Was Tom Clancy anti-Semitic?

Parsing through the news and views in the Judeosphere my eye fell upon an article written by one Benjamin Ivry in the ‘Jewish Daily Forward’ about the deceased best-selling military fiction writer Tom Clancy. (1)

The basis of the article is simple enough. Clancy used negative stereotypes about Israelis and thus was - as one commentator in the peanut gallery - put it: ‘a racist fuck’. Or if you want to put that in more obvious terms: Ivry is suggesting that Clancy was anti-Semitic.

Now before I comment on this, I should state that I have never read anything Clancy has written (nor have I ever wanted to [the closest I have ever come was an Andy McNab novel when I was a teenager]) so I am just going to go off the general outlines of the stories and also what others have written about what Clancy wrote.

With that said I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that Ivry’s article is basically that of a coward. Clancy dies and Ivry accuses him of anti-Semitism when Clancy cannot sue him for libel/slander where-as had Clancy been alive and had then Ivry had the fortitude to accuse Clancy of being an anti-Semite then Ivry could have had his day in court to prove his case should he have so wished.

That he didn’t do this is indicative of the fact that Ivry knows that he cannot actually evidence his claim and that if it came to a legal showdown then he would stand little to no chance of actually winning such a case. Hence Ivry waits till after Clancy has died to attempt to assassinate his memory among his readers.

This assassination of memory - to use a term used by ‘Holocaust’ believers - is a typical tactic of jews wanting to perpetuate the idea that historical or current individuals are in some way hostile to them (and that any such hostility is ipso facto irrational). (2) In this particular instance the case that Clancy was somehow anti-Semitic - or in Ivry’s double-speak ‘sent mixed messages’ to jewish readers - illustrates the utterly contrived nature of the charge.

In the first instance Ivry clearly doesn’t have a clue about the fact that charging someone with being ‘anti-Semitic’ is to label them as holding to a very specific intellectual position, which argues (and in my view correctly) that jews are a biological group and that as a biological group they are hostile to other groups. It is not the same thing with someone being hostile to jews as a religious group (i.e., being hostile to Judaism or anti-Judaism) or someone being hostile to Israel as a country (i.e., being hostile to Zionism or anti-Zionism): precisely because these are separate positions that can be held in differing combinations (hence why many historical anti-Semites expressed qualified support for Zionism). (3)

Ivry is using ‘anti-Semitic’ in its sense as a Zionist ideological trope that assumes that Zionism - and thus Israel - represents all jews because it claims to do so. This trope works by associating how Zionism views itself as the de facto representatives of all jews regardless of whether the jews concerned wish to be represented by Zionists or not.

To illustrate this we might say - to paraphrase a Polish proverb - that when you hit a jew then a jew on the other side of city cries out in pain. That is essentially what the Zionists are doing: they are declaring that if you hit one jew then you have hit all jews regardless of whether you were doing it because said individual was jewish or not.

This true in this instance because Ivry's case - such as it is - against Clancy for being 'anti-Semitic' is based not on things that Clancy said or did, but rather a very small amount of what he wrote.

Ivry states as follows:

'“The Sum of All Fears” (1991) posits that an Israeli nuclear weapon is commandeered by Palestinian terrorists. An Israeli policeman kills an Arab protestor because the policeman’s “adulterous ex-wife left him as a punishment from God because he was not measuring up to what a Jewish man should be,” as Wikipedia summarizes the character’s motivations.'

Now one wonders what on earth is ‘anti-Semitic’ about that plot line?

Israel is well-known to have nuclear weapons (even if it likes to deny having them) and Israelis killing Palestinian protesters for trivial reasons is also not exactly uncommon either. Anybody is free to go on YouTube for example and google 'Israeli killing Palestinian' and you get some 875,000 results!

Even if you were to doubt that then Israeli historians themselves have documented the horrific behaviour of Israeli civilians, police and military personnel towards the Palestinians. (4)

Ivry's claim seems to be based not on 'anti-Semitic' statements made by Clancy, but rather his objection to Clancy's suggestion of the highly sexed jewish woman and the rather wimpy jewish man who is unable to please jewish women in bed. These are stereotypes to be sure, but they are commonly accepted in jewish culture as truisms and also frequently find their way into jewish dating books.

After all, where does Ivry think the stereotypical fussy and seriously over-bearing jewish mother came from? While further not considering why there isn't a stereotypical over-bearing father stereotype in jewish culture.

Ivry need but consider the fact that going to the gym for many jews is considered to be goyische - i.e., something non-jews do (or in other works un-jewish) - to see that the jewish idea of masculinity is actually rather emasculating. When one understands that then it can be quickly appreciated that the jewish male is more 'Hebrew Heebie-Jeebies' than 'Hebrew Hammer'.

Essentially Ivry's case against Clancy comes down to the fact that he doesn't like the fact that Clancy portrayed jewish men as unmanly limp-wristed wimps and jewish women as ruthless man-eating sluts in a very small part of his corpus.

This is illustrated by the fact that Ivry takes issue with the depiction of a jewess in - of all things - a video game based on Clancy's work:

'Some Israeli women are highly sexualized temptresses in Clancy’s eyes, but also potential killers, as epitomized by Ayana Yacoby, an Israeli Army and Mossad fighter in his “Rainbow Six” series of video games. Wikipedia describes Ayana:

“Specialization in infiltration and intelligence gathering. Speaks fluent English and Arabic. Unmarried. Ayana is a master of the silent kill. Her training has prepared her for moving stealthily into hostile territory and neutralizing whatever threats may confront her. She is extremely intelligent with little tolerance for fools.”'

The above is clearly a very positive depiction of an Israeli jewess as it ascribes to said jewess preternatural physical and mental abilities so is actually ascribing her a form of 'chosen' status.

Ivry's taking issue with this depiction clearly shows two things:

The first is his sheer desperation to find faeces to fling at Clancy in the desperate hope that some of it is going to stick. After all, if Clancy's novels were replete with this sort of thing it should be easy to demonstrate and would have been done in his lifetime.

The second is the fact that Ivry's argument is really about Clancy's depiction of jewish men (i.e., as not being manly enough which has piqued Ivry so much that he has started trying to handbag Clancy's corpse) not about Clancy being 'anti-Semitic'.

Where - if Clancy was 'anti-Semitic' - are Clancy's disparaging comments about jews and his view of them as a biological group who are trying to subvert America?

That's right: nowhere.

So how on earth was Tom Clancy an anti-Semite?

That's right: he's 'anti-Semitic' for making Ivry have a mental crisis about his masculinity.

References

(1) http://forward.com/articles/184965/tom-clancys-mixed-moral-messages-to-jewish-readers/

(2) For example, see James Petras, 2006, 'The Power of Israel in the United States', 1st Edition, Clarity Press: Atlanta, p. 14

(3) For a summary of this please see: Albert Lindemann, 1997, 'Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews', 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York, pp. x-xxi

(4) For a detailed discussion of this please see: Avi Shlaim, 2010, 'Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations', 2nd Edition, Verso: New York and Ilan Pappe, 2011, 'The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel', 1st Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven