High life
The US, Israel and me
Taki
Irespectfully disagree with Conrad Black's assessment of my 24 February column concerning Marc Rich. I do not for the life of me see where I expressed hatred for Israel and a contempt for the United States.
It was widely reported at the time that the United States (I don't know which agency, but I assume the Justice Department) had ordered the capture of the fugitive Marc Rich. The only assumption I made was that he was tipped off by his Mossad contacts, in view of the fact that he has admitted that his bodyguards are mostly ex-Mossad people. I certainly did not acknowledge my anti-Semitism, as Conrad Black writes; I said my soi-disant antiSemitism, meaning that I have been besmirched with that charge ever since I protested against certain Israeli tactics. This does not a Goebbels make me, as Mr Black writes, nor an author of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I did not write nor hint that the Jews have suborned the United States government. I objected to the fact that Bill Clinton allowed Marc Rich and certain Israelis to suborn American justice. In this I am joined by prominent Jewish leaders such as Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, who wrote in two Jewish weeklies in Washington and New York that
We should be ashamed of ourselves, we have undermined our community's moral fabric, jeopardised our political standing, disillusioned our youth and compromised the sacred values of our tradition. In short, the moral stain of this sordid affair has begun to engulf us.
In his unusually frank piece, Rabbi Yoffie says Jewish leaders were bought by Marc Rich. He singled out Rabbi Irving Greenberg, a well-regarded Orthodox rabbi, who has since apologised for having written letters supporting Marc Rich. Where I made a mistake was in the wording. By writing I am a soi-disant anti-Semite, I clearly meant a so-called anti-Semite, something I ferociously deny being.
I agreed wholeheartedly with Barbara Black's article in the Daily Telegraph of last week, reminding us that Israel has a right to exist in peace and the way it's going it might well cease to exist altogether. In my own tiny New York paper I write this week that Arafat reminds me of a man who breaks the bank in a casino, plays a little longer, loses everything, and now is demanding credit from the bank he owned and lost through greed. (I am referring to the Barak offers he turned down.) Hardly the words of an anti-Semite.
I am the first to agree that the West Bank is now governed by corrupt thugs, but I am also the first to say that Israel bears a heavy responsibility where the unyielding settlers are concerned. I do not and never have wished the Jews any harm, and it is outrageous to hint that I do.
The New York Times and the Washington Post have both written leading articles about the disservice to Israel by the Rich pardon, and Jim Hoagland has written that Barak and other top Israelis were risking the vital and special relationship that America and Israel enjoy, one based on morality, ethical values born in the flames of the Holocaust, and strategic imperatives, and finishes by saying that in this sordid saga everybody loses except Marc Rich. In a less articulate manner, I was trying to say the exact same thing.
Conrad Black comments: Taki's renunciation of anti-Semitism is welcome. In the interests of a good cause, I will overlook the implausibility of his assertion that, in writing 'The way to Uncle Sam's heart runs through Tel Aviv and Israeli-occupied territory', he was only stating 'in a less articulate manner' that because of the Rich affair Israelis are risking their relationship with the United States 'based on morality [and] ethical values born in the flames of the Holocaust'.
Can the BBC, Independent. Guardian, Evening Standard and the Foreign Office take a similar pledge? In respect of them, I am prepared to fear the worst.
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