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This piece was originally put online on March 3 and can likely be found on
the Spectator website, by typing in "Conrad Black" into the site's
search engine. Conrad Black is a prominent figure in media circles in both
Canada and the UK, at one time owning a large percentage of all Canadian
newspapers.
Here it is:
COVER STORY
My friend Taki has gone too
far
Last week’s anti-Israel diatribe
by The Spectator’s High Life columnist is almost worthy of
Goebbels,
says Conrad Black
The Spectator’s social writer, Taki
Theodoracopulos,
has often graciously referred to me as an indulgent proprietor. Our
relations have been cordial for 15 years and we have frequently been
each other’s guests, have been friendly with each other’s spouses
and have many mutual friends. Long before I knew him I was aware of
his penchant, sometimes entertaining but sometimes excessive, to
denigrate certain ethnic groups, most often the Jews. With such a
bonhomous character there is a natural tendency to overlook his
lapses of judgment and give him the benefit of the doubt that he is
only railing against the prissy hypersensitivities of political
correctness. It is hard to imagine that a person with whom you are
friendly and have had many memorably agreeable times is a racist who
wishes and incites violence against innocent people because of their
ethnicity or religion.
 |
 |
Yes, we’re from Mars. But, if
you’re thinking of coming, forget it. We don’t like illegal
immigrants |
I defended Taki when he was attacked by the
Mayor of New York for a very insulting column about Puerto Ricans in
1997. His remarks were outrageous but, as the Puerto Ricans did make
a mess on Fifth Avenue, they contained a kernel of truth and did not
incite violence against Puerto Ricans. Nor are Puerto Ricans under
any particular external threat. Nor do they have a history of being
savagely oppressed. In the same spirit I defended one of our other
writers, William Cash, against the wrath of the entire US film
industry in 1994, when he published an article about the leading
Jewish figures in that industry which was somewhat insulting but
well short of an incitement to racial hatred.
These were not
among my most enjoyable moments as a publisher, but it is the duty
of a publisher to defend his writers unless they are, for whatever
reason, indefensible. Writers, like everyone else, have the right to
dislike individuals and whole nationalities and ethnic groups. They
have the right to express their dislike if they do so rationally,
are not legally defamatory, and if they are within the bounds of
civilised taste. Our publications will never be hounded into
politically correct avoidance of any forceful opinion touching
ethnicity, sectarianism, gender or sexual orientation. To do so
would be to accept a muzzle on freedom of expression and to prevent
comment on large and interesting aspects of life. My associates and
I would shut down our publications rather than submit to such
restrictions.
Unfortunately, last week in this magazine,
Taki’s reflections were indefensible. He expressed a hatred for
Israel and a contempt for the United States and its political
institutions that were irrational and an offence to civilised taste.
In the process, I am afraid he uttered a blood libel on the Jewish
people wherever they may be.
He wrote that the United States
had intended to invade French air space to force down fugitive
financier Marc Rich’s aeroplane (on orders ultimately from the same
commander-in-chief who has now pardoned Rich); that Israeli
intelligence knew more of US Air Force activities than the Pentagon
did and shared this information with Rich because Israel’s favour
had been bought by Rich. For Taki, the United States was not yet
‘Israel-occupied territory’; that is, occupied by ‘those nice guys
who attack rock-throwing youth with armour-piercing missiles’. He
acknowledged his anti-Semitism but implicitly defined it as ‘daring
to protest about soldiers shooting at kids’, and he asserted that
‘the way to Uncle Sam’s heart runs through Tel Aviv and
Israeli-occupied territory’.
In both its venomous character
and its unfathomable absurdity, this farrago of lies is almost
worthy of Goebbels or the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion. The Jews, according to Taki, have suborned the US government,
direct that country’s military like a docile attack dog, and glory
in the murder of innocent or mischievous children. He presents the
universal Jewish ethos as brutish, vulgar, grasping and cunningly
wicked.
It is a fearful thing to contemplate that someone
with whom I have had such long and cordial relations should use a
publication of ours for such malignant purposes, however veiled in
his familiar recourse to harmless excess, or even amplified by his
frequent and publicly confessed intake of intoxicating substances.
I wouldn’t suspect Taki of co-ordinating his views with
anyone else’s. But his opinions are not greatly more extreme than
those of large sections of the British media which habitually apply
a double standard when judging the Israelis and Palestinians. Behind
the spurious defence of merely seeking justice for the Palestinians,
most of the relevant sections of the BBC, Independent, Guardian,
Evening Standard and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office are rabidly
anti-Israel. I doubt that most of the people involved would be
hostile to someone merely because that person was Jewish, though
some would, but they are almost all, wittingly or not, stoking the
inferno of anti-Semitism.
