M<\/span>ark Arax’s recent\u00a0Los Angeles Times<\/i>\u00a0Sunday magazine essay (“The Valley’s Not So Civil War”) offers up a fanciful tale of a small group of rabid Jews and wild-eyed Christians, in service to the vast, right-wing conspiracy, threatening free speech in our Central Valley. It is striking to hear at this late date someone still parroting the tired canard that a cabal of neoconservatives, associated with the nefarious\u00a0Project for the New American Century<\/i>, somehow convinced the na\u00efve and non-Jewish Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, and Rice \u2014 not to mention the U.S. Congress \u2014 to go to war in Iraq for Israel, as their local minions (“The Jewish community was doing its part as well.”) threaten Peace Fresno dissenters on the streets of the city.<\/p>\nHow amusing to see those old bogeymen Richard Perle and Douglas Feith mixed in with local Christian fundamentalist zealots (“Up and down the valley, the church is a kind of state”), all cast as dire threats to the old Fresno liberal order of sophisticates like Mark Arax (“The Jews were willing to take their chances on Armageddon as long as the Christians supported Israel in the here and now.”)<\/p>\n
To concoct such a repulsive melodrama about “the Jews,” Arax pulled out all the stops. Stewart Weil, a local Jewish Republican, Arax sniffs with perfect aristocratic\u00a0hauteur<\/i>, is a “frog farmer.” And if we missed that condescending detail the first time, we will hear frogs of various sorts evoked by the snide Mr. Arax eight more times \u2014 as well as the absolutely critical fact that Mr. Weil wears “braces on his teeth” at 52 and appears with “a ponytail that hung down from a bald crown.”<\/p>\n
No more convincing than Arax’s cuts about Mr. Weil’s physiognomy is his theme that conservative Jews are at war with free speech in the Valley. Liberal Jewish professors and former Democratic Congressman John Krebs objected to a recent California State University lecture series about Palestine \u2014 consisting of\u00a0nine<\/i>\u00a0anti-Israel lectures, not one as Arax implies \u2014 not to stifle free speech, but to protest a public university’s presentation of only one point of view: that neo-colonialist Zionists had stolen Palestinian land and were at fault for the ongoing crisis.<\/p>\n
Mr. Arax also fails to tell his readers that the co-organizer of the nine biased anti-Israeli lectures, Professor Fayazmanesh, was in fact\u00a0not<\/i>\u00a0demonized by the local Jewish community, even though the thrust of his disturbing writings centers on what he calls “USraeli (sic<\/i>) mercenaries and hirelings” and “Men-in-Black characters” who hatch supposed Zionist plots to harm the current government in Iran.<\/p>\n
Mr. Arax cannot plead ignorance as an excuse for his shoddy reporting. He repeatedly called Victor Hanson for quotes and clarification. But he could use neither since when Hanson finally returned his calls, he patiently explained to Arax that his conspiratorial fantasies about the Valley (or what in this first-person driven piece Arax calls “this place, my place”) in the grasp of evangelical Christians and nefarious Jewish schemers exploiting poor white cannon fodder and cheap Mexican labor, though it might make gratifying copy for a reporter in an affluent suburb of Fresno or a reader in West Los Angeles, had no support in the Valley reality outside both.<\/p>\n
So instead Mr. Arax quotes Hanson at some unspecified date declaring that “Great nations needed to wage war to remain great,” and advocating “A call for war against Islam”. Arax cannot produce a citation for either sentence since Hanson never wrote or said either.<\/p>\n
I<\/span>n fact, it is not the local Jewish community or Mr. Weil who uses the families of the war dead for partisan purposes, but once again Mr. Arax himself. He insensitively anchors his story through his own strained, intrusive, and ultimately failed political attempts (“They’re using your sons for propaganda”) to convince a grieving family of a stealthy effort to further Israel’s aims through a war not in the interest of the United States.<\/p>\nArax never makes it clear whether he is a journalist reporting on what he observed, or a crass partisan debating the grief-stricken relatives (“The administration didn’t want a real debate,” I said. “Given the climate of 9\/11, they knew that fear trumped everything. So they exploited our fears with mushroom clouds and biological clouds and clouds from our own crop dusters.”) much less why others’ supposedly using the war-dead in propaganda for the war is more reprehensible than his own employing the war-dead in propaganda\u00a0against<\/i>\u00a0the war.<\/p>\n
In fact, the latter, particularly when practised by the media, strikes us as more dangerous. After all, the Pentagon that is waging a war is not restrained by the professional canons of objective neutrality that the media constantly insist guide their coverage.<\/p>\n
The whining of ideological axes being ground can be heard throughout the article. Arax warns us of the “reality” that in the present war against terror we are not fighting Hamas terrorists. And then he castigates those who worry about terrorists who profess such “an authentic cause” [“to even imply that a Palestine suicide bomber carried in his heart, a different (daresay more authentic) cause was to much to hear”].<\/p>\n
But to suggest that suicide bombing by Hamas inside Israel might be in service to an “authentic cause,” Arax must omit that Hamas has so far killed 14 Americans, pledges the destruction of an American ally, was subsidized in its homicide bombings by Saddam Hussein, and was declared a terrorist organization by Bill Clinton and the E.U. over a decade ago. And apparently in the world of Mr. Arax, an Iranian president who promises to wipe Israel off the map, and then proceeds to obtain nuclear missiles to repeat the Holocaust, apparently should pose no legitimate worries for Americans, Jewish or not.<\/p>\n
