Masters of defence
Taki
New York
Sometimes I wonder about Americans in general and Noo Yawkers in particular. Especially while watching war films. In Saving Private Ryan, GIs seem as cool under fire as the Wehrmacht troops look cowardly and ready to throw their hands up. In reality, of course, the Germans fought gallantly against overwhelming odds in men and materials. Some SS units kept counter-attacking when at only 10 per cent of their original strength. Total air superiority did the trick for the good guys. And von Rundstedt’s genius did not help. More than one million German front-line troops died on the Western front because old Gerd knew how to run rings around the Allies while retreating. He, Model and Kesselring were masters of defence.
As irony would have it, I was watching that particular war film when a New York Yankee baseball player and his flying instructor flew their small plane into a building on 72nd Street. Both men died but miraculously no one else was killed. I live on 71st Street and heard the crash. In no time the smoke was everywhere and one could see the flames licking the side of the high rise. What was ridiculous was the reaction of the crowd. You’d think the world was coming to an end. ‘It’s 9/11 again,’ was the mantra. ‘We’re being attacked, oh my God ... ’ Two minutes before I had been watching these cool dudes running up and sticking socks full of dynamite against dumb Panzers, and then I go out into the street and full-grown men are whining and crying and acting like girls. I know it’s just a Hollywood movie, but still. Two nights later, at 2.30 a.m., another crisis. On 70th Street this time, 20 or so yards from me as the crow flies. This time it’s sirens, cops and the fire department. I was winding up a dinner party with some young friends when we heard the commotion and walked out to see what was up. A beautiful townhouse was burning like a Panzer in a Spielberg movie. I asked a black guy who is the night-watchman in the house next door what was happening. ‘A Jewish fire,’ was his rude response. Before any of you ring up the Jewish Defense League, blacks living in Harlem call all fires Jewish ones because most of the real estate is owned by Jewish people who, in the bad old days, used to torch the buildings to get the squatters or rent-control tenants out. This also happens in the good present days. Last summer, a ten-alarm fire broke out in the Queens waterfront gutting a half-mile row of warehouses over which two developers were locked in dispute. The house which burned near me was a new conversion owned by a couple: he is in the clothing business big time; she is into climbing, society-wise. I have no idea if the night-watchman was right but the fuzz closed the street for 48 hours looking for clues. The place was uninhabited, as the owners live on 62nd Street, but the rumours are flying fast and furious. Mind you, no one has been charged, which means that until further notice there was absolutely no ‘Jewish’ fire and the owners are as innocent as Dreyfus.
Which is more than the three young lacrosse players got from the New York Times. As some of you may remember, a story about the rape of a young black woman by three white Duke University lacrosse players made the headlines for weeks over here last spring. It was the kind of story which the Big Bagel Times loves to assign a battalion of reporters to cover. In fact, it was the kind of story which writes itself. The three accused were perfect offenders, examples of the racism and upper-class hierarchy existing in American universities today. The facts were too good to be true, which got me thinking at the time that the boys were innocent. I wrote a column about it in the American Conservative. Now it’s all out, but the New York Times seems not to be listening, no less apologising.
Here are the facts: cell-phone records, ID-card swipes and surveillance videos prove that the three men could not have committed the rape. Furthermore, DNA tests exonerate them completely. As a coup de grâce, the so-called victim’s partner — they were lap dancers who had been hired to dance at an end-of-term party for the lacrosse team — has gone public on 60 Minutes disputing the story told by her friend who had been drinking that night and who she said seemed intoxicated. The DA, who was running in a tight race at the time, was dead set on prosecuting and got the black vote as a result. He won, incidentally. But it’s the Times which has shown a total disregard for the truth. It’s as if the paper has a visceral hate for anyone white and so-called privileged. Its columnists were even worse, expressing revulsion at Jim Crow behaviour and other such stereotyping. When one op-ed writer, David Brooks, dared write that the case was not exactly open and shut, his colleagues dismissed him as a conservative, and therefore his opinion did not matter.
Remember Tawana Brawley? She concocted a similar story 20 years ago and ruined the life of an innocent man, while making the career of one Al Sharpton, a race baiter and black firebrand. This time the lives of three totally innocent young men have been ruined, led by the New York Times. I wish someone would torch its building for a change, and leave my neighbourhood alone.
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