Daniel Greenfield article: The Subversive Hebrew Language

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The Subversive Hebrew Language Posted: 01 Jul 2012 08:32 PM PDT Alice Walker has joined fellow Hamas flotilla writers, Henning Mankell and Iain Banks in boycotting the Hebrew language and banning their books from being translated into the 4,000-year-old Zionist language. This move has gotten more attention, because, unlike Henning Mankell and Iain Banks, people have actually heard of Walker, if only because they were forced to read her in school. As punishments go, preventing Israelis from reading The Color Purple seems more like a blessing than a curse. If only Amos Oz and David Grossman could be similarly convinced to follow through on their politics and begin boycotting the Hebrew language, the national IQ would be better for it. Walker, Mankell and Banks (possibly the world's worst law firm) have every right to pick up their placards and boycott one of the world's oldest languages. When Wagner directed the work of Jewish composers, he reportedly immediately discarded the gloves that he wore during the onerous task. Perhaps Walker and the Gaza gang could do likewise, allowing the translation only so long as the laptop and printers that actually transform their words into the cursed Hebraic are swiftly thrown out afterward. "We have to explain to ourselves the involuntary repellence possessed for us by the nature and personality of the Jews," Wagner wrote in "Das Judenthum in der Musik", "so as to vindicate that instinctive dislike which we plainly recognize as stronger and more overpowering than our conscious zeal to rid ourselves thereof." Gaza is one of the ways that leftectuals like Walker, Banks and Mankell explain to themselves and their audiences that "involuntary repellence" that emanates for them from the Hebrew language, but not from Chinese, Turkish or Urdu. As committed progressives they may have to practice a conscious zeal to rid themselves of it, but the need of the left to express its Judeophobia is always stronger than its ability to control it. The boycotts, followed by broken windows in Jewish stores, vapidly self-righteous denunciations, operas and plays like "Seven Jewish Children", and the entire celebration of the left's emancipation from self-restraint on the "Jewish Question", is the rationalization of that bigotry. It explains the bigotry to the bigots as not being bigotry at all. Suddenly smashing Jewish store windows becomes the most unbigoted thing a leftist can possibly do with his spare time. In a letter to The Guardian, Iain Banks urged the world to impose "moral degradation and ethical isolation" on the Jewish State-- familiar terms from both recent and ancient European history. Sticking Jews in a ghetto, local or global, is not a particularly original idea. If Banks wrote that sort of thing into a novel, it might be considered plagiarism. But being derivative is not a problem when it comes to hating Jews. A novel has to be original, a rant claiming that Jews are inhuman monsters, that a cabal of rich Jews controls foreign policy and that the best thing would be to isolate Jews from the rest of mankind or deprive them of their homeland and send them wandering around the world is greeted with the same applause as it would have been in 1939 or 1339. Some dub these outbursts of left-wing Judeophobia; "The New Anti-Semitism", but what exactly is new about it? Like many movie remakes, it's new only in the sense that some words have been changed around and the whole thing has been given a fresh feel to tap into the emotions of a new generation. The left's hostility to Israel derives from its hostility to Jews. The left rejected Jewish nationalism because it rejected the idea that Jews were a separate people with individual rights, rather than more peasants and workers to be deprived of their religion and heritage, and submerged into the melting pots of a secular post-European Europe and post-Russian Russia. Some Jews went along with the program and became the bully boys of the Soviet Yevsektsia. Others were declared enemies of the revolution and created their own country, which the Socialist Motherland did its best to destroy with massive shipments of planes, tanks and artillery. The Nazis and the Communists, the far-right and the far-left, both agreed that the Jewish Question, had to be settled by getting rid of the Jew. Their only point of disagreement was on how to best accomplish this. What the Nazis tried to do in a decade, the Communists tried to do in a century, but the fall of Berlin ended both sets of experiments. It did not however end the attitude behind them. When the left denies this history and instead dresses up its hatred under the