Opinion Maker

TURNING JERUSALEM INTO “NEW MIAMI BEACH”

“IF ONLY THE PALESTINIANS COULD BE TAUGHT TO COOK AND CLEAN”

By Gordon Duff

The onslaught from the south, started by the Cubans escaping Castro, destroyed 7 decades of Jewish tradition in South Florida, centered around the holy city of Miami Beach.  The grand traditions, Arthur Godfrey, Yiddish Theatre, delicatessens, synagogues, Temple House, all gone, disappear as “Little Jerusalem” or as it was sometimes known as, Shtetl by the Sea sunk under waves of immigration.  Retirement for tens of thousands, vacations for more, maybe millions, a community that eventually spread as far north as Ft. Pierce and Vero Beach came to represent the real homeland of the Jews as much as Brooklyn.  First Wolfies at Collins and Lincoln fell.  Now Wolfie Cohen’s Rascal House in Sunny Isles is gone and with it, an irreplaceable Jewish tradition and free pickles too.  Anyone who hasn’t had a corned beef sandwich at the Rascal House hasn’t lived.

What used to be a drive down I-95 from New York is now replaced by the real Exodus, resettlement in Jerusalem, the one in Palestine in the country we call Israel, where every condo costs a life and every acre is paid for by the sacrifices of over 200,000 American troops and the financial ruin of what was meant to be the worlds great democracy.  Is the nation of Israel little more than a cheap imitation of Miami Beach?  When Flagler came down to Florida, 5 million Palestinians hadn’t been living there for hundreds, even thousands of years.  Is the entire world being turned upside down to provide condominiums for mahjong tournaments?  Well, actually yes.  Who do you think is going to live in those new settlements?  Did you think there was a mysterious Jewish population somewhere in Denmark, all young, adventurous and waiting to man the trenches at night and hoe vegetables all day in the desert?

Knock on a door.  You will find a furniture store owner from Shaker Heights.  You might ask, “For this we bulldoze people’s houses, to live in a hotzeplotz like this?  Has everyone gone meshuga?  We don’t know a khnyok from a schlemiel anymore?”  What we have lost with the decline of Yiddish, a language that makes one understood like no other.

We could do comedy routines about Israel and the Palestinians forever, there was once a time when comedy was what kept us all alive.  But something happened.  It stopped being funny.  Fooling the goyim never took all that much.  They used to be schmucks.  Now they aren’t even that, a government of schvitzers running a nation of schnooks.

It can all continue to be rocks and rockets and tanks and bulldozers but, in the end, it is going to come down to what is right and wrong.  Nobody can change that part, no matter how many phony news stories, no matter how clever the Mossad or how many sayanim are in congress or the Pentagon.

With all the noise, it was never really about Israel at all.  It began as the great thirst for oil and the need to keep the Soviet Union away from warm water ports.  Iran is now supposed to be a great satan, a nation of deceivers building nuclear weapons in their basements.  When Iran elected a free government, a government that wasn’t as considerate to British Petroleum as it could be, the CIA started blowing up buses and markets, false flag attacks to install a vicious dictatorship under the Shah.  You think people see that and don’t learn how to play the game?  If America can do it, the “land of the free and home of the brave,” anyone can and does and does and does.

When the west came into Kuwait to push out Iraq, if anything Saddam’s Iraq, the country we called a “nightmare” was a bastion of democracy compared to Kuwait, a primitive slave state colored to look like a bastion of personal freedom.  When Israel isn’t screaming “holocaust” and “anti-Semite” they are, very successfully, pointing out the illegitmate governments surrounding them.  What they don’t say, of course, is how the corruption they point out to us is used by them.  Israeli influence throughout the Islamic world is one of the greatest secrets of our age.  What we see Israel do in the United States through AIPAC, Fox News, Hollywood and more, they do in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan and half a dozen countries, some you would never imagine, not even close.

Should America be in the Middle East at all?  Are they there for oil, drugs, terrorism or to secure Israel?  Take a look at the war in Afghanistan, the “flavor of the week” conflict.  Are there war goals?  To the sane and informed the cover story about terrorist training camps fell apart a long time ago.  America is fighting the Mujahideen forces it organized and trained 30 years ago, or a version of them, with so many of the exact same names and faces, older, beards turned white and maybe, just maybe a bit smarter than before.

Then again, there was 9/11, the great “watershed” of terrorism.  Last week, Dr. Hans Koechler of Austria, one of the EU’s most conservative policy theorists raised the question of the mysterious Building 7 and how that one thing, out of so many, destroys the “house of cards” that made 9/11 a terrorist attack.  The brilliant Koechler put his two paragraphs, sans references to Mossad or “false flag” as such things are a crime in Austria, in the middle of a policy paper on global realignments.  What does this mean?  It is simple, “conspiracy theory” can now be defined as anyone pushing the old Bush era cover story about Osama bin Laden.

A friend sent me an email today about a recent episode of the hit TV series Numbers.  For those unfamilar with the series, it is about a Jewish family in San Francisco, a father and two sons, one a famous mathematician and the other an FBI agent.  The family is Jewish by religion, lightly so, very mainstream American and quite admirable.  Seeing a storyline about Pakistani terrorists trying to shoot down airliners with missiles is the problem.  The series had built credibility, yes, fictional characters can be credible.  Numbers always valued fairness, real Americanism, you could even call it “liberal ideals” though the term “liberal” makes me cringe because of the continual misuse.

It reminded me of 2003 when Colin Powell, “Mr. Credibility” was sent to the United Nations with proof of weapons of mass destruction.  Every word Powell repeated was a blatant lie, destroying his manhood and honor forever in the eyes of the world and justifying an invasion that has been a disaster for the United States.

Back in Israel, homes are being plowed under, not fancy homes but those of working people, farmers, tradesmen, Muslims all.  If enough people die, and so many have, we can call this a holocaust.  It is no stretch of the imagination to call it ethnic cleansing.

Moving into the new homes will be Jews, many American citizens, most kind and generous people who have spent most of their lives caring for their families, employees and their country, one some seem to forget, some but not all.  We call that country the United States and those loyalties should last a lifetime, perhaps longer for some of us.

Palestinians are defiant.  Palestinians are angry.  Many Palestinians are violent.

Are they right to be that way?  Fiction, fiction like Numbers, fiction like Colin Powell, fiction like Sean Hannity, fiction, not so innocent fiction has stolen the ability of any, Jew or not, to make a moral decision on this issue.  You can take nothing more important from a man than his ability to know right from wrong.  The most that can be asked, in a world where looking away has become easy,  is to never know the truth, to die deceived.  Is this what it means to be a Jew?

Gordon Duff is a Marine Vietnam veteran, grunt and 100% disabled vet. He has been a featured commentator on TV and radio including Al Jazeera and his articles have been carried by news services around the world. He has been a UN Diplomat, defense contractor and is a widely published expert on military and defense issues. He is active in the financial industry and is a specialist on global …