I write this during the weekend that finally saw the end of those two dreadful Chechens who were described by many newspapers—starting with the Times, of course—as typical American teenagers. Why is it that after every outrage, family members and friends of the perpetrators are given space to air their sick views here in the United States? I can’t remember British newspapers, or even the grotesquely lefty BBC, giving equal space to Muslims defending the terrorist attack of 2005, nor any Spanish media allowing defenders of the 2003 outrage in Madrid to soil the airwaves with the usual blah, blah, blah about American imperialism being the real cause of terrorism.

American financial and military involvement in the Middle East and total support of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands are the reasons terrorists give for blowing up innocent people minding their own business. But this is not the point of this column. As long as Uncle Sam plays policeman to the world he will suffer the consequences. And as long as our borders are open to Muslims there will be terrorism at home.

Incidentally, what were these Chechens doing here anyway? In 2004, the year the younger brother arrived to these shores, Chechen terrorists in Russia murdered over 300 people, nearly half of them children, during a three-day siege. Did we need to give Chechen immigrants priority over, say, Scandinavians? The immigration authorities have as much to answer for as anyone.

If we were to shut down radical Islamist propaganda over the Internet—Uncle Sam listens in on everything so he could do that in a jiffy, and to hell with ACLU—and deport all those who have involved themselves with Islamic hate preachers, presto, you will be reading about terrorism in France and Britain but not over here.

But the real terrorists behind the idiots who either blow themselves up or shoot innocents in public places are our allies the Saudis and Qataris, those nice fat guys in sheets who behead women accused of adultery, execute teenagers for stealing, and having bought much of Europe are now busy trying to make their economic power felt over here. Their first client is none other than Al Gore, who just sold his TV network to Al Jazeera for 500 million big ones. (Don’t worry, Al, the man who stole the first election from you sold out the whole country for less to the Saudis after 9/11.) The big lie is that Al Jazeera is not used as a vehicle by Al-Qaeda and is not hostile to the US, but is a professionally run news channel that has won prominent US journalism prizes. (Some prizes. The fix was on.)

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Al Jazeera is simply a vehicle for the Sunni Qatari rulers—in cahoots with the Sunni Saudi kleptocracy—to shape the narrative of the volatile Middle East in favor of themselves. Qatar and Saudi Arabia are two of the richest countries in the world and are ruled by absolute monarchs. Their only fear is the Wahhabi fundamentalist clergy that turns a blind eye to their whoring, boozing, and stealing of their respective countries’ wealth. To keep the clergy quiescent, those nice guys one sees getting off private 747s in the world’s fleshpots keep buying arms from Uncle Sam and from France and Britain. They are the ones who are supplying arms to the radical Islamists trying to overthrow one of the last secular leaders in the Middle East, Bashar Al-Assad. Their wealth has ensured that the world sees Assad as the villain and the so-called rebels as the nice guys. As I write, the idiotic Kerry is continuing Hillary’s stupidities in threatening to arm the “rebels.” All this because the Saudis and Qataris wish to establish a Sunni corridor throughout the Middle East, cutting out the majority Shiites.

Yes, dear readers, it is as simple as that. Take the case of Bahrain. A Sunni minority keeps a 70% Shiite majority enslaved. Obama chooses to ignore this outrage because the United States’ Fifth Fleet is based in Bahrain. The Saudis send tanks and troops occasionally over a bridge that connects the tiny island to the desert hellhole when the natives get too restless. Currying favors with dictators was a no-no when Obama was running for president, but it has somehow escaped his notice now that he’s in the driver’s seat.

Saudi money pays for madrasas all over the Middle East and the subcontinent. These schools of hate teach only one thing: jihad against the West. It would take the Fifth Fleet a day or two to do to the Saudis, Qataris, and Bahrainis what the Russian captain did to the Monte Carlo authorities when he gambled away his battleship’s money on a drunken night at the casino. He sent a message asking for the money to be returned or he would start firing. The money came back quicker than you can say “Monaco.” Uncle Sam should tell the unholy trio to stop financing terror or else. That would be the only real tribute to the victims of Boston. The rest is bullshit.

Image of Khaliji men courtesy of Shutterstock

Tony Blair and George W. Bush

OK, the tenth anniversary of the worst foreign blunder Uncle Sam has ever committed has come and gone, but the post-invasion headlines remain the same:

Explosions in Baghdad kill dozens and wound scores
—International Herald Tribune, 3/20/13

For Iraqis, no time for reflection, only desperation
— International Herald Tribune, 3/19/13

Iraq War Intelligence Was a Lie
—Daily Telegraph, 3/18/13

No Country Since 1945 Has Suffered More
—Daily Telegraph, 3/18/13

Ten years on, death still stalks Baghdad
—Daily Telegraph, 3/14/13

I could go on. The only victor has been Israel, whose nuclear domination of the region has been assured once the great bluffer Saddam was removed. Iraq is now a very weak nation split in three, with the Kurds up north, the Sunnis around the middle, and the Shiites down south. Uncle Sam spent four trillion dollars and is now broke. Nearly five thousand young Americans lost their lives and at least 30,000 were wounded, some grievously, blind, without limbs, and needing hospitalization for the rest of their lives. Iraqi casualties were estimated to be as high as one million, a number that is dwarfed by the number of Iraqis who became displaced.

And in the midst of this tragedy, that smirking criminal shyster Dick Cheney is given a whole hour by HBO to play Edith Piaf’s signature song, “I Regret Nothing.” Of course he regrets nothing; decency and honesty are not in his vocabulary. After all, didn’t Cheney the brave warrior avoid the Vietnam draft by taking five deferments? As they say, only in America folks, only in America.

And it gets worse. My friend Russell Seitz, a Harvard professor—please don’t hold it against him, he’s a very nice person—sent me a picture of a nine-foot bronze colossus of George W. presently adorning downtown Fushë-Krujë in Albania. Russell did not specify why the bronze statue went up, but I can guess. It’s because W. facilitated Albania’s criminal classes to invade Europe when he handed Kosovo to the drug gangs that rule it. It is certainly not for his heroics in Vietnam, because like Cheney, W. stayed safely behind the war zone.

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The third war criminal of the gang is Tony Blair, a con man whose phony smile is the envy of card sharks in Las Vegas. What troubles me about Blair is his ability to flit around the world in private jets giving speeches for a minimum of one hundred grand without a worry in the world that he will be picked up and flown to The Hague by the International Criminal Court as the war criminal that he is. Bush and Cheney are safe because Uncle Sam withdrew from the ICC Treaty, but Britain hasn’t, so why has Blair not been arrested? That’s an easy one to answer. There are rules for African war criminals and rules for Serb nationalists, and the rest don’t count. Bush, Cheney, and Blair belong behind bars for waging war against a sovereign nation that had absolutely no involvement with 9/11. They belong behind bars for having ordered the invasion of Iraq by using false evidence of Saddam’s WMD.

But I’m just whistling Dixie, as Bing Crosby used to say. None of the three criminals will ever face jail, which is a crime in itself.

About fifteen years ago I attended the 90th birthday party of Lord Shawcross in Sussex, England. His son William, a good friend, placed me near his father, who was the lead British prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials following the Nazi defeat. I asked the great man who was the most interesting person among the Allies and the Nazis during the yearlong trial. “Hermann Göring by a long shot,” said his lordship. As Göring was never implicated in atrocities, I asked Shawcross why he got the death penalty. “For waging aggressive war,” he answered. I then asked who was being more aggressive: the Allies bombing Dresden, Hamburg, and Berlin (killing an estimated half-million old men, women, and children), or Göring’s Luftwaffe bombing London and Coventry (killing an estimated 26,000 in four years). The good Lord was not best pleased with me, but such are the joys of having double standards.

