The Yiddish Supremacists like to flex their muscles in marketing their ideology of disdain for the native people of the Holy Land. There is a long tradition of denigrating the Palestinians to justify the wholesale theft of their native lands. A stroll through the archives of the ‘liberal’ Atlantic Monthly can be very instructive. Even today, prominently displayed, one will find an old article by George Biddle, who is introduced to the reader in glowing terms as “A ranking American artist who has had over fifty one-man exhibitions in Paris, Vienna, Rome and America.” The bit of old defamatory propaganda was published under the title “Israel: Young Blood and Old.” If a reader is alert enough, he will note that Biddle’s visit to Israel in 1949 was part of a publicity tour managed by Israeli government handlers. And the Atlantic Monthly was in on the deal in 1949 and they are still in on the same deal in 2002.
In an article dated April 21, 1949, Biddle draws a portrait of ‘attractive’ Jews, many just landed from Europe and ‘cowardly’ Arabs who just up and left their ancestral villages and farms. This is still part of the chauvinist crap that is the heritage of the Atlantic Monthly. They deserve the Biddle copyright. It is a perfect reflection of the undiluted Yiddish supremacy in the ranks of American mass media giants.
This is Biddle on Israelis in Tel Aviv in 1949: “The faces might come from any city where type, color, and dress are not too rigidly stressed; from Geneva or Lausanne, from the French towns of the Mediterranean, from North Italy or Barcelona. Nothing particular to mark them; youth, a high proportion of physical beauty, healthy vitality, politeness, good nature.” He writes approvingly that “One sees comparatively few marked Semitic types; and fewer still of the East Side, bearded, skullcapped, moth-eaten, grease-spotted, parchment-dry rabbis.”
It pleases Biddle that few Israelis have Semitic features. His argument against Anti-Semitism is that Jews look ‘just like us’. In his own words “there is far more difference between certain Frenchmen than between most Frenchmen and most Jews; far more difference between certain Americans or Italians than between most Americans and Italians and most Jews. At the end of a few days here, with the multiplicity of types, we entirely forget that they are ALL Jews, and we begin to distinguish between the Russians, who came first and are the best-looking, the most intelligent, the aristocrats; and the Poles, who came after the First World War, the sturdy, broad-cheeked tough Kibbutz workers; and lastly those who came since the last war, the Germans and the Sephardic Algerians and Orientals, the lowest and the least assimilated types.”
His first remarks on the native Arabs come as almost an incidental observation ” They tell me that there are no Arabs left in Tel Aviv. .. Was their departure due to cowardice or to orders from the Mufti? Probably a little of both, but mostly the latter.” Notice that Biddle proposes that there can only be one of two reasons for the absence of Muslim Palestinians. Either they were cowards or religous fanatics. Implicitly he allows for only one reason that Christian Palestinians, the oldest Christian community in the world, no longer lived in their ancestral villages. That one implied reason is cowardice, since they were unlikely to be answering the call of ‘the Mufti’. The brutal forced expulsion of the native Palestinians has been well documented by Israel Shahak and Simha Flapan. You can read of Rabin’s ‘heroic’ role in these expulsions at Ramle in Rabin’s diary. Even Israeli revisionist historians have tired of recycling these old tired myths. But at the Atlantic Monthly, recycling old Israeli propaganda is part of the daily favor they do for their war criminal cousins in Israel.
In the rubble of the ancient city of Jaffa, Biddle notices that “The former Arab section was completely and systematically destroyed by Hebrew bombing during the war. I have seen no city in Europe more ruthlessly demolished. Entire blocks were heaps of rubble, the height sometimes of a two-story building.” This does not elicit any sympathy from a bigot like Biddle who describes the Arabs as “Snotty, half-naked babies and slatternly women in filthy rags” who “crawled in and out of the dark stinking alleys and among the wreckage left by the bombing.” His next physical description of these Palestinians who resisted the forced expulsion is even less flattering. “foul, diseased, smelling, rotting, and pullulating with vermin and corruption, slinking about the streets, flat-footed, with loose, dribbling lower lip;”. At the Atlantic Monthly, they still count on these words to market their country, Israel.
