HOWARD EPSTEIN: HOW GREAT BRITONS CONTINUE TO AMUSE THE WORLD
One of the more endearing aspects of British life has been the eccentrics that it has thrown up from time to time. Consider, for example, Edward Lear (1812-1888) and his nonsense prose, poetry and limericks. From the Dong with the Luminous Nose to The Owl and the Pussycat, Lear has kept generations of successive His and Her Britannic Majesty’s subjects in stitches.
Then consider, if you will, Heath Robinson (1872-1944), famous for his drawings of preposterously complex machines for achieving simple objectives.
Even more interesting was Orde Wingate who, as a British officer posted to Palestine in the 1930s, and being a fundamentalist Christian had regard for and spent his spare time reading only the Old Testament, whilst lying on his cot in the officers’’ mess, stroking his chestal hair with a toothbrush. Why do I inflict this odd and apparently unsavoury character, and his bedroom habits, on you? The Wingate Institute for Physical Education and Sports, located south of Netanya, was established in 1957 in his name, in recognition of his making contact with the Palmach and, whilst moonlighting, literally and figuratively, taught them night-fighting and how to take the fight to the enemy (the marauding Arabs that attacked kibbutzim). Wingate was truly a great British eccentric so far as we are concerned.
Wingate apart, has there ever been a race of people like the British for causing so much amusement with so infinitesimal a purpose? Is it any wonder that so many of those escaping the pogroms of Russia at the end of the 19th century were content to be duped out of three quarters of their fare to Ellis Island and put down roots in Britain, where they could be endlessly amused by English eccentricity. (I never got the opportunity to ask my great-grandfather whether this was why he settled for Manchester over Manhattan – “Oy!”, as Jackie Mason so eloquently put it for me. “Could I have bought a property on Park Avenue back in the day!” But you won’t hear me complain. I have had the consolation of splitting my sides over the antics of English oddballs. Fortunately, the tradition is not yet a lost one. For example, today, if bored and in search of amusement, I can always read about Ken Livingstone.
Ken Livingstone – no luminosity
You remember Ken Livingstone, don’t you. OK, I know he is an irrelevance but, if you have been following my blogs, or even a decent newspaper (sorry, a double oxymoron this week) you will know that he has recently been hitting the headlines with his off-color jokes about Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) not being anti-Semitic until he went mad (which most people date to around 1889), or the one about Hitler being a Zionist (Hitler, Herzl – those Teutonic names are so easily confused), or, most recently, that beauty about the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 having been (as he told it to the Arab media) a catastrophe. Coming a day or two before the 68th anniversary of the creation of the State which itself amounts to a host of miracles – and not least for the world as a whole (see below) – with the population now ten times what it was then, this brought guffaws of laughter from all objective (and non-Jew-hating) people, confirming Livingstone’s place of honor in the British Eccentrics’ Hall of Fame.
What Ken, in his weirdness, did was to confuse Israel with Saudi Arabia. I know, I know. To you and me it is less easy to confuse Israel and Saudi Arabia than Hitler and Herzl, but not if you are a mad Englishman. Noel Coward plainly had the Livingstones of the Sceptred Isle in mind when he conjoined mad dogs and Englishmen, thus:-
Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun,
The Japanese don´t care to, the Chinese wouldn´t dare to,
Hindus and Argentines sleep firmly from twelve to one
But Englishmen detest-a siesta.
In the Philippines they have lovely screens to protect you from the glare.
In the Malay States, there are hats like plates which the Britishers won’t wear.
At twelve noon the natives swoon and no further work is done,
But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.
To the English eccentric, the creation of a true catastrophe would not be Saudi Arabia, the country built on shifting sands and the oil beneath them, with which they can and do blackmail the world from time to time (kicking off the depletion of America’s liquidity[1] by mercilessly hiking the oil price from 1973 onwards), and establish, and then export, Wahhabism, an extreme form of Islam, on which they nurtured terrorists who, in 2001 went out to the Americas to destroy two of the tallest buildings in the world and 3,000 lives in the name of The Prophet.
That, to Livingstone, does not equate with the catastrophic. To him, a country that within three score years and ten (to take a mere three unique, or close to unique, examples):-
- reacts to emergencies around the world by setting up field hospitals within hours not days (in Haiti in 2010, after the devastating earthquake, before the US could reach it despite being a ten times closer);
- reverses desertification; and
- develops world-leading technologies for water purification, solar power, desalination and medical devices to improve life and save lives;
to Livingstone, that country is a catastrophe. Now that is an attitude that is beyond eccentric. It is in mad dog territory.
