbraith, son of John Galbraith — famous communicator, broadcaster, politician and overrated economist — and even a writer of a book defending that thesis. Then we found out that Galbraith was an adviser to Iraqi Kurds, a community that obviously has a clear interest in becoming independent. And later we found out that Peter Galbraith took a few tens of millions of dollars in Iraqi Kurdistan oil contracts. Here, you see, there’s academic independence above all else.

The fact that the U.S. can ask calmly and without any problems, for example, for the dismemberment of Spain is something quaint because it occurs in a country that does not recognize the right to self determination in its territories. Let’s see; if Texas declares independence tomorrow, President Barack Obama, to fulfill the law, has to send the tanks to Austin (which is not difficult because Texas is full of military bases; that’s another example of how the government subsidizes states that claim to be against Obama’s socialism).

And although there is no case law, we can’t ask for the dismemberment of Israel. Even so, you can’t even ask that state to simply keep the borders the U.N. set, which, as you can see in the map, were significantly smaller than those it ended up having. Not to mention the possibility that the Jewish state ceases to be just that: a state based on ethnic criteria. Because, lest we forget, any Jew in the world can immediately obtain Israeli citizenship (in fact, any member of this community who can prove that their ancestors were expelled from Spain in 1492 can also get Spanish citizenship). Even calling the crazy racist proposals of Avigdor Lieberman “ethnic cleansing” is an understatement.

Criticism of Israel in the U.S. is a risky business from the professional standpoint, thanks largely to organizations like Campus Watch, run by Daniel Pipes, who is dedicated to harass anyone who isn’t sufficiently Zionist.

The thing is that Israel’s defense has become largely an industry. A peculiar industry based on the U.S.’ guilt (which doesn’t escape the Jews) about the Holocaust (remember the U.S. did nothing to prevent it), and whose best analysis is precisely that of a Jew, Norman Finkelstein, in his excellent essay “The Holocaust Industry.”

Sometimes these lobbies fall directly on the ground of insanity. An example: The former leader of Pink Floyd, Roger Waters, has ended up having to change this video of his tour of The Wall for the simple reason that it shows a fleet of B-52 bombers throwing Christian crosses, Muslim crescents, stars of David and dollar bills. The Anti-Defamation League, an organization that defends the rights of minorities in an admirable way, and which unfortunately loses paperwork when it comes to Israel and Jews, has accused the video of being “anti-Semitic” (another wrong name, since Arabs are also semites).

The reason is as simple as it is surreal: The dollars fall just after the stars of David. And so, “that’s how the classic anti-Semitic canard that has been repeated over more than 2,000 years,” according to what the leader of the organization, Abraham Foxman, explained to me a couple of weeks ago.

The paradox is that the Jews in America are anything but a persecuted minority; they’re a tremendously dynamic, hardworking and intellectual ethnic group of workers who form the backbone of the cultural, academic, journalistic, financial and entertainment elite. Of course, if instead of 6 million, the U.S. had 306 million Jews, that country would be much more powerful, as proven by the fact that out of that 2 percent of the U.S. population, 45 percent make up the 400 richest citizens of the country, while 20 percent of them are professors at major universities, 40 percent are Nobel Prize winners and 40 percent are members of major law firms in New York and Washington. Only at Columbia University are 40 percent of the students Jewish.

The Jews are part of the best in the U.S. The pity is that sometimes they lose the paperwork. If we could discuss them with the same freedom with which we talk about other groups, the U.S. would be an intellectually more fun country.