Now an aside for all those who think that I make too much of a fuss about Yiddish supremacists and their virtual monopoly hold on the ‘liberal media”. Note that the Atlantic Monthly reposted this bit of ‘Briddle’ trash as ‘useful background information’ from their archives. The truth is that Yiddish supremacists are not even concious of the depths of their own bigotry. Why else would they expose themselves to such bile from a diseased liver safely buried in their archives? Because they don’t recognize Biddle’s bigotry. It is their own very familiar intellectual innards. They just instinctively recycle their radical racist ideology. They continue to believe that the Palestinians, because of ‘collective character flaws’, deserved to lose their country to a ‘more cultured European people’. Indeed, the more militant of these Yiddish supremacists support Sharon’s army of illegal settlers and believe that the Palestinians are not even entitled to create an independent state on 22% of their native lands.
Biddle foams at the mouth with his second physical portrait of the Israelis at an art gallery in Tel Aviv “packed with young people, eager, vivacious, alert. It suggested to me what might have been the enthusiasm of the Italian youths during the High Renaissance.” Sounds pleasant enough. Except that the Renaissance was an Italian rebirth on Italian soil. Unlike Israel, the Italian re-birth did not first require the human sacrifice of an entire people. The Renaissance Italians might have built on the sites of old Roman ruins. But the Israelis first set out to deliberately ruin hundreds of vibrant animated ancient villages and towns belonging to an innocent people whose moral heritage had changed the hearts of half the world. Before their ”Renaissance’, the Yiddish supremacists first had to wreck village homes made of stone, millenium old churches and mosques, and olive and orange groves that were the fruit of generations of honest peasant work. The Yiddish supremacists did not even have the decency to spare Palestinian graveyards.
In this five decade old article, Biddle quotes Israelis on Arabs “The Arabs were well officered, but cowards, and ran at the least excuse.” The reason the Israeli flatters the ‘Officers’ is that many of the Arab Legion soldiers where led by British officers. Israeli soldiers, on the other hand, are described by Biddle as being as “tough and seasoned as the soldiers from the English Eighth Army or our own best divisions which I had seen in Africa or Italy” who paraded with “Pride, exultation, tension, a tremendous overflow of physical vitality.” Hitler could have made good use of this kind of propagandist. The Atlantic Monthly still makes good use of Biddle for the sake of a state they hold sacred, Israel.
It is important to note that Biddle is aware that the Israelis are new European colonial arrivals to this ancient land. Speaking of the Israelis, he writes that “One is apt to forget that about 200,000 of them — that is, one person in every four — came here during the war year, the first year of Israel’s national life; and that perhaps 400,000 — one person out of two — have come here during the past fifteen years.”
The fact that they came with the express purpose of displacing a native population of 1.4 million Palestinians was of no consequence to Biddle in 1949. It is still of no consequences to the Yiddish supremacist crowd that publish the Atlantic Monthly in 2002.
According to Biddle’s account ” the country was wild and had never been under cultivation. The tall Palestine thistle grew eight feet high and choked out vegetation.” A day later Biddle reports that he “sketched in the olive groves below Ein Karem.” This line proves that Biddle was acutely aware that he was writing a little bit of Israeli propaganda for his Atlantic Monthly bosses. Either that or he was stupid enough to be ignorant of who planted that olive grove in the birthplace of John the Baptist. Maybe he had no idea how long an olive grove takes to reach maturation. No matter, according to his account “the land had been wild and had never been under cultivation.”
In Ein Karam he encounters “charming little boys talking Spanish together. I asked them where they had learned it, for they spoke a pure Castilian. They were Sephardic Jews from Turkey and Jugoslavia”. Around him were the “charming ghosts” of Palestinian little boys who had been displaced to make room for these immigrants. But Biddle took no notice of their charms. He just enjoyed their Russian, Polish, Hungarian, English and German replacements. Around him, Israelis were speaking Yiddish, German, Polish and Russian and Rumanian. Biddle knew these Israelis were recent arrivals. Israel’s immigration policy was fine by him. He applauded their ‘progressive’ asylum policy for Jews. Yet he did not bother to write a word about the 800.000 Palestinians who were in refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria and Jordan, waiting to return to the ancestral villages and farms in time for the next olive harvest.
