Dumb and Dumber: From Ann Coulter to Little Green Skinheads
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Part III
But aside from using it as a springboard to attack American liberals, Johnson and his readers don't, in fact, doesn't seem to have much interest in Israel at all.
For example, I did a bunch of searches through his site for the names of various universities.
Take this with a grain of salt since the search engine isn't very good but I tried to be as specific as I could to avoid simple errors you get in propriety search engines.
For example, one would think that a serious resource on terrorism and the Middle-East would be very interested in Palestinian universities but here it doesn't seem to be the case. Birzeit University gets 5 hits. The Palestine Polytechnic Institute gets 0 hits. Contrast, An-Najah University in Nablus to Evergreen State College in Washington State. Where An-Najah University (the national university of the Palestinians) gets 36 hits, Evergreen State gets 66 hits. Where The Hebrew University of Jerusalem does get 137 matches, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey almost matches it with 130 hits. I'm almost afraid to type in "Harvard" or "The University of California."
Whatever value a little exercise like this has, it seems to me that Johnson, like Coulter is a lot more interested in monitoring the attitudes of American college students (and faculty) than he is in providing information about the possible sources of Palestinian militants or Israeli Peace activists. Rutgers almost matches the Hebrew University for the simple reason that a conference of pro-Palestinian activists almost took place there last fall and Evergreen State, of course, was attended by the site's arch-villinous Rachel Corrie (who pretty much acts as Johnson's symbol for the typical leftist college student in the US and Western Europe). Indeed, it seems to me that Johnson says all you really have to know about Israel's dependence on American financial and military support since he seems to consider any nascent pro-Palestinian sympathies in Washington State or New Jersey much more dangerous to Israel than institutions of higher learning which might just contain groups of actual Palestinian militants. Suicide bombers can be dangerous if you're riding a bus, but, then again, the loss of American tax money might just be fatal.
Then again, more likely, it's probably just a Coulteresque pique against hoity toity superior liberal college kids. Rachel Corrie probably just looks like the pretty girl in college who turned Johnson down to go off with some black guy ("morlock" in Johnson's world view) with dreads. Some hippy probably kicked his ass in the 70s. Rutgers is just another snobby bastion of east coast liberalism where people laugh at Nascar dads. Johnson probably just didn't get into Berkeley or maybe he did and people laughed at him for reading Ayn Rand. Or maybe it just sells. Maybe Johnson's just a liberal cynic playing to the rubes who read his site. Maybe he does speak Hebrew and Arabic and maybe he does in fact know all about the region itself, but is a shrewd enough webmaster to know that not everybody who's going to click on his links is going to get it.
Whatever Johnson's deal is, like Coulter, he's a master at throwing his audience huge heapings of red meat dripping with pure bloody hatred of liberal elitists and leftist college kids and like starved pit bulls they devour it as fast as he can dish it out.
A few more searches seem to indicate that Johnson does in fact look a lot like Thomas Frank's version of the economically illiterate culture provocateur Coulter.
Joseph Saba (a former World Bank Director for the West Bank and Gaza) gets 0 hits. Joudeh Jamal, assistant director general of the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees (PARC) gets 0 hits. Abdel Jawed Saleh, a former minister of agriculture, who resigned from Arafat's cabinent in protest over not having sufficient independence gets 0 hits. Once again, Abdel Jawed Saleh, who accuses Arafat of being "the principal of the PLO's school of corruption" gets 0 hits. Jacob Kaidar, the director of multilateral peace talks coordination and water issues in the Israeli foreign ministry, gets 0 hits. Obviously hoity toity blond college kids from Seattle are more important in the long run of things for the Israelis than water rights or the impending ecological disaster in Gaza when, you guessed it, the water runs out. "The Third World Water Conference in Kyoto" gets zero hits, even though the water rights problems in Israel were discussed in great detail. Muhammad Milham of the PLO Executive Committee gets 0 hits. Hasib Jiryus Sabbagh and Sa'id Khuri, both described by right wing intellectual and Little Green Footballs intellectual mentor Daniel Pipes as occupying "occupy central decision-making positions in the PA's financial apparatus" both get 0 hits. Let's leave aside Arafat, for a second, who's obviously by now almost a pop culture icon/villain in the US, but Ahmed Korei, the current Palestinian prime minister, gets only 4 hits.
Funny, isn't it? On a site offering itself up as a resource for information on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, it's almost impossible to find information on the hard economic facts of Israeli and Palestinian life.
What we do find is an obsession with culture. Thread after thread devoted to inflammatory photographs of Palestinian children supposedly being trained to kill Jews. Thread after thread devoted to "traitors" in the US and Western Europe. Thread after thread devoted to praising Arial Sharon's toughness and resolve. Thread after thread of grudging praise for George Bush. If only he'd be tougher on immigrants. Thread after thread bashing Howard Dean or John Kerry, both of whom strongly support Israeli dominance in the region but neither of whom strikes the right cultural signals to appeal to Johnson's backlash readers. Kerry, after all, does look French. Thread after thread which seem to have the underlying assumption that, unlike most of the human race, Palestinians aren't economic creatures who simply want to feed their families and get rich and get laid just like the rest of us. No, Johnson seems to imply, Palestinians are different. Like Coulter's liberals, they act that way simply because they're Palestinians, because they're Muslims and because culture in their case overwhelms economic motives.
