Autumn Kvetch
by: Schvach Yid

In the 1973 remake of The Three Musketeers (you remember – Michael York, Raquel Welch, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Faye Dunaway, Charlton Heston), a freelance executioner (have ax, will travel) demands additional payment from his clients for transporting their condemned prisoner by boat across a lake to her execution site (Bastille Day is my favorite holiday), proclaiming, ‘I’m a headsman, not a sailor’.

In other words, one doesn’t get ahead by functioning as an oarsman. An oarsman doesn’t care where he goes, just as long as he gets paid and doesn’t lose his life in the process or fall off the edge of the Earth, as in the opening skit of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.

Israel has a deadly date in Annapolis, and historically, this is a month for Jewish disasters. Not to sound astrological – I have no use for astrology – but still, I get nervous during the month of November. In the Northern Hemisphere the hours of daylight reduce, people seem to become sluggish, hibernating animals get ready for their annual big snooze; in other words, this half of the world seems to be falling asleep. Emotional depression sets in. Face it, for various reasons the month of November is a bummer.

As if to presage impending disaster, CNN chose to rebroadcast its recent ditty, Gd’s Jewish Warriors – you know, diamonds and schmooze. One of Christiane Amanpour’s ‘great’ lines from that production, ‘…defiance of international law comes dressed in diamonds’ just about sums up the world view of Jews and Judaism (she’s married to a Jew, you know).

I kvetch about this often. I’ve lived much of my life either witnessing or functioning as the target of Jew hatred. The stuff stinks (in my little Bible Belt locale, the powers that be have decided to build the municipal sewer treatment facility perhaps 1/10^th of a mile from an Orthodox synagogue, and believe me, that stinks on several levels).

I’m tired of it, but there’s evidently a lot more on the way. The only consolation was that this rebroadcast of media-sponsored anti-Jew tooth-nashing occurred on the evening of Halloween (last evening in October, by us, ‘erev November’). Get the message?

I’ve managed to change my view of Christiane Amanpour’s report about Jewish activism in and for Israel. At first I shrugged it off, but since re-viewing it several times it has now succeeded in grading against me. I now think it’s pure venom, and more is on the way, in Annapolis.

November 1938, the month of Kristallnacht, was all about capitulation. Granted, I don’t think anyone can blame the Jews of Europe (not just of Germany and Austria) for shying away from the political demands of the moment, given our long history as residents of Europe. We pretty much had been put and kept ‘in our place’ over a period of 1½ millennia. But more is on the way, and this time, it’s our Jewish Homeland that’s up for grabs.

The solution, according to the savvy meisters, has been to find ‘common ground’ on which all can agree. This makes for pleasant and low anxiety conversations at meetings. The chosen common ground is global terrorism. It must be stopped. Damn right! But this is no solution to the problem (and I don’t mean issue) confronting Israel. This so-called common ground of stopping global terrorism is a euphemism, or better yet, a distraction maneuver, from the real problem – Jew hatred. No happy talk with Arabs who demand the elimination of the Jewish State of Israel will solve anything; their position hasn’t changed, and won’t, and no third party mediation will change a thing.

For all intents and purposes, it’s November 1938 all over again.