Yes, dear readers, Ieng Sary—the Cheney to Pol Pot’s Bush—died in his bed two weeks ago. Pol Pot and Ieng Sary murdered more than a third of Cambodians and imprisoned and tortured an estimated two-thirds of the population. Sary was allowed to own two large houses and live it up until the end. The equivalent of Cambodian neocons made that possible. Our very own Fifth Columnist neocons—the Kristols, Abramses, Wolfowitzes, Perles, Feiths, and other such scummy types—are still being listened to by naïve Americans instead of being silenced for their criminal propagandizing leading up to war. Der Stürmer was shut down after the Nazi defeat. The Weekly Standard is still going. Go figure, as they say.

Oh, to be in England! The weather is bad, the cities are crowded with bearded Pakistanis, and the law shields foreign criminals from being deported under the dubious right to family life. In other words, all a foreign criminal in Britain has to do once he’s convicted and about to be deported is get a British girlfriend. I kid you not. An army of ambulance-chasing lawyers makes sure the criminals know their rights.

So the question for most British today is: “To be or not to be in the European Union?” I decided to move from London where I lived for close to forty years once the place was overrun by sub-continentals and by EU rules that remain wedded to an unworkable idea that one size fits all. The unelected bureaucrats of Brussels envision a Franco-German empire that stretches from Seville to Sylt and from Sligo to Salzburg, a 230-million-person bloc run by these same condescending and totalitarian unelected boobies who dictate high taxes and strict censorship of free speech. These boobies are now pushing the envelope further with flagrant attacks on press freedom, giving draconian powers to control the media and even sack journalists.

What Uncle Joe Stalin managed to do in the Soviet Union generations ago, the Brussels gang is about to impose on Europeans, with “media councils” in the place of the dreaded Cheka of long ago. These “independent” so-called councils would be monitored by the European Commission, which as yet does not have the right of the midnight knock on our doors.

Prime Minister David Cameron recently gave a speech that assuaged British fears concerning the power play by Brussels, one that was long on rhetoric but short on specifics. It was, however, bold and strong, articulating the anxieties of the people who have enjoyed freedoms for the last 800 years. He pledged a referendum by 2017 if he is reelected in 2015 when his mandate runs out. This is a very big “if.” And it involves the kind of deceptive rhetoric that has become so depressingly familiar in the European debate. The Brits joined the EU after an underhanded and deceitfully worded referendum led the people to believe they were joining a free-trade bloc. Ever since, there has been a stream of directives from a sclerotic Brussels bureaucracy paralyzing free enterprise and businesses’ ability to compete with a booming wider world. Brussels is bloated, monstrously costly, ineffectual, and totally corrupt.

So what are the British people to do? Europe lurches from one crisis to the next: first Greece, then Spain, followed by Portugal and now Italy. The Germans are pouring vast loans into a bottomless pit, with Chancellor Angela Merkel exposing her Eastern European upbringing that the state and its servants know best. Many observers think that sooner or later the German people will revolt against the crazy price they are paying for keeping the eurozone afloat. I’m not so sure. The European dream is instilled in stone in most northern European minds, and while the southern Europeans refuse to blame themselves for the state of their finances and instead blame the Germans for the austerity measures they’ve imposed, the Brussels machine keeps rolling along, making it almost impossible to leave the common currency without leaving Europe altogether.

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But Britain, unlike small the economies of Greece and Portugal, could easily go at it without Brussels. If I had ten dollars for every time I’ve heard responsible people say that the eurozone is doomed, I could buy a new yacht. And some of those have been members of Parliament and even ministers. Yet nothing is happening. More of the same is the order of the day, and that spells doom in the long run. As my friend Charles Moore wrote in The Telegraph:

The biggest error of European history has been the idea that some new order – a Holy Roman Empire, a Napoleonic system, a Reich, a United States of Europe – can dissolve the dangerous rivalries of Europeans.

Hear, hear!

I’ve said it before and will say it to my dying day: A Greek is as different from a Swede in culture and mindset as it is possible to be. A Texan has more in common with a Connecticut Yankee than a German has with his French neighbor. And when it comes to the Brits, furgetaboutit. Yet this one-size-fits-all alchemy is being cooked by the tinpot crooks in Brussels, who vote themselves extraordinary salaries while imposing their blindness on the rest of us. But because it doesn’t work does not mean it won’t happen. Unlike Americans, Europeans follow the leader. The same old bunch of politicians has been in power since the war: high-tax-and-you-relax-at-the-beach alchemists, with a sheep-like electorate voting them in as if they were in a trance. My hope is that the Brits will say no one day, but my money is on the crooks in Brussels. There is no Maggie Thatcher to save England.

Cary Mulligan and Leonardo DiCaprio

Hollywood is having one more shot at Gatsby—the sixth one. The first filmed Gatsby was silent, pun intended. My favorite was the second, made in 1949 and starring Alan Ladd. The blond, short Ladd had those hooded eyes and sharp features that conveyed depth as well as sensitivity while looking pretty tough. The Great Gatsby is the novel that made F. Scott Fitzgerald an immortal, but when it was first published in 1925 it was hardly a critical or financial success. It has been called the greatest American novel ever written, and when I look around at the crap being written today, I tend to agree. It’s number two, I’d say, after Tender is the Night.

The third film version, starring Robert Redford, was the worst. It was a fashion show performed by two tongue-tied robots. Redford cannot register emotion or longing—he can only act it, and it shows—and Mia Farrow as Daisy was totally miscast. La Farrow is actually quite cerebral, something Daisy is not, and by trying hard to show superficiality, Mia simply missed the boat by a mile or so. Ironically Jordan Baker, Tom Buchanan, and Nick Carraway were all very good, but when Jay and Daisy are out to lunch the only thing left is a sideshow.

So will the version with Leonardo DiCaprio playing Jay be any better? I doubt it very much. Hollywood has butchered more books than were ever burnt by Islamic fanatics, so I’m not getting my hopes up. There’s no way Hollywood can resist making it a sartorial bonanza with gleaming automobiles and incredible mansions getting in the story’s way.

Here’s Fitzgerald a few dozen pages into his novel:

There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

That is all a Hollywood director has to read and presto, he’s got a movie. Throw in the Jazz Age, women in cloche hats and cylinder dresses, great houses with retinues of servants, Park Avenue lockjaw accents, snobbery, and some suggestion of violence, and it’s Oscar time. (Well, almost but not quite.) The Jazz Age still holds us in its sway because the youthful rebels who let it rip between the wars were mostly upper-class and rich. At a distance of 90 years it is difficult to conceive the horror it instilled in parental hearts when they heard their children playing jazz music on their Victrolas. And worse, it was played by…Negroes! In segregated America, this was revolutionary. Scott and Zelda would emerge from the Plaza drunk, then jump fully clothed into the fountain abutting 5th Avenue. Gatsby’s guests would drink and party all night, then drive drunk back into the city. Those were wild, crazy years, and jazz was the anthem of the times.

My grandfather called it decadent gutter music. When I said Louis Armstrong was among the greatest musicians ever, he asked me to leave the room. But it’s the world of endless partygoing and high-octane frivolity that still fascinates and always will (until sharia law is imposed, that is).

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Which is where Hollywood comes in. Out West they can film anything that has to do with wealth and privilege. (It’s always shown in a bad light). Where they get into trouble is when trying to depict how deeply the hero of Fitzgerald’s novel has his roots implanted in the nature of the genteel champion, the creator of romantic dreams. (Dick Diver in Tender and Monroe Stahr in Tycoon, ditto.) Fitzgerald was the last to grow up believing in the genteel romantic ideal that pervaded late-nineteenth-century American culture. Gatsby is an easy short read, but the novel is full of fine-spun patterns and ironies. The wife, at the wheel of her lover’s car, runs down and kills the lover of her husband. Gatsby and Myrtle have a lot in common, and when the latter dies the magic aura departs from Gatsby’s quest. This is very difficult to film; in fact it’s impossible. DiCaprio can mug, but he can’t do Fitzgerald.

