Correspondence
Correspondence THE FALL OF FRANCE CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL's "Liberté, Egalité, Judéophobie" (May 6) is the single most insightful commentary I have yet read concerning the situation France faces at...
...The French Foreign Ministry and some E.U...
...The French Left insists that all French Jews are well assimilated and well off, but that's simply not true...
...Perhaps Caldwell has never worked an entry-level service job...
...Countering Sayyid Qutb's idea of Islamic superiority, D'Souza writes, "will require a full-bodied defense of freedom as understood in the West, as a gift from God and a necessary precondition for true virtue...
...But American interests may be hurt by such a step, and the United States' veto power in the U.N...
...Maybe he needs something more productive to do if he is writing whole articles on something as insignificant as a mis-keyed purchase...
...I would like, however, to provide one additional detail: The United States donates $89 million, about 26 percent, of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency's $339 million budget...
...But there, north of the Danube, almost since the time of Tacitus, Judeo-Christianity never did firmly win out over paganism...
...Security Council is necessary to protect Israel from a U.N.-sanctioned military attack...
...EDNA BALL Wittier, CA IN "THE U.N.'S ISRAEL OBSESSION," David Tell is right at every turn about the anti-Semitism at the United Nations...
...The clerk, instead of Christopher Caldwell, is owed an apology in this situation...
...It is similar in Germany, next door...
...French secularism "wholly admirable...
...Even Camus, penitently, later confessed "there is something vulgar about the anti-religious attitude...
...It's convenient to believe that Jews can no longer claim victim status in France...
...Perhaps Caldwell doesn't know what it is like to work at a corporate bookstore for $6.00 an hour, while customers like him pass their inherent bad moods on to those around them—people who don't matter because they are simply at work, there to be stepped on and ridiculed...
...What a difference in America, which was staunchly Judeo-Christian from the start and still mainly is, from the president and Congress on down, ignoring the loony campuses and the intellectual Left...
...Putting aside the renewed plight of French Jews, under physical assault from local Muslim youths and ideologically as well from Muslims' left-wing allies, and the daily horror of Jewish existence in France, what seasoned Francophile doesn't feel "What a falling off was there...
...Luther tried to gather the Jews in a vast holding area, and Hitler went much farther...
...I should hope so...
...DAVID TELL DAVID TELL's honest reporting about the unbelievably anti-Semitic organization that the United Nations has turned out to be is refreshing ("The U.N.'s Israel Obsession," May 6...
...I'd love to talk with the E.U...
...In all likelihood, Caldwell vastly underestimated the clerk's intelligence...
...AMOS DIAMANT Israel DAVID TELL's "The U.N.'s Israel Obsession" is a tour de force...
...The wave of mass violence against Jews in France by Islamic militants is severely underreported in the mainstream press, as is the fact that Islamists are a growing source of terror afflicting that country...
...If Jean-Marie Le Pen and the National Front did not exist, our news organizations would have to create him to fit that role...
...RAUL MASSUET Branchville, NJ AS SOMEONE WHO HAS SPENT most of his life teaching and writing French literature, I find Christopher Caldwell's "Liberté, Egalité, Judéophobie" both excellent reportage and commentary but somewhat deficient in perspective...
...It seems the only thing united about these United Nations is their hatred of Israel and of Jews...
...As an old Nazi collaborator, Vorster should have been arrested and tried the minute he set foot on Israeli soil...
...The big problem of course is promoting this idea, and giving the necessary courage to the first few members to take the critical step...
...The time, I think, has come to reconsider this costly allocation, particularly in light of the facts surrounding UNRWA's complicity in Palestinian terror...
...KAREN CALDERONE Charlotte, NC REVOLT OF THE CHECKERS I FOUND the Casual by Christopher Caldwell, "A Sorry State" (April 15), to be demeaning to all people unfortunate enough to work in the customer service industry...
...As historian Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi recalls, "For most Israelis, the Vorster visit was just another state visit by a foreign leader...
...Although, we have learned from the past that being assimilated and middle class doesn't prevent one from being the victim of anti-Semitism in France or anywhere else...
...I can hardly imagine a more terrifying view of the West than Sayyid's Qutb's, outlined by D'Souza...
...My bet is that the Borders clerk only works there as a "sidelight," as Caldwell suggests...
...That was the France we won't forget and that we fought for in World War II...
...It is also hard to imagine a more stout and morally superior answer to that view than his spiritual and meaningful conclusion...
...leaders believe that American Jews are the biggest obstacle to peace in the Middle East...
...Food for thought indeed...
...this very day...
...The South African leader left Israel four days later—after signing a number of friendship treaties between the Jewish state and South Africa's racist, apartheid regime...
...It did not draw much attention...
...This way, the initial power of the new, democratic organization would be great enough both to deter attacks and win more members—otherwise the experiment will peter out, and ensure continued domination of anti-democratic nations in the United Nations, whose spirit imbues its officials...
