Standing Fast

Marty Peretz, at one point in ancient history a semi-progressive person with some humanity struck it big when he married into the Singer Sewing Machine family fortune. Using his newly found dough he bought the one point liberal New Republic, which he has largely used to engage in his main political passion: gutter-style anti-Arab racism that one might find coming out of the mouth of a drunk French National Front supporter. Check out his latest blog entry on the TNR website:

"Is there no limit to the barbarity of which Iraqi Arabs are capable? None? An AP dispatch in this morning's International Herald Tribune reports that a car gained entrance to a shopping area over the weekend when its driver pointed out that he had his two children in the back. He did indeed have two youngsters in the back and he left them there when he and a comrade jumped out. The vehicle then exploded. Among the dead were three bystanders and the kids. Seven people were wounded. This, of course, is a result of Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians."

If one was to start a blog entry about a civilian death caused by the Israeli Defense Force with the line "is their no limit to horrors committed by the Jews" one would probably think they had accidentally pulled up some bad translation of a speech by a deranged preacher to a Wahabbi Madrassa.

Of course none of this is new. Peretz has been using the pages of one the longest running magazines in the US to expose the dangers of the "eternal Arab" for decades. Here are a few choice rants from the TNR:

[N]onviolence is foreign to the political culture of Arabs generally and of the Palestinians particularly. It is a failure of the collective imagination for which no one is to blame."
Diarist, The New Republic, March 10, 1986

"Some 2 percent of the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza are Christians. Not so long ago they were roughly 15 percent of the Arab population. The rest are Muslims, all Sunnis. What explains the decline? Birth rates, of course. Christians are better educated than Muslims (all over the Middle East), and they know that if you want to raise a productive, truly loving, and educated family, you'd be wise to raise fewer children and give them all more attention. " The Spine, The New Republic, September 21, 2006

"(Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad) Siniora seems to have changed his mind about Hezbollah. Or is he simply speaking with the forked tongue that defines the political culture from which he has emerged?" The Plank, The New Republic, July 20, 2006

"But surely there are tests that could have been taken of Hussein about what makes for evil. A certain level of testosterone combined with certain genes." The Spine, The New Republic, January 7, 2007. (You know even European anti-semitism avoided biological backings for their bigotry. That was a innovation by the Nazis).

Don't think that if you are a patriotic tax-paying Arab-American if you are any better in Peretz's eyes.

"One cannot discuss at any respectable dinner table what many respectable people are thinking themselves. This is the matter of where do Arab Americans really stand on terror. It's a question that Kenneth Chadwell, assistant U.S. attorney for the Detroit area, asked about the Lebanese Shia who make up about 30,000 of the 100,000 people in Dearborn, Michigan: 'Are they loyal to the United States or to this group Hezbollah?' The answer is not simple. Still, the question is not simple at all. … They have not really left the "old country" behind, and some of them are making themselves at home by committing criminal acts." The Plank, The New Republic, July 31, 2006"

I've had enough. You replace the word Arab with Jew, Chinese, Basque etc in any Marty Peretz article and we would all be screaming and picketing.And I'm fed up with the stony silence or lame attempts by New Republic staffers purportedly committed to a pluralistic and liberal-at least in the old-school use of the world-worldview to explain Peretz's ethnic fanaticism away. This isn't just Peretz running his mouth at a party. He is using the pages-both the tree and electronic kind- of a major circulation magazine to spew his racial rants.