Martin Indyk: A Commentary on Post-Modern Education*

Prof. Paul Eidelberg

To avoid misunderstanding, I must say at the outset that I am not interested in Martin Indyk per se, if only because I do not regard him as worthy of my attention. But since pundits take Indyk seriously, perhaps they may be enlightened if I use him to reveal the basic cause of Israel’s and America’s malaise. Hence, a brief bio of Indyk is necessary, for which Wikipedia will suffice.

Indyk was born in 1951 to a Jewish family in England, but grew up and was educated in Australia. He graduated from the University of Sydney in 1972 and received a PhD in international relations from the Australian National University in 1977. He immigrated to the United States and later gained American citizenship in 1993.

He has taught at the Middle East Institute at Columbia University and at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. He also served as special assistant to U.S. President Bill Clinton (whose administration, according to military theorist and former U.S. Army Colonel Ralph Peters, was “the most cowardly administration in history,” having failed to react vigorously to terrorist attacks on U.S. forces abroad, a failure leading to 9/11.)

Returning to Clinton adviser Martin Indyk, he also served as senior director of Near East and South Asian Affairs at the United States National Security Council. While at the NSC, he served as principal adviser to the President and the National Security Advisor on Arab-Israeli issues, Iraq, Iran, and South Asia. He served two stints as U.S. Ambassador to Israel, from April 1995 to September 1997 and from January 2000 to July 2001.

Writing in the New York Times, and interviewed by Israel Army Radio on April 22, Indyk blamed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the rift with the Obama administration. He went so far as to say “Israel has to adjust its policy to the interests of the United States.” Since I am anything but a fan of Netanyahu, this report should not be deemed a defense of Bibi.

Notwithstanding Indyk’s education and his experience in the American executive department, he appears abysmally ignorant of facts documented in American sources and confirmed by U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye and former Chief of U.S Air Force Intelligence George Keegan that dollar for dollar, Israel gives more to the U.S. than the U.S. gives to Israel—to say nothing of the overt and covert U.S. military aid to Israel’s enemies, including the Palestinian Authority.

Like his Washington handlers, Indyk has long advocated a Palestinian state, even though one does not require military expertise to arrive at a former U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff conclusion that such a state would endanger Israel’s existence. This is why Netanyahu insists that an Arab Palestinian state must be demilitarized and barred from forming alliances with any Arab regime.

Never mind that no Palestinian leader would survive a day if he accepted such terms. Consider only the fact that Indyk wants Israel to negotiate with the PA, whose mentality and behavior have been shaped by Islamic scriptures permeated by murderous hatred of “infidels,” especially Jews. Hence, I am not impressed by Indyk’s academic credentials and experience in the Clinton government, no more than George Orwell was impressed by the British intelligentsia of the 1930s which held posts in the Chamberlain government.

When Indyk served as Clinton’s ambassador to Israel, Israeli conservatives called him a “court Jew.” Such labels are not helpful. We know court Jews in America bend over backwards to avoid the canard of “dual loyalty.” Israel pays a price for this “political correctness.”

For a Democrat like Clinton, whose presidential campaign funding depended very much on Jewish donations, his appointment of Indyk was “religiously” as well as “politically” correct. And since Yasser Arafat was reportedly the most frequent foreign guest at the Clinton White House, Indyk’s endorsement of a Palestinian state made him a virtual ally of Arafat.

But what is “political correctness” if not a label descriptive of someone who willfully avoids taking a candid position on controversial political issues? To put it plainly, “political correctness” is a euphemism to describe a person lacking intellectual integrity or moral courage. But this label short-circuits serious thought about the factors that have shaped Indyk’s mentality.

Would it be proper to regard him simply as ignorant of the bellicose and mendacious nature of Arab-Islamic culture? But how is this possible given his fields of study at various universities? Can it be that his mentors were dominated by moral or multicultural relativism—the same doctrine that has influenced Barack Obama?

Like other “politically correct” democrats, Indyk tends to “mirror image”—sees Arabs as he sees him own peace-loving face in a mirror. This may explain his inability to take the bellicose nature of Arab-Islamic culture seriously. Perhaps he imbibed the academic doctrine of “conflict resolution,” which reinforces the natural bent of diplomats—a doctrine that ignores the enormity of evil in the world? There are legions of such people in academia—especially at Columbia and Tel Aviv universities, where moral relativism and pacifism flourish.

