Wednesday, November 04, 2020
From Ian:
Clifford D. May: From prison to politics to an exodus from Africa
Clifford D. May: From prison to politics to an exodus from Africa
In the Soviet Union of the 1970s, it wasn’t hard to meet Russians who knew the Communist system was incorrigibly corrupt, dysfunctional and oppressive. But it was one thing to whisper such truths to trusted friends, quite another to speak openly, to make oneself a target of the police state.The New York Times: 128 Years of Blaming Jews for Spreading Deadly Disease
A member of the intelligentsia who kept his head down asked me this question: “What do you call a man of integrity in the Soviet Union?” When I shook my head, he dolefully provided the answer: “An inmate.”
Natan Sharansky was born Anatoly Borisovich Shcharansky in 1948 in Stalino, a grimy Ukrainian coal town renamed Donetsk following the death of the second Soviet dictator in 1953. He showed enormous aptitude for mathematics and chess—useful pursuits for those who did not want to risk being “cancelled” (to borrow a contemporary expression) by the KGB. But he was not such a person.
In his 20s, he became a vocal Zionist (i.e. a believer in the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in part of their ancient homeland), refusenik (a Soviet citizen denied the right to emigrate) and human rights activist (not just for Soviet Jews but also for dispossessed Tartars, oppressed Pentecostalists, Armenian nationalists and others).
Before long, he was arrested, tried by a kangaroo court and, in 1978, sentenced to the Gulag. Released nine years later, he went to Israel where he spent nine years in politics, followed by nine years as head of the Jewish Agency, an organization that links Israelis with the remaining (or surviving) Jewish communities abroad.
He tells the stories of his life—along with large sprinklings of history, philosophy and polemics—in “Never Alone: Prison, Politics and My People,” written in tandem with Gil Troy, the eminent historian.
I had the opportunity to speak with Sharansky last week. I mentioned that I had attempted to report on his trial but, because it was closed to the press and public, the best I could do was hang around outside the courthouse with his supporters.
One day, a van arrived and backed up to the building’s exit. The van’s rear doors opened and then closed. The van drove away. We knew he was in it and where he was being taken.
Plaintively, his supporters called out what was then his nickname: “Tolya! Tolya! Tolya!” For more than 40 years, I’ve wondered: Had he heard them?
A year before the coronavirus hit, the Times was blaming Jews for the spread of measles. But it goes back even further than that.Jonathan Tobin: A Conformist Media Is No Friend to Freedom
A 1921 Times editorial headlined “Typhus Still a Menace” declared, “the immigration danger has been obvious for decades,” complaining about “the problems of infectious disease brought here by immigrants.” What was that a reference to? A Times editorial from 1892, headlined “Typhus and Immigration,” holds an answer: “Two weeks ago the steamship Massilia brought to this city 248 Russian Hebrews, and within the last two days it has been discovered that about one-third of these immigrants are suffering from typhus fever, one of the most virulent and menacing of the diseases which test the powers of sanitary officers. …Typhus fever is a disease caused by filth, overcrowding, destitution, and neglect of the fundamental laws of sanitation… This outbreak of dreaded disease must bring forcibly to the attention of all intelligent citizens the evils of unrestricted immigration. The Times has made the sufferings of the persecuted Hebrews in Russia the subject of a notable investigation, the results of which our readers are familiar. No one will accuse this journal of having failed to appreciate the hardships of these unfortunate persons… But it is the duty of the people of this country to protect themselves against the importation of such persons as these whom the Massilia brought to this port. Especially it is the duty of the people of New-York to protest against the admission of those whose habits and condition invite deadly infectious diseases and who carry with them the seeds of a plague that can be stamped out only by the most energetic measures of a large body of sanitary officers. Such immigrants are not wanted either in this city or in any other part of the United States. They should excluded. The doors should be shut against them.”
The 1892 editorial is still available on the Times website with no correction, apology, or retraction appended, not even a trigger warning.
What’s remarkable here is the continuity. The New York Times has been blaming Jews for the spread of deadly diseases in New York City for 128 years. The newspaper did not want us here in America to begin with. It would have preferred that we perished in Europe. Shmuel Rosner writing on the Times op-ed page in 2020 with the absurd claim that “Ultra-Orthodox Jews tend to be poor by design” and the assertion that they “live in densely populated areas” sounds like an echo of the 1892 Times editorial about “destitution” and “overcrowding.”
If the New York Times had been publishing in Europe between 1348 and 1350, it would be blaming the Jews for the Black Death.
But enough looking backward. What about the future?
With any luck, the Jews will be around in another 100 years. As to whether the Times will be around then to blame us for the latest pandemic—well, that’s a different question. One hopes that the market for this sort of scapegoating is diminishing over time.
He’s exactly the sort of person conservatives and some of Israel’s most ardent supporters despised. Yet today he’s being lionized by supporters of the most pro-Israel president in history and attacked by left-wingers who once idolized him. Perhaps more than anyone else, Glenn Greenwald embodies the contradictions and the ironies that abound in politics and the press in 2020. As such, the sympathy or scorn that he is now generating for his refusal to play by the contemporary rules of a tribal media culture has broad implications not just for the future of journalism but for democracy.
Greenwald led the team at The Guardian that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for writing about the massive leak of US intelligence information by Edward Snowden, a former US National Security Agency contractor. Snowden had provided the material directly to Greenwald, who had already made a name for himself writing scathing critiques of the tactics used by the Bush administration’s war on Islamist terror, as well as for vitriolic attacks on Israel in its efforts to defend itself against Palestinian terrorists.
Born to Jewish parents in New York, Greenwald is the sort of polemicist that defended the use of antisemitic slurs like “Israel-firster” to denigrate Jews who support Israel as disloyal to the United States. That demonstrated his antipathy for the right of the one Jewish state on the planet to exist or to defend itself against Hamas terrorists whose actions he justified. But it was also rich since, as his aiding and abetting of Snowden indicated, he didn’t seem to have much loyalty to the United States in its struggles against foreign enemies like Al-Qaeda and Iran.
Nevertheless, Greenwald’s undeniably intrepid reporting on US security issues, including his documenting the way Americans were being spied on by the agencies that were tasked with defending their freedoms, earned him a lot of respect among journalists as well as political liberals who shared his distrust of the intelligence establishment.