Red Ken, as he used to be known during the Soviet era – as it is right to remind ourselves, after (as with every socialist experiment from Cuba to North Korea) it imploded after running out of money – has never learned that, when you are in a hole, you should stop digging. But then, to refer to Red Ken’s Führer (hero, role model or whatever function he apparently still plays in Ken’s life), for Hitler, hating Jews and seeking to destroy them was always the number one priority, whether or not that would lead to self-destruction. Why else would the movement of Jews in cattle cars from Rhodes to Auschwitz, to their ugly and painful destruction, have continued as the Battle Of The Bulge and the battle for Warsaw were being lost by Germany to the Americans and the Russians respectively? You can see the same syndrome with Mad Ken: it was when Labour MP, Ms Chaz Shah, was suspended for her 2014 Facebook post about relocating Jews to the USA – from Israel – that he piped up revealing or confirming his naked anti-Semitism/Zionism, and thereby got himself dropped from the Labour Party National Executive Committee.
Last week, Red Ken effectively repeated Ms Shah’s calumny by suggesting that the catastrophe he perceives that Israel represents, could have been avoided by the remnants of the Holocaust (and the Yishuv? it was left unclear) having been absorbed into the UK and the USA. From what lunatic asylum did that one emerge?
I have a better suggestion: the Palestine after-thought – after 1967, that is, for there was no claim to a Palestinian state whilst the Egyptians ran Gaza and the Jordanians controlled Judea and Samaria – could easily have been solved within Egypt and Jordan, the latter alone being in scale of land and population 80% of Palestine, in any event.
Whilst Mad Ken’s outbursts – so outrageous as to be amusing – have confirmed that he is no longer essential to the UK Labour movement, they have unfortunately led to two Jews being grossly and dangerously confused, giving ammunition for use by our detractors in the future.
Firstly, as I blogged two weeks ago, Lord Daniel Finkelstein managed to play Uriah Heep (complete with his cloying humility, obsequiousness, and insincerity, making frequent references to his own “humbleness” – implied in Lord Danny’s case – see below) to his Peers of the Realm with his gratuitous concession in The Times of London, thus:-
It isn’t antisemitic to be a critic of the policies of the state of Israel. No government should be immune from criticism, and Jews are often the first to be critical of Israeli policy. It isn’t even antisemitic, in my view, to believe that Israel should not have been formed.
Well Danny, it is. It is fundamentally anti-Semitic to “believe that Israel should not have been formed” (as it was just four years the right side of Auschwitz and no-one wanted us then, numbers depleted by 6 million, any more than at Evian in 1938) because, without Israel, many Jews would not have survived this long. And you, my dear Lord, should appreciate that, whilst you may not be able to conceive of a world without you in it, your parents might have been unable to conceive you in the first place.
Secondly, and equally unnecessary, was the freebie surrender to our detractors by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian of April 29 last, entitled: “My plea to the Left: Treat Jews the same way you treat any other minority”:-
Israel’s creation came at a desperately high price for Palestinians – one that Israel will one day, I hope, acknowledge, respect and atone for through word and deed
Please note, Jonny – I know you will forgive my familiarity, given your presumption on my behalf:-
- we don’t submit pleas to anyone: Pleas are made by the impotent. Check it out. Israel is far from impotent; and
- we have nothing to atone for and nor do you, so desist from doing so on our account. Read George Gilder on how the Jews made this land capable of feeding and watering millions. Also, for good measure, Johnno, reflect on the fact that there were no institutions of tertiary education in Gaza and on the West Bank until they came under Israeli control in 1967, apart from the Kadourie Agricultural College founded by the Iraqi Jew of that name in the 1920s. You see: no room for atonement here.
The Uriah Heep-like columnist, this time of The Guardian, who has amused us with his less than objective journalism for more years than we care to remember, should consider that. And this: As soon as the Palestinians have gone half a generation without teaching their kids to hate and kill Jews[2], so that we feel confident in them as partners for peace, and peace-loving neighbours, no longer intent on genocide at our expense, our largesse will be unbounded – not because of any need for atonement but because that is how we are. We shall be as directly generous towards them as you, JF, are vicariously. And our deeds will speak much more loudly than your weasel words.
Now, Danny and Jonny (not so much eccentrics as ignoramuses), put that grist into your paper-mills and try to make something of it of which you can, as Jews, be proud.
© Howard Epstein – May 2016
[1] All but complete by 2009, but that is another story, and one which I fully cover in my forthcoming book: Guns, Traumas and redemption. America in the 21st Century.
[2] They need to make a start: http://www.timesofisrael.com/in-new-gaza-clip-kids-urge-martyrdom-blowing-up-enemies/
