A Polarizing Sympathy

After receiving the December issue and reading Taki Theodoracopulos’s article “Sympathy for Palestinian Misery” we want our subscription canceled and our money refunded.

The lies and total distortions of truth written in this article are an affront to the intelligence of your readers. I’m shocked that Chronicles would even print such claims. Theodoracopulos ends with, “A Palestinian mother cries as bitterly as an Israeli mother does after losing a child, so something must be done.”

I beg to differ with this author. Palestinian mothers are receiving happy phone calls from their children telling them how many Jews they murdered, and the mothers rejoice. When their sons are killed, Palestinian mothers believe they are martyrs for the cause and rejoice over the funds they’ll receive because of their child’s death.

This article is a stain on your reputation, and as such, we want nothing more to do with your magazine.

—Kelleigh Nelson
Knoxville, Tenn.

Sirs, I write as an avid fan of Mr. Theodoracopulos but disagree profoundly with his essay “Sympathy for Palestinian Misery.” The moral relativism and historical ignorance he displayed are in precise sync with the “cult of regard” so prevalent on the left. The preening wish to be thought virtuous regardless of facts engulfs us all.

First, Israel itself was a “refugee camp” from Mideast intolerance that grew from the 20th-century autocratic statism of Nazi Germany. Read David Fromkin’s book A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, which shows that Jews and Muslims lived in harmony in the Ottoman Empire, that Baghdad was once the second-largest Jewish enclave and known as “Jerusalem East.” Jews were driven from their lands without compensation.  

Second, in Israel the historic Jewish nation has been restored as a beacon of liberty in a region bereft of it. Mr. Theodoracopulos overlooks how radical Islamists murdered Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981 for making peace and murdered Lebanese President Rafic Hariri in Lebanon in 2005 for the same thing. Like the Houthis, these radicals are the sock puppets of Tehran.

Third, it’s a good thing that Arafat’s intransigence wrecked the chimera of the Oslo Accords in 2000. Even Henry Kissinger acknowledged the two-state solution was an impractical farce. Realpolitik requires the gradual return to the pre-1967 border, with limited suzerainty of the regions to Jordan and Egypt, neither of which wants radical terror groups to return.

Last, Taki flatly and wrongly relies on the reporting of an NGO (likely relying on Hamas’s false reports) on the number of children killed in Gaza as the highest in the world. Meanwhile, the bleeding heart media entirely ignores the current genocide in Sudan. Yes, war is horror, as Col. Kurtz remarked in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The sneak attack on the U.S. by Japan ended up costing more than 7 million lives, including several obliterated Japanese cities. In America, we say, “Don’t start none, and there won’t be none.” Japan’s torment blossomed into a peaceful and prosperous modern era, and the same can happen in Gaza. 

—Timothy P. O’Neill 
Pompano Beach, Fla.
 

I would like to commend Taki and Chronicles Magazine for his article “Sympathy for Palestinian Misery.” Taki wrote that he justified himself to his interlocutor as a “conservative and a gentleman” because he’d “been there and seen what’s going on up close.” I think another answer for a conservative gentleman could be that he supports Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims because they are much more likely to support conservative values—traditional values such as being pro-life and defending the rights of families—than the Zionists and their supporters here in the U.S. and around the world.

It is mind-boggling and sickening to me to see all these Republican candidates cheerleading for “Israel First” when the Zionists and their supporters would never vote for them (not unless they make Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez their running mate). I miss a candidate like Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul, who I think could unite people around a traditionalist America First campaign, including Muslims and Arab-Americans.

Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid acknowledged this potential in a Nov. 29 op-ed, “Why Arab Americans Don’t Want to Vote for Biden in 2024.” He writes,“Even before the Israel-Gaza war began, Arab and Muslim Americans were losing faith in the Democratic Party—for reasons that had little to do with foreign policy. They had become increasingly skeptical of the party’s leftward turn on cultural and social issues; lessons with LGBTQ+ themes in public schools had become a particular flash point.”

So, my question to the Republican Party is, why are you alienating this group of potential supporters? You can’t blame them for staying home and not voting if Trump and DeSantis and all the other candidates who have voiced unconditional support for Israel are slandering them as terrorists and telling them to drop dead.

In fact, it used to be an acceptable conservative position to support the Palestinians. One of the first books to come out in the United States about the plight of the Palestinians, They Are Human Too… was published in 1957 by the conservative publisher Regnery Press. So, you see, supporting the Palestinians and having a heart is what it means to be a true conservative and, in my case, a true Orthodox Jew.

—Yehuda Littmann
Brooklyn, N.Y. 

A Man for All Seasons

Prof. Presser has written an impressive review of James Posner’s first volume of the biography of the late Justice Antonin Scalia (“Scalia Gets the Biography He Deserves,” December 2023 Chronicles). In it, he writes that Posner “apparently interviewed virtually everyone alive who knew Scalia well.” The average person cannot fathom how extensive those acquaintances were. When Scalia’s casket was in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court, more than 90 of his former clerks, many of whom had lost contact with their mentor, came from far and wide to stand military style at the corners of the bier.

One evening in the summer of 1991, while I was assigned to the U.S. Embassy to The Holy See, Ambassador Thomas Melady asked me to take his place at a conference at the Vatican. I agreed, and that unplanned visit led to my first meeting with Justice Scalia and the beginning of a friendship that lasted more than a quarter century.

Upon returning to the U.S. in 1992 and for the next four years, I organized visits for Western European diplomats and journalists to the Supreme Court, where, at my request, Justice Scalia would meet the group and answer questions about the Court and the Constitution. When I retired, Justice Scalia invited me to hear oral arguments at the Court and then to have lunch with him in his chambers. That practice lasted 10 years, and then another 10 in an Italian restaurant. As a result, I came to learn a great deal about Justice Scalia.

During one lunch, I asked him why his name was Antonin, not Antonino, which is the Italian spelling. Scalia said his father, born in Sicily and later a professor of Romance languages at Brooklyn College, “thought that ‘Antonin’ would sound more American.” Père Scalia was a proud father and would often comment on his son’s academic achievements to his class.

Rosen mentions that Scalia initially sought to enter the priesthood but changed his mind because he believed that “God was not calling me.” That may be true, but the Justice told me another version: his father explained to the future Justice that if he were to enter the priesthood, the family name of Scalia would disappear, for he was an only child and there were no first cousins to carry on the name.

Aside from the many family photos in Scalia’s chambers, there were two special items: an 18th-century copy of Webster’s Dictionary and a copy of Holbein’s portrait of St. Thomas More. When told that More, the patron saint of lawyers, was now also the patron saint of politicians, he responded: “That’s no promotion!” The dictionary was necessary when Scalia sought the original meaning of a word to use in his opinions, however, as one of his former clerks described it, this often caused a verbal tug of war between the clerk’s interpretation and the Justice’s.

That clerk is Judge Joan Larsen, who sits on the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. At Scalia’s funeral celebration, she told this story: while a Justice on the Michigan Supreme Court, she traveled the state visiting town halls and community gatherings. At a meeting of about 60 people in the Upper Peninsula, after asking if there were any further questions, a man in the back raised his hand and asked: “Who was it that you clerked for?” Larsen replied: “I was a clerk for Justice Scalia.” Without prompting, the audience rose in unison and began to applaud. Judge Larsen never forgot that story, and neither have  I. Justice Antonin Gregory Scalia is and will always be, to me and countless others, our “man for all seasons.”

—Vincent Chiarello
Reston, Virginia