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Jewish World Review April 14, 2000 /9 Nissan, 5760

Julia Gorin

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The most violent people

http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
THEY MAY PLAY the lamb, hiding behind their fiction novels, "New Yorker" magazines and cultural events calendars. But they are the wolves, the aggressors, the war-makers. Their latest battle is to send Elian Gonzales back to his father, Fidel Castro.

They are the peaceniks, the pro-refugee, pro-choice, anti-gun, anti-capital punishment humanitarians. At first blush, the well-meaners’ position on the Gonzales issue seems riddled with inconsistencies, with inversions of their own principles. Whence, for example, this newfound respect for parental rights? And wherefore this uncharacteristic zeal for deporting refugees?

But it is no more baffling than their support, nay, demand, for the recent war in Yugoslavia on the side of aggressors. Or their moral support for Marxist revolutionaries the world over, who commit terrorist acts but whom they affectionately refer to as "freedom fighters" and "patriots."

It’s not the inconsistencies that are so confounding here. It’s the constant: Violence. Who else could be creative enough to come up with a bumper sticker like "Save a donut: Kill a cop"? Who else could weigh the worth of one life over another, bolstering a hate-crimes bill which imposes harsher penalties depending on who’s assaulted?

Recall, too, the way sympathy for an unborn child elicits their revulsion while death-row inmates elicit their sympathies. Somehow, it is not our place to end life when that life has taken others, but our inalienable right to do so on certain occasions when it hasn’t.

Even their contempt for the Second Amendment finds explanation in similar terms. Without the right to bear arms, only those who intend malice will be left bearing them, leaving the average American citizen as defenseless as a fetus.

According to one such violently enlightened soul with whom I’m acquainted, it is Rupert Murdoch who "should be shot!"

Why?

"Because he publishes things. Awful right-wing things."

Actor Alec Baldwin might have agreed, but he was more concerned with lynching Henry Hyde and his family.

Not unlike once blacklisted Hollywooder Abraham Polonsky who was "hoping someone shoots [Elia Kazan]," at last year’s Oscars. "It would no doubt be a thrill in an otherwise dull evening."

No wonder they’re for gun control: It’s themselves they don’t trust.

No wonder they’re soft on criminals: They identify with them.

On the international front, these people’s ambivalent loyalties have been instrumental in setting up some of the most violent regimes the world has known (Ho Chi Min and Stalin, for starters) as part of a relentless struggle to keep the world’s strongest democracy in its place. For a long time now, these saboteurs have been bent on diminishing the influence of their country, clearing the way for dictatorships, oligarchies, warlords, and religious fundamentalist rule. What intention could be more violent than sabotaging the world’s most committed peacekeeper and effective check on aggression and human rights abuses?

"Send him back to Cuba," was the essence of Hollywood’s head revolutionary Susan Sarandon’s verdict, as expressed in one interview. Could this be the same woman who only a few years ago utilized primetime Oscar airwaves to shame the government for detaining 10,000 HIV-positive Haitian refugees?

Helping these folks in their latest obfuscation of truth and their drive toward a perverse reality is the Department Formerly Known as Justice. Itself the object of an investigation, it nonetheless perches in anticipation, waiting to pounce on its child sacrifice to the Cuba prison.

"The rule of law" is what’s guiding us here, Reno said Thursday, looking as though she’s been dead for a year, held up only by a string which Clinton pulls. "We want to show Castro what kind of country we are," the marionette added.

Since when are we compelled to prove ourselves to totalitarian regimes? (Especially to a tiny island with a stale grudge and a leadership on its last legs.) Perhaps ever since Bill Clinton realized that he hadn’t protested the Vietnam War from enemy shores out of "youthful idealism"; or that he wasn’t too sorry to see some secret technology go China’s way; or maybe it was ever since the Commander-in-Treason secretly admitted to himself that Fidel Castro was his patron saint. Is it an accident that every other week another of the Communist-in-Chief’s appointees is under investigation for breaches of national security?

But let’s not call a spade a spade. Because in Clintonian America, where up is down, black is white, foe is friend, and "is" isn’t, we’ve come around to a way of thinking that is unprecedentedly convoluted. It used to be, there were no rewards for dictatorships without reforms. But Clinton, not unlike the compatibly anti-American U.N., has repeatedly called for the repeal of sanctions against Cuba. Today, democracies bend to dictatorships, and not the other way around.

Keeping Elian here is considered "pandering" to Cuban exiles, but somehow, sending him back isn’t pandering to Castro. Americans are happily going to let their country lose this battle. (They’re just not going to see it that way.) So let’s go ahead and send the boy back into Castro’s clutches, and let’ s get used to losing battles internationally against lesser nations and domestically against our self-loathing fellow Americans.

But if we do surrender Elian, it will be at the hands of a strange and unfamiliar America, one that is at the same time callous and knuckling, with a government run for the most violent people, by the most violent people.

Today a child. Tomorrow the country.



JWR contributor Julia Gorin is a journalist and stand-up comic residing in Manhattan. Send your comments to her by clicking here.

Up

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07/30/98: Kofi Annan's crimes against sensibility
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© 2000, Julia Gorin