Salute to Israel Parade

Last week in the Bagel, and then London here I come. As I write, hundreds of thousands of Jews are marching up 5th Avenue for “Salute to Israel Day.” They have been marching for close to six hours and although not as messy as the Puerto Ricans, they come close in noise and provocation. Looking out from my window I see only blue and white Israeli flags, no stars and stripes whatsoever, and the chants I hear are those of the aggrieved. They want Palestine back! Why waste time with the truth when there’s an angle to promote and a grievance to air? Palestinians should leave the West Bank because these late arrivals said so. Well, folks will say anything nowadays. Gerry Adams just said that the torture and execution by the IRA of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10, was an injustice. (Very big of him.) Leading the parade is the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, a man whose pop-eyed look derives—not from a prostate exam—but from fear of offending Zion. Next week it’s samba and caramba time, but I shall be in dear old London.

“America, I think, was greatly improved thanks to Hitler,” Mary McCarthy once ventured in an interview. She knew what she was talking about. Her circle of intellectuals was enriched by European Jews fleeing the Führer, people like Arthur Koestler—who tried to rape her but failed—Hannah Arendt, Paul Tillich, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein, Arnold Schoenberg, Fernand Léger, and the gruesome Marc Chagall. (I had the bad luck to meet the latter in Cap d’Antibes, and he was as unpleasant as they come.) McCarthy thought American intellectuals were crude, and that the European influx was a civilizing addition. Sartre, Malraux, Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir also paid visits and homage to the victor, Uncle Sam, who back in the 40s was still le chevalier sans peur and sans reproche. No longer.

Those must have been magnificent times to be an American or a friend of America. Koestler and Sidney Hook found a new direction—with CIA money—and began with James Burnham, Raymond Aron, and Hugh Trevor-Roper a concentrated effort to counter Stalinist propaganda. Literary New York turned light-years away from when it fancied itself a Bolshevik Soviet, although Uncle Joe’s crimes were still ten years from being exposed. And what crimes they were, in the tens if not hundreds of millions, yet there are those today who are trying to link Putin to him, as outrageous an accusation as those of wild-eyed Zionists who claim they are the victims of the Palestinians.

When it comes to the Ukraine, I see a man who chooses to kick Ava Gardner out of his bed and invites Hillary Clinton under the sheets. How can anyone, even a Ukrainian, trust the crooks and liars of the EU and believe their siren song, when he has Uncle Vlad with his cheap oil and gas as his next-door neighbor? A know-it-all like Thomas L. Friedman (don’t forget to write the L.) has pompously as well as recently announced that Putin blinked, just as Nikita did back in October 1962. Thomas L. Friedman is full of hot air and many other things I will not go into. The Soviets made a very good deal back in ’62. We took our missiles out of their vulva, Turkey, and they turned back their ships with missiles intended for ours, Cuba. It was a quid pro quo, except that our missiles were entrenched in their silos and ready to launch, whereas the Soviet ones were still on the high seas. So who got the better deal? The Kennedy PR machine, that’s who.