From: "wayne mcguire" <wayne.mcguire@channel1.com>
Newsgroups: talk.politics.mideast
Subject: jewish fundamenta 1/3
Date: 25 Dec 92 11:06:48 EST
Reply-To: "wayne mcguire" <wayne.mcguire@channel1.com>
Distribution: talk
Organization: Channel 1 Communications

<knotes>

<o>#clip

<des>

     Meir Kahane and Kahanism received support from mainstream
     forces in the Israeli government and the Jewish
     establishment. (Viorst Tikkun 9-10/90)

<doctype>book review
<author>Viorst, Milton
<title>Kach and Bull
<serial>Tikkun
<date> September/October 1990
<vol>5 <num>5
<pages>86-88

<book author>Friedman, Robert I.
<book title>The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane: From FBI
Informant to Knesset Member

<excerpt>

     Ironically, it was Shamir and Cohen who invented the
     political Kahane. As founder and head of the Jewish Defense
     League, Kahane was transformed by them from a small-time
     American rabble-rouser who stirred up Jews against New York
     Blacks, to the leader of a band of thugs identified with the
     noble cause of aiding the emigration of Soviet Jews. Some
     evidence even suggests that Shamir, chief of operations of
     the Mossad at the time, was Kahane's control officer. It
     bothered neither Shamir nor Cohen that Kahane was reputed to
     be--as the record shows--a demagogue, a terrorist, a
     collaborator with the mob, a philanderer, an FBI snitch, a
     money-grabber and, in all likelihood, an embezzler. When he
     finally got into trouble with the law in the U.S., they
     invited him to take refuge in Israel, where they looked
     forward to his buttressing their right-wing cause--but they
     fell out with him after he refused to play by the
     restrictive rules of Israeli politics. Once in Israel,
     Kahane spurned the existing parties and founded Kach to
     serve his own ambitions. When Shamir and Cohen mobilized the
     Knesset to bar him from office, it was not at all because he
     was antidemocratic or racist, but because they regarded him
     as out of their control.

     All of this is revealed to us in <it>The False Prophet:
     Rabbi Meir Kahane, from FBI Informant to Knesset
     Member</it>. Presenting a thoroughly researched work in a
     soft voice, Robert I. Friedman makes a persuasive case that
     Kahane, though less frequently in the headlines these days,
     remains emblematic of contemporary Israel, a society that
     has turned from its earlier commitment to humane values and
     embraced, instead, a harsh, self-righteous, territorial
     nationalism. Despite the book's fine qualities, Friedman
     encountered much difficulty in finding a publisher--an index
     of the intimidation still exercised over the communications
     media by right-wing friends of Israel. Witness the review
     published in the New York Times Book Review, which accused
     Friedman of being anti-Israel. If being critical of Kahane
     and the milieu in which he works is equivalent to being
     anti-Israel, then I fear there is little hope for that
     troubled Jewish state.

     Friedman makes it painfully clear that Kahane is not an
     aberration, a demagogue sprung full-blown on an innocent
     society; his roots are as deep in Jewish culture as were,
     say, Hitler's in Germany or Joe McCarthy's in middle
     America. If he is the creation of Shamir and Geula Cohen, it
     is certainly because they saw in him a kindred spirit, a bit
     eccentric perhaps, but a child (like them) of Jabotinsky's
     militant, right-wing Zionism.

     "I say what you think," was among Kahane's proclamations to
     Israelis. And he is no doubt correct. What we Jews have
     discovered--to the dismay of those of us who thought that
     "Jewish values" taught a special caring for others--is that
     within our collective psyche lies a patch of ground on which
     the sun does not shine. If for some Jews the vision of
     ourselves as the Chosen People imposes a certain
     responsibility to others, for Kahane this same vision is
     justification for holding all outsiders--the goyim--in
     contempt, and for treating Arabs as chaff that we have the
     right to sweep away in any manner we choose. What happened
     to our obligation to hold others in respect, to visit on
     them our compassion, to serve as a light unto the nations?
     It seems in Israel today to have been overwhelmed by the
     Kahanist weeds growing in that dark corner of our psyche,
     promoting tribalism and glorifying <it>force majeure</it>.

     Kahane is the product not only of Jabotinsky's secular
     Zionism but, as Friedman points out, of religious Judaism as
     well. The offspring of a rabbinical family, he must be

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