Out of the Woodwork

     When rocket attacks from Gaza were answered by
Israeli air strikes, a great outcry of empathy for the beleaguered
Palestinians rang out world-wide — along with growls of objurgation
and anathema aimed at Israel from certain quarters in the USA. They
showed up in my world as a raft of Jew-hating e-mails (read them yourself) after I wrote that Israel had a right to defend itself.
     Lately, public Jew-hating has made a comeback in the USA among two distinct groups:
one is the extreme right-wing crypto-Nazi step-child of the old John
Birch Society bunch, the idiots who believe the world is a web of
conspiracies against wholesome Christian white folks. As a young
newspaper reporter with an interest in political pathology back in the
early 1970s — a heyday for extremism — I used to cover the Birchers’
antics (and study their belief system, if you could call it that).
Their paranoid ideology has survived the decades marvelously intact,
complete with all the colorful leitmotifs including The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion, the Orders of the Illuminati narrative, the
Bilderburgers conspiracy story of world domination, and a Jesus-soaked
crusade against “socialism” that has mutated far beyond the quaint
sepulcher of John Birch into a broad mostly Southern evangelical,
Nascar-tinged, aggressive apocalypticism.
       Lately, another large cohort on the political Left adopted the
Palestinians as their “pet oppressed minority group du jour.” This
branch of Jew-haters emanated out of the humanities departments of the
universities, when the faculty got bored with the Nazi holocaust, or
wished to stake out some new turf in the arena of multiculturalism for
the sake of academic advancement. (It even included some ethnic Jews
intoxicated by new horizons in victimology.) To a certain extent, it
was an academic fashion choice. The drab old Jews from the Hitler
documentaries, with their shabby World War Two suits, gray skirts, boxy
shoes with bad hose, pitiful deal luggage, and black-and-white
expressions of horror on the train-platform-to-hell had exceeded their
sell-by date in the sociology seminars. And since irony and paradox had
become the stock-in-trade of higher ed in the USA, wasn’t it perfect to
cast the Israelis as “the new Nazis” with the Palestinians as the new
epitome of victimization?
      It’s a cute inversion, from a purely grad school standpoint —
good, perhaps for levering a PhD into an entry position on the faculty
at Brown University (or perhaps as an art “statement” suitable for the
Whitney Museum) — but it doesn’t comport with reality. The reality is
that decency requires the Palestinians to do two things: 1.) to stop
lobbing rockets into Israel; and 2.) to come to the peace negotiating
table with a position other than the idea that Israel has no right to
exist. Towards both of these simple propositions, the Palestinians have
been adamantly opposed and contemptuous, prompting the casual observer
to wonder: what part of these two things don’t you understand? Indeed, what part does world opinion not understand?
     Since Israel responded to the recent rocket attacks vigorously, a
new outcry has welled up about something called “proportionality.”
Israel’s retaliation is said to exceed the lethality of the Palestinian
rockets fired randomly at Israeli civilian settlements. It is curious
that so many of these outcries emanate from the USA, where the Powell
Doctrine (after General Colin Powell) still reigns supreme in the
strategic playbook, to wit:
“if you’re going to engage in any military operation, do so with
overwhelming force.” The American apologists for the Hamas extremists
— especially on the Right, where things military are generally revered
— conveniently forget the Powell Doctrine when it conflicts with their
rationalizations for Jew-hating.
     My own theory-du-jour goes
something like this: The current orgy of Jew-hating is prompted by rage
actually derived from the perceived “Jew-run” Wall Street companies who
have now utterly wrecked the US economy — Goldman Sachs, Lehman
Brothers, et cetera, not to mention the Jewish players leading the cast
of this show — Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Sandy
Weil, Bernie Madoff, et al., a veritable Jew-O-Rama of money-grubbing
(i.e. a Jewish trait) scoundrels who have utterly pranged the American
Way of Life in order to hide their private billions in the Cayman
Islands. These Jew villains, the story goes, have taken Little Debbie
Snack Cakes out of the mouths of millions of squalling
KMart-Shoppers-in-Training! And must now be called out to punishment!
The fear and anger over the losses on Wall Street — and the personal
accounts of millions of investors — is being deflected (for the
moment!) onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
      At my end, the anti-Jewish hate mail salvo opened with a blog
from one Bob Moriarty who runs a web site called www.Gold321.com (and
subsidiary www.energy321.com), where he denounced me for saying that
Israel was entitled to defend itself against the Hamas rocket salvos. (Read Bob’s screed.)
Moriarty used to run my blog on his site occasionally — I never asked
him to, by the way — and he’s apparently indignant over my defense of
Israel. He wrote: “…it took a reader to point out to me Kunstler is a racist anti-Semitic whining War Criminal.”
I was quite mystified by the rabid virulence of his response, including
his cockamamie assertion that only the Palestinians are entitled to be
called “Semites,” and therefore that the true anti-Semites are
opponents of the Palestinians, namely, the Jews. (This sort of clumsy
casuistry was a favorite of the old John Birch Society crowd.)
     As it happened, though, in the days that followed Bob’s
denunciation of me, I got some letters from people who had known Bob
Moriarty from the mining industry over the years, and this is what they
had to say about him:

