"I Refute His Oscar"

Thoughts inspired by John Podhoretz's essay...

In case you haven’t read it, here’s John Podhoretz’s essay (in the Washington Free Beacon) about writer/director Jonathan Glazer’s Academy Award acceptance speech in which he said he was refuting his Jewishness (while revealing himself as, at the very least, an apologist for Hamas and, according to Podhoretz, all too typical of the self-hating Jews that inhabit Hollywood).

There ought to be a special word in Yiddish for such self-hating Jews, a category by no means limited to Hollywood. It’s a category that includes names such as Marx, Alinsky, Soros, Sanders, Schumer, Schiff, Garland, Blinken and Mayorkas.

(Alinsky, for those who may have forgotten, is the Ur-"community organizer" whose fan club includes Hillary Clinton, William Ayers and Michelle Obama, and who wrote "Rules for Radicals,” the blueprint for exploiting liberal "causes" to bring down America as we know it.)

And there were even such self-hating Jews in the Third Reich. Look up "Kapos" and see what their role was in implementing Hitler's "final solution.” Or look up how an organization of Jews called "The 13" (the number came from the address of their HQ; they actually numbered in the hundreds and marched in shiny boots and snappy uniforms) aided the Nazis and ratted out the Jewish underground in the Warsaw Ghetto.

One of my favorite Yiddish words is paskudnyak, a word of Polish/Ukrainian origin, which denotes an odious, vulgar, contemptible, thoroughly reprehensible individual. It differs from most other Yiddish pejoratives in that (unlike pejoratives like, say, schnook, schlemiel, gonif or even schmuck) it contains not even a bissel of warmth, humor, sympathy or fondness. A big part of Yiddish’s charm is that even its deprecatory terms contain an element of warmth.

And yet even paskudnyak, which is pronounced with an instinctive sneer, is perhaps inadequate to describe those cited, or someone like Jonathan Glazer, who refutes his Jewishness in order to virtue-signal and to curry favor with his ignoble ilk, and in so doing joins those who have chosen to not just blur but erase the distinction between terrorist and victim.

As Podhoretz so eloquently points out, the effect of Glazer’s “refutation” of his Jewishness on Jew-haters’ ambition to see him dead would be zip/zilch/nada/nichego. Practitioners of The Religion of Peace™ would cut off his head as gleefully as they did to Nick Berg, Daniel Pearl, and the infants (and others) they butchered on Oct. 7 and have throughout history, not to mention the other unspeakable atrocities they delight in inflicting upon bodies both living and dead, actions which they and some of their sickest apologists describe as “exhilarating.”

So Glazer’s “refutation” evokes the old adage (attributed to Winston Churchill, who had some things to say about Mohammedanism) about one who "feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”

If I had any nit to pick with Podhoretz’s essay, it would be in his reference to “The Reverend” Al Sharpton (another paskudnyak if ever there were one). While Podhoretz rightly reminds us of Sharpton’s ignominious role in the conflagration and massacre at Freddy’s Fashion Mart in Harlem in 1995, he fails to mention that Sharpton also has blood on his hands for fomenting the Crown Heights riot in Brooklyn in 1991, in which a mob shouting “Get the Jew!” pursued and stabbed to death Yankel Rosenbaum, a rabbinical student from Australia.

I’m reminded of Sharpton’s complicity in these events, as well as his collaboration with C. Vernon Mason and the late Alton Maddox Jr. in perpetrating the infamous Tawana Brawley hoax in 1987, every time I see Sharpton fêted and celebrated as a “leader” and “civil rights activist,” not to mention a TV star. I’m reminded of Sharpton’s remark that the Tawana Brawley “case” would make him and his cohorts “the biggest n*****s in New York.” Whenever possible I make it my business to remind others of Sharpton’s history and the blood on his hands.

Whether Sharpton actually uttered the words “Get the Jew!” (or any variation thereof) while whipping up the crowd in Crown Heights ultimately proves to be “immaterial,” which also happens to be the word that Podhoretz aptly chooses to characterize Glazer’s “refutation of his Jewishness.”

ST