Johnson is a strange conservative indeed. Where even Daniel Pipes will say, quite often, that Arafat's in it for the money, for Johnson, it's all about culture, that fanatical Islamic religion and it's 5th column support of traitorous liberals in the US and in Europe. It's all about those snobby Cal Berkeley kids laughing at him.
Not surprisingly, his search engine bears it out.
Yossi Beilin the Israel liberal gets 61 matches. Adam Shapiro the founder of the ISM gets 291. Noam Chomsky gets 430 and if you thought that was impressive, Howard Dean gets 506. But, beating them all out, of course, getting more hits than any Israeli leftist, than the Prime Minister of the PA, than Howard Dean or Noam Chomsky, then even the founder of her movement Adam Shapiro, is of course, you guessed it, Rachel Corrie with 549 hits.
And apparently the class and cultural envy that motivate Americans like Johnson and Coulter are quite alive and well in Israel. Take, for example, the rabid militarist Steven Plaut, who, aside from using the stalker site Massada2000 as a legitmate statistical authority on the number of deaths in Israel (take that BBC, UN, Haaretz, Amnesty International, we have Massada2000), writes an article bashing "the beautiful people." Yes, somehow those 20 year old kids who fly coach and live in hostels or sleep on the floors of their friends get confused (in Plaut's delusional mind) with the "radical chic" set satirized by Tom Wolfe, the kind of people who used to get invited to Leonard Bernstein's parties, who own mansions on Pacific Heights and who write out $2000 checks to Howard Dean. Plaut's anger at all these foul appeasing hippie punks once again, comes down not to any actual influence on foreign policy or economics or control over the rules of engagement being followed by the IDF, but to their culture:
One wag suggested that ISM really stands for "I Support Murderers." But the Left responds, reflexively, by relying on their eyesight, rather than their insight. They cannot understand the charges leveled against their fellow leftists. They say, "But they are the beautiful people: They love peace. They pet cats. They sing Joan Baez songs and believe in the brotherhood of 'humankind.' How dare you slander them?"
Aside from being seriously out of date (Joan Baez? She was before my time let alone kids Rachel Corrie's age.), Plaut's rage over a ragtag group of leftist activists is curious considering just how little they effect Israeli military policy. Indeed, as Gideon Levy makes clear in his article in the liberal Israeli Haaretz, restraints on the IDF's rules of engagement have been drastically loosened since the Second Intfada began in 2000. The Israeli military has long ago taken off the gloves not only in their dealings with Palestinians and not only in their dealings with American and European troublemakers like Corrie and James Miller, but in their dealings with Isreali leftists themselves. Indeed, the most shocking part of Plaut's repellent article is the way he actually comes out and advocates shooting Israelis themselves:
"The Israeli army was waiting for us and shot live bullets directly at us," Liad Kantorowicz, one of the Israeli protesters, who described themselves as anarchists, told Reuters. They used wire cutters to destroy this segment of the fence...Yet the international Left cries in horror, "How dare those soldiers shoot one of these pro-terror vandals in his leg? So what if he was wearing a mask while valdalizing the fence? And how dare they injure one of the ISM provocateurs from overseas showing her support for terrorism? So what if she was using wire cutters at the time on the fence? So what if the crowd would have been mowed down with gunfire had they been trying to use wirecutters on, say, the fence of any U.S. military facility on earth?
Well, he was wearing a mask. He must deserve to get shot then. Let there be 1000 Kent States. Of course the last sentence is simple absurdity. Anybody using wirecutters on a military base in the US would simply be arrested, perhaps roughed up, shot with rubber bullets or teargassed, but "mowed down by gunfire?" I'm sure they'd be looking at serious jail time and have high bail set but "mowed down by gunfire?" We're not that far down the road to actual Stalinism just yet. Plaut really strikes you as a fun character to be around, doesn't he? Thankfully I look a bit like James Carville on a bad hair day so in the unlikely event that I ever meet Herr Plaut or any of the Massada2000 crowd, I'll always be able to say something like "Not a beautiful person. Please don't shoot." (1)
Cultural and class envy must really, really, really piss these people off. Funny too, because if I were a conservative, if I had all the power, money, political connections and initiative, I'd merely declare victory and laugh at the poor pathetic peace movement, their silly little signs and dopey little chants. Go to enough anti-war rallies and you realize that all you see are the same sad, powerless people, the same characters hocking Trotskyite newspapers, the same naive college kids who get suckered into it for a few weeks before getting bored and moving on to bigger and better things, the same guest speakers and musicians. The anti-war left stopped being a force years ago (and it was never very important or influential even when it was trendy and even when Leonard Bernstein did invite the radical chic crowd over to his pad on the Upper West Side), yet, to Plaut, Johnson and Coulter, it's some sort of unstoppable, overpowering force with the power to destroy Western Civilization itself. It's time the whole lot of conservative dumbasses stopped confusing their poor bruised little egos with Western Civilization.
1.) I must admit that I actually do rather like Joan Baez.