Gatsby’s grail is not Daisy, but the security and wealth and power of the plutocratic American upper class. Without knowing it, Fitzgerald painted the American experience on Gatsby’s character, his romantic quest and tragic failure:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…And one fine morning.

Poor old Scott. He died broke and believing himself a total failure, but ten years after his 1940 death in the arms of Sheila Graham, his star was back. His books became best sellers, Hollywood filmed all his novels (some many times over), and his place in the American literary canon is secure. Jay Gatsby, or James Gatz, is the quintessential American hero: a dreamer, a bootlegger, and a fine man who served his country in the war and returned determined to be somebody. What can be more American than that? Read or reread the book and give the movie a pass. DiCaprio is no Gatsby. He’s not even Gatz.

In a tiny hamlet next to where I live high up in the Swiss Alps, two gay friends of mine have set up house, and a beautiful old chalet it is. One man, a German, looks like a Panzer commander straight out of central casting; the other is an Englishman, more P. G. Wodehouse than John Bull. Both are very nice, very good-looking, generous, and amusing. I recently asked them if they planned to marry. They looked at me as if I had proposed Russian roulette. Here in Switzerland, a tolerant place as long as one has money, gay marriage does not the headlines make. After all, women’s right to vote was imposed from above on one of its cantons, Appenzell, as late as 1971. American feminists missed the occasion, but Bill Buckley and I did not, writing about how the end was nigh.

Recently The New York Times ran a long and boring article by Bill Keller, a very upright and boring man who used to edit the rag. His dateline was South Africa, and the spiel was how the South African Constitutional Court had established the right of South African gays and lesbians to marry. He then went on to bash Uncle Sam’s intolerance, blah, blah, blah, and to remind us that Thomas Jefferson favored castration for homosexuals. (Ouch—bad old Tom, and in the 18th century to boot.)

What I find so ludicrous are the realities. Unless Keller is an utter fool, which he probably is, he must know very well that gays in South Africa risk being lynched by their fellow Africans if they show homosexual behaviors such as flirting or kissing in public. Never mind what the court has ruled: Equal rights for gays are as likely to be respected in South Africa as I am to lead the Gay Pride Parade in Greenwich Village come June. Keller should have at least pointed out that before anything else, South Africa—Johannesburg being one of the world’s murder capitals—must ensure that first and foremost comes the right to live and not be murdered, and then to worry about gay marriage. But no, the fact that a South African court established the right for same-sex marriage makes America the hate and intolerance capital of the world, so there.

In good old Britain, where I assume most upper-class males are gay, a High Court judge recently said the following:

So much energy and time has been put into the debate for 0.1 percent of the population, when we have a crisis of family breakdown….We need a much more focused position by the government on the importance of marriage.

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Hear, hear! Society in Blighty has broken down, and the prime minister is wasting his time trying to ram same-sex marriage through Parliament. The breakdown of marriage and its impact on society affects 99.9 percent of the population, but Cameron is trying to look trendy by worrying about the 0.1 percent. Cameron and Biden are politicians, the former a bit more honest than the latter, and one expects politicians to lie and try to curry favor with pressure groups such as the gay lobby. But for a clown like Keller to try and show how far behind the US of A is from South Africa is typical of the dishonesty of the Times and its ilk. In reality, there are no human rights in Africa, no women’s rights, no minority rights. Might makes right in that particular continent and everyone except Rip Van Winkle knows it.

In the land of cheese, a Catholic country however secular it pretends to be, same-sex marriage has not raced every trendy French person’s motor. Even movie stars have spoken out against it. But the midget who is president has promised to legalize it. It has been a divisive issue and knowing how gutless Hollande is, it might be swept into the closet, pun intended.

The big problem is the adoption of children. The French, unlike the sheeplike Americans, have not embraced Ginette Has Two Mommies, or two daddies for that matter. But the socialists in power have gone a step further. They want the state to finance procreation for married lesbian couples. Most French people agree that gay couples should have legal rights; what they don’t want is for the state to decide who is a parent and who is not.

If he were alive, Noel Coward, a gay person, would raise an eyebrow and announce that it’s much ado about nothing. There are priorities in this world, and gay marriage is not one of them. Just because some effete left-wing academics and their lemmings in the media and Hollywood have taken up the cause is unadulterated bullshit. The best I’ve read against it is from Lord Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1991 to 2002:

I support civil partnerships, which put right a basic injustice. I am simply horrified that political leaders have the effrontery to redefine an understanding of marriage upheld by so many for so long.

I am not as polite as the Archbishop. Here’s what I’d say to Joe Biden and his ilk: “Shut the fuck up.”

USS Liberty

On the brilliant summer’s morning of June 8, 1967, the USS Liberty, a technical research ship lying in international waters about 25 miles north of the Sinai Peninsula, was suddenly attacked by Israeli fighter jets and Israeli Navy torpedo boats. The Liberty’s captain, immediately realizing that an ally was attacking his ship, frantically signaled his coordinates to the diving jets and the surrounding torpedo boats firing at him, but to no avail. The Israelis kept firing until the boat lay helpless and rudderless in the ocean. Thirty-four American sailors were dead and 171 were wounded, many of them severely.

The Israeli government eventually issued an apology, claiming the Liberty was mistaken for an Egyptian warship, a callous claim because even to an amateur’s eye, the Liberty was no warship. In reality, the Israelis suspected the Liberty may have recorded their unprovoked attack against Egypt the previous day and wanted to make sure no records contradicting who initiated the Six-Day War were available. The Liberty was no spy ship, just an innocent bystander to what was to become a 45-year—and counting—occupation of Palestinian lands, a brutal seizure that has seen millions ordained to live in refugee camps for three generations.

This week Israel is holding an election, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud coalition is a certain winner. The usual suspects—the Israeli lobby in DC, multi-billionaire Las Vegas and Hollywood tycoons, Rupert Murdoch’s worldwide empire, and other media friends—have been signaled not to hold back. A full press is on to ensure one of the greatest injustices of modern times goes on uninterrupted.

An article in the International Herald Tribune, owned by The New York Times, caught my attention as I sat down to write this. It was by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali anti-Islamist writer married to Niall Ferguson, whose daughter from a previous marriage happens to be my goddaughter. (Although I am not a Somali, thank God, I am virulently against militant Islam.) In brief, la Ali claims that the Arabs are brought up on hatred against Jews, and it is this hatred that is the greatest impediment to peace in the Holy Land. She makes for a convincing argument until one reads between the lines. She writes that the Koran teaches Arabs to believe Jews are “apes and pigs” and that schoolbooks compare Jews to “rats and cockroaches and also to vampires and a host of other imaginary creatures.”

Since Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi was recently discovered having said just about the same thing, why doesn’t Ali’s argument convince me? That’s an easy one. The offending words echo those of the Saudi Sheikh Abdul Rahman Al-Sudais, imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. In broadcasts over the popular Saudi-owned satellite program Iqraa, in Saudi-owned magazines and newspapers, and in school textbooks financed by Saudi oil money, the libel that Jews are the rats of the world is repeated ad nauseam. The Saudi ruling family of 15,000 thieves bought protection from the religious police long ago by financing this kind of propaganda. Only last week a 17-year-old Filipino maid was beheaded in Saudi Arabia on extremely dubious charges. Ten years ago 15 young Saudi girls burned to death when the Wahhabi cops did not allow them to escape the fire because they were improperly dressed. This is the regime, now aided by the chief crook in Qatar, that pays for the anti-Jewish propaganda. It also finances thousands of schools all over the Muslim world that teach the same kind of hate against the West in general and Jews in particular.

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Yet in all my years of travel in occupied Palestine I have yet to meet an educated Palestinian who ever held such views. Palestine ceased to exist in 1948. It lost its name, its territory, and many of its people. Three-quarters of the land was taken by the Jewish movement, which was financed by the Rothschilds and aided by militant criminal gangs such as the Stern Gang. They massacred Palestinian farmers, spreading terror and producing refugees that remain in camps to this day. The Palestinian diaspora still dreams of a return. It has never accepted that they, alone of all the Arab nations, should be refused the right to decide their own future in their own land.

