Entered on 01 July 2002 at 7:20 p.m..
Letter from America
BBC radio has a long standing program called Alister Cook's Letter from America. I think that the show began in 1946 and ever since Alister Cook has writen and read a 10 minute editorial. I enjoy listening to them because he provides such a sense of history to current events that I find lacking in most media accounts. This week was no exception. In fact it was extraordinarily good, so I reproduce it now. It is a bit long, but well worth the read.
Letter from America
Very shortly after 11 September I had a very touchingletter from a young woman student across the bay from San Francisco, at the very centre of student
radicalism: the University of California at Berkeley.
It was a letter at once moving and distressing and I have to say, to me, sadly familiar - a sort of helpless protest that arose after the outbreak of any American war since the Second World War.
The 1960s, the decade of the hippy, was notorious for - among many other peculiar things - recruiting small armies, on the campuses, of instant protestors.
They declared themselves at once for peace and in subsequent demonstrations and orations it turned out that, unlike you and me, they were also against poverty, the poverty of the people of our enemy being their special concern.
The young woman who wrote to me was of course against the war in Afghanistan.
She was more embarrassed than anything by the explosion of the Twin Towers but she deplored her country's response.
The burden of her lament, however, was for the poor people of Afghanistan - which up till then she appeared never to have heard of - and she wondered, as a soldier for peace, how to help.
I suggested that her objection to American policy had no connection with the poor of Afghanistan or of any other poverty-stricken country.
It had been a response to the act of a fanatical Islamic sect which declared at the start three war aims: to kill all Jews, as many Americans as possible, and to promise a continuous war on every American presence - an embassy, consulate, business and university - around the world.
Unfortunately the chief messiah of this pathological sect is a man with several hundred million dollars, enough anyway to finance a network - as we horrifyingly discovered in the fall, a worldwide network - of terrorists, which until last September we'd thought of, if we thought at all, as scattered and random conscripts of various Middle Eastern terrorist groups.
I didn't go into this in my response to the gentle and sincere girl at Berkeley.
I did say I thought the choice of the so-called World Trade Center, so conspicuously presiding over downtown New York city, was a brilliant target from their point of view since it destroyed an icon of American capitalism and at the same time emphasised New York city as what the Arabs call "the capital of Jewry" - which indeed it is when you consider, as I've mentioned before, that there are in the United States, out of 280 million Americans, six million Jews, and two million of them live in this city.
When the great tide of central and eastern European immigrants fell on these shores at the turn of the 19th-20th Century, the great majority of eastern and central Europeans were Jews fleeing from pogroms in Russia, Poland, Germany, from cruelly long terms of compulsory military service.
And when they went through immigration here most of them were not seduced by the farming agents who begged them to accept a gift of land on the prairie, turn a good crop in five years and keep the land for free.
Most of them, frightened of familiar persecutions, settled in New York city close together, sought the protection of their numbers, and sweated and worked in comparative freedom.
As we know some of them prospered in a big way and they most certainly, as they'd done in my native city of Manchester, raised the cultural tone of the place by their passion for and sponsorship of the arts, music, the theatre.
But until fairly recently the majority population of the city was quietly anti-Semitic in a polite, formal way. I'd better say, at once, what I mean by "fairly recently".
When, 52 years ago, I was looking for a new, larger apartment I walked with a friend up and around the part of town I'd first settled in and which ever since I've still preferred to live - the so-called Upper East Side.
At every apartment house we stopped and looked there was inevitably at the entrance a signpost surmounted by a rectangular wooden panel, a black varnished background, on which were beautifully painted in gilt the announcement of, say, "modern apartments, three to eight rooms".
Underneath was always in smaller, gilt letters a single word: "restricted". This was so normal that you never noticed it.
A visiting college friend of mine who was staying with me, when I'd been here about a year, he said one day: "By the way what does that word 'restricted' mean on the sign in your lobby?"
And without a tremor or a second thought I said: "Oh that, that means no Jews." "Ah," he said. That was in 1937.
When I was at college here four years earlier I'd seen another sign frequently pasted in shop windows and employment agencies.
It said "Nina" - N.I.N.A. More often it was spelled out - "No Irish Need Apply".
But by the early 1940s that Irish sign had vanished. By then the Irish and the Italians ran the Democratic Party in New York, and we were soon to have a couple of Jewish mayors.
But the end of the "restricted" signs was a deliberate act of policy by the governor of New York state in the early 40s.
He was the famous prosecutor I mentioned last time: Thomas Dewey, a Republican whom La Guardia hired to go after the mobsters.
He succeeded so well he became governor of New York state.
He was a very, very good governor and the abolition of all restrictive covenants in housing, let alone the simple declaration of a proclaimed restriction, was only a minor item in an admirable fair housing act which subsequently became federal law.
Today nobody, no ordinary citizen, no public character, dare utter aloud a sentiment that could be considered anti-Semitic. There'd be a media uproar at least; at worst, a slander suit from the anti-defamation society.
The seemingly pro-Israel policy of every administration since Harry Truman - and that's over 50 years ago - derives not from the obvious strength of the New York city vote, Jewish vote, but from President Truman's fears once Palestine ceased to be a British mandate that the Arabs would overwhelm and conquer the whole land of Judea.
Hence the shocker of his insisting that 100,000 of Europe's homeless - homeless Jews - be allowed to settle in Palestine the moment [the] British lost control.
Now remember, this was a time when anti-Semitism had banished, or slaughtered, most of the Jews of Germany and it was rife in Austria, Poland, the Soviet Union, and of all the main combatants in the Second World War the United States alone, in the forceful person of President Truman, was determined to see Israel set up as a sovereign nation and to have and hold it as America's reliable ally in the Middle East.
You'll recall, I'm afraid, that Britain - still having a big say in the future of Palestine - agreed to this incoming flood of European Jews but only if the Arabs approved.
The Arabs positively did not approve. And from then on maybe the present troubles began.
The Israelis did not wait. In the spring of 1948 they declared Israel to be a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine.
And literally within half an hour President Truman declared the United States to be the first foreign nation to recognise it.
From that moment on, 54 years ago, American policy has had one main aim: to protect the establishment of Israel.
In that half century nobody in middle age needs to be told that vast changes have taken place, empires have shrivelled, the Arab population throughout the region has doubled, the Palestinian Arabs have not produced a leader who would recognise the state of Israel and most of them have been openly devoted to destroying it.
The last week or two we've had several remarkable television news documentaries on the Arab world - many, many interviews with warlords, with merchants, politicians, poor families, most alarmingly with students, especially young women students.
And what's alarming about the dozens that I've seen interviewed was their calmness, their sincerity, among the women the devotional air of nuns to one cause - to give their lives to destroy Jews and Israel.
And very often standing by were mothers, quite simply proud of the prospect of their daughters becoming martyrs.
To me the most despairing feature of all these interviews was the total agreement of the young especially on the character and policy of the United States.
First, everyone told gravely their American interviewers that the United States was entirely governed by Jews, that the Congress was a lackey of Jewish interests, that Americans saw on television only the Israeli view of the violence - only the dead and the poor among Israeli families.
Never was total ignorance, overwhelming prejudice, expressed with such gravity, such gentleness.
Any bystander who had no personal experience of the United States would be much inclined to believe it all to be true.
But everything they said - which might have been learned from a catechism written by Hitler's propaganda minister, the vile Dr Goebbels - was wildly false.
So what was the latest thing to say to that other gentle protestor - the young student in Berkeley and her desperate wish to do something for the poor of Afghanistan?
I told her the best thing she could do would be to go ahead at once and do something for the poor - of Berkeley, California.