...SUSAN A. STEIN Philadelphia, PA IN "LIBERTÉ, EGALITÉ, JUDÉOPHOBIE," Christopher Caldwell says Holocaust deniers are mentally ill...
...When the South African prime minister John Vorster made a state visit to Israel in April 1976, it began with a tour of Yad Vashem, Israel's major Holocaust memorial, where the late Yitzhak Rabin invited the onetime Nazi collaborator, unabashed racist, and white supremacist to pay homage to Jews murdered in the Holocaust...
...So it is all mainly a matter of faith and knowing who you are...
...As democracies hold most of the world's fiscal and military power, the new organization would deter aggression and appeal to countries that teeter between democracy and totalitarianism to become democracies and join it...
...OREST SLEPOKURA Strathmore, Canada THE U.N...
...RAMON G. MCLEOD Pacifica, CA RIGHT RESPONSE TO RAGE RARELY does a short news article accomplish so much with me as "Osama's Brain" by Dinesh D'Souza (April 29), which examines the writings of Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb as the intellectual underpinnings of current Islamic extremism...
...But the European Union should not be trusted to intervene in the Middle East since its member nations can't protect their resident Jews...
...Would Caldwell dare suggest the late Yitzhak Rabin, for one (of many, many Jews), caused this to happen because he was mentally ill...
...Instead, he was graciously welcomed by his Jewish hosts...
...French culture from its inception was foundationally and often exquisitely steeped in the Hebraic, flowing into Christianity, as Jesus and the Virgin Mary supremely exemplified in the dominant Catholic tradition...
...The youth repented for a while, but here we go again...
...Another point to consider is that the Arab nations are supposed to provide 7 percent of UNRWA's annual funding...
...The final sentence of this piece legitimizes and elevates the entire article, in my view, to the status of essential knowledge...
...That, of course, is almost gone, but has left an emptiness and confusion such that Malraux, no bigot, declared that "the 21st century will be religious or won't exist...
...As Roger Martin du Gard describes the charming intellectual atmosphere under the Third Republic, it wasn't really secular...
...They have agreed to launch a campaign to change American Jewish public opinion...
...They live in the same poor neighborhoods as the Muslim immigrants...
...Is he expected to be warming up his fingers, meticulously practicing for customers to come in and buy cheap paperbacks...
...Its greatest poets, including the princely Mallarmé ("You can't do without Eden"), were subtly faith-drenched...
...But the Arab brothers of the Palestinians are not so generous: They contribute only about 1.8 percent of the agency's funds...
...Compared, say, to routine outcries from organized Jewry over often even mild whiffs of Holocaust controversy, no less remarkable was the bland equanimity both Israeli and diaspora Jews displayed toward the Vorster visit...
...leaders about their apparent anti-Semitism, but they will have to come to America, because it's not safe for American Jews to go to Paris or Brussels...
...And vastly murderous...
...Personally, I cannot help being pessimistic about a culture led by a self-hating Left that is being used by third world opportunists who take every possible advantage of democracy for the purpose of one day defeating it outright...
...should be coordinated among such countries as Taiwan, Germany, Britain, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand...
...There was no need for the clerk to apologize for mis-keying his purchase...
...Since the penchant of much of the media these days is to pass off editorializing as reporting, I am constantly looking for the slant in pieces such as D'Souza's...
...The only long-term solution to this dilemma is a walkout of prominent democracies from the U.N., and the formation of a truly democratic world organization whose members are demonstrated democracies...
...KELLY PACKER Missoula, MT...
...Most people don't work in the service industry by choice...
...Israel would not be worse off if it resigned from the U.N...
...Correspondence THE FALL OF FRANCE CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL's "Liberté, Egalité, Judéophobie" (May 6) is the single most insightful commentary I have yet read concerning the situation France faces at this point in history...
...This diplomatic episode, by any definition, was tantamount to Holocaust denial...
...The exodus of democracies from the U.N...
...Perhaps Caldwell should be looking in other places for reassurances that the world is peachy-keen, instead of in the faces of strangers...
...Most Israelis did not even remember his name, and did not see anything unusual, much less surreal in the scene [an old Nazi diehard invited to 'mourn' the victims at a Holocaust memorial]: Vorster was just another visiting dignitary being treated to the usual routine...
...Proust spoke of a "lovelier world" beyond us...
...The current crop of clever, gutless, listless, morose hedonists is something to live down...
...ROBERT GREER COHN Palo Alto, CA THE PRIMARY TARGETS of anti-Semitic violence in France are the Jewish immigrants from North Africa...
...Short of reading dozens of books by questionable "experts," I believe that this snapshot of the foundations of Islamic anti-Western sentiment is one of the more educational experiences I could hope for—particularly from the news media...
Vol. 7 • May 2002 • No. 35
