Last week in the Bagel, and then London here I come. As I write, hundreds of thousands of Jews are marching up 5th Avenue in ‘Salute to Israel Day’. They have been marching for close to six hours and come close to the Puerto Ricans in terms of noise and provocation. Looking out from my window I see only blue and white Israeli flags, no stars and stripes whatsoever, and the chants I hear are those of the aggrieved. They want Palestine back! Why waste time with the truth when there’s an angle to promote and a grievance to air? Palestinians should leave the West Bank because these late arrivals say so. Well, folks will say anything nowadays. Gerry Adams has just said that the torture and execution by the IRA of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten, was an injustice. (Very big of him.) Leading the parade is the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, a man whose pop-eyed look derives not from a prostate examination but from a fear of offending Zion. Next week it’s samba and caramba time, but I shall be in dear old London.
‘America, I think, was greatly improved thanks to Hitler,’ Mary McCarthy once ventured in an interview. She knew what she was talking about. Her circle of intellectuals was enriched by European Jews fleeing the Führer, people such as Arthur Koestler — who tried to rape her but failed — Hannah Arendt, Paul Tillich, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein, Arnold Schoenberg, Fernand Léger and the gruesome Marc Chagall. (I had the bad luck to meet the last in Cap d’Antibes, and he was as unpleasant as they come.) McCarthy thought American intellectuals were crude, and that the Europeaninflux was a civilising addition. Sartre, Malraux, Camus and Simone de Beauvoir also paid visits and homage to the victor, Uncle Sam, back in the Forties, still le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche. No longer.
Those must have been magnificent times to be an American or a friend of America. Koestler and Sidney Hook found a new direction — with CIA money — and began with James Burnham, Raymond Aron and Hugh Trevor-Roper a concentrated effort to counter Stalinist propaganda. Literary New York moved light-years away from when it fancied itself a Bolshevik Soviet, although Uncle Joe’s crimes were still ten years from being exposed. And what crimes they were, in the tens if not hundreds of millions, yet there are those today who are trying to link Putin to him, as outrageous an accusation as those wild-eyed Zionists who claim they are the victims of the Palestinians.
When it comes to Ukraine, I see a man who chooses to kick Ava Gardner out of his bed and invite Hillary Clinton under the sheets. How can anyone, even a Ukrainian, trust the crooks and liars of the EU and believe their siren song, when he has Uncle Vlad with his cheap oil and gas as his next-door neighbour? A know-it-all like Thomas L. Friedman (don’t forget to write the L.) has pompously as well as recently announced that Putin blinked, just as Nikita did back in October 1962. Thomas L. Friedman is full of hot air and many other things I will not go into. The Soviets struck a very good deal back in ’62. We took our missiles out of their backyard, Turkey, and they turned back their ships with missiles intended for ours, Cuba. It was a quid pro quo, except that our missiles were entrenched in their silos and ready to launch, whereas the Soviet ones were still on the high seas. So who got the better deal? The Kennedy PR machine, that’s who.
Russian society lives according to fundamental principles that are different from those of western societies, such as not teaching young children about homosexuality but teaching them about the importance of the Russian Orthodox Church. Russians uphold taboos we abolished years ago, but that does not make Vladimir Putin an ogre or a danger. Crimea was his and he took it back. If he wanted Ukraine he’d have a pretty good argument, but he does not. Let the Brussels crooks subsidise the Ukrainians, which means they will promise a hell of a lot and give only hell and austerity. But if Thomas L. Friedman says Vladimir blinked, he must know something I don’t. Thomas L. says that Vlad underestimated Ukrainian patriotism. How was that again, Thomas L.? The bloody country is split down the middle and he bangs on about patriotism. I am sure if he dropped the L. he might begin to think more clearly.
But if you think Mr L. writes with a forked pen, what about that clown Barosso? The head of the European Commission, whatever that means, proclaimed the day after the Brussels outrage against a synagogue, where three people were shot dead, that the far-right parties were responsible. This is what I meant before about people saying anything that suits them, and to hell with the truth. It is parties such as Ukip, the National Front in France and the Freedom party in Austria who want to limit immigration, especially Muslim immigration. Yet that clown Barosso turns the case on its head, as if Christians were running around Brussels shooting down Jews. No wonder even the Europeans have had enough. The EU is the greatest danger since Uncle Joe, but a far bigger one in my opinion. He never got past Hungary. They are ruling us.
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