I DON'T WANT TO GO TO ISRAEL ... Mark Steyn

This Happy Warrior column was written before yesterday's news about the Gaza flotilla. I'm on the Continent at the moment, and, not having seen a full-court anti-Israel feeding frenzy in a couple of years, was startled by the naked hostility of the coverage. I think the headline of this Jonathan Kay column sums it up. In the European media, the loathing of the Jewish state is palpable - and alarming in its implications. Anyway, here's what I had to say in National Review:

“It is after considerable contemplation,” began the pop star Elvis Costello, sounding remarkably like Queen Victoria, “that I have lately arrived at the decision that I must withdraw from the two performances scheduled in Israel on the 30th of June and the 1st of July.”

“There are occasions when merely having your name added to a concert schedule may be interpreted as a political act that resonates more than anything that might be sung.”

And as Mr Costello concluded: “I cannot imagine receiving another invitation to perform in Israel.”

I felt rather saddened by the news. It’s some years since I’ve seen the old rocker, but I enjoyed the conversation immensely: We discoursed on Sinatra concept albums, Vic Damone, the late BBC radio host Benny Green… Elvis Costello’s eclecticism-for-the-sake-of-eclecticism can get a little wearying (and didn’t do his wife Diana Krall many favors on her post-wedding album), but, on much of the stuff I dig, he knew whereof he spoke. Physically, he reminded me a bit of my old friend Lionel Bart, the East End Jew who wrote Oliver! But I guess he’s not. And it’s always sobering when someone you assume you’ve got a lot in common with turns out, in the most basic sense, to see the world entirely differently.

That somewhat banal thought used to occur to me whenever I’d be in a “moderate” Muslim state chatting up some westernized Arab hottie and, just at the point at which I’d be thinking we were getting along gangbusters, she’d say something utterly nutty, invariably involving Jews. These days, the thought is as likely to occur at London dinner parties. There’s no “incursion” or “disproportionate response” by Israel that prompted Elvis’ divestment from the Zionist Entity: These days, it’s just business (or lack of it) as usual. I wouldn’t say I exactly avoid the topic in English or French drawing rooms, and if it does come up I robustly defend Israel and eviscerate Palestinian “nationalism”. But no minds are changed – and these days the talk is less of the “occupied territories” and more of how the very creation of the Jewish state was a dreadful mistake. Once upon a time, a pro-Palestinian European would reluctantly concede the point if you brought up the Arabs’ refusal to recognize Israel’s “right to exist”. No more. Now Israel’s “right to exist” has as few takers among Europe’s “intellectual” class as it does on the Hamas executive board.

On the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state’s founding, a large number of British “Jews” - I use the term loosely (many of them would barely have qualified under the expansive definitions of Nuremberg) but their claim to the faith was felt to give them a special authority – wrote to The Guardian to say that they could not “celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people”. The most eminent signatory, aside from Harold Pinter, was Stephen Fry, best known to Americans as valet to Hugh Laurie in TV’s “Jeeves & Wooster” but a man of many other talents. Many a Saturday morning, years ago, I sat opposite him on a larky BBC show called “Loose Ends”. When I was flailing badly on a topical comedy quiz, he expertly rescued me with a deft penis joke.

But, among the British and European artistic community, the fetishization of the Palestinians and the consequent obsession with Israeli iniquity is indestructible - even as millions are murdered in the Congo, and hundreds of thousands in Darfur, and (less genocidally) as the High Administrative Court in Cairo contemplates stripping Egyptian men of their citizens for the crime of marrying Israeli women. At one level, the rampant zionhass is a mere reflection of demographic reality – what’s left of European Jewry is a community in steep decline; Muslims, on the other hand, are the Continent’s fastest growing population. But demographic reality is easier to accept dressed as a moral cause, and so the heirs to those western artists who two generations ago enthusiastically embraced the new Jewish state now boycott it and support its dismantling. I’m told that in Dutch grade schools The Diary Of Anne Frank can no longer be performed because certain, ahem, immigrant communities root for the Nazis. But I don’t think you could produce The Diary Of Anne Frank in the West End, either. Nor Fiddler On The Roof*. No takers. Doesn’t fit the narrative.

In “Palestine”, only one side lives under continuous threat of extermination – now upgraded, in the face of western passivity, into nuclear extermination. The means change but not the desired end. And the ease with which the principal expression of contemporary Jewish identity has been delegitimized in the salons of the west is both pathetic, and awfully familiar. When I read the announcement by Elvis Costello, an old line from his fellow songwriter Alan Jay Lerner (whom I mentioned here a few weeks ago) sprang to mind. As Hitler's favorite composer, Franz Lehar was untouchable, but his Jewish colleagues weren’t so lucky. His librettist, Franz Lohner-Beda, died in a concentration camp in 1942, the same year Lehar conducted a production of their operetta The Land Of Smiles. To the end, Lohner-Beda expected his old friend to intercede, but he never did. “To this day,” said Alan Lerner, “when I am transported by the music of Franz Lehar, my glass of champagne is rimmed with aloes” – a fine operetta image.

