Amy Klein

Understanding the Political Theater Following the Flotilla Raid

2010-06-13T10:59:20-04:00

Earlier this week I wrote that the Jews were good at P.R. But that was before I saw the "We Con the World" video, a spoof of Michael Jackson's 1985 song "We Are The World" which raised charity for Africa.

I saw "We Con the World," on -- where else? -- Facebook. A number of my friends here in America and Israel (where I lived and worked as a reporter a decade ago) posted the five-minute video, which I watched with my usual Facebook A.D.D. while IMing a few friends and checking status updates. It's a well-made skit, managing to mimic the original, which had famous headphoned artists holding sheet music and singing into recording mikes, but instead of opening with:

There comes a time when we heed a certain call
When the world must come together as one
There are people dying
and it's time to lend a hand to life
There greatest gift of all...

"We Con The World," opens with:.

There comes a time that we need to make a show
For the world, the web and CNN.
There's no people dying,
so the best that we can do is create
The greatest bluff of all...

The spoof got the original lyrically and musically -- even with the twangy country tone of a Kenny Roger's sound-a-like, but the singers in "We Con the World" video included spoofs of some Arabs -- someone with a mustache and captain's hat, another wearing a read checked Keffiyeh and some other people. Like I said, the first time I watched it I wasn't paying that much attention.

To be honest -- really, I have to be honest about my initial reaction -- I thought it was cute. I "liked" it on Facebook. Being formerly religious, I receive "insider-baseball" jokes like these all the time, such as this week's Kosher Top Ten Reasons Why Israel Did Not Make the World Cup: "Team's strong defense constantly confused with unnecessary offense." These things remind me of when I was religious and living in Israel and we made skits spoofing bible stories, like re-imagining Moses and Jews wanderings in the desert as a Star Trek voyage, or Abraham accidentally sacrificing his son Isaac because God's angel showed up too late. Funny stuff -- when it was performed before a live audience of about 300 people who were all of the same mindset, more or less. (We managed to offend a few humorless die-hards, for example, with our spoof outside the ritual bath. "Hey, can I borrow that towel?")

But "We Con the World" was no inside joke for a small audience of hundreds. In this viral YouTube age, it passed from Facebook friend to friend and has reached 3 million viewers. I shared it with my Israeli-American boyfriend, who was the first to point out to me its inherent unfunnyness. "Amy, people were killed. This is not the time to make a joke," he said. Since he usually has a terrific sense of humor, I took him seriously. And I actually watched the video, catching things I hadn't caught when I hardly watched it.

The opening sequence, like the original had a title, but here it was
Turkish "Aid" to Gaza Song with Captain Stabbing & Friends.

Under a logo of a red buoy of the Marmara. The first mustachioed captain singing was meant to parody the captain of the Mavi Marmara, and the singing was interspersed with footage of the passengers waiting on the boat with clubs and throwing soldiers off the boat. This video was from the partial edited video released by Israel's government shortly after the attack. The full, unedited video, taken from a lower deck, was just released today. Filmmaker Iara Lee, a Brazilian-American activist and filmmaker, smuggled it out of Israel, which confiscated other footage, and presented it to the U.N. on Thursday.

Examination of the footage and investigations of the attack will someday soon shed light on the truth of the attack, on who fired first, who was lying in wait for whom. What is clear, though, given that people died was that the "We Con the World" spoof was in poor taste.

CNN seemed to think so. In its web Site story "Israeli government office links to video mocking flotilla" it follows the government press office's explanation that it was "mistake," with the news:

"Nine Turkish citizens were killed Monday after violence erupted on one of six ships in a flotilla carrying humanitarian aid to the Palestinian Gaza Strip. A number of other people were wounded. Israel said the passengers initiated the attack; the passengers blamed the troops."

Jerusalem Post journalist Caroline Glick, who created the video, wrote on her blog, "We produced a clip in English. There we feature the Turkish-Hamas 'love boat' captain, crew and passengers in a musical explanation of how they con the world....We think this is an important Israeli contribution to the discussion of recent events and we hope you distribute it far and wide."