The Israeli right, which has added one million Russian Jews since the fall of communism, views things differently. In fact, Jewish settlers on Palestinian lands have been known to express the same kind of opinion about “subhuman” Palestinians that the Saudis use about Jews. When the United Nations called in 1947 for the partition of Mandate Palestine, the Zionists had taken close to 50 percent of the Holy Land. Today the occupied West Bank and Gaza stand to get 22 percent of the land under any two-state peace. Still, Netanyahu and his gang keep building illegal settlements, making a contiguous two-state solution pretty much impossible.

Nearly five million Palestinians are refugees. They have seen Israel flout international law with impunity, they have seen Israel plant apartheid colonies, and they have seen the number of Israeli settlers double on the West Bank since 1993’s Oslo Accord. Israel also withholds the 100 million dollars in tax revenues it collects monthly for the Palestinian Authority, which needs the money to pay salaries. (It is as if the Israeli right wants Hamas, rather than the very responsible PA, to represent the Palestinians.) It is illegal under international law—a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court—for an occupying power to transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies. Yet Israel has been doing this with impunity since 1967, having gained most of its land with the same practices previous to that date.

So the next time you read about the Arabs raised on hatred of the Jews and you cringe when they’re called the offspring of apes and pigs, think not of the Palestinians, but of those nice guys wearing sheets with whom George W. Bush held hands after 9/11. Think of the Saudis and Qataris whose trillions finance TV channels and schools that preach libel against the Jews, and also spare a thought for the innocent Palestinians whose lands have been stolen and who continue to live under the Israeli yoke.

Maureen Dowd

New Year’s resolutions work only for bores and ambulance-chasing, money-grubbing lawyers. Normal people do not and cannot stick to them. Hence I will list for you my irritants of 2013, hoping against hope that they’ll disappear, but I don’t advise any Taki’s Mag reader to hold his breath.

Bill Maher. His political correctness aside, he has a repulsive face, a nose that closely resembles a penis, and a mind so fine that no original idea could violate it. Maher fancies himself a writer, but in reality he has a large retinue of writers who scribble the stuff he presents as his own. He’s as phony as they come but I love looking at him because by comparison he makes me feel like Apollo, Adonis, and Paris of Troy combined. Maher hates conservatives, Christians, heterosexuals, and people who don’t smoke dope. He went weak at the knees when Christopher Hitchens was in proximity. Come out, come out Bill Maher, all is forgiven, and you could marry Andrew Sullivan (who likes it bareback).

Gay marriage. Many good friends of mine are homos, and the last thing they desire is same-sex marriage. That’s why they like the word “gay” rather than “queer.” They are swingers, not homebodies. The patrimony of the United States consists of values and traditions, and same-sex marriage ain’t one of them. I am not homophobic and I support civil partnerships, but I find it a crime for politicians and busybodies to have the effrontery to redefine an institution such as marriage, which has been upheld since time immemorial.

David Frum, Bill Kristol, and John Podhoretz. In their infinite wisdom, the ancient Greeks mistrusted very ugly people. These three neocons exemplify mistrust. All three are fat and shrill and hysterical and need to wear makeup when out and about; otherwise, horses might bolt. In olden days they would have been sent to a leper colony. Now they appear on TV.

Maureen Dowd. The female version of the three stooges mentioned above, she is as politically correct as they come. She keeps reminding us that she was born a pleb. Gee whiz, Mo, did you think any of us ever mistook you for anything but a lowlife? La Dowd was in ecstasy when Romney bit the dust. A lot of people were, but she went on for days writing how the next time we will have more gays, more blacks, more Hispanics, and more women, making sure no white guy is ever president again. Is that what they mean when they call this kind of hysteria penis envy?

Africa. I am rather tired of having people raise money for Africa. The bloodiest continent of all, it has immense mineral wealth and lies in the midst of fertile land and favorable climate, yet the poverty is endemic, its leaders psychopathic murderers, and its only hope is that the white man stay away and let them sort their problems out or recolonize the place and build schools and hospitals and teach them some manners.

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The EU. Never in the history of the world has a bigger con been perpetrated by a bunch of conmen that make Damon Runyon’s Big Julie from Chicago and Nathan Detroit look like Socrates and Plato. It is indicative that the EU’s base is in Brussels, capital of a non-country, invented by the Brits to stop the Germans attacking them in the 19th century. (It certainly didn’t stop Germany during two World Wars, although it weakened the Wehrmacht slightly; Belgian women were very busy sleeping with the good-looking German officer corps.) Everyone who is not on the government’s payroll knows that where government controls have been effective—Europe, Africa—the impact has been devastating. These bums in Brussels pass close to 1,000 laws per month, turning Europe into one big bureaucracy where the unelected bureaucrat is king. High taxes, economic controls, and price-fixing are the bureaucrooks’ answers to all problems. There used to be a law pertaining to the length a banana must be before it can be sold. Brussels knew very well that the Greeks were cooking the books but did absolutely nothing about it until even the Greeks couldn’t hide any longer. The EU is the greatest danger free men and women are facing. Give me Uncle Joe Stalin any day. And Benito did make the trains run on time. Nuke Iran? Never. Nuke Brussels instead.

Benjamin Netanyahu. He looks like a dishonest plumber and would be one if he hadn’t managed to intimidate people with pro-settler zealots, right-wing donors such as the casino-owning man from Las Vegas, and the storm-trooper tactics of those who equate the slightest criticism of Israeli policy to anti-Semitism. Netanyahu has no intention to allow a two-state peace. He considers Palestinians to be hardly human and scoffs at their aspirations. He cries wolf at all times and will do his damndest to get Uncle Sam to bomb Iran. Watch out for AIPAC going on overdrive when the combat veteran Senator Hagel’s name comes up for confirmation. Who ever said Israel doesn’t decide things in DC?

Have a happy 2013.

It began late in the afternoon of March 13, 1954. The great Battle of Dien Bien Phu had finally begun. 105mm and 75mm howitzers and 120mm mortars rained down from above. Ten thousand French troops were defending a valley ringed by hills crawling with close to 30,000 Vietnamese. The French commander was Christian de Castries, the flamboyant general who had named the nine outposts after his various mistresses: Beatrice, Huguette, Elaine, Isabelle, and so on. Most soldiers in the French Foreign Legion were German; the officers were all French. The first to die was major Paul Pegot, who called for artillery support barely 200 yards from his command post at Beatrice. A Viet Minh artillery round hit him as he put down the telephone, killing him instantly along with his entire staff. Another shell tore open the chest and ripped the arms off Lieutenant Colonel Gaucher, who had rushed in to take over. Their two leaders gone, the men had to fight on their own. All but 200 out of 750 died. They took 600 Vietnamese with them.

The battle continued for another seven weeks. On May 7, 1954, it was all over. De Castries refused to raise the white flag but ordered the Legionnaires to stop shooting as the Viets came storming in. For the first time in colonial warfare, Asian troops had defeated a European army in a fixed battle.

A hushed French National Assembly chamber heard Premier Laniel announce the defeat. Women deputies sobbed and Paris declared all theaters and cinemas shut. Television was canceled and the radio played only classical music. Far away in Washington, DC, a somber Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was busy drafting a statement praying for peace in Indochina and urging the aggressors to purge themselves of their aggression for the coming Geneva Peace Conference. Dulles had played his cards well. He had agreed to attend Geneva mostly as an observer, leaving the Soviets and Chinese to deal with the defeated French and victorious Vietnamese. Dulles had refused to give air cover to the French in Dien Bien Phu, although the first Americans to die in Indochina were two American pilots flying for the money. The Eisenhower Administration had been very generous with armaments but had refused direct military intervention to save the colonial French skin. According to Dulles, the first domino had fallen. The French presence in Indochina was a busted flush. It was time for Uncle Sam to stop the red tide.