This might explain why Indyk ignored Arafat’s remark that “peace for us means the destruction of Israel.” It might also explain why a person tainted by multicultural relativism cannot factor into his evaluation of Islam the significance of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s vow to “wipe Israel off the map,” even though that Muslim leader sent tens of thousands of Iranian children to walk across and thereby explode Iraqi minefields in the Iraqi-Iranian war. (By the way, Ahmadinejad he was a recent guest of Columbia University!)

Hence, it is reckless folly to dismiss Ahmadinejad’s maledictions as mere rhetoric, as smug academics teach their students. The genocidal imprecations of Arabs and Muslims vis-a-vis Israel and America underlie what Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington have called the “clash of civilizations"—which means, to any person unaffected by academic obscurantism: It’s either them or us.” Does Indyk deem these renowned scholars ignoramuses or “extremists”?

Even more important on a practical level than Lewis and Huntington is Ralph Peters mentioned earlier. In two books, Fighting for the Future and Beyond Terror, Peters cautions us not to negotiate with terrorists—and the Palestinian Authority is nothing if it not a terrorist organization bent on Israel’s annihilation. I assume the learned Mr. Indyk has read the PA’s genocidal charter. If so, he seems to construe it as mere rhetoric for the masses.

Let me therefore urge him to study the extraordinary erudition and worldwide experience of Michael Radu, especially Radu’s recent book Europe's Ghost: Tolerance, Jihadism, and the Crisis of the West. What’s left of Europe is a “ghost”—nations disembodied by the multicultural relativism of their ruling elites (academics and politicians, judges and journalists). No wonder Barack Obama has been called an “empty suit.”

Of course, my remarks will have no impact on those who take civilization for granted. Like overindulged children, our decision makers and diplomats do not really understand—because they have not been taught to understand—how much hard work and stamina, how much self-sacrifice and heroism, are required in each generation to defend civilization against its enemies. Read Lee Harris to learn why. Or think of how much it cost in blood and treasure to save Europe from barbarism in the wars of the last century—a barbarism no less monstrous than that promised by totalitarian Islam.

Perhaps Ralph Peters, Michael Radu, and Lee Harris are beyond Mr. Indyk’s limited comprehension. I doubt men of their “politically incorrect” views are required reading at Columbia and Tel Aviv universities. I wonder if any academic today—despite all the drivel about academic freedom—can remain at his post if he were to explain, in scholarly terms, using Islamic documents, why it is futile and fatal to negotiate with the self-professed enemies of Israel and America, be they Fatah Palestinians or Iranian mullahs.

Since Martin Indyk surely does not want America and Israel to become mere “ghosts,” I wonder what he would say after reading Raymond Ibraham’s essay on the Islamic art of dissimulation, “taqiyya,” a military doctrine best revealed by Ibrahim in the Winter 2010 edition of the Middle East Quarterly (http://www.meforum.org/2538/taqiyya-islam-rules-of-war).

Some readers may accuse me of arrogance by criticizing a man of Indyk’s academic and governmental background. But I feel obliged to do so not because I am a former officer in the U.S. Air Force who studied under Leo Strauss, a classical political scientist without equal in the twentieth century. No: you don’t need to be a soldier or a scholar to discern the enormity of evil confronting America and Israel. So I am not impressed by America’s erstwhile ambassador to Israel. Indeed, he reminds me of Nietzsche’s remark about German intellectuals: “great learning and great stupidity often go well together under the same hat.”

____________________
*Edited transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, 26 April 2010,

Understanding the Jewish Psyche

Excerpts from Echoes of the Holocaust

by Rebecca Bynum

A Review of Jihad and Genocide

by Richard L. Rubenstein

. . . In addition to being a student of history, Rubenstein is also a student of psychology. He doesn’t write history in terms of disembodied historic forces playing upon hapless individuals. His history is driven by men of flesh and blood whose actions are psychologically conditioned by their worldview and experience.

