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Winning Arguments by Landslides Barry Farber OK, maybe this piece does wind up in the Middle East and gives the liberal mindset a lot to be ashamed of. But my real point is Winning Arguments by Landslides! I'm not talking about 48 percent of the audience siding with you, 35 percent with the other side, 11 percent undecided and 6 percent falling asleep. I'm talking about a rout, a blowout, winning by a knockout! It happened to me one night in the 1970s when I was doing a late-night radio show in New York City. My guests one night were a pair of far-left revisionist historians whose book purported to prove that America was at fault for the Cold War and all Josef Stalin and his Soviet Union wanted was to "preserve the gains of the working class."
Earlier in the day I asked my producer to line up the "usual suspects" experts we frequently called in whenever we talked about East European communism. At one point late in the rather interesting tussle I recalled my visit to Tito's Yugoslavia in 1951. Yugoslavia had split from the Soviet bloc in 1948 and President Harry Truman sent all kind of aid, military and economic, to the embattled Tito. Imagine: a communist country on our side! It was a brilliant move by President Truman. Our embrace of Tito gave Stalin acid reflux.
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"When I was in Yugoslavia," I said, "they had to deal with border incidents every single night along one or more of the "bayonet borders" with Stalinist Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania. They feared invasion by Soviet forces at any moment." One of the professors interrupted, saying: "Mr. Farber, that's precisely the type of Cold War myth our book seeks to dispel. Josef Stalin never had any intention of invading Yugoslavia." "Oh, yes he did," interrupted a voice from the far end of the table. "I know he did because I was supposed to lead it!" Psychology can be fun. My instant reaction was "Who's that clown on my serious-minded radio show who says he was supposed to lead Stalin's invasion of Yugoslavia?" That disdain did not survive a full half-second. A glance told me that guest was General Bela Kiraly, the military leader of the Hungarian Freedom Fighters in their uprising against the Soviet forces in 1956.
I'd always thought of him solely as the leader of the Hungarian Revolution, as though he were born just in time to take command when the students began protest marching in October 1956. It never until that instant occurred to me that a Hungarian general in 1956 was also a military big shot in 1955, 1954, 1953 and so on.
It was suddenly stomp-down plausible that General Kiraly was "supposed to lead" Stalin's invasion of Yugoslavia! "Stalin never gave the go-ahead," Kiraly explained, "but the plan was in place." I'm afraid I rubbed it in. As the revisionist professors gaped in stunned and stony silence, I said, "General Kiraly, were your Hungarian forces primed to attack through the Ljubljana Gap and take Rijeka just south of Trieste on the Adriatic Sea?" "No," he replied. "Our orders were to smash from Szeged over the border to Subotica and dart through the Vojvodina, stopping at the gates of Belgrade to give our Soviet comrades the honor of taking the enemy's capital." Are you going to tell me that wasn't a knockout? General Kiraly enjoyed that moment, too. Years later, when communism was crumbling in Hungary, I was the only reporter of any nationality invited to ride with him from the Budapenta Hotel in Budapest and walk behind him as he entered Hero's Square to the unending cheers of 300,000 freedom-loving Hungarians. Another knockout in my scrapbook was against a Holocaust denier who called my show with the usual you've heard it "The Nazis had no intention at any time of exterminating or even persecuting the Jews but war is hell and a lot of innocent people get pushed around."
Robin Moore of much-deserved "Green Beret" and "French Connection" fame was a frequent and welcome guest on the show and he told me of his interview with the notorious Klaus Barbie, the Nazi Gestapo chief of Lyons, France, who Moore successfully tracked to his hideout in Bolivia. Moore told me how best to slam-dunk a Holocaust denier and I followed instructions. "Sir," I began, "let's make this quick. I will not give you Jewish sources to prove the Holocaust, even though we have millions, because you will say the Jews are upholding the party line about Nazi extermination. Further, I will not give you NEUTRAL sources diplomats and journalists from Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal because you will say they've been bought off by the Jews. "I will confine my presentation," I concluded, "to NAZI sources exclusively." And I proceeded to quote what Klaus Barbie told Robin Moore. "Every time I was about to break the back of the French Resistance," Barbie told Moore, "I'd get a phone call from Berlin. The Jews!' they would yell. Where are your Jews? The Command needs your Jews and no more excuses!' "If only they'd forgotten about the blankety-blank Jews," said Barbie, "and let me fight my war, it might have turned out differently!" I needed to quote no further Nazi sources. The caller's response was deliciously feeble. He sourly said, "Well, in a nation like Germany with seventy million people you're going to find a few traitors like Barbie!" And he hung up. The foregoing are, may we say, the preliminary fights, the minor acts opening the proceedings before the main entertainment. And here it comes! Si Frumkin, a Lithanian Holocaust survivor, wrote an essay about something the media did report, but only glancingly and then only because they had to. There was no follow-up and I suspect major American media want no follow-up. In the spirit of anti-Naziism. anti-Communism and anti-political correctness, I'm proud