Throughout the seven-year war of independence from French colonial rule, Ho Chi Minh had eyed the Americans with suspicion. What Uncle Sam preached and what he did were two different things. America was for democracy, an unknown institution in Indochina, but it was helping the French throughout. Ho was a communist who established a totalitarian military regime with no questions asked once he became North Vietnam’s boss. Uncle Sam’s excuse was the domino theory. Communism, unless checked, would overrun Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and even threaten Indonesia and eventually Australia and Japan. The theory was good on paper, but like most such theories, it was not worth the papyrus on which it was printed. Easing the French out from South Vietnam, the Eisenhower people poured into Saigon. They trained, advised, and picked up the bill. The French had lost a war fought 5,600 miles from home. The Americans had the will and the money to show the little yellow bastards all about American ingenuity.

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Seventy-five thousand French troops had died in the first act of the war for Vietnamese independence. Fifty-eight thousand American lives and close to three million Vietnamese ones later, Uncle Sam was seen leaving from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon on a helicopter in April 1975. Vietnam became one nation under communism and remains red to this day. Cambodia and Laos went commie for a while but then went quasi-democratic.

The Eisenhower Administration had decided long before the final French defeat to create and sustain a non-communist bastion in southern Vietnam. The Vietnam lobby included a Supreme Court judge and a young Senator, JFK. Through developmental aid and technical know-how, the US would help the Vietnamese and other newly independent neighbors move away from colonial rule without falling for communism’s false promises.

Well, we all know the results. Well-meaning superpowers cannot win faraway wars. Battlefield victories by the good guys are followed by the establishment of authoritarian, elite-led local mafias, as is the case in Iraq and Afghanistan. The neocons and the Israeli lobby led the cheerleading while Uncle Sam yet again spilled American blood to overthrow one of the Middle East’s few secular leaders. Iraq remains in far worse shape than it was under Saddam Hussein. In Afghanistan we have wasted billions while enriching a mafia close to president Karzai, a man so crooked he makes a pretzel look straight.

The pompous bores that blow hot air over the airwaves and in print for the five deadly sinners—CBS, NBC, ABC, The New York Times, and the Washington Post—continue to rattle sabers for democracy in faraway places. US interventions that resulted in regime change since the Cold War ended—in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya—have made the world a far more dangerous place. The next domino to fall will be Syria—it will fall to chaos and al-Qaeda, that is. And Uncle Sam will have one more failed state to deal with, thanks to the neocon and Saudi propaganda, his inability to learn from history, and his lack of common sense. Poor Uncle Sam. Can’t someone force him to sit down and study Fredrik Logevall’s Embers of War? It’s about the fall of an empire and the making of America’s Vietnam. Make him read it again and again, then test him on what he learned. And then force him never to read or watch anything that the five deadly sinners print or say.

Is America exceptional? Once upon a time, hardly anyone dissented from the idea that the USA was different from all other nations. The “exceptional” sobriquet made the rounds when it became obvious that hereditary status and class distinctions did not count in America, leaving individuals free to be judged on their merits alone.

I write this partly in shock, as I had driven by the bucolic village of Newtown, Connecticut only 12 hours before the massacre of 20 schoolchildren, six staff members, and the mass murderer’s own mother.

Is the mass murder of little children a uniquely American tragedy? Well, a Chinese crazy only last week attacked and stabbed 22 children in Henan province before police subdued him. The attack mirrored a similar one against Chinese children in 2010, where more than 20 children were slashed, with three of them dying. Another attack took place last August, when two children were stabbed in a middle school in Nanchang. Most of the Chinese attackers have been mentally disturbed men unable to adjust to the rapid pace of social change in China, a country whose medical system’s ability to diagnose psychiatric illness is close to null.

But—and this is a very big “but”—the Chinese attackers used knives, not automatic weapons. No Glocks, no SIG Sauers, no .223-caliber Bushmaster rifles, all three of which were in possession of Adam Lanza, the Newtown mass murderer. These weapons are capable of extinguishing 26 lives in a matter of minutes. This is a uniquely American phenomenon. Even Washington’s gun lobby is going to have trouble with this one. Yes, I know the slogan: “Guns don’t kill, people do.” But how does one justify military-style, high-volume-of-fire weaponry in a modern society? All recent mass shootings of innocents in America, from Columbine to Virginia Tech, from Aurora to the Oregon mall, have involved high-tech weaponry. How far can the Constitution’s Second Amendment go—until we all murder each other?

It’s a horrible thing, but it’s only when it hits close to home that such horrors get to us. The fact that Gaza’s children are habitually shot dead because of Israeli-Hamas differences is reported on a par with football scores. African massacres of tots are not even reported—much ado about nothing. Northern Sudan’s enforced famine on the Christian south has killed countless innocent children, but the chief architect of the horror, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, was awarded a seat on the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations.

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The basic trait of mass killers is a sense of anger and resentment. They are social pariahs, nerdy loners who most likely are addicts of violent Hollywood movies. Hollywood has a lot to answer for where mass murder is concerned. Just as watching hard porn can lead to rape, I believe that anesthetizing people to shooting off high-caliber weapons can lead to mass murder. Most action films today show heroes and villains blasting guns nonstop without bodies piling up and blocking off the action. The screen fills with tracers but the action continues. And life goes on undisturbed. Rap lyrics don’t help. Kill this, kill that, kill everyone who disagrees. Nowhere else on Earth—except for Britain, which follows slavishly in Uncle Sam’s footsteps—do songwriters and moviemakers advertise such violence.

So when will it end? After the next killing, or the one after, or the one after that? When will the politicians who take the gun lobby’s money confront their benefactors? The answer is not in the immediate future. What will it take to stop the killing of innocents? Screening prospective gun buyers for criminal records is not enough. Most mass murderers don’t even have parking tickets on their resume. Adam Lanza used his mother’s guns. Why did a mother-housewife need three guns? And how typical of a mass murderer to murder his mother first, shooting her in the face.

America has endured over 60 mass shootings in the last 30 years alone. I know no country in Europe that even begins to compete with this sick record. Black children as young as ten play with guns they obtain in high-crime neighborhoods. Some bring them to school. It’s a macho thing to do. Just listen to some rap and you’ll find out. Watch some movie. Or better yet, listen to those who live and die by the Second Amendment. But the dead children of Newtown never had a chance to read about their right to bear guns. They died because their parents chose not to bear guns, as did their teachers. Uncle Sam should bury his head in shame.

Saudi Arabia will not have Uncle Sam to kick around much longer. This is the best news I’ve heard since both the Governor of New York State and a Congressman from the depraved City of New York had to resign because of sex scandals. The bad news is that the kicking won’t stop until 2030, when the US will finally become self-sufficient in black gold and will be able to say sayonara to probably the most disgusting, revolting, and odious barbarians to inhabit our planet, and in this I include the fanatic Jewish settlers of the occupied territories. I know, I know, I’m going too far; seemingly nothing can top the settlers as far as intellectual squalor is concerned, but the Saudis somehow manage it.

In all the years that I’ve lived in London—where the place is crawling with Saudis—I’ve yet to meet one of these bums who didn’t treat poor people like dirt, didn’t abuse women, didn’t physically beat up his servants, and ever paid his bills on time. I’m sure there are a few Saudis who are educated and act like normal human beings, but I have yet to meet any of them.

