Holocaust Hustler

Dear Editor, It’s about time someone pulled Jerry Boris’ sleazy chain. I’m no fan of Professor Edward S. Herman. Indeed I have had better public debate with him, but to use the scumbag rhetoric Boris uses in his “Not-So-Fast, Eddie” simply demeans Boris himself in the judgment of all serious and fair persons. Boris, by the way, has written that I am an anti-Semite and Nazi for having the temerity to criticize Jews and Israeli foreign policy in an essay I wrote two years ago. He has recently repeated this baseless slander, if he does it again in print, he’d better get himself a good libel lawyer. Intellectual punks seem to fear to no lighter sanctions.
 
His mindless anti-anti-Semitism is evident in his puerile sneering at a man with a distinguished intellectual reputation as “Eddie.” Later, he somehow confuses Herman with the German Ph.D.’s who collaborated with Nazism. And because Norman Podhoretz (with his own very well-known axes to grind) says, “It takes an academic to really get things screwed up,” we are to assume that Herman is such a screw-up. Boris badly needs an introductory course in logic.

“Herman strongly suggests,” Boris goes on—and I do mean goes on, “that the U.S. politicians protect Israel. Yet we only have to consider the hostility of the Bush Administration to Israel in its effort to appease the Arabs.” Since about August 2, thick-headed one. When it has appeared that U.S. foreign policy and Israel strategic interests might not coincide for a while. That proves Herman’s very point: when some American has the temerity to diverge from Israel interests he’s dubbed an Israeli basher. It won’t wash, Mr. Boris. You prove the very opposite of what you intend with your loose cannon logic.
 
“Herman also incorrectly indicates that ‘U.S. editors are sympathetic’ to Israel. To refute this obvious truth, Boris alleges that the Inquirer is anti-Israel. Alleges, midget mind, is not proving. This Narbeth Nincompoop deserves some kind of Logic Chopping Award. If he wants evidence of Pro-Israel bias in the American media, let him start with the Katzenjammer Kids of U.S. journalism. William Safire and A.M. Rosenthal, and work on down. We’re biased in favor of Israel, schmuck, because we love her and want her to survive, but not at the expense of the Palestinians or anyone else that gets in Yitzak Shamir’s way. But that means we have to try all the harder to give the Palestinians a fair shake in the American media, skewed as they have been since Ben Gurion’s days, in favor of the country of the Diaspora.

But Holocaust Hustlers like you don’t understand that, you’d rather score cheap debating points off a man who has done more to reveal the systemic biases of the official American media than anyone else in the world today. His and Noam Chomsky’s content analysis of major American media coverage of the Polish priest’s murder by security forces compared with how they covered up by omitting coverage of the savaging of El Salvador priests and peasants by right-wing U.S. funded fascists is a classic of contemporary press criticism.
 
But I suppose it’s too much to ask you to read anything beyond the agit prop slogans you periodically rearrange in your obsessive letter writing to the press. What we want from the rest of you, to answer your hokey rhetorical question to Professor Herman, is a minimum of civility in political discourse and a cessation of your equating Israel’s passing set of predicaments with world humanism. I’d tell you to go to Tel Aviv to help build Israel with real deeds not phony words like those you dump on Herman and me.
 
But I infer form the shabbiness of your discourse that you’re just a Big Mouth who gets off on sounding off. Israel I fear would be worse off if you migrated there. They’ve already got nutty rabbis who attribute the Holocaust to too many Jews eating pork. Well, on second thought, you might really get along with such an idiot. In any event, Sir, stop bothering your intellectual betters with trash like your letter of December 28. Israel’s got enough real enemies; it doesn’t need stupid “friends” like you.