guise of humanitarianism, it's practicing a repugnant lie. When it tries to hide its bigotry by sending out its Jewish collaborators to give a proper face to the whole affair, the lie becomes even more repulsive. The only conclusion to be drawn from these tactics is that the only kind of Jews that the left likes are the kind who turn on their own people. The endgame on the side of the terrorists and their leftist supporters has never been peace, because peace has been futilely offered innumerable times. Their goal is to indefinitely prolong a conflict  in order to justify their hatred and violence. No one who boycotts Israel wants a specific demand met, what they want is an excuse for unleashing that overpowering hatred that Wagner tried to rationalize by claiming that Jews were incapable of creating true music and that the left rationalizes by claiming that the Jewish State is starving babies. The elaborate explanations are not the content, they are the context, they make the hatred, which is the end, seem like it is only the means to a noble end. Step one. Impose isolation and degradation on the Jews. Step two. Utopia. In the Soviet Union, as in the Hebrewless world that Alice Walker, Henning Mankell and Iain Banks would create, the Hebrew language was banned. Possession of a Hebrew dictionary could mean a one-way ticket to a Gulag chock full of the isolation and degradation so prized by the left's Bankses'. Hebrew is a subversive language. It has a way of giving people ideas. Particularly Jewish people. "When my grandfather was about 70 years old, he began to learn Hebrew," writes a former Refusnik and Prisoner of Zion in the Socialist Motherland. "He studied from a text book that he got hold of somewhere and had a notebook of Hebrew words that he copied from a dictionary. It was only after my grandfather died that I decided to study Hebrew using the books that he had left, partly in his memory and partly out of curiosity." That man today is Israel's Information Minister, which just goes to show you how subversive those strange jumbled Hebraic letters can be. One day you're studying its peculiar grammar and the next day you're in a prison camp for asking to emigrate to Israel. And then you're the information minister of the Zionist Entity while the Socialist Motherland is pawning statues of Lenin and Stalin to the highest bidder. Perhaps there is something in those inky black lines that passes into the soul. Much as Wagner feared being contaminated by Jewish music, perhaps Walker, Mankell and Banks (experts in litigating Semitic claims and marine navigation) fear some mystic power of the language contaminating their cause, flowing backward from the translation and into their hearts. Certainly the Hebrew language can be blamed for some of it. The Jewish Anti-Zionist left stubbornly resisted Hebrew, clinging to the Yiddish dialect of German, Russian and Hebrew as the true language of the working class. Today Hebrew is a language with millions of speakers while Yiddish is spoken primarily by Orthodox Jews, whose own resistance to modern Hebrew is breaking down. The Soviet Union understood that banning Hebrew was a way of banning Jewish identity. Whether Walker, Mankell and Banks (we do broken windows and doors) understand this is debatable, but they have that same Wagnerian "involuntary repellence" when it comes to having their precious books translated into the tongue of Moses, David and Jeremiah. Something about it troubles them, gives them an itch in the back of the head and a tickle in the throat. As much as they know that calling for a boycott of an entire language makes them look like bigoted fools, they just can't help it. For all their empty blather about concentration camps in Gaza, the real concentration camp is the one that they want to build around that subversive Hebrew language, the subversive Hebrews, their subversive country and everything that they do to subvert the stability and sanity of the left. In 2012, the Jewish Question is still alive and well, and the answer is still isolation and degradation. But the Hebrew language has been degraded and isolated by better than the likes of Walker, Mankell and Banks (dropped clauses a specialty) and after 4,000 years, it is still here. The books written in that language have outlived anything that these three scribblers will ever pen.   Hebrew and Hebrew speakers will not be destroyed by a cultural boycott put forward by proponents of degrading culture for political ends. "Bereishis Bara Elohim Et Hashamayim Ve'Et Haaretz". These words are the opening to the most famous books ever written, in its original language. In English they read, "In the beginning, G-d created the heavens and the earth." How much more subversive can you get?