There are many reasons for this, but the main one is the Wahhabi Islamic sect, a fanatical order of Islam that even a Hollywood scriptwriter couldn’t invent. Think of primitive man just before he discovered how to make fire, go back a thousand years or so, and then you might begin to understand the mental state of affairs in Saudi Arabia today. The Muttawah, the religious police, are everywhere, separating men and women and enforcing laws that wouldn’t stand up even in the Gulag. Everyone lives in houses that are enclosed—no verandas, no balconies, certainly no gardens in that horrible arid hellhole. Women are permitted to mix only with other women, who must be relations. A man can order his woman around in the manner German guards ordered concentration-camp orderlies. There is no recourse if a woman objects, except for escape from the country. In 2002, 15 girls died in a fire when the religious police refused to let them escape the flames without being properly dressed. This act alone should have had the world declare war against the Saudis, but what we did instead was look on approvingly when George W. Bush held hands with Abdullah, the head camel driver, just before the Iraq War.

The Saudis treat other Islamic sects in the benevolent manner Nero and Caligula behaved toward their Christian slaves. In the eastern part of this hellhole where the oil reserves are, Shia Muslims who do all the heavy lifting live in conditions unfit for rats and other such vermin. The religious authorities regard them as heretics and act toward them accordingly. In Bahrain, also a so-called kingdom, the head, one Khalifa, regards the two-thirds of the Muslim population that is Shia as subhuman and occasionally calls for help from the Saudis whenever the natives get restless. Saudi tanks cross over a skyway and restore order.

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Which brings me to the ruling family, all fifteen thousand of them, a tribe that the genuflecting media refer to as royals. These bums are all descended from Abdulaziz ibn Abdul Rahman Al Saud, a peasant who emerged from the desert back in the 1920s, kicked out the Hashemite royal family, and declared himself king. FDR, in his infinite wisdom, became his protector in exchange for oil exploration by the nice American oil companies. Fifteen thousand so-called princes later, Europe is selling them its companies, banks, real estate, hotels, yachts, hookers, airplanes, weapons, and liquor. Despite the strict laws prohibiting booze, these billionaire camel drivers drink, whore, and gamble in Europe’s flesh spots in a manner that would compel the old Russian aristocracy to shave their beards in shame if they even approached the Saudi excesses. Talk about a place that needs a revolution and needs it very badly.

As Mark Steyn wrote in National Review:

Restive European Muslims and unlimited Saudi money can put pressure on American publishers, institutions, and media that will eventually render the First Amendment moot.

And it gets worse. The world’s tens of thousands of madrasas—schools where the young are taught to hate the West—are paid for by Saudi money, which are really your and my dollars as we continue to pay top price for Saudi oil. So what will happen when the wells run dry or when the rest of the world, including China, finds enough alternative energy to send the ghastly ones to hell?

Well, for one the hookers will have to look for other jobs, as will the expensive strip joints of the French Riviera. Casinos ditto, but there’s always the Russians, some of whom resemble the Saudis in manners if not in looks. The Internet apparently has caused some rumbles among the young, but even the Saudi youth are no prize. They are a suspicious lot, devoid of love of the arts or enjoyment of beauty. I shall not be around when the Saudi kleptocracy finally crumbles, but the Almighty has a lot to answer for after creating modern Saudi Arabia.

Joe DiMaggio

It was 1948, and the great Joe DiMaggio was injured most of the season. Tommy Henrich and Charlie Keller were in the outfield and a young Yogi Berra was behind the plate. But even with pitchers such as Allie Reynolds and Vic Raschi the Bronx Bombers could not catch the Cleveland Indians, led by playing manager-shortstop Lou Boudreau and two future Hall of Famers on the mound: Bob Feller and Bob Lemon.

I write these names without looking them up. They are embedded in my mind as they were back then in any 11-year-old who followed the down-to-the-wire race. I didn’t follow baseball and in fact had never heard of the game until I landed at LaGuardia Airport around September of that year. My father had pulled some strings and I was accepted at Lawrenceville, a leading prep school near Princeton University. Having spoken Greek and German for the first eleven years of my life, my English was nonexistent. One of my father’s executives thought it a good idea to start with baseball, so he took me out to the ball game at Yankee Stadium. Tommy Byrne was pitching against the Washington Senators. By the end of the game I had a pretty good idea of the national pastime.

The Indians went on to beat the Boston Braves (as they were known back then) in the World Series. I remember a jingle even now, “Spahn and Sain and Pray for Rain,” the Braves having two great pitchers in Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain. In the middle of the series I left New York for Lawrenceville. The 280-acre campus left me agog. After eight years of war, occupation, and then a vicious civil war, the only green I’d ever seen was on military uniforms, and not particularly friendly ones. The Greek army wore khaki, the Germans gray, and the Italians green. The communists wore all sorts of things but had a red star on their caps. Lawrenceville’s colors were red and black.

On the very first day I was taken to meet Dr. Healy, the headmaster, a kind man, and Dr. Hyatt, the assistant headmaster, a no-nonsense gentleman who never cracked a smile. I was assigned to Thomas House, in Lower School, and to my amazement was immediately scouted by a Hollywood type. Before any of you suspect I’m on LSD, there was a movie being shot on campus called The Happy Years starring Dean Stockwell as the young rebel and Leo G. Carroll as the headmaster. The film was based on The Lawrenceville Stories, a very popular book some 70 or 80 years ago. I was picked was because I had Gomina on my hair, a gel that young European gentlemen wore at the time—and that men still wear in Argentina—and was wearing plus fours, a sign of refinery in Greece but definitely the sign of a jerk in New Jersey circa 1948.

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I have seen the movie many times since but have yet to spot myself. Such are the joys of Tinseltown. Lawrenceville had some very strange customs. New boys were called “rhinies” and were not allowed to walk on the grass except for sports. We also had to wear a beanie. If one broke the rules and walked on the grass, any older boy could order him to take a brick, which the rhinie had to carry with him at all times except while playing sports. Already quite confused by the language, I nevertheless discovered a way not to attend class but stay in my cube in Thomas House and read the novel Michael Strogoff in German. Using sign language and some German, the head of the lower school, Mr. Heynigger, asked me my reason for cutting classes. I pointed at my corner, where I’d dumped about twenty bricks. The rule soon was changed thanks to Taki. Any boy who weighed less than 120 pounds could not carry more than three bricks, if that.

I weighed 103 pounds and soon found myself wrestling in the junior varsity team because no American boy at the time was as puny as me. And there was a 103-pound class. Winning my numerals helped me stick out a bit.

All the 400 boys used to go to the Jigger Shop after dinner and before study hall. One night, the captain of the football team, Carl MacDonald, crossed the crowded room there and came up to me. He shook my hand and asked if I was the son of the King of Greece. I nodded yes. “I thought so,” said Carl. I was made right there and then.

The student council president was Temple Brown. The best sportsman was Homer Smith, who died only this year and was an Army general and a well-known football coach. My best friends were Ben Cooper, Bill Trimble, and Ludlow Miller. My favorite teacher was Mr. Wagner, the wrestling coach, and I was the only foreign-born student that year. My, how things have changed. 

Valérie Trierweiler

Back in 1840, an Englishman by the name of Alexander Walker wrote a manual by the name of Woman, in which he quoted David Hume and from which I quote:

Among the inferior creatures, nature herself, being the supreme legislator, prescribes all the laws which regulate their marriages, and varies those laws according to the different circumstances of the creature.

So far, so good. Nature is the supreme arbiter, and unnatural acts are a no-no. Hume goes on to say:

But nature, having endowed man with reason, has not so exactly regulated every article of his marriage contract, but has left him to adjust them, by his own prudence, according to his particular circumstances and situation.

Whew!

Walker goes on to disagree with Hume about monogamy, calling marriage not merely a social, but a natural institution. In other words, once hitched you don’t fool around, and he brings in apes as an example. They have one female at a time, he writes, which is a bit like pointing out that it’s dark during the night. Apes do not go in for orgies à la Rome or à la Hollywood. Or à la Dominique Strauss-Kahn, for that matter.

