2 Friday, October 31, 1980
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Purely Commentary
Potpourri of Human Concerns for Americans, for
Jewish Communities, Commencing with the Political
Quandaries, Embracing the Anti-Semitic Tendencies
By Philip
Slomovitz
Problems Relating to the Nation's Agonies and the Religious and Human Aspects of a Puzzled Generation
Opinion polls would be most accurate had it not been for the sizable number of those
contacted who have not decided on how to vote on Tuesday s who are listed in the
"Undecided" column. It points to one certain factor in the ranks of those who are judged,
rightly or wrongly, as "the Jewish vote." It emphasizes a basic fact: that the voters
recognize that all the major candidates are supporting Israel with assurances that in the
role of the highest official in the land the security of Israel would be assured. All
candidates speak of an "undivided Jerusalem," none being able to guarantee transfer of
the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Only John Anderson's running-mate, Patrick Lucey, told the convention of the
Zionist Organization of America that he would take the U.S. seat to Jerusalem.
Voters are not influenced, however, by that alone. They are puzzled by the religious
issue that has been injected by extremists. They want to know about the sanctity of the
American Separation of Church and State principle. They would like to be certain about
many foreign policy advocacies, the economic problems, the social issues.
Some would even like to know whether the outrages experienced in France could
have an effect on American life, since the neo-Nazis and the KKK have rejuvenated, and
whether even a single member of this nation's government could ever condone what is
happening in France, how the Arabs react to PLO and whether the U.S. will ever
countenance PLO and the terrorist barbarians.
There is also the inexcusable propagandizing of the view that this is a Christian
nation. No American government ever gave credence to such a view and the voter has a
right to ask whether any one would, in the future, dare encourage it.
* * *
•
This Country Christologically Destined?
This pre-election at random potpourri must, therefore, begin with the following
item:
In a New York Times Op-Ed Page essay entitled "A Christian America," Harry
Potter, who heads "Catholics for Christian Political Action," advanced his views as
follows:
Every really serious political issue is moral. When Humberto Cardinal
Medeiros urged voters in Massachusetts to elect pro-life candidates he was
not speaking as a politician. He spoke as the quintessential moralist, a man
of religion. It is for a man of religion to instruct us morally even as it is for a
man of politics to seek a public order annealed to the highest conception of
the public good: a society of free men bent on doing their duty. That would
be a Christian society.
What about men, Christian and otherwise, who are unmindful of their
duty? What about the non-Christians in Christian society? Would they be
oppressed? It is the rule of the secularist that is oppressive. The secularist
has no vision of anything beyond the here and now. He does not believe in
eternal life, or at least he acts as if he does not. The here and the now are all
he has. So his compulsion is to make an imperfect world perfect.'To do it he
regulates, controls, manipulates, dictates and, in the end, tyrannizes.
Tyranny is a substitute for government. There is nothing that prevents our
having a tyranny, except the growing awareness of the nation's Christians
that it is dangerous for their values, beliefs, principles and morals to be
disregarded in the political process and in the formulation of public policy.
So they are beginning to weigh candidates and issues in the light of their
faith.
Commentators disturbed by this development are not consistent. They
argue that "private" moral views inspired by religious beliefs should not
infuse public actions, but they never arguethat persons who ,believe in
nothing beyond themselves and their ability to perfect the world should fail
to vote their views.
Men who believe in nothing beyond themselves and their ability to per-
fect the world are liberals by definition. It was inevitable that Christians
should be in conflict with them. That is not because Christians necessarily
are conservatives, but because liberalism is a sin.
If the voters were to be asked to act on such a viewpoint as a theme for America, how
would they react? Could traditional Americanism condone it? Which of the Christian
elements would under such a rule ask for domination? Would it create ghettos for those
denying the idea and would they be sheared of citizenship?
What a marvelous land to live in! That such an idea can be advocated! Yet, the fact
that candidates for President speak in terms of being "Born Again Christians" may be
cause for concern. In the top ranks there is an almost unanimous tendency towards such
claim to religious sanctimony, and the concern therefore is not unwarranted.
* * *
The Ugly Side of the French Connection ,
The French are not alone in their embarrassment over what had happened there.
Why wouldn't people love the wonderful people of France, the dictum Egalite, Equalite,
Fraternite? Wasn't it also a guideline for the American democratic aims?
Yet, the anti-Semites there have not ended their barbarities. They have been
renewed. The government is guilty of indifference.
There are the defenders. They don't have much leg to stand on.
The French government, Giscard d'Estaing himself, has condemned the most
recent outrages. Yet there is a connection, a background, that cannot be ignored.
An analysis of the French connection prepared by the Conference of Presidents of
Major American Jewish Organizations reminds the world of the experiences that con-
tinue to shock mankind, as follows:
Curiously, none of the many comments about the apparent resurgence
of anti-Semitism in France — and the discovery that the open Hitlerite
FANE movement had penetrated the local police — recalled the last event in
France that had similar international repercussions. The date was Jan. 11,
1977; the event was the release of the notorious PLO terrorist Abu Daoud
by a French magistrate after he had been unwittingly apprehended by
French border police. France's craven surrender to Arab pressure in re-
leasing the PLO killer who had plotted the murder of 11 Israeli Olympic
athletes in Munich in 1972 underscored a French foreign policy that has
since become notorious: to appease, whitewash and ultimately embrace the
PLO; to blame Israel for the turbulence and instability of the Middle East; to
risk global catastrophe by providing nuclear know-how to the radical
government in Baghdad in exchange for Iraqi oil; to countenance terrorism
as an acceptable form of political discourse; and to sabotage the Camp
David peace process.
