The Crazy Lobby

In the U.S., talk about the dismemberment of any state is perfectly normal. Take, for example, Vice President Joe Biden asking for the division of Iraq into three ‘regions’, which, in practice, would amount to three independent quasi-states, as if the civil war the country has been suffering would not be combined with an even more fierce wave of ethnic cleansing if the country was divided into three virtually independent governments.

Biden had the intellectual support of Peter Galbraith, son of John Galbraith, a renowned broadcaster, politician, and overrated economist who also authored a book to defend this thesis. Furthermore, on investigation we learned that Galbraith was an adviser to the Iraqi Kurds, a community that obviously has a clear interest in becoming independent. We also learned that Peter Galbraith possessed a few tens of millions of dollars in Iraqi Kurdistan oil contracts.

The U.S. acts as if this is something that could be asked calmly and without any problems. For example, the dismemberment of Spain is seen as something quaint because it occurs in a country that does not recognize the right of self-determination in their respective territories. Come on, if Texas were to declare independence tomorrow, Barack Obama, to fulfill the law, would have to send tanks to Austin (which is not difficult, because Texas is full of military bases, which is another example of how the national government subsidizes states that claim to be against the socialism of Obama.)

And, although there is no case for it, we cannot ask the for dismemberment of Israel. What’s more: one cannot even challenge the legitimacy of that state simply because it has borders granted to it by the UN that, as shown in the original proposal, were significantly lower than those that Israel 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 that can also prove that their ancestors were expelled from Spain in 1492, will also receive Spanish nationality). Is this not the application of the term “ethnic cleansing” as proposed by the crazy racist Avigdor Lieberman?

Criticism of Israel in the U.S. is risky business from a professional standpoint, thanks largely to organizations like Campus Watch, created by Daniel Pipes, that is dedicated to harassing all who are not sufficiently Zionist.

The point is that the defense of Israel has become largely an industry. A peculiar industry in the U.S., based on guilt (of which the even American Jews are a part of) about the Holocaust (remember the U.S. did nothing to prevent it), whose best analysis is in fact done by 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 shows a fleet of B-52 bombers pulling Christian crosses, Muslim crescents, Stars of David and dollars. The Anti-Defamation League, an organization that defends the rights of minorities and is not to be admired in its defense of Israel and Jews, unfortunately accused the video of being “anti-Semitic” (another misnomer, since Arabs are also Semites). The reason is as simple as surreal: The dollars fall right after the viewer sees the Star of David. And so, “that’s how the classic anti-Semitic canard 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 Jews in America are anything but a persecuted minority ethnic group but a tremendously dynamic group of intellectual workers who form the backbone of the cultural, academic, journalistic, financial and entertainment elite. Of course, if the U.S. had 306 million instead of 6 million Jews, this country would be much more powerful, as evidenced by the fact that, although only 2 percent of the U.S. is Jewish this group makes up 45 percent of the 400 richest citizens in the country, 20 percent of professors at major universities, 40 percent of Nobel Prizes, and 40 percent of the members in major law firms in New York and Washington. At Columbia University, 40 percent of students are Jewish.

The Jews are a large part of the best in the U.S. It is a pity that all of that is sometimes lost in the paperwork. If we could discuss them with the same liberty that is used with discussing other groups, the U.S. would be much more fun intellectually.