S. A. Essay
I've never felt strongly about Scott Adams since I never followed Dilbert. But after reading this rant at his website, I now think he's amazingly--perhaps wilfully--ill-informed, and also a huge jerk.
posted by LAGuy @ 2:38 AM
Pajama Guy
"You couldn’t have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances [at ‘60 Minutes’] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing.”
-Jonathan Klein, former CBS Executive
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5 Comments:
I have been partial to Adams ever since he mentioned back in 1996 that his favorite show was Babylon 5. (This landed him a two-minute guest spot on the show.)
But not only is his rant totally wrong, it's full of blatant anachronisms. The Holocaust became a cultural meme ("myth"), leading to the founding of Israel? Sorry, but the Holocaust as a cultural meme is post-sixties. In fact, until the miniseries "Holocaust" in the late 1970s, the H-word alone didn't immediately mean the Nazi mass murders. In the 1960s, the term "holocaust" more commonly referred to a possible future nuclear war -- this usage can be found in political speeches, science fiction books, and even Tom Lehrer songs.
Certainly the Shoah was widely known from 1945 onward, but it wasn't anything that one could call a "myth" in the sense of cultural meme. Today, it certainly is. I suspect the average American schoolchild will mention the Holocaust as the first thing they know about World War II, and even in some cases as the first thing they would mention about Jewish people.
But this all happened long after the founding of Israel. Israel was not founded because "the world created a whole new country
because of holocaust guilt". In fact, it wasn't created by the world at all. It was created by Jews, most of whom had nowhere else to go, and who had no awareness of any "holocaust myth" -- they just knew that their relatives had been slaughtered.
On the other hand, when Adams says that "the world" gives Israel "a free pass no matter what it does," he certainly has hit the nail on the mark. Israel is the least-criticized nation in our lifetimes. I can't think of a single time that anyone from any country or organization has said anything critical about Israel.
I just read a bunch of the comments on Adams' blog. It appears that his incredibly non-subtle sarcasm was too complex for most of his readers, who are furious at him for opposing Ahmadinejad.
Another myth about Israel is that most of the Jews moved there after World War II. In fact, most of the Jews there at the founding had been living there since before the war. They were a majority in the areas given the Jews in the partition plan that the Palestinian Arabs rejected (even though it gave these Arabs an official country for the first time).
There were also a lot of Jews who had been living in Arab countries, especially Iraq, for centuries. Millennia, actually: there were Jewish families that lived in Iraq from 586 BCE to 1948 CE. After the 1948 war, many of these families lost their homes and fled to Israel. We hear a lot about the Palestinians who had to leave their homes in 1948 (and I do believe they deserve compensation). But how often do we hear about their mirror-image counterparts who had to flee the Arab lands for Israel?
If I had five billion dollars and a time machine, I could fix the whole mess. Go back in time to 1967, just after the war. Pay the king of Jordan two billion dollars to take in all the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank. Then spend three billion dollars to build nice condominiums for them in Jordan. There might be an occasional grandfather who yearned for his old run-down dwelling in East Jerusalem, but the vast majority would be happy and content. And it would save massive money in the long run.
Perhaps you're right, but I have my doubts. The actions of the Arab nations at the time (and often since) suggest they're more interested in the destruction of Israel than peace.
If it had truly been desired, there could have been peace-for-land negotiations after the Six Day War. Instead, the Arab nations, at the Khartoum Summit, responded with the Three No's: no peace, no recognition, no negotiations with Israel.
That some today claim this Statement was a victory for Arab "moderates" shows just how deadset they were against the Jewish state.
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