To the world's protests over the freeing of Abu Daoud, France turned a
deaf ear and a blind eye. That same French contempt for the opinion of
mankind was inherent in Giscard's action in leading the European Eco-
nomic Community in declaring at Venice last June that the PLO should be
"associated" with any final Middle East settlement. Some weeks earlier
French authorities had let it be known that they would like nothing better
than to be the first major Western country to receive PLO chieftain Yasir
Arafat.
Can anyone believe that there is no connection — psychological or
political — between the French kiss that Giscard gave the PLO and the
wave of anti-Semitic attacks that culminated in the synagogue bombing in
the Rue Copernic?
Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler, president of the Union of American
Hebrew Congregations, flew to Paris as the representative of the Confer-
ence of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (which he
headed from 1976 to 1978) to express the solidarity of American Jewry with
the beleagUered Jewish minority of France. In a sermon delivered to mem-
bers of the bombed synagogue, Rabbi Schindler declared:
"We share with you the deep concern that the new Nazis who seek to
destroy Jewish lives may have been encouraged by official laxity and
inattention to the violent nature of the anti-Semitic movement in France.
The government's willingness to accept the terrorist PLO as a legitimate
party in the Middle East political scene must surely have emboldened the
French counterparts of the PLO to engage in the same loathsome tactics.
"A generation ago," Rabbi Schindler continued, "the world learned, at
the cost of tens of millions of lives, that the Jews were only the first victims
of the scourge of Nazism. Let us pray and let us work so that this new Nazi
movement and its PLO partners may be blotted out before another
Holocaust engulfs us all."
A Jewish delegation headed by Howard M. Squadron, the current
chairman of the Conference of Presidents, met with the French Ambas-
sador to the United States, Francois de la Boulez. Mr. Squadron told the
French envoy he was confident France would eliminate the Nazi nest in the
French surete and see to it that those guilty of the cowardly bombing were
caught, tried and punished. But about the French attitude toward the root
of the problem, Mr. Squadron was less sure, particularly in view of the
willingness of French policy-makers to buy the Arabs' propaganda line that
they really do love Jews; it's the Zionists they can't abide. (Last week France
supported an Arab resolution at the International Civil Aviation meeting
that said Jerusalem was "under Arab sovereignty.")
Said Mr. Squadron to the French ambassador: "France must learn, and
the world must learn, that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, that any Jew who
has to deny his relationship to the state of Israel in order to assure his safety
is denying his own identity. To be Jewish is to be part of the Jewish people
everywhere. If the state of Israel is threatened, no Jew anywhere feels
safe."
The Arabs who claim to love Jews while they attack Israelis are deceiv-
ing no one. When they occupied East Jerusalem from 1949 to 1967 and
barred Jews from worshipping at the Western Wall, was that being anti-
Zionist or anti-Semitic? When they destroyed the Jewish quarter and de-
secrated Jewish holy places and razed the tombstones of Jewish sages to
use them in lining latrines, was that anti-Zionist or anti-Semitic?
Prime Minister Begin, in a comment that will surely be pondered by
thoughtful people everywhere, put the issue into sharp perspective when
he said: "The President of France and his government most certainly do not
want outbreaks of anti-Semitism, in France or in other countries. But they
must know that by the propagandathey themselves carry out, aimed con-
sistently against Israel, they are inevitably creating the ground from which
that lethal anti-Semitism sprouts."
The quote is lengthy out of necessity. The truth can not be ignored. How else will the
protest be heard? Will the warnings against the crimes prevent them from becoming
repetitive?
Defenders of the French, those who credit the bigots with a minute role as hatemon-
gers, should also have a platform. Stanley Hoffman, Douglas Dillon Professor of French
Civilization at Harvard University, acts as defender of the French in a New York Times
statement in which he wrote:
First, there is — as Raymond Aron has noted in a remarkable article in
L'Express — no wave of anti-Semitism in the 1930s, the crimes of the col-
laborationist forces under German occupation and those of the Vichy re-
gime have, in a sinister and tragic way, cleansed most of France of anti-
Semitic poisons.
To write, as some have done, that the French" in general were anti-
Semitic during World War II is simply false: while the police all too often
obeyed ghastly orders, much of the population helped and protected
French or foreign Jews (as a child, I was among these). To say that in the '30s
it wasn't clear whether France or Germany would go fascist shows total
ignorance of French history.
In the past 20 years, racism and xenophobia have had a resurgence, but
the victims have usually been North African immigrants, foreign workers
and Arabs (the government's foreign policy may be pro-Arab, but public
feelings have not been any warmer toward Arabs than in the United States).
Even the so-called New Right, a remarkably mushy intellectual amalgam,
has been careful to excommunicate anti-Semitism. And on the far right,
where Jew-baiting used to flourish, there has been a great deal of admira-
tion for Israel's toughness and victories over its Arab foes.
Secondly, the idea that the government's Middle East policy has some-
how encouraged anti-Semitism is preposterous. The French government
has not recognized the PLO. It has endorsed self-determination for the
Palestinians, but also the recognition of Israel by its neighbors and safe
borders as well as international guarantee for Israel. This policy was in-
itiated by de Gaulle, long before the oil embargo of 1973.
The government's criticisms of the Camp David process and of some of
Prime Minister Begin's policies — as Aron has also noted — are shared by
many people who cannot be suspected of anti-Semitism (including Jews in
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