The perfect European, K-mart’s good deed, a personal story, &c.

September 17, 2001 3:25 p.m.

hat is the most maddening news photo of the 20th century? Is it Hitler’s jig? I think it may be. I have thought of Hitler’s jig when witnessing the delight of our enemies over the mass murder committed against us.

You wanna know the Perfect European? Here he is, Antonio Martino, representing the Italian government as defense minister. First, he says that under no circumstances will the Italian military join the United States in war. Then he says that the United States must not act without the consent and participation of a broad coalition of allies.

There he is, folks: the Perfect European.

On Sunday morning, I was slightly turned around, and had to ask directions to Washington Square (in lower New York, but not as far south as the financial district). The woman I asked pointed me in the right direction, then said, with a nervous laugh, “It’s still there” (meaning the square). This was a strange moment, perfectly understandable to me, and anyone else in the city.

The same Sunday morning, church bells rang the notes of an old, perfect spiritual: “There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole.” I have heard this sung many, many times, from Marian Anderson to the present. Rarely has it been so moving or meaningful as from those church bells, wordless.

I don’t know about you, but I cringe a bit every time I see John Ashcroft on television: law enforcement, criminal catching, Miranda rights, prosecution, courts of law, etc. We are of course beyond that. And “the people who did this,” most directly? They’re dead.

The full-page ad that K-mart bought over the weekend, I found extremely moving. It wasn’t an ad; it was just a full page, and it contained an American flag, which people were invited to tape to a window. In tiny letters at the bottom was “K-mart.” Good for them.

Someone asked whether there have been signs of peacenik-ism here in New York. Very, very few. Very few yellow ribbons, very few “violence begets violence” people, very few (visible and audible) apologists. This is possibly because the biggest attack was on New York itself. If the attack had been on, oh, Salt Lake City, would the “No Blood for Oil” types be out in greater force?

Just as there are “no atheists in a foxhole,” it may be true that there are no doves in New York at the moment. And is a hawk a dove who has been bombed by reality?

A lot of us can’t help thinking of the Afghans: the brave, noble souls whom we all loved, cheered, and admired through the ’80s. Those heroes of resistance who showed the whole world how humanity might stand up to evil. Those shining examples whom we were proud to supply with Stinger missiles and the like.

Ach.

David Bloom, the NBC correspondent, said to Bill Clinton, “You spent eight years fighting terrorism. How do you feel now?” (or words to that effect). Eight years fighting terrorism? Was it perhaps done in secret?

I had a wicked thought, when President Bush gathered with his men: Now we know what a real war room looks like. And it doesn’t look anything like the den of plotters, smearers, and tricksters staffed by Stephanopoulos, Carville, et al.

Readers have heard me rail against Billy Ayres, the Weather Underground terrorist whose deeds include bombing the Pentagon. The New York Times can’t stop celebrating him. On the day of the attacks, of course, the Times ran a nauseating, fawning profile of Ayres and his partner in terror, Bernadine Dorhn.

Now, adding insult to our injury, they have run a nauseating, fawning interview with Ayres in the Sunday magazine. Titled “Forever Rad,” the interview has the man who tried so hard to kill us saying, of American society, “I don’t trust it. . . . This society is not a just and fair and decent place.” His interviewer — one Hope Reeves, the daughter of Ayres’s fellow Weathermen (there’s an objective interview, in the good ol’ Times spirit!) — asks, “So if things are bad as ever, was it worth it, all the struggling?” ("Struggling”? No, Hope, it was peaceful and decent people who had to struggle against Ayres and your parents.) He answers, “Without a doubt. And the reason is that we really did play a role in destroying the old system of segregation and in destroying the conquest of Indochina by the Americans.”

Ayres then praises the “wonderful activism going on internationally — Seattle and Genoa . . .” And for his coup de grace, he denies being serious when he asked the young to “kill all the rich people, break up their cars and apartments, bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s at.” He now claims, “Many things were said in a kind of a humor. They were excessive and extreme and a joke. They were taken literally mainly by the for-profit media to show how crazy we were.”

But the Weather Underground, of course, did kill people, and they were unapologetic about it, and it was no joke.

You may not believe me, but people like me do get sick of bashing the New York Times, which is so valuable an organ in so many ways. We weary of it; we are weighed down by it. Yet the Times, as in these two instances — both Ayres tributes — is capable of a moral idiocy that stuns the conscience and turns the stomach.