The origins of the Arab–Israeli
problem are too complicated for easy summary, but among the points
normally overlooked by most of the British media is that the
government of the United Kingdom bears a unique responsibility for
the problem. It sold the same real estate twice. In the direst
moments of the first world war Britain promised the same territory
to the Jews and to the Arabs.
Israel, after an
unconscionable length of time, and with the exact borders still in
dispute, has accepted the principle of two states in the territory
it once hoped to occupy itself. The Palestinians have not accepted
the right of the state of Israel to survive. They do not accept the
Israelis as an indigenous people and still think of them as foreign
colonial occupiers like the British, the Turks and the Romans. This
and the implosion of Arafat’s authority among his own people, and
not the actions of the Israelis, are the sources of the present
impasse, and every knowledgable observer of the Middle East knows
it.
The West Bank is now governed by groups of thugs, and
Arafat has been afraid to go there for several months. The
Palestinian Authority is a brutal dictatorship and one of the most
financially corrupt regimes in the world. The PLO has not lived up
to any of its significant obligations under the Oslo Accords,
including expunging the anti-Israel clauses of the Palestine
National Charter. Barak went as far as any Israeli leader could
possibly go at Camp David and was rewarded with rejection by Arafat
and the unleashing of a new insurrection. Large numbers of
Palestinians have been persuaded that glorious eternity awaits them
if they manage to die at the hands of the Israelis. Fortified by
this belief, mobs of stone-throwers have been pushed forward with
snipers interspersed among them and children in the vanguard to take
the brunt of the Israeli response. Sharon gave the Muslim leaders
plenty of notice of his now famous ten-minute walk on the Temple
Mount, and did nothing on it that was disrespectful of Islam or of
the Palestinian people. Arafat has declared that he requires an
almost unlimited right of return of designated Palestinians,
including millions born after the initial departure in 1948, and the
demographic inundation of Israel with Arabs. It is as if the UK were
asked to receive 60 million people of a foreign nationality with
which we had been at war for more than 50 years. Apart from Adolf
Eichmann, Israel has never executed anyone, including terrorists — a
refreshing contrast to the peremptory executions routinely conducted
by the Palestinians and some other neighbouring regimes.
We
hear almost nothing of any of this from most of the British media or
the Foreign Office. We hear only shrill orchestrated solicitude for
the supposed underdog and relentless antagonism against Israel —
ostensibly the Israeli government but, inevitably and implicitly,
the Jews.
These Jews are the same people whom Pope John Paul
II has recognised as ‘not the cousins but the brothers and sisters
of all Christians, the chosen people of the Old Testament’, to whom
the world should repent, as he did, for millennia of oppression. The
Pope’s own record in these matters is exemplary, but he repented for
his one billion co-religionists and for the 2,000-year history of
the world’s foremost Church.
Israel has many failings, and
of course the treatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis, by the
Arab powers who keep them in the camps (breeding grounds for their
terrorist cannon fodder), and by the United Nations is a crime in
which we are all complicit. Of course the world must put this right.
But we will not put it right by returning to the ancient and
evil practice of persecuting the Jewish people, to whom we owe so
much for its genius in almost every field and its courage in heroic
circumstances for nearly 6,000 years. The Jews, as much as any other
people, have shown the world what human bravery and perseverance can
achieve. It was pathetic and shaming that many of the distinguished
leaders of London’s Jewish community felt the need to tell me last
week, after local performances of the Israeli Philharmonic
Orchestra, that they hoped that ‘people will realise that Israel
doesn’t just quell Palestinian riots’.
All Israel really
wants is to be like other countries, to be accepted in the world as
a people with dignity and a right to a state. Israel has that right.
It is a sophisticated democracy and a society of laws. Those
neurotic racists who dispute that right should be forced to come out
from behind the skirts of legitimate differences of opinion in
Middle Eastern controversies. They should be made to face those who
would be their victims.
And those who have assisted them,
through lassitude or negligence or malice, should follow the Pope’s
inspiring example: they should repent. The Pharisees and hypocrites
in the British press should repent their calumnies. A few days after
Arafat cavalierly rejected generous concessions from Israel and
unleashed his latest bloodbath, the Foreign Secretary was
photographed walking hand-in-hand with Arafat and caused Britain to
condemn Israel at the United Nations. He should repent and exorcise
the institutional bias of his department.
In our
publications justice will be done.
To read Taki's
original column, click
here. Other responses to it can be found in 'Feedback' and
Taki's response to the above can be found in this week's 'High
Life'.

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