. . . . The most poignant aspects of Rubenstein’s body of work concerns the meek acceptance of the Jews of their fate at the hands of the Nazis and not only acceptance, but active collaboration in some cases, born of the denial of reality coupled with the hope for the survival of a remnant.

In The Cunning of History, he writes:
One of the elements conditioning the compliant Jewish response to the process of extermination was their own history. The last time Jews had taken up arms against an enemy was during the Judeo-Roman Wars of 66-70 C. E. and 131-35 C.E. On both occasions, they fought valiantly and lost disastrously. Those who during the first Judeo-Roman was had counseled submission and surrender were installed by the victors as the religious and political leaders of the Jewish people. The religious leaders of the European diaspora for almost two thousand years were the spiritual heirs of the Pharisees and rabbis who rose to political and religious dominance only after they had been selected by the Romans as their "loyal and non-seditious agents." Thus, diaspora Judaism began in the aftermath of catastrophic military defeat and survived by developing a culture of surrender and submission in consequence of that defeat. Until the bloody wars with the Romans, the Jews had been a violent, troublesome, rebellious nation. Their transformation from a warrior people of the sword into a submissive people of the book led by plebian scribes and scholars took several generations. By the year 200 C.E., Jewish character had undergone one of the most radical psychological and cultural transformations in history. Rabbinic Judaism is the result of that transformation. It shaped Jewish character and conditioned Jewish responses in the diaspora for two thousand years. Long after Western Jews were secularized and considered themselves "emancipated" from their ancient traditions, they continued as an organized community to respond to overlords as had those who surrendered to the Romans. No matter how grave the provocation, the Jewish Community instinctively avoided violent response. They sought to avert hostile action by bribery, petitions for mercy, or appeals to the religious or moral sentiments of their adversaries. [2]

That is why during the Holocaust the Germans were able to incorporate the existing Jewish leadership and organizations into their bureaucracy and thereby to direct Jews to cooperate in their own extermination.

In the Warsaw Ghetto and in Lodz, Poland, the Jewish council, or Judenrat, did not resist German directives even when the Germans demanded the "selection" of 10,000 Jews a day for deportation. Jewish bureaucrats made the selection; Jewish police rounded up the victims. [3]

When resistance was finally organized in the Warsaw Ghetto, they were forced to shoot the leader of the Jewish police along with several others in order to overthrow and replace the existing Jewish Council. Regarding Europe today, at a time of sharply increasing antisemitic attacks and a growing atmosphere of persecution, it is hard to discern any organized and active Jewish resistance. We see instead an emphasis on "interfaith dialogue" along with increased emigration from Europe on the part of young Jews who see the writing on the wall for their children. Last year during Israel's brief war in Gaza, a small demonstration in Malmo, Sweden in favor of Israel was attacked by a screaming mob of Arabs and Swedish leftists, who threw bottles and firecrackers as the police passively looked on and did nothing. The mayor, Ilmar Reepalu, insisted to The Sunday Telegraph that he was opposed to anti-Semitism, but added: "I believe these are anti-Israel attacks, connected to the war in Gaza. We want Malmo to be cosmopolitan and safe for everybody and we have taken action. I have started a dialogue forum. There haven't been any attacks on Jewish people, and if Jews from the city want to move to Israel that is not a matter for Malmo. [4]

Meanwhile, Malmo’s synagogue employs full time security guards along with rocket-proof glass for the windows, and the Jewish kindergarten is equipped with thick steel doors. This pattern is repeating all over Europe and Great Britain.And even after the Holocaust and in the face of the most strident genocidal rhetoric, the denial on the part of both Jewish organizations and secular Western governments continues.

Read the whole thing!

Lots More There

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/58633/sec_id/58633


[2] Rubenstein, Richard L., The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future (Perennial, an imprint of Harper Collins, 1975, reprint 2001) pg. 70
[3] Ibid. pg. 74
[4] Meo, Nick “Jews leave Swedish city after sharp rise an Anti-Semitic hate crimes” The Sunday Telegraph Feb. 21, 2010

Are you a "Good" Jew or a "Bad" Jew?

Subject: I am a bad Jew (as defined here)

This was written by Rami Kaminski, MD, founder and director of the Institute for Integrative Psychiatry in New York City--from Prof Paul Eidelberg:


For centuries, we lived in Berdichev.