to throw this juicy plate of pickled beets onto the liberal media's white dinner jacket. If sportscasters can talk about the sheer beauty of the way a football play develops, I can brag about the beautiful unfolding of Frumkin's essay. He starts with a one-word German lesson: "Schadenfreude." It takes SEVEN English words to get that one German word across: "malicious satisfaction in the misfortunes of others." Frunkin owns up to a little Schadenfreude of his own, and I salute him for the accuracy of his aim. Frumkin proceeds on to Moscow at a flower stall offering the most beautiful flowers ever seen. "Where do these flowers come from?" asked a friend of his. "Oh," replied the vendor, "they come from Holland, but the Dutch buy them from Israel. Aren't they the most beautiful you've ever seen?" Another friend of his spent a month in the French countryside, where he enjoyed an explosively luscious fruit he'd never seen before, something like a cross between a peach and a plum. And where did that tasty treat come from? "It comes from Israel," replied the French shopkeeper. "They're the only ones in the world who produce it." A lot of that goodness, says Frumkin, must have come from the 3,000 greenhouses built on barren land in Gaza by the Jews, who until a few years ago employed 12,000 Palestinians. As the number of terrorist attacks grew, the number of Palestinian employees diminished and were replaced by Thais, Filipinos and Africans. Forgive me, please, while I steal a few lines from Si Frumkin verbatim. "During the months of preparation for the Israeli withdrawal there were many questions on what should be done with the greenhouses. They were state-of-the-art agricultural marvels with their own sophisticated temperature and humidity control systems. They turned out millions of dollars worth of produce yearly and they were a source of employment for thousands of people in an area where close to 40% were unemployed. "Should these marvelous structures be destroyed? Moved? Abandoned?" Now it gets good no, GREAT! A small group of wealthy American Jews decided to buy the greenhouses and donate them to the Palestinian Authority. One of the donors was former World Bank president James Wolfenson, who put in half a million dollars of his own money.
FOURTEEN MILLION dollars were raised. The deal was done. The appreciative spokesman for the Palestinian Authority announced that the greenhouses would become the cornerstone of the new Palestinian economy. Back to Frumkin's words. "Happy ending for all, right? Palestinians get the greenhouses, Israelis get $14 million and the small group of admirable Jews in America gets the warm feeling of having made the world a more tolerant and loving place where Arabs appreciate Jewish kindness and are less eager to murder Jews, right?" If you're a liberal, I want you to enjoy that warm, milky feeling inside for a few more seconds before you read on. There was a time in my own life when I would have pasted a stupid smile on my face and proclaimed to one and all, "Man, this is GREAT. The Palestinians are going to say to one another, "Look at this. I guess we got those Jews all wrong. Hey, Mohammed. How do you say I apologize' in Hebrew?"
OK. Dream time is over. Back now to the brilliant construction of Frumkin's essay. At this point he gives us Mideast Cliche Story 101, but in this context it comes across not as a hackneyed cliche we've heard too many times before. It comes across as a precious stone in a setting of carved gold. It's the one about the scorpion in the Middle East who goes up to the fox and says, "Look, I see you're about to swim to the other side of this river. I have to get over there, but I can't swim. Do you mind if I hitch a ride on your back?" "Oh, no," says the fox. "You'll sting me when we get halfway across and I'll die." "Don't be silly," replies the scorpion. "Then I'd die, too. I can't swim." The fox thought for a minute and found that reasoning sensible, so he said, "OK. Hop on." And sure enough: Halfway across, the scorpion sank his stinger into the fox's neck. With his last breath before sinking the fox said, "Why did you do that?" "You damned fool," said the scorpion. "Don't you know this is the Middle East?" Let's let Si Frumkin have the ending of his essay verbatim. "Just an hour or so after the Jews left Gaza thousands of Palestinians swarmed into the empty settlements. The Palestinian police watched the mob demolish the abandoned synagogues and set them on fire. They also watched with interest as part of the crowd turned on the greenhouses breaking windows, taking plates of glass, wiring, computer and electronic parts and irrigation pipes and timers. It didn't take long; after a few hours or so the greenshouses that it had taken years to build were just so much junk. "And so," confesses Frumkin, "I have Schadenfreude. The Palestinians will not export flowers to Holland or fruit to France. The greenhouses will not be rebuilt. The Palestinian economy, such as it is, will continue to be mired in corruption, hatred and violence. They will suffer but still they'll never admit that it was their own fault." "And I have Schadenfreude," confesses Si Frumkin, "towards the naive rich Jews who thought that the Arab reaction to their gift would be based on logic and not on inbred hatred. You silly people. Didn't you learn yet that this is the Middle East where scorpions sting even if this means their own destruction? You lost $14 million and, you know, I am glad you did. I only hope that Israel cashed the $14 million check before it was too late." I can only add that if Moses were present to witness all this, there would have been another Commandment. And that extra Commandment would have jabbed its stinger, not into the rampaging Palestinians, but into those blithering, clueless, naive Jews!
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