Of course, in 1949, the Atlantic Monthly was more open with its racist sentiments. Biddle writes and his editors approved this drivel “what dynamic drive the Arabs must have had! How can one explain their architecture and achievements in mathematics, war, medicine and the humanities in terms of the apathy, filth, disease degradation, and laziness of their descendants? I have felt the same way in attempting to measure the furious thrust of the Spanish conquistadors in some lazy, half-buried Guatemalan town, rotting away in apathy, pellagra, and undernourishment.” Biddle’s sentiments about Guatemalans and Palestinians are shared to this very day by the Yiddish supremacists who masquerade in print as ‘liberal all-American globally oriented modern wizards with universal values’. That is why they have to continue their elaborate deception of the American people. Because real Americans living in 2002 do not share the sentiments of a vile bigot like Biddle. Yiddish supremacists, however, are still happy to peddle Biddle’s recycled garbage from archives full of similar ‘fit to print’ materials. Need to take a dig at Sulzberger in most every article to remind him of what he thought was buried. Just to let him know that he has an even bigger archive problem at the New York Times. Unlike The Atlantic Monthly, the Times has to be deceptive on a daily basis. As journalists around the world get easy access to his archives through the internet, Sulzberger and his minions are going to have to explain why the narratives in his archive does not square with the historical record. That is an ENRON size problem for a paper that bills itself as a ‘paper of record’.
Back in 1949, pro-Israeli American Yiddish supremacists justified the displacement of the Palestinians based on the fact that the Israelis were ‘culturally superior’ people who would build a country that had Opera, Classical Music, Museums and ‘attractive’ European looking folks to displace the ‘ugly natives and their backward culture’. Biddle approvingly quotes Harry Beilin of the Israeli Foreign Office . “When I was told that the English were afraid to allow greater immigration or concessions to the Jews in Palestine, because they dreaded a Pan-Islamic uprising that would threaten war in the entire Orient, I always answered that two first-class motored divisions could police the entire country. I felt then, as events have shown, that the Arabs were about as dangerous as so many North American Indians in modern mechanized war. The English must have known that a strong and friendly state of Israel was the best guarantee for the protection of their interests in Asia Minor. How could they have been so stupid?”. Back in Biddle’s day Israel was marketed as protecting “British interests” among the “heathen of Asia Minor”. I am sure the Turks will be reassured. It was still the colonial era and WASPs like Biddle had no moral qualms about clearing the land for “European” settlement. Although American WASPs have clearly modified their attitudes over the last half century, the Yiddish supremacists at Atlantic Monthly are still enclined to actively collaborate with the designs of a war criminal thug like Ariel Sharon.
More on Biddle, the slime who resides in the archives of Atlantic Monthly. He visits a Kibbutz and reports on “the faces — lean, hard, tanned, self-reliant, intelligent, sober; yet full of faith, hope, and confidence — that are the promise of the future of the country.” He writes that it is “It is tragic to think that the English of Churchill’s *Their Finest Hour* should have shown themselves so morally corrupt, so unchivalrous, ungenerous, and politically stupid, as they did in their behavior toward the most democratic and intelligent people in Asia.”
Every few years, the Yiddish supremacists have to cook up a whole new batch of historic mythology to jive with international geo-political realities. In 1949, the ‘heroic European Jews’ were going to displace the ‘ugly cowardly generic native Arabs’ and build an ideal society on the eastern banks of the Mediterranean to protect the interests of the British empire in Asia Minor. Today, their narrative is that the ‘Palestinians’ are all deranged suicidal religious fanatics who have no fear of death and deserve Sharon’s draconian repression because they attack Jews just on account of their religion. There is one constant theme, though. The Yiddish supremacists are still obsessed with their ‘European’ look. They still subliminally market an overt racist message to America that just because they are in the Middle East does not make them Middle Eastern. One rarely encounters a Palestinian who denies being part of the Middle East. But the Israelis insist they are ‘like Americans and Europeans’. The part of America that Israel is really like is Alabama and Mississippi in 1930, sans the moderating Baptist influence.
The Palestinians are as handsome a people as any of the great folks of the eastern Mediterranean. If they seem ugly to the Yiddish supremacists in New York, it is just that racist supremacist ideologies can mess up one’s vision of other people. In the Middle East, and around the Eastern Mediterranean, folks see a Palestinian face and smile at its native beauty. Around the world, people marvel at the raw courage and endurance of these folk who have resisted Yiddish supremacist thugs for five decades. The Jubran’s of Nazareth, who Biddle writes of and than writes off, still cling onto Nazareth. Eight million Palestinians have endured, suffered, struggled and survived with their culture intact. And Briddle lives on only as a recycled bigot and an intellectually dishonest mercenary in the archives of the Atlantic Monthly.
Mr. Ahmed Amr is Editor of NileMedia.com in Seattle and a regular contributor to Media Monitors Network (MMN).