Which brings me to the core of this piece: the French, their political leaders, and sex. With the publication of a new biography of the French president’s live-in mistress, Valérie Trierweiler—or Rottweiler, as her enemies dub her—it emerges that President Hollande, while living with the mother of his four children, Ségolène Royal, was sharing the Rottweiler with one Patrick Devedjian, a man of Armenian descent and a close friend of ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy. I know, I know, you’re getting confused. I’ll start again. Hollande is living and having children with Ségolène, but on the side he’s knocking off the Rottweiler, who is cheating on him with an Armenian. Does that make it any clearer?

Far from suggesting that these people are depraved, it illustrates that sex triangles actually get people elected to the highest office in the land of cheese and surrender.

Ironically, just 20 miles away, in the land of bad teeth and freeloading—Britain—triangulation leads to the loss of office for politicians and rotten publicity in the tabloids for footballers, pop stars, and even royalty. Sex, even to the British, is supposedly life enhancing, but it got Bill Clinton into trouble, although being Clinton, he got away with it. Infidelity is not something society approves of, but it depends which society.

In South Africa, by far the most civilized country in that tortured continent, President Zuma has had many wives and fathered 20 children, some out of wedlock. He’s not even a Muslim, but a Zulu, the bravest of his country’s brave tribes. When Zuma was running for president, no Western newspaper or media dared to touch upon his extracurricular activities because Zuma is black. It would have been racist to suggest it.

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Even in these puritanical shores, Martin Luther King’s voracious sexual appetite did not hinder him from becoming an icon, especially after his assassination in 1968. Mind you, stories got out because J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General Bobby Kennedy made sure they did. Never mind. Blacks are babied by the media, except when they’re conservative like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

FDR, another so-called icon, lived openly with his mistress and dropped dead in her arms, but the press turned a blind eye. After him came a long line of uxorious presidents—until Clinton, that is. My problems with him were his women. They were mostly white trash, inelegant, and publicity seeking. My father always said that there are only two ways to judge a man: by his women and by the kind of boat he sailed. He would have loathed Bill Clinton.

But back to the Frogs. My favorite was Georges Pompidou, a gentleman, a charmer, and a secret swinger. De Gaulle suffered from halitosis and never womanized, which is just as well. Giscard was openly a swinger, unsafe in taxis, as they say—not that he ever used one—and he preferred upper-class women, revealing his insecurity over his phony surname “d’Estaing,” purchased by his social-climbing father. Our very own JFK suffered from the same insecurity, because of all his girlfriends that I know of, ninety-nine percent were from the upper classes and from exclusive country-club sets (except for Marilyn Monroe, who was, after all, Marilyn Monroe). Mitterand was openly an adulterer and proud of it.

According to Shelley, “Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty….” The Frogs have their own poets, but Shelley must have come to mind when Hollande defended himself and his mistress against charges of depravity. Hollande is an awful little man, a Uriah Heep who worked his way up the greasy pole by never doing anything but brownnosing. All the people involved in his sordid little circle are like him: Opportunists, careerists, sexual deviates, and unattractive. JFK had great women; Clinton and Hollande have trash. There lies the difference.

And that goes for your correspondent, too. I’m a sinner, but all my girls have been rather special, starting with my great wife. See you swingers in Paris.

Bernie Ecclestone

Bernie Ecclestone is a gnomish Brit ex-grease monkey. He is my neighbor in Gstaad, the small alpine Swiss village which once upon a time was the Mecca of the old rich and titled but is now slowly turning into the playground of the nouveaux riches and vulgar. I’ve often written about Bernie because for a very short man, he has a very long reach. About ten years or so ago he bought a beautiful old inn, a Gstaad landmark used by both locals and tourists, and turned it into a chic boutique type of restaurant/hotel whose prices only the very rich can afford. I wrote about it in the Spectator, and Bernie answered that it was not his fault my finances were not up to it. Par for the course.

He recently purchased yet another chalet for his daughters, both of whom are experts in knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. Ecclestone is a multi-billionaire, having made his fortune as owner of Formula I Grand Prix racing, whatever that means. Bernie doesn’t own the teams that race, nor the courses where the racing takes place, yet somehow he has made billions for reasons that escape me.

Ecclestone remarked last November:

I think Europe is finished. It will be a good place for tourism but little else. Europe is a thing of the past.

Enter the Brussels gang. The bureaucrooks of Brussels have begun an advertising campaign that aims to encourage young Europeans to take charge of their economic future by starting businesses. They hired the M&C Saatchi advertising company and have shot an ad in London institutions such as the V&A Museum and the British Library highlighting displays that feature historical thinkers including Plato, Galileo, and Darwin. A narrator reads Bernie’s message while a girl in a glass takes a hammer and shatters the glass. “This is not my future,” she says.

The not-so-subtle message is that Europe is moving forward and should not be consigned to a museum of economic and technological history. So far, so good, but like everything that Brussels preaches, it’s totally false. In fact it’s so false, I for once am on Bernie’s side. To be an entrepreneur in Europe nowadays is a very dangerous business. There is a rigid labor market across Europe that makes it extremely costly to hire and fire workers. Even worse, the banks are not lending any money.

A friend of mine in France, a karate instructor, wanted to hire a couple of assistants so he could provide more classes in his rented studio throughout the day. One of the assistants turned out to be a total dunce. My friend could not fire him, is stuck with him, and is losing business because of him. The French state is behind the dunce. So much for the entrepreneurial spirit.

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The structural barriers put up by the very same Brussels gang that now calls for more start-ups is what makes the whole thing such a bad joke. Immigration policies that attract uneducated poor people from North and Central Africa do not help. Ditto for tax rates that discourage risk. Who would want to start a business that if successful might see him paying 75% to the French taxman? I know the French are unpleasant, but they are not stupid. Job creation has been killed by excessive Brussels legislation, yet these same clowns are now paying for an expensive advertising campaign—with our tax euros, of course—urging the suckers to come up with more vigorous investments. It’s a bit like Al Capone taking out an ad urging for more police in Chicago.

And it gets worse. Brussels now wants more European oversight over national governments’ budgets. It wants a single supervisory mechanism for eurozone banks and more power for the European Parliament. It claims that the biggest danger to Europe is a resurgence of nationalism and populism, i.e., the fact that people are waking up to the Brussels dictatorship and are demanding more controls over their lives by their own kind. To illustrate the kind of arrogance these crypto-dictators practice and their total dismissal of European peoples’ aspirations of self-determination, I refer to Greece, a moribund nation in hock to the EU, and what the latest Greek government is doing.

Antonis Samaras, the prime minister of the three-party coalition, talks a good game trying to prevail on his EU partners to give him more time. In the meantime he has squeezed the Greeks as much as possible by cutting pensions. He has totally failed to eliminate corruption or fire civil servants from the bloated state sector that is mainly responsible for Greece’s condition. Starting a business in Greece means getting around a labyrinthine bureaucracy of bribe-taking officials, the same officials whom Samaras has failed to eliminate. In the meantime he has bled poor Greeks dry, leading to despair and suicides.

The arrogant Brussels gang knows this but will do nothing about it. Keeping the euro and the union intact is all that matters. The electorate’s wishes are immaterial. Such are the joys of being a European nowadays, and there will be plenty more joy to come. 

Raymond Chandler

I stopped reading novels long ago. When those arch-phonies writing magic realism became household words, I dropped out quicker than you can say, “Raymond Chandler.” Now that’s what I call a novel—the stuff Chandler churned out about old El Lay, everyone gulping booze and puffing away like steam engines, and only exercising between the sheets. Crime writers have always had an inferiority complex about their work, but they sure beat some of the clowns posing as novelists nowadays. Chandler was a master of style, a serious writer who applied his classical English education to the task of creating rich slang. His similes were extravagant and P. G. Wodehousian: “[H]e looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.” Chandler turned detective stories into art, labeling Los Angeles the city “with the personality of a paper cup.”