In the brutal Ukrainian winter of 1941, SS soldiers arrived there and rounded up eighty-seven members of my family – babies, young adults, octogenarians – stripped them naked, marched them to a nearby ditch, and executed them. Their lifeless bodies fell silently into a mass grave.

Like most Jews in Europe, my family "cooperated" with the Final Solution. They did not resist or fight back.

Six million Jews were slaughtered in a period of four years. They received little sympathy while they were still alive and hunted down like animals.

There was no public outcry because the Holocaust fit the world's narrative for Jews during the past 2000 years: a people destined to be persecuted and slaughtered.

During their two millennial in the Diaspora, Jews were not known to resist. There are few recorded instances in which Jews turned against their host nations or retaliated against their murderers.

Instead, the survivors – if there were any – were expelled or left for another place. The murdered were regarded as "good" Jews. They accepted their fate helplessly, without resistance.

This narrative of the Jews has played out on the historical stage with boring monotony: Jews get killed because they are Jews. Nothing novel about it.

After the Holocaust, however, the world, disgusted by this particularly ghoulish period of history, accorded some sympathy for the Jews.

Media commentary about the ongoing Gaza War reveals the world has now reverted to its pre-Holocaust perspective.

Today, the only good Jew is a powerless Jew willing to become a dead one.

The Zionist Revolution is to blame. It changed everything. Jews re-created their own country. The Arabs attacked the new Jewish state the day after independence and promised to complete Hitler's genocide. In succeeding decades, the Arabs attacked again and again.

Strangely, the Jews, many of them refugees from Arab nations, adopted a surprising, new tactic: they fought back.

With Zionism, the Jews stubbornly refused to follow the centuries-old script. They refuse to be killed without resistance. As a result, the world has become increasingly enraged at their impertinence.

The recent events in Gaza and Mumbai make this plain.

In 2005, Israel eliminated all Jewish presence in Gaza making it "Jud[enrein]," and handed it over to the Palestinians.

Left behind were synagogues and thriving green houses. The Arabs looted and destroyed them literally the day after Israel 's withdrawal was complete.

Where these structures once stood, the Palestinians built military bases and installed rocket launchers to shell Israeli civilians.

To date, some 7,000 missiles have fallen on Israeli cities and towns, killing and maiming dozens, and sowing widespread terror.

Medical studies reveal nearly all Jewish children in the communities bordering Gaza suffer from serious, trauma-induced illness.

The Gazan Palestinians then elected Hamas to lead them. Hamas proceeded to kill or imprison their political rivals, and its leaders, true to the Hamas charter, were unabashed in clearly stating their aims: they will not stop until they achieve their Final Solution, kill all the Jews, take over the land of Israel, and establish a theocracy governed by Islamic law.

As killing Jews for being Jews has been a national sport for centuries, Islamic militants are justified in believing they are merely fulfilling historical tradition in Argentina, India and Gaza. Surely the Jews in Mumbai did not occupy Gaza. They were tortured and killed just for being Jews. And predictably, in the eyes of the world, they immediately became good Jews, just like my murdered family in Bertishev.

Good Jews would wait until Hamas has weapons enabling its members to achieve their ultimate goal of absolute mass murder. Those enraged by Israel 's defensive military action insist Hamas uses only "crude" rockets, as if Qassams were BB guns, and military inferiority were somehow equivalent with moral superiority.

In fact, Hamas now has Iranian-supplied Grad missiles which have landed on Be'er Sheva and the outskirts of Tel Aviv.

Westerners have had only sporadic exposure to the indiscriminate killing in the name of "holy war" which Israel has lived with for years. Memories of 9-11, Madrid, and London have dimmed.

This is not because the Islamic militants made a careful choice of weapons. They simply have not yet acquired nuclear bombs. Once they do, the West will develop a less detached view about the Islamics' professed intentions for the "infidels."

The only enlightened people in the civilized world who actually get it are the Israelis. They've not had time for detached philosophical pondering. They've been too busy confronting the reality of Islamic fundamentalism.