It happens that I had in the past
extended email “conversations” with Mr. Bob Moriarty. A couple of
years ago I challenged him for some very pointed and (I believe)
unfair remarks concerning the United States and George Bush. The
upshot of our several dozen emails was that he is..without a
doubt ..the most virulent anti-Semite I’ve ever met. His attacks
against people he disagrees with shoot out of him like nuclear powered
garbage….He even accused me and my relatives!! of being Jew loving
cowards. I informed him that my father and uncles were combat soldiers
that engaged in 5 sea borne invasions including Italy..Sicily..Iwo
Jima..and Guadalcanal!! He then became very angry and said he was
going to kick my butt..at which point I gave him a place to meet me in
California so we find out just how tough a blow hard ex-Marine he
really was. He never came…very fortunate for him.
Mr. Moriarty is one of the most disgusting racists I’ve ever met. Mr.
Kunstler has nothing to apologize for…

And this one:

I
work in the Mining Industry — I know of his [Bob Moriarty’s] websites.
This is not new. Mr. Moriarity has for years provided links to
anti-semitic, anti-Israel commentary. And, everytime there is flare up
in Israel — he spews even more rubbish. I have sent his comments to
many people and company’s in the Mining World, to boycott his site —
as many mining company’s advertising on his site probably are unaware
they are supporting a racist. Mr. Moriarity is entitled to his opinion
on the Middle East, but when he inserts racists lies against Jews (IE.
the Khazar lie) he loses any moral ground. In fact, a person I know —
Jewish — and in the mining business informed him a couple years ago,
that they will no longer advertise on his site due to his racist views.
Mr. Moriarity responded by emailing a Jewish Contributor to his site,
telling him his commentaries will no longer be on his 321sites. No
reason given –Just a Jew fires me — I will fire Jew — mentality of
Mr. Moriarity. Mr. Moriarity, like many in the anti-Israel/Peace
movement has exposed his real reason for hating Israel –They Hate Jews.

Some of it was just garden variety name-calling:

From: victoria@victoriaguitar.com
Subject: Aloha
Date: January 10, 2009 1:40:02 PM EST
To: kunstler@aol.com
Dear Mr Cuntsler, Concerning your comments on Israel: By your
reasoning, if a neighbor’s dog shits on your lawn you would be
justified in blowing up the poor animal with a rocket launcher while
the neighbor’s children watched. And if that didn’t teach the fuckers a
lesson you would shoot all his friends in their sleep as well. Being
bald, ugly and Zionist is really no way to go through life. Why don’t
you take some of your shekels and go buy yourself a conscience. Asshole.

    What remains to be seen, of course, is whether the new spate of
All-American red-white-and-blue Jew-hating will ramp up and turn into
something I have been predicting for a while: “Corn-pone Nazism.” We
are a people now with great reservoirs of grievance and resentment. The
nation is getting hammered economically, and yes, the banking industry
lies in smoldering ruins — due, no more to the Jews than to all those
fine, blonde-headed WASP young men and women who marched straight out
of the Ivy League MBA programs to the computer boiler rooms of the Wall
Street Investment banks, where they cooked up the giant alphabet soup
of securities swindles that blew up the banks. There’s culpability
galore to go around to all ethnic persuasions — a regular diversity
fiesta of misfeasance and greed.
     The basic formula persists, though, despite Hitler, Himmler, Eichman, Hasan Nasrullah, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:
when something goes wrong with money, blame the Jews. A lot of readers
have sent me letters pressing me to lay low, go into hiding, be quiet,
buy motion-detector lights for the house. I’m not doing any of these
things, but I’m real eager to see what kind of craziness will come
streaming out of America’s woodwork. Maybe I should buy some stock in
the company that manufactures roach motels.

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My 2008 novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available in paperback  at all booksellers.