Chandler taught himself to write by churning out pastiches of Hemingway, the other writer I read when very young, a man who along with Fitzgerald formed my life. After reading The Sun Also Rises, I had to go to Pamplona and run with the bulls, chase hard-drinking women who were like Lady Brett Ashley, and get into drunken fights in Paris nightclubs. Fitzgerald was even worse for me. All Jay Gatsby did was party, as did Dick Diver and Tommy Barban in Tender Is the Night. All three had character, were inwardly sensitive and decent, and all three threw their lives away for women.

John O’Hara was another writer I adored when still a schoolboy. He was never taken seriously as a top writer, which shows how little the critics know. His Appointment in Samarra left me shaken and fascinated as to how quickly one’s life can collapse. O’Hara was obsessed with the world of the rich, forgivable enough for someone who rose from obscure poverty, and a fascinating subject to boot. His short stories were top of the line, as were his novels Ten North Frederick, From the Terrace, and The Lockwood Concern.

Speaking of underrated writers, what about the master, W. Somerset Maugham? I wouldn’t dare call him “Willy” to his face, but he was a great stylist, a wonderful short-story writer, and his The Razor’s Edge is one of the masterpieces of English prose. Larry Darrell’s minimal subsistence—by choice—to cultivate the life of the spirit is a lesson some of our present masters of the universe would do well to ponder.

Norman Mailer’s An American Dream was outrageously provocative in the existential angst of its hero Stephen Rojack, and later on Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost was a beautifully written and researched opus. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities is a modern classic, illustrating exactly what Larry Darrell had foreseen as capitalism’s soul-wrenching weakness. Gore Vidal’s Washington, D.C. had me enthralled about the goings-on inside the Beltway, a place I’d choose instead of jail, but only just.

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Which brings me to Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet”: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea. Each novel is meaningless on its own. The quartet’s structure works perfectly, but it is the setting’s exoticism which, as they say, blew my mind. The quartet was written between 1957 and 1960, back when my father had sent me to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan—as it was then called—as punishment for running up debts. He owned the region’s biggest textile mills. I spent every weekend in Alexandria and Cairo, back then magical places of easy living, easier service, and very easy sex. Durrell captures the atmosphere like a photographer—better yet, like an Impressionist painter. Anything and everything happens in Alexandria: pederasty, incest, and all the convolutions of lust, greed, and betrayal. Durrell’s Alexandria is a dream city inhabited by pashas, sophisticated foreigners, mysterious women, rich merchants, ragamuffin street vendors, drug dealers, and spies of all colors and nationalities. He wrote of the “flesh coming alive, trying the bars of its prison.” I used to play tennis with the great Baron von Cramm in the Gezira Club every morning, gamble in the Mohammed Ali Club (only foreigners and Egyptian pashas permitted) in the afternoon, and do the outdoor nightclubs at night. I was in love with a Justine type who drove me crazy despite my youth and lust for life. Those were the days. And nights.

Durrell is hardly read nowadays. Some of the untalented and illiterate phonies who write unreadable prose dismiss many of those I have mentioned as small fry. It’s like insects calling lions weaklings.

No one of my generation can write about novels without mentioning The Catcher in the Rye, which I read when I was 14. The acute observations of a boy alone in a world of hypocrisy gave me confidence that the images I had of certain people weren’t so far off. Salinger was the opposite of Waugh, whose Vile Bodies I adored however much I loathed the writer. Salinger wrote about love. Waugh, a not-so-closeted queen, wrote about guilt.

Graham Greene and George Orwell complete this very incomplete list of my favorites. (I have read most American and British novelists of that period but listed only a few choices.) Greene is our greatest Catholic writer, and Orwell predicted what our free world would turn into. Hooray for all of the above. 

Here we go again! Scary sofa samurai Robert Kagan, a neocon so-called foreign-policy scholar, is also an expert on war, having watched a lot of Hollywood movies. Kagan says that if Obama were to use force against Iran, the election is over and he would win overwhelmingly. Kagan and his brother are inside-the-Beltway hucksters, always hustling and doing Israel’s bidding, although not necessarily for cash. Zionists have countless ways to remunerate American citizens who are loyal to Israel. That’s what the neoconservative movement was and is all about.

I remember some twenty years or so ago running into Gore Vidal at a London book party. We had a very close common friend, Maria St. Just, who was Tennessee Williams’s muse and probably the reason poor old Tennessee was gay. Lady St. Just was the only woman he had slept with, and she was a real man-eater. Maria was Tennessee’s literary executor, and my wife was Maria’s executor, which are two different things. Gore pointed this out and told me to make sure people remained confused. “Every producer the world over will come knocking at your door, you’ll have actresses stripping for you.…” Well, that was the last thing I wanted, and I made the distinction clear in print soon afterward.

Gore Vidal was a patrician American who wasn’t shy to question the loyalties of Zionists such as Irving Kristol (pere et fils) and Norman Podhoretz, whom he always referred to as Poddy. They threw mud in return, calling him an anti-Semite, but he was too big for them. They failed to make him a nonperson, however hard they tried. No Joe Sobran he.

And now we’re back where we started ten years ago. The war drums are getting louder by the minute, the neocons are out hustling in print and on television screens spreading the word from Tel Aviv, and the hundreds of thousands of dead after the disastrous wars of Iraq and Afghanistan are long forgotten. Netanyahu wants to bomb Iran, and Mitt Romney has made it clear that he will send American planes and warships to assist him if he wins the White House.

Obama may be useless as president, but at least he resists playing the hit man for Netanyahu and the wild men of Likud. He realizes that every country we “liberated”—Iraq, Afghanistan, even Libya—hates our guts. The world knows that Israel is the Middle East’s only nuclear (illegal) superpower. When Netanyahu calls Iran’s nuclear plants an existential threat, I’m sure he breaks down laughing in private. Iran would be vaporized in a day if it tried to launch a nuclear-tipped missile, however crude. The mullahs know it, Netanyahu knows it, Obama and Romney know it, yet Uncle Sam is being held hostage to the extent that Obama is begging Israel to hold off attacking Iran until after the November elections.

What in hell’s name is going on here? Are the American government’s executive and legislative branches taking orders from Jerusalem? The answer, alas, is a resounding YES.

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The three percent or so of American voters who are Jewish usually vote Democrat. They are an educated and wealthy bloc who seem to set reason aside when it comes to Israel.

In order to win their vote, Republicans are now debasing themselves in front of such grotesque lowlife shysters as Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas casino owner whose looks reflect his morals. Romney took a back seat to him in Tel Aviv, as did the ghastly Newt Gingrich, who said Palestinians are an “invented” people. AIPAC has a blacklist of lawmakers who are considered not one hundred percent pro-Israel. The list is very, very small. Politicians know their money supply will dry up if they’re perceived not to be solidly behind the sole Middle Eastern nuclear superpower.

Netanyahu is known to regard Palestinians with contempt, and his plan to drive them out of the West Bank altogether and into Jordan is no secret. Although North Korea, Pakistan, and India possess nuclear weapons, we have learned to live with them. Not where Iran is concerned, and the mullahs are not even close—if ever—to achieving nuclear capabilities. The Likudists want war because in the turmoil of its aftermath—terrorism on land and sea, the Strait of Hormuz’s closing, and Hezbollah raining rockets against northern Israel—the army and settlers can drive most Palestinians from their lands once and for all.

Netanyahu’s natural constituency is the settlers, those ultra-Orthodox maniacs who claim the West Bank as their own and see Arabs not unlike the way the Nazis considered the Jews. The settlers find nothing wrong with brutally controlling another people against their will. Graffiti in their streets demonstrates their hidden dreams: “No Arabs no Gentiles.”

Yes, we have come to this. The Adelsons of this world are telling American lawmakers and the media how and what to think and do. Netanyahu began as a marketing man, a huckster, and he knows exactly which buttons to push where Americans are concerned. He is the ultimate con man who will lead us to Armageddon.

Image of Israel courtesy of Shutterstock