Here we go again.
This is not what I wanted to write about today. For a change, I wanted to write about writers and writing, or music and musicians.
There is another world out there, isn’t there, I mean other than politics, and people who make your skin crawl, and spoil your appetite, and not just for food, but for life.
I was going to write about Beethoven, and the sensational discovery I made on YouTube; his Triple Concerto.
This one is with Amanda Forsyth, Pinchas Zuckerman, Yefim Bronfman, Zubin Mehta, and the Israel Philharmonic. I don’t know where this was performed. In Israel, I imagine, and I imagine the Israelis in the audience so grateful for the sublime music, and for those sublime few hours to get away from it all.
In Tel Aviv, hours ago, some 50,000 Israelis forgot their troubles rocking with J-Lo.
But there is no getting away, is there; our adversaries keep on coming, and it’s the worst of them, all through history, to this very moment, who rise to the top.
Reluctantly, then, it is time to get to the point. I have stalled long enough.
In the middle of it all, here in America, comes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now known simply as AOC. She has become so famous, so fast, so dangerous.
She is a member of Congress, after all. She speaks. People listen. She leads a group of three others likeminded on everything, except that Ayanna Pressley, as a reader alerted me, differs from the rest on Israel. She is somewhat more sympathetic. But grades must be deducted for guilt by association.
The others are rabidly anti-Israel – one through her native country, another through her native culture, and so far as AOC, born In the USA – who knows!
They are known as the Squad Congresswomen. I’ve been calling them the Four Ingrates.
We have no choice except to deal, once again, with AOC. She knows how to attract attention.
The girl knows nothing. But it requires no education to learn anti-Semitism. It comes naturally. It rolls off the tongue, and when this keeps happening in a country, when such talk becomes loose and commonplace, it seldom ends well.
She is condoning violence, focusing most emphatically on Israel. Some might say, whatever follows, the blood is on her hands.
She came to office through a fluke. Her opponent (Jim Crowley, the incumbent at the time) could have won, but he did not take her seriously, so now this fluke is our fluke and ours to fear. Hers is a message from the 1930s.
She is making headlines this time saying that the Palestinian Arabs have “no option” except to riot, as do all other “marginalized” people in America and around the world.
So, she is condoning violence, focusing most emphatically on Israel. Some might say, whatever follows, the blood is on her hands.
Her views came out in a radio show, here, where the moderator kept to such language as “the occupation” and to “white supremacist Jews.”
To which AOC fully concurred.
There is so much to say about this child’s ignorance (yes, she is 29), but for another time. For now, the question – what happened to America? What the heck happened?
Virtually overnight.
This was supposed to be land of refuge, the place to relax from the incitements, the vexations and the tyrannies common to the rest of the world.
This is why the Christians came by way of the Pilgrims and the Puritans, and the millions who followed, and soon followed by the Jews, all of them arriving to feel safe from persecution.
The story is a success – but with terrible exceptions, namely the types, like AOC, who talks the talk we thought we would never hear again.
Not in America. Never from Congress.
Peacefully and intelligently, we have to deal with this, because it is upon us, again.
America was not born into this. Outside of the United States and Israel, there is no place left to go. Here we make our stand. There is no other option.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He is the author of the international book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal.” His Holocaust to Montreal memoir “Escape from Mount Moriah” has been honored from page to screen at CANNES. His Inside Journalism thriller, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” is being prepared for the movies. Contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com
