להחרים את ישראל
להחרים את ישראלצילום: istock

Just when I started to despair, about everything, along comes the New York Post’s op-ed editor, Sohab Ahmari, to say, so far as Israel, everything’s going to be just fine.

His column of the other day, runs with this headline – “Trump’s peace deals mean the anti-Israel boycott movement [BDS} is dead.”

So says an optimist. If only it were so, says me, a pessimist, and I hate to bring this up, but pessimists get it right about 80 percent of the time.


We get no kick saying, “I told you so.” In this book on the media, I warned what’s coming, and it did.

But Francis Fukuyama was wrong. He wrote that we’ve approached “the end of history” because post-Cold War, the world has come to its senses.

No more battles to be fought because “tolerant democracies” are sprouting up all over, and if I’m off target with his message, so is he. He has since retreated from so sunny a point of view.

Alas, says a pessimist, Trump is out, and Biden is in, and so all bets are off the table. John Kerry, Susan Rice, and that whole gang are back, and getting ready to pounce.
I hope the Post’s Ahmari never has to second guess himself upon his own upside view regarding the end of BDS. He is right to cheer an Age of Aquarius (“a coming together on our planet”) at this time of normalization and tranquility between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, Morocco, and more to come.

Yes, thanks to Trump, and another big hand for teammate Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

If only the planet would quit spinning…backwards.

A pessimist will tell you that, alas, Trump is out, and Biden is in, and so all bets are off the table. John Kerry, Susan Rice, and that whole gang are back, and getting ready to pounce.

John Brennan and James Comey are licking their chops.

My next column ought to be -- “Waiting for Godot and the Durham Report” for the low-down on the swamp that never arrives.

They are not finished with America, nor with Israel.

Who told you so? I told you so. In the weeks leading up to the election, I kept telling good friend and top author Linda Shelnutt that Trump’s campaign is failing.

The Democrats are up to something.

Linda kept saying not to worry. Trump’s got everything in hand. Yes, he knows crookedness is afoot, and he’s on top of that, too. Trump is a shoo-in.

There you go…and among pessimists there is the standard belief that everything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and so it does, and so it did.

Here is what we do not believe, that in the end, talent and goodness will prevail. Pessimists laugh when they hear this. Very funny.

Millions of talented people are never heard from, and the same number of good people never get a chance, but rather get trashed, scorned, and spurned.

I say this after reading Barbara Amiel’s “Friends and Enemies”, a bravely written cautionary tale about what happened to her and husband Conrad Black. (Lovers of Israel, both.)

Think the Book of Job.

What happened to them can happen to anyone once the Establishment (aka the swamp) for no good reason, decides to dump on you with a ton of bricks.

So something else we don’t trust…people in authority, people in charge, people with titles and degrees who know nothing, or know but don’t care, or care only to do harm.

Does it sometimes feel that the cheats are everywhere and in control of everything? It’s in all the channels and in all the papers.

That attitude may be so for being a Child of the 1960s. But being an adult of 2020…the world of Pelosi, Hunter, Joe, Swalwell…inspires no confidence that anything has changed.

Nor does a rigged election where no judge comes to the rescue, offer much hope that change is over the horizon.

I’ll take Martin Amis’s word that to be a true pessimist, it helps to be Jewish, and so I remember growing up in Montreal and coming home with a black eye every day.

That was courtesy of the French gangs who waited for the Jewish kids before and after school.

So one day, IDF-inspired, we all got together, fought back, and won….all in this award-winning memoir.

Did that stop the harassment? For a time, yes. But it was never really safe, and it never really is safe, and it never really ends. They only regroup.

So bless Sohab Ahmari for his optimism. But fate has other plans and I know other things.

New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.

He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com

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