Opinion

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Dry Bones

Editorial

Wave The Wand

Ii

I

ust for once, Jewish cynics,
let's follow the lead of the Arab
world, the president of Iran,
the United Nations General Assembly, a
Georgia peanut farmer, Iraq's martyred
dictator and some high-ranking U.S. State
Department officials. Let's remove Israel
from the Middle East equation and see
how automatically all the ills of the world
are resolved:
• Iran. Former U.S. President Jimmy
Carter and Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad make strange bedfellows. If
Ahmadinejad was not involved in the fall
of the Shah and the subsequent takeover
in 1979 of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, he
certainly was, and is, a cheerleader. And
the hostage affair at the embassy was
Carter's defining, and most embarrassing,
moment.
Iran's policy since the demise of the
Shah has been nationalist Islamic expan-
sionism. It uncaringly slaughtered mil-
lions of its own soldiers during eight
years of human-wave attacks on Saddam
Hussein's Iraq. Iran finances Islamic ter-
rorists around the world, including attacks
on U.S. embassies, consulates, diplomats
and soldiers. Remove Israel from the Iran
equation and none of Iran's horrendous
internal and external history during the
last 30 years would change.

Don't be deceived: Iran's quest for nucle-
ar power is not aimed solely at little Israel.
• Iraq. If Israel's air force hadn't surgi-
cally removed the Osirak nuclear reactor
in 1981, the U.S. would have had to do it.
Saddam, like Ahmadinejad, used Israel as
a favorite whipping boy while keeping his
thumb on Iraqi Shiites — fellow Muslims,
of course — and the Kurds. Now that
Uncle Sam has removed Saddam, the reli-
gious warfare between Shiites and Sunnis
— Muslims all — has been a bloodbath
of historic proportions. Tell us again how
removing Israel would halt the bloodshed.
• Syria and Lebanon. Israel's neigh-
bors to the north have a long history
of entangled, troubled relations. Syria,
under father-and-son despots Hafez and
Bashar al-Assad, has meddled in internal
Lebanese affairs for the same reason that
Syria hates Israel: Its vision of "Greater
Syria" encompasses both Lebanon and
Israel.
Syria's co-sponsorship of Hezbollah
terrorists, smuggling of Iranian arms and
money and the murder of Lebanese politi-
cians only furthers its grand plan. Having
Israel on its southern border might be the
only counter-balance Lebanon has.
• Palestine. There is no "Palestine"
you say? Right, and there may never be. If
the Jews had jumped into the sea rather

WELCOMED NAZIS,
ELECTED FASCISTS,
SPREAD COMMU-
NISM

LATIN AMERICA
HOSTED THE
SPANISH INQUI-
SITION

than win their war for
independence in 1948,
there would have been
no Palestinian refugees
and everything would
have been dandy, cor-
rect?
el
Jordan (West
AP7
Palestine?) controlled
the West Bank from
1948 to 1967. It did
AND NOW IS
SO HOW DID THEY
not allow the creation
of a Palestinian state
CHEERING IRANIAN
GET SUCH A REPU-
there. The terrorist
PRESIDENT AHMA-
TATION FOR BEING
Black September got
DINESAD.
FUN-LOVING?
its name from the 1970
war between Jordan's
Hashemite minority
and the Palestinian
majority, when King
Hussein defeated ter-
ror godfather Yasser
Arafat and exported
him and his henchmen
bryBonesBlog.com
to Beirut.
Then cometh the
Lebanese civil war
(East Palestine?) disappear certainly will
between Muslims and Christians. Now
solve all these issues! l I
cometh the Palestinian civil war between
Sunni Hamas and secular Fatah — self-
E-mail letters of no more than 150 words to:
serving terrorists all.
letters@thejewishnews.com .
Waving a magic wand to make Israel

k

Reality Check

Play Me A Show Tune

W

hen someone tells me that
they don't like musicals, I
immediately suspect that
they're trying to divert my attention so
they can knock me down and steal my
wallet.
Who cannot like musicals? It's like say-
ing,"You can keep your Dover sole; give
me Mrs. Paul's fish sticks any day of the
week."
When they are done well (and admit-
tedly that is an increasingly rare event),
musicals send you away with the sense
that things have been set right and this is
a big, wide, wonderful world, after all.
Dreamgirls did that for me on many
levels. For those of us who can remem-
ber, it was a trip back to the glory days
of Motown. More than that, it was a time
when we believed that Detroit would
actually make it work and the music was
emblematic of a full-blown civic and cul-
tural awakening.
Motown acts sharpened their skills at

places like the Twenty Grand Lounge and
their performances drew a substantial
white audience. The daily papers were
slow to understand what was happening,
but once they did they joined the celebra-
tion with big Sunday magazine articles. I
even wrote one or two of them.
After 1967, of course, the triumphant
voyage turned into the Titanic, drown-
ing all such dreams. But for a little while,
it seemed the story would have a better
closing number.
The movie itself, as those who have
seen it already know, featured one of
those moments that wipe you out. The
performance of "And I Am Telling You I'm
Not Going" was a show stopper, just as it
was on the stage. People applauded the
screen. It was also an example of what
makes musicals great.
Detractors say it isn't realistic for
people to break into song or poetry to
express their deepest thoughts. But that
is what great theater does — from the

Greek chorus to
Shakespeare's
soliloquies to a
Puccini aria to the
dream and mem-
ory interludes
that burst into
the middle of an
otherwise realistic
drama.
Some emotions
are simply too
profound for simple dialogue and prose.
That's why so many people insist on recit-
ing verse at bar mitzvahs, weddings and
funerals. The occasion demands it. The
sequence in Dreamgirls was proof of
that.
That same week, I also watched an
old musical on TV. Roberta, which
dates from 1935, was shot in black and
white. The film is set in the studio of a
Paris couturier and was as much a fash-
ion show as a musical; a look at what

was regarded as just too utterly utterly
back then. But how it must have lifted
the spirits of its audience in that bleak
Depression year.
There was so much more. The Jerome
Kern score, the Astaire-Rogers magic, the
beautiful Irene Dunne as the lead. She is
not as well remembered as many of the
other leading ladies of the 1930s, but in
this film she is stunning. When she sings
"Lovely To Look At" at the finale, she
made you want to inhabit that world.
And, of course when Fred and Ginger
go into "I Won't Dance it is the cream.
I have a special weakness for old musi-
cals like this, where everybody dances
at the end, all problems are resolved and
social consciousness stays out of the way.
After 70 years, it still holds up. I
guess that means it must have been art.
Sometimes it still is. II

George Cantor's e-mail address is

gcantor614@aoLcom.

IN

January 25 • 2007

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