Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1997, Page 138

Editor's Essays, Explications, Explanations and Expletives

Family Secrets

Our maternal grandmother was the genealogist in the family and it started when she, a Canadian who had followed her young husband across the river to Detroit, decided to join the Daughters of the American Revolution.

She had a cool badge with little attached metal bars, each bearing the name of an ancestor who had fought in the Revolutionary War. She wore it to national conventions in Washington, DC and she used to drag my teenaged mother, whom she'd made a life member, along, perhaps because there were twice as many bars on my mother's badge. When my mother married a young man from California, my grandmother disappeared into her genealogy books for a day or two and emerged smiling. Not much money, but lots and lots of Revolutionary War grunts. I remember her spreading her arms wide like a mendacious fisherman as she told me that when I grew up and joined the Sons of the American Revolution I would have a badge "this long."

However, my mother had inherited a recessive Unitarian gene lurking all along in her father's DNA, and the DAR wasn't egalitarian enough for her tastes. My father wasn't much of a joiner, and on my 17th birthday I went off to my own wars.

So my grandmother's vision of her gangly grandson clanking around Washington, DC wearing a string of little metal names almost as long as he was never materialized. But since none of the names on those little bars were on the Mayflower passenger list, I always wondered how in the world did all my folks get over here from over there? Then, recently, I stumbled across the shocking truth.

But, enough chitchat. On to business. If there's space at the end of the column we'll return to the family secret. And if there isn't, well, it's none of your business anyway.

Pro-Israel McCarthyism

In our last issue we said we had planned to begin a new series, "Pro-Israel McCarthyism," with some of our own experiences. But then the very thugs we were going to complain about burned down Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky's house in Ottawa, and that seemed like hotter news than anything we had to offer. So we printed it instead, and asked our readers to send in their own first-hand experiences with the pro-Israel bookburners, and that we would protect the writers' anonymity if they wished.

That seemed to touch a nerve. In this issue we have five articles by separate authors under the heading "Bookburners and Their Victims: First-Hand Accounts of Pro-Israel McCarthyism," and none of the writers requested anonymity (although one asked us to fuzz up a present place of residence). One of these actually was a long-promised "Seeing the Light" submission, but it fit into the new genre just as well. So we put it there. The fact is, it took us 16 years to accumulate the 74 articles, at no more than one per issue, that we brought out last May in our book, Seeing the Light: Personal Encounters With the Middle East and Islam.

We don't want to wait that long to publish a book of personal experiences with the banning of free speech about the Middle East, and retaliation against those who insist on exercising it. So we'll publish articles on that subject as fast as they come in. In fact, at the last minute we laid on 16 extra pages in this issue just to accommodate everything along this line already on hand.

People are grabbing up the Seeing the Light book so fast, we're not sure it will last past Christmas. And we're not sure when we'll have the floos (that's "dinero" to readers who only speak American) to bring out a second edition. But for sure we're going all out now to produce a book with dozens of authors about the one subject to which the First Amendment doesn't apply, and how the media the Bill of Rights was supposed to protect have succeeded in circumventing it, and how they control not only the dialogue but even the vocabulary.

For example, Israelis kill large numbers of civilians in Palestine and Lebanon, but it's absolutely okay because it's only done in the course of "crowd control, reprisals, retaliation, and preventative and pre-emptive actions." By contrast, although far fewer Israeli civilians have been killed, it's grossly impermissible because when Israelis die, it's terrorism.

That therefore justifies confiscating Arab lands, demolishing their houses, blockading their towns and villages so that no one can go to work or school and even sick children and old people can't be transported to hospitals, and torturing their young men and then filling Israeli prisons with them without lodging charges or holding trials.

So get this straight if you want to be published in the U.S. media: Dropping a cluster bomb, which kills everyone in an area the size of a football field, on a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon is okay, and the pilots who do it are heroes. Setting off a suicide bomb in a marketplace isn't okay, and since the people who did it are beyond human vengeance, reprisals against their whole nation are justified.

People who say otherwise are "anti-Semites." If they teach, they should lose tenure. If they write for a periodical, they should be fired. And woe to the librarian who doesn't burn any books or magazines containing articles by such people.

We could go on explaining these elementary rules for survival in American intellectual life, but we'll let our contributing authors do it for us in the five articles.

The Case Against AIPAC

The most asked question this month was "how do I get copies of The Link issue on U.S. taxpayer aid to Israel?" For the answer, see the "Publishers' Page" on the back of this one. The second-most asked question was "how's the case against AIPAC going?" There's little to add to what we wrote in this space last month except that the Supreme Court is supposed to hear it this fall, and the decision will be announced in the spring. Meanwhile you may want to read about the California case against B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League on p. 57 of this issue.

How You Can Help

Though we received some help for the lawyers handling the AIPAC case in response to the urgent appeal in this space last month, we need a lot more. If you can, make your check payable to "The Campaign for a Sound American Foreign Policy." We'll credit you in our January listing of the 1997 AET Angels' Choir.

But remember that those contributions are not tax-exempt. If you plan to deduct contributions you send our way from your 1997 income tax, make them to the AET Library Endowment (Federal ID #52-1460362) and we'll use them to get this magazine and our library book packets into as many libraries as possible.

Or, if you can help do that yourself (and we'd appreciate it if you would), explain to the librarians in your area that if they subscribe directly to the Washington Report, they can have our 1997 library donation package (list value $150) at no additional charge for the asking. On the other hand, if you donate a subscription to them (at $20), or they subscribe through a service, then they only get the library package if you buy it for them, or they buy it themselves, at $20. (Or call Delinda Hanley at 1-800-368-5788 who can explain all this better.)

All the money you spend on gift subscriptions for anyone is credited to your 1997 total in the Angels' Choir, which will be listed twice more after this issue. We hope that you'll give subscriptions to the Washington Report to as many friends as possible this Christmas. That, in turn, would be the greatest gift you could give to us.

And About that Family Secret

Although we're of Massachusetts stock, we never could quite relate to the tidy homes, orderly offices, and carefully scheduled lives we're sure all those blue-blooded descendants of Miles Standish, Patricia Mullens, John Alden and the rest of the Mayflower gang maintain. Recently we learned why. It turns out our people all came over on the Juneflower.