I was never exactly “transported” by the music of Elvis Costello. But my glass of champagne is rimmed with aloes.

[*NOTE: Readers point out there was a revival of Fiddler at the Savoy Theatre in 2007.]

Rhymes Without Reason [Mark Steyn]

From The Corner at NRO....

I had no idea until today that this was the marching slogan of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid:

Butch, femme, bottom, top
Israeli apartheid has to stop.

Hmm. Michael Coren expands on the paradox of an anti-apartheid rallying cry itself obsessed with categorization. But I found myself wondering: Is there a Queers Against Sharia? If not:

Butch, femme, top, bottom
Gay bars in Riyadh? It's hard to spot 'em

Bottom, top, femme, butch
Pride parade's dull since the Taliban putsch

Top, bottom, butch, femme
With complimentary FGM

Top, bott, butch, femme, trans
Quit your chanting and read your Korans.

I DON’T WANT TO GO TO CHELSEA

Photographs of fancy tricks to get your kicks at sixty-six
He thinks of all the lips that he licks
And all the girls that he’s going to fix
She gave a little flirt, gave herself a little cuddle
But there’s no place here for the mini-skirt waddle
Capital punishment, she’s last year’s model
They call her Natasha when she looks like Elsie
I don’t want to go to Chelsea

Oh no it does not move me
Even though I’ve seen the movie
I don’t want to check your pulse
I don’t want nobody else
I don’t want to go to Chelsea

Everybody’s got new orders
Be a nice girl and kiss the warders
Now the teacher is away
All the kids begin to play

Men come screaming, dressed in white coats
Shake you very gently by the throat
One’s named Gus, one’s named Alfie
I don’t want to go to Chelsea

Oh no it does not move me
Even though I’ve seen the movie
I don’t want to check your pulse
I don’t want nobody else
I don’t want to go to Chelsea

Steyn rocks!

How it goes deeper than Helen Thomas:

Glenn Beck nitpicked by Media Matters regarding quote of Nazi author
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=163877
[Were they have as persnickety with Helen Thomas all these years?]

Richard Cohen: A lesson from Helen Thomas
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2529624/posts
“Thomas, of Lebanese ancestry and almost 90, has never been shy about her anti-Israel views ...”

Arab racist Helen Thomas reflects the real conflict: Arab racism, Islamic bigotry
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2529603/posts

“For most Conservatives, Helen’s statement last week did not come as much of a shock.”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2529503/posts
[Tony Snow nailed it years ago when he “thanked her for the Hezbollah view”.]

[Where was Media Matters all these years? Where were these loving, caring, better-than-everyone else leftists? How did such a racist thrive in their midst all this time when her words betrayed her long ago?]

Reuters caught cropping incriminating flotilla photos
http://wizbangblog.com/content/2010/06/07/reuters-caught-cropping-incriminating-flotilla-photos.php
http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2010/06/reuters-brings-fauxtography-to-gaza.html
“You may remember during the second Lebanese war Reuters was caught making news pictures look worse than they were with a little touch of Photo Shop.”

[There you have it. Even Reuters is anti-semitic.]

Are we Reliving the 1930’s? Antisemitism on the Rise
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2529831/posts

Little Jihadi Girl at School [Vanity]
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2527010/posts
“[A 6 year old muslim girl] walked up to my daughter (aged 6) and told her that she was going to “cut her dirty Jew throat” and shoved her down. Out of the blue. Completely in seperate classrooms. This was in the USA, btw. ... School is involved. They don’t want me to call the cops ...” [snip]

Lone Jewish boy attacked by Muslim mob in Los Angeles
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2526878/posts

High School Kids Play Beat the Jew
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2525469/posts

I DON’T WANT TO GO TO ISRAEL ... Mark Steyn
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2525835/posts
“I think the headline of this Jonathan Kay column sums it up. In the European media, the loathing of the Jewish state is palpable - and alarming in its implications.” [snip]

“That somewhat banal thought used to occur to me whenever I’d be in a ‘moderate’ Muslim state chatting up some westernized Arab hottie and, just at the point at which I’d be thinking we were getting along gangbusters, she’d say something utterly nutty, invariably involving Jews. These days, the thought is as likely to occur at London dinner parties. There’s no “incursion” or “disproportionate response” by Israel that prompted Elvis’ divestment from the Zionist Entity: These days, it’s just business (or lack of it) as usual.” [snip]

[So where is Obama?]

Groups want stronger U.S. defense of Israel, Obama not obliging
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2526356/posts
[Actually, he’s stirring up trouble for Israel as noted in dip-lunacy research found in my profile.]

Iran Beats the War [aka oil] Drums:

Iran’s navy offers to escort Gaza ships
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2528911/posts

AHMADINEJAD [Iran]: FLOTILLA RAID STEP TOWARDS ISRAEL’S ANNIHILATION
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2529941/posts

‘Iranian ships won’t reach Gaza’ [Israeli officials]
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2529968/posts

[How’s 0bama Dip-lunacy working for you?]

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