Soon, Iran will have nuclear weapons. It will give them to Hezbollah and Hamas. Today, Jews must take a position: either be "good" Jews willing to be slaughtered without resistance, or be "bad" Jews who defend themselves at the cost of being pariahs of our enlightened world.

Good Jews would wait for another six million to be murdered, and pick up to leave for another country to start the cycle again. The bad ones refuse to go calmly into the ditch.

I confess: I'm a bad Jew.

What are you?

American Jews and Israel

(an overheard conversation)

DG: Rahm Emanuel reportedly said, “I’ve had it with Israel.” I think a lot of Jews now feel that way. They’re tired of worrying about Israel, unendingly, from crisis to crisis . The Palestinians are the heroes of our victim-adoring age; accordingly, many liberal Jews have come to believe the Palestinian “Nakba” revision, the lies that turned a miracle into another Jewish blood libel.

But whatever their politics, modern Jews have little sense of history. I speak about the ‘48 war, and the lies about it that are now believed by too many Jews. For most U.S. Jews, the ‘48 war is an old and perhaps boring story. They saw “Exodus”; they don’t want to see it again. They don’t realize that history is the present, and that [post-Zionist] revisionist history is central to the attack on contemporary Israel. It is one of the manifold attempts to bring it down, first morally and then physically.

JP: Did you stay in touch with others from Aliyah Bet?

DG: Yes. I was one of the founders of the now defunct American Veterans of Israel organization. I held office and attended their reunions in Israel and the States. But that was then. Most of us are dead now, and I haven’t had a drink with an old shipmate in years.

Bob Levitan, our captain, participated indirectly in the breakout from Acco. With his Leica, he took ID-type photos of all the Irgun and Lehi prisoners, and these were later used in the phony ID cards issued to them prior to their escape.

JP: What similarities, if any, do you see between American Jewish attitudes in the 1930s and 1940s and today?

DG: In the 1930s and ’40s, American Jews sanctified FDR. Now they are equally loyal to Obama. Despite their growing awareness of the Holocaust, during World War II American Jews for the most part stayed silent – very few mass protests and very little covert action. “FDR will save the Jews.”

My fear is that too many contemporary Jews are preparing to repeat this pattern. They will not embarrass the great and good Obama with their selfish concerns for what they view as a victimizing country – Israel – that no longer deserves their loyalty. Too many will follow Obama’s lead and stay silent while Israel is weakened or even destroyed.

(not really an overheard conversation)

from
ISRAEL’S REBIRTH ‘A BORING STORY’ TO U.S. JEWS.
AN INTERVIEW WITH AMERICAN ZIONIST HERO DR. DAVID GUTMANN
JewishPress.com Posted Mar 29 2010

http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler/2010/03/29/dr-david-gutmann-an-american-zionist-hero/?singlepage=true

Dr. David Gutmann: An American-Zionist Hero
Phyllis Chesler
Chesler Chronicles

via Solomonia

Read the whole thing . . . Click here

What Needs Saying (What Bibi Should Say)

Paul Eidelberg

In response to the infamous Goldstone Report, Israel’s Prime Minister should quote that marvelous poet and literary critic Matthew Arnold who wrote: “As long as the world lasts, all who want to make progress in righteousness will come to Israel for inspiration…”

In response to European anti-Semitism, Prime Minister Netanyahu—with Genesis 12:1-3 in mind—might quote South African author Olive Schreiner: “The study of history of Europe during the past centuries teaches us one uniform lesson: That the nations which received and in any way dealt fairly with the Jew have prospered; and that the nations that have tortured and oppressed him have written out their own curse.”

Finally, how would you feel if you heard Mr. Netanyahu quote British historian and statesman Thomas B. Macaulay who declared, in a debate in 1833 in the British House of Commons over whether Jews should have their legal and political disabilities removed by law:

In the infancy of civilization, when our island was as savage as New Guinea, when letters and arts were still unknown in Athens, when scarcely a thatched hut stood on what was afterwards the site of Rome, this condemned people had their fenced cities and cedar palaces, their splendid temple ... their schools of sacred learning, their great statesmen and soldiers, their natural philosophers, their historians and poets.

Ah, if only Mr. Netanyahu—when speaking of Jerusalem—had the wit to quote Macaulay in the presence of Barack Obama!