Finally, Mark Arax often evokes his own Armenian Valley heritage. That is the final irony: in fact, Arax’s puerile conspiracy spinning is just the sort of slurs against the Central Valley Armenian community that we heard growing up. Many Armenians were likewise once libeled as right-wing, close-knit, eccentric (though tavern owners and middle-men rather than amphibian farmers), unduly wealthy and influential, and narrowly concerned only with advancing Armenian issues \u2014 whether purportedly trying to subvert the local raisin cooperative, or more grandly forcing the U.S. government to decouple from an allied Turkey for its disavowal of the Armenian genocide.<\/p>\n
That sort of ethnic stereotyping was a pernicious prejudice. Yet such bias is one that Mark Arax’s latest myth-narrative of the Valley, for all his faux-populism and cardboard caricatures of frog-farming Jews and bible-thumping evangelicals, has oddly emulated.<\/p>\n
Victor Davis Hanson
\nSelma, California<\/p>\n
Bruce Thornton
\nFresno, California<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Bruce S. Thornton and Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers [Editor\u2019s Note: In the Sunday February 5, 2006 edition of the\u00a0Los Angeles Times Magazine, Fresno-based\u00a0Times\u00a0reporter Mark Arax published an essay purportedly about how acrimony over 9\/11 issues, Iraq, and the war on terror has divided his community\u00a0“The Valley’s Not So Civil War”.\u00a0In fact, the piece […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,779],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-14J","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9959,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/moving-forward-the-need-for-innovations-in-technology-and-strategy\/","url_meta":{"origin":4137,"position":0},"title":"Moving Forward: The Need For Innovations In Technology And Strategy","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 20, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Kiron K. Skinner \/\/ Strategika Two broad sets of U.S. military strategies during the second half of the twentieth century combined ideas, innovation, and technology in ways that offset Soviet conventional (and later nuclear) superiority in arms and military forces. These strategies also contributed to the overall state of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Strategika"","block_context":{"text":"Strategika","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/strategika\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13500,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-classicist-memories-for-memorial-day\/","url_meta":{"origin":4137,"position":1},"title":"The Classicist: Memories for Memorial Day","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 4, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Art19 \/\/ Private Papers Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler discuss the firebombing of Japan, Battlefield Monuments Commission, and favorite war movies.","rel":"","context":"With 3 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 3 comments","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-classicist-memories-for-memorial-day\/#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5307,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/interpreting-the-returns-of-election-04\/","url_meta":{"origin":4137,"position":2},"title":"Interpreting the Returns of Election ’04","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 4, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"All that razzle-dazzle can't fool average Joe. by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers Now that, as Hank Williams might put it, it's all over but the Democrats' crying, what are some preliminary conclusions we can draw from this election? The most obvious is that the Democrats are increasingly out of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5233,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/jihad-is-knocking-another-episode-in-the-war-between-christendom-and-islam\/","url_meta":{"origin":4137,"position":3},"title":"Jihad Is Knocking: Another Episode in the War between Christendom and Islam","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 9, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The slaughter in London is another grisly wake-up call that likely will go as unheeded as earlier ones. Already the standard narrative is being trotted out: evildoers created by what the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0predictably called the \u201croot causes of terrorism\u201d: autocracy, or economic stagnation, or\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6606,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bruce-thornton-on-secure-freedom-radio-with-frank-gaffney\/","url_meta":{"origin":4137,"position":4},"title":"Bruce Thornton on Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 10, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Seth Jones, Bruce Thornton, Peter Pham, Diana West October 9th, 2013\u00a0\u00b7\u00a0Comments SETH JONES, Associate Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation, joins guest host DAN BONGINO, to help explain the terror threat from and historical background of the terrorist organization al-Shabaab. BRUCE THORNTON, a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9945,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/you-say-you-want-a-revolution\/","url_meta":{"origin":4137,"position":5},"title":"You Say You Want A Revolution?","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 16, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"By Thomas Donnelly \u00a0 To paraphrase the Beatles: Well, you know, you\u2019d better free your mind instead; you may want a revolution but ought to settle for some evolution. It is an article of revealed religion among defense elites that \u201cwe live in a relentlessly changing and fiercely competitive world.\u201d\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Strategika"","block_context":{"text":"Strategika","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/strategika\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4137"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4137"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4138,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4137\/revisions\/4138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}