Now that General Jim Jones, the current national security adviser to the president of the United States, has apologized (sort of) for his blatantly anti-Semitic joke, told to an audience including many Jews, the matter is supposed to be closed. End of discussion.
Hold on just a gosh-darned minute.
Read the joke here, dear readers, so you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.
This supposedly all-in-good-fun “joke” has extremely — yes, extremely — dangerous undertones, especially in this current age and especially under this current administration. And I, for one, am not going to just blithely accept General Jones’ up-against-the-wall, sorry-that-some-were-offended “apology” and let this get swept under the media’s protect-Obama-at-all-costs rug.
Depicting Jewish merchants in of all places, Afghanistan, turning away a bedraggled, dangerously dehydrated, fleeing Taliban fighter, Jones employed one of the oldest, crudest Jewish stereotypes in the world — “greedy Jewish merchant.” In not seeing the obvious to even the densest ninnies on the planet regarding his adaptation of the old joke, General Jones would seem to be following the rewritten history template of this administration regarding Islam. Hear no Islamic evil; see no Islamic evil; wish all Islamic evil away.
For one thing, the only really funny item within this so-called joke was the appearance of two Jewish merchants doing unmolested business in a radical Islamic stronghold. Now, that is a real joke.
For the record, there is only one Jew left in all of Afghanistan. Because of his single-Jew-in-Afghanistan status, Ishaq Levin has become quite the international celebrity. He remains despite his family having immigrated to Israel and is continuing his one-man demand that the Taliban return the Torah confiscated from the last remaining synagogue in Afghanistan. This last remaining synagogue is the building which Levin, the last remaining Jew in Afghanistan, now guards day and night, depending on the charity of neighbors and good Samaritans around the world.
But leave it to a high-ranking member of this administration to imply that the overwhelming number of prosperous Jews in Afghanistan are taking advantage of the impoverished, fighting-only-for-justice Taliban.
As for me, I believe that this “joke” was intended as a thinly veiled metaphor for Israeli-Palestinian relations. This “joke” seems to meld perfectly with the long-cherished Palestinian whoppers about Jews prospering on Palestinian misery, about Jews never being satisfied and always wanting more, about Jews perpetrating “Israeli apartheid” against them. Isn’t this the story line of every Palestinian-support group of the last 50 years?
The implications of this story line coming from a national security adviser to the president are even more ominous in light of the Obama administration’s moves towards Israel over the past 16 months. Both President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton have given signal after signal that they believe this Palestinians-as-victims-of-Jews story line.
President Obama has seemingly gone out of his way to snub Prime Minister Netanyahu and to humiliate him publicly. And everyone has noticed. Everyone has noticed, also, that President Obama has gone just as far in the other direction to sanitize every decidedly Islam-inspired act of terror, even going so far as to make no mention of Islam in the report on the Ft. Hood terrorist act.
The media looked the other way when disturbing anti-Semitic associations turned up in Barack Obama’s past. They ignored his chosen church’s close ties to Louis Farrakhan, the most well-known Jew hater in America. They ignored Barack Obama’s decades-long choice of a black liberation theology “church,” among whose tenets is an undeniable anti-Semitism. They ignored Barack Obama’s links to Rashid Khalidi, known promoter of the Palestinians-as-victims story line.
Just as now the mainstream media expect all Jews and supporters of Israel to just get over this blatantly anti-Semitic joke, told by a very high ranking member of this administration.
Now, all of this reminds me sadly of a conversation I had with a Jewish friend from New York in 2007. At that time, it looked as though Hillary Clinton was the likely Democrat nominee for ‘08 and I asked my friend whether she would vote for Hillary knowing about the disturbingly anti-Semitic features of her past. My friend was shocked.
She was evidently completely unaware that Hillary and Bill’s most frequent guest to the White House during their tenure there was Yasser Arafat, the late-great leader of the PLO. My friend was also in the dark about the infamous Hillary sympathy-kiss to Arafat’s wife when she accused Israelis of, among other things, using poison gas on Palestinians. My friend seemed never to have even heard the charges made by a good many close associates of the Clintons that the harshly derogatory phrases, “Jew Motherf***er” and “f***ing Jew bastard,” were among Hillary’s favorite epithets.
In fact, my Jewish friend from New York accused me of making it all up and insisted vehemently that “all Democrats support Israel and all Democrats love the Jews.” End of discussion.
And General Jones didn’t really mean a single nasty thing by this blatantly anti-Semitic, full-of-logical-holes “joke.”
Sweep it all under the protect-Obama-at-all-costs rug, folks.
As for my Jewish friend, I implore her to refrain from saying “never again” in my vicinity as long as she and so many like her keep voting for these people. It gives me the vapors and I’m running low on smelling salts these days.
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