Glick, who moved to Israel in 1991, was born in Hyde Park, what she calls "Chicago's ultra-liberal, anti-American and anti-Israel stronghold" and attended Columbia University, what she calls "Beir Zeit on the Hudson." She served as an Israel Defense Forces officer for five and a half years and worked as adviser for Bibi Netanyahu. In her Jerusalem Post column (which also appears on her blog,) she writes,

"Similarly, the Israeli public feels that when we go out of our way to show our peaceful intentions and nature to the world, we are greeted with an international lynch mob. Rather than listen to us, the world shouts us down with mendacious propaganda in act after act of political theater."

This is her political theater. And I understand it, I do. I "liked" the video, until I realized the timing, the event it was spoofing and that the entire world would be seeing it -- and not seeing it in a particularly good light.

"You don't understand what it's like for us here in the heart of it, reading in the newspaper how the whole world hates us no matter what we do," a friend of mine in Israel told me on the phone before the Jewish Sabbath. Of course I don't understand, exactly, because I no longer live there, and I no longer subscribe to the narrative that the entire world is out to get me, and "it's the same as it always has been throughout history," as my friend said. She was glad the video was made, glad that the world would finally hear Israel's side.

But would it? Would the world? More than three million people have, although from the whitewashed YouTube comments it's hard to say (walksbyf8h writes: "Just thought? that I'd stop by to encourage you all. You have friends and even if not one human stands with you, never forget that HE WHO WATCHES OVER YISRAEL NEITHER SLUMBERS NOR SLEEPS. Shalom.") But on Robert Mackey's "The Lede" blog on The New York Times Web site talking about the video, one commenter, "Rev. Guss" from Queens writes: "Mocking the murders of those 9 individuals is simply disgusting. Gosh, I really hadn't realized quite how vile the Israelis have become. May God forgive them, although I wish I could say they know not what they do."

I suppose when I said in my article here on Jewish Chosenness that the Jews were good at P.R., what I should have instead said was that many Jews and many Israelis feel that it's all about P.R. It's all about spin, winning the media war. They often point -- rightly so -- to the 2002 Jenin attacks, when Israel was accused of killing hundreds, when in the end "only" 56 Palestinians were killed.

My friend -- and many Israelis -- are tired of the media maelstrom, regardless of what started it. Just like a child overly reprimanded for his actions won't learn a lesson if the rebuke is disproportionate, many Israelis and Jews -- certainly not all -- feel they lose the media battle all the time. They don't realize it's not just a media battle, it's not always about spinning a story. Sometimes the story spins itself.

"If only you could see what we're going through," my friend said to me. If only everyone could experience the world the way they see it -- attacked, vilified, criticized by the likes of Helen Thomas and other anti-Semites, Israel haters and, of course, the crazies, who like to throw their lot in any chance they can get -- then maybe you'd make a video like "We Con the World." And you'd even laugh.

The Real Myth -- and Gift -- of Jewish Chosenness

2010-06-08T13:41:32-04:00

Michael Chabon wrote a curious op-ed in The New York Times this weekend decrying the Jewish people's "chosenness" and alleged superior intelligence that left many Jews scratching their heads, thinking either "why is he writing this now?" or "duh, we knew that already!" Either way, many were saying to themselves (and their friends), "please don't publicize this to the rest of the world."

The Yiddish Policeman's Union author uses the occasion of the Flotilla fiasco to puncture the Jewish belief that they are chosen -- and smarter -- than other peoples.

"Jews are stupid in roughly the same proportion as all the world's people -- but simply because from an early age we have been trained, implicitly and explicitly, to ignore them. A stupid Jew is like a hole in the pocket of your pants, there every time you put them on, always forgotten until the instant your quarters run clattering across the floor."

Forget, for a moment, the flotillas; forget that Chabon lumps together Israeli and American Jews, peoples with as different psyches as the British and the Americans. What Chabon doesn't get is how Jews came to see themselves as chosen and what it means today.

Already in Genesis God commands Abraham to leave his homeland for Israel, which God will bequeath to him and his descendants forever. "And I will make you a great nation," God tells Abraham (More later on the fact that the word here for nation is "goy.") God repeats and expands his promises throughout Genesis, and by the time Moses comes into the picture, God says that if the people of Israel follow his commandments he will make them a "treasured" or "special" nation -- which has been translated many time as "chosen." in prayers like the Friday night blessing over the wine: "Because it is us You have chosen and blessed above all the other nations."