Every now and then, I wish Shakespeare were around to see how fixed he is in our language and minds. Maybe he could guess. I think of the young man at the Trade Center site who held up a sign for the visiting Bush to see: “Mr. President, Let Loose Our War Dogs.” I found this sign even more affecting for the young man’s variation on the original phrase. It’s an unusual thought to have at a time like this, but I am struck — once more — by the all-pervading influence and lasting power of the greatest user of any language ever.

Last, a word on the Ryder Cup: In my view, its cancellation is not a mistake, not a blunder, but an outrage. How far from Churchillian self-respect and defiance can you get? The players and spectators would face no danger. And the Cup authorities have allowed our enemies to disrupt our way of life — completely unnecessarily.

I see people here in New York carrying on with life less than a mile from the smoking ruins — and these poor, confused ninnies won’t carry out the Ryder Cup in faraway England, giving us all some normalcy, some diversion, something good and right.

This is not just a bad decision. It’s disgusting and mean.

No, actually, I’d like to say one more thing — something autobiographical. I have held off, but it seems appropriate, and — who knows? — it may be of some help to people, as they think our situation through.

When I was young, I was quite the little Arabist — cocksure, arrogant, wholly misguided. I grew up in Ann Arbor, Mich., and there were many Arab students — most of them Palestinian — in my high school. I befriended them, loved them. Was intensely interested in them. Some wore keys around their necks, and they claimed that these were the keys to the homes back in Palestine their families had been forced to abandon. I was mightily impressed. Later on, I knew to doubt the authenticity of those keys.

I remember one girl, who liked me, asking, “Jay, you’re not Jewish, are you?” She had to be reassured before our friendship could continue.

I was taught to believe that the Arab-Israeli conflict was very much like the American South: a civil-rights struggle. The Arabs were the blacks — the victims, the oppressed. The Israelis were the whites, the oppressors. Menachem Begin was pretty much George Wallace; his defense minister, Ariel Sharon, was Bull Connor (they even looked alike). Arafat, of course, was Martin Luther King. It seemed very clear.

In due course, I grew up, but it took a while. I enrolled in the Near Eastern Studies Department at the University of Michigan, where I took several courses, including the Arabic language. The department was dominated by extremists. The graduate assistants, certainly, were Arabs to the “left” of the PLO, meaning, they took Arafat and Co. to be sell-outs, untrue to the cause. There was no discussion of the legitimacy of Israel: It wasn’t discussable; Israel was illegitimate, and every worthy person knew it.

One day, we trooped into an auditorium to see a documentary on the conflict. I can’t remember the name of the documentary or of the documentary-maker, but I can see her, and she was on hand to introduce her film and to take questions. The film featured mainly radical Palestinians talking about dismembering Israel.

During the Q&A, a middle-aged white woman — a little fat — raised her hand and asked the following question: “These were such extreme voices. You’ve made a wonderful film, but couldn’t you have found some softer, more moderate voices?”

In the row in which I was sitting were several Arab students — older ones, graduate students — and one of them, in front of everybody, stood up and said words I will never forget. I won’t forget the words, or his face, or his relatively quiet, determined tone. He said: “I will kill you.” (This was directed at the woman who had asked the question.) His buddies got him to sit down.

But that’s not the important part — what he said is not the important part. The important part is, no one said a word. No one reacted. We all sort of coughed, and looked away, nervously. We all pretended that what had just occurred had not, in fact, occurred — or that it was normal, acceptable. We simply ignored it.

Eventually, I took another path, both at the university and in my own thought. I could never be convinced that America and its influence were evil. I could not be convinced that Israel was illegitimate. And I could not accept the “I will kill you” and our complete cowardice, or complicity, in the face of it.

I sort of vowed, inwardly, that I wouldn’t be afraid, wouldn’t be intimidated, by Arab extremism. We all dance delicately around it. We tend to sweep it under the rug. We look away, all politically correct, and cough . I further vowed that, unlike my fellow white liberals, I would pay Arabs the compliment of treating them as full human beings, accountable for their words and actions, capable of good or bad, like everyone else — morally responsible. I wouldn’t treat them as children, unable to help a certain savagery. I wouldn’t “understand” that savagery, in the sense my teachers intended. I wouldn’t have double, or triple, or quadruple standards. All men were equal.

My lessons were hard, but they have lasted, and I believe they are right ones.