But did God really choose the Israelites? The simple story -- the one we Orthodox kids heard as bedtime stories probably before we could read and write -- is that God went to the Jews (above all other nations!) and offered them the Torah. "We will do it, and we will listen," the Jews said, which rabbis later interpreted to mean that the Jews were so obedient, such willing followers of God that they said yes even before they knew it would entail missing Saturday morning cartoons...forever.

But all the simple biblical stories we learned as kids were more nuanced. Religious eduction/indoctrination ensures that our teachings are age-appropriate. Thus, Eve's apple might have been a pomegranate (grade 4); King David had a man murdered so he take the wife for himself (grade 7); and each "day" of the world's creation might have actually been a million years, allowing the bible and 9th-grade biology to coexist, uneasily.

So too with the story at Mount Sinai. Some rabbis suggest that God actually went to each nation and offered them the Torah and be his one and only. But they all said no - this one nation liked murder, another liked their cheeseburgers. Then God went to Israel -- hence the phrase, "Save the best for last" -- and made his offer to them. One commentator suggests, though, that God lifted and held Mount Sinai over the Jews' heads if they would not accept the Torah. He coerced them to into becoming Jews. Now that sounds more like the God I know from the Old Testament.

Whatever story you believe -- if you believe any of it at all - there's no way that the moral takeaway should be that the Jews are "chosen" -- as in "exhalted" or "superior." Jews might be "chosen" like a fat kid is "chosen" last for the baseball team, like one "chooses" to eat an apple. "Chosen" in the case of the Jews simply means selected, singled out -- not superior, just picked.

Now isn't that the brilliance of the Jewish people? Jews turned the simple act of being selected into a concept of being chosen. It's one of the first of many Jewish public relations coups. Throughout history we told ourselves that everyone hated us because they were jealous of us. We weren't different -- we were unique. How else could we survive all these years of persecution?

Not that most Jews really believe we are chosen or smarter or better, not deep down. (Just look at Woody Allen and Larry David - is that the look of a secure person?). But we don't mind if other people believe it. And boy, do they. Consider the word "goy" -- a gentile, or a non-Jew. What other group has everyone defining themselves by what they aren't? Is someone non-Christian, non-white, non-Asian? But they are non-Jewish. Non-Chosen. Non-God's people.

If there's one thing we Jews are good at, it's public relations. We are the masters of rhetoric. We've practically copyrighted the word Holocaust ©, making other countries covet the title. How's that for PR?

What people like Michael Chabon and Peter Beinart (who wrote "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment" in The New York Review of Books) fail to understand is that the Jews may or may not be more intellectual than other people, superior, smarter, richer, or have cabals that rule the world. But Jews are best at P.R., at promoting themselves endlessly, whether it be from the Last Nation Standing to become the Chosen People, or whenever anything bad happens to any Jew anywhere in the world: the old Jewish guard believes it's a Jew's job to spin it.

That's why all this arguing is pointless. "Why The Gaza Flotilla Attack Proves That I Am Right About Israel / Palestine" blogger Wayne Myers writes semi-seriously, showing how both sides are so entrenched in their positions that they vilify the other. Maybe these days everyone has become entrenched in their position and all political arguing has become pointless, but it's been this way for the Jews since the beginning.

Jews pride themselves as being the only religion that encourages questioning, dialectical reasoning -- the Talmud, after all, is a series of books created just for this purpose -- but this "questioning" is deceptive. The answer in the end, as I discovered when so many of my early question went unanswered, will always be to make God, the bible, the Jews look good. Taiku, the Talmud sometimes says when something doesn't make sense, meaning: We'll know the answer when the Messiah comes. In other words, "whatever."

That's why anyone's desire to tell "the truth" about the Jews, to the Jews, will fall on deaf ears.

Many simply aren't interested in "truth" or "facts" or differing opinions. They are only interested in spin. That is the Jewish legacy.

Amy Klein was the religion editor The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. She is working on a memoir about her former religious life.